Republican Party Reptile

by P. J. O'Rourke

  It seems to me the Drug Enforcement Agency picked the Turks and Caicos as a nice lackadaisical place, a place with a friendly NATO-ally administration, a place that was an easy target. No stonewalling commies or angry armed peasants or touchy blackpower governments here. Governor Turner said the very reason the Turks and Caicos are popular with drug smugglers is that the people are law-abiding. “There’s no violence, no rip-offs, no shakedowns.”

  And they are lovely islands. And the Third Turtle really is first-rate—excellent food, big, airy rooms opening onto terraces above the beach, great bar. And the expanse of wilderness is wonderful. There’s no clog of high-rise condos or clots of dippy shops and prissy restaurants, just miles of verdant land aroil with bird and lizard life where perhaps no human has stood since hungry Carib Indian invaders chased edible Arawak natives into the brush.

  On Providenciales I took my Jeep an hour’s trip out a near-impassable track to eight miles of untouched beach and cliffs. I found a little cove between two great rocks where the waves came up on Clairol sand. I took my clothes off and all morning disported myself like Brooke Shields in Blue Lagoon (about as much chest but more stomach).

  Back at the Third Turtle I was writing in my notebook—“Drugs—can’t find any”; “Pirates—a lot of hooey”—when I heard the unmistakable bellow of the redneck Gulf Coast man of affairs, the peckerwood entrepreneur, the Snopes with an M.B.A. “Two hundert square miles of un-de-veloped beachfront. . . God damn! I tell you what we gotta do! You know that Golden Door place? Where the fat ladies go? How about wunna them! And how about with a goddam cosmetic surgery clinic right attached? Huh? How ’bout that!? God damn!!!” Ah. Well. I crossed out “a lot of hooey.”

  With Hostage and Hijacker in Sunny Beirut

  Boarding Middle East Airlines flight 804 from London to Lebanon, I was picking out the terrorist. The guy in the shiny suit who looked like Danny Thomas—it wasn’t him. The exhausted mother with three children under three—it wasn’t her. Then dozens of swarthy youths, bearded to the eyes, came trotting on board. They wore the off-brand blue jeans and pilled-up synthetic polo shirts that are the usual mufti of the Lebanese militias. “Allah akbar!” they shouted as the plane took off, which just means “God is great” but always sends a chill up my backside. As the hoot of the Moslem fundamentalist, it carries a meaning like “Jesus loves you!” would if Jerry Falwell and his friends were running around America murdering Episcopalians. I headed for the toilet to take a nervous leak and size up my flying companions. There was one bunch standing by the galley. I leaned in close to see who had the fragmentation grenade in his duty-free shopping bag. “Yalluh!” They jumped back in alarm. “Awk!” I did too. “CIA!!” said their horrified faces. What a letdown. With blue eyes and striped necktie, the most suspicious-looking person on the airplane was me.

  I don’t know why any of us was getting in a sweat. The only way to keep from being hijacked to Beirut these days is to buy a commercial ticket and fly there.

  Beirut International Airport was a Weekly Reader current-events quiz made manifest. Here was the Amal in force. There was a blown-up Royal Jordanian passenger plane. And right at our wingtip was the pirated TWA jet. Somewhere off in the snakes-and-ladders maze of the Shiite neighborhoods, thirty-six American tourists were in a pickle. The whole scene set me to thinking about the villainy of human motivation, mostly my own. I mean, I was delighted for the excuse to be back in Lebanon. I like to hang around places where human nature is at its most baffling.

  Lebanon sits on the thin neck of the Fertile Crescent, an arable strip no more than forty miles wide that joins the great basins of Mesopotamia and the Nile. From this flinder of sparsely watered top spoil come our alphabet, our religion, and, in the form of the first agriculture, our civilization itself. Who holds “The Mountain,” as the Lebanese call it, stands athwart the trade routes of Africa and Asia, controls the eastern Mediterranean, and has a grip on the remote-control garage-door opener to Europe or something like that. No fan of social chaos can help but thrill to tread ground fought over by Canaanites, Egyptians, Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Arabs, Turks, French, British, more Arabs, and occasional U.S. Marines. It’s been a five-thousand-year tag-team match, and, what’s more, the crazy oafs are still in the ring. Philistines, Nazarenes, Israelites, peoples of the great Syrian desert, and strange firinghi European interlopers are, to this very day, tossing half nelsons on each other and flailing away with rabbit punches and illegal flying dropkicks.

  A friend had sent one of Lebanon’s innumerable “fixers” to meet me at the airport. “Mr. Bisgee! Mr. Bisgee!” (“P.J.” is quite beyond the Arab tongue.) This sweaty, amiable little man shoved me in front of fifty people at passport control, dragooned a porter, fended off a bribery touch from a Lebanese army officer, whisked me uninspected through customs, and put me in a chauffeured car. The Lebanese understand trouble. That is, they understand the only understandable thing about it. There’s always a buck to be made when trouble’s afoot.

  Six months ago nearly all American newsmen were pulled out of Lebanon. Terrorism was one reason, but so was the lack of a “hometown hook.” The only other Americans left in the country were seven obscure kidnap victims and some embassy duffs. Neither group lent itself to vibrant coverage. So what if man’s fate might depend on the ugly events hereabouts? Stateside coverage dwindled to a few paragraphs in the international “Deaths Elsewhere” column. Now, however, Hostages II was playing, and scribblers, Nikon hounds, tape jockeys, and talking heads were in from the ends of the earth. The Lebanese middlemen couldn’t have been happier if the Marines had invaded, and they might just yet.

  I checked into the Summerland Hotel on the seafront in Beirut’s south suburbs. The Summerland is a great three-sided, four-tiered resort complex with shopping center, health club, sauna, restaurants, and a beauty salon. In the Summerland’s center court are three swimming pools, a spiral water slide, an artificial grotto with waterfall, a small-boat harbor, and a private beach. Two acres of deck chairs were covered with tan bodies. The smooth Arab girls wearing makeup poolside looked to have been teleported from a Westchester country club.

  This doesn’t match your mental picture of Beirut. But Beirut doesn’t match any mental picture of anything. After ten years of polygonal civil war and invasions and air strikes by Syrians, Israelis, and multilateral peace-keeping forces, the place still isn’t as squalid as some cities that have never been hit by anything but government social programs. There are zones of manic destruction, of course. The Green Line looks like an antinuke-benefit-concert album cover. The Bois de Pins, planted in the 1600s, has taken so many rocket attacks that it’s a forest of phone poles. Hotel Row along the Corniche was destroyed in the first year of warfare. The best hotel, the St. George, is a burned hulk. But its bar is still open and people water-ski from the beach there in all but the worst of the fighting. “What about snipers?” I once asked someone. He said, “Oh, most of the snipers have automatic weapons. They aren’t very accurate.”

  Everywhere there are chips and chucks out of buildings and buildings missing entirely, but there are also cranes and construction gangs and masons and plasterers. Maybe nowhere else has a city been built and destroyed at the same time. Electricity is intermittent and the garbage hasn’t been collected since the late 1970s, but the shops are full of all the world’s imports. And with no trade quotas or import duties or government to enforce them if they existed, goods are cheap. Not an hour passes without gunfire or explosion, but the traffic jams are filled with Mercedes sedans.

  The Summerland itself sits bracketed by the bombed ruins of another resort and by a principal Amal checkpoint. At the checkpoint the wrong kind of beachgoer can be pulled out of his car and taken away and shot. Beirut is a sort of Janus-faced monument to the entire history of man. He will endure, but what a shithead.

  Anyway, drugs are cheap, about $50 a gram for cocaine. Some friends and I sniffed piles of it and emptied the minibars in tw
o hotel rooms. About midnight it seemed like a good idea to go out. Street fighting had been desultory. We could probably make it to a nightclub.

  ABC News had its headquarters at the Summerland. We stopped to say hello. It was “day 15,” as they say in hostage crises, and everybody was settling in. We all figured the thing would be good for at least a month, maybe three. We stood around yammering wisely about Arab intransigence and how time has no meaning in the East. Then somebody, I think it was Chris Harper, ABC’s Rome bureau chief, stepped out onto a balcony and stepped right back in looking like he’d caught the family dog playing the cello.

  Directly below us on the wide flagstone terrace by the double-Olympic-size pool were thirty-two American hostages. The Amal had brought them to the Summerland for dinner.

  Let me tell you, they looked terrible. I don’t mean they looked abused. They just looked like American tourists do everywhere—elastic-waisted loaf-around slacks, T-shirts with dim slogans and embarrassing place names, waffle-soled sandals worn with socks. These people had been thrust into a dramatic situation with vast international implications and, frankly, they weren’t dressed for it.

  I think history deserves at least rumpled linen suits and sweat-stained panama hats. And what’s a possible world war without something to drink? But Amal is very opposed to that sort of thing. Instead everybody stood around for about two hours munching snacks and sipping fruit juice while waiters got a giant banquet table ready.

  It was a Rotary Club men’s breakfast in the middle of the night at Club Med with guns—sort of. The hostages looked confused. The more so since some reporters knew some Amal guards and were chatting them up. You could hear tourist minds clicking over—“Oh, God, they’re all in it together.” Which, in a sense, is true, but it’s the kind of insight that makes for really tedious New York Times op-ed-page pieces on the role of the media.

  The captive dinner guests, poor devils, were a bit wooden and formal at first. They had the eggshell walk and stiff solemn movements that come from long-accumulated fear. At least everyone on the terrace knew how they felt. You can’t spend time in this part of the earth and not be familiar with the indissoluble cold softball beneath the diaphragm, the slow hyperventilation, the runny feeling in the bowels and wet flesh creepiness along the limbs. It sucks.

  Maybe for this reason everybody behaved himself. There was no blast of camera lights or lewd thrust of microphones from the reporters. The hostages didn’t whimper for mercy or ask the President to A-bomb us all. The Amal guards were casual, propping their guns against the stone planters and gathering in little groups to smoke cigarettes. They let their charges wander around the courtyard unescorted and amble down to the beach.

  ABC had three telephone lines held permanently open to the United States, and the engineers wired one into a poolside phone so everybody could call his folks.

  I wish I could say it was fascinating. One hostage began giving me a complete inside story of what had gone on since they’d been removed from the plane. I was scribbling madly on a napkin. “You’ve all been in communication with each other, then?” I said. “No,” said the hostage, “I heard this on BBC World News.”

  Ridley Moon said he wanted a stiff drink. Victor Amburgy had had dysentery and had lost so much weight he was falling out of his pants. Kurt Carlson told me his younger brother, Bun, is the drummer for Cheap Trick. Jack McCarty said he and some of the others had been working up notes for a Hostage Handbook “Bring Toilet Paper” was one chapter heading. A little forehead-sized pillow is another good idea, he said, and told me how at one point when they were still on the plane they’d been forced to keep their heads between their knees for six hours. “I’d stopped smoking before this happened,” said Kurt Carlson. Great events are something like doughnuts for all that’s right at the center of them.

  And so the reluctant houseguests went home with their hosts, though not before an Amal guard brought one guy back because he hadn’t had a chance to phone home. Could we—journalists and hostages together—have overpowered the slack and outnumbered Amal guards? Could we have mounted fire from the Summerland’s ramparts, phoned the Sixth Fleet and held out until rescue choppers arrived? It would be a marketable movie premise. Nothing like real guns to show how lousy popular art is.

  I got into bed at 4:00 that morning with an uneasy mind. There are supposed to be U.S. spy satellites that can read the headlines on newspapers. I know there are radio listening posts all over the Middle East, and the Amal guys were on their walkietalkies all night. Every would-be Jimmy Carter antonym on the National Security Council must have heard about the dinner at the Summerland by now. It would be just like U.S. foreign policy to send Delta Force in an hour late. I could see it all—concussion bombs in the swimming pools, Hueys tangled in the beach umbrellas, and hyperadrenalinized Marine sergeants indiscriminately rescuing the wrong people from a bunch of sleepy room-service waiters. I left the door to my balcony open. If I was going to be dragged to safety and someplace American Express could find me, the last thing I wanted was a six-by-four-foot broken glass slider added to my hotel bill.

  At the end of the Friday-night dinner the Summerland Hotel staff had brought out a huge cake with chocolate lettering across the top: “Wishing you all a happy trip back home.” Saturday morning the U.S. State Department announced the hostages’ release. So did the Syrian government. Various networks and wire services carried the story. It seemed like a lot of people were getting their news from cake frosting.

  In fact, nobody had gone much of anywhere. The thirty-two dinner hostages and the plane crew had been gathered in a school in a Shiite slum, the Burj Barajna. But the extraradical Hizbullah Shiites were refusing to cough up the four extra hostages they had stashed in a basement somewhere.

  Hizbullah wouldn’t release the other four because . . . well, you have to understand Lebanese politics. It’s sort of like a gang war because the militias are organized in normal Mediterranean friends-of-Frank-Sinatra style and control the drug traffic and smuggling. It’s sort of like a real war because Syria, Israel, the PLO, etc. are irked at each other and commit most of their irksomeness on Lebanese territory. It’s sort of like a race riot because every religious group thinks it’s being treated like niggers and thinks every other group should be. And it’s sort of like an American presidential election because most of the worst things in life are. It’s insane. It’s incomprehensible. Everybody in the place ought to be whacked over the head. The whole business is almost as horrid as New York City during rush hour. (Though not, I think, as horrid as New York would be if our national system of checks and balances called in sick and Syria, Israel, Russia, the United States, Iran, and North Korea gave everybody who could make a flag free guns and a dump truck full of money.)

  Beats me. I went out to the airport and watched hot, grumpy photographers on stakeout at the TWA jet. I stood on top of the control tower and got something—a pistol, a finger, a rolled-up copy of the TWA in-flight magazine—pointed at me from the cockpit window. There were a lot of reporters and TV producers talking into paper bags. This is because the militiamen call you a spy if you have a two-way radio, and also because the militiamen love two-way radios and calling you a spy at gunpoint is a good way to get a free one.

  Nothing happening here. I went back to the Summerland and poked around in the ABC office. A newsroom had been created by hauling the beds out of five hotel rooms and shipping in 2,500 kilos of electronic gear. There were three bureau chiefs in the place, and correspondents, producers, editors, technicians, camera crews, drivers, and money men all yelling orders at each other while the open phone lines disgorged useful suggestions from the ABC brass in New York:

  “Hello, Beirut. We have a report from the Muncie, Indiana, Advertiser-Wasp that the hostages have been moved to Senegal. Would you confirm?”

  “Hello, Beirut. Is Kahlil Gibran still alive? Could we get him on the wire for a Good Morning America phoner?”

  “Hello, Beirut. Radio New Zealand s
ays five of the hostages have mumps.”

  I’m used to the quiet life of free-lance writers where we just go home and make things up. This looked more like the time my little sister knocked my ant farm off the dresser.

  I sat down in one of the five hotel rooms and watched the tapes ABC was sending out, like I’d watch pay TV in any hotel room except with a mess of old coffee cups, wine bottles, room-service trays, and cigarette butts even worse than the one I usually accumulate. There was gunfire on the screen, gunfire outside too. Weird. Reminded me of those sixties acid wallows where, you know, like this is the movie and you’re watching it, but, like, you’re in it and . . . The medium is the message, indeed.

  Darn good coverage, though, I thought: swell get-a-load-of-this-guy smile from Captain Testlake with that gun-waving Hizbullah bunny behind him, nice earnest hostage interviews (one guy told his wife to pay the mortgage, though I don’t think that got on the air), and deeply important (if slightly dull-o) talks with Nabih Berri (who doesn’t speak English worse than most people who’ve lived in Detroit).

  I understand that back home there was a lot of argle-bargle about what the networks were doing during America Held Hostage: The Sequel. But you have to remember a television has two sides. I was up by the head. What came out the other end, I can’t tell you. For all I know Eyewitness News starred Donny and Marie and featured commentary by Koko, the gorilla who uses computers to talk.