Watching the CBS news coverage of the D-Day commemorations nine days ago, I was moved to wonder: Do I understand anything about the US? asks Kevin Myers
Quite clearly, sometimes I don't. Of course, we like to think we understand other peoples, other nations, but the truth is, at bottom we probably don't. Once the commonplace civilities with which we enwrap almost our entire lives are dispensed with, and we come to examine the raw tribal pulse of others, we find the blood-red mysteries of identity, pulsing incomprehensibly.
Paradoxically, this is especially true for different peoples sharing the same language, and who might be deluded into thinking that a common tongue provides an entrance into the minds of others. It does not. It's no coincidence that the finest assessment of the US mentality was by a Frenchman, Alexis de Toqueville.
What would he have made of the insights into the US with which recent events have provided us? I confess, as an ardent friend and admirer of the US, those events have left me dumbfounded and baffled. Words which should share the same meaning clearly do not; values which we normally seem to share evaporated like the Sarahan dew.
On the evening of June 6th, CBS television news dealt with just two items: one was the death of Ronald Reagan, the other was the 60th anniversary of the D-Day landings. Perhaps the passing of a much-loved and enormously important figure in 20th-century history in some way influenced the way that CBS covered the other main event of the bulletin, infusing it with much more patriotic ardour.
Whatever the cause, the bulletin on that day provided a small master class in the meaning of American-ness. For if that bulletin was your only source of information about the landings - and for millions of Americans it probably would have been - Operation Overlord consisted entirely of American soldiers disembarking from American ships, and American paratroopers jumping from American planes. No other country, no other armed forces, were included. None whatever. And nor was any other of the many guests of the French government - who included Tony Blair, Queen Elizabeth, President Putin - even mentioned in the report. President Bush alone was featured.
Now this was not the failing of a single callow and inexperienced reporter, but the product of a gigantic team effort. The entire bulletin was built around Operation Overlord, with the anchorman John Roberts actually presenting the programme from Normandy. So the failure to report the vast contribution of other countries, most especially the UK, the only military ally of substance that the US now possesses in the entire world, must represent some unintentional but massively important cultural statement about the US: that Americans genuinely don't see other people if they share the picture with Americans.
So, this failure to perceive anyone else in Normandy wasn't intentional bad manners, but a national cognitive dissonance, which at some level or other lies close to the heart of the US cultural identity. Not even the Canadians made it into the CBS view of the landings which, we were led to believe, were composed solely of only one kind of North Americans.
Another vertigo-inducing insight into the meaning of "American" was provided by Vice-President Dick Cheney during the obsequies to Ronald Reagan a couple of days later. The late president, said Cheney, was an American - which meant, of course, that he was an idealist. The vice-president was a reading a scripted piece, so he wasn't improvising his way into infelicity; this was a considered judgment, intended to mean precisely as it sounded: all Americans are idealists.
Never mind that it would be an ungovernable world indeed if everyone in it was an idealist. A surfeit of idealism, from Zwingli to the Khmer Rouge, is usually the precursor to the arrival of our old friend, the blood-dimmed tide. No, the real issue is that this most articulate and intelligent US vice-president really does believes that Americanism and idealism are invariably and unfailingly synonymous.
This is rubbish, of course. Donald Trump is no more an idealist than his crack-dealing fellow-American two blocks away. However, such myth-making is not a uniquely American phenomenon. Perhaps all nationalities cling to some vital conceit that that they possess some unique and distinctive virtue.
What is the self-proclaimed Irish national virtue? Probably the ability to have a good time, as in "crack". The very fact that we now, with a grisly and winsome pretentiousness, spell this word as craic suggests that we are engaged in a major piece of identity-concoction. The word is an English word. The Irish form is a recent derivative from the English. Moreover, what to one person is a bit of crack is to another a loud-mouthed bawling hell of witless self-indulgence. Pursuit of this tiresome linguistic affectation craic is often enough the prelude to cracked skulls outside nightclubs, and hospital casualty wards being overwhelmed with bloodied masses of the voluntarily unwell at midnight.
And on June 6th, we saw another expression of Irish identity, when the Government chose not to be represented at the D-Day commemorative ceremony in Islandbridge, because - said a spokesman - the Annual Day of Commemoration at the Royal Hospital covers all such events. Bah, humbug and flannel: if that were so, there'd be no annual Government pilgrimage to Bodenstown and Arbour Hill. For as both the Government's absence from Islandbridge and the outrageous CBS bulletin suggest, the key to tribal identity often depends not so much on virtue, but on an utterly defining absence of generosity.