HOLIDAYS
IN
HECK
P. J.
O’ROURKE
HOLIDAYS
IN
HECK
First published in the United States of America in 2011 by Grove/Atlantic Inc.
First published in Great Britain in 2011 by Grove Press UK, an imprint of Grove/Atlantic Inc.
Copyright ©P.J. O’Rourke, 2011
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To Tina,
I owe you a holiday, and—what the heck—
to Lizzie, Lulu, and Cliff
I have discovered that all human evil comes from this, man’s being unable to sit still in a room.
—Pascal
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Introduction: A Former War Correspondent Experiences Frightening Vacation Fun
1 Republicans Evolving: The Galápagos Islands, April 2003
2 Monumnetal Generations: The National World War II Memorial, Washington, D.C., June 2004
3 Round on the Ends and “Hi!” in the Middle: Ohio Skiing, February 2005
4 Riding to the Hounds versus Going to the Dogs: Britain after the Hunting Ban, March 2005
5 My EU Vacation: Reading the European Constitution on a French Beach, Guadeloupe, May 2005
6 On First Looking into the Airbus A380: Toulouse, June 2005
7 If You Think Modern Life Is Awful, You Haven’t Seen Modern Art: Venice Biennale, July 2005
8 My Wife’s Got a Gun: Brays Island Plantation, South Carolina, February 2006
9 A Freedom Ride through China: Spring 2006
10 Side Trip Up the Yangtze: June 2006
11 A Horse of a Different Color: Kyrgyzstan, July 2006
12 Sweet-and-Sour Children and Twice-Fried Parents to Go: Hong Kong, December 2007
13 The Big Stick, or Why I Voted for John McCain: USS Theodore Roosevelt, April 2008
14 White Man Speak with Forked Tongue: The Field Museum, Chicago, May 2008
15 The Decline and Fall of Tomorrow: Disneyland, June 2008
16 A Journey to . . . Let’s Not Go There: Summer 2008
17 The Seventy-Two-Hour Afghan Expert: Kabul, July 2010
18 Capital Gains: Washington, D.C., August 2010
19 Home Unalone: New Hampshire, March 2011
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Sheer amateurism is a reporter’s only excuse for traveling without an assignment to do so. Therefore, the pieces in this book were assigned. Many of these assignations came from Forbes Life, which is—and I mean this in the best way—the monkey business supplement to Forbes, America’s preeminent business magazine. Forbes Life (originally called Forbes FYI) was founded by my excellent friend Christopher Buckley who, in a flash of inspiration, realized that the people who make money reading Forbes might occasionally want to blow some. Blowing money is what I do.
My thanks to Christopher and a plug in recompense. He is the first person since Evelyn Waugh to master the agonizingly difficult art of the comic novel. Buy all his books. And my thanks to Patrick Cooke and Richard Nalley who brilliantly followed Christopher’s brilliance as editors of Forbes Life and to their brilliant boss Bob Forbes, my summer neighbor in New Hampshire’s Beige Mountains. Together these gentlemen underwrote my journeys to the Galapagos Islands, the Yangtze, Kyrgyzstan, Hong Kong, Brays Island Plantation, and even my rare opportunity, described in Chapter 19, to stay home.
My wife, Tina, and I were invited to go on the Galapagos excursion by our extraordinary Texas friends Lee and Ramona Bass. But, between invitation and embarkation, Tina turned up pregnant with Buster (whose first appearance in print is recorded in Chapter 3). Doctors forbade Tina from messing around in boats. So I took along my Godson Nick McDonell.
Nick, a New York City boy, was then a freshman at Harvard. This was his first exposure to Republicans en mass, particularly Texas Republicans, and, more particularly, the beautiful teenage daughters of Texas Republicans, who accompanied us on the cruise. Nick is a handsome and engaging young man, and the girls were fascinated by his exotic liberalism. One evening, on my way to the bar, I saw the entire contingent of adolescent Texan females gathered around a table with my Godson. I overheard a mellifluous voice with sugared southern accent say, “Why, Nick, you-all just don’t understand gun control!”
My travels through mainland China and my sojourn with my family in Hong Kong would not have been possible without our peerless friends Dave and Celia Garcia. I’ve been imposing on their hospitality in the Orient for twenty years. We’ve shared trips with them to Italy, Spain, and Thailand. And Dave has been a boon companion—coming along for the fun of it—on my reporting trips to Israel, the West Bank, and Egypt. Once, while we were walking back to the American Colony Hotel in East Jerusalem late at night, a couple of kids tried to heave a Molotov cocktail at us. It fell pathetically short. Dave shouted, “You throw like girls. If you Palestinians want a country, you’d better learn to play baseball.”
Speaking of learning things, I owe my—very tenuous—ability to stay on a horse to the worthy Adrian Dangar. If it weren’t for him I wouldn’t have survived the horseback ride across the mountains of Kyrgyzstan. Although, come to think of it, if it weren’t for him I wouldn’t have been on the horseback ride across the mountains of Kyrgyzstan. So thanks, Adrian, I guess. Anyway, Adrian’s Wild and Exotic Ltd. tour company—www.wildandexotic.co.uk—is a splendid operation. He’ll talk you into doing all sorts of things that are wild and exotic. But it’s all perfectly safe. The last time Adrian led a horse trek across the Serengeti only one of the riders was attacked by a lion and hardly any of his horse was eaten. Adrian also took the author photo for this book, capturing with speed and skill a rare instant when I wasn’t falling out of the saddle.
Still speaking of learning things, my wife owes her knowledge of how to shoot me on the fly to our estimable friends at Brays Island Plantation in South Carolina, Perry and Sally Harvey, and to the admirable Hugh and Gay Eaton who first introduced us to the Brays. It’s the perfect place to retire, which I’ll never get to do because my wife knows how to shoot me on the fly.
Another generous source of holidays has been The Weekly Standard. I’ve been a proud contributor since its inception in 1995—though how proud its masters of political deep-thinking—founders Bill Kristol and Fred Barnes, deputy editor Richard Starr, and literary editor Phil Terzian—are of that I can’t say. TWS is not the first venue that comes to mind for leisure and travel writing. But now and then conservative virtue needs to take time off. Meanwhile the evils of leftism are notoriously far-flung.
I took some time off in Guadeloupe, with the excuse that the island was voting on the E.U.
constitution just then. Being a Neo-Con, I needed no excuse to visit the aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt, go to Kabul, or mock the docents-fluent-in-Newspeak Field Museum in Chicago. I can’t remember what excuse I used to get myself to Venice with a room at the Gritti Palace on the magazine’s nickel. But it must have been a doozy.
For my visit to the “Big Stick” I thank my distinguished old friend Frank Saul who introduced me to my distinguished new friend Jim Haynes at the Friendly Sons of St. Patrick dinner in Washington, where many bold plans are hatched. This one still seemed like a good idea in the morning. Jim, former general counsel of the Department of Defense during the George W. Bush administration (and how we miss it), arranged the carrier embark. Thank you, Jim, and may the wind be always at your back and may the road rise to meet you. (Whatever the Irish mean by that—sounds like an Irish description of tripping on your shoelaces).
Among the first and best friends I made in Washington was Jim Denton, who gave me the occasion to travel to Afghanistan. Jim runs Heldref Publications and edits World Affairs, America’s oldest foreign policy publication. He introduced me to Jeff Gedmin, who was then the head of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. Jeff, with the help of executive editor John O’Sullivan, had great success in transcending the genre of government broadcasting. He turned RFE/RL into a network of radio stations to which people listen avidly rather than dutifully. I went to Prague to do a story on RFE/RL for World Affairs. As part of that story I visited RFE/RL’s Afghan station, Radio Azadi. My journey to Kabul turned out to be a pleasure trip. This, obviously, was due to the people rather than the place. Foremost among these people is M. Amin Mudaqiq, RFE/RL Afghan Bureau Chief. He provided the broadest access, the most wide-ranging introductions, and the warmest hospitality. This gave me material to write a second piece, about Afghanistan itself, for The Weekly Standard.
Jim Denton also published, in World Affairs, the account of my conversations with manufacturers and entrepreneurs in China. These would have been the mute talking to the deaf if it hadn’t been for the help of Celia Garcia, fluent in English, Cantonese, and Mandarin. Additional thanks to Harvey West and Xiaobo Yao-West for even more and even better conversations at their home in Guangzhou.
Search is another magazine from Heldref Publications (a company founded by Jeanne Kirkpatrick and her husband). It’s devoted to the science/religion relationship. (They need to talk.) Search, under the skilled editorship of Peter Manseau, published the first part of my essay on getting cancer. Having failed to die, there was a second part. This was published in the Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center’s newsletter, Skylight, an attractive glossy broadsheet that’s more interesting than most of what you read in hospital waiting rooms. Not that they keep you waiting long at competent and considerate Dartmouth-Hitchcock. I failed to die as the result of the efforts of virtuoso oncologist Dr. Marc Pipas and maestro radiologist Dr. Bassem Zaki. I thank you both and so do my wife, my children, two out of three of my dogs, and my life insurance company. My health insurance company says they’ll get back to you on that. I also owe undying, as it were, gratitude to my incomparable buddy Greg Grip. Greg lives on a lake near the hospital. When he heard that I needed to undergo treatments every weekday, ninety miles from my home, he said, “I’m not telling you that you can stay with me. I’m telling you that I will be deeply offended if you don’t.” Whereupon he vacated his own bedroom and installed me there, with Elvis-sized bed, giant flat screen TV, and his bird dog to keep me company. You won’t get that kind of treatment from from Obama’s healthcare plan.
Although I have traveled a lot, I have rarely traveled to the realms of literary respectability. When I did, however, in the pages of The Atlantic, I had the rare good fortune to work with editors worthy of respect no matter how respectable they were. First there was the late, much-missed Michael Kelly, then Cullen Murphy, and, after the magazine had moved to Washington, James Bennet, James Gibney, and Don Peck. Under their aegis The Atlantic sent me to cover a stupefaction—the Airbus A380—a stupefying—Britain’s hunting ban—and the stupid—Disney’s House of the Future.
Adrian Dangar took me to the stag hunt on Exmoor and called upon his friends Tom and Margaret Yandle and Astrid St. Aubyn to feed me to surfeit and shelter me in comfort.
The same duties fell to my sterling friend Peter Flynn with whom I toured the giant Airbus A380 and the small, by comparison, city of Toulouse.
When I told the editor of Ski magazine, the clever and sagacious Kendall Hamilton, that I wanted to go skiing in Ohio, he didn’t laugh. Which was a problem because he was supposed to. But he thought I was kidding. When he realized I was serious, then he laughed. And sent me there. This may have been carrying the joke too far.
All of the articles collected here have been rewritten, some of them extensively—in order that this be a book rather than a recycling bin of old magazine pieces. Although, of course, recycling is a good thing. We don’t want to pollute the mental environment by leaving discarded piles of old ideas lying around or deplete the mind’s natural resources of new thought. However, one story—my failed attempt to get the family to tour Washington, D.C.—has not been published before. This is because, as you may notice, nothing happens in it. At my age and with a bunch of kids, to have nothing happen is a dream come true. Tina and I were able to live the dream because of the wonderful leisure skills of our splendid Washington friends Andy and Denise Ferguson and their children Gillum and Emily. Nick and Mary Eberstadt and their children Rick, Kate, Isabel, and my Goddaughter Alexandra; and Frank and Dawn Saul and their children Natalie, Charlotte, and young Frank. Tina and I thank them.
Tina can thank herself for being married to the peripatetic, or peripathetic as it more properly should be spelled. But it is I who must thank her for putting up with it. And also for inputting up with it. She got this book computerized while her husband stood around making exasperated noises and pretending his ignorance and sloth represented a principled stand against the indignities of the digital age.
Many other thanksgivings are to be celebrated. Noble soldier pal Lt. Colonel Mike Schellhammer and I, with the help of beer, have been working on the Introduction’s rant against modern air travel for years now.
Liane Emond deciphered my raw manuscripts and entered them into the mysteries of Microsoft Word.
Don Epstein, who has been both my friend and partner in business for three decades, and all the hard-working, good-looking smart people at the Greater Talent Network lecture agency kept finding real work for me in an era when “print journalist” is a synonym for “unemployed.” I was a writer for forty years. Now I’m a content provider. And the Internet says, “Content is free.” Not at GTN it isn’t.
Nor at the Grove/Atlantic publishing house under the intrepid leadership of Morgan Entrekin—my publisher since 1983 and the Best Man at one of my weddings (unfortunately the wrong one). Anyway, we dinosaurs of the printed page are going to fight this comet collision with new media. Notable among the brave combatants: managing editor Michael Hornburg—who manages somehow to manage it all; associate editor Andrew Robinton—with whom all good things are associated; production director Sue Cole—who directs production like Sam Peckinpah directed The Wild Bunch; art director Charles Rue Woods—let’s dump all those tired old Picassos and hang the book covers of Charles Woods in MOMA; illustrator Daniel Horowitz—the Piero della Francesca of families packed into a car (and thanks as well to camera wizard and good friend James Kegley from whose kind and flattering photo of me Daniel worked); copy editor Susan Gamer—if James Joyce had known about her you’d be able to read Finnegans Wake; proofreader Caroline Trefler—proof that sainthood awaits those who suffer PJ’s spelling; publicity director Deb Seager—Grove/Atlantic’s one true celebrity; and Scott Manning of Scott Manning and Associates—Lady Gaga would be really famous if she had Scott doing her P.R.
Be of stout heart all of you. Books will survive. I’ll tell you why:
• As the Good Kindle says . . .
> • There is no frigate like a Kindle.
• Throw the Kindle at him!
• I wonder, wonder, wonder, wonder who? Who scanned in the Kindle of love?
• My life is a charged Kindle.
• “Kindle him, Dano.”
• I could Twitter a Kindle about it.
HOLIDAYS
IN
HECK
INTRODUCTION
A Former War Correspondent
Experiences Frightening Vacation Fun
After the Iraq War I gave up on being what’s known in the trade as a “shithole specialist.” I was too old to be scared stiff and too stiff to sleep on the ground. I’d been writing about overseas troubles of one kind or another for twenty-one years, in forty-some countries, none of them the nice ones. I had a happy marriage and cute kids. There wasn’t much happy or cute about Iraq.
Michael Kelly, my boss at The Atlantic, and I had gone to cover the war, he as an “imbed” with the Third Infantry Division, I as a “unilateral.” We thought, once ground operations began, I’d have the same freedom to pester the locals that he and I had had during the Gulf War a dozen years before. The last time I saw Mike he said, “I’m going to be stuck with the 111th Latrine Cleaning Battalion while you’re driving your rental car through liberated Iraq, drinking Rumsfeld Beer and judging wet abeyya contests.” Instead I wound up trapped in Kuwait, bored and useless, and Mike went with the front line to Baghdad, where he was killed during the assault on the airport. Mike had a happy marriage, too, and cute kids the same ages as mine. I called my wife, Tina, and told her that Mike was dead and I was going to Baghdad to take his place. Tina cried about Mike and his widow and his children. But Tina is the daughter of an FBI agent. Until she was fourteen she thought all men carried guns to work. She said, “All right, if you think it’s important to go.”