Meet the neighbours

A couple of weeks ago, Cardinal Cooke, no relation, ordered prayers to be spoken in all the Catholic churches of New York. This is a rare thing, though of course it requires no order, it's more or less automatic when some local benefactor or a national figure has died.

Cardinal Cooke, however, was doing something he's never done before. He was asking everybody under his pastoral care to pray for rain. Now devoted, or perhaps I should say tolerant, listeners to these talks may remember my enthusiasm earlier in the year for the splendour of our winter.

This, I should say, is strictly the view of a comfortable citizen who did not have, as very many New Yorkers do have, a sneaky, gouging landlord who skimps on the heat he's supposed to provide. But if you were warm inside, it was a memorable winter. Weeks on end of cloudless days from dawn to sunset. By the same token, the north-west, the Canada, wind that chases the clouds away is a dry wind that blows across 3,000 miles of ice and snow. So those brilliant days were also days of piercing cold. Yet, as I reported from Vermont at Christmas time, if you keep moving very fast and very briefly outdoors, it is possible to enjoy even 30 below zero, provided your movement is directly from one warm house to another warm house.

But, what those of us who enjoy this sort of winter selfishly forgot, or ignored, was the fact that most of the north-east coast had had only a couple of rainy days since last June. The reservoirs that feed New York and New Jersey were down to 27 per cent of capacity, producing those well-known pictures of rare birds strutting on arid soil which is usually six feet deep.

Things got so bad that the mayor of New York ordered all restaurants to suspend the immemorial custom of serving, the moment the customers sit down, a glass of water or, as they used to specify in English novels, a glass of iced water. Well, as a good Catholic with some training in logic, Cardinal Cooke is undoubtedly well aware of the logical fallacy which says if B happens after A, B happened because of A. Nevertheless, Cardinal Cooke begged his flock to pray for rain and we've had nothing else ever since. Not quite true, but ludicrously warm days and frequent rain.

I imagine Cardinal Cooke is sufficiently human not to go around pointing out to people that just because he prayed for rain and we got it, there's not necessarily any connection. Let us accept the remarkable fact and rejoice. Does God always answer prayers? Yes, the man said and sometimes the answer is no. As I say this, I hear that some churches, whether their pastors were trained in logic or not, have already put on services of thanksgiving.

There is, I'm sorry to have to report, a rather sinister after effect of this bounty. Acid rain. I mention it because on Tuesday President Reagan will be going up to Canada for some long, frank talks with Prime Minister Trudeau about a whole raft of grievances that the Canadians hold against the United States. Acid rain, bred by toxic fumes that go into the atmosphere from industrial plants, is, I ought to say, not so much a grievance, as a problem common to both countries. The Canadians and the Carter administration saw eye to eye – bloodshot eye to eye – on this problem. But the Canadians, who always know infinitely more about American politics than Americans do about Canadian politics, are worried about the drastic cuts that the Reagan administration has ordered, not least in the money that goes to police, or regulate, threats to the environment.

Preventing pollution and protecting the national forests and so on was a big thing with President Carter but, during the presidential campaign, Mr Reagan picked up an alarming reputation – alarming to environmentalists – by his promises to ease the regulations that try to keep the atmosphere and the waters clean.

He's going along with that and demonstrators won't let him forget a couple of boo-boos he once made. The first, and most undying, was the answer he's said to have given to some group that was fighting any incursion of the logging industry on the famous, the ancient, redwood groves of California. 'When you've seen one tree, you've seen them all,' was the line the cartoonists made much fun of at the time, and then, last summer, Mr Reagan quite clearly announced that trees were the main cause of nitrogen pollution. After a shudder passed over the populace and a belly laugh shook the forestry service, he quickly admitted that he'd got the wrong gas and positively the wrong source.

Well, it's been made very plain in the past few weeks that President Reagan is going to ease the regulations in the cities, in the countryside, which, at the moment, hamper the rapid growth of industry and headlong production. One significant sign is the news, which seems reliably reported, that the administration is going to abolish the Federal Council on Environmental Quality.

This is a very small government outfit but it has been an important policeman. Its job is to survey reported threats to the land, the water, the air, whether they come from industry, from commercial traffic, from dumping of natural wastes or whatever. It hears what different departments of the government have to say in any argument and adjudicates between them. It keeps tabs on reports of toxic chemicals, on mine owners plans to replant after strip-mining, on what America is or is not doing to keep the lakes and inland seas and offshore waters clean enough for fish to swim and live in. The president means to abolish it.

Since the United States shares a border – what's more important, a climate – with Canada and many of Canada's industries are subsidiaries of American firms (another and a very sore point), many of the problems of pollution are shared by two countries with the same landscape across which the same winds blow. However, the word came out from Washington last weekend that one problem which the Reagan administration has decided to excuse from the budget cuts is acid rain. This exception may have been made because, I imagine, the president was already being briefed about his coming visit to Canada. Let's hope so.

I should guess that the most useful thing to come out of the talks between Mr Reagan and Mrs Thatcher and, in the back room, so to speak, between General Haig and Lord Carrington, was the sudden softening of the American hard line on making a military move in El Salvador. By military move I don't of course mean sending in American men, though remembering the so-called technical advisers who mushroomed and mushroomed in Vietnam into an army, we tend to be hypersensitive to the word advisers.

But before Mrs Thatcher and her team appeared, General Haig was very vocal and very sure that the main threat to El Salvador's stability was the supplying of arms to the guerrillas by the Communist underground in Central American countries, arms which, naturally, the Russians say they've never heard of. Ergo, the thing to do was to send in massive, or considerable, American supplies of arms to the junta.

Well, the British visitors, like the French foreign minister the week before, urged a second thought. It was pointed out that not only the European allies think this arms move ill considered, but that the junta itself, and El Salvador's civilian president, are against it, that the need they all cry for is economic help and a political settlement contrived only by El Salvador and her neighbours.

Also, there's a grim fact which will not go away and which El Salvador's neighbours recall more clearly than we do, that the security forces the United States is preparing to back, had gone hog wild in the past year and killed 6,000 people, many of them on the spot and on suspicion. Another sobering note was struck, however, by Central and South American diplomats in the United Nations – a quiet reminder that the Organisation of American States would absolutely not vote to support an American policy based on sending arms.

Among these Latin American countries, there is one whose opposition to United States' intervention of any kind is loud and clear. It is Mexico. It was the first neighbour that President Reagan visited when he came into office and it's made clear to him then what the Latin American diplomatic establishment in Washington and the United Nations has now reinforced – that overt, let alone covert, American intervention below the Rio Grande would not only revive the old symbol of the Yankee bully, but would play into the hands of guerrillas and terrorists in more countries than El Salvador.

So, if this early obsession with El Salvador is the place to take a stand against what the administration calls Soviet expansionism in the Americas, if it has done nothing else, it has aroused both America's European allies and her Latin American neighbours to give a painful lesson in the facts of life to a president whose foreign policy ideas have not yet shed the slogans and the simplicities of the election campaign.

There are just two other vital but less disturbing matters I feel I ought to bring you up to date on. Two headlines will quickly give you a hint of these topics, or as we now say in Washington, send out the proper signals. One headline says, 'Dramatic Drop in Sterling Flatware' which sounds like a crashing accident in the kitchen but is an interesting note about the latest generations of brides and bridegrooms. Quite simply, young people have neither the money nor the inclination to acquire silver as wedding presents. Who's going to buy it and who's going to polish it? One gloomy retailer thought the market had gone for good. The dramatic drop was, of course, in the price and flatware, by the way, is American for silverware.

It seems that a young and delightful lady who has come into the news has been praised in her native land for her becoming shyness. The appraiser should pause.

Stanford University in California has a whole research project going on shyness. After studying 10,000 shy persons, Dr Zimbardo, the head of this immense study says, 'Shyness is a kind of prison in which the person plays the dual roles of the guard who imposes restricting rules and the prisoner who follows the rules and thus earns the guard's contempt.' Fancy that!

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.

Letter from America audio recordings of broadcasts ©BBC

Letter from America scripts © Cooke Americas, RLLP. All rights reserved.