America? Ask Letterman

Every so often, one reads in the newspaper how good that American talk show host named David Letterman is — and also that the Italian public can watch it on Rai 5. Evidently, whoever writes that never saw the fantastic figure who was Johnny Carson (and he, I believe, also inspired Maurizio Costanzo when he started the Italian talk show). And yet Carson headed “The Tonight Show” on NBC from 1958 to 1992. It was a great show, full of irony, mischief and winks. In comparison to Carson, Letterman is more brusque and wooden.

The last time I watched, Letterman was interviewing a man who had written a book on the crisis in the Middle East. Letterman started to question him on why (this was before the recent insurrections from Tunisia to Egypt) the Arab people were content to live under dictators or sheiks who grew fat on the local petroleum by keeping their subjects in political and economic subjugation. Why, asked Letterman, do the people accept this as their fate? And yet the fondly-remembered Pilgrims, in 1620, when England trampled on their rights as puritans, set out on the Mayflower and immigrated to America, founding in New England the first center of a democratic country.

The guest was so startled that he could barely articulate one of the most obvious answers: The Pilgrims were just a handful of people (I think about 120) and they had at their disposal a country still empty, while the poor Muslims are millions upon millions and they can only migrate to crowded countries and cities that are already struggling to accommodate mere tens of thousands. The Pilgrims were a fairly advanced group of people who lived in an England, where the notion of a citizen’s political rights had long existed and where the right of habeas corpus would be proclaimed within 50 years. How can one think that the same thing can happen for countless millions who not only would not know where to go, but instead of having a Mayflower, could rely at best on some scoundrel smuggler? Furthermore, they are not in conflict with their religious faith and do not have any conception of Western democracy.

Hearing that conversation left me stunned. Does a man who, with his interviews, should help us to understand the world we live in really have ideas so infantile about what exists beyond the borders of the United States? And yet Letterman was displaying the normal condition not of the American intellectual, but of the immense mass that lives in the center of the continent and reads local newspapers where they talk about the birth of a two-headed calf in the county and give vague news about the rest of the planet; where the New York Times does not come, or one can find it only at some exceptional place for twice the price; where, in the days when long distance calls were made through the switchboard, a young woman who is asked to connect someone with Rome, after asking which Rome (because there is one in Georgia, one in the state of New York, one in Indiana, one in Tennessee, and some other which escapes me), was surprised that one existed in Italy too. More to the point, a few years ago at a conference in Florence, a person who worked in the Pentagon or the White House (I can’t remember which), after having enjoyed an excellent fish for dinner that he knew had been caught in the Mediterranean, asked if the Mediterranean was a “salt lake.”

Sometimes one cannot understand why the average American politician (who occasionally may become a Bush) commits so many errors when drawing conclusions about Europe, Africa or Asia — as if his own country dominated areas of the unknown. Just ask Letterman.