US troops in Lebanon

When I was a little boy, a big boy, a schoolmaster of ours decided to give us a treat. He'd come on a news item in an English paper which had picked up the current syllabus of studies at some American college or other. In those days, our knowledge of American college life was restricted to what we learned from the movies of Harold Lloyd – knowledge that was confirmed later by an American musical comedy that arrived in London.

There were apparently no classes, no studies at American colleges. Football was the reason for going there. The head boy, or the big man on campus, as we learned to call him, was not, as you might expect, the captain of the football team, but its weakest member. He didn't see very well. He wore what were than an exclusively American type of spectacles, comical dark circles known as horn-rimmed glasses. This weakling, though he was a joke to his buddies, somehow attracted the prettiest girl on campus. Another outrageous thing about American colleges, we discovered, was that young men and women went to the same college.

While this numbskull dashed around the field mixing up the plays and causing an uproar of ridicule from the crowd on the sidelines, the prettiest girl alternately cheered and wept. Finally, the numbskull broke out of the pack, scored an incredible try or touch down and won both the match and the heart of the prettiest girl.

Well, our genial history master had news for us. There were classes. There were academic studies at American colleges. He read from the syllabus. There was a course in real estate, estate agentry. There was another in something called business management. Most hilarious of all, there was a course in hair cutting. How we laughed! We were left to figure out for ourselves, if we ever came to think about it, how and where the telephone came into being and the electrical light bulb and the oil refinery and the assembly line and brain surgery and why the Americans began to pick up Nobel prizes in medicine and science, not to mention, so help us, in literature.

Well, move on, say, 40 years or so. An English friend is staying with us in New York. One day when he's looking over the New York Times, he laughs out loud, with much the same satisfaction as we had laughed at that old college syllabus. He read that the University of Minnesota was starting a research laboratory in, what? In sleep! A sleep research department. 'Sleep!' My friend said, with, I imagine the same inflection that King Edward VII once used when he enquired about the identity of a guest at the far end of the table and was told that the man was an authority on bacon. 'Bacon!' cried the incredulous monarch.

'Oh dear, oh dear!' sighed my friend, 'What will they think of studying next?' Well, down the intervening years, the University of Minnesota has punctured a lot of myths in the process of discovering how sleep works and how it doesn't, which should not have surprised us if we'd ever taken time out to reflect that practically everything most of us know about sleep comes from the same source that we call on to know about climate and weather, namely old wives' tales and hand-me-down superstitions, like, you need about eight hours sleep to be healthy, that two hours' sleep before midnight is sounder and healthier than the sleep you get later, and so on.

Minnesota discovered that there is no healthy norm, that some people need ten hours and some five, that everybody dreams a lot, as indicated by the frequency of REMs (rapid eye movements), that 24 hours is only an arbitrary division set up by the calendar and that human beings have accommodated themselves to it. When you put them in a darkened room and remove the clocks, radios and television, some people develop a 26-hour cycle, some a 20-hour cycle and so on, which means they lose track of the date. They also discover their own feeding cycles which varies very widely, enough, anyway, to suggest that three meals a day is a convention developed by the civilised routine necessary for working, playing, running an office and so forth and so forth.

A new study has just come from the University of California. I don't know whether it should be called a social or a neurological study. It has measured the effects of various facial expressions on skin temperature and respiration and, what is more fascinating, on the people out front, the people to whom the expressions of smiling, frowning, ridicule, sympathy, are addressed.

The first tentative findings say that while the expression on the face of A may not be instantly reflected by the same expression on the face of B, B begins to feel what A is feeling inside. Somebody dug up a surprising passage in Edgar Allen Poe, in which he says that whenever he wanted to know what emotions were being felt by a person he was describing, he would adopt that person's facial expression and then tap a surprising flow of new feelings. Poe maintained that this was the secret of his ability to get under the skin, so to speak, of criminals.

Is all this going to help much? Well, yes. For the happy news is that genial people tend to generate geniality, that laughing reduces blood pressure, is better for the skin than cosmetics and takes the strain off the nervous system.

The study I'm waiting for is one about the effect of weather on human beings in general and politicians in particular. In this, we are roughly as ignorant as we've been about sleep and yet, nations that lie in the path of a wayward wind – usually a hot, dry wind that comes in from some adjacent desert – have actually written into their criminal codes statutes of forgiveness for crimes committed under the influence.

This indulgence has not yet spread to California where I found myself last week in pursuit of cool weather and sunless skies. After over two months of the most infernal summer in 50 years, I got out of New York and went to London. Hopeless! While London was 15 degrees or so cooler outdoors, it was boiling indoors. So, a quick retreat to Edinburgh. Cooler yet outdoors but every restaurant, theatre, bedroom was an oven.

In desperation, finally, and knowing very well what I was up to, I took off for a week to San Francisco. August into September is a very reliable cool, even cold, time out there. Anybody with any money or spare time or both who lives in San Francisco gets out of town in August because it's the month when the well-known air-conditioning system, provided by the Pacific Ocean, goes to work with a vengeance, pouring in the dense, white fog through the Golden Gate from mid-afternoon, through the night, till mid-morning. This is what I craved, since I decided I never wanted to see the sun again for the rest of my lifetime.

The San Francisco mean temperature varies by no more than seven degrees, winter and summer. Perfect! Relax, do no work, play golf... you know what happened? For the first time on record for so long, the prevailing westerly wind, in from across the cold Pacific, failed to prevail. What happens very rarely happened all through July and August – the wind came in from the east, from across the California desert, the well-known Santa Ana wind.

Result? On three successive days when I'd arranged to follow that damnable little ball over the rolling, lovely fairways of the Coastal Hills, it was 87, then 94. Last Monday, 98 – the second-highest temperature ever recorded in San Francisco – people prostrate on the grass or boiling indoors because San Francisco, like London, boasts that since it has such an equable climate, it has no need of air-conditioning.

Anyway, I'd had it after some days and flew back to New York. And there, at the airport, I came on what I'd been searching for for three months. Brilliant and crisp and 60-something. Bliss!

Whether or not my hunch about the effect of weather on behaviour is correct, it was very noticeable this week that the Senate and the House stopped jumping at each other's throats and began to work in almost sweet reasonableness on a compromise over the knotty question of Lebanon and the status or future of the marines there.

The conflict goes back to 1973 and something Congress passed towards the weary and frustrate end of the Vietnam war. It was called the War Powers Act. It requires the president to report to Congress within 48 hours of committing troops to foreign combat, why he's doing it and how long they'll be there. After 60 days he must stop their combat duty and have another 30 days to bring them home. Congress could either approve his action or defeat it by a resolution to bring the men home, which is not subject to a presidential veto.

There's nothing fundamentally new in this. Simply, ten years ago Congress was fed up with three presidents who, alone, had committed troops to wars abroad, thereby defying what was written into the constitution nearly 200 years ago, namely, that Congress and only Congress can declare war, can raise and support armies for no more than two years, can maintain a navy, can make rules for the government and regulation of the land and naval forces.

After Korea and Vietnam, Congress was simply reasserting its constitutional right to have the main say about American troops abroad. Most of the Senate and the House approve of the marines being in Lebanon, most don't want to see them embroiled there forever. The president has maintained that the marines are, like the other NATO forces, forbidden to launch attacks or retaliate and so cannot be covered by the act defining combat.

At the moment, Congress wants the president to invoke the War Powers Act and then leave it up to both of them to agree at some unstated future time when to say, 'Hold! Enough!'

Beyond this constitutional quibble, the president has to face a popular outcry about the death of several marines. Lebanon would not be helped and the Lebanese Druze militias would rejoice if everybody knew the date when the marines were to be brought home and we all have to face the fact that soldiers, of any branch of the service, are not sent into trouble for show, on the general understanding that, on no account, shall they be killed.

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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