Holidays in Heck

by P. J. O'Rourke

  Everything that makes for a terrible pre-teen—the attitude, the talking back, the eye-rolling, the exasperated sighs—makes for an excellent Hong Kong shopper. That’s how shopping is done in Hong Kong. Poppet couldn’t quite get the knack of it. But Muffin would flounce into a shop, examine a few items without evident interest, and loudly announce, “Ho gwai!” (“Too expensive!”)

  More than one shopkeeper came out from behind the cash register to embrace her. “You real Hong Kong girl!”

  Muffin and Popped bought Christmas presents for Mom. Back home Mrs. O. would receive, from the Hong Kong Santa, a Tian Tan Buddha snow globe; a pair of embroidered slippers (size 1½); a kite in the shape of, I think, a cockroach; and a paper mobile phone that can be burned on the grave of Mrs. O.’s ancestors so that they’ll have cell service in heaven.

  I took the kids back to Ovoid Tower to teach them to eat properly with those chopsticks. This is easy, with the help of HK $100 worth of candy. You start with gummy bears. Anyone can pick up a gummy bear with chopsticks. Then you progress to gumdrops, through Hershey Kisses and jelly beans, until you arrive at the ultimate test of skill, the peanut M&M. Dad calls floorsies!

  “But what about noodles?” asked Poppet, who, since her talk with the sharks, was taking the subject seriously.

  “Oh, even the Chinese can’t eat noodles with chop-sticks,” I said. “Just wait until your mother isn’t looking, bring the bowl right up to your face, and shovel the noodles into your mouth like everybody else does.” We practiced with Twizzlers.

  Mrs. O. came home burdened with packages and also Chinese take-out.

  “We’re so not hungry,” said Muffin.

  Mrs. O. eyed the candy wrappers covering the apartment floor. “Would that have anything to do with candy?”

  “Candy is a state of mind,” said Poppet, who seemed to have been absorbing Oriental philosophy.

  Tom and Mai had a barbecue on the roof of their apartment building in Wan Chai. I looked at the splendid view and drank. Mrs. O. looked at the all-too-climbable railing around the patio and didn’t.

  We don’t generally—because we’re not insane—bring our children to grown-up parties. But Tom and Mai insisted. “The secret to traveling,” said Tom, who has spent even more years doing it than I have, “is to bring the party with you.” Our little party comported themselves pretty well, ages considered.

  Muffin realized that if she carefully refined her sulk, she could do her sulking in front of Tom’s wide-screen TV watching Japanese anime while the caterers served her treats.

  “Muffin,” said Mai, “will make a perfect Tai Tai.” (Rich Hong Kong wife.)

  Buster attached himself to the best-looking female guest. He jumped into her lap, clasped her hand, and, moving her wrist from first through fourth gears, explained how to use a stick shift. Then he told her everything about ambulances and fire trucks. Mrs. O. tried to shoo him off. He turned and glared and said in a fierce whisper, “Mommy, go away! I’m talking to she!”

  Poppet, however, was undergoing a homesickness melt-down. It seems that in the congress of plush toys that accompany her everywhere, some key player—perhaps the Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi stuffed ferret or something—had been left behind in New Hampshire.

  When I’d had enough to drink to be under the illusion that things can be explained to children, I called on my old pal (who, sadly, has since died) Hugh Van Es to back me up in my pep talk to the sobbing Poppet.

  “I know you’re homesick, Honey,” I said. “But everybody here’s been homesick. We’ve all spent lots of time away from home. Remember that picture that I showed you in the Foreign Correspondents’ Club? The one with the helicopter on top of the building and all the people escaping? Uncle Hugh took that picture. It was in the Vietnam War when the bad guys conquered Saigon, and Uncle Hugh was the only reporter left. Think how homesick he must have been.”

  “But Uncle Hugh,” said Poppet, awash in tears, “you didn’t leave your most important stuffed animal at home.”

  In a day, of course, the homesickness had doubled back on itself. Poppet was weeping about the prospect of leaving Hong Kong. “Because there’s no feng shui in New Hampshire.”

  “Feng shui?” I said.

  “Aunt Mai told me all about it. Everything has to be rearranged to make the invisible dragons happy,” said Poppet, rearranging her stuffed animals and Buster’s trucks and cars. “In Hong Kong everybody sees invisible dragons, just like I do!”

  Buster came out of the nosewheel kitchen and raced through the bedrooms with his police cruiser PA system blaring. “I live in Honk-Honk! I live in Honk-Honk!” He paused in front of me, bit his lip, and looked serious. “Daddy,” he said, “do ladies like diapers?”

  “Ladies?”

  “Like she.”

  “Your father,” I said, “would never claim to be an expert on what women want. But, no, ladies don’t like diapers.”

  And Buster has been, more or less, dry all day ever since—having made a sacrifice of self-restraint for the sake of beauty that puts him one up on Bill Clinton in the moral intelligence department.

  Muffin and Mrs. O. returned from shopping. Muffin had discovered an Australian surf-wear shop where the clothing was manufactured to look like it had already been eaten by Poppet’s shark with the chopsticks. “I am so over New Hampshire,” said Muffin.

  I was sitting in the FCC with Hugh Van Es. CNN International was broadcasting news about very interesting-looking riots in Indonesia. That and a few drinks were making Hugh and me wax nostalgic about our foreign correspondent careers. The children ate noodles in the approved Chinese fashion. Mrs. O. arrived from Central with more packages. Hugh called for the waiter to bring her a Tai Tai drink and said, “You and the kids seem right at home in Hong Kong.”

  “P.J. is not,” said Mrs. O., “allowed to leave us here.”

  13

  THE BIG STICK, OR WHY I VOTED FOR JOHN MCCAIN

  USS Theodore Roosevelt, April 2008

  Landing on an aircraft carrier is . . .

  To begin with, you travel out to the carrier on a powerful, compact, and chunky aircraft—a weight-lifter version of a regional airline turboprop. This is a C-2 Greyhound, named after the wrong dog; C-2 Flying Pit Bull is more like it. In fact what everyone calls the C-2 is the COD. This is an acronym for “Curling the hair Of Dumb reporters,” although they tell you it stands for “Carrier Onboard Delivery.”

  There is only one window in the freight/passenger compartment, and you’re nowhere near it. Your seat faces aft. Cabin lighting and noise insulation are absent. The heater is from the parts bin at the Plymouth factory in 1950. You sit reversed in cold, dark cacophony while the airplane maneuvers for what is euphemistically called a “landing.” The nearest land is 150 miles away. And the plane doesn’t land; its tailhook snags a cable on the carrier deck. The effect is of being strapped to an armchair and dropped backward off a balcony onto a patio. There is a fleeting moment of unconsciousness. This is a good thing, as is being far from the window, because what happens next is that the COD reels the hooked cable out the entire length of the carrier deck until a big, fat nothing is between you and a plunge in the ocean, should the hook, cable, or pilot’s judgment snap. Then, miraculously, you’re still alive.

  Landing on an aircraft carrier is the most fun I’ve ever had with my trousers on.

  And the twenty-four hours that I spent aboard the USS Theodore Roosevelt—the “Big Stick”—were an equally unalloyed pleasure. I love big, moving machinery. And machinery doesn’t get any bigger, or more moving, than a U.S.-flagged nuclear-powered aircraft carrier that’s longer than the Empire State Building is tall and has four acres of flight deck. This four acres, if it were a nation, would have the fifth- or sixth-largest air force in the world: eighty-six fixed-wing aircraft plus helicopters.

  The Theodore Roosevelt and its accompanying cruisers, destroyers, and submarines can blow up most of the military of most of the countries on earth. God ha
s given America a special mission. Russia can barely blow up Chechnya. China can blow up Tibet, maybe, and possibly Taiwan. And the EU can’t blow up Liechtenstein. But the USA can blow up . . . Gosh, where to start?

  But I didn’t visit the Theodore Roosevelt just to gush patriotically—although some patriotic gushing was called for in America at the time. And while I’m at it, let me heap praise on the people who arranged and guided my Big Stick tour. I was invited on the “embark” thanks to the kindness of the Honorable William J. (Jim) Haynes, former U.S. Department of Defense general counsel. The trip was arranged by Colonel Kelly Wheaton, senior military assistant to the Acting Department of Defense general counsel, Daniel Dell’Orto; and by Lieutenant Commander Philip Rosi, public affairs officer of the Theodore Roosevelt Carrier Strike Group.

  I traveled with the Honorable Mr. Dell’Orto and a group of ten (minus me) Distinguished Visitors. On board we met people more distinguished yet, including Captain C. L. Wheeler, commanding officer of the Theodore Roosevelt; Rear Admiral Frank C. Pandolfe, commander of the Theodore Roosevelt Carrier Strike Group; and Command Master Chief Petty Officer Chris Engles, who—as anyone with experience in or of the Navy knows (my dad was a chief petty officer during World War II)—actually runs everything.

  I could go on about the TR and its crew at epic length. And one day, if they’ll invite me back, I’ll do so. But, being a reporter, I wasn’t there to report on things. I was there to get a journalistic hook—a tailhook, as it were—for a preconceived idea. I wanted to say something about presidential candidate Senator John McCain. And as soon as our distinguished visitors group donned “float coats” and ear protection and went to the flight deck and saw F-18s take off and land, I had something to say.

  Carrier launches are astonishing events. The plane is moved to within what seems like a bowling alley’s length of the bow. A blast shield larger than any government building driveway Khomeini-flipper rises behind the fighter jet, and the jet’s twin engines are cranked to maximum thrust. A slot-car slot runs down the middle of the bowling alley. The powered-up jet is held at the end of its slot by a steel shear pin smaller than a V8 can. When the shear pin shears, the jet is unleashed and so is a steam catapult that hurls the plane down the slot, from 0 to 130 miles per hour in two seconds. And—if all goes well—the airplane is airborne. This is not a pilot taking off. This is a pilot as cat’s-eye marble pinched between boundless thumb and infinite forefinger of Heaven’s own Wham-O slingshot.

  Carrier landings are more astonishing. We were in heavy seas. Spray was coming over the bow onto the flight deck, sixty feet above the waterline. As the ship was pitching, eighteen tons of F-18 with a wingspan of forty-odd feet approached at the speed of a celebrity sex-assault rumor. Four acres of flight deck have never looked so small. Had it been lawn you’d swear you could do it in fifteen minutes with a push mower.

  Four arresting cables are stretched across the stern, each thick as a pepperoni. The cables are held slightly above the runway by metal hoops. The pilot can’t really see these cables and isn’t really looking at that runway, which is rising at him like a slap in the face or falling away like the slope of a playground slide when you’re four. The pilot has his eye on the “meatball,” a device, portside midship, with a glowing dot that does—or doesn’t—line up between two lighted dashes. This indicates that the pilot is . . . no, isn’t . . . yes, is . . . isn’t . . . is . . . on course to land. Meanwhile there are sailors in charge of the landing, hunched at a control panel portside aft. They are on the radio telling the pilot what he’s doing or better had do or hadn’t better. They are also waving colored paddles at him, meaning this or that. (I don’t pretend to know what I’m going on about here.) Plus there are other pilots on the radio along with an officer in the control tower. The pilot is very well trained, because at this point his head doesn’t explode.

  The pilot drops his tailhook. This is not an impressive-looking piece of equipment—no smirks about the 1991 Tailhook Association brouhaha, please. The hook doesn’t appear sturdy enough to yank Al Franken offstage when Al is smirking about the presidential candidate who belonged to the Tailhook Association. The hook is supposed to—and somehow usually does—strike the deck between the second and third arresting cables. The cable then does not jerk the F-18 back to the stern the way it would in a cartoon, although watching these events is so unreal that you expect cartoon logic to apply.

  Now imagine all concerned doing all of the above with their eyes closed. That is a night operation. We went back on deck to see—wrong verb—to feel and hear the night flights. The only things we could see were the flaming twin suns of the F-18 afterburners at the end of the catapult slot.

  Some say John McCain’s character was formed in a North Vietnamese prison. I say those people should take a gander at what John chose to do—voluntarily. Being a carrier pilot requires aptitude, intelligence, skill, knowledge, discernment, and courage of a kind rarely found anywhere but in a poem of Homer’s or a half-gallon of Dewar’s. I look from John McCain to what the opposition has to offer. There’s Ms. Smarty-Pantsuit, the Bosnia-under-sniper-fire poster gal, former prominent Washington hostess, and now the JV senator from the state that brought you Eliot Spitzer and Bear Stearns. And there’s the happy-talk boy wonder, the plaster Balthazar in the Cook County political crèche, whose policy pronouncements sound like a walk through Greenwich Village in 1968, “Change, man? Got any spare change? Change?”

  Some people say John McCain isn’t conservative enough. But there’s more to conservatism than low taxes, Jesus, and waterboarding at Gitmo. Conservatism is also a matter of honor, duty, valor, patriotism, self-discipline, responsibility, good order, respect for our national institutions, reverence for the traditions of civilization, and adherence to the political honesty upon which all principles of democracy are based. Given what screwups we humans are in these respects, conservatism is also a matter of sense of humor. Heard any good quips lately from Hillary or Barack?

  A one-day visit to an aircraft carrier is a lifelong lesson in conservatism. The ship is immense, going seven decks down from the flight deck and ten levels up in the tower. But it’s full, with some 5,500 people aboard. Living space is as cramped as steerage on the way to Ellis Island. Even the pilots live in three-bunk cabins as small and windowless as a hall closet. A warship is a sort of giant Sherman tank upon the water. Once belowdecks you’re sealed inside. There are no cheery portholes to wave from.

  McCain could hardly escape understanding the limits of something huge but hermetic, like a government, and packed with a madding crowd. It requires organization, needs hierarchies, demands meritocracy, insists upon delegation of authority. An intricate, time-tested system replete with checks and balances is not a plaything to be moved around in a dollhouse of ideology. It is not a toy bunny serving imaginary sweets in a make-believe political doll house. The captain commands, but his whims do not. He answers to the nation.

  And yet an aircraft carrier is more an example of what people can do than what government can’t. Scores of people are all over the flight deck during takeoffs and landings. They wear color-coded T-shirts—yellow for flight-directing, purple for fueling, blue for chocking and tying down, red for weapon-loading, brown for I-know-not-what, and so on. These people can’t hear each other. They use hand signals. And, come night ops, they can’t do that. Really, they communicate by “training telepathy.” They have absorbed their responsibilities to the point that each knows exactly where to be and when and doing what.

  These are supremely dangerous jobs. And most of the flight deck crew members are only nineteen or twenty. Indeed the whole ship is run by youngsters. The average age, officers and all, is about twenty-four. ”These are the same kids,” a chief petty officer said, “who, back on land, have their hats bumped to one side and their pants around their knees, hanging out on corners. And here they’re in charge of thirty-five-million-dollar airplanes.”

  The crew is in more danger than the pilots. If an
arresting cable breaks—and they do—half a dozen young men and women could be sliced in half. When a plane crashes, a weapon malfunctions, or a fire breaks out, there’s no ejection seat for the flight deck crew. While we were on the Theodore Roosevelt, a memorial service was held for a crew member who had been swept overboard. Would there have been an admiral and a captain of an aircraft carrier and hundreds of the bravest Americans at a memorial service for you when you were twenty?

  Supposedly the “youth vote” is all for Obama. But it’s John McCain who actually has put his life in the hands of adolescents on a carrier deck. Supposedly the “women’s vote” is . . . well, let’s not go too far with this. I can speak to John’s honor, duty, valor, patriotism, etc., but I’m not sure how well his self-discipline would have fared if he’d been on an aircraft carrier with more than 500 beautiful women sailors the way I was. At least John likes women, which is more than we can say about Hillary’s attitude toward, for instance, the women in Bill’s life, who may constitute nearly a majority of the “women’s vote.”

  These would be interesting subjects to discuss with the Theodore Roosevelt shipmates, but time was up.

  Back on the COD you’re buckled in and told to brace as if for a crash. Whereupon there is a crash. The catapult sends you squashed against your flight harness. And just when you think that everything inside your body is going to blow out your nose and navel, it’s over. You’re in steady, level flight.

  A strange flight it is—from the hard-and-fast reality of a floating island to the fantasy world of American solid ground. In this never-never land a couple of tinhorn Second City shysters—who, put together, don’t have the life experience of the lowest-ranking gob-with-a-swab cleaning a head on the Big Stick—presume to run for president of the United States. They’re not just running against the hero John Mc-Cain; they’re running against heroism itself and against almost everything about America that ought to be conserved.