I received an invitation recently from the US Embassy to a reception for its new public affairs officer. It is the first communication of any kind I have received from that source since September 11th, when I began to write a series of columns in support of the US.
That support remains unchanged - because the US, Europe and Ireland should stand for the same essential values which are worth defending not just verbally, but by military alliance as well, with all the compromises such alliances mean. The US now needs to know who its true friends are. Me. I'm one.
So when many Irish commentators were trying to "contextualise" the WTC and Pentagon attacks, I was one of just three who came down unequivocally on the US side. From the US-haters, I have been rewarded with vilification, abuse and even some idle death threats. But from the US embassy, as with the two other declared friends of the US, I have heard nothing whatever.
Senior diplomats
Moreover, as a journalist, I was recently introduced to two very senior American diplomats at non-US embassy social occasions. Neither had the least idea who I was, or that this column had unequivocally backed the US. One of them chose to address me as "Myles", on the grounds, I suppose, that that was close enough; and is close enough not good enough, when you represent the US in a country the size of Maine? So, no, I will not be going to the reception to welcome the new public affairs officer, in order to stand around being called Myles and being asked by US diplomats what precisely I do in The Irish Times.
This sounds like vanity. Truly it's not, but merely an expectation of professionalism of the kind I would have of any Irish embassy abroad; for I absolutely know that our diplomats anywhere could give a swift and accurate assessment of who the local journalists are and what they've been saying. Maybe this is because Ireland is so little and our diplomats have to be professional.
Do US diplomats in Ireland feel that because they represent the world superpower in tadpoleland they don't really need to understand the local media and local mores of the local tadpoles? If so, it might explain why Richard Egan, the US Ambassador, attended the Sinn FΘin ard-fheis, even as his government's worldwide war against terrorism was under way.
Almost the entire corps of foreign ambassadors was elsewhere, at the Labour Party conference, that party having 20 more TDs than Sinn FΘin. Meanwhile, the US ambassador was busy having his picture taken with members of the IRA Army Council, thereby providing a photo-opportunity which Sinn FΘin has triumphantly presented as a US endorsement of its policies.
And frankly, I don't blame poor Richard Egan at all for this colossal gaffe. He is not a professional diplomat, and he was presumably acting on advice from an official. So was this embassy official's understanding of Irish politics informed by any real knowledge of local politics and local media - oh, you know, petty things such as the possibility that gunless, peace-loving Ruairi Quinn might be the next Tβnaiste and Minister for Foreign Affairs?
Read newspapers
Thus one is moved to ask: How many US officials here really feel they know about gunless Irish democracy? How many bother to read Irish newspapers? Or how many just settle for some simple, cordite version emanating from New York's Irish newspapers? With this in mind, we might wonder: what sort of advice are US diplomats giving their ambassadors in other countries with far stranger rites and more impenetrable cultures than we have?
Since the US embassy in Dublin clearly feels it unnecessary to speak to local columnists on matters of interest to the US, we may reasonably ask: is that how the US embassies in Ankara, Islamabad and Nairobi also work? So does the dropping of supplies of a brown food in tubes, vaguely resembling wormshit, to baffled Afhans who have never seen peanut butter before suggest a hint of imperial arrogance? And is the presumption that a US embassy may function without paying any attention to local journalists - poor sad and contemptible creatures though we be - so very different?
Benign empire
Now only a fool would deny that Europe - and that includes us - is free because of the United States. We live within the American imperium, the most benign empire in world history. Its values being largely the same as mine, that's fine. But my regard and affection for that country co-exist with a considerable suspicion towards some of the out-stations of its State Department, with their arid complacence and their cocksure ignorance. A health warning: even the warmest affection can sour when protestations of regard are ignored. To lose a friend is simply done: treat him as a tadpole.
So perhaps, when peace finally returns, the State Department might consider an odd reform or two. It might insist that its imperial district commissioners pack two qualities in their kit-bags before they go forth to us distant tadpoles. One is the virtue of modesty, the other a desire to learn the ways of us poor natives among whom they must work. It's odd, but we find a desire to understand us curiously beguiling.
Happily, I say all this in the confident expectation that no one in the US embassy in Dublin will ever read it. I have, however, higher hopes of the consulate in Belfast, where there is at least one good and learned soul. . .