“The need for travel [to the Middle East] at this time should be carefully evaluated.”
—State Department advisory, March 29, 1986
There was madness in the news last week. Not even Paul Harvey could handle it. Volcanoes belched ash in Alaska and the Berkeley Hills slipped another foot toward China. Yasser Arafat became chic, there were orgies in the streets of Palm Springs, and young Nazis destroyed the Democratic Party in Chicago.
On Monday the United States got involved in two wars on the same day, and the rest of the week on TV was like Grenada all over again. The big dog had decided to eat, but not everybody liked it.
On the night before Easter there were eerie reports out of Tripoli saying that Moammar Khadafy had publicly butchered an ox “with the name ‘Reagan’ painted on the side of it.”
Nobody denied these things—not even Khadafy—and by the time all the rocks had been rolled away on Sunday night there were millions of people all over America who assumed it was probably all true.
Why not? It happened in Apocalypse Now, and CNN had raw film of a freshly slaughtered ox with a crowd of wild Libyans whooping all around it, waving fists dipped in blood and screaming, “Down with the U.S.A.”
Whether or not the Colonel had actually slain the beast was no longer relevant. He was certainly capable of it. We all understood that from the things we’d seen him do on TV. . . . And in any case a full-grown ox named “Reagan” had been hacked to death in a public square in Tripoli, by the people who were not on our side. A bulletin on “Headline News” said, “They danced in the animal’s blood.”
We are getting used to these scenes. All over the world Our People seem to be on the run, from Baby Doc and Marcos, to Chun Doo Hwan in South Korea. . . . And the ones who are still stable, like the Germans and Japanese, may not be entirely reliable.
Not even the Italians are with us. On Friday in Rome a court freed all but one of the Turks and Bulgarians on trial for shooting the pope— and the public was apparently satisfied.
Nobody called it a fix, or a communist plot. The only demonstrations in Italy last week were a few rallies against the “warlike behavior” of the U.S. 6th Fleet off the coast of Libya.
Not even the White House denied that one. It was self-defense, they said. That maniac shot at us. He tried to destroy the Yorktown.
Which may have been true, although it made no sense at all . . . which is getting more and more to be par for the course these days, but who cares?
CNN, for instance, just moved an item out of French Guyana, down on the equator, about a French space rocket launched successfully last night, which “contained an American satellite.”
Who knows what this means? The blast-off looked much like the Challenger, except that it appeared to take place at night and there was no subsequent explosion.
It was a week of senseless violence all over the world. People lined up to be crucified in the Philippines, and a man in Albuquerque was slain by police after taking four hostages in a Pizza Hut, for no apparent reason.
Some people said it was the full moon and others blamed the ides of March, but in truth there was no pattern at all except random angst and conflict. Many fishermen in the Florida Keys were stricken with a disfiguring skin disease called pityriasis rosea, with symptoms often mistaken for syphilis and no known cause except possibly the “wearing of new underwear.”
My own personal physician, a man nationally known in his field, called it an utterly mysterious virus of some kind, with no hint of a cure and no long-term effects beyond a sense of shame and personal repugnance. “I had it myself, one time,” he said. “It happens to a lot of people, and let me tell you it’s a very ugly thing.”
So what? I thought. We live in ugly times. A flatworm can crawl into your body and grow to be 50 feet long in a matter of five or six weeks. Or bloodsucking hookworms can come up through the soles of your feet and into your liver and finally into your brain, and there is nothing anybody can do about it—not even at Johns Hopkins or the Houston Medical Center.
One of my earliest memories of Easter is my grandmother telling me on Saturday night that, when she woke me up the next morning and said, “He has risen,” that I should sit up in bed and reply, “He has risen indeed.”
I never understood, but we did it year after year, and even now it makes no sense to me.
I have understood almost everything since then except the nature of women, pityriasis rosea and the meaning of last week’s news.
But I understand politics and I know Pat Buchanan. And when the hardball comes by, I can hear it.
We all know Patrick, in a sense. He is the Director of Communications in the White House, a position of uncommon power—which he almost lost, last week, when The Boss came up 12 votes short in the House of Representatives on the question of sending another $100 million worth of bombs and guns and missiles to the “contras” in Nicaragua, or maybe Tegucigalpa.
Buchanan took the loss personally and swore that it would soon be avenged. The Senate would vote a week later, and things might change before then.
Which was true. All manner of big-bore hell broke loose in the next few days—from the Line of Death in the Gulf of Sidra to rumors of a whole new war in Honduras (only a two-day drive from Harlingen, Texas, according to Reagan’s calculations) and nobody was surprised on Thursday afternoon when the Senate voted 53-47 to give the president whatever he wanted for the war in Nicaragua, and also to save Buchanan’s job.
Even Bill Bradley, the ex-basketball star from New Jersey, was swept away in the finely orchestrated frenzy. He voted with Stennis and Thurmond and Goldwater, and never mind the confusion.
We have a long history of these things, and most of it has been eminently profitable. Those lines in the Marine Corps hymn that say “. . . from the halls of Montezuma, to the shores of Tripoli” are not there by accident.
March 31, 1986