Holidays in Hell

by P. J. O'Rourke

  After I was kicked off the plane to Libya, I went to visit my friend in Brugge, the one who was under instructions from the police to be ashamed. We spent the weekend looking for fun in Belgium, which is an isometric exercise. That is, it's a strain and you get nowhere.

  A hotel desk clerk gave us the name of the one local hot spot. It was called "The Korral" or "Sixes Gun" or some such bogus American moniker like they put on everything over here when they want you to think you're going to get something un-European, like a good time. It was a crowded place where they played French rock and roll (which sounds like somebody's chasing Edith Piaf around the old Peppermint Lounge with an electric hedge trimmer).

  My friend was trying to explain that you don't put sweet vermouth in a martini when a little scene caught my eye. Standing by the door was a Belgian greaser, a young hard guy with a modified skinhead haircut, dressed all in black and carrying a motorcycle helmet. He was running through all the usual teenage tough-kid postures and checking out the room to make sure all the other kids understood how unconcerned he was with their opinion. Perched on a railing in front of him, with her legs wrapped around his butt, was an adorable blonde girl about sixteen years old. She was kissing and nuzzling her cool beau, who would peck her briefly then swig his beer and check the room again.

  In the breast pocket of her blouse the girl had a little toy stuffed rabbit. After another offhand kiss from her boyfriend, she took the rabbit out, held it in her hand and whispered in the boy's ear. I couldn't hear what she said and they were speaking Flemish anyway, but I could tell what was going on:

  "I want a real kiss."

  "Yeah, okay."

  "Now the bunny wants a kiss."

  "Knock it off."

  "The bunny wants a kiss soooooooo bad."

  "Come on, knock it off."

  "If the bunny doesn't get a kiss, somebody's going to be very cross."

  The greaser kid scoped the room with mean but panicked eyes. Then he kissed the bunny.

  On Monday I went to the U. K. to make one more attempt to get to Libya before I started kissing toy bunnies myself. I got a reservation on Lufthansa again. I figured I'd just lie, show them my old Lebanese visa with a lot of Arabic squiggles on it. Germans respond well to lies. At least, they always have historically.

  Then I went to the ABC News bureau in London where they had a phone line open to the Grand Hotel in Tripoli. I talked to my old Lebanon buddy, ABC video editor George Moll.

  "Get your ass down here!" said George. "This is great! And bring some salami, okay? And cheese. And potato chips and pretzels."

  "And cigarettes!" said a voice in the background. "A carton of Marlboros."

  "Two cartons!" said another voice. "And a carton of Salems and chocolate bars and Cokes!"

  "And bring pita bread!" said George.

  "Pita bread? What the hell do you want with pita bread? You're surrounded by Arabs," I said. "You can't get pita bread?"

  "You can't get anything," said George. "And for chrissake bring booze!"

  "How can I do that? They'll kill me."

  "Naw," said George, "they'll just rough you up. Anyway, they won't catch you. It's easy. Just get a six-pack of soda water, the little bottles, the kind with the screw tops. And fill them up with vodka and screw the tops back on and put them back in that plastic collar thing."

  Are you sure you should be telling me this over the phone?"

  "If they can't make pita bread, what the fuck do you think their phone taps are like?" said George. "So, anyway, what's happening?"

  "Nothing much," I said. "It's raining. And everybody's yelling at Margaret Thatcher about the F -Ills and...."

  "Not up there," said George. "I mean, what's happening down here? They won't let us out of the hotel."

  Loaded with three times the European Economic Community's import limit on tobacco and foodstuffs and stinking like a delicatessen, I got as far as Frankfurt. Then a telex came through from Libya that all foreign journalists who could count higher than ten were expelled.

  Back in London-tired, discouraged and a little drunk-I called an old girlfriend from college. She and I had been through a lot together back when the U. S. was taking a punch at the Vietnamese and I was the one blocking the streets and screaming about American imperialism. (Morality was so much simpler when I thought the government was trying to kill me.) This girl is married now, with a family. So it wasn't anything, you know. . . . I mean we'd hardly seen each other since she moved to England fifteen years ago. I just longed for a friendly face. (Where do they keep the motels in Europe, anyway?)

  "You're bloody mad!" she shouted. "All you Americans are mad! All you want to do is put McDonald's all over the earth and start World War III!"

  And this from someone who was born and raised in Great Neck, Long Island. Well, if I was going to get barked at, it might as well be by a person who does it for a living. I went to see Meg Beresford, general secretary of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.

  In England, even the peace movement has a bureaucracy, and the CND is the central organizing body for all those demonstrations the Brits are always having against cruise missiles, Polaris submarines, atomic power plants and other things that can or do blow up. In England, everything has a musty old tradition too. It was the CND who, nearly thirty years ago, devised that semaphore of Nuclear Disarmament initials, the ® . Thus, the "footprint of the American chicken" is really a European invention.

  Meg told me that the phones at CND had been ringing off the hook on the day of the air strike and that the demonstrations against the raid had been highly spontaneous. She said the air strike was "a foolish way to try to deal with terrorism" and that people in England had "a feeling that Libya is rather a small actor" in the terror pageant and that the effect of the raid "will be to bring terror to our streets."

  What I didn't understand, I said, was the emotional intensity of the demonstrations. Big civilized countries had been launching punative raids on misbehaving weedy little native powers since . . . . Well, at least since the Redcoats shot up Lexington and Concord.

  Meg said that when the Fills were launched from English soil, the British realized for the first time "what those bases were for."

  This made the British sound a little thick.

  Meg claimed the apparent attempt to kill Qaddafi himself had upset people, "like watching one of those John Wayne movies."

  When a European mentions John Wayne, you know you're going to get an earful.

  Meg admitted there was "resentment at American culture." She said, "Western democracies feel there is nothing immoral about spreading that kind of system, spreading Western-style democracy." She paused. "McDonald's everywhere."

  Will somebody please tell me what's the matter with McDonald's? It's not like the Europeans don't line up by the millions to eat there. Maybe McDonald's food isn't the best thing for you, but roasted goose liver smooshed up with truffles isn't either. And has anyone ever smoked a joint and had a "p&te de foie gran attack"?

  "There is," said Meg, "at the back of the American psyche the feeling that the American way is the best."

  As opposed to what? As opposed to living in seedy, old, downat-the-heels England with an eighteenth-century class system and seventeenth-century plumbing? Or as opposed to lining up for pita bread ration cards in a half-assed African sandlot run by a fanatical big mouth with a dish towel on his head?

  "What do you think we should be doing?" I asked Meg.

  "Sitting down in a really serious way to solve the Middle East problem is what Reagan should be doing."

  "What if it won't solve?" I said. "I know the source of this terrorism is the Israeli-Palestinian problem. And that's a place where two wrongs don't make a right. But it's also a place where two rights don't make a right."

  "The Palestinian problem has to be treated in a much more serious way," said Meg.

  The Europeans are great ones for solving problems by taking them more seriously.

  She said there
was a need for a "definite Middle East policy that's not involved with violence." (Which would be a first in three or four thousand years.) "Something," said Meg, "that other European countries with more experience and understanding could get involved with. . . . The U. N. has to be the place where these things ultimately get solved."

  I mean, the U. N. has done such a bang-up job on the IraqIran war, for instance, and the Pol Pot holocaust. They've really got things straightened out in Namibia and Afghanistan too-with the help, of course, of those European countries with more experience and understanding.

  I don't mean to pick on Meg Beresford, really. She is obviously a decent person and committed as all get-out to international niceness. But she herself said, musing on the booze-addled States-side Micks who give the IRA guns and money, "If the U.S. feels morally justified in bombing Libya, Britain should feel justified in bombing the U. S."

  "Damn right," I said. "Any dumb potato-head who's dragged those rotten ancestral quarrels to his new home in America deserves no better than to get a British laser bomb targeted on his south Boston bar." (That is, assuming the British have laser bombs, and assuming the British have the capability to launch a transAtlantic air strike without U.S. aid. Which they don't.)

  I left CND even more depressed than when I'd arrived. Not over anything Meg said, it's just that why are all high-minded causes so dowdy? The CND offices were an earnest muddle of desks and cubicles and unpainted bookshelves with piles and stacks and quires and reams of those mimeographed handouts that swarm around all do-good organizations like flies on cattle. The better the cause, the worse the atmosphere. And what cause could be better than saving the whole of mankind from nuke vaporizing? You could bottle the dumpy glumness at CND and sell it to .. . well, to the English. London is a quaint and beautiful city-if you stick to the double-decker tourist buses. But the CND offices were out in the East End, in the aptly named district of Shoreditch. Dr. Johnson said, "When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life." But these days he might just be tired of shabby, sad crowds, lowincome housing that looks worse than the weather and tattoo-faced, spike-haired pin brains on the dole.

  Meanwhile, the Soviet Union was trying to poison half the world with its Chernobyl atomic power plant. But was anybody blocking Oxford Street or calling Gorbachev's energy policy "a game of cossacks and rabbis'? It just didn't seem fair.

  I decided to go to West Berlin. Berlin was close to the scum cloud of cesium, iodine and other isotopes that will light up your thyroid and give your kids three heads. Maybe I could make some sense of the Europeans in this isolated, beleagured and slightly radioactive outpost of freedom. And maybe I could peek over the Iron Curtain and get a look at what we've been protecting these Euro-weenies from since 1945.

  That wasn't hard. The boundary between East and West is shockingly apparent from the air. The plane descended to 9,500 feet, the permitted altitude through the air corridor to Berlin, and there it was-a thick streak of raked-dirt minefield following, with painful accuracy, the medieval zig-zag border between the kingdoms of Hanover and Prussia.

  There was a slide-show change in the landscape. Crisp paved highways turned to muzzy gravel roads. The little towns were suddenly littler. Surburban sprawl evaporated. The distinctive fishbone patterns of parking lots disappeared. The lush, ditzy quiltwork of private farmland gave way to big, rational, geometric collective fields, where the crops looked thin and the furrows were harrowed T-square straight with no concession to contour plowing. The constraints, the loss of liberties were visible from nearly two miles up.

  Upon landing the scenery changed back. Suddenly you were in the world again, at least the slightly fussy, slightly tiresome European version of it.

  It was May Day, and when I checked into my hotel, I asked the desk clerk if there were any big Red doings scheduled.

  "Yes," she said, "in the Platz der Republik there is always a large program."

  "Where's that?" I asked.

  "Oh, just down the street."

  "In West Berlin?"

  "Oh, yes."

  "Don't they have a big May day thing in East Berlin? I mean, this is the main communist holiday."

  "No, I don't think so," said the desk clerk, "not so much over there. The demonstrations are usually on this side."

  The Platz der Republik is a wide, grassy square near the Brandenburg Gate. The "large program" was a sort of political fair put on by one of West Berlin's left-wing trade-union organizations. There were no pony rides or ferris wheels, but there was food, beer, a bad rock band singing memorized American lyrics and a hundred booths and tents filled with haymows of those high-minded mimeographed leaflets. The booths seemed like the world's worst carnival games. "Hurry! Hurry! Hurry! Hit the clown on the nose, and win three hundred pounds of literature denouncing U. S. intervention in Nicaragua and a `Ban NATO' button!"

  It was fascinating to wander among the posters and banners and displays of elaborately captioned photographs and be absolutely ignorant of the language. German, to me, looks like what worms do under rocks. There were lots of photos of dirty and tiredlooking workers, but I couldn't tell if they were exploited victims of capitalist oppression or heroic comrades struggling to build the joyful new world of socialism. The dead babies in blast wreckage were definitely victims of capitalist oppression. They just didn't have a Kievish look about them. In fact, I saw no reference to Chernobyl. It had been almost a week since the accident started, and the plume of loathsomeness sprouting from the Ukrainian steppe had, that very day, reached its greatest extent. But there were plenty of poster-paint cartoons of Uncle Sam with dog fangs. Usually he was gnawing on someone foreign-looking.

  And fifty feet away was the Berlin Wall.

  West Berlin is the city that Iggy Pop once moved to because New York wasn't decadent enough for him. I was expecting at least Cabaret or maybe Gotterdammerung performed by the cast of La Cage Aux Folles. Forget it. We bombed the place flat in WWII, and they rebuilt it as a pretty good imitation of Minneapolis. The downtown hub of West Berlin, the Europa Center, is a perfectly modern business/shopping/entertainment complex. As a result, the hot tip for an evening of merriment is to cruise the mall. Furthermore, they serve you bologna for breakfast.

  On Saturday there was finally a demonstration in West Berlin protesting the Chernobyl mess. Eight or ten thousand people participated, but this was only half the crowd that rallied against the Libya strike. None of the placards or banners even mentioned Russia by name. And the whole thing was a thoroughly spiritless affair.

  Everyone gathered in the Europa Center in front of the Aeroflot airline office. A couple of chants were begun, but nobody took them up. Then the crowd marched. It marched a mile out toward the Technical College, a mile down toward Adenauer Platz and a mile or so back toward downtown, where it petered out in some obligatory speech-making. Apparently this was a standard route. On the way, the crowd passed the American cultural center, which was blocked off by tall wire-mesh barricades and a tripe cordon of riot police. There was nothing in the least anti-American about this demonstration, but the authorities seemed to be worried that the protestors would turn and storm the cultural center from pure force of habit.

  As I slogged along, bored and footsore, I talked to the English-speakers in the bunch. They said it was a shame I'd missed the Libya demo. That one was much more interesting.

  "How come?" I asked.

  They got all excited and told me West Germany was "a colony of the United States." They told me the La Belle discotheque terrorist bomb that killed an American soldier in Berlin was prob ably a set-up. "Perhaps this bombing was necessary to bomb Tripoli." And they told me . . . Shit, they told me all sorts of things. Basically, they told me off.

  I'm sorry. I quit. I just don't have the stomach to go through my sheaves of scribbled notes and piles of garbled tape cassettes again just to shake out three more quotes about what a sack of bastards Americans are.

  The day before I left Berlin, I ran into a dozen young Arab
men on the street. They were trotting along, taking up the whole sidewalk, accosting busty girls and generally making a nuisance of themselves. One was beating on a snareless drum, and the others were letting loose with intermittent snatches of song and aggressive shouts. They descended on me and loudly demanded cigarettes in German.

  "I don't speak German," I said.

  "Are you American?" said one, suddenly polite.

  "Yes."

  "Please, my friend, if you don't mind, do you have a cigarette you could spare?"

  I gave them a pack. "Where are you from?" I asked.

  "West Beirut," said the drum beater.

  "I've been there," I said.

  "It is wonderful, no?"

  Compared to Berlin, it is. "Sure," I said. They began reminiscing volubly. "What are you doing here?" I asked.

  "Our families sent us because of the war. We want to go back to Beirut but we cannot."

  I told them I guessed I couldn't go back either, what with the kidnapping and all. They laughed. One of them stuck out his middle finger and said, "This place sucks."

  "You should go to America," I said.

  "There, is only one bad thing about America," said the drum beater. "They won't let us in."

  Back in London, I was having dinner in the Groucho Clubthis week's in-spot for what's left of Britain's lit glitz and nouveau rock riche-when one more person started in on the Stars and Stripes. Eventually he got, as the Europeans always do, to the part about "Your country's never been invaded." (This fellow had been two during the Blitz, you see.) "You don't know the horror, the suffering. You think war is ..."

  I snapped.

  "A John Wayne movie," I said. "That's what you were going to say, wasn't it? We think war is a John Wayne movie. We think life is a John Wayne movie-with good guys and bad guys, as simple as that. Well, you know something, Mister Limey Poofter? You're right. And let me tell you who those bad guys are. They're us. WE BE BAD.

  "We're the baddest-assed sons of bitches that ever jogged in Reeboks. We're three-quaters grizzly bear and two-thirds car wreck and descended from a stock market crash on our mother's side. You take your Germany, France and Spain, roll them all together and it wouldn't give us room to park our cars. We're the big boys, Jack, the original, giant, economy-sized, new and improved butt kickers of all time. When we snort coke in Houston, people lose their hats in Cap d'Antibes. And we've got an American Express card credit limit higher than your piss-ant metric numbers go.