Leaving St. Andrews

My stay in this beautiful and historic city by the bay is nearly over. This final posting looks back on the many experiences enjoyed and memories formed in my two months here. As I get ready to depart, it has become noticeably warmer – the first week here I was jogging in a snow storm! Now, although it continues to be breezy, the locals are out in shirtsleeves and shorts. And, of course, there’s the phenomenon in the far north in late spring and summer, of daylight past 10 p.m.

I owe much to both WRA for allowing me this sabbatical and the University of St Andrews for selecting me for one of their Schoolteacher Fellowships. My contact points with the University – the Admissions people – have been just great. I have assured them that, upon my return to Reserve, I will be an enthusiastic St. Andrews advocate for any and all who might listen. While here, I attended classes on American Foreign Policy and Constitutionalism in International Politics, as well as doing some important (and much needed) work on my golf game. On a separate note, thanks to introductions provided by my colleagues at Caterham School, I was able to contact Dr. Anthony Bennett, the author of the US Politics textbook used in the classes I taught this past fall. We engaged in a nice e-mail exchange and, as well, I wrote up some suggested additions for possible inclusion in the next revision of his widely-used text.

Travel adventures (some of which were mentioned in previous blogs), provided another great sabbatical benefit. Northern Ireland, Amsterdam, and any number of places in Scotland – Edinburgh, Glasgow, Glencoe, Loch Ness, Pennan – to name just a few, have found a permanent place in my memory bank. The people encountered during these travels were nearly always helpful and interesting, including, for example, the waitress in Portballintrae Northern Ireland. She was from the Philippines and listened politely to my recollections of two years spent there at the American naval base at Subic Bay. We even engaged in a brief (very brief on my part) conversation in Tagalog.

Other friendly folks included the hotel manager in Amsterdam who had spent many years in New York City and couldn’t wait to go back and Julie, a young woman who runs a small juice and coffee shop here in town. She’ll be starting her career as a primary school teacher in St. Andrews in the fall, a long way from where she grew up in Whitehorse, Yukon Territory. She chuckled at my telling her of driving through Whitehorse on the Alaska Highway with my daughter Rebecca some two decades ago. Rebecca and I saw the classic Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, in the Whitehorse theatre which, I suspect, is the only one to be found for more than three hundred miles in either direction.

While sad to leave this special place, I’m at the same time anxious to get back to the States. And speaking of “special,” that certainly applies to the upcoming WRA graduation ceremonies. I’m excited to be presenting the first University of St Andrews Book Award to a deserving senior at Prize Day. But, even more significantly, I’ll be in town to say good-bye (in an official context) to my good friend Skip Flanagan, Reserve’s Headmaster for well over two decades. It should be quite an occasion.

Finally, looking very briefly at the Democratic nominating marathon, the results of Tuesday’s Kentucky and Oregon primaries were sufficiently predictable that the dynamics of the race were barely affected. Barring any dramatic, unexpected development, Barack Obama’s got the nomination despite much hand-wringing coming up in the next week or two over what to do about Michigan and Florida.

We’ll let that flavorful stew simmer a little while and pick back up with one or two more blogs from the States before signing off for the summer.

In the meantime, I’m off to say good-bye to the Old Course (getting ready for the Curtis Cup between outstanding women golfers from America, Ireland and Britain), the West Sands beach (where the introduction to Chariots of Fire was filmed), and the oldest University in Scotland and the town whose name it bears.

Northern Ireland

Over a decade ago, my wife and daughter and I got to spend about a week in the republic of Ireland. Arriving in Dublin, we rented a car and drove through the gorgeous green countryside. Our tour took us to the Dingle peninsula in the south-western part of the country, the Cliffs of Moher, Tralee, Galway, other towns and cities, and then back to Dublin, spending our last night there in a dorm room at the city’s venerable Trinity College.

The people we met throughout our journey were invariably friendly, animated conversationalists, humorous and helpful. Many, in response to our inquiries, suggested we absolutely had to go to Northern Ireland – to Ulster. A lack of time and some apprehension on our part prevented that from happening. “The Troubles” – the ongoing violence involving the Catholic Irish Republican Army, Protestant militia groups, and the British military, continued to dominate our outsider’s view of the North. (As an aside, don’t you just love the use to which we can put euphemisms? The phrase “The Troubles” reminds me, indirectly, of an acutely painful medical situation I encountered a few years ago. In checking with my doctor to find out what was going on, he responded, somewhat less than helpfully, that I had “irritable symptoms.” Wow! Thanks a lot for that medical insight!)

But, back to Northern Ireland. With a power-sharing arrangement now in place brokered by, among others, former Senator George Mitchell, the Irish Republic’s leader Bertie Ahern, and former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, the region is a much different place than it was in the past. And this time, thanks to Ryan Airlines, I wasn’t going to be denied. Ryan Air, as you may know, is an Irish-based discount carrier that flies throughout Europe, sometimes at ridiculously low fares. I was able to fly from Glasgow to Belfast and back for the grand total of 10£ -- about 20 dollars! How they can make money with those rates is beyond my comprehension. Driving a rented car from Belfast, I headed northwest along the Causeway Coastal route to my destination, a little town called Portballintrae. The 60-mile drive twisted and turned along the coast – a truly spectacular setting. The road wound around bright-green cliffs that hung precariously over the crashing Atlantic. The only nervousness I felt occurred when trucks and buses, large, unconcerned, and speeding, came barrelling by me as I squeezed my tiny car against the rock wall bordering the road.

The day after getting to Portballintrae, I drove to the Ulster American Folk Park in Omagh. For a history buff, the park was just great fun. I spent about four hours there, in both the museum and outside exhibits. The Park was really interesting, with exhibits tracing the emigrant experience from Ulster to the New World. It reminded me of a miniature Williamsburg. My visit reinforced the importance of the role played by the Scotch-Irish in American history. For example, the parents of Andrew Jackson and John C. Calhoun, two of the dominant figures of early 19th century America, were from Ulster. In fact, Jackson’s parents lived in a cottage near Carrickfergus (a few miles from Belfast), before moving in 1765 to the South Carolina up-country where the future seventh president was born two years later.

The boyhood home of John Joseph Hughes, the first Roman Catholic Archbishop of New York, is located in the Folk Park, as is the birthplace of Thomas Mellon, who at the age of five, emigrated with his parents to western Pennsylvania. Mellon went on to found what is now one of the largest banks in the United States; his children and grandchildren became Cabinet secretaries, Ambassadors, corporate executives and philanthropists (as in Carnegie-Mellon University).

My Northern Ireland adventure left me excited -- no troubles and no irritable symptoms. I was extremely pleased to have made it there, and I was pleased as well that its warm, delightful people are finally at peace. After devastation and famine in the 19th century, followed by violence and bloodshed in the 20th, they deserve it.

It's Over -- Almost

Last Tuesday, your faithful blog poster headed off from St. Andrews to Northern Ireland. I spent a couple of days there and was struck by the natural beauty of the countryside; more details on Northern Ireland in a subsequent blog.

But, while there, the seemingly endless Democratic party presidential nominating process effectively came to an end. Barack Obama’s bigger than expected victory margin in North Carolina (57-43%), coupled with Hillary Clinton’s narrow (51-49%) win in Indiana effectively wrapped up the nomination for Obama. Let’s put this in sports terms that students on both sides of the Atlantic can understand. So, we will avoid, for now, baseball, cricket, or rugby – instead, let’s take basketball. Before the two primaries last Tuesday, Clinton was down ten points with two minutes to go – daunting but not insurmountable. Now, she’s down 15 with 60 seconds left on the clock.

So, while the remaining six primaries will play themselves out over the next three weeks, the Democrats have a nominee – almost. Although Clinton is likely to win overwhelmingly in West Virginia tomorrow and Kentucky next week, she’s too far behind Obama to catch him in the pledged delegate race. Meanwhile, according to the highly reliable www.realclearpolitics.com website, Obama has now edged ahead of her in the superdelegate count. Clinton’s last remaining hope rests on two slender possibilities. One, a catastrophe of major proportions hits the Obama campaign (greater, say, than the Reverend Jeremiah Wright issue of a while back). Second, her campaign will try, probably without success but you never know, to raise the nettlesome, as yet uncounted, Michigan and Florida results. Switching briefly back to sports, this time to American football, Senator Clinton needs a Hail Mary touchdown, followed by a successfully recovered on-side kick, followed by another Hail Mary score. Those are very long odds.

Meanwhile, to wrap up the blog’s pledged delegate contest associated with Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and Indiana. Remember, Obama led Clinton by 166 pledged delegates before Pennsylvania. She picked up twelve there, to cut his lead to 154 and gained an additional four from her win in Indiana. But, his landslide success in North Carolina netted him fifteen so, headed into tomorrow, his pre-Pennsylvania lead has been reduced by a grand total of one, to 165. His likely pledged delegate lead when all is said and done is likely to be in the vicinity of 135 to 140. By the way, the winner of the blog contest was Rebecca B., who came very close, predicting things would remain unchanged at 166. More soon on Northern Ireland.

The Perils of Incumbency

Bear with me here – I’m skating on thin ice as far as my knowledge base goes. But, nonetheless, let me offer a few words on the British election results from this past Thursday.

Fundamentally, they amounted to a major disaster for Gordon Brown and his ruling Labor Party. (By the way, the spellchecker insists on “Labour” but I’m holding onto my Americanism, even in Scotland.) The elections were local, for community council seats; for reasons I don’t fully understand, they occurred only in England and Wales, not in Scotland or Northern Ireland.

But, in any event, Labor went down like the proverbial free drink. The Conservatives, led by David Cameron, garnered 44% of the votes cast. Remarkably, the somewhat marginalized third party, the Liberal Democrats, came in ahead – 25% to 24% -- of the Labor Party. To cap off an all-round miserable performance, in by far the most important local election the two-term incumbent mayor of London, Labor’s Ken Livingstone, lost to the Conservative media celebrity and political maverick Boris Johnson. Exit interviews and political experts attributed Labor’s wipe out to economic concerns: the credit crunch, falling home prices, rising gasoline prices. Sound familiar? And, speaking of high gas prices, those of you who read the last blog, on my journey to Pennan, consider this. The price for regular unleaded is, right now, about 1.10£ per litre. That amounts, if I’m doing the multiple math conversions correctly, to about $8.30 per gallon in U.S. dollars! Maybe we Americans should quit whining.

OK, back to American politics for a couple of brief points. Those of you (I’m sure you are legion), interested in the Democratic presidential caucus in Guam, here’s an early Sunday morning headline: Barack Obama beat Hillary Clinton by a grand total of 7 (!) votes – 2264 to 2257. I doubt that either side, no matter how hard they try, will be able to discern any notable trends from those results.

And, reaching back into American history, I have had a wonderful time here at St. Andrews reading through the latest installment in the Oxford University History of the United States series. The book, written by Daniel Walker Howe, is entitled What Hath God Wrought:the Transformation of America, 1815-1848. At one point Howe discusses the hotly contested election of 1828 between Andrew Jackson and the incumbent, John Quincy Adams. The Jackson campaign made much of the president’s putting a billiard table in the White House; in addition, many of Old Hickory’s supporters attacked Adams’s Unitarian religious beliefs as "heresy.” In sum, Howe writes, “the accusations against Adams were designed to show him as aristocratic, intellectual, and un-American.” Does this have a familiar ring? Like not wearing an American flag pin in one’s lapel, having a fairly unhinged pastor for a number of years, or asserting that, in tough economic times, less-well-off Americans “cling” to guns and religion? The names have changed but, nearly 200 years later, some political constants remain: tagging your opponent as elitist and potentially unpatriotic may top the list as the best possible sure-fire vote-getter.