A Nation Of Hair Stylists - 13 January 1995

By now we've heard the last of the prophets and pundits who at the end of every year are under an obligation to their editors, I suppose, to do a thoughtful review of the year and, what's worse, to draw morals from it and begin to prophesy. One columnist I greatly admire, had the gall to make a list of 15 predictions – like the good news for freedom in the world will be … and challenging Clinton for the Democratic nomination will be ….

He offers anywhere between three and eight answers to each question, on the American multi-choice system, and then in the small print at the bottom dares to make his own choices. He urges us to have a go in order to, as he puts it, hone our humility and stretch our imaginations. What he's offering you is 60 answers to 15 questions and by next January, of course, we won't remember any of them, except perhaps the two I'm going to quote, and then we'll see. The good news for freedom will be the collapse, or fade-out as he puts it, of Fidel Castro, he says. Who will challenge President Clinton's second run? Sam Nunn, Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, a space-age wallah and always a Southern moderate.

There was a time when I myself kept up this quaint annual ritual but I went out of the prophecy business in a hurry after those three unforgettable days in August 1991 when Gorbachev was arrested, the old gang took over for an hour or two, then Yeltsin stood on a tank and the soldiers refused to fire on the cheering people and a day and a night later, communism, that long-promised and monotonously pounding wave of the future, broke and vanished.

I looked through at the time, a small library of the books we'd been brought up on, from the late 1920s on. The Kremlinologists – the Soviet experts – the good, the bad, the very good, the terribly distinguished. The last chapter of all such histories, studies, always carried a prediction of how things would come out or progress in the Soviet Union. Much of this writing was learned and fascinating and enlightening but not one of them even let the thought steal across his mind that perhaps in the '40s, '50s, '80s, the '90s, there was a remote chance that the 70-year-old system would totally collapse. Their huge, thoughtful writings were suddenly irrelevant.

Now, however, a very distinguished historian, a Soviet expert himself, has just come out with a piece which alone among his kind, amounts to a confessional. All the scholars, he believes, were wrong. Was there anyone of importance who was right? He writhes to have to say it but he says, yes, the man who was right for the last 15 years or so, was dismissed by scholars, historians, by most Western politicians, Nato statesmen and generals, dismissed as an ignoramus or a super-patriot, driven by an obsessive anti-communism. This man, whom Dr Pipes calls, on the contrary no scholar, but a man of great discernment and instinctive judgement, this man said that the Soviet Union, for all its elaborate theories and its power and bluster, was a weak superpower, riding a tiger, because its power "rested on police terror at home and nuclear blackmail abroad." As early as May 1981, the man said, the West will not contain communism, it will transcend communism. The communist experiment itself is a sad, bizarre chapter in human history, whose last pages are even now being written. That was 14 years ago.

Well, you'll have guessed by now, I hope, who his ranting innocent was. It was Ronald Reagan, who was scolded by practically everybody except the hysterical right, when he characterised the Soviet Union as an evil empire. He truly believed it and 11 years later his belief was echoed in a speech to the United States Congress. This was the key passage: "The world can sigh in relief. The idol of communism, which spread everywhere social strife, animosity and unparalleled brutality, which instilled fear in all humanity, has collapsed." The speaker was Boris Yeltsin.

And still nobody I've heard or read can tell us why it collapsed. Mr Reagan of course was a naïf, an ideologue, also an idealist and a Boy Scout. He was saying it collapsed because it was evil. As far as I ever got was wondering, about five, six years ago, what would happen if the KGB ever got cold feet or for some reason got out of line. A thought that occurred to me after an argument, a moderately hot discussion with a double-domed scholar, who would not concede for a minute that the Soviet Union was held together by one force, by the same threat that held Nazi Germany together – the threat of the midnight knock on the door. The fact of the existence of a secret police that was everywhere and was absolutely, dependably brutal.

Anyway, after those three days in August '91, I've not predicted anything and, looking back over 1994, I don't even feel inclined to recall the big stories, the serious issues. For some reason, they simply do not take the imagination. When I look back, I remember one or two stories I never reported at the time but I think of 1994 and they stand out among all the big stories, the bad, the wonderful and the bizarre. A lady, the heroine of 1994, if only for having the chutzpah to sue a great corporation and win. She bought a cup of coffee at McDonald's, a plastic cup, got in her car and wedged the coffee cup between her legs. The car moved off, the coffee was hot, it spilled, she burned, it burned her leg. She sued, she got a jury trial and the jury awarded her $2.9 million.

When I think of the next memory, I realise that the odd anecdotes that attach themselves to me anyway, usually have something to do with a citizen asserting some right or other, even when that right has not before now been known to exist, either in or out of the American Constitution. Remember the man in Massachusetts, I believe, who had some drinks, left a bar feeling no pain, got in his car, drove off and crashed into a tree. He sued the restaurant, well the bartender really, the restaurant as accessory, for serving him one drink too many. He won, too.

My 1994 favourite of a man denied his constitutional rights was a convict in the state of Colorado. He protested to the guards and eventually got through to the warden, that he was a member of a certain religious faction, a Satanist, and he was forced to deny his religion in effect, by having to dress like everybody else. The case came before a judge. He ruled that the man had been denied his rights under, of course as always, the First Amendment to the Bill of Rights, which says that not only shall Congress make no law respecting an establishment of religion, but it may not prohibit the free exercise thereof. Well the man said he couldn't freely practice his religion unless he had the required symbols, the articles of his faith. The judge therefore ruled that he must be provided with one black robe, a gong and a supply of incense.

I've not heard of anything so far this year, that can touch that, though there are always good stories available in the world's most engrossing bed book, a great volume with the score, the figures on everything, everything you've never thought of – The Statistical Abstract of the United States. Of course, a government publication and when I say in this context, a good story, I mean the sort of story foreign correspondents ought always to be on the lookout for, what you might call corrective stories, ones that correct a common preconception. Such as … at election times most reporters by now, collect, certainly pay attention to, the opinion polls that are taken, of a place, particular social type, middle class, working people, the rich. In fact, I suppose there's a generation, maybe two generations of reporters alive today who can't remember a time when there were no such things – which was any time before 1936 – and long after that time, you were expected to feel the pulse of the public, as they said, by getting out on your legs, in your car, trains, buses and doing your own poll, questioning every sort of person you came across and calling it a cross section of America. Pretty naïve stuff. What the doctors call anecdotal evidence, about as scientific as calling up your aunts and cousins and publishing them as the voice of the people.

But now we can know fairly accurately how the office worker vote's likely to go, how small businessmen, how people between 20 and 35 and so on. But even then we tend still to choose the categories ahead of time, like how will the steel workers' vote go? The steel workers' vote, we always noted as likely to swing the industrial parts of the Midwest but one day a friend of mine with an equal passion for the statistical sample, called me and said with fake solemnity, never mind the steel workers' vote, I want to know how the hairdressers' vote's going to go. The what? Look in the Abstract, he said. I did. There was a whole species of human being that might well form, well, as much of a voting block as the organised steel workers. I discovered there are three times as many hair stylists, so called, in the United States as steel workers.

It's too early in the new year to make a social political discovery as hair raising, sorry, as that one, but there came out last week the results of a nationwide survey that produced as bizarre and enlightening a result. You know there's been recently a fearful to-do about deaths on commuter planes, those are the smaller, propeller planes, thousands of them, that link small cities to the main ones the jets fly from. Well, recently one airline has had the bad luck, and it can be nothing else, to lose three commuter planes, which fired up a big congressional hearing on air safety. One of the side effects, little noticed, not long remembered, is one I shall leave you to ponder on. There are fewer casualties, fewer deaths in the United States from commuter plane accidents than from animal-drawn vehicles.

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