Burma and Quentin Burdick - 11 September 1992

Twiddling through 50-odd cable channels, which is a breakfast routine of mine, I came on something the like of which I doubt has been seen in recent years in any Western or shall we say halfway democratic country. It was broadcast from, of course, Atlanta's TNT and showed the results of a Scotsman's trip inside Burma. The last inside look at a foreign country that had a similar uneasy effect on me was all over our networks 20 years ago, when the then President Nixon made his famous breakthrough visit to Communist China. There we saw beaming workers who work fewer hours than they used to under the tyrant Chiang Kai-shek, so they could get home and spend the evenings, our guide said, studying the works of Chairman Mao.

Mmm, we saw happy students, happy peasants thrashing rice, even happy surgeons carrying the little sacred red book, The Thoughts of Chairman Mao. We saw bookstalls, platoons of books all on Karl Marx or Lenin or Mao or the Long March or the history and triumph of communism. What about the rest of the world's literature, no call for it apparently. We saw a group of eight-year-olds performing a dance – and they were dressed as cute little soldiers – in which they stabbed the air with fixed baronets. This didn't impress our side quite as much as they'd hoped.

Well, inside Burma was nothing like so sugary and spicy, the Scotsman's little tour of Burma, mainly of the capital Rangoon, was obviously totally controlled by the authorities. He went where they let him go, but the commentary was his, so he showed us first a whole company of marching soldiers coming towards us – hip hub, hip hub – but they weren't soldiers, they were doctors. Young male and female in blue fatigues marching along under a major doctor, I guess, to an orientation or training class, training in the proper military approach to medicine. The doctors were asked if they enjoyed their training lesson. Two, three extremely pretty young women said with no expression at all, "Yes, why?", they turned back to their books they didn't say they weren't going to say anything. Few people on the streets said anything at all.

We did have a short interview with U Nu whom some people will remember as the first prime minister of an Independent Burma after the Second War. He'd been under house arrest, but now he was free, free to make guarded remarks about the people's wish for democracy. We never knew quite what anybody meant by that since under U Nu, Burma was once firmly allied with the people's democracy of China. I never saw a population going about its daily business in more uniformed gloom, the people wouldn't say anything controversial like "it's a great day, isn't it" to the Scot. Here and there, outside an important building you would see a lolling soldier or two, otherwise as the Scot remarked there was nothing except the weary I'd say frightened faces of the people nothing to show that this was a country under martial law run by a military dictatorship.

A couple of present cabinet ministers were quick to explain that it's true, there were several hundred political prisoners – Amnesty says many thousands – but the present government does not intend to stay for ever, there will be elections. I gathered that they were about as imminent as the elections in Cuba, which Castro has been promising ever since 1960 when he took over. As for the infamous 1987/8 student demonstrationists, what he called "'descendants for democracy", well we were assured that they were not genuine political uprisings just a shambles of lootings and burnings and killings by hooligans. What has all this got to do with America?

Well this whole bleak piece was no longer than about 12 minutes, but I shall never forget it and I had the feeling that the Scotsman was trying to be as fair and inquisitive as he could, but when I switched over to one of our networks and heard and saw the messieurs Bush and Clinton and Gore and Quayle bawling away lampooning and systematically distorting each other's policies and generally behaving like teenagers in a tantrum, I felt like the prodigal hot footing it home. I thought well bless your heart George and Bill and Dan and Al, Churchill was right, democracy is a perfectly awful form of government. Unfortunately, it's better than all the others.

It's sometimes hard to believe that, but I have to say that electioneering in a democracy while mainly the sound and fury of factious oratory does allow for something vital, which I gather from an old friend of mine a born Russian is highly suspect in any totalitarian regime – humour, conscious or not. I haven't heard this time of any campaigner as good as the southern senator who beat the late Senator Pepper in I think his first run for the Senate from Florida. His opponent rattled around the inland countryside, the back country of Florida in an old jalopy, stopped at every rural crossroads rang a bell to summon everyone in sight – sometimes he'd gather only 20 or 30 people but he did it everywhere and he crisscrossed the state. He made the same little speech, an outrageous, scurrilous speech about his opponent designed to impress the poor and the simple and he delivered it absolutely deadpan.

It ended: I just hate to tell you this folks, but my opponent masticates his food and worse he has a sister up in New York who's a thespian. He won handsomely. Well we have nothing to match that classic this time, but we did pick up a jewel of rhetoric from the Republican convention.

Do you remember the evangelical, the Reverend Pat Robertson who four years ago, ran for the presidency himself. He was one of the orators at the Huston convention and in doom-laden tones he made a warning reference to something most of us had forgotten, the Equal Rights Amendment. Now that was an amendment to the Constitution, which declared in the simplest language, equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex. Sounds sensible, it was thought to be so by both Houses of Congress, which passed it easily. But to make an amendment to the Constitution come into force, it must be ratified by the legislatures of three-quarters of the 50 states. The Equal Rights Amendment fell short by three states 10 years ago this summer and expired.

But the Reverend Robertson seemed scared that it's going to be brought up again. At the Republican convention he thundered, and I quote, "The Equal Rights Amendment is a socialist plot designed to have women leave their husbands, kill their children, destroy capitalism and turn lesbian". Almost as offensive as the sentence itself was the fact that nobody, from President Bush down, got up and said "the Reverend Pat Robertson is talking rubbish", they just let it stay there like a bad smell in the air. It would do its work, nasty work among the ignorant.

This week an old politician died whom nobody practically nobody outside his home state had ever heard off even though the man was 84 and had been in the United States Senate for 32 years – Senator Quentin Burdick. He was known and cherished in its native state of North Dakota for the reason any congressman or senator is cherished quite apart from his personal charm or beguiling character, he brought home the bacon. Fellow senators were enviably aghast over Burdick's unashamed way of tacking amendments on to every sort of bill that could cajole federal money for some strictly North Dakotan project – a bridge, a crops subsidy, a veterans hospital, a highway – what are known as pork barrel projects.

In his time, Quentin Burdick was proud to be known in the Senate as the King of Pork. Only once and very lately did he acquire national exposure, an old dance band leader early sweet swing much adored for years on the telly by fans equally creaking died a year to two ago. Senator Burdick somehow collared $500,000 in government money to build a museum in Strasburg, North Dakota in honour of the dead sweet swing king. Usually slices of pork go deliberately unnoticed, since your colleague is busy slicing his own, but this was a whole hog. Congress was properly appalled and withdrew the half million dollars.

We haven't up north here heard anything lately from Louisiana, where at election time you can see democracy in full bloom. Louisiana is famous for Cajun cooking, jazz, reformers, machine politicians and routine corruption. I suppose David Duke the former neo-Nazi is running for something, but we haven't heard of anybody in the fine old scoundrelly Louisiana tradition, nobody anywhere in the country as memorable as the late Earl Long, Hugh's brother one and forever remembered as governor of the state. He who, once elected, immediately reneged on the main promise of his campaign and confronted by an angry delegation of citizens asking him what he thought he'd done – "Done?" he said, "I lied."

One time, the federals were after him with a raft of income tax evasion charges and his opponents crowed that the investigation would upset him, he said, "I'm the most investigated man in history and I'm upset, proof". He was the first Southern governor to give blacks the vote and when a notorious New Orleans judge, a racist leader, went storming into Earl Long's office, the governor said, "What are you going to do judge, the feds have got the atom bomb." An honest politician if ever there was one. When he left office and was in failing health and an old colleague was deploring the corruption in public life, the old man said, "One of these days, the people of Louisiana are going to get decent government and they ain't gonna like it."

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