A couple of years ago I was noting with astonishment on this page that 28% of American Republicans believed Barack Obama had not been born in the United States and was therefore ineligible to be president. A further 30% of Republicans were "not sure", despite the fact that Obama's birth in Honolulu on 4 August 1961 had been officially registered with the authorities at the time and his birth certificate published in two Hawaiian newspapers. What, I wondered, could persuade these millions of Americans to accept a fact that had been repeatedly investigated and verified? The answer seems to be nothing.
No opinion poll has been published on the question since Obama produced his birth certificate for inspection this week; but a poll carried out by CBS News and the New York Times only a week ago showed that the percentage of Republicans believing that he was born in another country had risen to a staggering 45% (and that a quarter of all Americans, including Democrats, were of the same view).
This willful denial of a seemingly incontrovertible truth is bewildering. But the myth of the president as a sinister alien and secret subversive has gathered new strength since its adoption by Donald Trump, the real-estate tycoon who is wondering whether to seek the Republican presidential nomination. Obama may have hoped that Trump would be chastened by the sight of his birth certificate, but, if so, he was to be disappointed.
"Today, I'm very proud of myself because I accomplished something that nobody else has been able to accomplish," Trump said, claiming responsibility for its publication. And he promised he would still go on digging into the president's past, despite the media's efforts to "protect" him. His next target would be Obama's college records. Obama had reputedly been "a terrible student" at Occidental College in Los Angeles, said Trump, but he had nevertheless gone on to both Columbia and Harvard universities. "How do you get into Harvard if you're not a good student?" he asked.
Like other leading "birthers", as those questioning Obama's origins are called, Trump also refused to accept the birth certificate at face value. He would examine it for authenticity, he said; as did Joseph Farah, the editor of an Obama-obsessed website, who declared that "it raises far more questions than it answers". Another prominent Obama critic, Orly Taitz, questioned the certificate's authenticity because it gave Obama's father's race as "African". "It sounds like it would be written today, in the age of political correctness, and not in 1961, when they wrote white or Asian or 'Negro'," Taitz said.
Be that as it may, the controversy seems doomed to continue. As the Washington Post put it yesterday: "Conspiracy theories have the self-sustaining gift of ramification: they sprout new tendrils, like a mad vine that has invaded from another continent. For the committed conspiracy theorist, there is always another angle to explore, another anomaly to scrutinize." But in America, unfortunately, the conspiracy theorists are not just a few crazy people but millions of supposedly normal ones. The level of political debate in Britain is often dismal, as when an historic reform of the voting system is discussed mainly in terms of what it would cost and which political party it would hurt the most. But the world's greatest democracy seems to take the cake.
Tyrannical instincts
Pride in our western civilisation, with its democratic and liberal values, is to be encouraged, but we shouldn't overestimate its appeal to others. I remember in the late 1970s sitting with the then prime minister, Indira Gandhi, in her garden in Delhi as she talked nostalgically about her old friends in the British Labour party and the bookshops on Charing Cross Road and thinking how odd it was that this same woman had imposed a state of emergency on her country and was ruling it by decree. Then there is Saif Gaddafi, described recently by his professor at the London School of Economics as "someone who looks to democracy, civil society and deep liberal values for the core of his inspiration", now helping his father in the bloody repression of his people so as to preserve the family dictatorship. Then there is Bashar al-Assad, the president of Syria. He is an ophthalmologist, looks like an ophthalmologist, and trained at the Western Eye Hospital in London. But his gentle appearance and his experience of the British way of life haven't stopped him becoming a tyrannical monster.
It's only the royal protocol we need to change
The Syrian ambassador to London, Sami Khiyami, speaks very soothingly on television, knows to call Jeremy Paxman "Jeremy" at every opportunity, and comes across as a man of wisdom and moderation. But he is an apologist for the vicious crackdown in Syria, and I am very glad that he won't, after all, be allowed to attend today's royal wedding. The invitation extended to him, but bizarrely denied to two former Labour prime ministers, has been explained by reference to rules of protocol that now clearly need to be changed. What sense does it make that only ex-prime ministers who are Knights of the Garter should be asked? But the wedding should not be criticised, as it has been by some, for presenting the world with an old-fashioned image of Britain. A country that rejects its history in order to appear cool and modern simply looks pathetic. Consider the reverence the Americans have for theirs?