Whatever you do, we’ll waltz all the way along

FROM MY CORNER ... with Ann Brunswick

Readers often write to me or to the editor of this newspaper asking to know my age. Why they consider it a vital fact they need to possess is beyond me and of course that information is among the best-kept secrets in our nation.
Not even Wikileaks has managed to obtain it. Yet.
Usually readers are spurred to ask my age because of a reference made in my column once to an event many years in the past. Many of those who write suggest it would be impossible for me to have had personal knowledge or remembrance of such events, being one so young. Of course that sort of flattery is always welcome.
But let me now once again tempt fate by referring to an event that I witnessed 35 years ago. It was 1976 and the USA was celebrating its bicentenary year. As part of its efforts to promote the nation’s 200th birthday and international goodwill the then US president Gerald Ford sent “personal” messages to people in all nations around the world, or at least the ones the US had not previously nor was currently invading or had plans to do so.
The greetings took the form of a short message delivered by the president seated behind his desk in the Oval Office of the White House. All very majestic. But when the message for Australia and all Australians aired here it was obvious that Mr Ford had simply “topped and tailed” a standard message for all nations.
He began by saying something like “Greetings to all our friends in Australia”. There was then a distinct edit in the tape before Mr Ford continued with his message. It was soon obvious to anyone who saw the message on TV that Mr Ford’s minders had sat him down at his desk and had him say something like “Greetings to all our friends in Afghanistan” and then had him back up and say “Greetings to all our friends in Albania”, then Algeria, then Andorra. Somewhere down the list came “Greetings to all our friends in Australia”, then through the rest of the As, on to the Bs and – possibly several hours or the best part of a day later – he finally wound up by sending greetings to America’s good friends in Yemen and Zambia (Zimbabwe did not exist then).
It was that performance that came to my mind when watching the TV news to see the current US President Barack Obama take the opportunity of our PM Julia Gillard’s recent visit to Washington to laud Australia, using words such as “We have no stronger ally than Australia” or “The US has no firmer friend than ...”, well you know the rest.
It seemed to me they are lines that are trotted out no matter which head of state or government of which US-friendly country sets foot in the White House. So it did seem to me that in return our PM went a tad overboard in her speech to some members of the US Congress. (It was some, because even though the US has “no firmer friend...etc”, most American lawmakers still do not turn up to hear our current or past PMs when they have the opportunity.) In particular, to me the line Ms Gillard used right at the end of her speech telling the US “you can do anything”, was especially inappropriate.
It was even worse than both Harold Holt’s commitment to then president Lyndon Johnson that Australia would go “all the way with LBJ”, and John Gorton’s pledge also to Johnson that Australia would go “a-Waltzing Matilda with you”. Both syrupy sentiments were expressed at the height of the Vietnam War when Aussie troops were fighting and dying alongside Yanks. Now we are doing the same again in the endless War on Terror started by that giant brain-box George W Bush.
So to my ears “you can do anything” sounded as if Ms Gillard was telling the US “do what you like”. Not the best concept to be promoting, even accidentally, in a world where many nations question the might of the US and how it is used.
Certainly the line is ripe for misrepresentation when translated into the language of some of America’s foes. And that means they are our foes too.