Holidays in Hell: In Which Our Intrepid Reporter Travels to the World's Worst Places and Asks, "What's Funny About This" (41 page)

This is bullshit. This is barbarism. I've covered a lot of rioting
and pushes-come-to-shoves, and there is no excuse for this kind of
civilian-hammering by soldiers and police. Panamanian kids can
throw a rock in a way that Palestinian boys, who are innocent of
baseball, only dream about. The Panamanians have been rioting
steadily since last July and only one rioter has been killed. Korean
college students are the most organized and determined bunch of
rioters on earth, and Korean riot cops are no bowl of Sugar Pops.
But the Koreans have been at it since June 1987 and the death toll
is only two.

A few days later Tony Suau and I got into a little riot, a riot-
ette, in the Kalandia refugee camp on the West Bank several miles
north of Jerusalem. This camp wasn't under curfew, but the Israeli
army was running patrols through it and holding down intersections
and generally acting like this was downtown Hue in the middle of
the Tet offensive.

The enemy was horsing around in the side streets, giving each
other nuggies and trying to figure out how to tie the kaffiyehs over
their faces in a genuine fierce-desert-warrior way. They were
twelve, thirteen, fourteen years old. I recognized their every move
and didn't have to speak a word of Arabic to know what they were
saying because this was Tommy, Larry, Gary, Wayne and me playing war in 1959, except for keeps.

Of course they were excited to find adult foreigners taking
everything they were doing seriously. They delivered long speeches
on patriotism as only pubescents can. I believe the equivalent translation would be, "My old man was on Iwo. . . ." And they
showed us where to park our car so it wouldn't get hit with stones or
rubber bullets.

We followed the kids through a maze of houses and passageways-another modern version of the architecture around the
Haram-to an alley on a hilltop that commanded an Israeli control
point. These kids are no future Dwight Goodens, but the rocks of
Judea are excellent rocks, all pointy and jagged chalk limestone.
And the kids get good distance with a run-up underhand throw like
a cricket fast bowler's. Some of them also have the shepherd's sling
David used on the Philistine version of Andre the Giant. The slings
are as potent as a Whammo Wrist Rocket with a steelie in it-and
almost as accurate.

The kids rushed down the alley, and the shop gates, parked
cars and tin roofs at the Israeli-held intersection resounded with
the merry bing and clatter of a Holy Land stoning.

At least the soldiers weren't firing much live ammo that week.
Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin had told them, "The first priority
is to use force, might, beatings." And according to The Jerusalem
Post: "Large numbers of troops are to be concentrated at each
trouble spot, where they will fire rubber bullets, charge at the
demonstrators, and try to get the leaders, whom they are to beat
and detain." Or try to beat and detain since there was fat chance of
laying hands on any of these high-speed, wily urchins.

The rubber bullets come at you with an untuned guitar-string
twang and a whistle and hit the pavement and buildings in profound whacks. A couple of these projectiles bounced up by my
feet. They're black cylinders about as big as the last knuckle on
your thumb, heavy in the hand and hard as a shoe heel. I cut one
open later. It had a steel pellet the size of a .45 slug inside.

The kids darted forward and back, jacked-up and grinning
with the "drunk delight of battle" people used to get before it was
discovered that war is horrible and wrong. The Israelis attempted a
charge up the alley, but the kids held the high ground and the
soldiers had no cover. Eventually the soldiers made an old man,
who'd been driving by, get out of his VW van. They used the van as
a rolling shield, pushing it uphill and zinging rubber bullets from
behind. The kids (and me and Tony) made a tactical retreat.

I could understand why the Israeli soldiers were showing such
anger and fear. It wasn't just the taunting, pesky boys armed with
less than Neanderthal weapons. The whole Kalandia camp was
alive with hatred. Moms and doddering granddads were shouting
instructions from the house tops. "Jeeps are coming! A platoon is
coming up this street! Over here!" Old ladies and little girls rushed
out of houses and began throwing up barricades of trash barrels
and paving stones they could barely lift. A pretty girl of twelve with
an infant on her hip, whom we'd seen by the camp gate, was no
idling baby-sitter. She was a lookout. She came running up the
slope, baby aflap, saying something about troops with tear gas.
Doors flew open and the half-pint Geronimos disappeared into
labyrinthine Arab domiciles.

Again I was surprised by a peculiar ordinariness-hatred as
universal, as simple, as much a foregone conclusion as God had
been at the al-Aksa Mosque. It had never occurred to me that God
or hatred could permeate people this way, let alone at the same
time.

Tony and I drove on north and, near Ramallah, caught up with
another Israeli patrol just as it was entering the small Al Ama're
refugee camp. There was a roadblock on the main street, a single
burning truck tire. The Israelis get all exercised about roadblocks.
They grabbed the handyman at the camp's U. N. office and made
him pour water on the tire and pull it out of the road. None of the
Israeli troops looked mature enough to trust with the car keys after
dark. And all of them looked anxious with that particular anxiety of
the stranger, the anomie modern fiction writers are always writing
about except modern fiction writers think it takes place in lonely
grad-school writing seminars.

The patrol's commanding officer was a captain, about thirty,
and carrying, of all things, a pair of nunchakus-a dippy kung fu
weapon made from a pair of sticks joined by a short chain. A crowd
of cat-calling Arab boys had gathered down the street and stones
began to fall in among us. The captain moved his patrol toward the
boys. Tony and I tagged along. The soldiers had their gas grenades
and Galil rifles ready. The boys vaporized.

The captain picked up the pace, trying to catch the kids and
shake Tony and me. But, being in full combat gear, he could do neither. The soldiers were rude to us, as armed men invariably are.
(And in the Middle East whoever's top dog at the moment is
terrifically rude, just as he's terrifically courteous when he's shitout-of-luck.) The Arab kids stayed always just beyond the next
corner, while the soldiers ran faster and faster, around and back
and up and down through the twisting streets, sweating like horses.

As the patrol approached an area, the pavement would be
empty and all the houses shuttered and dark. As soon as it passed,
the doors and windows opened and women and children poked
their heads outside, laughing in happy malice. I saw a three-yearold boy step into the road and send mocking kisses at the Israeli
soldiers' backs.

After forty-five minutes the soldiers gave up, winded. They
returned to the entrance of the camp. By now there were some
grudging smiles for Tony and me. The only soldier who seemed to
speak English pointed at my notebook and said, "This they see and
go wild."

"No, no," I said. "They see this," I held up the notebook"and they only go wild two times. They see this," I pointed to Tony's
Nikons, "they go wild ten times. They see TV"-I pantomimed a
TV cameraman-"they go wild a hundred times!" The soldier
laughed and translated for his buddies. They laughed, and gave us
some dates and apricots from their packs. We gave them some
cigarettes. Then we stood around shrugging amiably. "So much
trouble . . . What can be done . . . Who knows . . ." with these
young men who would have to live their whole lives in this mess.

When I'd been in front of the al-Aksa Mosque and everyone
was bowing toward Mecca and praying, I prayed too. And I repeated that prayer when we left Al Ama're. Actually, it wasn't
exactly a prayer. It was more a sort of chat with God. I said, "God,
the next time you're looking for people, you know, to receive
Revealed Truth and everything and be the Anointed of the Lord like
the Christians and the Jews and the Moslems are, please, God,
don't choose semiagnostic lapsed Methodists from Ohio. Choose
somebody else."

Like many people who've spent time absorbing the exotic sights,
loud sounds and great big smells of the developing world and
getting to know the special warmth and humor of its citizens ("Have
a Goodyear," as the Soweto comrades said to the necklaced police
informer on New Year's Eve), I can only wonder what the coming
years will bring. What will happen to the "emerging nations' over,
say, the next-quarter-of a century?

Personally, I believe a brilliant future awaits the Third World,
a future filled with peace, prosperity, health and happiness, a
future that the people of the Third World will reach, um . . . the
moment they die and go to heaven. And, for a very large number of
them that will be soon indeed, because they're dying like flies out
there in Upper Revolta and Absurdistan.

This is the main thing the next quarter century will bring to
the Third World-the same thing the last quarter century
brought-lots and lots of colorful death. What with famine, war, genocide, sexually transmitted diseases and general dirty habits,
we can expect the next twenty-five years to be a veritable festival of
Malthusianism. Or semi-Malthusianism. Because the only thing
that's going to exceed the astonishing, incredible Third World
death rate will be its amazing, unbelievable, buglike rate of reproduction. By the year 2013 something like 3 billion people will be
added to the earth's population, none of them in a place you'd care
to have a second home.

Due to this actuarial wrestling match between mortality and
screwing like bunnies, average age in the Third World will drop
precipitously. By 2013 many Third World business and political
leaders will be under the age of five. Thus government and economic matters will be conducted at approximately the same level of
maturity and sophistication as-they-are now.

Of course, all underdeveloped countries will be military dictatorships. The army seems to be the only institution capable of
keeping order in these lands. It does this by shooting all the
corrupt and incompetent people, which in Uganda, for instance,
turned out to be everybody. Usually, however, the corrupt and
incompetent people the army shoots are army officers. This is why
Third World military dictatorships tend to move, coup by coup,
down through the ranks. Colonels overthrow generals, majors overthrow colonels and so forth until we get to Ghana's Flight Lieutenant Jerry Rawlings or Liberia's Sergeant Samuel K. Doe. The trend
will continue. Soon Third World military dictatorships will be
headed by Weblo Scouts and grade-school crossing guards.

Nonetheless, a rough political stability will have been
achieved in some places such as Lebanon, Afghanistan, Angola,
Peru and Sri Lanka, where insurgent terrorist groups will have
multiplied until there is one for each living person.

The Indian subcontinent, much of Africa and parts of the
Mideast will give up on the whole idea of independence and plead
for reestablishment of the British Empire. "Please to come back
Sahib English and snob us and get the Coca-Cola machine to work
again," they will beg. But to no avail. Margaret Thatcher will be
long out of office; the Labour Party will be back in power; and
Britain will be a colony of Jamaica.

Ideologically, Marxism will continue to make enormous in roads in underdeveloped countries. After all, when you're living in
hopeless poverty and filth and there's a political philosophy that
offers you hopeless poverty and filth, it only makes sense to go with
the flow. In 2013 every Third World country will be a member of the
Communist Bloc. This should go a long way to destroying the new,
hip, glasnost Soviet Union. The Soviet Communist Party chief
(probably Olga Korbut) will find herself broke, confused, embroiled in a thousand local tribal wars and reduced to the same
influence over international Marxism that Mayor Koch now has over
New York.

Koch will be, thank God, dead by then. But not before having
been elected secretary general of the U. N. The Ayatollah Khomeini, however, will still be alive and serving as president of the
World Council of Churches.

Twenty-five years from now all religion will be fundamentalist
religion, even the Church of England. Wild-eyed "Tutuist" Anglicans will riot in Anzania (formerly the Union of South Africa).
They'll force people to play contract bridge at gunpoint and make
unbelievers eat little sandwiches with the crusts cut off. No woman
will dare appear in the street without a small, stupid hat like Queen
Di's.

Zionism will still raise unaccountably powerful emotions in
the Third World. And there will be continuing terrorist attacks and
protest incidents in the Israeli capital of Riyadh.