The New York water shortage - 30 June 1989

At the end of April here in New York City little stickers, notices, suddenly appeared in shops, on blank walls, in lifts, office lobbies and so on saying simply “Drought emergency. Conserve water in every way. No watering of lawns, washing of cars.”

Mayor Koch appeared on television. That, I must say, is a vacuous remark – Mayor Koch appears on television almost every day and has two half-hour weekly programmes of his own, explaining, soliciting, rebuffing ideas about the street people, drugs, crime, child abuse, battered wives, day care, rent control, industries leaving the city and, now, the proposed abandonment of a nuclear power plant on Long Island which at the cost of several billion dollars has been getting steam up so to speak for 20 years and has never opened and apparently won’t, due in the main to the overwhelming conviction of Long Islanders that in a nuclear accident the population of Long Island would be trapped and could be evacuated through the poisoned air only into the humid jungle of New York City.

Much good the mayor’s brave, unceasing question time appearances do him. In every borough of the city, among every racial or ethnic group, Anglos, Hispanics, blacks, and among every age group from teenagers to geriatrics his favourable rating is no higher than 29%. He’s running in a game but weary fashion for re-election in November but is, at the moment, given almost no chance to win.

Still, he’s an entertainment in himself and on public matters that are less than heart-rending he preserves his light touch. So on 1 May when those warning drought emergency stickers appeared he came on to say – no car washes, let your lawn enjoy a weed or two, no water to be served in restaurants, take a quick shower, he said.

The city reservoirs were at 48% of capacity when they should be, after a normal snowy winter and rainy spring, about 90. Well, we had less snow through the winter than at any time in the past 50 years. Things looked bad. Thereupon we have the wettest May ever recorded. June kept up the downpour – floods of warm water in a city as sticky as the Amazon jungles.

By the middle of June we’d had in all, in six weeks, 30 inches of rain, which is just two inches short of our average annual rainfall. The reservoirs are flooding the neighbouring lowlands and, naturally, people who live there up the river wanted to know what the mayor was going to do about it – it’s his doing, isn’t it? Everything bad that happens in the city and its environs is his business.

He appeared on the evening news for about 15 seconds leaning back, his elbows out, his hands clutching the back of his head, relaxed, a Cheshire cat smile. What to do now, Mr Mayor? He said, “Take a long shower and any restaurant that fails to serve two glasses of water per customer will be prosecuted.”

We can talk easily about such a light topic because this morning I woke up and I thought it was the first day of fall. Our hideous prevailing summer winds, which come across hot ocean, either from the south-east or the south-west, had collapsed before the blessed north-west wind which comes across 3,000 miles of dry land and pushes every memory of smog and heat haze and summer stew out to sea and leaves you with a crystalline city that makes you think that overnight your eyesight has been miraculously restored to 20:20, the balmy temperature an unbelievable 66 degrees.

Well, by the time you hear this talk the chances are about 10-1 that this freakish break will be over and we shall be back to blazing leaden skies and an oven of a city in which even the newspapers feel like towels in your hands. The effect of this tonic break on me was to banish depressing thoughts from the mind, especially thoughts about pressing public topics which 24 hours ago I was resolved to talk about.

My whole inclination is to forget the chronic ordeals of the republic, the contentious judgments just handed down by the Supreme Court in the last week of its current session, and talk about happy things, about issues that are always settled, contests in which there is always a winner, in a word, say, about Wimbledon.

We have a sports commentator on the early evening news who always ends his report with 30 seconds of shots of the sensational or funny baseball players of the day, unbelievable catches snatched from the bleachers, a player sliding into third and toppling the umpire.

On the last day of the Eastbourne tennis tournament the reporter said to camera, “Meanwhile in England John McEnroe is getting ready for Wimbledon.” Cut immediately to McEnroe shouting a four-letter word at the umpire. Cut back to the reporter saying rightly, “Yes he’s ready”.

How I wish I were there to see the outrageous child Monica Seles and the Russian 16-year-old who set the Kremlin in a tizzy by saying “I want the money I’ve earned”, most of all that dark-eyed, bouncing pixie Sanchez who danced around in Paris, snatched returns – sometimes, it seemed, from the stands – darted for ungettable drop-shots two inches from the net and in many other incredible delightful ways made a monkey out of the incomparable Steffi Graf. But it cannot be. All this time I have been saying under my breath “Mea culpa”.

Last week, some of you will remember, I talked about the extraordinary ruling of the United States Supreme Court in saying that to burn the American flag in public was not an act of desecration if you did it for a political purpose, that the act was in principle sanctioned by the First Amendment to the Constitution which protects the freedom of speech.

As you will recall, this judgment was the last word in the case of a young man in Dallas who at the Republican convention there in 1984 burned a flag while his comrades chanted “America red, white and blue, we spit on you”. He was prosecuted under a Texas statute which makes it a crime to desecrate the American flag. Forty-seven other states have similar statutes all of which, it’s now assumed, are null and void.

Well, in the days after the court’s ruling the country blew up in a storm of protest. Veterans of the armed forces of course were the most vocal – the older the veteran, the louder the protest. Radio and television stations across the continent had their telephones jammed by indignant citizens. Marches in many cities with waving placards.

One troop of protesters got together outside the Supreme Court itself and burned a judge’s robe, a prop robe. The Congress put off, for the moment, its normal business.

The Senate was the first to rally and – a very rare event – all 100 senators were present and voting. The result, on a Senate resolution expressing "profound disappointment with the Court’s ruling" –- 97 for, 3 against.

In both houses there was a prompt call for a Constitution amendment specifically saying that the desecration of the American flag is a crime. After that, the Senate got busy drafting an alternative form of what it calls "corrective action", namely a new law.

Now skipping for a moment the rights and wrongs, the opposing views, if the Congress is mad at a judgment – which it sometimes is, and this time is madder than ever – it of course it has the power to write and pass another law which will try to evade the particular clause or word of the Constitution that was interpreted in the offensive way.

But writing into the Constitution an amendment which defines an exception to the First Amendment is a very different business bristling with trouble, for it might start a whole slew of new amendments to the definition of free speech.

Moreover, to be adopted, a Constitutional amendment must get a two-thirds majority vote in the Senate and then go to the 50 state legislatures and then receive a three-quarters majority in each chamber. This can take years and rarely happens. The last amendment was made in 1971, lowering the voting age to 18 when there was really no argument. So the chances of a new amendment – which, by the way, President Bush wants too – a new amendment on freedom of speech, are very remote.

The present one, the first, has lasted 200 years and successfully upheld hundreds of different applications of the phrase “the principle of the freedom of speech”. As for the alternative – passing a new law – the problem for the Congress there is that if it specified that the flag was sacrosanct and outside the protection of free speech,that would inevitably end up before the court, which would surely strike it down.

Much of the clamour and indignation in the Senate was colourful and eloquent about the sanctity, the cherished symbol, of the flag. Only one voice was heard saying, in effect, if the flag is so sacred, so special, then why down the past 20 years have all the ruling usages of the flag, incorporated by Congress in 1971, why have they been ignored or violated? So that the very prohibition that I mentioned last time – that the flag may not be used on a commercial product – has gone with the wind.

Flags on bikinis, on jeans, on T-shirts. I think the Congress would, in the end, have a hard time convincing the court that a national symbol worn on the bottom of a stripper is less of a desecration than a solemn burning as an act of political protest.

When the blood of the angry citizens cools we shall see if the Congress or the president or any state legislature can write a law which strikes a workable, legal, compromise between the two extreme views expressed in the Senate, one from a Democrat, “The greatest travesty in the annals of jurisprudence”, the other a Republican who described the speeches of his colleagues as “an exercise in silliness and hypocrisy”.

To strike a legal, workable balance between such extremes would be quite a feat and, I should guess, will never happen.

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