Royal Jubilee

It may be a sign of the times, it may be no more than a rare coincidence, but it is a fact that among all the cast of real characters that crowd the newspapers and the news programmes on television, this week three women took the spotlight and left all the important men of the world in the dark, and even dimmed the appearance, or non-appearance, of President Idi Amin.

I should guess, anyway, that most Americans who pay any sort of attention to the news would say, correctly, that the three big news stories of the week have been the triumph of the Queen of England, the travels of President Carter's wife and the sudden rise to national fame of /.../ named Anita Bryant. 

Long before the celebrations got under way, the American television networks began to lay elaborate plans to cover the Royal Jubilee. Television, as we all know, tells its message through pictures, that's fairly obvious to the normal viewer, but it's a truth that many scholars, commentators and other talking heads prefer to forget. They like to think that their wise words carry at least half the weight of the message, but time and again it's proved to be not so. 

I remember, some years ago, a public opinion survey made a general study of the popular memories of President John Kennedy's assassination. People of all sorts and pretensions were asked to recall the horror and to say what evidence supported the theory of a single killer, what evidence inclined them to suspect two killers or a conspiracy, or whatever. The whole study was defeated by the force of people's visual memory. They remembered, more than all the reams of testimony in the nine volumes of the presidential commissions report, they remembered most vividly the blurry, jerky little movie, an 8mm movie taken by a bystander, of the president slumping over and Mrs Kennedy's frantic climb over his sagging body. They remembered, next the astonishing scene, which was being televised routinely the following Sunday morning, of Lee Harvey Oswald being transferred from one place of detention to another, when a small, chunky man broke through the onlookers and shot Oswald. They remembered most of all the figure of the sheriff or guard, in a white suit, rearing back with his mouth wide open in shock. This is pitifully little to go on as a file of evidence on an assassination, but there it is in the public memory preserved like a horrible fly in amber. 

What I'm saying is that American television was not primarily interested in the institution of monarchy or where it stands today. It was interested, as I should guess every other country's television system was, in the prospect of a gorgeous show. If it is the understandable weakness of television to want to film the flames of a fire and not try to find the motive for starting it, it's all the more understandable that in a world which has abandoned uniforms – even the old uniform of a businessman, or a soldier, or a schoolboy – the promise of a procession and a cathedral service blazing with medieval colour and Elizabethan costumes with heralds and trumpets and golden coaches and sparkling jewels and high-stepping cavalry and the rest, was irresistible. 

However, I've noticed in talking to Americans who saw the knightly pageant that the sight they hold on to is the reverse shot, taken as if from the roof of Buckingham Palace which showed the enormous packed crowd on Tuesday, waving and cheering. A crowd that went from the Palace gates, it seemed to us anyway, as far as Admiralty Arch, if not the far horizon of Trafalgar Square. 

John Chancellor, the NBC anchorman who had gone to London said that no old Londoner he talked to, none of them, could remember anything quite like it since the Coronation itself or the Silver Jubilee of George V. Well, I was there then and I would dare to say that no crowd I have ever seen outside Buckingham Palace began to match the huge ocean of people last Tuesday. Not even the roaring mass of people out there on the night of VE Day. 

However, what I think makes this scene unforgettable to the Americans is the shock of it. They've heard and read with the rest of us, down the past few years, British complaints about the cost of the upkeep of the Royal Family, they've assumed that the decline in the old formality, and I find it impossible to imagine King George V having a cosy television talk with Robin Day, sa. They have assumed that this fading of the remoteness, almost god-like, of the Royal Family, implied a fading in the institution itself. 

There is no uniform American attitude to royalty except a 200-year-old agreement that it's not for them. There's much superficial nonsense talked in Britain and the reaches of the Commonwealth about THE American passion for titles. Certainly there are no fewer, but no more, Americans than there are Britons or Australians or South Africans who, as the saying goes, ’love a lord’. 

Most Americans, I believe, are at once quietly fascinated by the survival of the medieval pageantry into modern life but they're also quietly baffled by how it fits in with a country that is, undoubtedly, democratic. It's a puzzle they never resolve, just as they are puzzled to know how Britain can have a constitution when you can't see it, when, unlike the American Constitution, it is not written down. Most ordinary people don't fret over this but I've noticed that the higher you go up the American educational scale, you have a harder time convincing American businessmen, scholars, lawyers that such a thing as the British Constitution even exists. 

I said that the, what, half a million swaying, cheering people outside the Palace was the main memory and the main shock. Put very simply, the shock was the visible and thunderingly audible evidence that this ancient institution, whose trappings seem almost bizarre and irrelevant in our time, should have produced a family that aroused such undeniable affection. 

The explanation that Americans give, in however off-hand a way, seems to be that the family itself, raised above the tides of politics and the squalor of so much public life, is a reassurance, the assertion through what looks like a stern and austere institution, the assertion of some old values that American middle-aged and old people see crumbling around them. Quite simply, duty, family, country. I think there's no doubt that this impression is what will remain. At any rate, the reporting of the jubilee in American papers has been very full, colourful, not starry-eyed or fawning, but it's noticeable also that they have been practically free from the kind of rearguard, tart criticism of the monarchy that erupted last week in some British papers. 

Now, to go south instead of east, we've watched the remarkable tour of Mrs Carter through the Caribbean and South American republics. What was most remarkable, even unpleasant to some of those republics themselves was the fact the President Carter chose his wife to undertake the mission. If she'd gone to Europe it might have seemed unusual but simply a refreshing change, but the Latin republics normally take a sharp, machismo view of women in politics, or women anywhere outside the home or the working farm or the boudoir. 

President Carter must have had many warning memoranda from the Latin American desk of the state department but, whatever else he is, he is not a naive man. He knew what he was doing and since his wife's mission was to press, ever so gently, for a new consideration of human rights in those countries that are seeking American aid, what's more pointed than to send a member of the sex which in non-Latin nations too has only recently begun to assert its equality before the law. 

The toughest trip must have been the one to Brazil. President Carter had begged the West Germans not to ship to Brazil the means to nuclear power. The Brazilians protested, as the Argentines have done, that human rights in their own country are their own business. Now the American attitude is quite courteous but firm. If you are living your own life and want no help from us, agreed. Civil, human rights and liberties are your own business. But if you want economic, not to mention military, aid then gross violations of human rights inside your country are our business too. 

Well, it's much too early to say whether Mrs Carter's mission has been a success. Obviously she was greeted and treated with impeccable Latin courtesy whatever misgivings, resentments, doubts there may have been beneath the smiles and the bows; we'll have to wait for the reports of the embassies back to Washington. But the very idea of the trip is one of those odd, unexpected initiatives which make the presence of Jimmy Carter in the White House still a surprise and refreshment. 

Now, in Dade County, Florida, which is the great populous area around Miami, they held the other day a referendum to say whether a county law should stand which forbids legal discrimination against homosexuals in employment, housing and public accommodations. Dade County is supposedly the most liberal corner of Florida. 

Well, the people voted by more than two to one to repeal the law and this thumping majority was due, it seems to be agreed, to the almost evangelical campaign of an actress named Anita Bryant, who has aroused fears of the corruption of children and went around quoting the Bible's forthright denunciations of homosexuality as an abomination. And yet the enormous number of 90,000 people voted to uphold the law. It will go, I should guess, to a test case and could go to the United States Supreme Court. And the so-called 'gays' don't require any amendment, any new amendment, to the constitution. They take their stand on the century-old 14th Amendment which guarantees the equal protection of the laws to all citizens. 

Meantime, Miss, Mrs, Bryant promises a national campaign. Whether or not she can take the country, she took Dade County with a simple, stunning slogan. 'If God,' she said, 'had intended to condone homosexuality, he would not have put Adam and Eve in the Garden, he would have put Adam and Bruce.'

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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