Holidays in Hell: In Which Our Intrepid Reporter Travels to the World's Worst Places and Asks, "What's Funny About This" (2 page)
Authors: P. J. O'Rourke
Jann convinced me to occupy the International Affairs Desk
at Rolling Stone; he never complained (well, hardly ever) about the cost of my travels, and he persisted in publishing my work despite
irate mail (much of it on recycled paper decorated in unicorn
motifs) from his more liberal readers. Thank you, Jann, and the
piece about terrorist activity on South Pacific nude beaches is in
the mail. Really.
I am also greatly beholden to Rolling Stone Senior Editor
Robert Vare, who rendered the confused absurdity in my manuscripts lucidly absurd, and to Rolling Stone Managing Editor Bob
Wallace, whose unerring news sense kept me from making a
number of silly mistakes such as going off to cover the Spanish
Civil War which, as Bob pointed out, is over.
I would also like to thank Joseph Fitchett at the International
Herald Tribune, Wayne Lawson at Vanity Fair, Jack Shafer at the
City Paper, John Rezek at Playboy, David E. Davis and Jean
Lindamood at Automobile and Wladyslaw Pleszczynski and Andrew Ferguson at The American Spectator, all of whom conspired to
improve my prose. I hope they succeeded. And I would like to
thank Morgan Entrekin-publisher, editor and friend-without
whom this book would be a largish stack of yellowing, badly
smudged typing paper.
There is one more group of people I need to thank here: the
print and broadcast reporters, the editors, producers, camera
crews and photographers of the international press corps, especially those who make a career of covering dangerous and
disgusting places. These "shithole specialists were always welcoming when I traipsed through their bailiwicks. They gave me
information, advice, background briefings and an awful lot of free
drinks. They let me tag along on stories and hang out in news
bureaus. And more than once they saved my ass from jail and
worse. I owe most of the facts in this book to them. (The truths are
theirs, the errors, mine.) In fact, I owe them the whole book. What
I tell readers in my stories is nothing but what members of the press
tell each other around the bar at 10:00 P.m. Thank you Chris
Isham, George Moll, Charles Glass, Derwin Johnson, Tony Suau,
Betsey West, Kazim Eddire, Robert Fisk, Chris Harper, Jane
Hartney, Ray Homer, David Jaffee, Steve Cocklin, Anne Cocklin,
Salim Aridi, Andy Cottum, Dorota Kowalska, John Giannini,
Nathan Benn, Robin Moyer, Greg Davis, Steve Gardner, Tom Haley, Jim Nachtwey, Glen Gavin, Darrell Barton, Jerry Gonzalez,
Anna Cerrud, Tom Brown, Mike Drudge, Kristina Luz, Clayton
Jones, Scott Williams, Mark Littke, Kathleen Barnes, Allen Tannenbaum, James Fenton, Bill Rettiker, Chris Morris, Jeanne Hallacy, Keith Miller, Al Varga, Christine Chavez, Mike Boettcher,
Qassem Ali, Nayef Hashlamoun, John Reardon, Tim Llwellyn and
a hundred others I know I'm forgetting or whose names are illegible
in my scribbled notes. May bad news follow you around.
Introduction
.......................... 1
The Innocents Abroad, Updated
.......... 5
A Ramble Through Lebanon
............. 12
Seoul Brothers
........................ 44
Panama Banal
........................ 58
Third World Driving Hints and Tips
....... 69
What Do They Do for Fun in Warsaw?
...... 74
Weekend Getaway: Heritage USA
......... 91
Christmas in El Salvador
................ 127
At Sea with the America's Cup
........... 141
Intellectual Wilderness, Ho-A Visit to Harvard's 350th Anniversary Celebration
...................... 150
In Whitest Africa
...................... 159
Through Darkest America: Epcot Center....
180
Among the Euro-Weenies
............... 186
Thirty-six Hours in Managua-An In-depth Report
.......................... 204
Through Darkest America, Part II: The 1987 Reagan/Gorbachev Summit
.......... 217
Mexican Border Idyll
................... 224
The Holyland-God's Monkey House
...... 240
Epilogue: What Does the Future Hold In Store for Our Friends in Faraway Lands?
................................ 253
I've been working as a foreign correspondent for the past few years,
although "working" isn't the right word and "foreign correspondent" is too dignified a title. What I've really been is a Trouble
Tourist-going to see insurrections, stupidities, political crises,
civil disturbances and other human folly because . . . because it's
fun.
Like most people who don't own Bermuda shorts, I'm bored
by ordinary travel. See the Beautiful Grand Canyon. Okay, I see it.
Okay, it's beautiful. Now what? And I have no use for vacation
paradises. Take the little true love along to kick back and work on
the relationship. She gets her tits sunburned. I wreck the rental
car. We've got our teeth in each other's throats before you can say
"lost luggage." Nor do attractions attract me. If I had a chance to
visit another planet, I wouldn't want to go to Six Flags Over Mars or
ride through the artificial ammonia lake in a silicone-bottomed
boat at Venusian Cypress Gardens. I'd want to see the planet's principal features-what makes it tick. Well, the planet I've got a
chance to visit is Earth, and Earth's principal features are chaos
and war. I think I'd be a fool to spend years here and never have a
look.
I also became a foreign correspondent because I was tired of
making bad jokes. I spent most of the Seventies as an editor at The
National Lampoon, and I spent the early Eighties writing comedy
scripts for movies and comic articles for magazines. All the while,
the world outside seemed a much worse joke than anything I could
conjure. "The secret source of humor itself is not joy but sorrow,"
said Mark Twain. I wanted to get at that awful source of mirth and
make very, very bad jokes.
I thought maybe I could use the techniques of humor to report
on real news events. Or, at least, I thought I could use that phrase
to convince editors and publishers to pay my way to Lebanon, El
Salvador and so forth. Actually, I was just curious. I wanted to
know where trouble came from and why the world was such a lousy
place. I wasn't curious about natural disasters-earthquakes,
mudslides, floods and droughts. These are nothing but the losing
side of the Grand Canyon coin toss. Okay, it's sad. Now what? I was
curious about the trouble man causes himself and which he could
presumably quit causing himself at the drop of a hat, or, anyway, a
gun. I wanted to know why life, which ought to be an only
moderately miserable thing, is such a frightful, disgusting, horrid
thing for so many people in so many places.
Because I was curious and wanted a few facts, there are no
important people in this book-no interviews with Heads Of State
or Major Figures On The International Scene. These people didn't
get where they are by being dumb enough to tell reporters the truth.
And, although I admit to most faults, I don't have the Network
Anchor-Creature self-conceit that lets some people believe
Mikhail Gorbachev will suddenly take them aside and say, "Strictly
between you and me, on Wednesday we invade Finland." This book
is written from the worm's viewpoint, and the things I've asked my
fellow blind, spineless members of the phylum Annelida are things
like, "What's for dinner?" and "Please don't kill me"-the stuff of
mankind's real-life interviews.
There are also no earnest messages in this book. Half the world's suffering is caused by earnest messages contained in grand
theories bearing no relation to reality-Marxism and No-Fault Auto
Insurance, to name two. Earnestness is just stupidity sent to
college. I'm not sure this book contains any serious content. No
matter how serious the events I've witnessed, I've never noticed
that being serious about them did anything to improve the fate of
the people involved. Some writers, the young and the dim ones,
think being near something important makes them important so
they should act and sound important which will, somehow, make
their audience important, too. Then, as soon as everybody is filled
with a sufficient sense of importance, Something Will Be Done. It's
not the truth. Thirty years of acting and sounding important about
the Holocaust did nothing to prevent Cambodia.
Furthermore, there are no answers in this book. Even simple
questions do not, with logical necessity, lead to them. I can sum up
everything I've learned about trouble in a few words, and I will:
Civilization is an enormous improvement on the lack thereof.
No reasonable person who has had a look at the East Bloc (or an
issue of the Nation) can countenance the barbarities of the Left.
And every dorm bull-session anarchist should spend an hour in
Beirut. So-called Western Civilization, as practiced in half of
Europe, some of Asia and a few parts of North America, is better
than anything else available. Western Civilization not only provides
a bit of life, a pinch of liberty and the occasional pursuance of a
happiness, it's also the only thing that's ever tried to. Our civilization is the first in history to show even the slightest concern for
average, undistinguished, none-too-commendable people like us.
We are fools when we fail to defend civilization. The ancient
Romans might as well have said, "Oh, the Germanic tribes have
valid nationalistic and cultural aspirations. Let's pull the legions
off the Rhine, submit our differences to a multilateral peace
conference chaired by the Pathan Empire and start a Vandal
Studies program at the Academy in Athens."
To extend civilization, even with guns, isn't the worst thing in
the world. War will exist as long as there's a food chain. No amount
of mushy essaying on the Boston Globe editorial page and no
number of noisy, ill-kempt women sitting in at Greenham Common
will change this. Better that we study to conduct war as decently as possible and as little as necessary. The trouble in Lebanon, South
Africa, Haiti and the occupied territories of Palestine should,
simply, be stopped by the military intervention of civilized nations.
This won't stop trouble, of course. Trouble is fun. It will always be
more fun to carry a gun around in the hills and sleep with ideologyaddled college girls than to spend life behind a water buffalo or
rotting in a slum.
Finally, people are all exactly alike. There's no such thing as a
race and barely such a thing as an ethnic group. If we were dogs,
we'd be the same breed. George Bush and an Australian aborigine
have fewer differences than a Lhasa apso and a toy fox terrier. A
Japanese raised in Riyadh would be an Arab. A Zulu raised in New
Rochelle would be an orthodonist. I wish I could say I found this
out by spending arctic nights on ice floes with Inuit elders and by
sitting with tribal medicine men over fires made of human bones in
Madagascar. But, actually, I found it out by sleeping around.
People are all the same, though their circumstances differ terribly.
Trouble doesn't come from Slopes, Kikes, Niggers, Spies or White
Capitalist Pigs; it comes from the heart.