Argentina bailed out

Another glittering San Francisco day reminds me that it's more years ago than I care to remember that a doctor told me to throw away the sunglasses that I regularly wore outdoors in the blazing New York summers. Now if anybody had wanted to make an issue of this habit at the time, the time being the late 1930s, I would have maintained that I practised it out of respect for my eyesight, what else? But, at this safe distance of time, I can now manfully admit that, of course, I wore dark sunglasses because they were just becoming chic. Only just, except among the top Hollywood film stars.

So there was always the secret hope that you might be mistaken for Ronald Coleman or, at least, Bella Lugosi. However, I was just then at the turn of one of those seven-year periods when, I'm reliably told, changes in ones vision are most marked. So I went off to an eye doctor. He examined the glasses I'd worn for reading. He held them up and he wobbled them back and forth like a see-saw. 'Land's sake!' he cried – he was from Utah – 'How do you manage to find your way along the streets? Do you have headaches?' he asked me. I said I'd heard of headaches but never had one.

'Well,' he said, 'you don't squinny, you don't look like somebody who ought to be wearing glasses, so go on as you are!' he said, but he prescribed another pair for long distance. 'What games do you play?' was the next question. 'Tennis,' I said, 'and squash and I bowl, at least once a week.' I throw in quickly that I'm talking about the game that is now the most popular indoor game in the United States, played in bowling alleys – tenpins, I suppose you could quaintly describe it. 'Ever play golf?' he asked. 'No.' 'Pity!' he said. How so?

'Well, like all astigmatics,' he said, 'and you are a monster of astigmatism, your trouble is muscle laziness. The great thing about golf is that you constantly have to switch focus from five feet to maybe a couple of hundred yards. Think about it!' he said. I didn't. I was not merely unmoved. He might as well have recommended that I take up polo or knitting. 'Well,' said the doctor, 'at least you could throw away those ridiculous sunglasses. All they do is encourage more muscle laziness by inhibiting the eyes' marvellous ability to respond in a fraction of a second to changes in light.' I obediently threw away my sunglasses and have never worn any since.

By the way, I see from the marvellous, fat annual the government has just put out known as the United States Statistical Abstract, a massive 1600-page compendium of every conceivable kind of national statistic, I see that bowling is played or watched on the tube regularly by 65 million Americans. That's almost one in three. Every shop, factory, office, political party, lodge, union, collection of buddies from every sort of trade has its bowling team and every Saturday afternoon, it seems that about a quarter of the population is either out clattering the pins or watching the touring champs do it.

One of the fascinating related statistics was compiled from a national study asking people which games they played, watched or read about. The result is certainly a blow to some of us. Baseball in summer is at the top and football – American football, of course – in winter, followed very closely by basketball whose stars garner almost as many millions of dollars in contracts as the young giants of baseball and football. After that comes racing and hockey – ice-hockey that is – and wrestling and then boxing and down to harness racing and, almost at the bottom, along with lacrosse – lacrosse? – tennis and golf. Just barely over five per cent of the population ever watches, plays or reads about golf. A fact of life which must, at all costs, be kept from the lively egos the big golfing stars, who are under the delusion that they're not only household names, but familiar faces.

The only pleasure I take from the shocking statistic about bowling is the memory of an old man I knew, I believe he's still alive, in Chicago, who struggled for years with his own very small advertising company. Some time around the turn of the 1950s, '60s, a young associate of his said, 'Walter, we'll never get anywhere if we restrict ourselves to print advertising'. Walter looked puzzled, almost to the point of insult. 'What other sort of advertising was there?' 'Television! That's what!' said his assistant. Walter, I think, demurred, is what a novelist would have said, 'Television!' he snorted, 'I don't know anything about drama and news and ballet and such.'

They let it drop till one day, Walter called into his office his very small staff, 'We're going,' he said, 'into television.' 'Good!' they cried. 'Not television advertising', he said, 'but television production.' How's that?' they asked. 'Well,' said Walter, 'I've been looking at the stuff and I've decided that what people want to see on television is somebody doing very well what they do badly.'

And what would that be, pray? 'Bowling,' he said, 'is what.' They thought, of course, he was insane but he approached some team that had won a local city contest and matched them with another regional winner. He incorporated himself as a television production company. He was the first man to put bowling on television and he stayed with it. Today, he must savour more than most of us that staggering figure of 65 million Americans. Walter's retired now and chuckling as the banks come to him to bail out Argentina or Brazil or whoever.

Incidentally, you must have seen that Argentina has just been bailed out or, at least, her colossal debt has been put on hold. It seems to me to be only about two years ago that you could make a smart joke about a new definition of bankruptcy. Now you weren't bankrupt if you couldn't possibly repay a debt but only if you couldn't pay the interest on it. It was no longer than two years ago, certainly, that I asked a man in international banking how Argentina was doing. He said, 'Oh, she's in great shape. We've stretched out the interest payments and, given time, she'll be able to meet them.'

Well, a week ago, Argentina declared that she was about to default on several hundreds of millions of dollars due in interest payments that suddenly gave a new definition to 'default'. It made three or four of the top American banks wonder how to write off these appalling losses which could no longer be absorbed or redeemed by the World Bank or the International Monetary Fund. So a new wrinkle was though up – a consortium led by Mexico and joined by the United States, Colombia, Brazil, Venezuela and, guess who? – Argentina.

They managed to put together $500 million as what is described as an emergency package. It doesn't solve the debt, the interest debt, problem, it allows a breathing space of a sort which evidently nations may enjoy, but don't try it on your local banker! This magic is all the more baffling to laymen when they consider that the saviours of Argentina are made up, apart from the United States, of at least four countries that are in dire financial straits themselves.

Anyway, the United States, for one, is vastly relieved by this new formula of postponement. I haven't been able to find out what happens when the postponement has to be postponed. The United States government feels relieved on two counts. First, when you publicise the members of the consortium, the United States sheds its unfair, but evil, reputation as the solitary, heartless, rich uncle pressing countries with much poverty to pay their bills and it's surely no news to the initiated that Uncle Sam has, in the past decade or so, for this reason and some others, considerably heightened his reputation as the cruel Colossus of the North.

The second cause for relief is more statesmanlike in its intention and one that will very much come to affect Great Britain. It's the idea, the notion, that Argentina is now engaged in a tough and admirable attempt to establish democracy in a country terrorised time and again by what Winston Churchill used to call 'the jackboot and the prison house'. After all these years of the Peronist régimes and successful military dictators, President Raul Alfonsin is trying to unite his country and it's felt here that he must be given time to restore not only the country's political health, but its collapsing economy.

Washington is also mentioning two other burdens that Alfonsin is bravely trying to shed. One is the dreadful plight of 'the disappeared'. Alfonsin is relentlessly going after the generals and the others who were responsible for this routine cruelty and the other burden is what Washington can now comfortably, or calmly, refer to as 'the Falklands' humiliation'.

To give a topical point to this feeling, we can now switch to a long cable taking up most of a page in the San Francisco Chronicle a day or two ago, a cable from Buenos Aires. It was the second anniversary of the beginning of the war with Britain. It was celebrated, if that's the word, by a parade of 200 veterans of the Falklands episode leading over 10,000 people assembled in a downtown plaza who marched to the so-called English tower that stands in front of the railway station. It's a replica of Big Ben's clock tower and it was put up there in 1910 by British residents.

Well, the veterans broke through the door of the tower, piled up wooden crates and started a fire. It was quickly put out by two fire engines but the angry gesture had been made.

Another band of demonstrators, meanwhile, went off to the 10-foot statue of George Canning, the British foreign secretary who lobbied for European recognition of the new countries of Latin America that had fought for and won their independence from Spain. The crowd pulled down the statue.

At a memorial service for the more than 700 Argentines killed in the Falklands war, President Alfonsin pledged himself to the 'firmness of our decision to obtain a just and definitive solution, to secure our rights by negotiation, dialogue and understanding'.

So the consortium we talked about, as I said, is meant to give the Argentine president the chance to unite his people. One element on which they are already united, which both their neighbours and the United States feel would be fatal to deny or discourage, is their conviction that the Falklands defeat did not solve the problem of the Malvinas and that the next move is up to Britain.

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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