A bit of England-baiting
Richard West
New York The nearest bar that was open late at night had an Irish name, and whimsical prints of an Irishman letting a small boy search his pocket for sweets, and an Irish doctor putting his stethoscope to the chest of a little girl's doll. The smug, jowly pianist sang of Bobby Sands, the late Ulster terrorist: 'Send the English back to where they came from/And make the Irish Republican Army an issue once again'. At least that was one of the stanzas as noted in my book. With songs like that in his honour, Sands will not go down in history like the German terrorist martyr, Horst Wessel, a Brownshirt who died in Munich after being hit on the head by a well-aimed stein beer mug. The song in his honour had plenty of verve, and set the Nazis marching to power.
The pianist chose to ignore my request for 'The Sash' and 'The Old Orange Flute' but I found plenty of customers in the bar who were ready to talk of the Irish problem. They were not annoyed, even a little pleased to hear the English side of the argument. A quarrel is much more fun when person to person. Much of this Irish-American rant — as I tried to show in some recent articles — is simply the longing to find some ethnic or national loyalty in the melting pot of America. It is also, I think, a revival of old-fashioned American xenophobia — directed especially against the traditional English enemy. This feeling flourished during the two world wars, when the troops of the allied countries indulged in good-natured, and more frequently badnatured, rivalry. Between those wars an Irish Mayor of Chicago threatened to punch the King of England's nose and now, once again, on behalf of his Irish supporters, a Jewish Mayor of New York has yapped at the Prince of Wales, and egged on a demonstration against his attending the ballet here.
The Royal Wedding is good material for the England-baiters. So are the recent riots. After the first flare-up in Brixton, the liberal Miami Herald blamed the trouble on unemployment, housing and racial prejudice, then went on to say that blacks in England could not surmount the traditional walls of prejudice — as though, back in the Middle Ages, England's African population struggled in vain for acceptance as knights, sheriffs, abbots, guild-masters and royal patent-holders. The popular press has been more robust in its coverage of the riots. 'First the action then the words', exulted the semi-literate Village Voice, which is Rupert Murdoch's 'prestige' newspaper here. It went on: 'For a moment, as the street fighting spread, words failed and only pictures — flaming buildings, gutted cars, layer upon layer of policemen — told the story. The words soon spewed again — "riots", "hooligans", etc — but for that moment the shock to the British political system was tangible. Old certainties crumbled, and a new condition flickered through the smoke'.
Some of the British complain of the press and television treatment here of Ulster and riots in English cities. But this is no worse than the treatment by British TV and newspapers. The recent troubles in Ulster were partly provoked by trendy TV and press reporters who saw in the IRA a chance to indulge in a spot of revolutionary fun; the English riots are no better reported or understood. An Irish-American journalist lost his job because he invented incidents in his coverage of Belfast but he did no more and no worse than several British journalists I could name. In last week's Spectator, Tom Bethell laughed at the left-wing American columnist Anthony Lewis, who blames the English riots on Mrs Thatcher's monetarism. But most of the British papers say the same thing.
And does it matter if US papers indulge in a little England-baiting? I find it preferable to the liberal piety of the Miami Herald or New York Times. There was much indignation here when a black lady journalist, Janet Cooke, was found to have made up the very improbable story for which she had just been given this year's Pulitzer Prize — a dubious honour in any case. She was much attacked for having invented her own credentials, for bringing disgrace to her ethnic group and, worst crime of all, betraying the paper which claimed to have broken the Watergate scandal. And yet what she wrote was no more false, and much less pompous, than most of the self-satisfied guff in the Washington Post and similar papers. At least she did not take herself or the newspaper seriously.
The case of Miss Cooke may mean a break with modern 'responsible' journalism and a welcome return to the rip-roaring style of The Front Page, and prohibition Chicago. There is a welcome ribaldry in the air concerning those things which were taken too seriously in the Sixties. For example, there has just appeared a report on the tests given to mice to find out whether marijuana affected their sexual drive. Exhaustive studies suggest that although the drug initially roused the animals' lust, it lessened the time of excitement. The experiment tended to disprove the popular wisdom that marijuana 'makes you hold out longer'. Such experiments have been commonplace in a country obsessively given to talk of sex and drugs. But this time, the report was met with hints of sarcasm. One is now permitted to laugh at grown men and women observing mice to see whether marijuana gives them erections. One can even make jokes again on the subject of race.
Americans are at last beginning to throw off their feeling of guilt: about sex, women's rights, ethnic minorities, poverty, drugs and the Third World. They are even losing their guilt about Vietnam. And so they should. But having for so long suffered the humbug and hectoring of the outside world, they are now replying in kind; hence some of the noise about Ulster. It is said that after a long fever, a patient will show the first sign of health by snapping at the doctor or nurse.
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