Holidays in Heck

by P. J. O'Rourke

  A missing persons program, In Search of a Loved One, tries to reunite families separated by decades of chaos. A medical program is hosted by doctors with eminent specialists, often from overseas, as guests. Azadi and Listeners is devoted to getting individuals individual responses from government ministries.

  The call-in shows are popular. On a day when I was in the studio Afghanistan’s minister of communications and minister of the interior were taking random phoners, trying to clear up confusion about a confusing-sounding system of national ID cards. I don’t think it’s likely that the head of the FCC and a member of President Obama’s cabinet would spend two hours in a spartan, airless broadcast booth helping people who are unable to read through a form-filling process and suggesting work-arounds when local government corruption is encountered.

  The quiet mullah told me that the day before an elderly religious scholar had asked for help buying a radio so that Azadi could be listened to in his mosque.

  The Pashtun tribal leader said, “Azadi is doing very well because they are telling the facts.” He griped that other media were insensitive to religion and culture.

  The civil society activist thought that wisdom and social relationships were best established in person, but second best was radio. “Radio can pass wisdom,” he said.

  The woman member of parliament told me about how, after the fall of the Taliban, Radio Azadi had conducted four hours a week of open political debate. “The Afghans got it,” she said. She praised Azadi’s “diversity of opinion” and the fact that it sometimes has “the government getting upset.”

  “Even the U.S. ambassador is afraid of our show,” an Azadi journalist told me with a big smile.

  “Any feeling of censorship from the U.S.?” I asked Amin.

  “We haven’t felt any,” he said.

  “A good channel,” the minister of education called it. “An important institution. I’ve never had the feeling it was unnecessarily taking sides in the Afghan conflict. It maintains its impartiality.”

  “I wasn’t sure what you’d hear from the minister,” a journalist with Radio Azadi told me later. “We’ve been critical of him.”

  The member of parliament to whom I’d talked about clashing civilizations and deteriorating neighborhoods was a bit surprised at America sponsoring Azadi, the more so, I think, because he’s an American. That is, he lived for a long time in America, where he spent ten years as a commercial airline pilot.

  “America,” he said, not without pride, “is spending money for you to express your opinions—not to twist your opinions but to express your opinions.”

  Ramazan Bashardost’s only complaint about Radio Azadi was that he wasn’t on it often enough. He was reminded that, only recently, he had been named by Radio Azadi as “Person of the Year.”

  “Yes,” he said, and apologized for bringing too much documentation to radio interviews. “One positive point in Afghanistan is media,” he said. “And the only positive point in Afghanistan is media.”

  Even the Taliban call in to Radio Azadi—to argue with the hosts and guests.

  “We know you are funded by the U.S. Congress,” a Taliban spokesman told Amin. “But we judge you by your deeds.”

  “The Taliban call to argue—this is good,” said the woman member of parliament.

  “The Taliban fights the U.S. militarily,” said the former airline pilot, “but uses the U.S. media to express themselves.” He chuckled. “I say to them, ‘If this system is bad, you are using it! When you had your radio, would you let us call in?’” He saw the Taliban as caught in a trap by the logic of freedom. “This is a format that must be expanded.”

  The governor thought the Taliban itself might accidentally expand it. He recalled the days before Radio Azadi, during Taliban rule, when the only outside media was the BBC Afghan service. “The Taliban told people that they would go to hell if they listened to the BBC. Then everyone listened.”

  There was one other point that people in Kabul agreed on. Whatever it is that America does in Afghanistan, America should proceed with wisdom. The governor told a story about wisdom.

  There was a student who had been studying for many years at a madrassa. He had memorized the Qu’ran and learned all the lessons his teacher taught. One day he went to his teacher and said, “I am ready to leave and go be a mullah.”

  His teacher said, “I think you should stay here for a few more years.”

  “Why?” asked the student. “Is there some additional degree or higher certificate that I will get?”

  “No,” said the teacher, “all you will get is wisdom.”

  “But I’m ready to be a mullah now,” said the student. And he left the madrassa and wandered from village to village looking for a mosque where he could be the prayer leader.

  Finally the student came to a village where a corrupt old mullah was using the mosque as a stall for his cow. The student was outraged. He gathered the villagers together and told them, “I have studied at a madrassa. I have memorized the Qu’ran. It is a great sacrilege for your mullah to use the mosque as a stall for his cow.” The villagers beat him up.

  The student limped back to the madrassa and told his teacher what had happened. The teacher said, “Follow me.” They went back to the village where the mullah was using the mosque as a stall.

  The teacher gathered the villagers together and told them, “I see you have a beautiful cow being kept in your mosque. It must be a very blessed animal. And I hear the cow belongs to your mullah. He must be a very holy man. In fact, I think that this cow is so blessed and your mullah is so holy that if you were to take one hair from the cow’s hide and one hair from the mullah’s beard and rub them together, you would be assured of paradise.”

  The villagers ran into the mosque and began plucking hairs from the cow’s hide. The cow started to buck and kick and it bolted from the mosque and disappeared. Then the villagers ran to the corrupt old mullah’s house and began plucking hairs from his beard. And they tugged and they yanked so hard at the mullah’s beard that he had a heart attack and died.

  “You see,” said the teacher to the student. “No cow in the mosque and a need for a new mullah—that is wisdom.”

  18

  CAPITAL GAINS

  Washington, D.C., August 2010

  We take the kids to Washington once or twice a year. In fact, Muffin and Poppet were born there, and until 2005 we split our time between an apartment in Washington and Breakwind Oaks, our house in New Hampshire’s Beige Mountains. Eventually teachers lost their sense of humor about children being pulled out of school when New Hampshire got too cold and icy (October) and reinserted when Washington got too hot and muggy (March). We gave up the apartment and resigned ourselves to being year-round summer people in a state with no summer.

  The kids still have friends in Washington and so do Mrs. O. and I, even if they do look at us funny when we arrive at the Capital Grill in muck boots and six layers of fleece and talk about what the hens, instead of the congressmen, are laying. Yet, although our children had been to Washington, they’d never BEEN TO WASHINGTON. That is, they’d never gone on the formal pilgrimage to our nation’s capital, the expedition through history and civics that is all but mandatory for our country’s young people and which, when not provided by parents, is supplied by the junior high class trip. Our kids hadn’t yet journeyed to Washington for the specific purpose of being awed by America’s saga-filled past, august institutions of democratic government, and many public buildings with lots of columns in the front.

  Mrs. O. and I had each gone with our families, I in the 1950s, she in the 1970s. My memories of the experience remain vivid to this day. We toured the FBI building and got to see a machine gun fired. And we stayed in a hotel. “We stayed in a hotel!” I endlessly told my friends back in Toledo, when I wasn’t endlessly telling them I’d seen a machine gun fired. I confess that many of the rest of my memories are not so vivid. I was impressed by how thick the piece of glass was over the top of the
Declaration of Independence. The Smithsonian had the better part of a railroad train indoors. The lantern that hung from the front porch of the White House was huge. At the hotel you could call on the telephone and a man brought ice cream.

  Mrs. O. did not think so much of the FBI building. Her father was an FBI agent, so they got the special tour that went on forever. To Mrs. O. it was as if Dagwood had taken Cookie to Mr. Dithers’s office. She liked the room in the Smithsonian devoted to the first ladies’ ball gowns. She can still recall a multitude of details about color, fabric, and style, if you let her.

  “Our kids need these vivid memories,” I said to Mrs. O. I decided that this time when we went to Washington we would be real tourists.

  I immediately encountered resistance from the children. When I suggested a sightseeing excursion on one of the fake trolleys that lumber around the Mall, Muffin, age twelve, rolled her eyes so far back in her head that I wanted to ask her what the medulla oblongata looks like. “We used to live here, Dad,” she sighed.

  “What kind of sightseeing is seeing sights you’ve always seen?” asked Poppet, age ten.

  “It’s ninety-two degrees,” said Mrs. O.

  Buster, six, is usually game for anything on wheels, but he eyed the trolley and said, “That’s a dumb bus.”

  We’d been through the White House the previous Christmas to see the holiday decorations, which were, to put it politely, Texan. The kids weren’t impressed. There’s some nut in the nearby town of Quaintford, New Hampshire, who has Mr. and Mrs. Claus and all the little Clauses on his roof along with a real sleigh drawn by the full complement of reindeer, Dancer through Rudolph, plus the Grinch and his sleigh over the garage and twenty giant candy canes made from old phone poles in his yard, all of this covered in blinking red and green lights, giving him an electric bill in an amount that would alarm Ben Bernanke and a long-running fight with the local zoning board. The Christmas White House was drab by comparison.

  Mrs. O. and I remember thinking how big the White House was. Not our children. They’re used to the neighboring summer places in the Beige Mountains, built when that region was a fashionable retreat for the more cracked type of Boston Brahmin. These dwellings cover acres with their cobwebs, dry rot, curling shingles, falling roof slates, and various wings that have been boarded up since the Gilded Age. We emerged from the White House at dusk. “Where are the bats?” said Poppet.

  The kids had had a tour of the Capitol building, too, given by our then-senator John Sununu. He is a vigorous guide who loves the place and knows everything about it, but what the kids liked best was getting their photograph taken with the senator—because he signed his name “Sunununununu.”

  We couldn’t get into the FBI building, no matter the wire-pulling by Mrs. O.’s father. Something about construction activity or the security situation or security activity in the construction situation. I doubt the FBI’s liability lawyers let them fire machine guns anymore anyway.

  The ranks of tour buses idling in a reek of diesel smoke and disgorging cargoes of fat rubbernecks camcording each other in their gigantic sports jerseys, balloon shoes, and fashion mistake shorts spoiled the quiet majesty of the Lincoln Memorial. And the emphasis on Sally Hemings in our children’s history lessons spoiled the quiet majesty of the Jefferson Memorial.

  The Air and Space Museum was great, of course, but we always go there. Buster and I like things that go fast and explode. And Mrs. O. and the girls get a kick out of hearing Daddy make dive-bomber noises.

  In the end, by way of being real tourists, we went to the National Museum of American History. Built in 1964, the museum is ugly in a way that’s best described as built in 1964. The ill-proportioned exterior slab walls are covered in prolix quotations from historical Americans. It takes longer to read the building than it took the architectural firm of McKim, Mead, and White to design it.

  Inside the front doors was an exhibit of random guitars and a folk musician playing folk music. Folk music had an enormous impact on American history, causing the North to win the Civil War documentary by Ken Burns. Also, Woody Guthrie had a guitar with “This Machine Kills Fascists” carved on it, although the guitar probably would have been broken if any fascists actually had been killed. But maybe the guitar did get broken, because it wasn’t in the exhibit. At least I don’t think so. Not that we looked very hard.

  Mrs. O. and the girls headed straight for the first ladies’ ball gowns. An attempt had been made to add relevance to this exhibit. “Includes material related to their social and political activities,” read a placard at the entrance. I dragged Buster to the exit to see if Hillary Clinton’s ball gown was on display. Wasn’t there some kerfuffle about this in 1993? Didn’t Hillary Clinton think the First Lady clothes horse thing was beneath the dignity of the office (not that first ladies technically hold office) or sexist or something? And she wasn’t going for that. But there was Hillary Clinton’s ball gown nonetheless. Trailer park burka.

  Buster and I retreated to a bench outside, where we contemplated Horatio Greenough’s monumental sculpture of George Washington. Washington is depicted in the classical manner, half naked with his toga slipping. I don’t think of George Washington as somebody who went around with his shirt off much. “Did he just get out of the bathtub?” Buster asked.

  Poppet darted out from among the ball gowns looking worried about the prospect of adult womanhood. “What if they want to get on a teeter-totter or go down a slide?”

  Muffin, although she is more fashion-conscious, or because she is more fashion-conscious, escaped soon after. “Stupid,” she said.

  Mrs. O. was in there for an hour. She emerged confirmed in her philosophical conservatism. “There’s no such thing as progress,” she said. “If I were to take a stylish Martian woman through that exhibit backward, starting with Michelle Obama’s off-the-shoulder bedsheet and winding up with Abigail Adams, the Martian woman would be convinced that I was showing her the story of a society’s gradual development of sophistication and good taste.”

  The Hall of Invention conveyed the same reverse message, beginning with marvelous things like mechanical wheat reapers and finishing with “How a Stroller Is Designed.” How strollers are designed so that parents invariably get their fingers pinched when folding the strollers was not explained. Women and minority inventors were emphasized. Another exhibit was “The House.” All it contained was pictures of and objects from what seemed to be the house where I grew up in the 1950s and 1960s. (Although the people depicted as living in my house were improbably racially integrated and dads were doing more housework than ever happened.) What interest could anyone have in looking at my house in the 1950s and 1960s? The less so since everyone visiting the museum had grown up in a house just like it or had parents or grandparents who did. Many of those houses are still around, much the same as they always were. I suppose “The House” had something to do with being interested in ordinary middle-class life or making ordinary middle-class life interesting, this being of interest to extraordinary non-middle-class museum curators. But John Hughes’s movies do a better job.

  “The History of Transportation” was sponsored by General Motors, so it was the history of cars, trucks, buses, and locomotives made by General Motors. Your tax dollars paying to bail out a corporation that’s paying for an exhibit at a museum so that the museum doesn’t have to spend your tax dollars—a nice Third-Way social democracy touch.

  Buster and I were blissfully surrounded by cars. A great thing about being sixty-two years old and having a six-year-old son is that there’s still somebody you can impress. “When I was a kid we owned one of these,” I said. “And one of these and one of these and one of these . . .” (My father was a car dealer.)

  Poppet likes the round-fendered models from just after World War II. “They’re cuddly.”

  Muffin prefers the styling exuberance of the late 1950s. She said, of a 1959 Cadillac Eldorado convertible, “Justin Bieber should drive one.”

  “With the t
op up,” said her little sister, “because of his girlie hair.”

  Mrs. O. travels forty miles a day delivering kids to school and picking them up. She was interested in the old streetcars. “Or anything else that’s on rails, so I could read a book or something.”

  It was a fine exhibit despite the Museum of American History doing what it could to spoil the mood by using every excuse to present text and videos about segregation in public transport. It’s not something the transportation did. Trains, Greyhound buses, farm pickups, and old jalopies got millions of black Americans out of the segregated South.

  We went to see the Star-Spangled Banner. Older readers will remember when this hung on a wall in the Smithsonian. (And that wonderful Charles Addams house/nation’s attic is no more. The original Smithsonian building has been turned into, I quote our guidebook, “an information center with video orientations.”) The Star-Spangled Banner hung on the wall, and if you were nine, as I was when I visited Washington, you stood there agape, saying, “Wow. It’s the Star-Spangled Banner whose broad stripes and bright stars through the perilous fight, o’er the ramparts we watched were so gallantly streaming. And it’s right here hanging on the wall. Wow.”

  Not any more. The Star Spangled Banner has undergone “eventification.” It’s not about what you’re going to see, it’s about the journey. We entered a labyrinth darkened to pre-dawn’s early light degree and cluttered with ancillary displays—“Baltimore in the Balance”—every one of them interactive as all get-out. We were bumping around in there for fifteen minutes, almost forgetting why, when Muffin mumbled, “Oh, there’s the flag.” It reclined on a semi-elevated surface as if on a hospital bed and was illuminated sporadically by only a dim light to prevent UV damage, never mind the rockets’ red glare that our national colors had survived handily. It’s not nearly as big as the AIDS quilt displayed on the Mall a few years back.