Opinion Mark SteynThe Iron Lady was on cracking form in her eulogy for President Reagan. Cannily anticipating the faint praise with which he would be damned by the media, she hailed him not as the Great Communicator - i.e., a genial snake-oil salesman - but as the Great Liberator, and then gave a roll-call of Eastern European capitals to prove it.
By contrast, I thought Brian Mulroney, the former Canadian prime minister, rather misjudged the room. He began with an anecdote of him and the Gipper watching their wives step out of a limo. "And as they headed towards us, President Reagan beamed. He threw his arm around my shoulder and he said with a grin: 'You know, Brian, for two Irishmen we sure married up'."
It drew polite laughter rather than the real thing. It was a bit too generic, the sort of thing any two Irish pals might say to each other on the stump in Boston or Chicago. Friday's service was dedicated to the proposition that Ronald Reagan was special: you could talk about him toppling the evil empire - that's pretty special - or you could tell some Ronnie anecdotes, but they had to be special, too, and Mr Mulroney's wasn't. Even in the 1980s, of these three doughty warriors of the Anglosphere, Mr Mulroney brought up the rear: he was supportive without being helpful, which is about as much as Washington and London can expect from modern Canada. Maggie and Ron were best known for battling communism together, so that's what she talked about. Brian and Ron were best known for being Irish together, so that's what he talked about. (They famously sang When Irish Eyes Are Smiling, arm-in-arm at the so-called Shamrock Summit in Quebec City in 1985.)
For his next slab of sentimental blarney, he turned to a poem by Thomas Darcy McGee, Irish-born but one of Canada's Fathers of Confederation:
Am I remembered in Erin?
I charge you speak me true.
Has my name a sound, a meaning
In the scenes my boyhood knew?
"Ronald Reagan will not have to worry about Erin," the former prime minister assured us, "because they remember him well and affectionately there. Indeed they do. From Erin to Estonia, from Maryland to Madagascar, from Montreal to Monterey, Ronald Reagan does not enter history tentatively. He does so with certainty and panache."
Well, they certainly remember him well and affectionately in Estonia. But Erin? I very much doubt it, if the correspondence I had last week from Dublin, Limerick, Mullingar, Bray, etc. is anything to go by. My glowing tribute to the great man appeared in various countries last week, but it generated by far the most hostile mail from readers in Ireland - you may have seen a couple of responses on the letters page here. Ronald Reagan was certainly remembered at Dublin Castle, where Morrissey, the elderly pop star, announced the president's death and the crowd cheered. The famously morose Mancunian, whom I'd assumed had retired around the same time the Gipper did, then said he only wished it had been Bush who'd died. The crowd gave an even bigger cheer.
I don't know whether the good folk of Erin would go that far, but my sense is that Morrisey's closer to their thinking than Brian Mulroney. The Irish would agree that Nancy Reagan and Mila Mulroney had married down, but seem less anxious to recognise either Ron (born Tampico, Illinois, in the great flatness of the Mid-West) or Brian (born Baie Comeau, Quebec, an old paper town on the lower north shore of the St Lawrence) as "two Irishmen" rather than one insane B-movie warmonger plus his overly slobbering poodle.
Shamrock-flavoured blather is not what it once was in North America, and St Patrick's Day has never really recovered from the "queering of the green" - the battle by Irish gays and lesbians to march as such in the parade, which has led either to its cancellation (Boston), its subversion by an alternative "inclusive" parade (New York), or its fading as a demonstration of political muscle.
But John Kerry still thought it worth passing himself off as Irish for two decades (he's not; he's of Jewish descent). And the lion's share of green cards in the annual lottery is reserved for the Irish, thanks to an artful wheeze by Ted Kennedy. Plus, if you fly there from Shannon, you get to pre-clear US immigration, a privilege extended to no other country apart from Canada.
With Canada, there are compelling economic reasons for facilitating cross-border traffic. With Ireland, it's pure sentimentality - and largely unreciprocated at that. These days, when it comes to the Great Satan, Irish eyes aren't smiling, but American eyes are too moist and blurry to spot it. Bush is about to touch down on the Emerald Isle for the US-EU summit, a huge waste of everyone's time except, insofar as one Dubliner wrote to me, as it enables Dubya to be arrested and tried for war crimes at the Hague.
Mr Reagan's death reminds us that Bush is not the first US president to be unloved in Europe. In this week's Weekly Standard, David Gelernter compares Reagan's trip to western Europe in 1982 with JFK's in 1962: "Both arrived bearing the same message: America will stand by Europe. America and Europe will face down the Soviet threat." George W. Bush, like Kennedy and Reagan a tax-cutter at home, will also arrive with that message - common values against a common enemy. But four decades ago le tout Europe loved Kennedy and was happy to stand with him; two decades ago, the Euro-left reviled Reagan and thought he would lead them to Armageddon; today, not just the left but a big chunk of the European right loathe Bush as the most dangerous man on earth, and half the cabinet ministers in the EU aren't shy about saying so in public.
The same message, more or less, across 40 years. But, like Ron and Brian singing When Irish Eyes Are Smiling, the old song doesn't play so well in the old country. Certainly, there are differences in style: Kennedy was an East Coast aristocrat with a consort partial to Parisian chic; Reagan was a Hollywood actor with a folksy mien; Bush is a drawling Texan who likes mentioning God. To European eyes and ears, there isn't much further to fall: on present trends, in 2020 the US president will be a stump-toothed Appalachian mountain man with his 14-year-old cousin as First Lady.
But stylistic revulsion doesn't quite account for the ever widening gulf - for that would mean western Europeans are simply frightful snobs and nothing more, wouldn't it? It's the broader underlying trends in Europe - social, demographic, economic, religious - that make America more and more foreign to it.
Am I remembered in Erin?
Yes, Mr President, but you don't want to hear the details.