I was watching the other night the show that American television put on to celebrate the refurbished Statue of Liberty. The occasion was attended by Presidents Reagan and Mitterand and by loads of other people, all obviously freezing half-to-death on a windy platform in New York harbor.
It was fascinating, as always, to see what a nation chooses to display as expressing itself. You will recall that when the eyes of millions of viewers were upon us, at Ballyporeen, we – or somebody – settled on Derek Davis and some small Irish dancers to encapsulate the mystery of Irishness. The Americans have a great deal more confidence than we have when it comes to patriotic showbiz, as well they might. All the same, Liberty weekend was, from a European point of view, a very, very odd occasion.
For one thing, America’s royalty, the stars, were playing amazing roles. President Mitterand was introduced by that well-known statesman, Gregory Peck; Robert De Niro, with a microphone that didn’t work, introduced the Chief Justice, who in turn administered the oath of allegiance to thousands of new citizens in a simultaneous nationwide telecast.
This ceremony could have been the emotional highlight of the night. The Statue of Liberty stands for the millions of immigrants who founded modern America, and citizenship of the States is still the goal, the almost religious aspiration, of millions of people all over the globe. As the cameras panned over the new citizens you could see one reason at least why American-ness means liberty. There they were; people of all shapes, sizes, and colors, not knowing the words of the oath, yawning, shuffling, casually dressed. Nobody had drilled them into deference. They are, like the earlier immigrants, free now from lords and bishops and the oppression of class. They are equal; the old countries of Europe, even the socialist ones, have never achieved such an ideal. This is to put to one side, of course, the questions raised by the show’s opening with a little African American boy singing the National Anthem.
Andy Williams and Mireille Mathieu demonstrated détente. The camera never got to the Secretary of Transportation – whose reason for giving a speech I didn’t catch – so we never saw her. “I Want to Be in America” was danced with the marvellous Busby Berkeley–type precision that is one of America’s real arts. Bob Hope was given a medal in the company of Elie Wiesel, chronicler of the Holocaust, Mr. Wang of computers, Kissinger, a token woman, and Irving Berlin, who not only typifies immigrant success but also wrote “White Christmas,” America’s folk anthem.
The video from Lawrence, Kansas, didn’t show up. Coretta Scott King shivered in the audience along with Senator Robert Dole, Steven Spielberg, and a glowing George Shultz. Mrs. Mitterand looked as if she would never smile again. When President Reagan turned on the lights of the Statue of Liberty and no flames came out of her torch, I thought it was another technical hitch. In fact, they turned on the torch in a later part of the ceremony. And the flames didn’t work.
But by then the viewer was reeling. The Fonz, a chillingly popular television star with close-set eyes, questioned a resettled Vietnamese teenager about Communism. The Communists, she said, were “cruel, stern, and ill-tempered” and she is very glad to be in the Land of the Free. Well, I don’t know about ill-tempered. I’m not sure that the manners of the millions of people on this planet who live by Communism are even relevant. But the Fonz was overcome with emotion. So were the Reagans. Nancy had been in her misty-eyed mode from the very start and couldn’t do much more. But the President got even more broken-voiced sincerity into saying “God Bless America” at the end than he had in the beginning.
The sanitization of good and evil continued. A crowd of extras, tastefully dressed as huddled masses, formed tableaux as Neil Diamond in two different shirts sang “Yes, to America.” This dissolved into a barn-dance sequence about freedom, with girls in gingham dresses and boys in denim. Tactically, that was a mistake. The whole night was asserting that there was no one else in America before the ships arrived at Ellis Island, that the state was born of innocence and hard work, that America has no colonizing past. But you can’t conjure up the settlement of the interior without reminding people of the aboriginals, the Native American, who were completely ignored on Liberty weekend and whose hearts are buried at Wounded Knee. I bet they thought the new Americans were cruel, stern, and ill-tempered.
It was a splendidly elitist night. Nobody was there because they matter in their own small community, or because they had spent a lifetime in the service of others. You had to be either a Republican politician or a top star to be allowed to talk. And when it comes to choosing between politicians and stars, the producers spoke for all of us, and brought on the real King and Queen, Sinatra and Elizabeth Taylor.
The latter, and not the Statue of Liberty, was the evening’s memorable woman; 
265 million it cost to refurbish Liberty: Miss Taylor did it by willpower. When last seen, she was fat, she was sad, and she was visibly getting old. But in a scene of rebirth as stunning as the chrysanthemums coming back to life in E.T., she is now slim and beautiful and younger than ever. It was a joy to behold.
And it was joyous, too, to listen to Sinatra singing. Cracked and scratchy as his voice is now, it is still the voice of America. Millions of people courted to his music, danced, played his records to suit their moods, had babies to it, and will go on loving it as long as ballads survive. The producers of the show dissolved to a shot of the Reagans as he sang. But popular as they are, they are not as potent as Ol’ Blue Eyes, and the camera returned to him. And so to the fireworks and the end of the show.
It was a new way of displaying power. What the English say with the Royal Family, what the Russians say with tank parades, what the Vatican says with St. Peter’s, the Americans said with entertainment. The images were so familiar and benevolent, the verbal content was so irrelevant, that the state behind the glitter was forgotten, the state that bombed Libya and terrorizes Nicaragua and ignores the anti-nuclear movement.
State occasions – and Liberty weekend was a state occasion – usually say something. But Reagan’s America baffled these expectations. It covers its idea of itself in sentimentality and gloss. And since most of us have reason to be grateful to America and do love it, we are inclined to take it at its own valuation. It seems bad-mannered to insist that what matters to us now is not the America that once gave shelter to our emigrants, but the modern America that exercises foreign policies to which we are vulnerable.
The Americans have every right to celebrate themselves. But do they extend the same rights to everyone else? Would they lend Sinatra to the Sandinistas to celebrate their revolution? That sense of the world outside its shores which America once had, the generosity toward ethnic identity which it exemplified, was altogether missing from Liberty weekend. Between the song and dance, the speeches betrayed an isolation, a wilfully simple self-approval, which no non-American can be happy with. Liberty is not their property, even if the Statue is.
The Irish Times, July 8, 1986