In the light of recent events from Berlin to Bucharest, the scene is now piquant with irony. It was late 1986, in the evening, after the eminent English academic had finished giving a series of well-endowed open lectures at a prominent eastern American university. The visiting lecturer and his wife were being entertained in the private dining room of a fine restaurant near the campus. Full of wine and bonhomie, the visitor - whose stratospherically esoteric lectures may or may not have entertained and informed his politically attentive professorial American hosts - was certainly now entertaining a half dozen of them with his obiter dicta and clever comments on a number of topical issues in politics, the arts, letters, and current affairs. These were delivered with the pace and wit developed and refined at many a similar dinner at the high tables of Oxbridge colleges - a pace, art, and style just delightfully a quarter-or half-step faster in delivery than the repartee of his hosts, such being one of the advantages of the convivial style at the senior universities in the old country.
As one of the younger hosts, puzzled at having been invited and, in truth, somewhat annoyed at having had to attend some highly complex lectures rather distant from my own academic interests, I was sitting across the table listening to the English guest, slightly more interested, by ten at night, in my wine than his conversation. But my interest was sparked by the English guest's earnest pursuit of a fairly typical, leftist, anti-American line of analysis. He mentioned, I think, that in England Martin Amis' recent book on the United States had been entitled The Moronic Inferno, but that it had been given a different title over here in the land of the free and home of the brave. But his main point was the, to him, repellent combination of self-interest and naïveté that characterized so many American efforts, especially in foreign policy.
This line of analysis and comment was fairly predictable, especially from leftwing British academics, but having lived abroad for much of my life and not being immensely impressed with the disinterestedness of other nations' foreign policies, I questioned the point.
“Give me an example, N---, of our self-interested naïveté,” I said.
“Happily,” he quickly replied, moving toward a conversational victory. “You Americans insist on reserving the word democracy for yourselves, denying other definitions and forms of democracy that are, in truth, more real than your own, living as you do in a plutocracy.”
“But give me an example of one of those other definitions and forms,” I said.
“Certainly,” he replied. “My wife and I, and friends of ours, frequently spend time in the German Democratic Republic, where they define democracy to mean economic rights, everyone's right to a job, instead of your mostly bogus political democracy, where everyone gets the ‘right’ to vote for Tweedledee or Tweedledum every four years, though of course only wealthy Tweedledees and Tweedledums can really afford to run at all. In addition,” he went on, now gaining confidence, “my wife and I have just returned from two weeks in Cuba. There people have free medical care, subsidized social services, and full employment. The Havana whorehouses and casinos of the Batista days are long gone, and the whole country is embarked on a
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