From private parts to foreign parts

Spectator, The, Sep 5, 1998 by Steyn, Mark

Americans are uninterested in abroad, says Mark Steyn, but abroad could be about to make them less tolerant of Mr Clinton

New Hampshire

A FEW WEEKS ago, I drove over to see my friend Ed, who does something on Wall Street involving getting up early and downloading lists of numbers. As I was leaving, his little girl pointed excitedly to my pickup and squealed, `Big twuck! Big twuck!'

Ed leaned down and patiently explained the facts of life: `Sweetie, that was a big truck when the Dow was at 4,000.'

No one likes to have his rig slighted, so naturally I beat the crap out of him. But that's not my point. My point is that this is how these fellows see things: the Dow Jones was supposed to be as reliable as a calendar - 6,000 follows 4,000 as surely as 1996 follows 1995. Even Ed's general automotive theory is sound: the American economy is so rich that cars have been getting bigger and bigger and bigger just so's folks will have something to do with the money. The fastest-growing sector - `light trucks' - is full of `sport-utility' vehicles that get bulkier and bulkier each year. Aside from the truck, I've now got a huge state-of-the-art sport-ute with 28 cup-holders, in case I ever need to host a Nato summit in there. It only does four miles per gallon, but, with gas prices under a buck per, who cares?

To get bigger is the natural American condition: the suburban soccer moms buy cumbersome family vans that shear the roof off the drive-thru lane at the bank; the blue-collar lardbutts buy supersized packs of Dunkin' Donuts that, cumulatively, are forcing movie theatres and bus companies to widen their seating to accommodate the ever-expanding American bottom. As my friend Ed would say, contemplating a 3001b woman, `Hey, that was a big ass when the Dow was at 5,000.'

This week, alas, like Bill Clinton's pants welcoming Paula Jones, the bottom dropped out. In July, the Dow reached its all-time high of 9,337. Since then, it's fallen 1,800 points; in the last week of August it fell 1,000; on Monday, 500. At this rate, it'll soon be of a size commensurate with my truck once more. In one sense, it's absurd that as piffling and insignificant an economy as Russia's should send the price of American Express, The Gap, IBM, Wall-Mart and Microsoft tumbling. But, as this White House knows well, perception is everything. Faced with rock-solid `approval ratings', the President's supporters long ago perfected a cute line: the American people care more about Dow Jones than Paula Jones. The Clinton spin team is now faced with the awful prospect that, just this once, the spin might actually be true - and what then? Ever since January, polls have shown that a more or less consistent twothirds of Americans approve of the way the President is running the country. The fact that it's an idiot question - the President does not, in any sense, 'run' the country is neither here nor there: he's been happy to take credit for it, so it's only fair he should get stuck with it now it's all heading south.

Until Monday, the President figured that this week's historic first summit between a dead duck and a dead bear could still work to his advantage: he would be the representative of an impregnable superpower graciously condescending to assist in a little regional difficulty. As ABC News headlined it: 'A country in chaos struggling to survive: can President Clinton's visit make a difference?'

Er, no. Next question. And the next question, with all its forlorn echoes of the Cold War, suddenly bubbled up everywhere: `Who lost Russia?'

The cynic's line on this administration is that Bill Clinton is a trivial president for trivial times: with general prosperity at home and no serious threats abroad, the country could afford to indulge Bill's sex drive. This week, the times began to look less trivial, and the wreckage of the Presidential boxer shorts seems not so much an `irrelevant distraction' from the world's affairs as a peculiarly vivid example of what literary critics call `internalisation of the landscape'.

Americans, it should be said, define prosperity slightly differently from the British. They work harder for longer hours and have substantially less (if any) paid vacation time, compared to, say, the automatic six weeks of salaried leave the humblest English typist expects. On the other hand, paid holiday is more important to the British, who aspire to spend as much time as possible out of the country. Very few Americans desire to go anywhere at all. According to one recent survey, two-thirds of current members of Congress don't even have passports. The distinguished British novelist Sebastian Faulks once came to stay with me to research some local colour (he turned me into a woman and had sex with me, but let that pass) and fell into a conversation with my yardman on this very subject. Jim was planning to take a week's vacation and spend it about an hour north of us at his fishing camp, and Sebastian suggested that, if he liked fishing, he should try Scotland. `No, thanks,' said Jim. 'I went abroad once. Vietnam. That was enough for me.' Sebastian tried to point out some of the obvious differences between Scotland and Vietnam -- fewer guerrillas, less napalm and so forth - but Jim was unmoved.