Holidays in Hell: In Which Our Intrepid Reporter Travels to the World's Worst Places and Asks, "What's Funny About This" (33 page)

Loaded with three times the European Economic Community's
import limit on tobacco and foodstuffs and stinking like a delicatessen, I got as far as Frankfurt. Then a telex came through from
Libya that all foreign journalists who could count higher than ten
were expelled.

Back in London-tired, discouraged and a little drunk-I
called an old girlfriend from college. She and I had been through a
lot together back when the U. S. was taking a punch at the Vietnamese and I was the one blocking the streets and screaming about
American imperialism. (Morality was so much simpler when I
thought the government was trying to kill me.) This girl is married
now, with a family. So it wasn't anything, you know. . . . I mean
we'd hardly seen each other since she moved to England fifteen
years ago. I just longed for a friendly face. (Where do they keep the
motels in Europe, anyway?)

"You're bloody mad!" she shouted. "All you Americans are
mad! All you want to do is put McDonald's all over the earth and
start World War III!"

And this from someone who was born and raised in Great
Neck, Long Island. Well, if I was going to get barked at, it might as
well be by a person who does it for a living. I went to see Meg
Beresford, general secretary of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.

In England, even the peace movement has a bureaucracy, and
the CND is the central organizing body for all those demonstrations
the Brits are always having against cruise missiles, Polaris submarines, atomic power plants and other things that can or do blow
up. In England, everything has a musty old tradition too. It was the CND who, nearly thirty years ago, devised that semaphore of
Nuclear Disarmament initials, the ® . Thus, the "footprint of the
American chicken" is really a European invention.

Meg told me that the phones at CND had been ringing off the
hook on the day of the air strike and that the demonstrations
against the raid had been highly spontaneous. She said the air
strike was "a foolish way to try to deal with terrorism" and that
people in England had "a feeling that Libya is rather a small actor"
in the terror pageant and that the effect of the raid "will be to bring
terror to our streets."

What I didn't understand, I said, was the emotional intensity
of the demonstrations. Big civilized countries had been launching
punative raids on misbehaving weedy little native powers
since . . . . Well, at least since the Redcoats shot up Lexington
and Concord.

Meg said that when the Fills were launched from English
soil, the British realized for the first time "what those bases were
for."

This made the British sound a little thick.

Meg claimed the apparent attempt to kill Qaddafi himself had
upset people, "like watching one of those John Wayne movies."

When a European mentions John Wayne, you know you're
going to get an earful.

Meg admitted there was "resentment at American culture."
She said, "Western democracies feel there is nothing immoral
about spreading that kind of system, spreading Western-style democracy." She paused. "McDonald's everywhere."

Will somebody please tell me what's the matter with
McDonald's? It's not like the Europeans don't line up by the
millions to eat there. Maybe McDonald's food isn't the best thing
for you, but roasted goose liver smooshed up with truffles isn't
either. And has anyone ever smoked a joint and had a "p&te de foie
gran attack"?

"There is," said Meg, "at the back of the American psyche the
feeling that the American way is the best."

As opposed to what? As opposed to living in seedy, old, downat-the-heels England with an eighteenth-century class system and
seventeenth-century plumbing? Or as opposed to lining up for pita bread ration cards in a half-assed African sandlot run by a fanatical
big mouth with a dish towel on his head?

"What do you think we should be doing?" I asked Meg.

"Sitting down in a really serious way to solve the Middle East
problem is what Reagan should be doing."

"What if it won't solve?" I said. "I know the source of this
terrorism is the Israeli-Palestinian problem. And that's a place
where two wrongs don't make a right. But it's also a place where two
rights don't make a right."

"The Palestinian problem has to be treated in a much more
serious way," said Meg.

The Europeans are great ones for solving problems by taking
them more seriously.

She said there was a need for a "definite Middle East policy
that's not involved with violence." (Which would be a first in three
or four thousand years.) "Something," said Meg, "that other European countries with more experience and understanding could get
involved with. . . . The U. N. has to be the place where these
things ultimately get solved."

I mean, the U. N. has done such a bang-up job on the IraqIran war, for instance, and the Pol Pot holocaust. They've really got
things straightened out in Namibia and Afghanistan too-with the
help, of course, of those European countries with more experience
and understanding.

I don't mean to pick on Meg Beresford, really. She is obviously a decent person and committed as all get-out to international niceness. But she herself said, musing on the booze-addled
States-side Micks who give the IRA guns and money, "If the U.S.
feels morally justified in bombing Libya, Britain should feel justified in bombing the U. S."

"Damn right," I said. "Any dumb potato-head who's dragged
those rotten ancestral quarrels to his new home in America deserves no better than to get a British laser bomb targeted on his
south Boston bar." (That is, assuming the British have laser bombs,
and assuming the British have the capability to launch a transAtlantic air strike without U.S. aid. Which they don't.)

I left CND even more depressed than when I'd arrived. Not
over anything Meg said, it's just that why are all high-minded causes so dowdy? The CND offices were an earnest muddle of
desks and cubicles and unpainted bookshelves with piles and
stacks and quires and reams of those mimeographed handouts that
swarm around all do-good organizations like flies on cattle. The
better the cause, the worse the atmosphere. And what cause could
be better than saving the whole of mankind from nuke vaporizing?
You could bottle the dumpy glumness at CND and sell it to .. .
well, to the English. London is a quaint and beautiful city-if you
stick to the double-decker tourist buses. But the CND offices were
out in the East End, in the aptly named district of Shoreditch. Dr.
Johnson said, "When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life."
But these days he might just be tired of shabby, sad crowds, lowincome housing that looks worse than the weather and tattoo-faced,
spike-haired pin brains on the dole.

Meanwhile, the Soviet Union was trying to poison half the
world with its Chernobyl atomic power plant. But was anybody
blocking Oxford Street or calling Gorbachev's energy policy "a
game of cossacks and rabbis'? It just didn't seem fair.

I decided to go to West Berlin. Berlin was close to the scum
cloud of cesium, iodine and other isotopes that will light up your
thyroid and give your kids three heads. Maybe I could make some
sense of the Europeans in this isolated, beleagured and slightly
radioactive outpost of freedom. And maybe I could peek over the
Iron Curtain and get a look at what we've been protecting these
Euro-weenies from since 1945.

That wasn't hard. The boundary between East and West is
shockingly apparent from the air. The plane descended to 9,500
feet, the permitted altitude through the air corridor to Berlin, and
there it was-a thick streak of raked-dirt minefield following, with
painful accuracy, the medieval zig-zag border between the kingdoms of Hanover and Prussia.

There was a slide-show change in the landscape. Crisp paved
highways turned to muzzy gravel roads. The little towns were
suddenly littler. Surburban sprawl evaporated. The distinctive fishbone patterns of parking lots disappeared. The lush, ditzy quiltwork of private farmland gave way to big, rational, geometric
collective fields, where the crops looked thin and the furrows were
harrowed T-square straight with no concession to contour plowing. The constraints, the loss of liberties were visible from nearly two
miles up.

Upon landing the scenery changed back. Suddenly you were
in the world again, at least the slightly fussy, slightly tiresome
European version of it.

It was May Day, and when I checked into my hotel, I asked
the desk clerk if there were any big Red doings scheduled.

"Yes," she said, "in the Platz der Republik there is always a
large program."

"Where's that?" I asked.

"Oh, just down the street."

"In West Berlin?"

"Oh, yes."

"Don't they have a big May day thing in East Berlin? I mean,
this is the main communist holiday."

"No, I don't think so," said the desk clerk, "not so much over
there. The demonstrations are usually on this side."

The Platz der Republik is a wide, grassy square near the
Brandenburg Gate. The "large program" was a sort of political fair
put on by one of West Berlin's left-wing trade-union organizations.
There were no pony rides or ferris wheels, but there was food, beer,
a bad rock band singing memorized American lyrics and a hundred
booths and tents filled with haymows of those high-minded mimeographed leaflets. The booths seemed like the world's worst carnival games. "Hurry! Hurry! Hurry! Hit the clown on the nose, and
win three hundred pounds of literature denouncing U. S. intervention in Nicaragua and a `Ban NATO' button!"

It was fascinating to wander among the posters and banners
and displays of elaborately captioned photographs and be absolutely ignorant of the language. German, to me, looks like what
worms do under rocks. There were lots of photos of dirty and tiredlooking workers, but I couldn't tell if they were exploited victims of
capitalist oppression or heroic comrades struggling to build the
joyful new world of socialism. The dead babies in blast wreckage
were definitely victims of capitalist oppression. They just didn't
have a Kievish look about them. In fact, I saw no reference to
Chernobyl. It had been almost a week since the accident started,
and the plume of loathsomeness sprouting from the Ukrainian steppe had, that very day, reached its greatest extent. But there
were plenty of poster-paint cartoons of Uncle Sam with dog fangs.
Usually he was gnawing on someone foreign-looking.

And fifty feet away was the Berlin Wall.

West Berlin is the city that Iggy Pop once moved to because
New York wasn't decadent enough for him. I was expecting at least
Cabaret or maybe Gotterdammerung performed by the cast of La
Cage Aux Folles. Forget it. We bombed the place flat in WWII, and
they rebuilt it as a pretty good imitation of Minneapolis. The
downtown hub of West Berlin, the Europa Center, is a perfectly
modern business/shopping/entertainment complex. As a result, the
hot tip for an evening of merriment is to cruise the mall. Furthermore, they serve you bologna for breakfast.

On Saturday there was finally a demonstration in West Berlin
protesting the Chernobyl mess. Eight or ten thousand people participated, but this was only half the crowd that rallied against the
Libya strike. None of the placards or banners even mentioned
Russia by name. And the whole thing was a thoroughly spiritless
affair.

Everyone gathered in the Europa Center in front of the Aeroflot airline office. A couple of chants were begun, but nobody took
them up. Then the crowd marched. It marched a mile out toward
the Technical College, a mile down toward Adenauer Platz and a
mile or so back toward downtown, where it petered out in some
obligatory speech-making. Apparently this was a standard route.
On the way, the crowd passed the American cultural center, which
was blocked off by tall wire-mesh barricades and a tripe cordon of
riot police. There was nothing in the least anti-American about this
demonstration, but the authorities seemed to be worried that the
protestors would turn and storm the cultural center from pure force
of habit.

As I slogged along, bored and footsore, I talked to the English-speakers in the bunch. They said it was a shame I'd missed
the Libya demo. That one was much more interesting.

"How come?" I asked.

They got all excited and told me West Germany was "a colony
of the United States." They told me the La Belle discotheque
terrorist bomb that killed an American soldier in Berlin was prob ably a set-up. "Perhaps this bombing was necessary to bomb
Tripoli." And they told me . . . Shit, they told me all sorts of
things. Basically, they told me off.

I'm sorry. I quit. I just don't have the stomach to go through
my sheaves of scribbled notes and piles of garbled tape cassettes
again just to shake out three more quotes about what a sack of
bastards Americans are.

The day before I left Berlin, I ran into a dozen young Arab
men on the street. They were trotting along, taking up the whole
sidewalk, accosting busty girls and generally making a nuisance of
themselves. One was beating on a snareless drum, and the others
were letting loose with intermittent snatches of song and aggressive
shouts. They descended on me and loudly demanded cigarettes in
German.

"I don't speak German," I said.

"Are you American?" said one, suddenly polite.

"Yes."

"Please, my friend, if you don't mind, do you have a cigarette
you could spare?"

I gave them a pack. "Where are you from?" I asked.

"West Beirut," said the drum beater.

"I've been there," I said.

"It is wonderful, no?"

Compared to Berlin, it is. "Sure," I said. They began reminiscing volubly. "What are you doing here?" I asked.

"Our families sent us because of the war. We want to go back
to Beirut but we cannot."

I told them I guessed I couldn't go back either, what with the
kidnapping and all. They laughed. One of them stuck out his
middle finger and said, "This place sucks."