Leave well alone
Petronella Wyatt
Virginia
America appears to have de-politically orrected itself. On my last trip to New York before 11 September, I was likely to get mud in my eye if I did any of these things: wore fur, smoked or made ironic remarks.
While London had quietened down on the fur issue, leaving it to a few extremists, smoking, thank goodness, did not bestow upon one the stamp of a 'loser', and the British were still saying 'really' in six different ways, New York was one big faux pas trap — or perhaps fur-pas trap.
Now, however, the situations seem to have been reversed. I viewed the crater that had once been the World Trade Center and is now an enormous tourist attraction, with camera-carrying Japanese milling around as if they were snapping the Tower of Pisa. For most Americans, though, it has become a shrine. This has produced the beneficial effect of encouraging these same Americans slowly but inexorably to conclude that there are more important things in life than hectoring people about their social behaviour.
Meanwhile, the opposite is happening in Blighty. Bureaucrats are thinking of more ways to stop people smoking and the animal-rights activists grow more active by the day. It is still a hazard to wear fur in London, yet it is no longer so in New York. Indeed, wearing a black coat with a fur collar garnered me — or rather the coat — more compliments than I can recall receiving in the past year.
The most extreme example of this unnatural shift is hunting. As a ban on hunting with hounds steals upon us, the Americans are hunting more than ever. This has been Virginia National Hunt Week, during which packs from all over the state take part in meets on the same day. I asked one of the participants why there were no anti-hunting protesters around wearing their placards and shouting the familiar abuse. He looked at me as if I had asked why there was not a herd of elephant nearby. 'We don't have any of those,' he remarked. 'No one ever disrupts a meet.' Indeed, a group of jolly-looking cameramen were filming the hunt for a television station and, untypically for media types, were shouting out pleasantries as we rode past.
As I stared out across the frosty hills I tried to work out why this should be. For one thing, people are quite happy to have hunts galloping over their property — therefore there are vast tracts of hunting ground. Second, there is no National Trust land to be barred from. Third, after 11 September, Americans are hell-bent on maintaining their traditional liberties. Listening to the radio or television news, one hears of practically nothing but the Patriot Act and terrorism. This has aided both the hunting and the gun lobbies.
Americans have become obsessed with the need to protect themselves. You can walk into a shop here — merely produce ID and proof of residence — and walk off with a shotgun. I nearly walked off with a mother-of-pearl-handled pistol — purely for aesthetic purposes — then remembered that there might be a tad of trouble getting it through customs.
But back to hunting. Driven to desperation by the Blair government, an increasing number of British are coming out here to hunt. I must have heard, on that one frosty day when I plucked up my meagre courage to mount a horse, at least ten English voices. One now has to travel to America in order to behave as we English have done for centuries. This leads to the slightly risible sight of the Americans aping the British, and the British not knowing whether to be flattered or to smother giggles. On the whole, one feels rather touched. Particularly as everyone I have met has embraced me as an Englishwoman and therefore, as in 1066 And Al! That, a 'good thing'. But it is also embarrassing as the British media have not exactly been kind about the US presence in Iraq or about America's greatest foreign hero since Churchill, Tony Blair. Still, I smile politely and say thank-you.
Meanwhile, as all American trends travel across the Atlantic to Britain in the space of a few years, perhaps it will be the USA that will be responsible for halting the rise of control-freaks in Britain. That indeed would be ironic.
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