Strong dollar hits jobs

Of all the headlines over all the pieces I've read in the past week, there are two that I find myself coming back to. They're not exactly what present-day journalists call riveting, because, to tell the truth, I have, from time to time, had my eyes on other things like breakfast, traffic lights and other necessary aids to survival. But, here they are – one from the most venerable of American papers, the other from a venerable British paper.

The British one caught my eye first when a friend from England arrived at Kennedy airport and dropped the paper on my desk. It said, 'Surging Pound Assails Dollar'. Good grief, I thought, who would have guessed it? We're back to the good old norm of two dollars 40 cents to the pound. Well, not quite yet. But up from 1.07 to 1.18 – a bit of news that only serves to stress how little we outsiders know about the workings of money in the money markets.

Just so you won't think we're going off into the incomprehensible language of the marketing men, stuff like flash estimates of gross national product and mortgage fluidity against sterling index, let me say that, for most of us, including politicians of any stripe, professors of economics and the foreign exchange dealers themselves, we seem to know as little about what makes a national economy tick as we do about what causes an earthquake to erupt when it does.

Before I go into a story about the surprising effect of a strong dollar on one far-flung American town, I ought to tantalise you into holding on by quoting the other, the New York Times's, headline to which I promise we will surely return and I ought to say, at once, that it is not a tabloid catchpenny. It was printed over a very long piece summarising an important piece of research just concluded by a very learned journal. Brace yourselves for a shocker. This is it: 'Dislike of Own Body Found Common Among Women' and the subtitle reads, 'Men tend to see themselves as just about perfect'.

Well, back first to the news about the strong, but not impregnable dollar. It comes from a small town in Oregon, a state that borders Northern California and lies between California and the state of Washington. North of that, you are into British Columbia and pretty soon mushing into Alaska and, if you keep going, will come to the Baring Strait and be looking across a mere 30 miles or so towards the shores of the Soviet Union.

The story of Mapleton, Oregon, is no different in essentials from that of several towns in Northern California which has snow and spring floods and fleets of timber floating down the rivers to the lumber mills and if that gives you, for the moment, a bizarre picture of California, let me remind you that California reaches, so to speak, from Edinburgh to Southern Spain and the northern stretch of it is as far removed from bikinis and oranges and swimmable ocean as the Isle of Skye is from flamenco music and olive groves.

Mapleton, Oregon, then, is a lumber town and its people are suffering much more from the strong dollar than the aggrieved British tourist arriving in the United States. Mapleton is only a small, but a bleak example of what is happening to any other town, big or little, in America, that lives by the export trade. The cause of its present misery is very simple.

For the first time in many years, timber cut from the forests of Canada to the north is strikingly cheaper than the local product. So an abrupt shift in the orders of the countries and the states that are Mapleton's normal customers. And so, in a town of 8,000 lumber men, 2,000 of them have lost their jobs. Mills are closing down, houses of people who've lived there for generations have signs up for sale, teachers are being laid off, the schools are losing pupils. Families, in alarming numbers, are packing up and going off somewhere, anywhere south for another sort of work.

All in all, it's figured by optimistic economists that a million Americans are suffering grievously from the strong dollar. By pessimistic economists, two million. So, it's worth pausing for a second thought when next you see President Reagan getting on a plane or getting off a plane and giving his thumbs-up, eye-crinkling, Sunny-Jim grin. True, for most Americans, a strong dollar reflects the bulging muscles of a strong economy and in strength – in the constant repetition of the word itself – there is joy. But it seems to be the general belief of the knowing people around the world that the dollar is overvalued and it would be a blessing to more countries than those of Europe, most of all to the desperate debtor nations of South America, if a much weaker dollar healthily syphoned off the flood of investment money pouring into the United States and poured some of it into other countries.

Now, before we come to the strange news that women don't like their own bodies while men, even grossly misshapen men or reedy little beanpole men look on themselves in the mirror with fatuous complacency, my eye is caught by another theme that is rampant in the Western media. It's the great, ponderous question, what is Mr Gorbachev really like? And, if we ever find out, what effect is his character going to have on your life and mine? I don't think we have to spend long on this puzzle.

Do you remember how we gazed in a wistful, spinsterish way at Mr Andropov? We all lit up when we heard that he liked a spot of bourbon and had a private stock of Glenn Miller big band records. Just our man! The liberal press and the press well to the left of liberal burst into hosannas. How could any leader who was fond of Tennessee sour mash and 'Chattanooga Choo Choo' want to be beastly to us?

The reminder from those grouchy paranoids on the right that he'd been the head of the KGB – and a merciless one – seemed almost tasteless at the time, but within a month or less, the same old blistering editorials were pouring out of Pravda about the military mania of the fascist, imperialist ruling circles. That's us.

The best comment I've seen on the likeliest turn in Russian policy came in a cartoon out of Chicago. It showed a radio commentator saying, 'There is a general consensus here that Mr Gorbachev will either take bold new steps or will move cautiously from now on. Remember! You heard it first on this station.' I think that about sums it up.

Now – 'Dislike of own body found common among women, men tend to see themselves as just about perfect'. This is the conclusion of a study of 500 college-age men and women which has just been reported in the Journal of Abnormal Psychology. It's rather misleading that this study should appear there because, at first glance, you might think that those 500 subjects or guinea pigs, were chosen to prove their abnormality.

However, though it's true that many doctors are so busy watching how disease works that they neglect to notice or tell us how marvellous is the mechanism of health, you can't know what's abnormal until you've isolated what's normal. And the distinguished Journal of Abnormal Psychology, if it has a secondary mission, it's to reassure people that what they fear may be their unique quirks and eccentricities are usual and harmless among the other members of the human race.

Evidently, this extraordinary discovery that women tend to be dissatisfied with their bodies, even, it says here, when those bodies are gorgeous, and that in the other mirror, lumpish and weedy men, who ought to be ashamed of themselves, see only the reflection of an Apollo, this, it is concluded, is true of at least a third of all men and women.

The conclusion does not arise simply from those college-age men and women, it's been noticed in observations of middle-aged people by two psychologists who've been working on this specialty for years. One man, a Doctor Seymour Fisher, has been busy at this work, how people perceive their own body image, for 25 years. I'm dying to know what sort of a figure he thinks he cuts when he's about to plunge into the country club pool but the report doesn't go into that.

Of course the truly abnormal side of this tendency is gone into at great length. Various extreme forms of hypochondria in people who have some disability such as a bad knee or a spinal injury and balloon this trouble to enclose their cock-eyed view of their whole body. The most conspicuous example of a sick, even dangerous, abnormality is that of the women who go in for extreme dieting and turn out to be anorexics, even unto death.

It's an interesting point that 90 per cent of people who suffer from anorexia nervosa are women and this finding stresses the point that in very many women – more than one in three, anyway – their view of an ideal body is thinner than most men, including their man, like. And a woman's acceptance of her own body has little to do with its actual attractiveness.

One of the researchers who treats women for their real or fancied unattractiveness reports that extremely attractive women come for treatment because they don't share the outsider's view of themselves. Whereas lots of healthy women who don't come for treatment are quite happy with their unattractive bodies.

Well, to get down to the, if you'll excuse the expression, the bottom line, I should mention that the main difference between how men and women feel about their bodies, and I quote, 'centres on the middle of the torso from hips to abdomen'. And that, by the way, is the conclusion of a national survey.

And here's the hopeless truth. Women are least satisfied with that zone, however attractive it may be, and men are most satisfied with their stomachs, however gross they may be. Moreover, to press a heartless word, happily married women, while constantly trying to improve in themselves what doesn't need improvement, refuse to notice the pot or vast bow window of their mates and tend to share with him his view that he bears a striking resemblance to Robert Redford or Clint Eastwood.

Now, I have, I'm told by both doctors and golf partners, the slightest, barely visible ripple of a bulge, but my wife regards it as a Victorian bow window. Any offers?

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.

Letter from America audio recordings of broadcasts ©BBC

Letter from America scripts © Cooke Americas, RLLP. All rights reserved.