Carter's popularity soars

We're always being told by high-minded students of politics that to get a sensible perspective on your own country you have to subscribe regularly to a foreign paper or magazine and see how we look to the others.

There's no question that this is a good, and often a sobering, thing to do. For instance, I have a friend in San Francisco who, like Americans everywhere from the Florida Keys to Alaska, supplements his daily paper and television news with a weekly dose of either Time or Newsweek. But he does have a different angle on most topics that concern America and Britain, not to mention Russia or France, because he also takes in the British Economist. 

Well, he and I have both been in Mexico and I noticed that, when he came home to San Francisco, he eased into his daily life with never a ripple of discomfort or misgiving. I find this difficult to do and it can only be because I was born and brought up in one country and have lived most of my life in another. Interviewers always say, 'I suppose you feel equally at home in Britain and the United States?' And that's true, but it doesn't contradict the other truth where I feel equally strange, especially on arrival, in both countries. This is a fact of what they now call 'alienation' which many novelists have made into a pathetic theme. The poor expatriate is always rootless, moody, always yearning for his native pasture. 

Well, it's a matter of temperament and expatriates come in just as many temperaments as other people. It comes as a shock to many people, for example, to hear that P. G. Wodehouse who in life, as well as in fiction, seemed to be a monumentally typical Englishman, first went to America when he was 23, returned when he was 27, decided it was the place for him and for the next 68 years of his life spent all but about ten of them in and around New York or on assignment to Hollywood and from all his published letters, I never read nor in his last years ever heard him express any homesickness for England or – which is rarer still among expatriates – ever express any irritation about America. He was, essentially, a simple man who never needed to be told or to learn what most people have to learn, that the vast majority of people, everywhere, don't represent or symbolise their country. They are human beings who happen to be born and live in a certain place. 

Is this so rare? Extremely so, in my experience and absolutely non-existent among learned and sophisticated people who make up for their intellect or ideas with periodic fits of childish spleen against the foreigners they find themselves living among. Wodehouse was a very rare bird indeed. A childlike man who was never childish. 

Well, I was saying, I have been in Mexico and I find it took more than a day or two to get used to being back in the United States, as it also would have done if it was England I was returning to. Mexico already seems like another planet and because of the ruins and artefacts you see everywhere of such early civilisations as the Mayans, a very ancient planet visited centuries ago. I think it was Balzac who said that the desert was God with man left out. Well, Mexico is a god-like, harsh landscape with man put in and it's quite a test of one's faith, of a Christian faith at any rate, to believe that man was blessed in being put there for Mexico is part of that huge reach of the south-west where for centuries there was not enough rain to produce anything but a grain crop, where there was hardly any animal food, where in a landscape of blinding light and relentless heat, the human being had literally to scratch for a living, as millions in Mexico still do. 

I suppose I ought to throw in here the old but necessary reminder that God did not create nations but only landscapes and if there weren't immigration stations along the border, there'd be no way of knowing that you had left Mexico and were in the United States. It was not much more than a century ago that the United States, after a quick and very profitable war, annexed a vast section of Mexico and pushed the Mexicans back below the Rio Grande. 

We all know that Arizona and Texas used to be part of Mexico but it may be news to you that when Brigham Young took his Mormon family for its long walk west after they'd be hounded out of New England and Ohio and Missouri, he decided that there was no possible, peaceful future for the Mormons in the United States and that 'we had better seek out a place where the devil does not rule'. And when he came to look down on the white flats of the Salt Lake Valley, he said, 'This is the place'. Not just because salt in such abundance offered a sure preservative for their food but because what is now the state of Utah was, then, another country. It was the northernmost province of Mexico. But, obviously, a hundred years of American development in the northern part of Old Mexico and a hundred years of so little development in much of present Mexico have produced enormous differences. 

I don't find Mexico instantly depressing as, say, Calcutta seems, beyond all human hope, because the people are not listless and doomed. Even the country poor seem lively and the children are as sprightly as grasshoppers. I think this can only be because they have a diet a good deal healthier than most of us, with their corn, their maize and many vegetables and the huge variety of fruits. 

One shock which reflects poorly I'm afraid on the Anglo-Saxon is the discovery that the restaurants, however humble, and the restaurant kitchens and the simple hotels and the ones that are converted convents and monasteries, are strikingly cleaner than similar places in the United States and Europe. They have, indeed, a passion for cleanliness not, I must say, as unflagging as that of the Siamese, the Thais. An Englishman, even an American, is made to feel very gamey if he attends a dinner party, even more a dance, in Bangkok, for not only do the people bathe, in the American sense that is, I mean take a bath, several times before the party, but in the middle of it the women retire to take another bath and change out of no matter how exquisite a dress and put on another. Later on, perhaps, a third, since they think it is fairly repulsive to go through a hot evening dancing in sweaty clothes. 

The main shock of returning to New York was to realise what we put up with, what we come to take for granted, until we are away long enough. And the most glaring thing today is the awful wobbly state of New York's avenues and side streets. I mean the state of the road surfaces. I came home last night in a cab and had my liver thoroughly shaken by the crashing over potholes. 

I don't believe I've ever mentioned this before simply because down the years we've got used to the fact that the city, on its economy spree, has not only fired hundreds of policemen and sanitation workers and school teachers and the rest, but have done two things that make a New York cab ride one of the most jostling ordeal imaginable, something you would imagine as being typical of a cab ride in darkest Africa. They have withdrawn the money for street repairs and the city has abolished the bureau that used to inspect cabs and see that they were safe and navigable. So the cab companies now inspect themselves, which is never a recipe for good government. 

By the way, you may wonder how New York is faring in its gallant attempt to save and save and retreat safely from the verge of bankruptcy. You may recall that when the storm signals went up, the annual budget of New York City was an appalling $11 billion. Well, the economy moves have been so strict and self-sacrificing that today the city budget has been reduced from $11 billion to $13 billion. 

And this brings us back with a bang to the topic that I find most foreigners seem intensely interested in, namely how is Jimmy Carter doing as president? After a month away that seems like six months, I found myself with a new and lively curiosity about it. Well, so far as the people are concerned, he's doing fine. The Gallup poll which when he took office found about 50/51 per cent of the people approving of him now gives him 70 per cent approval. And there's much evidence that people who were strong for Ford on election day are now glad that Carter won. 

This popularity is quite an achievement; I mean a subjective achievement, apart from the very palpable fact that Carter, in office, has a poise and confidence he never had when he was campaigning. A friend of mine who did not vote for Carter, a man who's been a close watcher of American politicians since President Harding – and that covers a span of over 50 years – says, 'On his present showing Carter might well be the most brilliant politician since Franklin Roosevelt.' 

Now to hear the word 'brilliant' applied to a Democrat by this man seemed very odd. He elaborated. 'After all,' he said, 'he promised to stay close to the people. He gets 40,000 letters a week from the people. He went on his telephone binge and talked to exactly 42 people, yet he gave the impression he'd taken the entire American population into his home. He said the White House must set an example of economy and self-restraint. So, he raised the salaries of his top staff by $400,000 saying he couldn't possibly go to the $500,000 some people had suggested. He swore to reduce what he called the "bloated bureaucracy" of President Ford's staff. So his staff is 30 per cent larger than Ford's, but only, he says, for the time being. He's won universal praise for castigating the Russians about their denial of human rights. So now he's getting ready to embrace and normalise relations with Cuba and Vietnam whose record of human rights must compare equally unfavourably with the Russians. And he gets away with it! 

'I tell you,' my friend said, 'he's making Franklin Roosevelt look like a piker.'

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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