CLANCY
SIGAL
137
people can say America is God's Country without blushing . .. where
blacks and browns fight for equality but not for simple recognition of
their existence ... where I'm billed (as I was) $3,000 for fainting in the
street ... California dentists look into my mouth and mutter "Yeah, I
heard all about your socialized medicine, it'll cost you a bomb to fix
that mess" ... where a twenty-nine-cent stamp is enough to unlock my
FBI file ... where football players get the Nobel Prize for ordinary
tackles and backslapping compliments is the preferred method of
"interpersonal interaction" .. . where measured detachment is a sign ei–
ther of insanity or TV punditry but not of friendship ... friends make
dates for breakfast tomorrow not dinner four months hence ... an un–
paid bill is a cause less of concern than jail ... and where I was born.
The change I tried to escape in America has finally caught up with
me, and there's a new Britain we're inventing. Len Doherty killed him–
self, nobody wants to know his name any more, not even in Thurcroft.
It's made me feel suddenly lonely . Once it was the two of us against
"Them," but now I'm almost one of them myself. I wonder if Len, too
tired to go down to pit again but strangely out of place in his new
whitecollar class, felt any of this. There must be a laugh in it somewhere.
After all, why live here unless you pick up a trace of the famed English
sense of humor - essentially a kiss before dying, a bemused appreciation
ofjust how bloody hard it is to stay sane on this crowded little island?
There's a brilliant rainbow over Chalk Farm as I write this after a
sleety rain. Cheap symbolism. After all, there will be rainbows in
L.
A. or
New York or wherever I go. But it won't be quite the same. For thirty
years - half my life - I've lived on the lower slopes ofJerusalem we call
democratic socialism, or welfarism, Labourism, or simply the English
sickness. An extraordinary experience of misery, ecstasy, broken promises,
structural decency, and shallow compromises - neither all-out capitalism
nor "true" socialism. You're a midway people, halfway between America
and Russia, heaven and hell. This delicate, often dispiriting balance can
be maddening. And I really did go crazy here, in love, for fraternity,
with comrades who nearly killed me and women who sometimes I wish
had. Anyone who calls this place "sane" is nuts.
But no more grumbles. You don't reward the lifeguard who saved
you from drowning by reminding him he should have sent you home in
a Porsche. I don't want to go. But needs must.
I 'll
be back. After all,
would Marx have turned his back on a "revolution," Thatcherite or
otherwise, or Freud have ignored a country where repression is such an
art form? But then, they could afford housekeepers .
