Meese takes oath of office

We have a political comedian who appears at monthly intervals on public, that is non-commercial, television. His name is Mark Russell. He's a dapper, personable type with what can only be described as the most cheerful leer in show business.

I think 'show business' is the wrong phrase. It suggests frivolous glamour and Broadway hype, whereas Mark Russell looks and sounds more like a very affable and attractive young professor of politics – one of those amiable cut-ups on the university faculty for whom, amid a heavy tramp of academics, the students are always grateful.

Mark Russell takes all politicians for his province but, like all satirists, like Calvin Trillin in print, trains his barbs most witheringly on the administration, whatever administration may happen to be in. For the past four years, of course, it has been the follies and the mock grandeur of the Reagan administration that have provided his most conspicuous targets.

It occurs to me he may be one reason why the Reagan administration is more disposed than most to want to cut, to reduce anyway, the funds, the seed money, as they say, for public television. Russell has been hilarious in the past – how many? – eight months, maybe a year, about the qualifications required for anyone who wants to be attorney general, the chief law officer of the United States. That's because of the gruelling investigations that have been going on into the affairs – the financial affairs, most of all – of Mr Edwin Meese, whom the president nominated – it seems an age ago – to succeed Mr William French Smith. Mr Smith, like several others in the administration, has wearied of fighting the good Reagan fight and wants to go home to California and replenish his family's treasury.

Well, Mr Meese seemed to be about to take the final hurdle when, after a vigorous session of a Senate committee, he was confirmed for the job and his name sent to the full Senate for a vote. Usually when a man is nominated for a post that requires, as the constitution puts it, the advice and consent of the Senate, the vote on the Senate floor is a formality. This time, however, the Democrats and Republicans from the farming states held up the vote and put on a filibuster until they could get a promise from the administration of emergency credit for farmers facing hard times, even bankruptcy, unless they got cash now for the spring planting.

What has help to farmers got to do with appointing an attorney general? Nothing, in the wildest stretch of American political theory. But, in practice, one of the most effective, if bizarre, habits of congressmen with a grievance is to attach that grievance to a bill up for passage that has nothing whatever to do with it.

For three days and nights, the Democrats and the rebel Republicans talked and talked and stood firm. Meese's name, his confirmation, would be held up until the White House relented and gave the farmers a whacking new grant of credit. Well, in the end, the Republican leaders, in particular their Senate leader, Mr Dole, managed to unhinge the farm issue from Mr Meese's nomination and attach it to another pending bill. And what do you suppose that was? It was a bill to provide emergency money for relief to the starving people of Africa. The farmers' emergency credit would not diminish the aid to the Ethiopes and the other famished peoples – it was tacked on as a supplement.

So, once this burning farm issue was sidetracked – one furious farm senator said the administration was blind to a prairie fire that's eating up the land and livelihood of half our farmers – once this was done, the way was clear for a vote on the fitness of Mr Meese to be attorney general and he was confirmed by 63 to 31, which, while it's a two to one majority, is as narrow a vote of confidence as anyone can remember for such a high post.

Anyway, Mr Meese took the oath of office the next day and he's smiling in public again for the first time in a year and the commentators and Mark Russell will presumably forget him.

The other night, Mr Russell was having a lot of mordant fun with recollections of his childhood and the advantages and disadvantages of being brought up in a parochial, that is, a Roman Catholic school. He was 18, he confessed blankly, before he knew that Protestants and Jews also played basketball. All the best teams have come from Catholic universities. Then, he said, he was struck these days by how many among his old playmates had become relapsed Catholics. 'It's so bad,' he said, 'that when you ask them what are the seven deadly sins, they all start smartly with lust and then have to struggle to think of the other six. Practically nobody,' he said, 'gets pride, covetousness and sloth, which just happens to be the name of a prominent Washington law firm.'

Well, this struck a very... a very personal note with me. My mind's eye recalled the models of a human head, made of plaster usually, sometimes ivory, that we saw in my childhood in the offices of a type of doctor – healer, would be better – known as a phrenologist.

Phrenology pretended to be a science but it is a theory that is no longer even mentioned in the better encyclopedias. It was developed by a man named Joseph Gall and at the end of the nineteenth century and on into the twentieth, it had quite a vogue in Britain and the United States. The model was a complete human head – in those Dark Ages, need I say it was always a male – and from the forehead, on round to the nape of the neck, there were painted lines dividing the skull off into segments, like irregular pieces of pie, which then had printed on them such words as memory, anger, facts, desire.

The idea was that the mind consists of a group of separate faculties, each located in a particular part of the brain. It was a pretty primitive picture of neurology but, then, to laymen, in those days, neurology was something akin to a black art and brain surgery didn't exist.

A lot of otherwise quite intelligent people took phrenology quite seriously and I even remember one doctor, I mean a licensed physician, who had one of these impressive head models, the segments were often prettily coloured, in his outer office. I now realise he probably didn't believe a word of it but it suggested to his more scared patients that he was wise to their innermost thoughts and it added an extra touch of authority to his gravely prescribing, say, a spoonful of castor oil at bedtime.

Well, they're learning amazing things about the brain these days. Maybe the most promising discovery for you and me is how the sensation of pain is triggered by the brain and how that trigger may be stalled or shut off. How exposure to light, to sunlight, as I mentioned a month or two ago, can relieve certain types of depression. Much of this fascinating research is being written up in the magazines and on public television programmes but the actual application of it for mortals, not gravely ill, seems still in the future.

For the rest of us, there is at this time of the year a simple experiment performed by the television networks which produces an immediate, remarkable response in the viewers. It's not... it's not an actual experiment. It's an interesting case of action and response. We're now well into the professional golf tour which, on this far-flung continent, is luckily enough to being in January in the Arizona desert. It then moves to California briefly, out to Hawaii and is now in Florida. By April, it begins to move up into Georgia.

The tour, the pros say, follows the sun. Every Saturday and Sunday, since the beginning of January, we, wherever we are – in Alaska, in the mountainous snows of Colorado, in the perishing winter of northern New England – we can sit down before a set and see handsome, loose-limbed young men in slacks and sports shirts, cavorting over lush green acres, while thousands of spectators, in shorts and floppy shirts or even halter bras, peer at the great men from under swaying palm trees by shimmering aquamarine lakes. I hear that these pictures, watched in the dead of winter by legions of non-golfers, are reliably followed every Monday morning by brisk telephone calls – thousands of them – to travel agents.

Of course, from time to time, the weather, even in southern Florida, can be baulky. A travel agent I know took it as a personal insult when a big tennis tournament in Florida was shown in which the players wore sweaters and the spectators were huddled together in sweaters and blankets. This was during the freak, the record cold spell, that afflicted Florida a month or more ago. Record cold to them is anything below freezing and afflicted is a serious word; it was figured that something between a third and a half of the whole citrus crop, the oranges and limes and lemons, was ruined by frost.

But this past weekend, we saw the closing rounds of a tournament on a lavish course near Miami, played in temperatures in the low 80s, with occasional fill-in shots of pretty boats, skimming close to shore or on the lakes and nubile girls, splashing and waving, with never a thought in the world.

Thirty years ago, there was no televised golf. Then there was and then, in the Sixties, colour television came in. So, well into my lifetime, you had to read about the blessed, balmy Florida winter or imagine it. Seeing is believing and my travel agent tells me that during this winter – in much of the country one of preposterous cold – in the thousands of places that have had 50, 60 more degrees of frost, the Saturday and Sunday afternoon audiences take two steady hours of looking at Florida and enormous numbers of them make a beeline for the telephone and the travel offices. With the worst month, March, still to come, 'The heck with it! they say, 'How about two weeks in Florida now?' And some say, 'Why not get out of these Arctic winters once for all and settle there?'

Now, one thousand Americans a day set up a new, permanent residence in Florida. The result, the latest report says, is as predictable as the tides – urban sprawl, immense traffic congestions, over-crowded schools, dire water shortages and no place to put the garbage.

For more on the horrendous social effects of this sun rush, stay tuned – same time, same station!

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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