Holidays in Hell: Travels to the World's Worst Places and Asks What's Funny About This?

by P. J. O'Rourke

  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."

  Epilogue: What Does the Future

  Hold In Store for Our Friend in

  Faraway Lance?

  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 t
o 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.

  Over the next two and a half decades the military balance will shift dramatically in favor of the Third World. We in the United States, the Soviet Union and China will have given up our nuclear arms because they didn't go with our shoes and took up valuable space that could be used to build vacation condos. In the meantime every Third World country including Fernando Po will have acquired the bomb. Unfortunately, they won't use their bombs on each other no matter how forcefully sensible people like ourselves argue for them to do so. They will use the bombs on us, or, at least, they'll try to. But every time they do they'll find five hundred or a thousand refugee families living in the missile silos and all the weapons-grade plutonium stolen to make glow-in-the-dark tourist knick-knacks.

  On the financial front, most underdeveloped countries will have economies based on breaking things, losing things and stealing. The resulting negative GNPs will be made up by World Bank loans-necessary in order to maintain low unemployment and inflation in the last of the remaining Western democracies (South Korea, Singapore and Taiwan). International currency will be the cow chip.

  The Third World debt problem, however, will be solved at last as developing nations offer to "work off" their various loan defaults. The entire country of Bolivia will come over to your house and do the lawn.

  This and other factors will make illegal immigration a continuing problem. But liberals will still resist passing laws giving the United States an official language. Many Americans, they'll point out, don't speak Spanish. Many speak Hindi and-Urdu..-

  The Third World will be out of oil in 2013. But this will not cause economic dislocations since pollution by then will be such that all South American, Asian and African rivers will be flammable and can be burned as energy sources.

  Another effect of pollution will be that all Third World wildlife that hasn't been eaten will be dead. There will be no more elephants, rhinos or lions except in zoos (where most college-educated people will also be confined). On the bright side, mutations caused by the disappearance of the ozone layer and high levels of carbon monoxide in the atmosphere will result in new forms of wildlife, such as fifty-foot boll weevils and mealworms the size of Amtrak trains.

  Insects will be given a seat at the U.N., where they will vote with the Communist Bloc on most issues, especially the increase of farm subsidies in the U. S.

  Third World nations will continue to gain influence in international organizations such as the Olympic Committee. As a result a number of new sports will be added to Olympic competitionstreet begging, student rioting and hostage murder (originally a demonstration event at the 1972 Olympics in Munich).

  Another upbeat trend will be the gradual elimination of the international narcotics traffic. As the entire world becomes lethargic, larcenous, mentally disconnected and given to fits of violent rage, there won't be any need for drugs.

  But other Third World health problems will persist, malnutrition being the worst because there will never be quite enough of it to eliminate the other Third World maladies. Public-spirited types will form Malnutrition-Aid organizations to raise money to take food away from the underdeveloped world's burgeoning mass of ignorant, crazy and ungovernable AIDS-fodder. But it will be too little, too late.

  Bizarre diseases will continue to spawn in the developing countries. We're all hoping for one that kills only lawyers. And Third World values and aesthetics will also come to permeate the globe, causing a welcome respite from feminism and bringing spray paint to the fore as the principle medium of expression in literature and the arts.

  But in the next quarter century the most dramatic change in the Third World will be the United States becoming a part of it. We are already well on our way. Many of our cities are indistinguishable, in large part, from Beirut. The manners, dress and grammar of our young people have a decidedly underdeveloped cast. And most of our intellectuals have belonged to "lesser breeds without the law" for ages. All we have to do now is elect a few more Democrats.