It was sobering, on reading the recent flurry of letters in this newspaper under the heading "Balancing The US Debate", to discover that it was this column that had single-handedly unbalanced it. "If Steyn represents the American right, where is the spokesperson for the American left?" demands Conor McCarthy of Dun Laoghaire. The hitherto perfectly poised seesaw of press coverage of the United States is apparently all out of whack because my corpulent column is weighing down one end while on the other up in the air are the massed ranks of Irish Times correspondents, RTE, the BBC and 97% of the European media class, plus Anthony O'Halloran, who opined in these pages a few days ago that "anyone who cares to visit a small town in the Midwest will encounter what can only be described as ultra-right-wing thinking." Prof O'Halloran didn't cite any examples of this "ultra-right-wing thinking", secure in his assumption that most readers would know the sort of thing he had in mind.
As the ne plus ultra of unbalanced right-wing thinkers, it's not for me to suggest how the US debate might be balanced in these pages. I have only one theory on column-writing, which is this: at a certain basic level, a columnist has to be right more often than not, otherwise the reader (I use the singular advisedly) is just wasting his time. If I were Robert Fisk, the famed foreign correspondent with decades of experience in the Muslim world, I'd be ashamed to leave the house. Sample Fisk headlines on the Afghan war: "Bush Is Walking Into A Trap", "It Could Become More Costly Than Vietnam". Sample insight on the Iraq war: when the Yanks announced they'd taken Baghdad International Airport, Fisky insisted they hadn't and suggested they'd seized an abandoned RAF airfield from the Fifties by mistake. It's this kind of unique expertise that has made him so admired around the world, not least in Ireland.
By contrast, readers of this column may have gained the impression that George W Bush will win the Presidential election on November 2nd. If he doesn't, I shall trouble readers of this newspaper no further. It would be ridiculous to continue passing myself off as an incisive analyst of US affairs after I've been exposed as a deluded fool who completely misread the entire situation. In the bright new dawn of the Kerry Administration, you'd deserve better. If that's not an incentive for Irish citizens to smuggle a few illegal campaign contributions the Senator's way, I don't know what is. |