Peace Kills

by P. J. O'Rourke

  “We just have to quit being Americans for a little while,” said a staffer from the Republican National Committee. “For get about carrying our constitution to people who don’t give a rat’s ass.”

  Michele and I walked across Capitol Hill. On Massachusetts we met a Senate staffer whom Michele knew. He was jogging. “It was a little hairy when they told us to evacuate,” he said. “Then I saw our F-16s fly over, and I felt okay.”

  We met another Senate staffer who was trying to get his car out of a parking lot that was inside the police cordon around the Capitol. The four of us walked to the Dubliner bar on North Capital Street.

  “The congressional leadership,” said the second staffer, “has been whisked off to ‘an undisclosed location.’ As far as I’m concerned they can keep most of them there.” This touched on another theory of terrorism: that the organization of society can be attacked by striking at organizations; that we can’t organize things ourselves.

  “Four Guinness,” the first Senate staffer said to the bartender.

  “Time to take sides,” the second staffer said.

  “Time to turn sand into glass,” said the first.

  Ariel Sharon was on CNN. “It is a war between the good and the bad,” said Sharon.

  From the Dubliner we took a cab to the Palm restaurant on Nineteenth Street. The bar and the dining room were full. President Bush came on television at 8:30. Everyone has seen, in movies, a restaurant go quiet. I had never before really heard all talk come to a halt and all noise from tableware cease. The customers and staff applauded when the president said, “We will make no distinction between the people who committed these acts and the people who harbor them.”

  “As I was driving in to open for lunch,” the Palm’s assistant general manager, Jocelyn Zarr, said, “all the traffic was going the other way. Ten minutes after the Pentagon was hit, I was getting reservations. I’m thinking, ‘Aren’t these people watching the news?’ But they were. They just wanted to be with other people. I told the staff that if anyone wanted to go home, just go. No one did. I opened early. People were streaming in. My only fear was putting a group of people in danger. Once I got past that, I thought, ‘The Palm is the center point.’ Everyone wanted to come and sit at the bar and talk. Smith and Wollensky called and asked what I was going to do. I said I was staying open. All the evening staff showed up. A friend called and said, ‘You shouldn’t be working when thousands of people died.’ But what else am I going to do?”

  On Monday night, September 10, I had finished an article for The Atlantic about Israel (an article that appears as the previous chapter in this book). Israel is a country that has been under terrorist attack for generations, forever. On Tuesday I didn’t want to publish the article. It wasn’t serious enough. I was thinking “After today things will never be the same.” Lines from W. H. Auden’s poem “September 1, 1939” kept coming to mind:

  Waves of anger and fear

  Circulate over the bright

  And darkened lands of the earth

  By Wednesday I realized I’d never known what Auden was getting at with that poem, except, perhaps, in “As the clever hopes expire / Of a low dishonest decade.” Apt enough, but …

  Where blind skyscrapers use

  Their full height to proclaim

  The strength of Collective Man

  What’s that crap? Or this:

  Ironic points of light

  Flash out whenever the Just

  Exchange their messages

  Anyway, Auden repudiated the poem, mostly because of the fatuous line “We must love one another or die.” Or just die. And neither agape nor eros is an appropriate response to Osama bin Laden. Also, Auden was the Englishman who, when World War II loomed, acted as Hitler would have had Englishmen act—he ran to America and stayed there. In Israel, on September 11, things were the same as ever.

  SEPTEMBER 30, 2001

  Traveling to London from Washington twelve days after the terrorist attack, I expected security measures. I’d been told to arrive at Dulles Airport three hours before departure. I was ready for checkpoints where people in flak jackets would use mirrors to look for bombs under cars—although, nowadays, with automotive electronics and the puzzle plumbing of emissions control, everything under cars looks like a bomb. Anyway, the checkpoints weren’t there.

  At the ticket counter, instead of being asked once, “Hasyourluggagebeenunderyourcontrolatalltimes,” I was asked twice. The metal detectors and X-ray machines were operated by the usual dim but friendly minimum-wage security guards, now somewhat less friendly. I was told to hand over my disposable lighter, to prevent, I suppose, any threat of “Do what I say or I’ll light this Marlboro and you’ll all die—in thirty years due to inhalation of secondhand smoke.”

  I headed cheerlessly to the designated smoking area, expecting to find a roomful of desperate, fireless people paying black-market prices for Nicorette. Everyone was smoking. I asked for a light, and someone produced a disposable lighter. It seems that if you went through one of the airport’s two security portals, you were made to surrender all lighters and matches. But if you went through the other …

  Concern had been voiced that fear of terrorism could lead to renewed racial profiling. Never mind that the languages of the Taliban—Pashto and Dari—are part of the Indo-European linguistic family and that, if “Caucasian” has any meaning at all, Afghans have a better claim to it than Hungarians or Finns.

  The profiling at the boarding gate couldn’t be called racial, exactly. The ruddy and the pallid were ushered directly on board, as were the sufficiently black. It was the tanned or swarthy who had to line up for additional questioning. On my flight these included, as far as I could tell, some Hindus, some Filipinos, a Hispanic or two, and a pair of elderly Iranian women wearing chadors in violation of the new American no-unusual-things-on-your-head taboo that has brought grief to Sikhs in the U.S. hinterland. (Not that there hasn’t been Sikh terrorism, but it was directed against Indira Gandhi, in retaliation for the Indian army’s storming the Golden Temple at Amritsar. This isn’t an issue at the moment, but the complexities of building an international coalition against terrorism could lead to India demanding a wholesale revocation of Sikh cab licenses in New York, thereby bringing that city to a halt again.)

  An English friend asked me, “Would a bald chap who was sunburned and was gardening and put a tea towel on his head be in trouble in America?”

  My plane was two thirds empty. But the unflappable British flight crew was unflapped. I was not subjected to the indignity that an acquaintance suffered on a flight from New York to Chicago. He was made to press the flight attendant call button and identify himself before being allowed to go to the bathroom. This—for a drinking man in the enlarged-prostate years—is a serious violation of civil rights.

  The people I know in Great Britain were in the same state of shock and anger as the people I know in America. And, like my American friends, they weren’t particularly frightened of a second terrorist strike or of poison gas or germ warfare. But this may be a matter of being old smokers and drinkers, of an age for cardiac arrest and malignancy, with children they’d like to see grow up or at least get a damn job, and retirement funds that had gone to hell during the previous year. How much more frightening can life get?

  The Brits, however, were more likely to raise the subject of the IRA and say a word about America leading the fight against terrorism while letting the NORAID cans be passed in the bars of Southie and the Bronx. I blamed the Kennedys—always a safe course when questions of bad U.S. political policies are raised. Meanwhile, it’s the British themselves who were at the negotiating table with my moron cousins from Ulster. Personally, I’d start the war on terrorism with Gerry Adams. At least we know where he is.

  Incidentally, it’s ridiculous if you’re Irish to claim that you can’t fathom the mind-set behind the wild destruction of innocents, the casual self-murder, and the bathos of martyrdom on September 11. Al Qaeda probably
has a Yeats of its own—” A terrible beauty is born.”

  But there was something going on in Great Britain, among the people I don’t know, that was more troubling than Northern Ireland home-rule concessions. The September 17 issue of The New Statesman ran an amazing editorial leader:

  Look at the pictures on pages 6-7, showing Americans running in terror from the New York explosions and then ask yourself how often in the past (particularly in Vietnam and more recently in Iraq) you have seen people running in terror from American firepower. American bond traders, you may say, are as innocent and as undeserving of terror as Vietnamese or Iraqi peasants. Well, yes and no.

  To quote more might set off a wave of retribution in America against people wearing derby hats.

  I had dinner with the critic and television commentator Clive James and his assistant. The assistant was an able and well-educated young woman who could not be convinced by Clive that, in the matter of moral values, there was such a thing as a superior culture. “They cover their women in the ballroom drapes!” Clive said. “Your dad can have you stoned to death for not marrying some old goat!”

  “I wouldn’t call it an inferior culture,” his assistant said.

  “What about Somalia?! What about clitoridectomies?!”

  “Of course I’m a feminist,” his assistant said. “But I resist the idea of an inferior culture.”

  It’s usually Clive and I who have the arguments. He’s a liberal democrat. But he’s my age; he remembers when the whole point of being on the left was the effort (alas, misplaced) to forge a superior culture.

  I was a guest on a BBC radio phone-in talk show. If the world is mad at America for anything, it should be for invention of the phone-in talk show. The idea of a news broadcast once was to find someone with information and broadcast it. The idea now is to find someone with ignorance and spread it around. (Being ignorant myself, I’m not mad personally.)

  A woman named Rhona called and said we didn’t have enough empathy for the poor people in the world. We’re so rich and they’re so poor, no wonder they’re angry.

  I told her that was a slur on poor people. And anyway, Osama bin Laden is a rich twit.

  Rhona said that we are so wealthy and materialistic and they are so deprived. “Here I am,” she said, “just an ordinary suburban housewife in a semidetached, and I’m surrounded by all these things I don’t need.” Privately I was thinking that my moron cousins from Belfast could fix that with breaking and entering. I said, “You’re arguing completely beside the point.” She was employing a fallacy of relevance, specifically what’s called in logic argumentum ad misericordiam (although I had to look that up later; what I said on the radio was “So what?”).

  Rhona accused me of that most grievous of contemporary sins, especially when committed against a woman by a middle-aged man. “Don’t patronize me,” she said.

  Calls and e-mails were nine to one in Rhona’s favor, but one stalwart sent this message: “I suspect why ninety percent of callers are not in favor of P.J.’s opinions is because they are out-of-work socialists who have nothing better to do but phone radio stations.”

  And there are some of their ilk in the United States. Back in Washington, I went to a peace rally on September 29 at Freedom Plaza, near the White House. Several thousand people attended. As I arrived, a man on the speaker’s platform was saying, “We cannot permit the president of our country to claim there are only two forces—good and evil. We are not with either.”

  The Bread and Puppet Theater troupe was carrying a score of what appeared to be eight-foot-high papier-mâché baked potatoes. Asked what this was about, one of the troupe said it represented “naked people being oppressed by clothed people.” Asked again, she said the same thing.

  Members of another performing arts group were wearing cardboard bird heads and flapping bedsheets. They said they were “the cranes of peace.”

  A woman asked for signatures on a petition in favor of affirmative action. The National Youth Rights Association had set up a card table with a sign reading LOWER THE DRINKING AGE. Snappy protest rhymes seemed as yet inchoate. Drumming and pogo dancing accompanied the chant “Stop the war / In Afganistan / While we / Still can!”

  Another speaker came to the podium and said, “Let us bomb the world with housing.” One of those McMansions with the lawyer foyer and the cathedral-ceilinged great room could do real damage.

  Vegetarian demonstrators carried large banners illustrated with vegetables. A carrot was captioned “Intelligence.” Placards in the crowd read KILLING IS BAD; POVERTY IS TERRIBLE TOO; ABOLISH MONEY FOR A WORLD OF SHARING; and CONGRESS PLEASE KEEP A COOL HEAD. One young man wore a headband scrawled with VICTORY 4 CHECHNYA. Another carried a black-and-red ensign that he said stood for “anarchosyndicalism,” a word I didn’t think had been spoken aloud since Monty Python and the Holy Grail. “Do you work for the police?” the standard-bearer asked. My work-shirt-and-chinos liberal disguise was ineffective.

  A child of nine or ten, wearing a FUCK WAR T-shirt, harangued some police officers. The officers could not keep straight faces. Most of the other demonstrators were of college age with subdermal ink, transdermal hardware, and haircuts from the barber college on Mars. But people my age were present, too, and beginning to resemble Bertrand Russell, especially the women. Then I saw him: a hippie with a walker, wearing a hearing aid. Sic transit generation gap.

  Demonstrators tried to burn an American flag. They had trouble lighting it. Maybe their matches had been taken by airport security—or maybe all the antismoking propaganda aimed at the young has come home to roost in a lack of fire-making skills. When the flag at last caught flame, a passerby shoved his way into the crowd. He was a normal-looking man without great height or bulk. He began to throw punches. He was set upon by twenty-five or thirty of the … anarchosyndicalists, I guess. There was a momentary geyser of funny clothes, odd hairstyles, and flopping tattooed limbs. The normal-looking man emerged, slightly winded, carrying the remains of the flag and having received a small scuff on the forehead.

  OCTOBER 21, 2001

  Six weeks into the War on Terrorism, contemporary war seemed to exhibit the vulgarity that Oscar Wilde said would be needed to make warfare unpopular. That is to say, the opening offensive of this war was directed at ‘the quotidian, the workaday, the commonplace, the vulgar—ordinary people working at their daily jobs in office buildings. And common people, not self-exalted jihad warriors, were showing the bravery and making the sacrifices in Afghanistan as well as the United States. Then, in a more Wildean sense of the world “vulgar,” there came the anthrax contamination. A cowflop of a weapon elicited all sorts of bull in response. On October 20 the Los Angeles Times devoted 465 column inches to a disease that had sickened fewer people than the corporation that makes the antibiotic by which the disease is cured. Only a few months before, Bayer had withdrawn the anticholesterol drug Baycol after it had been linked to fifty-two deaths.

  Fortunately, my family doctor, William Hughes, has expertise in the most virulent aspect of anthrax—publicity. Dr. Hughes is married to ABC White House correspondent Ann Compton. He suggested that I get a ciprofloxacin prescription, lest anyone think I was too low in the journalism hierarchy to receive threatening mail. And indeed there were threats in my mail, but only the usual ones from Visa, American Express, and the landlord.

  One of the first anthrax attacks was made against the company that owns The National Enquirer. The company’s name is displayed in large letters on its suburban Florida offices: AMERICAN MEDIA. Supposing that the anthrax contamination is really the work of terrorists, al Qaeda may be less sophisticated than we feared. “Ah,” thought the bin Laden operatives, “here is where the American media have their place of headquarters.” On the other hand, considering the role of supermarket tabloids in America’s life of the mind, al Qaeda may be more sophisticated than we thought.

  Anyway, the media were enormously reassuring, simultaneously telling the public that members of the pu
blic won’t contract anthrax while giving nonstop coverage to the members of the public who did, will, or might. Then Tom Ridge, the head of the Office of Homeland Security, came on the air, reminding us how much “Homeland Security” sounds like a failed savings-and-loan. Didn’t Grandma lose $15,000 in a CD when Homeland Security went under? The media also recounted the complete list of symptoms for all three types of anthrax infection—symptoms that correspond to those of the common cold, the flu, a hangover, acne, and eating the church-picnic potato salad.

  According to CNN on October 19, being infected with the intestinal form of anthrax results in “nausea, lack of appetite, and fever.” And—if boiling rage counts as fever—so did being on a commercial flight. I had flown on ten during the five weeks after September 11, owing to an author tour for a badly timed collection of light humorous essays. (Not that I’m complaining about being knocked off the medium-well-seller list by people who spent five minutes with Osama bin Laden’s brother-in-law in 1976. Especially not after hearing publishing-world scuttlebutt about a certain Manhattan novelist famous for tales of fashion models and drug excess, whose reaction on September 11, it’s said, was to exclaim how glad he was that he didn’t have a book out. Discriminating readers are always glad when he doesn’t have a book out.)

  Airport security would soon be turned over to the government so that a federal agency could do the same fine job of protecting the nation in the future that the CIA and the FBI did in early September. Meanwhile, “heightened security precautions” were allowing airlines to perfect their technique of treating passengers like convicted felons and providing all the transportation amenities usually accorded to smuggled cockatoos.