South Africa boycott

I think I mentioned – it seems only yesteryear but is probably more years ago than I care to count – one of the interesting offshoots of the women's liberation movement is the rechristening of our hurricanes. I say 'our' because I'm talking about the hurricanes that are brewed usually in the late summer down in the Caribbean and move north-west, most frequently into Florida or, when they stay out at sea, turn more northward and so hit the jutting peninsula of the Carolinas. If things get really bad from the point of view of us northerners, they stay slightly north-east and then smash into New Jersey, Long Island and on into New England.

As, we shall never forget, happened on 21, I believe, September 1938, drowned over 600 people, ripped up forever the splendid American elms of Long Island and ravaged millions of white birches along a 400-mile stretch of New England, up to and beyond the Canadian border.

That was the first hurricane any living New Englander had ever encountered and was thought of at the time as a freak. However, the freak was pretty soon recognised as, I guess you could call it, a mutant for, after that, through the 1950s, we had a succession of them.

I remember two in one week, the first of which, Carol, crashed through our house on Long Island about four in the morning, when we were all convinced, with windows bursting like bombs, that we, with the house, were airborne into Peconic Bay. And that would have been the end of, among other properties, Letter From America.

You'll notice I have grim memories of Carol and always look a little warily at any woman who bears the name. I expect her not to sidle but to tear into a room, which brings us back to the effect of women's lib on the naming of these monsters.

When the feminist movement was getting well under way, about the time I should guess that young, unmarried women were requiring us to call them Ms, a strong protest went out against the immemorial custom of the Weather Bureau in giving hurricanes female names.

As I remember, the 1954 sequence which started in mid-August went Audrey, Beatrice, Carol, Dora and Edna. The Weather Bureau was dubbed a male chauvinist bureaucracy and had no plausible comeback. So, they started alternating male and female names.

Well, this year, the first came up early and petered out along the southern Florida coast. It was called Anna. This week, however, the Florida peninsula was warned about the imminent arrival of Bob. Bob was first defined as a tropical storm but it was not moving shaft of rain and wind, it had the genuine shape of a hurricane, which is like a... like a whizzing doughnut with nothing, or a dead eye, in the middle. Rather a large doughnut – it can be between 25 to 600 miles in diameter – usually, in the northern hemisphere closer to 25, thank goodness.

Well, the technical qualification for promotion from a tropical storm from a hurricane is to have circulating winds of more than 73 miles an hour and last Tuesday, Bob was so promoted, touching 75. Accordingly, residents along a designated 'hit' stretch of Florida retreated inland – a few hundreds of them because 75 miles an hour is a routine nuisance to most of them. It turned out to be not a false alarm but an excessive one, for Bob cooled down, moved inland, caused a lot of flooding but no lives lost and, immediately, the Weather Bureau whipped out a warning about a Pacific storm – rare at this time of the year and nobody on the east coast paid any attention, except a remark that this one, jumping six places in the alphabet was called Ignacio. The first time that I can remember one of them ever being given a Latin ethnic name. So far no protest has been registered from the Puerto Rican population of the east coast or the Mexican immigrants in California.

We are warned that the north-eastern coast, our hunting ground, is long overdue for a rash or plague of hurricanes and I hope they're wrong and you hear no more about them.

Well, this is an anxiety that affects only or mainly the people who live along the coastline of the Atlantic states. Everybody else is now in the middle of the summer respite from politics, from anxieties that go beyond the home. Congress will be going home next week, but with no sense of satisfaction that it has tackled the aching problem that will start hurting all over again in the fall – the problem of agreeing on a national budget.

When the president's old friend and steadiest political enemy, speaker of the House Tip O'Neill, called on him and remarked, 'You're looking good, Mr President.' Mr Reagan ruefully replied, 'I'll look better when I have a budget.'

It's become a dependable visitation of midsummer madness, this business of hopeless disagreement, not merely between the two parties and the White House, they divide into all sorts of factions. You have conservatives who don't want to freeze social security benefits – they're the ones, usually members of the House who are up for re-election next year. You have liberal Democrats who want to reduce the rate of growth of the social security budget. You have every sort of exception to what we think of as the regular, ideological stand-off – conservative Republicans versus liberal Democrats.

When you look back at all the stirring headlines of the spring, 'Reagan Demands No Cuts in Defense Budget', 'President Wants Social Security Freeze', and then you read in this morning's paper that the responsible financial committee of the House, which is overwhelmingly Democratic, has just approved a whole package of cutbacks which will reduce the Medicare budget by $10 billion, you are reminded – and foreign onlookers should be forcibly reminded – that what the president, any president, wants is not what the president gets.

He must, every time he meets Mrs Thatcher, envy her the comparatively dictatorial powers of a prime minister who, once elected, can want a programme and get it. If the United States had a parliamentary system, Mr Reagan would have suffered so many defeats on votes of confidence that he'd have been out of the White House several times over. Of course, we are nowhere near the parliamentary system or any approximation to it.

Mr Reagan is, after all, not only the head of government, he's also the head of state. So, if a defeat in the Congress led to the resignation of his government, he'd have to go to see the head of state, himself, and wait and see, guess who he would summon to form a government, which sounds like an American adaptation of 'Iolanthe'.

I suppose his only consolation when he measures his powers against those of a prime minister is that, by God's grace and his own good behaviour, it doesn't matter how often the Congress defies him and rejects his plans, his policies, his budget, he is there for four years.

In short, the present failure of the president to get anything like what he wants as a budget goes directly to the blunter reminder of what is laid down in the very first sentence of the first article of the United States' constitution – all legislative powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States which shall consist of a Senate and House of Representatives. Stop.

To get around a stubborn Congress, the president is as helpless as you or I.

Another bit of unfinished business, all the more sad to contemplate since South Africa declared a state of emergency, is a couple of bills in the House that would withdraw American investment or stop new investment in South African business. It has become a very hot issue across the country. Several universities have divested themselves of their South African holdings. Other universities that are debating the problem are having to put up with campus marches and protests.

On Tuesday, more than a thousand demonstrators marched on the South African embassy in Washington and 40-odd of them were arrested. And just when Secretary of State Shultz was saying that the policy of so-called disinvestment would reduce what influence and leverage we have and break all contact' with a government whose apartheid policies the United States abhors, the same day Bishop Tutu was being interviewed by the television networks and condemning the American policy of what is called constructive engagement.

This conflict, between Americans who want to check out of South Africa's economy and the people who want to stay and compel South African business to pursue the increasingly liberal policies towards black employees, it's a conflict that is not going to go away. It has been heated up and simplified into a burning, moral issue. Bishop Tutu does not deny that if the United States disinvested, something like 120,000 black employees of American firms in South Africa would lose their jobs, but what are they against the many millions in penury who have no vote, no say in their government?

Of course, recognising a nation that excludes its vast majority from their own government is a moral problem. How they can be helped is the actual problem. And, recently, we've heard from a black South African with half a million or more of subjects – Mr Buthelezi, the hereditary leader of the Zulu people. He is, surprisingly, against disinvestment. He calls it anti-black, a running away from the problem.

He makes the point that the biggest assault on the barriers of apartheid have been made by big corporations led by the Ford Motor Company which defied the law and endangered the black apprentices. He notes also that it is mainly American corporations that have moved towards equalising black and white pay and, as he puts it 'hastened the day of black trade union recognition'.

To stand, he says, on indignation by withdrawing diplomatically and economically from South Africa would do more than demonstrate the moral ineptitude of a great nation and, he fears, leave the field to the strident voices that call for confrontation and violence. They are the voices most dominant in calls for disinvestment.

I don't know. Very many Americans who have gone beyond all sympathy with the South African system yearn for a simple, massive, moral gesture. The Zulu chief has, for the moment anyway, given them an uncomfortable pause.

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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