Fear of Russia returns

I don't know how many years ago it was, but last Saturday brought back to me a sharp picture of it. Last Saturday was Yom Kippur, the Jewish day of atonement, on which fasting and prayer are prescribed for the atonement of sins.

The picture I have in mind was a full-page cartoon in the New Yorker, the magazine, a long shot of Broadway looking down to Times Square which is usually as crammed with people and taxis and trucks as Piccadilly Circus on a Saturday night. In this cartoon, there was not a living soul. It had no need of a caption. The issue of the magazine came out on Yom Kippur.

It certainly is a day when travel in and out of New York is easier than on any other day of the year. For of the six million Jews in the United States, two million live in New York which is five times the number in the whole of Great Britain or, for that matter, in Tel Aviv.

I doubt the New Yorker would publish that cartoon today, for since the blacks were liberated from discrimination to the extent that they were by the historic Supreme Court ruling of 1954, all so-called minorities, even when they're majorities, all of what we now call ethnic groups, have become increasingly sensitive about remarks, whether frankly pejorative or jokey, which might suggest that they are not mainstream Americans. There was a time, it was very much in my time in the 1930s, when every vaudeville show and burlesque house had its specifically Jewish comedians, black comedians, German and Italian and Irish comedians – they have gone with the wind and the Supreme Court judgment.

Ethnic jokes are not published. In a recent administration, a Cabinet officer was overheard on an airplane telling a funny, but positively ethnic joke. It was reported – the incident, not the joke – and he was forced to resign and he's not been heard of since. And still Jewish jokes in particular abound and the most frequent, the best tellers of them, are Jews.

My lawyer, who has never, I believe, in his life, said, 'Have you heard this one?' is an anthology of them and they come from him whenever you ask him about his health, politics, family relations, some trouble he's having with one of his clients. Instead of boring you with the subtleties of the actual facts, he says, 'It's really the old Jewish story' and caps a complicated situation with a short, wry, wise joke. Which only goes to show that what is enduring about Jewish humour is that it's always about life situations, usually poignant.

Last week I heard a new one and tried to tell it to him. He's a courteous listener and he let me get through the punchline and then gently nodded his head. Of course he'd heard it, in many variations, long ago.

On the day of Yom Kippur, a friend of mine, a WASP – a white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant – looking over the grievous and, I must say, occasionally frightening news out of America as well as out of Lebanon, Moscow, the Philippines, Korea, said, 'I think we ought to replace the slogan or text on the dollar bill.' It says, 'In God we trust.' He suggested it ought to be changed to, 'Mea Culpa'.

And it's true, it would be hard to find another country, so much devoted of late to lamenting its sins, both past and present. There's yet another – four-hour this time – documentary coming up reviewing the whole ghastly experience of Vietnam. Hardly a month goes by without our being reminded of the plight of thousands of the Haitian and Cuban boat people, held in camps in the south. We don't lack other TV shows from time to time on the wretched fate of some Indian tribe or other out West.

It's a rare evening TV news programme that does not show the despair of some unemployed family in any one of a score of states and about every two weeks or so, there are special news segments of six minutes which survey the various ordeals of the unemployed in a coal-mining town in West Virginia, in the depressed automobile capital of Detroit, copper miners in Nevada, farmers in Kansas or Iowa who have seen as much as a half of their corn (that's maize) crops burnt to unsaleable cinders in the appalling summer drought. All this, when employment is rising and unemployment is dropping impressively.

It's got so that one American writer gave thanks that his family didn't arrive in the United States till 1906, so that they needn't feel any guilt about the treatment of the Indians or the massacre of the buffalo or any other of the sins of American history that somebody's always writing a vast lamentation about, by way of a novel, an historical exposé or a television documentary.

This man suggests that America has embarked on what he calls 'an all-year-round Yom Kippur'. This orgy of atonement is not something that is much known about, I find, among Europeans or other foreigners who still think of Americans as being, in the main, either uncommonly proud of their history or defiant about its excesses and shortcomings. On the contrary, even in the worst times of jingoism – even such a wicked form of jingoism as that practised by the late Senator McCarthy – I'd say that more Americans feel ashamed of such goings-on than feel comfortable with them. This is sometimes depressing to live with but it is, I think, no bad thing. It saves you from complacency about the good things.

Well, it's not easy just now to ferret out the good things, apart from the groaning bill that's now being presented, so to speak, for the ravages of the freakish weather everywhere. The whirlwind of tornadoes in the South and Midwest, the immense floods along the delta country of the Mississippi and Missouri rivers, the brutal damage to the houses and the beaches along the California coastline from the merciless rains of the last winter.

These disasters, it's always noticeable, Americans take in their stride. Acts of God, if that's what they are, were always the humdrum experience of the pioneers pushing west. And the assumption is still there in the heartland of the country and it's still acted on that the neighbours are always on hand to repair what God hath wrought and they do it with surprising speed and spirit.

That small town in California that was practically destroyed by an earthquake is already well on the way to its resurrection. In Texas, where enumerable small towns were pulverised by roving tornadoes, 30 old retired carpenters banded together, surveyed an area of 3,000 square miles which had lost their churches and decided to build new ones from scratch. They start and finish one church every three days and in three months have put up 30 churches. For free!

'These people,' said one old gaffer, 'they don't have no money but we have the labour, right? It's better 'n sitting around on the back porch just swappin' stories.'

It's a cheerful note in a generally depressing landscape which, there's no point in belittling, is dominated by the revived fear, not resentment of or antagonism to, but fear of the Russians. The president has certainly lost his old dependable backing from conservatives who want him to take far more drastic sanctions against the Soviet Union than the international airline pilots have managed to impose.

But then, if Mr Reagan is thinking about his political future – which he's bound to be doing in the last year before a presidential election – he has, by the same token, picked up a surprising amount of support from liberals while blasting the Russians for an act which, when the Israelis and the Bulgarians did it some years ago, they instantly apologised and offered prompt compensation.

The president has put the question squarely to friends and critics alike. What do you they expect me to do? Drop the bomb? Declare war? And, of course, that is the galling nub of the question. However rigid, however brutal, however impenitent the Russians may be in their public behaviour and however paranoid in their suspicions of the United States, they cannot be challenged and defied, as Churchill challenged and defied the Nazis.

Mr Reagan and Mr Shultz, the Secretary of State and Mr Clark, the National Security Adviser, have had as frustrating a couple of weeks as they've known in recognising that anger and rhetoric cannot any longer be acted on in the old decisive way. Their ordeal cannot have been softened by the news of a national poll which reports that 60 per cent of Americans think they have not been told the whole story about the downing of the Korean airliner.

The general gloom was deepened by the brusque work from Moscow that Mr Gromyko, for the first time in I don't know how many years, will not be attending the annual meeting of the United Nations general assembly because, as the Russians put it, the United States has failed to guarantee the security of their foreign minister and to abide by international norms of behaviour. The irony of that phrase, I imagine, will be lost on the Russian people who've had only one brisk and self-righteous account of how the unscrupulous Americans used a civilian plane to stand in for their illegal spying over the most secret installations of a nuclear base.

There is, however – just to make life and righteousness harder for Mr Reagan and Mr Shultz – an uncomfortable snag in the action of the governors of New Jersey and New York in forbidding Mr Gromyko to land at a civilian airport in Greater New York.

When the United States became the host of the United Nations, an agreement was worked out between the city and the international body which said that neither federal nor state nor city authorities would impose impediments to transit of the delegates of a member nation AND that this freedom of transit should not be suspended irrespective of the relations existing between governments.

So, if you want to be strictly legal about it, the two state governors, with the consent of the federal government, are in violation of the United Nations law. Maybe it's as well Mr Gromyko won't be on hand to bemoan, at dreadful length, yet another international crime of the fascist imperialist beast known as the United States of America.

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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