Mississippi relief package - 23 July 1993

I've been reminded, accused by some genial correspondents: you have not, they say, talked about the Mississippi and the floods. True. What is one to say, except to elaborate gruesome particulars that all add up to saying, isn't it awful. Talk is gagged before any great natural disaster and where the pains and cruelties of it have not been described, they can be imagined, by any person who's ever seen a small fire, a modest flood, a minute earthquake.

Reporters from all over the world have rushed out there in the certain knowledge that they could startle their readers for weeks to come. At least till the day, which blessedly seems to have arrived, when the crest has been reached and the waters subside and revel billions of dollars worth of ruined farms, wrecked cities, a landscape or seascape the size of England, plastered with an apocalyptic layer of mud.

No one has described the Mississippi more fearsomely than Mark Twain, who after all trained for 18 months to become a licensed river pilot and plied his trade for four years before beating it out west on the arrival of the Civil War, a quarrel in which he felt he had no business interfering.

Twenty years later he went on a trip, just after a great flood and he wrote: "This present flood of 1882 will doubtless be celebrated in the river's history for several generations, before a deluge of like magnitude will be seen."

It put all the unprotected lowlands underwater from Cairo in Illinois to the grey and muddy mouth at New Orleans. It broke the levees on both sides of the river and when the flood was at its highest, the Mississippi was 70 miles wide. So that, in many stretches, what looked by night to be dense bushes rising from the swirling waters, were seen by day to be the tops of a drowned forest. Islands that used to be were no more. The pilot's skill enjoyed its most exquisite agonies for it was possible to steer into a fairly level stretch of river and find yourself next day grounded for weeks on a sugar plantation, miles away from the river bank. The properties of multitudes of people were underwater for months and the poorer ones starved by the hundred. Mark Twain, as a romantic boy, aching to become a steamboat pilot, came to lose his romanticism in learning the extreme and constant treacheries of the long river with, as he called it, its capacity for calamity.

Well, the only objective comment I can offer to the disaster seen from Washington is that Mr Clinton is going to have to shell out yet another mighty sum to eat away at his austerity budget. Nine billion dollars at the latest count. It was being remarked by people in Washington the other day, that one thing you can say for the federal government, whoever's in charge, is that it has always been generous and forgiving when it comes to providing relief for natural disasters, floods in particular. But then there are also politicians equally generous in thought, who complain they have the devastating Florida hurricane in mind, I think, complain that the federal government can too often be too generous and forgiving, in providing such abundant help and means of reconstruction, that victims tend to stay put in their new homes, in a place that is still open to similar disasters.

Well, do people still say it was an education? Usually after first visit to some natural marvel, Bryce Canyon or the Mount Palomar telescope or Disneyland or some other human confection? I can say I have just emerged from an education in a subject I've supposed to have been educating myself in for so many years that would make the mind reel backwards. How came this revelation? I went to England and I have to confess it was for three weeks, as long a stretch as I can remember since my old newspaper days, when the editor insisted I spend four weeks every summer with what he called the audience, to gather from the horse's mouth, the sort of thing he'd most like to read about. What I found, the surprising education I referred to, is that when you stay too long in the country you're reporting on, you can't say for sure what topics, political problems, social conditions, whatever, are peculiar to it. In a word or two I've found, by reading every London paper in sight, every day for three weeks, that many social ordeals, puzzles, problems I'd thought were peculiarly American afflict Britain at least just as much or just as naggingly.

For instance, so far as I can gather, the main problems of university education that vex the American establishment, vex you too. Britain, finding it cannot go on affording to give free university tuition to everybody, is now thinking of some dependable system of student loans. Lots of luck. This country instituted student loans two, three decades ago, and that too is an expensive mess when more than half the borrowers, after college, get on their feet or don't, but anyway can't meet their obligation or won't or have forgotten to repay. In one English paper I read the sentence, even people on the left begin to think that the rich should be made to pay for the tuition, as well as the food and shelter of their young. Which sounds also just like the Medicare debate here. One certain way of saving billions from the budget is to stop the nearly free ride citizens over 65 get from hospitals, doctors and surgeons. Those same old folk, now known as senior citizens, they have one of the most powerful lobbies in Washington and at the whiff of a rumour from the White House, that the comparatively rich old must pay out of their own pockets, they set up a resounding hullabaloo about the fact, and it is a fact, that everything the federal government pays out for their hospital needs, was taken from them in the form of weekly social security deductions going back, for some of us, to the spring of 1937, when the system was set up.

Also I was going to tell you about the peculiar problems that attach to Vietnamese refugees here. Here, being by the time you hear this, in northern California, San Francisco. So I just saw a piece in a London paper on exactly the same topic. You may not have as many Vietnamese refugees yet, but you will unless Mr Churchill, the living one, has his way. Or I feel I must sooner of later get around to a morbid, but pressing, subject problem here, the bursting American prisons, the consequent setting free into life of not only petty criminals but the mentally sick, actual psychopaths, some of whom, with horrid despatch, kill or rape again. Then I heard much protest on this very topic most days in London. It reminded me how pressing the problem became here, or was made to become, in 1988 when a vivid and grossly unfair little dramatisation of the problem propelled Mr Bush into the White House. That was the notorious Willie Horton incident, a name that will live in Republican infamy. Willie Horton was a black convict who was allowed to do what Massachusetts and several other states practised, which was to be let out when thought to be harmless, on a weekend parole. The system had worked very well in several states but that one man, Horton, went out for the weekend and raped again. Unfortunately he was imprisoned in Massachusetts and Mr Bush's Democratic opponent was the governor of Massachusetts, so the Republican whiz kids got out a 30 second, it may have been only 15 second, television commercial. A revolving door, a bulky, shadowy figure, suggesting others behind, comes out of it, out on to the street, that was all.

Or how about single parents? I knew you had them but I was astonished to discover that the figures were just about as daunting as they are here. Not though, I believe, so many proportionately black mothers alone with a child or two or three. I imagine I would have been equally surprised to hear that drugs are a menace with your youth too, were it not for a friendship going back some years, a young woman I worked with in this country who revealed in her 30s, that she'd been on cocaine since she was 17, a body blow to us all. She was in a bad way but she gritted her teeth, went off for six months and dried out for keeps. She now tours high schools as a warning example. But, I once remonstrated with her, you'd been three years in England, at Oxford, in your 20s. No problem, she said, she knew the whole subterranean network. She could take a train to Edinburgh, to the Midland cities, to the universities and mingle and do business with her kind within the hour. Only a year to two ago, she went to England on a holiday, drove around a good deal and to her surprise and pride, found herself most evenings addressing small CA, Cocaine Anonymous groups in some of the most bucolic and romantic and adorable small towns in the West Country.

As for the ordeals of Mr Clinton in the wash of Reaganism and of Mr Major in the wash of Thatcherism, the British brand of Reaganism or vice versa, the similarities are so glaring and constant, that we are bound to bring them up all the time. However, there is one attitude of denial, not much written about on your side, that is common to the tenants of Downing Street and Pennsylvania Avenue. Both President and Prime Minister insist on the main challenge, what they call their priority, jobs, creating jobs. How to do this by other means than silly old Reagan and yet don't remind the public, in either country, that President Reagan started wholesale de-regulation, cut high taxes and spread low ones and created 20,000 jobs, more than the whole of Europe, over a period, eight years of continuous economic expansion. The racking problem here, at an rate, is to find some way of repeating that undeniable achievement, while you go on denying it.

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.