Fountains and Trade Wars - 31 May 2002

I promised last time that I'd tell you about the new fountain of youth that is being touted, claimed, extolled around this country - and the promise will be kept.

But I don't think we can let this week go by without a passing thought on Mr Bush's safari through three of the capital cities of Europe he had never seen before.

The main business, set up some time ago, was of course a meeting with Mr Putin.

The stops at Berlin and Paris were meant to be congratulatory visits to two allies in the war - Germany and France - are both said to be in the front line of intelligence scouts.

Unfortunately the European visit came in the wake of two acts of American domestic policy that had just shocked and angered all three allies.

The first was Mr Bush's decision to slap a 30% tariff on the importation of foreign steel. Can the president do that?

Well five previous presidents did have the power, though an act of Congress, to forbid congressional amendments to trade deals sought by the president.

The act lapsed. President Clinton didn't attempt to renew it. But the new age of global trade underway President Bush very much wanted this power restored.

To his astonishment the Congress, the Senate especially though finely divided on most domestic issues, turned out to be heavily for free trade - so that Mr Bush immediately ran into massive opposition from both parties.

He got the old power back, if you can call it power, but only at the cost of promising huge subsidies to trades and crops and manufactures that politicians running for election in November were eager to protect.

So for the price of one tariff he had to promise to hand out a clutch of tariffs all around the country - or I should say, to senators in those half dozen states which will be battlegrounds for both parties in November.

The second act was, if anything, more protective than the first. It was a bill was to offer a whacking subsidy to the farmers.

Not the small, hard-sweating, independent family farmer we think of when we talk of the American farmer. Thomas Jefferson thought the future of this country would be that of a farming republic, to be run by God's finest creature - the American farmer.

Well this subsidy bill did little, and in a year of historic drought, for God's finest creature.

The money went to the agribusinesses, the huge farming corporations, many if not most of whose members have hardly ever planted a potato.

These two acts angered all free-trading Americans and until now we've boasted of both parties as being committed free traders.

There's been no party feud about it, no easy question of liberals versus conservatives. After the steel tariff a great howl of dissent went up from the Wall Street Journal, which is the bible of the conservatives and from time to time can express snatches of Biblical wisdom.

The agribusiness farm bill released a withering denunciation from the Journal which called the farm co-operatives "prairie predators".

There are as many Americans as Europeans who are sad and furious about this sudden, unannounced lurch towards protectionism, except the senators who got the subsidies.

And neither party can be blamed for it, therefore. Only one man, the president. Why and how this happened is a mystery, unless you believe, as most parties and politicians do, that it was done with a November election in mind, in other words a bit of electoral strategy or what some people call "dirty pool."

When Mr Bush discovered the depth and range of criticism and indignation that confronted him in Berlin and Paris he understandably lost his cool - inevitably in Paris, whose traditional disdain for America and Americans, was something that this first-time visitor had never encountered.

Surely however, it's time for the jibes and the sneers to be dropped and more attention be given to the one achievement of the trip which from any previous president, from Roosevelt to Clinton, would have been hailed everywhere as a mighty and historic act - namely the striking of a partnership, an alliance in effect, with Russia.

After nearly 60 years of fear, suspicion, distrust, bursts of fake friendship, of a European military alliance created to defend both Europe and North America from one enemy - the Soviet Union - Mr Putin and Mr Bush have sworn to destroy more nuclear missiles than four previous treaties could have tolerated.

The most unbelievable deed is the offer to Russia of a joint partnership - a limited liability membership to be sure - in the councils of Nato.

Mr Putin celebrated the signing with the remark that when he came to power not only the arms control treaty but even more the Nato connection would have been something not even to dream about.

The two men did get down to some nasty, gritty detail.

How about Russia's building of a nuclear capability in Iran?

Did Mr Bush say, "If we attack Iraq we'll see that your large economic interests in Iraq will be taken care of"?

Yes there will be doubts and there should be wariness but these are two of the only three powers that can run or ruin the world.

The third is the hysterical sect of Islamic extremists who discovered the deadliest of modern weapons - the ability to paralyse whole civilian populations and their economies with the furtive use of explosives and poison.

If we can be saved from extinction by terrorism only the United States and Russia together can do it.

When Mr Bush wrung the hands of Mr Putin in a farewell scene it was surely a time for us, after so many months of weal and woe and hatred and ill feeling, a time to rejoice.

So if most listeners are, after all, going to survive then perhaps you're all the more eager to come back with me to hear about the new fountain of youth which may not actually make you young again but it says here will marvellously make you look young again.

Let's catch up with the story so far.

I told why in this country the phrase "the fountain of youth" instantly recalls the name of an early 16th Century Spanish conqueror, governor of Puerto Rico, who in old age was told by the native Indians that if he'd go on an expedition north and west he'd come on an island rich in gold but also possessing a magical fountain whose waters could restore his youth.

Juan Ponce de León was very old in those days. He was 60.

So he went off to colonise this island which turned out to be a peninsula called Florida.

No matter, he didn't find the fountain of youth, sailed home to Havana to die.

But he's been renowned down five centuries for being the man who didn't find the fountain of youth.

But I suggested that this myth strongly affected later settlers and in the 20th Century became almost a motto, certainly a chamber of commerce slogan, for the state of Florida which recognises, with a bow to Shakespeare, three ages of man - youth, middle age and "gee you look great".

True or not the powerful if secret desire to look younger than you are is I suppose practically universal except, I'm told, among a prominent sect of Confucians who would regard a tribute to the youth of their looks as an insult - they aim and hope, as soon as possible, to look and be thought old and wise.

However, I meant to trace the steady, constant social history in America of the ways in which this near-universal urge has tried to be satisfied.

All the essences and spices and ointments and scents and herbs in the world were the best we could do until the Second World War marked a great advance in the surgical repair of wounded faces, as of much else.

And once the war was over we soon began to notice that a favourite movie actress would get lost to her friends for a month or more and then reappear so smoothly done over, so cosmetically treated, as to be frequently unrecognisable.

And this, in the past 50 years, has become true of movie stars, television stars, especially television anchors of both sexes and may be half of all middle and upper middle class females.

What is rarely mentioned about cosmetic surgery is that more often than not what the surgery takes away as often as flaps and bags and wrinkles, it also takes away your character so that, I notice this every week with television anchors, where you once had an attractive human being with an odd droll expression, say, around the eyes you wind up with the face of a doll, a puppet with two eyes, a nose and a mouth.

Robert Redford is one who has refused it.

"You end up," he said, "looking body-snatched."

The new twist is perpetual - well for six months anyway - youth without surgery with a distillate of a famous poison.

Poison? Yes, botulinic acid is a toxin found in putrid sausage.

This is not mentioned in the ads and is maybe strained out of its modified cosmetic form but it promises to get rid of wrinkles, all wrinkles.

Either way - the knife or the sausage essence - I think George Bernard Shaw had the last word on face lifts, even if he'd never seen one.

When the world famous Italian actress Eleanora Duse came to London for the last time she was too old for the part of a young woman she played and the critics protested.

One wrote: "A fatal error on Duse's part. She has wrinkles."

In his weekly column Shaw thundered back: "It has been complained of Senora Duse that she has wrinkles. Her wrinkles are the credentials of her humanity."

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