A sleeping child sums up the best of America
When I studied the Soviet Union in school, I remember learning about the phenomenon of endless ovations. A Soviet official would visit a factory and give a speech. At the end, the workers would burst into applause and it went on and on and on, sometimes for half an hour. Why? The first person to stop clapping risked finding their name on a list.
An uninitiated observer of the US president’s annual State of the Union address this week could be forgiven for thinking that she was witnessing a similar spectacle. The speech took an hour and 20 minutes. It ought to have taken half an hour, but members of Congress constantly jumped to their feet to applaud, cheer and chant: “USA! USA! USA!” And Donald Trump’s speech, like any president’s, was full of obligatory “applaud” buzzwords: veterans, policemen, child cancer survivors, reformed convicts and proclamations about how no country in the history of the universe has ever done as much for humanity as America.
None of this actually told us anything real about the US’S greatness. Thankfully, though, there was one unambiguous sign that this was indeed the land of the free and not a One-party rally: the sight of a young boy, a pupil especially invited to watch Mr Trump’s speech, who had instead fallen asleep in his chair. No one woke him or put his name on a list. Through the pomp and noise, he was Joshua Trump (no relation) fell asleep during the president’s State of the Union address quietly left alone. He was, in other words, living the true American dream.
Anglo-irish relations have seen better days. They hit a new low this week when the smirking Irish Taoiseach was shown by EU president Jeanclaude Juncker a “thank you” card, apparently from an Irish family, which declared: “Britain does not care about peace in Northern Ireland.”
Tell that to the families of the thousands killed and wounded in the conflict.
Britain peaceably absorbed this utterly crass gesture without fanning the flames of outrage, as it has absorbed every Irish insult throughout the process. Still, it’s hard to swallow the double standard.
This week, Der Spiegel magazine cited German MEP Elmar Brok as stating that the integrity of the EU single market is much more important than peace in Northern Ireland. In the event of a no deal, he said, the EU would force Ireland to put up a border because Germans fear American chlorinated chicken more than they care about “civil war” on the island of Ireland. This is someone who really “doesn’t care” about peace. Yet this story caused not a ripple of complaint in Ireland.
We are supposed to go on believing that the EU is, as Donald Tusk says, first and foremost “a peace project”.