US immigrants and identity - 10 September 1993

I think I ought to begin with a PS, a postscript to last week's talk just in case any persons who heard it found themselves in New York City last Monday Labour Day and couldn't cross 5th Avenue for a little while because of the parade I confidently predicted wouldn't take place.

Well, New York City did have a parade whereas recently it has tended to skip the great annual celebration of honest sweat, but this time it was put on mainly because this is an election year for the Mayor of New York City. Mr Dinkins, New York's first black mayor, a decent and singularly dapper handsome man is in trouble. The fear of asbestos still in the public schools, which is keeping them, over 1,000 of them, shut indefinitely. The bitter memories of last years riots in a suburb a district known as Crown Heights between blacks and Hasidic Jews the idea of expanding the United States Tennis Center by taking over land which now serves as playground for the poor.

Last week, an enthusiastic minority of listeners will know, saw the beginning and the progress of the United States Open Tennis Championships, I stress minority because of a fact rarely known to fans of minority sports, 94 Americans in 100 have never played, watched or read about tennis or golf.

Mayor Dinkins is a rabid tennis fan and during the last three championships, he's gone out to Flushing Meadows to watch and be watched at the Tennis Center, which compared with the cosy charm of Wimbledon and the elegant grandeur of Melbourne looks like a vast parking lot with railings, most of the pros can't bear it, but such is the prestige of the tournament that they play anyway in this great brawling coliseum. Until last year, merely one complaint of the players was that the centre had built practically on the tarmac of La Guardia Airport and at critical times, planes took off actually over the heads of the players who couldn't hear the ball they were hitting, let alone the bawling obscenities of John McEnroe.

Well, because Mayor Dinkins is such a tennis buff and has such clout with the powers that be, he managed to persuade the federal aviation authorities the ruling body over civil aviation to have the control tower at La Guardia re-route all incoming and outgoing planes during the big matches and all evening sessions. This is quite a feat of persuasion but not one that appeals to the people who live in two neighbouring boroughs who now find themselves for two hot weeks of the summer directly under the glide path of the thundering jets. There are several hundred thousand voters among those complainers and very many of them are the working people who use the playing fields that the city council has just voted to have the Tennis Center take over and embrace in its expansion plan.

In fact, the agreed deal, the city's permission is not final. The agreed deal makes many concessions to the local residents, they will have for instance 11 new courts to play on for 50 weeks of the year, but the big influential Long Island daily newspaper has had a sizzling editorial or two on the general theme of the rich guys wanting more room to play their rich man's sport and trample on the recreational fields of the poor. Mr Dinkins is all for the deal, but last week anyway, he was careful not to appear at the games. It sounds like a trivial issue, but it is a burning one to those mostly poor neighbourhoods to whom the humming jets so close overhead are a mocking reminder that the people who brought them this nuisance are about to invade their public park.

So Mayor Dinkins last Monday instead of being seen and photographed out of Flushing Meadows was eager to make the most of whatever Labor Day parade could be mustered and be seen marching along with this small group and that. At times a reporter called it, compared with the old days a "piddling little parade" and another man wrote "that the crowds packed the sidewalks one deep". A bigger parade took place in that lately embattled district of Crown Heights and big rollicking fiesta. What's this all about, asked a bystander. Nobody answered him, well of course, it's Labor Day. They said, this is the West Indian American Parade. There are 370,000 West Indians who live mostly across the East River in two suburbs one to the north and one to the south, both by the way in earshot of those diverted jets and they put on a gaudy show worthy of a New Orleans Mardi Gras parade with a different musical accompaniment of course.

It's the latest parade instigated by yet another group of immigrants anxious – as once upon a time, the immigrants were not – to assert their special pride in their country of origin to the old and regular annual parades, Columbus Day, Thanksgiving Day, Pulaski Polish American Day, we've lately added Italian American Parade, a Puerto Rican Day, now a West Indian Day and soon I imagine Haitian French Day and French Day and not far off in the future it's possible Russian American Day for there's a nearby town on Long Island called Brighton Beach to which in the past few years thousands of refugee Russians have swarmed in like homing pigeons.

A friend in the movie business tells me that you could make a believable motion picture about a town, many a town in Russia and never leave Brighton Beach and its environments. The town is locally known as Odessa by the Sea.

Now a lot of people believe that the more special national days there are celebrating the old country, the more the Republic will be fulfilling its destiny as the refuge of the poor and persecuted, other fewer people note the defiance as well as the pride of these new immigrants are alarmed by the proliferation of what old President Teddy Roosevelt swore America existed to abolish, namely hyphenated Americans. "Let's have an end," he said, "of Italian Americans, German Americans, Polish Americans – we're all Americans", and the thing that more than anything else makes us one is the English language. People who applaud the aggressive separatism of the new immigrants say that their children are just as eager as any previous generation to mould into the majority and learn English. The anxious minority fears not so that more and more newcomers whatever their language will form as the Cubans have done indeed County Florida their own self-sufficient community, bankers, merchants, schools, clubs, playing fields, churches and so on and achieve the day when like some places in Florida shops may proudly bear a sign "English spoken here".

It occurs to me just now that pretty soon another family of nations will be meeting here in New York that's facing a similar problem, perhaps as faced it since its birth the problem of how much to cherish the interests of the old country, how much to invest in the common interests of the whole family. What I'm saying simply, boldly is that on the 21st of this month, the United Nations General Assembly will hold its 48th Annual Meeting, 48. I'm still recovering from the shock of a call from a good friend in San Francisco who said, "I'm doing a little organising for 1995 and I wonder if we might have access to some of your memories, maybe even your dispatches". I said, "Frank, what's this all about?" he said "We're beginning the arrangements for the 50th anniversary of the founding of the United Nations, you were here were you not in April, May and June, I flew in, of 1945, right."

Well, my point about the United States and the United Nations is that both of them face a crisis of disunity in the sense I mean it's quite new for the United Nations and we can see now that the ideal or the need to stand together against a foe an aggressor really came up realistically as long as the Cold War lasted that's to say as long as the two superpowers glared at each other as potential enemies and when things went wrong anywhere in the world that affected their own interests, they went their own way after dropping a calling card at the UN by way of common courtesy. Other nations could go about their grudges and little wars, but the Soviets went into Afghanistan alone and the United States threatened Cuba and went into Grenada alone and anywhere else they thought they were being threatened.

Since the collapse of European Communism, the United Nations has been challenged to become what it was supposed to be a family of nations pledged to defend any member from aggression and that means always meant the readiness of all the members to put military force at the disposal of the whole, no it hasn't happened. We've seen more despairingly in Bosnia than anywhere else that few members of the family including the big boys are willing to do that.

In San Francisco in '45, there were 50 nations pledged to act together. Now there are 183 and the chances of their acting '"E Pluribus Unum" – out of the many one – are obviously remote, but some nations are still more powerful than others and enough of them could become the first international superpower. It would mean that Russia, Britain, France, the United States, China, Germany, Japan begin together to take the United Nations seriously as the only possible world policeman. Now for that it would need the promise of great manpower, a prescribed quota of weapons and much money. At the moment, the United Nations suffers a $2 billion deficit because mainly of three big-mouth members who haven't paid their dues their way behind, it might be a beginning to a united United Nations if those delinquents would put their money where their mouth is and cough up. Japan $108 million due, Russia an unlikely penitent $505 millions, the United States of America $786 millions.

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