I don't know why Mickey Mouse isn't in the "France" exhibit. You see him all over Paris where he is considered an existential figure of stature equal to Camus or Jerry Lewis. But it was worth Epcot's $15 admission ticket to see a glass of "lait" on a French menu.
"Japan" has the best gift shop.
"Canada" is surely indulging in a bit of good-natured selfmockery with a national display so dull that its centerpiece is a one-quarter scale replica of the Chateau Frontenac, a second-rate luxury hotel built in Quebec City in the 1920s.
I picked up one of the toys for sale at the "United Kingdom" pavilion. I leave it to your imagination where it was made.
With Epcot Center the Disney corporation has accomplished something I didn't think possible in today's world. They have created a land of make-believe that's worse than regular life. Unvarnished reality would be preferable. In fact, it might be fun.
"United Kingdom" could feature green-haired teenagers wearing diaper pins through their lips and spray-painting swastikas on the fake bull's-eye pub windows. "France" could be manned by snarling Parisian garcons bullying the naive tourists into ordering peeled mice in heavy cream. "America" could be the very stretch of highway through Kissimmee, Florida, that leads to Epcot's gatesa thousand Dairy Queens, RV parks, pee-wee golf establishments, and souvenir stands selling cypress knee clocks and shellacked blowfish. All the Mexicans next door could be trying to sneak in. We could buy cars from General Motors, gas up at Exxon and drive over to the Bell System where, if they have any sense, they'll give us free whiskey so we'll make nine-hour phone calls to old girlfriends in Taos. When we've spent all our money doing this, we could go to Kraft and get free government-surplus cheese-food substances. And, if Disney still wants to make Epcot Center futuristic, they could do so by blowing the place up with an atom bomb.
Among the EuroWeenies
APRIL-MAY 1986
The Europeans are going to have to feather their nests with somebody else's travelers checks this year. The usual flock of American pigeons is crapping on statues elsewhere. Sylvester Stallone canned the Cannes Film Festival. Prince won't tour this side of the sink. The U. S. Junior Wimbledon team is keeping its balls on the home court. And Trans-Atlantic rubber-neck bookings have taken a dive. Some say it's fear of terrorism. Some say it's Chernobyl fallout. Some say it's the weak dollar. But all of that ignores one basic fact. This place sucks.
I've been over here for one gray, dank spring month now, and I think I can tell you why everyone with an IQ bigger than his hat size hit the beach at Ellis Island. Say what you want about "land of opportunity" and "purpled mountains majesty above the fruited plain," our forebears moved to the United States because they were sick to death of lukewarm beer-and lukewarm coffee and lukewarm bath water and lukewarm mystery cutlets with muckycolored mushroom cheese junk on them. Everything in Europe is lukewarm except the radiators. You could use the radiators to make party ice. But nobody does. I'll bet you could walk from the Ural Mountains to the beach at Biarritz and not find one rock-hard, crystal-clear, fist-sized American ice cube. Ask for whiskey on the rocks, and you get a single, gray, crumbling leftover from some Lilliputian puddle freeze plopped in a thimble of Scotch (for which you're charged like sin). And the phones don't work. They go "blatblat" and "neek-neek" and "ugu-ugu-ugu." No two dial tones are alike. The busy signal sounds as if the phone is ringing. And when the phone rings you think the dog farted.
All the light switches in Europe are upside down. The electrical plugs are terrifying with nine or a dozen huge, nasty prongs, and you'd better wear rubber boots if you come within a yard of them because house current here is about one hundred thousand volts. Not that that makes the appliances work. This electric typewriter I'm pounding, for instance-I'd throw it out the window but it's one of those silly European windows that, when you push it open from the right, comes around from the left and smacks you in the back of the head.
The Europeans can't figure out which side of the road to drive on, and I can't figure out how to flush their toilets. Do I push the knob or pull it or twist it or pump it? And I keep cracking my shins on that stupid bidet thing. (Memo to Europeans: Try washing your whole body; believe me, you'd smell better.) Plus there are ruins everywhere. The Italians have had two thousand years to fix up the Forum and just look at the place.
I've had it with these dopey little countries and all their poky borders. You can't swing a cat without sending it through customs. Everything's too small. The cars are too small. The beds are too small. The elevators are the size of broom closets. Even the languages are itty-bitty. Sometimes you need two or three just to get you through till lunch.
It's not like the Europeans have been very nice hosts either. The whole month here has been one long shower of shit about America, just because we took a punch at the Libyans. There were huge demonstrations in Germany, Italy and Spain. In West Berlin twenty thousand young bucketheads turned out. In Barcelona a group of protestors vented their fury on that symbol of American imperialism, a McDonald's. In London thousands of peace mongers blocked the main shopping thoroughfare of Oxford Street, staging sit-down strikes and throwing bottles at the police. Thousands more Brits came out to holler in Manchester, Cardiff and Glasgow and at the military bases on the Clyde and in Oxfordshire. According to various opinion polls, 66 percent of the British deplored our behavior as did 75 percent of the West Germans, 32 percent of the French and 60 percent of the Italians. In Belgium a friend of mine was stopped on the street by a policeman and told he should be ashamed to be an American.
The cover story of Time Out, London's equivalent to New York magazine, was OVER ARMED, OVER EAGER, OVER HERE. A British TV comedy program showed a puppet skit with President Reagan as the Jordanian who tried to blow up an El Al airliner and Mrs. Thatcher as the dim-bulb pregnant Irish girl duped into carrying the explosives. The New Statesman ran an editorial explaining how U.S. defense policy can be understood only in light of American football. "Defense, to the average redneck," it said, "means hitting your opponent hard before he sees the ball." An article in the magazine New Socialist said that in the U.S. world view "non-Americans are simply not people," claimed that, "To be President, you have to be mad or an actor," and asked itself, "Does not the United States need a hostile relationship with the Soviet Union to contain discontent at home. . . ?" Another article in the same magazine began, "It is the United States which is clearly the greatest evil to peoples seeking just rights of self-determination." (New Socialist is not, by the way, some nut-fudge fringe publication like it would be in the States. It's the official organ of the Labour Party.) As Paris Match put it, "Le point de vue europeen etait different et tons nos responsables plaidaient pour une action plus discrete." Whatever that means.
Actually, the only discrete people I've met here were Libyans, the employees of Libyan Arab Airlines in Paris, who never referred to our rocketing and bombing each other as anything but "this difficult situation."
I was talking to the Libyans because I never wanted to go to Europe in the first place. I was headed for Tripoli. It was a dream by-line: "From our correspondent on the Line of Death." But daily life kept getting in the way. Taxes were due. I owed a 4,000-word story to Gerbil and Pet Mouse Monthly. My girlfriend was restive. She pointed out I'd forgotten Christmas and that when I'd taken her out for New Year's, I'd taken her out in the backyard to blow off M-80s under the garbage cans.
I set to work with a will, emptying checkbooks, wrestling accountants, interviewing small rodents, scouring the bargain bin at Cartier's. By Monday, April 14, I had everything paid, written, kissed, made up and in the mail. My safari jacket was packed, my tape recorder loaded. I zipped shut my official foreign correspondent duffel bag, fixed myself a drink and flipped on the eleven o'clock news. "BOOM!" My friend Charles Glass, ABC-TV's Middle East correspondent, was holding a telephone receiver out a window of the Grand Hotel in Tripoli. "We're not sure exactly what's going on," shouted Glass at the phone. I was. Those weren't the Nicaraguan
contras out there pounding Mad Mo, the terrorbombing Sheikh of Shriek. "It would appear that the United States has launched a military action against Libya," shouted Glass, trying to sound grave. But you could hear the boyish enthusiasm creeping into his voice the way it always does when a reporter manages to get himself right smack dab in the middle of something god-awful.-
I could have cried. I did cry. I threw things. I took the first plane to Paris.
Paris had the nearest Libyan Embassy or People's Bureau or whatever they're calling them. It looked like military school the way I'd pictured it when my parents used to threaten to send me there. I made four trips to this forbidding crib before somebody there told me the only way I could get a visa to go to Tripoli was to go to Tripoli.
I went back to my hotel and got on the worthless, static-filled French telephone. Air France wasn't flying to Libya just then. British Airways definitely wasn't. Swissair was coy. Maybe they were, and maybe they weren't. I finally got a reservation on Lufthansa, rushed to their office and handed over a thousand dollars worth of funny-colored French bumwad. The ticket agent said, "You have a visa?"
"My visa is waiting for me in Tripoli."
"We cannot take you to Tripoli without a visa."
"I can't get a visa without going to Tripoli."
"You can get a visa in Tripoli?"
"Right."
"But we cannot take you there."
"Why not?"
"You don't have a visa."
You can always reason with a German. You can always reason with a barnyard animal, too, for all the good it does.
I didn't figure an American would be very welcome on the Libyan flag carrier at the moment, unless he wanted to travel naked and in a muzzle. But it was worth a try. I went to the Libyan Arab Airlines office on the Champs-Elysees. There were half a dozen Libyans inside. I picked out a young one behind the counter and began explaining with many worried hand gestures how I had been told by my editor, of a very important magazine, to go directly to Libya no matter what and now I was stranded in this faraway country among foreigners and could not seem to get to Libya by any means, etc. "Oh, my goodness," said the young man, "and right now there is this . . ." He paused and considered the delicacy of my feelings. "... this difficult situation."
I'd hate to have to explain this to anyone who was on the Achille Lauro, but Arabs are the sweetest-natured people on earth. To meet an Arab is to gain a devoted friend. If you even make eye contact with an Arab, you've got a pal for life. "Would you like some coffee?" said the young man. The other Libyans pulled up their chairs and offered cigarettes. But there was one, with sharp clothes and an equally sharp face, who eyed me narrowly. He said, "What kind of journalistic story is it that you wish to do?"
Well, he had me there. I'd never given it a thought. I just figured, what with guns going off and things blowing up, there'd be plenty of deep truths and penetrating insights. Tragedy and strife produce these things in boxcar lots, as any good reporter knows. Also, I wanted a chance to wear my new safari jacket. You really look like a twink if it isn't adequately dirty and sweat-stained. "Uh," I said, "I'd like to do a cultural piece. ("Cultural piece" is a key phrase for foreign correspondents. It means you aren't going to poke into any political leader's Luxembourg bank account or try to find out if his wife has ten thousand pairs of Maud Frizon pumps in the palace basement.)
"There is a great lack of understanding between the Arab world and the United States just now," said the young man behind the counter.
"There sure is," I said.
"Why do you think this is?" said the sharp dresser.
The truthful answer would have been, "Because one by one and man to man Arabs are the salt of the earth-generous, hospitable, brave, wise, and so forth. But get you in a pack and shove a Koran down your pants and you act like a footlocker full of gluesniffing civet cats." We're a frank people, we Americans. But not quite that frank. I decided to blame it on Paul Newman.
"It's because of Exodus," I said. "Exodus was a very popular movie in the United States. Ever since this movie all Americans think everyone in Israel is kind and good and looks like Paul Newman."
"Hmmmmm," said the Libyans. It made sense to them.
"I will call my uncle," said the sharp dresser. "He is an important man at the embassy in Rome."
"I will call the embassy here," said someone else.
"I will book a flight," said the young man behind the counter, and he got me more coffee (The only decent coffee I'd had since I left New York, by the way).
The Libyan Arab Air people squared everything with the Ministry of Information in Tripoli, got me a ticket for that Friday, and told their airport manager at Orly to take me under his wing. All to no avail, however. Come Friday, the French government decided to expel four Libyan diplomats, and I was bumped off the plane.
In the meantime, I was stuck in Paris. A lot of people get all moist and runny at the mention of this place. I don't get it. It's just a big city, no dirtier than most. It does have nice architecture because the French chickened out of World War II. But it's sur rounded by the most depressing ring of lower-middle-class suburbs this side of Smolensk. In fact, one of these suburbs is actually named Stalingrad, which goes to show that the French have learned nothing about politics since they guillotined all the smart people in 1793.
French women, whether pretty or not, all walk around with their noses in the air (and pretty big noses they usually are). I guess this is what's meant by their "sense of style." Where did this sense of style thing get started? The French are a smallish, monkeylooking bunch and not dressed any better, on average, than the citizens of Baltimore. True, you can sit outside in Paris and drink little cups of coffee, but why this is more stylish than sitting inside and drinking large glasses of whiskey I don't know
I was exhausted the night I arrived and couldn't think of any place to go except Harry's New York Bar. Harry's is a 1930s hangout left over from the days when Hemingway used to stop in while taking a break from pestering large animals, such as his drunk friend F Scott Fitzgerald. At least the drinks at Harry's aren't microscopic. I had three and called for the "carte de menu." I'd forgotten that Harry's doesn't serve food.
"We do not serve food," said the waiter, cocking a snook. There was a ferocious pause, "except hot dogs." Thus, on my first night in this capital of international gastronomy, I dined on two hot dogs and five Scotches.
The next night I called my girlfriend who was back in the States and, no doubt, happily contemplating the sterling silver Elsa Peretti refrigerator magnet I'd bought her to make up for Christmas. She's spent a lot of time in Paris. "Where's a good place for dinner?" I asked.
"There's the Brasserie Lipp on the Avenue St. Germaine," she said, "or La Coupole in Montmartre."
"Not La Coupole," I said. "I've been there before. That's the place that's crowded and noisy and smells bad and everybody's rude as hell, isn't it?"
"I think you just described France," she said.
Actually, it was Brasserie Lipp I'd been to before. I remembered the minute they stuffed me behind a hankie-size table between the pissoir and a trolley full of sheep cheese. I ordered steak, and they brought me sauerkraut.
Nobody's French is that bad, not even mine. But Parisians never deign to understand a word you say in their own language, no matter how loud or often you pronounce it. They insist on speaking English until you wonder if the whole thing is a put-up job. Maybe they just take a couple of years of Frog Talk in high school like the rest of us and can no more speak French themselves than they can make ice cubes.
I also went to the Louvre. Big deal. The "Winged Victory" of Samothrace looks like somebody dropped it. And the "Mona Lisa" has a sheet of bulletproof glass in front of it, covered with smudgy nose prints. Besides, I think if something is going to be as famous as the "Mona Lisa," it ought to be bigger. Do not, however, miss the Peter-Paul Rubens Unabashed Sell-Out and Philistine Sycophant Room on floor two. In 1622 Queen Marie de Medici commission
ed Rubens to paint about two dozen Greyhound bus-sized canvases celebrating every moment of her worthless life. The series runs from Queen Marie's birth, attended by all the hosts of heaven, to her marriage to the King of France when they invited every figure in ancient mythology including lo the cow. These paintings take win, place and show in the international hilarious fat girl derby.
At least the French weren't rioting about American imperialism. In fact, it was hard to tell what the French thought about our little experiment in Libyan bomb tag. (You're "it," Muammar, and no taps back.) The French official position was all over the map. It was "a question of national sovereignty" one day and "we weren't consulted in advance" the next. Then it was "we don't approve of such methods' followed by a hint that they would have approved of such methods after all if we'd only used bigger bombs. The French are masters of "the dog ate my homework" school of diplomatic relations.
French unofficial position, that is, the opinion of taxi drivers, bartenders, the concierge at the hotel and those old women they keep in the bathrooms, was no easier to figure out. I'd ask and get a nudge, a smirk, pursed lips, shrugged shoulders, knowing rolls of the eyes, waved hands, knit brows-the whole panoply of Froggy visual ticks.
Maybe it is fun to sit outside in Paris and drink little cups of coffee. You can watch the French grimace and posture. And then you can guess what they're saying to each other.
"I think, Antoinette, for me the croissant has the aspect existential. It is bread, the staff of life, but no? And yet, there is the paradox marvelous. Because the bread itself, it is a lifeless thing. Is it not true? We must order croissants."
"No, no, no, no, Jacques. To think as this is is to make the miscomprehension of the universe, its nature. To order the croissants would be an act inconceivable. An action of the most bourgeois type ..."
Who gives a shit what the French think.