The Undocumented Mark Steyn (23 page)

He’s right: How many black generals does the British Army have? Powell would probably have left as a disenchanted squaddie and wound up in Brixton
competing with John Major for a job on the buses. As National Security Advisor, General Powell meets Sir Charles Powell
¹
and is amused to discover that he’s actually Sir Charles “Pole”: there’s quite a lot on pronunciation in the book—the General’s family still call him “Collin,” in the British style, rather than “Coe-lin,” as the American public does, and at the height of the Gulf War he still found time to write to the London
Times
on the matter. But it was easier to Americanize his Christian name than it would have been to Anglicize his surname, easier to be General Coelin Powell than to become General Sir Colin Pole.

Nonetheless, in searching for reasons as to why white America seems prepared to abandon its oldest and most enduring prejudice, you come back, always, to the Britishness of Colin Powell. In rare moments of honesty, whites will tell you that the black leaders blacks like scare the pants off ’em. Watching “The Reverends” Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, or Marion Barry, Washington’s born-again crackhead mayor, on television, roaring their grievance jingles, whipping up the crowd with hallelujahs and hollerin’ and other pseudo-religiosity has most middle-class whites making a mental note to order a new security system: all that shouting, all that noise, all that anger. Colin Powell doesn’t shout. He’s not a southern Baptist, but an Anglican, a man who likes the King James Bible and the Book of Common Prayer and the quiet dignity of the old liturgy.

When he recalls the way his Gran’ma’s English “wedded African cadence to British inflection, the sound of which is still music to my soul,” you’re reminded that, though he’s less musical, less sing-songy, his vocal timbre is closer to the soft-spoken authority of Caribbeans like Michael Manley and Lynden Pindling. Whitey likes Colin Powell because he’s the antithesis of the angry, resentful black man full of “black rage”—the deeply ingrained fury at centuries of oppression which ingenious lawyers have managed to get accepted as mitigating circumstances even unto murder.

So why isn’t this particular black man full of hate? “For one thing, the British ended slavery in the Caribbean in 1833, well over a generation before America did. And after abolition, the lingering weight of servitude did not persist as long,” he writes.

         
After the British ended slavery, they told my ancestors that they were now British citizens with all the rights of any subject of the Crown. That was an exaggeration; still, the British did establish good schools and made attendance mandatory. They filled the lower ranks of the civil service with blacks. Consequently, West Indians had an opportunity to develop attitudes of independence, self-responsibility and self-worth. They did not have their individual dignity beaten down for three hundred years.

Most of General Powell’s television interviewers haven’t read his book, but, if they did, they’d realize their preferred label isn’t quite the story: General Powell is certainly black, but is he “African-American”? Even the mandatory sense of rhythm, calypso excepted, has gone missing: “Jamaican miscegenation,” he pleads, “had blocked passage of both the basketball and the dance genes in me.” It gets worse: his favorite composer is Andrew Lloyd Webber. (“Is this guy even black?” wondered Jesse Jackson.) Commentators have puzzled over why the General commands less support among blacks than whites. For what it’s worth, most of those to whom I’ve spoken seem to regard him as a honkies’ patsy. Not to mention that there has never, ever, been a genuine black American called “Colin.”

There is in any case a long-standing distrust by African-Americans of West Indians. They call them “black Jews.” Caribbean blacks have a tradition of higher achievement in America: in the Fifties, Harry Belafonte became one of the first big-selling album artists; in the Sixties, Sidney Poitier became the first black movie star to bed a white actress in
Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?
The film seems tame stuff now: Hepburn and Tracy are supposedly shocked by their daughter’s colored boyfriend, but who wouldn’t want Sidney Poitier
for a son-in-law? Well, Powell’s in the Poitier role, with America happy to be romanced like Katharine Houghton. You can’t blame the likes of Reverend Jackson for feeling miffed that, after decades of marches and bussing protests and lunch-counter demos, black America should have foisted on it a man who skipped all that, whose father got off the banana boat and followed the Jews uptown.

“Get over it,” Mayor Barry told Washington’s stunned white voters on the eve of his re-election, in between thanking the Lord for his deliverance from cocaine. But it’s black America that can’t get over it, that can’t seem to flush the poison of racism from its system. General Powell’s trump card is that he never had to get over it—because he grew up within a British West Indian sensibility. That reference to “miscegenation” would, in American terms, usually mean a plantation owner with a penchant for pleasuring himself with his slaves; in Colin Powell’s case, it refers to his maternal grandfather, a Scots overseer on a sugar plantation, who took the General’s gran’ma as his wife and fathered nine children by her. That would have been illegal in most American states.

As blacks put it, they were specifically excluded from the American Dream: where most immigrants arrived in America to escape oppression, blacks were brought here in order to endure it. There again General Powell is at odds with the broader narrative: “Mom and Pop chose to emigrate to this country for the same reason that Italians, Irish and Hungarians did, to seek better lives for themselves and their children.”

Where most blacks have been contemptuous of the myths of Ellis Island, the General is now claiming to be their most potent exemplar: Irving Berlin, Sam Goldwyn, sure, all very impressive, but not till now has a son of that great immigrant tide of the early twentieth century presumed to claim the top prize of all. How odd that it takes a Powell not a Pole, a Scots-Jamaican rather than an Italian or Greek or Russian Jew, to complete that long journey from the Lower East Side to the White House.

So, even as they prepare to break with that long line of Anglo-Celts, Americans re-affirm their nation’s cultural and constitutional origins. General
Powell belongs (as I do) to that wider British family beyond its shores, which the United Kingdom, in its morbid Euro-resigned defeatism, has managed to shrug off within the space of a generation. He rightly cites the evenhandedness of British nationality—the first supranational nationality, the first citizenship of the modern era not to be defined by race or ethnicity. But when did you last hear an Englishman sing its praises?

He’s wrong on one point, though: had his folks stayed in Jamaica, he might well have been knighted. I think of all those group shots at all those Commonwealth Conferences, of the Queen surrounded by her black and brown prime ministers, a sight the British love to mock. But it shows a grace in transition few other societies have managed, the same grace which distinguishes General Powell and commends him to his fellow Americans, and seems set to make him the unlikeliest imperial bequest to the young republic; the first black president.

If Colin Powell does win, it will be hailed as a victory for black America or a victory for immigrant America, according to taste. But it will also be an unspoken vindication of the virtues of British Imperialism.

1
    
Charles Powell was Private Secretary both to Mrs. Thatcher and her successor, John Major.

THE PEOPLE’S QUEEN

The National Post
, November 11, 1999

AS READERS OF
Monday’s Comment page may have noted, I passed a jolly evening last week at the Elks Lodge in Littleton, New Hampshire, in the company of George W. Bush. Immediately afterwards, I flew to London for dinner at Buckingham Palace.

“Wow! That’s quite a week,” said my assistant. “One minute, you’re with America’s next head of state. The next, you’re with Britain’s and Canada’s head of state.”

“Or look at it another way,” I said. “One minute, I’m at the Elks Lodge in Littleton. The next, I’m at Buckingham Palace.”

It would be invidious for me to disclose the reasons for the Palace’s call, if only because
The Financial Post
’s Linda McQuaig has already complained that I sound more like something from
Monarchy
than a Canadian newspaper column. But, at the risk of breaching the confidence of a private occasion, here’s an exchange that deserves to make it into the public prints:

One of my fellow guests at the Palace, remarking on the lack of agricultural workers in Britain, said that he now brought in young Australians and South Africans, who were able to make ninety to a hundred pounds a day (about sixty thousand dollars a year) picking onions.

“Crying all the way to the bank?” said the Duke of Edinburgh.

The next day, Australians went to the polls for their referendum on whether to dump the monarchy. The Queen won. Australia, we’d been told, wanted an elected head of state, and now it’s got one. Yet, rather than respect the people’s verdict, the proponents of a republic flew into a rage. Aussies often refer to the English as “whinging Poms,” but you’ve never seen anyone whinge like the sore losers on the republican side when the electorate declined to agree with them.

The overwhelmingly republican press took defeat particularly hard: It seems Australians do resent a remote autocratic foreigner from thousands of miles away running the place and lording it over them. Unfortunately, it turned out to be Rupert Murdoch rather than Elizabeth Windsor. The media mogul overplayed his hand by declaring on his front page that he’d lived under three different systems (Aussie, British, American) and republics were best. John Howard, the Prime Minister, reminded Mr. Murdoch that he was now a U.S. citizen and, in an unguarded moment, apparently suggested that he “f**k off.” Even after the republican side had conceded, the Murdoch press seemed reluctant to accept the actual result: “Queen Hurt by No Vote Despite Win” was the headline on
The Sunday Times
of London. Mr. Murdoch’s poodle, anxious to please, began his report as follows: “The Queen was hurt and disappointed by the strength of republican feeling in Australia. . . .”

Come again? Her Majesty was “hurt and disappointed”? How does the
Times
hack know? He was down the pub with her? She’d called him at home, choked up with tears, to confide her innermost feelings? As the only journalist on the planet present at Buckingham Palace on the eve of the big vote, I think I can speak with complete authority on this matter when I say I haven’t a clue as to the Royal Family’s state of mind and private thoughts. I kept trying to slip Australia into the conversation, right up to the end when, as the Duke of Edinburgh was showing me the door and my carriage was about to turn back into a pumpkin, I opined that I thought the 1901 Australian constitution was rather better than the 1867 Canadian one. “Hmm,” he said, and made some sharp observations about the differences between the two forms of federalism. But, as to how they feel about losing their antipodean throne, who knows?

Still, if I had to guess, “crying all the way to the bank” isn’t a bad way to put it. Like Liberace, the Queen may have been “hurt” by some of the beastly things that have been said about her; but, on the big day, she came through: Her electoral validation may be a long way from the divine right of kings, but it’s also useful ammunition against careless post-monarchists in her realms. The snubbed Australian media keep harping on about the electoral divide—between
young upscale educated urban republicans and old poor rube hick monarchists—but the interesting aspect of the royalist victory is how widespread it was: On Tuesday, it emerged that, as votes continued to be counted, the sole pro-republican state—Victoria—had tipped back to the Queen’s side. The only two large polling centers to plump for the republican cause were the national capital, Canberra—like Ottawa, a company town where the company happens to be big government—and London, England, where 60 percent of expats are supposed to have voted to dump the Crown. If the Republic of Oz needs the votes of Earl’s Court bedsits, it’s in bigger trouble than it knows.

For Canadian republicans, the Australian referendum has several lessons. First, it’s a rebuke to the “inevitabilist” theory of history. Secondly, it’s a telling defeat for the “minimalist” republic—the idea that you simply change the Governor-General’s title to President, and life goes on as before. The defeated republican forces now say that next time the question should simply ask whether Australians want a republic per se and leave it until later to work out whether it’s going to be the Václav Havel model or the Saddam Hussein model. The devil is in the details—and to demand that the electorate reject an actual specific monarchy in favor of a vague, unspecified republic is as absurd as asking them to vote for a monarchy and assuring them you’ll let ’em know afterwards whether they’ll be getting Elizabeth II, Emperor Bokassa, or Mad King Ludwig of Bavaria.