State of the Nation Adress

It’s not the usual job of an historian – calling events as they happen. But that’s what Simon Schama elected to do for his book and television series The American Future: A History as he travelled around the good old US of A during 2008’s historic election.

America is not homogenous in terms of language, culture, religion, climate or even time zone. It’s the land of plenty where talk of extending healthcare to the poor causes panic; the richest country in the world where nearly 60 percent of the population will live below the poverty line at some point; a modern industrialised country where infant mortality, teenage pregnancy and child poverty are among the worst in the first world; a bastion of freedom where the right-wing sees their democratically elected president as a threat to the social fabric and the left-wing is furious of the slow pace of change.
As such, it’s impossible not to use broad strokes to try and make sense of the place, its people and its attitudes. Among others, Schama uses the idea of ‘plenty’ and the influence of religion to try and get to grips with the diversity of America.
“I would say that American idea of plenty rested on the premise that all you had to do was find another bit of America, of American land and shout ‘Drill, baby, drill!’ in a kind of Sarah Palin way and all the problems will be solved. This isn’t really believed anymore. There were plenty of opinion polls at the time of the ‘drill, baby, drill’ mantra [for Alaskan oil] and there were plenty of Americans who said, ‘Yes we don’t really have the luxury of being conservationists, let’s get the oil even if we wreck the environment’, but just as many felt it was a sop for short-term gratification.”
“I think America is collectively more capable of changing its ways than people imagine. Limits are not an American concept, but at the time when petrol prices were climbing through the stars, SUVs were suddenly unsellable and they’ve remained unsellable, even though petrol prices have fallen again.”
With the assassination in May of Dr George Tiller, medical director of a clinic offering late-term abortions, and California upholding the ban on gay marriage, religion in America is generally seen as a conservative force. However, as Schama notes, in the black community, churches were one of the few places that organisers and activists could meet.
“For the African American community, the church had been the only place where they could have exercised some degree of self-determination, both as slaves in their secret churches, then through the long years of Jim Crow segregation when the Baptist churches and Methodist churches and to some extent the Episcopalian churches offered schooling – they were the only place of real social coherence for communities that had been promised rights and got none.”
Schama believes that the noise created by religious groups is nothing to fear – at least not under Obama.
“When school boards have inserted creationist Christian teaching in the guise that it should be taught alongside evolution, the courts ruled very firmly that this was religious instruction pretending to be an alternative teaching of science and it was ruled unconstitutional.
“Equally, so far, Roe vs. Wade, a woman’s right to terminate a pregnancy has been upheld, even though a number of Supreme Court justices don’t believe there is a constitutional protection.”
‘The nominees Obama’s going to present as Supreme Court justices retire are going to confirm the separation of church and state. It wouldn’t have happened if the election went the other way.”
Talking of which, how different a place would America be if it had?
“I think things would be fantastically different if McCain had won. As soon as he chose Sarah Palin… She’s a formidable politician; we’ve not heard the last of her. She may not have much between the ears, but what she does have is an amazing instinct for working an audience and that’s a very rare skill. But the notion that she was within a hair’s breath of the White House was very terrifying to many, many people that there really wasn’t much possibility [of McCain winning.]”
As vocal a supporter of Obama as he is critical of Bush (“he inflicted catastrophic damage on the world”), Schama is happy sticking his neck out – Obama may not yet have delivered the ‘change we can believe in’, but Schama believes that it was his coolheaded approach that won the day and which should see him through the presidency.
“After the AIG moment when we all thought, ‘Bloody hell, there is no bottom, it’s like Lord of the Rings, we’re staring down into a sulphurous hell’ and McCain chose to suspend his campaign, cancel the debate and insisted he sit in on the cabinet meeting with George Bush, it seemed maniacal. He also said that the fundamentals of the economy are sound. America saw him as a sort of Uncle Fester marching up and down. Obama seemed to people to be someone who’d be decent at the job – be intelligent, put in the hours and understand what was at stake.”
‘What Obama has done – and there’s no guarantee it will continue – is steady the ship. There seems to be absolutely bloody nothing that causes him to lose a night’s sleep. But remember the famous joke in The Onion – Black man gets worst job in the world!”