El Niño making Congress restless - 12 June 1998

We've been having two, three weeks lately, a brilliant, beautiful weather that has the weathermen, the climatologists, baffled. Why?

Well, this is June and here in New York City, here throughout the north-east, to be exact, we expect warm days, an average temperature of 78 and, along with it, high humidity. What Londoners call "very muggy". And they ought to know, since according to the International Weather Statistical book, Londoners have throughout the twelve months of the year the highest humidity of any city in Europe.

But that's not what we've been having. And revelling in. It's been glorious, but like the fall. Brilliant and bone dry. Little white puffball clouds scudding by quite briskly, because there's a wind up there and it's north-west. And that, to the weathermen, is the puzzle. At this time of the year, the prevailing wind is always from the south-west or worse, the south-east, which means from the Caribbean, across water all the way – hence the clammy humidity. But in September and on into the fall through October, the wind is north-west. In other words, it blows across 3,000 miles of dry land, hurls all the smog and mist and mugginess out into the Atlantic and leaves us inhaling and exhaling with conscious pleasure the dry, humidity-free air.

Well, the best I've been able to get from the climatologists is a slightly nervous suggestion that it may due to El Niño. Their nerves can be explained by the fact that for the past six months everything that happened everywhere through the winter and the early spring, everything from mud and house slides in California to Grandma's bad cold in Florida, has been attributed to the Christ child, as that weird Pacific Ocean phenomenon is known.

Of course, many large disturbances in nature have been due to the huge rains in the west, the unbelievable mildness of our winter. Most of us, however, cannot take into our imaginations the scope of the burning forests of Mexico. We can only sense it to be beyond human imagining when we see the huge, grey foggy skies over the cities of Arizona and Texas, and hear warnings there for old people to stay indoors.

"Who", asked the prophet "stretches out the heavens as a curtain?" We know the answer is "the Lord". But what stretches out a vast blanket of smog hundreds of miles wide over the cities of Texas and Arizona and up into the Deep South? It's the apocalyptic smoke from one million flaming acres in Mexico.

I've noticed before that at this time of the year, Congress tends to get restless, like schoolboys, on the week or two just before the summer break. So, after months of monotonous and always gentlemanly debate and nattering on the talk shows and bemoaning the other party's ineffectiveness in public, suddenly the legislatures in Washington and in the state capitals started to pass bills because they're impatient to get home and feel the tug of the trout or the sweet, quite new, ping of a golf ball on a metal wood driver. (Pretty soon I'm sure we're going to have to stop calling them woods, since wooden clubs will soon be as antediluvian as the mashie and the niblick.) There are many sportsmen in the house, in the Senate, many a mad baseball fan and basketball maniacs and quite a bunch who are itching to get through their waiting chores and head off, day in, day out, to the first tee.

By the way, I didn't tell you in my last week's obituary tribute to Senator Barry Goldwater a rather charming early story about him. When he arrived in the Senate and one day was changing in the locker room of Burning Tree, the club that the better golfers in Congress belong to, an official who'd welcomed him to the club asked him quite quietly a question he'd heard bandied or whispered about. And these were the days, believe it or not, only 40-odd years ago, when most private golf and country clubs tended, shall we say, not to welcome Jews. The man said quite genially, "Senator, is it true that you're half Jewish?" Goldwater looked up with a merry smile and said, "Yes, it is!" And then behind the palm of his hand, "Would it be all right if I played just nine holes?"

So there's been some fast action after all these months of wrangling and doing very little about the big, tenacious, seemingly insoluble issues of the day. Should abortion once again be outlawed? Should addictive drugs be legalised? Should prayer be allowed in the schools, in school time? Does more gun control lead to fewer homicides? Can an anti-proliferation treaty have any positive effect on stopping single nations or rogue dictators from acquiring nuclear weapons? Is the whole idea of a shield against incoming missiles possible, or is it nonsense? We've been debating, fighting over, being dogmatic about these things for ever. It seems. But if the great issues are insoluble, something this spring has been done to tidy up, you might say the fringes, of the great issues.

The middle-western state of Wisconsin – which for decades was a pioneer in social legislation and whose governor has recently devised the only successful system of converting welfare dependents into self-supporting workers – Wisconsin this week passed a law unique in the country. Or rather its Supreme Court ruled that the city of Milwaukee can spend taxpayers' money to send pupils to parochial, that is Catholic or other religious, schools. This is an amazing move. Ever since I first covered Congress I have listened to the rolling biblical baritones of Southern Baptist senators warning America that if ever Catholic children were allowed to air their abominable faith in the schools, next thing you'd know the Pope would arrive in Washington to take up residence in the White House.

This preposterous bigotry reached its peak in the terrorist parades and lynchings of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s, when about one-third of Americans were of the conviction, or under the delusion, that the Founding Fathers had founded a Christian Republic and Protestant to boot. Well, once the Klan was discredited for its criminal tactics and its corruption, the anti-Catholics fell back on the famous First Amendment, the Free Speech Amendment to the Constitution, whose first clause, however, declares Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion. And today, people who are most determined to maintain America as a country having no state religion – and the most fervent people are atheists and agnostics – ignore the point of the First Amendment, which is to protect everybody who practises any religion as well as those that practise none.

But though this Wisconsin ruling may seem a mild thing to non-Americans, it's a landmark or a thunderbolt here, and is sure to go to the Supreme Court. To let your taxes pay for children to get steeped in Popery? Heavens to Betsy!! What next?

What next? Well, the state of New Jersey, across the Hudson here from Manhattan, has become the first state of the 50 to allow homosexual partners jointly to adopt children, just as married couples – that's a male and a female – just as they can do. The case that decided the issue was about children now held in custody by New Jersey, but it will streamline the process of adoption for homosexual couples of either, what shall we say, persuasion. That is a social issue that has been argued, deplored, fought over and rejected for at least three decades. And there's no doubt, I think, that more states will follow.

And here's another move, hinted at and ridiculed quietly for some time in the Deep South, or wherever there's a majority or sizeable voting block of black people. It has happened, in New Orleans. The School Board there six years ago passed what seemed like a sensible, certainly understandable, city ordinance: it was to give the local schools the right to rename any school that bore the name of a former slave owner. A lot of people of various colours nodded approvingly without saying much or doing anything about it. However, the blacks took a second look at the script and thought it was time to act it out. So, New Orleans' George Washington Elementary School has been renamed after a black surgeon who did notable work on blood plasma during the Second World War; a worthy man that few white people had ever heard of.

But could they not have found a notorious bad slave-holder during the Confederacy? There were both very bad and very good slave holders. And George Washington was the only Founding Father who set down in his will his wish to have his slaves freed when he died. Jefferson made no such provision. Lincoln didn't ever free a slave under his jurisdiction. More renamings will follow.

And this past week we moved another giant step forwards, or backwards, in the interminable matter of penalising a tobacco company for somebody's death. This week, on unique grounds, a jury in Florida awarded £1 million to the family of a man who died last year of cancer who was 67 and had admittedly smoked one brand of cigarettes for 50 years. Half that time his cigarette packets had clearly printed the Surgeon General's warning. But the jury agreed with the prosecution's claim that the company had made a defective product and in quoted documents "conspired to conceal the cigarettes' dangers". This verdict will surely be appealed. Meanwhile, a fervent anti-tobacco missionary cried, "We'll get them all yet!" And it could be.

Make cigarettes illegal and then watch for the glow on the faces of the Mafia as they revive the glory days of Al Capone, Dutch Schultz, Lucky Luciano and company.

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