Anyone for Dominoes?

Other countries’ politics are always a mystery. Of course, it helps to know some history. Then you can at least ask how they got here from there, rather than merely measure how different they are from us, how they fail to meet our highest standards of democracy, feminism, etc.

But even disinterested interest is sometimes thrown for a loop. Take the recent debate in the Turkish Parliament about making adultery a criminal offense. Most English-language coverage of this unlikely proposal considered its impact on Turkey’s application to join the European Union. A rationale was suggested by a brisk reflection on honor in the villages as described in the novels of Yashar Kemal–and yet there was clearly still more to the politics of this proposal.

American politics can be just as mystifying for foreigners–even for helots who have lived here for decades. Some years ago the London Times published a piece explaining President Carter’s reasons for not attending the funeral of President Tito of Yugoslavia: “Mr. Carter believes in the sanctity of motherhood and therefore sent his mother to the funeral. The affection he feels for her is not universally shared in the United States and is not widely understood abroad.” Quite so.

Maybe it is incomprehension on this level that is behind poll results recently released by the BBC World Service. The BBC reasoned that the Rest of the World were the consumers of American foreign policy and so asked its listeners whom they would vote for as president of the U.S. If the Rest of the World had votes, the result would not be encouraging for Current Resident at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. N.W.

My guess is that the Rest of the World simply does not see the point of recent U.S. foreign policy. It’s decisive, of course; in Iraq it has decided the fates of between ten thousand and twenty thousand people of several nationalities. But its apologists explain it in circular terms, with a persistent resistance to facts that might only serve to “confuse” the issue. It’s as if history was, or ought to be, a series of self-fulfilling prophecies.

Some of us in the Rest of the World actually feel as if we have been here before. There was just this sort of circularity about the Domino Theory. You remember–nothing to do with pizza, but the Cold War notion that the Reds would pick off adjacent countries one by one and that the West was fated to try to stop them. The trouble is, Russians play chess, not dominoes.

Wine talk, too, can often seem circular when it gets separated from confusing facts like what the liquid in your glass actually tastes and smells of. It is easy for those not paying attention to what they are drinking to think that they are tasting what they have been told they ought to be tasting. Which is why I mention a pleasant surprise I had the other night: a single-variety cabernet sauvignon I really liked. Often, the pure cabernets of California seem overpowering, like a new friend from the West Coast who is trying to tell you too much all at once. The great winemakers of Bordeaux don’t use pure cabernet; they blend it with the blander merlot, so tempering the angular character of the cabernet.

What I was expecting, then, after reading the label, was something with an edge. Instead, I encountered Taft Street Cabernet Sauvignon, a rich, round red (well, almost purple, actually) from the Russian River Valley–the limit of Russian expansion down the California coast from Alaska in the nineteenth century. The soft edges of the taste have a charm that does not weaken the central strength of flavor characteristic of cabernet. If one were not operating a motor vehicle (or a foreign policy), one could drink quite a lot of this, with pork or beef or cheese, even with turkey (no, Jessica, the Rest of the World does not have Thanksgiving). And it’s priced so that many can afford to do so.

The name Taft Street comes from the road in Oakland where the company was founded. President Taft was a Republican; he was also the incumbent president who received the fewest electoral college votes when he stood for reelection (eight to be precise–Utah and Vermont). What the Rest of the World does not understand about the electoral college could be measured by the imperial gallon. One might be happier not thinking too hard about it, but rather getting into bed gratefully with a bottle of this pleasant red. Oblomov rules, OK?