Limousine envy

'Chaos', said Othello, 'is come again.' He was speaking some time ago, but if he'd been in New York this week as the delegate from Morocco to the United Nations, he would have had to find new stronger words to describe what the New York Times, which is not given to lurid headlines, described as 'a torrent of limousines flooding the city's canyons'.

A limousine, I ought to say, is not just a fancy word for a motorcar. It's THE word for a fancy motorcar and, mostly these days, for what is called a stretch, which is the largest limousine you can imagine that has had its body enlarged by about six feet. It is an elongated black monster of a sort that Othello would not be likely to have seen in the alleys of Casablanca, nor that anyone would see today in the streets of Soho for the simple reason that on its first attempt at a passage, it would have been plugged like a chicken bone in the throat.

A stretch has dark blue or brown tinted windows, so as not to expose its occupants to the vulgar gaze of the people on the streets, which is a contradiction of sorts since the whole idea of riding in a stretch is to impress on the people the grandeur of the occupants.

New York City has a little more than 10,000 limousines and, as the owner of the city's largest limousine service said on Wednesday, 'Every one of those limousines is rolling right now'. Trying to roll, would have been better. Why this sudden torrent through the canyons? Why should the wife of New York's assistant police chief have had to wake up her husband on Tuesday night – we have our reporters everywhere – because he was screaming? He was haunted, he said, when he came to, by a dream in which a giant black limousine was just about to swallow New York City.

Well, as everybody must know by now, the 24 October every year is celebrated as United Nations' Day, being the anniversary of the coming into effect, so to speak, of the United Nations charter. Last Thursday was special because this year marks the fortieth birthday of the United Nations founded in San Francisco in 1945 and while most years the day is celebrated quietly and elegantly, especially in the evening with a concert at the UN using the music and the performers of several member nations, this year the secretary-general and his staff went all out to give a fitting birthday party to the poor old, crippled, wheezing world organisation.

Flowery invitations went out to over a hundred national leaders and the secretary-general's office got an alarming number of replies asking, in effect, simply, 'When?'. In other, longer words, they wanted to know at what stage in the birthday proceedings they would be expected to appear. When would they address the general assembly?

And you can be sure that some of the most influential, as well as some of the most pretentious, heads of government were not going to come here in grey November or any time later than the icing had been eaten off the birthday cake. They all wanted to come on the very birthday itself to give their country and themselves the maximum possible exposure, except, that is, when they were riding invisibly in one of those stretch limousines.

So the programme was set up to provide for 60-odd presidents, prime ministers, foreign ministers, sultans, royals and other magnificoes to speak to the general assembly for four days, from Wednesday on. Let me say, at once, that many of them gave eloquent speeches. Many gave pious speeches. Many deplored the world's indifference to their own fine political systems. Just about all of them were convinced that they represented courage and virtue in a naughty world and if only the other fellows would get in line, peace would reign again.

Some of these speeches were thoughtful. Most of them, I should say, were well intentioned. To the listener on the outside with no axe to grind, they offered a bewildering, a finally stifling, variety of definitions of democracy. It seems that just about every nation in the world is a true democracy and regrets only that all the others have not yet understood or practised it.

However, we must get back to those limousines for reasons that will be made clear. The man who speaks for the secretary-general, an office not given to boasting, said that last Wednesday we will have collected in this one place the most limousines ever seen in the world. The New York police chief assigned to controlling – controlling! – the midtown traffic said his only ambition was to prevent Manhattan from becoming a victim of 'limo lock'. He had a raft of digital computers and fifteen hundred policemen to help him. The mayor has asked everybody to travel by subway, tube.

All right! Now, the UN, of course, has a bureau that helps visiting delegations hire cars and see the city's museums and galleries, opera, island tours and so on, but each delegation does its own hiring of limousines and the most interesting social fact of the present spree to me is that most of the delegations – remember that there are over 150 member nations – want not one big limousine, but a flock. I don't know who started it. I think it was some sheikh or other some years ago. Anyway, some high muckamuck insisted not on one grand limousine, but a motorcade – six or eight or ten of them – to transport the whole delegation to the UN headquarters at a single swish, or crawl.

This year everybody wants a motorcade which is what threatens Mr William Fugazy with an ulcer. Mr Fugazy is the owner of the city's largest limousine service and this week, he moaned, '10,000 cars are not enough!'. It's not just a fancy car that most delegations want, they want the amenities that go with it or that they've heard another delegation has collared. Mr Fugazy says they want to make sure that a neighbouring state doesn't have more features in its limo.

All these limos have a television set, a wooden cradle for glasses and a locker with bottles of liquor, but then the kingdom of razzmatazz discovers that the border kingdom of hernia has a videocassette player attached to its limo's telly. It wants one too. One embassy, Mr Fugazy reported, heard that another embassy had a car that had provision for serving hors d'oeuvres, so Mr Fugazy's phone rattles with complaints from A that his enemy or neighbour B has portable telephones and he does not. Why, another potentate wanted to know, did the limousines he'd ordered have large seats with armrests whereas a rival potentate had circular sofas?

Most of the delegations want to see in their limos their own native wines or spirits. The news of these status baubles gets around. One sheikh got the jump on his fellows by seeing that the limousine service produced a catered breakfast in his limousine and there was no doubt much gnashing of distinguished teeth when it came out that the chief French delegate has had sent over a French car, the only one of its model, in which all the instructions are indicated not by red lights on the dashboard, but by a French man's voice. He wishes it had been a French woman's voice. Time to check the oil, the rear left door is open, your passenger's seat belt is not fastened and so forth.

Why have I gone on about this vanity of vanities? Well, all newspapermen, I mean reporters for serious newspapers, recognise three main types of political story. There is the so-called hard news story. There is the analytical story going into the political manoeuvres behind the public acts and statements and then there is what forever has been known as a colour story – something light, picturesque, droll that you might want to read when you're bored or baffled by the hard news. The trials of Mr Fugazy is undoubtedly such a story, but for once I believe the colour story is the real, hard, cruel news story.

I said, or implied, earlier that the mark of almost all the speeches delivered by heads of state or government before the general assembly, the mark was one of self-righteousness or, at best, of urging the big powers, the two superpowers especially, to mend their ways. If only Mr Reagan and Mr Gorbachev would sit down in Geneva and trust each other, the world would be a better place. But they don't trust each other.

Many of the speeches, when you strip them of their good or bad rhetoric were, in essence, much like the excitable manifestos I get in the mail about once a week from all sorts of people and places. They are plans, positive solutions to the world crisis. Foolproof recipes for peace. And, without exception, they echo one I had this week which was entitled, 'Albert Einstein's Prescription for World Peace'. The late, great man had provided the text. It said, 'Mankind must learn to change the way it thinks'. That means, of course, that mankind must first change the way it feels.

I, frankly, don't know how this is to be done. I should like to see all the delegates, however grand, however modest, do what my old friend, Hamilton White, used to do. He was the deputy chief of the United Kingdom delegation to the United Nations. He cut through all this folderol by bicycling to the assembly to work. But, how about security? But, of course. No doubt, terrorists also must learn to cease from terrorism and the lion must be taught to lie down with the lamb.

In the meantime, we get a sharp, sobering glimpse of what the human family is really like from the story of Mr Fugazy's troubles, trying to accommodate his international clients. It seems unlikely to me that any plan for world peace that merely wishes people were different is ever going to succeed. Whatever the presidents, the prime ministers, say when they get up on the United Nations rostrum, we had better remember that some of them were piqued when a rival or neighbouring nation had hors d'oeuvres served in his limousine.

At the convention of the 13 states that met in Philadelphia nearly 200 years ago to write a constitution for the new nation called the United States of America, a delegate got up to protest against James Madison's insistence that disputing factions must not be suppressed, that there should be a house of representatives with large powers to represent the competing interests, the different factions that existed in each state.

The protesting delegate puffed, 'Is Mr Madison saying that the frailties of human nature are the proper elements of good government?' Madison said, 'I know no other.'

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.