Mid-term elections

As I more than hinted a week ago, Americans, over this weekend, are going to be absorbed – politically at least – by the congressional and local elections that take place as usual on the first Tuesday in November.

The only warning I'd like to add about the congressional elections is that as soon as they're over, the pundits, the pollsters, the foreign correspondents, will all start analysing like mad in terms of party politics. That's to say they ask each other, mainly, did President Carter get a vote of confidence or did he, on the contrary, receive a blow to the chops? 

To look on the election of a new Congress in this way is irresistible. But it's worth resisting because that's not what a congressional election is about, except in a year, once every four years, when a president is also being elected. It's become crystal clear lately that the so-called 'mid-term' election of a wholly new House of Representatives and a new one-third of the Senate is an intensely regional and local election, dealing with regional and local issues and the personalities, rather than the parties, of the opponents. 

Of course, there are issues that burn the whole country and just now it's obvious that what burns more states than California is the load of taxes, especially property taxes – what, in Britain, are called 'rates'. There's also a national row about abortion and in every state the antagonists square off – the people who say the control of her own body is the least a woman can ask and the people who say that a voluntary abortion is a form of legalised murder. And, of course, there's crime. The present argument is over crimes of violence, the ease of parole and whether juvenile criminals should be considered compassionately as special cases or should receive the full adult treatment. 

But it's not safe to say that any one of these national issues is paramount in any one state or city. In a south-western state, for instance, there's a hullabaloo about the cost of taxes on water. The availability of a water supply has always been a Western anxiety. In one New England town, the issue is what to do with an old factory that's out of date and eating up ground taxes. In another, they'll vote for anybody who can think up a way of banning foreign-made shoes and reviving the depressed local shoe industry. In many parts of Florida, the voters who count are retired people who cannot get by on small pensions. In other states, all the uproar is about the administration's decision to open a nuclear testing plant or, in another place, to close an aerospace factory. 

Now these preoccupations, since they mostly concern how people get their livelihood or don't, or how they're going to pay the mortgage or how safe they feel on the streets or even in their own homes, obviously there's no party line. No politician of any party is going to come out in favour of big taxes or rape any more than he or she is going to come out against Santa Claus or Mother. And if you need statistical backing for this conviction, there are recent surveys – very late in hindsight but all in agreement – which report that for many years now, Americans have considered party less and less in mid-term congressional elections. What I'm saying is it will be foolish to discover any significant national pattern to the results next Tuesday. I don't doubt that discoveries will be made nonetheless. 

Apart from domestic politics, there are two foreign puzzles that are fascinating a lot of people just now. One is the award of the Nobel Peace Prize jointly to Mr Begin and Mr Sadat, unhappily at a time when there appears to be a nasty backlash to the peace and joy of Camp David. The papers and the cartoonists, not to mention some old cynics in the United Nations, have not been slow to notice the irony in the undeniable fact that both the new prize-winners started their political life as terrorists. One oldster suggested it was time to amend the stern prohibition enunciated by the late Dean Acheson when he was opposing, as he did implacably, the admission of Communist China into the UN. 'No one,' he said, 'ought to be able to shoot his way into the United Nations.' 

The suggested amendment is a prescription: 'Burn enough buildings, order enough assassinations and in time you'll have bombed your way into a Nobel Peace Prize'. Now we must surely believe that no two men, in the Middle East or outside it, are more sincerely off on the search for a general peace than Mr Begin and Mr Sadat. But the memory of their route to power is there. And what it's done – in New York, anyway – is to give new point to the warning of the Jews that if there is to be an autonomous Palestinian State, in no time it could be seized and presided over by Mr Arafat. 

The other puzzle is perhaps not so much a puzzle as a very American reflex to a foreign event that's so complicated and so remote that the only way to make sense of it is in ideological terms. I'm talking about the appointment of a Pole as the new pope. The press and television commentators have had a field day on the basis of Poland's being a communist country. I've noticed in the past few weeks how people, who had no thoughts at all about the significance of the election of John Paul I, except to note his simplicity and jolliness, have a knee-jerk reaction to the election of his successor. 

The most cocksure reaction is, in my observation, among non-Catholics, both liberals and conservatives. 'One in the eye for Moscow' is the thought. Or, among the more intellectual, 'At last Rome has redeemed the prolonged and scandalous silence of old Pacelli, the wartime pope in the face of the Nazi Holocaust.' Now we're being told the cardinals have thrown down the gauntlet to communism. There was a shrewd second thought from one of our best cartoonists who showed Mr Brezhnev in the Kremlin looking anxiously at an adviser who's saying, 'The question is, have we penetrated the Vatican or have they penetrated us?'. 

These questions may herald an immense political conflict in the years to come and the knee-jerk reaction may turn out to be correct but what strikes me, at the moment, is that nothing the Pope himself has said gives ground for thinking so. From his enthronement address through all his subsequent remarks, he has stressed that his kingdom is a spiritual one and that a political conflict is neither present nor being sought – which, coming from a Pole who openly resisted the Nazis, is a remarkable statement in itself. 

But what he seems to be saying is that so long as the millions of Catholics in his own country are not openly persecuted, it is not the mission of the Vatican to stir opposition to the temporal rulers. I've looked again at his statements and can see nothing more political, nothing more provocative than the implied injunction, 'Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's and unto God, the things that are God's'. 

The Americans who are noticeably jubilant for quite other reasons about the papal election are the Polish-Americans. For years they have quietly resented the spate of Polish jokes which attribute to them a special dimension of stupidity. These people now feel a long overdue sense of pride. I live, through the summer and fall, among a goodly number of them. Seventy and more years ago, the Poles came in droves through New York, the city Poles, the Jews especially, settling in New York or going off to Chicago or Pittsburgh. The farmers were Catholics and, like all immigrant farmers, smelled out the native soil. They looked for sand country and found it in the so-called 'sand country' of Wisconsin and on the North Fork of eastern Long Island and resumed doing what they'd done at home, namely growing potatoes. 

Within a generation, the Long Island potato began to rival the Idaho potato in fame, and what's better, in sales. It was the Poles, also, who went to work on the Long Island duck farms, saved their pennies and in 30 years bought out the Anglo-Americans, the original English owners who, like most long-established firms, began to rest on their oars, so to speak. 

The Poles do not take prosperity for granted. I remember, during the war, visiting a duck farm 18 miles from us. It was already supplying restaurants around the world as well as every part of this country. They now, quote, 'put through' – as the saying goes – eight million ducks a year. Yet when I called on the owner, he was eating in the kitchen with his family and when he went to get some ice, he opened a huge refrigerator which was stacked with neat piles of 100-dollar bills. By now, I imagine, his heirs have transferred the loot to a bank. 

The climax of the Poles new-found joy came the other week in our parts when the pastor of our local church, Our Lady of Ostrabrama, who'd never been to Europe, was chosen as one of the six American Polish pastors to go and attend the enthronement of the new pope. For once the Anglos down our end of the island felt and acted like second fiddles. But the rest of the time these two strains live together without strain, the Poles and the original English who've been here since 1649, some of whose descendants have never been to New York City and don't intend to. So we have the Tuthills and the Deroskis, the Jewells and the Stepnowskis, the Zimnoskis and the Hortons, the Klimkoskis and the Richmonds. 

Which reminds me. While we're giving two cheers for the Poles, I'd like to propose one cheer for the Anglos, Mrs Richmond. Mrs Richmond has been running a small, local, grocery store at the end of a lane since I can remember, in a house built in the 1790s that has stayed in her family since. She was always there in the mornings, stacking the shelves, sorting the newspapers, stirring the logs in the Franklin stove and shaking her head over what she deplored as the 'fads and fusses' of the day, especially the latest diet.

'Mercy me!' she used to say, 'I don't know how we ever got along without this proteins and vitamins and calories and I don't know what or!' She took no exercise. She walked and bent over, had a lively appetite for potatoes, bluefish, the local cauliflower and squash, meat and potatoes.There came a day when she decided she wanted a few years to herself, so she retired at the sensible age of 93. 

Last week she died, still deploring protein and vitamins, at the age of 100.

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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