Squishier than thou
Demonstrating against reality in London and Washington
by P. J. O'Rourke
Traveling to London from Washington twelve
days after the terrorist attack, I expected
security measures. I'd been told to arrive at
Dulles Airport three hours before departure. I was
ready for checkpoints where people in flak jackets
would use mirrors to look for bombs under
cars—although with automotive electronics and the
puzzle plumbing of emissions control, everything
under cars looks like a bomb. Anyway, the
checkpoints weren't there.
At the ticket counter, instead of being asked once
"Hasyourluggagebeenunderyourcontrolatalltimes?," I
was asked twice. The metal detectors and x-ray
machines were operated by the usual dim but
friendly minimum-wage security guards, now
somewhat less friendly. I was told to hand over my
disposable lighter, to prevent, I suppose, any threat
of "Do what I say or I'll light this Marlboro and
you'll all die—in thirty years, owing to inhalation of
secondhand smoke."
I headed cheerlessly to the designated smoking area,
expecting to find a room full of desperate, fireless
people paying black-market prices for Nicorette.
Everyone was smoking. I asked for a light, and
someone produced a disposable lighter. It seems that
if you went through one of the airport's two security
portals, you were made to surrender all lighters and
matches. But if you went through the other ...
Concern has been voiced that fear of terrorism could
lead to renewed racial profiling. Never mind that the
languages of the Taliban—Pashto and Dari—are part
of the Indo-European linguistic family, and that if
"Caucasian" has any meaning at all, Afghans have a
better claim to it than Hungarians or Finns.
The profiling at the boarding gate couldn't be called
racial, exactly. The ruddy and the pallid were
ushered directly onboard, as were the sufficiently
black. It was the tanned or swarthy who had to line
up for additional questioning. On my flight these
included, as far as I could tell, some Hindus, some
Filipinos, a Hispanic or two, and a pair of elderly
Iranian women wearing chadors in violation of
America's new no-unusual-things-on-your-head
taboo, which has brought grief to Sikhs in the U.S.
hinterland. (Not that there hasn't been Sikh terrorism,
but it was directed against Indira Gandhi, in
retaliation for the Indian army's storming the Golden
Temple at Amritsar. This isn't an issue at the
moment, but the complexities of building an
international coalition against terrorism could be
illustrated if India demands a wholesale revocation
of Sikh cab licenses in New York, thereby bringing
that city to a halt again.)
An English friend asked me, Would a bald chap who
was sunburned and gardening and put a tea towel on
his head be in trouble in America?
My plane was two-thirds empty. But the unflappable
British flight crew was unflapped. I was not
subjected to the indignity that an acquaintance
suffered on a flight from New York to Chicago. He
was made to press the flight-attendant call button and
identify himself before being allowed to go to the
bathroom. This—for a drinking man in the
enlarged-prostate years—is a serious violation of
civil rights.
he people I know in London were in the same
state of shock and anger as the people I know in
America. And, like my American friends, they
weren't particularly frightened of a second terrorist
strike or of poison gas or germ warfare. But this may
be a matter of being old smokers and drinkers, at an
age for cardiac arrest and malignancy, with children
they'd like to see grow up or at least get a damn job,
and retirement funds that have gone to hell in the past
year. How much more frightening can life get?
The Brits, however, were more likely to raise the
subject of the IRA and say a word about America's
leading the fight against terrorism while letting the
NORAID cans be passed in the bars of Southie and
the Bronx. I blamed the Kennedys—always a safe
course when questions of bad U.S. political policies
are raised. Meanwhile, it's the British themselves
who are at the negotiating table with my moron
cousins from Ulster. Personally, I'd start the war on
terrorism with Gerry Adams. At least we know
where he is.
Incidentally, it's ridiculous if
you're Irish to claim that you
can't fathom the mindset
behind the wild destruction of
innocents, the casual
self-murder, and the bathos of
martyrdom on September 11.
Al Qaeda no doubt has a
Yeats of its own—"A terrible
beauty is born."
But there was something going on in Great Britain
that was squishier than Northern Ireland home-rule
concessions. The September 17 issue of The New
Statesman ran an amazing editorial leader.
Look at the picture on pages 6-7, showing
Americans running in terror from the New
York explosions and then ask yourself how
often in the past (particularly in Vietnam
and more recently in Iraq) you have seen
people running in terror from American
firepower. American bond traders, you
may say, are as innocent and as
undeserving of terror as Vietnamese or
Iraqi peasants. Well, yes and no.
To quote more might set off a wave of retribution in
America against people wearing derby hats.
I had dinner with the critic and television
commentator Clive James and his assistant. The
assistant was an able and well-educated young
woman who could not be convinced by Clive that in
the matter of moral values there was such a thing as a
superior culture. "They cover their women in the
ballroom drapes!" Clive said. "Your dad can have
you stoned to death for not marrying some old goat!"
"I wouldn't call it an inferior culture," his assistant
said.
"What about Somalia?! What about clitorectomies?!"
"Of course I'm a feminist," his assistant said. "But I
resist the idea of an inferior culture."
It's usually Clive and I who have the arguments. He's
a liberal democrat. But he's my age; he remembers
when the whole point of being on the left was the
effort (alas, misplaced) to forge a superior culture.
I was a guest on a BBC phone-in talk show. If the
world is mad at America for anything, it should be
for the invention of the phone-in talk show. The idea
of a news broadcast once was to find someone with
information and broadcast it. The idea now is to find
someone with ignorance and spread it around. (Being
ignorant myself, I'm not mad personally.)
A woman named Rhona called and said we didn't
have enough empathy for the poor people in the
world. We're so rich and they're so poor, no wonder
they're angry.
I told her that was a slur on poor people. And
anyway, Osama bin Laden is a rich twit.
Rhona said that we are so wealthy and materialistic
and they are so deprived. "Here I am," she said, "just
an ordinary suburban housewife in a semi-detached,
and I'm surrounded by all these things I don't need."
Privately I was thinking that my moron cousins from
Ulster could fix that with breaking and entering. I
said, "You're arguing completely beside the point."
She was employing a fallacy of relevance,
specifically argumentum ad misericordiam.
(Although I had to look that up later; what I said on
the radio was "So what?")
Rhona accused me of that most grievous of modern
sins, especially when committed against a woman by
a middle-aged man. "Don't patronize me," she said.
Calls and e-mails were nine to one in Rhona's favor,
but one stalwart sent this message: "I suspect why
ninety percent of callers are not in favor of PJ's
opinions is because they are out of work socialists
who have nothing better to do but phone radio
stations."
nd there is squishiness in the United States.
Back in Washington, I went to a peace rally on
September 29 at Freedom Plaza, near the White
House. Several thousand people attended. As I
arrived, a man on the speaker's platform was saying,
"We cannot permit the President of our country to
claim there are only two forces—good and evil. We
are not with either."
The Bread and Puppet theater troupe was carrying a
score of what appeared to be eight-foot-high
papier-mâché baked potatoes. Asked what this was
about, one of the troupe said it represented "naked
people being oppressed by clothed people." Asked
again, she said the same thing.
Members of another performing-arts group were
wearing cardboard bird heads and flapping bed
sheets. They said they were "the cranes of peace."
A woman asked for signatures on a petition in favor
of affirmative action. The National Youth Rights
Association had set up a card table with a sign
reading LOWER THE DRINKING AGE. Snappy
protest rhymes seemed as yet inchoate. Drumming
and pogo dancing accompanied the chant "Stop the
war/In Afghanistan/While we/Still can!"
Another speaker came to the podium and said, "Let
us bomb the world with housing." One of those
McMansions with the lawyer foyer and the
cathedral-ceilinged great room could do real
damage.
Vegetarian demonstrators carried large banners
illustrated with vegetables. A carrot was captioned
"Intelligence." Placards in the crowd read KILLING
IS BAD, POVERTY IS TERRIBLE TOO; ABOLISH
MONEY FOR A WORLD OF SHARING; and
CONGRESS PLEASE KEEP A COOL HEAD. One
young man wore a headband scrawled with
VICTORY 4 CHECHNYA. Another carried a
black-and-red ensign that he said stood for
"anarcho-syndicalism," a word I didn't think had
been spoken aloud since Monty Python and the Holy
Grail. "Do you work for the police?" the
standard-bearer asked. My work-shirt-and-chinos
liberal disguise had proved ineffective.
A child of nine or ten, wearing a F**K WAR T-shirt
without the asterisks, harangued some police
officers. The officers could not keep straight faces.
Most of the other demonstrators were of college age,
with subdermal ink, transdermal hardware, and
haircuts from the barber college on Mars. But people
my age were present too, and beginning to resemble
Bertrand Russell, especially the women. Then I saw
him: a hippie in a walker wearing a hearing aid. Sic
transit generation gap.
Demonstrators tried to burn an American flag. They
had trouble lighting it. Maybe their matches had been
taken by airport security—or maybe all the
anti-smoking propaganda aimed at the young has
come home to roost in a lack of fire-making skills.
When the flag at last caught flame, a passerby shoved
his way into the crowd. He was a normal-looking
man without great height or bulk. He began to throw
punches. He was set upon by twenty-five or thirty of
the ... anarcho-syndicalists, I guess. There was a
momentary geyser of funny clothes, odd hairstyles,
and flopping tattooed limbs. The normal-looking man
emerged, slightly winded, carrying the remains of the
flag and having received a small scuff on the
forehead.
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