America, 1998 - 01 January 1999

This is the time when pundits of all sorts - clergymen, politicians, columnists, business tycoons, television anchor people, journalists - are called on to look down throughout the months of the last year and either sum it up or tell us what was most remarkable about it.

A second's pause for a second thought will tell you, I think, what a fatuous undertaking this is.

The absurdity is that none of them can speak for any of us, all they can do is remind us of news events that have - how shall I put it? - bulked large on television, radio and in print. I've avoided saying "the events that were important" because often very lurid and dramatic events turned out to be of no importance whatsoever, whereas, for instance, one young Chinese standing in front of a tank in a public square, turned out to be not only most memorable but most important for the progress, or perhaps for the survival, of a protest movement of any kind in communist China. Never did any nation have better reason to curse the invention of television.

And I believe that to any one of us what is most memorable - what sticks in the memory - is different and personal for each of us. Of course once you're given a cue - and I say "Clinton" or "Saddam Hussein" or "Kosovo" - everybody will have his or her own picture that the word registers on your mental retina.

But such is the marvellous complexity and mystery of the human mind, about whose workings we are on the outside edge of beginning to understand, that left to ourselves without any verbal cues given to us, each of the six billion people alive would produce a different photo album of memories of 1998.

So I'm just sitting back and casually tapping the memory bank of all the things I've talked about and the only cue I give myself is "America, 1998".

First, something I don't have to reach far to recall because it hangs behind me on a wall of my study. And every late afternoon the sun comes in and lights it up as if to say here's the whole situation in a nutshell. It's that drawing by one of the last of the fine stable of fine cartoonists the New Yorker magazine used to boast of. You know, don't you, that in both this country and Britain I think we live in the dark age of comic caricature and cartooning.

This is by Dana Fradon. It shows a small reception room in a Roman palace and droopy melancholy-looking emperor with a sausage nose. (All Fradon's characters have sausage noses). A pathetic drooping emperor is sitting on his throne, two steps beneath him stand four sausage-nosed senators in their togas. One in the foreground has a scroll in his hand and he's unrolled it and has just consulted it. He looks up and is saying: "It's true Caesar that Rome is declining but I expect it to pick up in the next quarter."

I hung this drawing up as a reminder of the mood of the 1980s but it's just as true of the 90s. In spite of the dreadful warnings about what the Asian economic slump would do to us and the virtual collapse of Russia and threatening omens from Brazil and the unprecedented shaming of the presidency, it appears that over 70% of the people want the president to go on, and flush with pleasure when they think of the stock market and the minuscule unemployment rate, and nod sagely in agreement when a distinguished visiting Canadian says: after each so-called crisis in American affairs he's always struck by the resiliency of this nation. I expect it to pick up in the next quarter.

Next, for no logical reason, I think of a taxi trip way down town to the immigration office of the government where I needed some document or other.

My driver was by odd chance a young Moroccan who was himself in a stew about the Immigration Department because, apparently, he was on his way to citizenship but it was taking a wearisome long time to process his application. But that was not his complaint, it was a conflict within himself. He came clean with me.

He was here on a work permit which he hoped might go on forever. In other words he didn't really like the idea of becoming an American citizen.

"Why?" I asked him.

"Because," he said irritably, "I would like to be a Moroccan first and an American second."

This is something new and depressing. When I say new I mean over the past quarter century. I think back to the turn of the century and President Teddy Roosevelt saying with great confidence: "We must stop talking about hyphenated Americans - Italian-Americans and German-Americans and Russian-Americans. The English language alone can make us one: e pluribus unum - out of many, one". Or as Lincoln had said 50 years earlier: "The Union is the thing."

Today more and more immigrant groups - the young especially - are defiant ethnic minorities who ask why they should become Americans at all. And you may have noticed we more and more are required to say "Hispanics" and "Asian Americans" and - most new and most significant - "African Americans".

Then out of nowhere comes the ominous recall of that frozen food manufacturer and the day last spring when the supervisor was going his rounds and noticed something he'd never seen before. The tags on a big shipment of food that was just going out, they all said the same thing: the food was 40 years old. In fact the tags said that this sample of the firm's manufactured food ante-dated the founding of the firm - ridiculous. Still, to be on the safe side, they'd better throw the whole shipment out, which they did.

And that, of course, was for that firm the first threatening sign that struck the rest of us months later - unforgivably late if you remember that Arthur C Clarke warned us about it 10 years ago - the simple colossal error in the making of computers which by an oversight were never programmed to handle a four digit year. Same for microchips: 1993 is 93, 1998 is 98 - but no 2000, they go back to 1900.

Well you all know by now and I trust your grocer and banker and food makers know and are busy busy. As the Senator said - Senator Bennett from Utah - who first roused the Congress to the oncoming disaster: "Is the world coming to an end? I don't know but I do know Y2K is coming and we have to deal with the problem coldly and intelligently and efficiently. Don't panic but don't spend a lot of time asleep either."

There is a picture which stays bright at the back of my mind and comes to the front of it whenever these days I come close to a flapping American flag. It's a picture of that trim old lady - somebody once called her "Toujours Swanier", never mind - the trim old lady by my side in a cab going down Fifth Avenue one wet evening and seeing an American flag flapping in the dark and the rain above a museum.

"Isn't there a penalty for that?" she said.

"Yes indeed," I said, "$1,000 - by Act of Congress."

The Act, called Usages of the American Flag, was passed over 60 years ago. It dictated that the flag may never be raised at night, never illuminated, must be lowered at sundown, never touch the ground, never be used as decoration of any object. It was to be flown according to 16 separate directions and so on and so forth.

There never was any objection to this code I ever heard of. It was a reflection of legitimate pride, not in a person but in the nation of the United States. Forty eight states had laws against desecrating the flag.

Flash forward to the war in Vietnam. Some youths burn the flag on the streets of Chicago and a year or so later the Supreme Court of the United States upheld their right to do so under the good old First Amendment - the right of free speech. The 48 states that have desecration laws can forget them.

At about the same time the court threw out other sanctities - the cross of Christ sunk in a jar of the artist's urine is also permissible free speech.

I keep noticing that much that's happening in America today is there at the end of the first volume of Edward Gibbons' Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. I recalled the other week, a taut sentence: "The people drew insensitive or indifferent to the Emperor's debauches provided he repaired the roadways and remitted taxes."

But even in the slumping decades of Rome's decadence there were virtuous emperors and there were many virtuous Romans.

I close on a rousing picture which was flashed on our screens only two nights ago. An old black woman - a square-jawed, very handsome woman with glasses, in her mid-80s. A young handsome black man - 19 or so. Then a shot of one Joe Namath, a name that resounds throughout the world of American football as say Don Bradman does throughout the world of cricket.

Said Namath: "This boy really has something, the best quarterback in college football."

That's an endorsement that could alone push him up several steps to national fame. He's the adopted son of the old black lady who is now 86. Eight six? I can't forget her simple explanation of how it all came about when she was in her mid-60s.

"This young woman came a begging to me. 'Take my baby,' she says, 'adopt my baby.' Well I never had no trouble with my other 14 so one more makes no difference and he turned out a real fine boy."

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