Iran Air Flight 655 - 8 July 1988

Last Monday I drove the hundred miles from the end of Long Island to New York city in the morning along highways as empty as I’ve seen them since the middle of the Second War, when everybody was rationed and only doctors and the military seemed to own cars.

There was nothing remarkable about this, it was 4 July, the most generally-observed holiday of the year and nobody was moving, everybody was there. Along the way though, there were moments at first alarming when you were convinced you’d just blown a tyre. From nearby and from far off on the horizon by the seashore the blazing sky was ripped by small explosions and the drum rattle of erupting squibs. Practically nobody, it seems, pays much attention to the laws against fireworks which in many states are rigorously enforced except on the 4th.

This year Americans woke up to a more awful bang that sent full-page headlines streaming across the papers and had the news commentators butting in from time to time even on the on-again off-again Wimbledon men’s final. It was the news of the appalling accident in the Persian Gulf and it’s difficult even now to say much about it except to deplore it.

In the first 24 hours any simple downright explanation was challenged by as many questions as bedevilled the shooting down of 007, the Korean airliner in 1983. Armchair experts were tempted to draw sinister comparisons by the fact that the Iranian airliner too was way off course and did not respond to seven warnings, three on a civilian network and four on the military. Until we heard that it had responded but on both channels.

The laymen among us at once settled on the puzzle of how the most sophisticated – and that means complex and expensive – air defence system, the best that the Americans possess could not distinguish between the radar signature of a small fighter plane and a jumbo jet. But then an American former head of the CIA told us that radar is not enough to confirm identity.

Then the Americans say the plane was flying, in spite of regular warnings, in a combat zone. But the Iranian ambassador here says on the contrary, it’s a corridor long approved for commercial flights. Then we were told all commercial aircraft carry transponders, devices that flash on to distant radar screens their identity, as well as type, direction, speed, altitude.

And then that the jumbo was at the astonishingly low altitude of 9,000 feet when you’d expect a commercial flight to be climbing to, say, 25,000 feet or higher. The Vincennes captain says it was actually descending and appeared, at nine miles, to be headed down directly for his ship. Now nobody’s quite sure of that.

Well even as you hear this, I’m sure there’ll be a score more pertinent questions. You’ll have to wait first for the investigation the Pentagon has already got under way. My first thought – a dream from long ago – was that the ideal neutral investigator would be ICAAO, the International Civil Aviation Authority Organisation of the United Nations.

The Iranian ambassador, by the way, was the first to propose the UN, but I’m afraid we are years beyond the point where the great powers automatically turn first to the United Nations.

So people shared glum looks and desultory guesswork with their families, but it was the 4th and time for the beach party, the fair on the common, the barbecue in the back yard, or the garden.

The barbecue. A magazine devoted to social history has just reported that the day of the barbecue is over, or fading fast. There was a witty forecast of this in a cartoon a couple of weeks ago in the New Yorker, the magazine, a drawing of an Independence Day scene, typical we should have thought from Maine to Mexico, from Alaska to the Florida Keys.

A clutch of wide-eyed children hugging their knees on a patch of grass, and gazing admiringly at dad, rigged out proudly in his chef’s hat, smock, padded gloves, spatula, the works. And standing by the instrument that will glorify his skill with the steaks and the veggies... only it isn’t a barbecue grill, it’s a microwave oven.

My detective theory, which certainly sounds plausible, is that as the automobile spelled the doom of the horse and buggy, the cannon the bow and arrow, the aerial Blitzkrieg trench warfare – these are his cosmic comparisons, not mine – so the microwave will kill off the barbecue.

I believe the barbecue came into Europe – into Britain anyway – through the American forces stationed there during the Second World War. I can find no English reference before then: the Oxford dictionary gives it a cross, which means of distinctively American origin. And Sir William Craigie’s vast undertaking, the Dictionary of American English on historical principals traces a fascinating history for it, and much longer than any I’d imagined. Since it’s about to vanish maybe you’d like to hear bits of it.

The word undoubtedly comes from the Spanish "barbacoa", and, it appears, turned up first in Haiti. At any rate it’s of Carib origin and in various parts of Central and South America is described as the name of a wooden grid on which meat is dried or roasted. In South America the word acquired a secondary meaning for, a wooden grid used as a sleeping place. You’ll be relieved to know that no North American has ever been reported as mistaking the barbecue for a sofa.

The first North American mention goes way back to 1733 and throughout the 18th Century it turns up all the time as, noticeably, a favourite form of feast in Virginia. Thus in 1769 George Washington wrote in his diary, "went up to Alexandria to a barbecue and stayed all night". Five years later he evidently took to the smock himself, "went to a barbecue of my own giving".

It must have stayed native to Virginia for many years, for, at the turn of the century, a northerner wrote, “The people in this part of the country bordering on the James River are extremely fond of an entertainment which they call a barbecue. It consists in a large party meeting together, either under some trees or in a house, to partake of a sturgeon or a pig roasted in the open air on a sort of hurdle over a slow fire. This however,” writes the huffy visitor “appears to be chiefly confined to the lower ranks.” Like General George Washington.

As late as 1833 a northerner invited to a barbecue expressed either ignorance or distaste and his host says, “You surprise me Mr Fennimore, no taste for a barbecue? Well that shows that you were not raised in Virginia.” You can pick up from these entries, by the way, more than a hint of the persistent southern belief which they’re too courteous ever to mention outside the south, of the comparative social brusqueness of northerners.

The only time it ever came out, I can recall, was years ago when four or five of us were entertaining a great man. A man from Georgia, of marvellous humour and gentle charm, his name was Nunnally Johnson, quite incidentally – and a fact you’d never even hear touched on by him – possibly the most successful, most prolific screen writer in Hollywood’s history.

We were joking about this and that and one of us, one of the northerners said, “D’you all feel the same way about that Master Johnson?” with grave good humour and, in pretended alarm, Johnson turned to me and said, “You ever noticed Alistair how we in the south never imitate northerners, we can do it, but we have an odd feeling about it, we’d call it rude.” It was said so disarmingly that everybody fell about. But the point had been made.

Anyway you can be sure that last Monday in several million homes, out in the open, the barbecue was putting on a final fling before it retreats into memory and the history books.

There’s a little topic I’d meant to talk about last time but we were involved with mighty matters concerning the Supreme Court, and this tasty item, nothing less than a chocolate with cream filling, might have seemed out of place. But this legal struggle that’s developing up in Albany, the state capital of New York, illustrates in a comic but no less grim way the difficulty in a nation of lawyers of getting almost any bill through Congress, however simple seeming.

Because more often than not a bill is not being argued on its merits, it’s rightness or wrongness, but on its ability to accommodate as many of the opposing congressmen’s constituents as possible. Let me be specific, we’re talking about a mounting legal battle between three candy – in this case chocolate – manufacturers A, B and C.

The state of New York, unlike 15 other states, prohibits the manufacture or sale of chocolates with liquor inside them. The assembly, the lower house, just passed a bill which will allow candy containing up to 5% alcohol for sale to adults and in liquor stores, simple. But when it went to the New York Senate it was amended to allow chocolates that have cream fillings spiked with alcohol and to allow them without a licence, whereas the ones in which the chocolate is a bottle needs a licence.

This change was sponsored by lobbyists financed, of course, by a manufacturer of cream-filled chocs. They say chocolate creams with a whiff of alcohol are no threat to anyone.

Not so, says a citizens group, NOALCC, National Organisation Against Liquor in Candy for Children. They, by the way, are financed by a third chocolate manufacturer that uses no liquor, not even in cream and has announced its lifelong devotion to, “Promoting a wholesome image of chocolate.”

Apart from A, who makes liquor-filled candies and B, who doesn’t but makes chocolate creams with a whiff of rum, bourbon, whatever, and C, who doesn’t make either, but wants to sell more of its wholesome, character-building chocolates, there are several highly interested onlookers – namely other manufacturers waiting to see, and paying the overseers, on how it all comes out.

The Senate is ready for the fight. Up in the gallery and out in the corridors are their back-up troops. Highly-paid lawyers, public relations firms, advertisers, but the only certain outcome is a legal, liquor-filled or cream liquor-filled chocolate that will cost twice as much as it did before the moral conflict was joined.

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