Among the Euro-Weenies

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 transatlantic rubberneck 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 “purple mountain majesties 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 mucky-colored 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 “blat-blat” 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 protesters vented their fury on that symbol of American imperialism, a McDonald’s. In London thousands of peacemongers 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. worldview “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 européen était different et tous nos responsables plaidaient pour une action plus discrète.” Whatever that means.

Actually, the only discrète 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 byline: “From our correspondent on the Line of Death.” But daily life kept getting in the way. Taxes were due. I owed a four-thousand-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 foreign correspondent friend Charles Glass 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 terror-bombing 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 it was, and maybe it wasn’t. I finally got a reservation on Lufthansa, rushed to the airline’s 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-Elysées. 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 glue-sniffing 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 surrounded by the most depressing ring of working-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.

Frenchwomen, 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, monkey-looking 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 Boulevard Saint-Germain,” 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 commissioned Rubens to paint about two dozen Greyhound bus–size 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 Io 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 tics.

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 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.

After I was kicked off the plane to Libya, I went to visit my friend in Bruges, the one who was under instructions from the police to be ashamed. We spent the weekend looking for fun in Belgium, which is an isometric exercise. That is, it’s a strain and you get nowhere.

A hotel desk clerk gave us the name of the one local hot spot. It was called “The Korral” or “Sixes Gun” or some such bogus American moniker like they put on everything over here when they want you to think you’re going to get something un-European, like a good time. It was a crowded place where they played French rock and roll (which sounds like somebody’s chasing Edith Piaf around the old Peppermint Lounge with an electric hedge trimmer).

My friend was trying to explain that you don’t put sweet vermouth in a martini when a little scene caught my eye. Standing by the door was a Belgian greaser, a young hard guy with a modified skinhead haircut, dressed all in black and carrying a motorcycle helmet. He was running through all the usual teenage tough-kid postures and checking out the room to make sure all the other kids understood how unconcerned he was with their opinion. Perched on a railing in front of him, with her legs wrapped around his butt, was an adorable blonde girl about sixteen years old. She was kissing and nuzzling her cool beau, who would peck her briefly then swig his beer and check the room again.

In the breast pocket of her blouse the girl had a little toy stuffed rabbit. After another offhand kiss from her boyfriend, she took the rabbit out, held it in her hand, and whispered in the boy’s ear. I couldn’t hear what she said and they were speaking Flemish anyway, but I could tell what was going on.

“I want a real kiss.”

“Yeah, okay.”

“Now the bunny wants a kiss.”

“Knock it off.”

“The bunny wants a kiss soooooooo bad.”

“Come on, knock it off.”

“If the bunny doesn’t get a kiss, somebody’s going to be very cross.”

The greaser kid scoped the room with mean but panicked eyes. Then he kissed the bunny.

On Monday I went to the UK to make one more attempt to get to Libya before I started kissing toy bunnies myself. I got a reservation on Lufthansa again. I figured I’d just lie, show them my old Lebanese visa with a lot of Arabic squiggles on it. Germans respond well to lies. At least, they always have historically.

Then I went to the ABC News bureau in London where a phone line was open to the Grand Hotel in Tripoli. I talked to my old Lebanon buddy the ABC video editor George Moll.

“Get your ass down here!” said George. “This is great! And bring some salami, okay? And cheese. And potato chips and pretzels.”

“And cigarettes!” said a voice in the background. “A carton of Marlboros.”

“Two cartons!” said another voice. “And a carton of Salems and chocolate bars and Cokes!”

“And bring pita bread!” said George.

“Pita bread? What the hell do you want with pita bread? You’re surrounded by Arabs,” I said. “You can’t get pita bread?”

“You can’t get anything,” said George. “And for chrissake bring booze!”

“How can I do that? They’ll kill me.”

“Naw,” said George, “they’ll just rough you up. Anyway, they won’t catch you. It’s easy. Just get a six-pack of soda water, the little bottles, the kind with the screw tops. And fill them up with vodka and screw the tops back on and put them back in that plastic collar thing.”

“Are you sure you should be telling me this over the phone?”

“If they can’t make pita bread, what the fuck do you think their phone taps are like?” said George. “So, anyway, what’s happening?”

“Nothing much,” I said. “Its raining. And everybody’s yelling at Margaret Thatcher about the F-111s and …”

“Not up there,” said George. “I mean, what’s happening down here? They won’t let us out of the hotel.”

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 punitive raids on misbehaving weedy little native powers since … well, at least since the redcoats shot up Lexington and Concord.

Meg said that when the F-111s 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 “pâté de foie gras 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, down-at-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 dishtowel 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 UN has to be the place where these things ultimately get solved.”

I mean, the UN has done such a bang-up job on the Iraq-Iran 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, low-income housing that looks worse than the weather, and tattoo-faced, spike-haired pea 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, beleaguered, 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 zigzag 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. 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 tired-looking 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 Kiev-ish 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 Götterdämmerung 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 protesters 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 probably a setup. “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.”

“You should go to America,” I said.

“There is only one bad thing about America,” said the drum beater. “They won’t let us in.”

Back in London, I was having dinner in the Groucho Club—the in spot for what’s left of Britain’s lit glitz and nouveau rock riche—when one more person started in on the Stars and Stripes. Eventually he got, as the Europeans always do, to the part about “Your country’s never been invaded.” (This fellow had been two during the Blitz, you see.) “You don’t know the horror, the suffering. You think war is …”

I snapped.

“A John Wayne movie,” I said. “That’s what you were going to say, wasn’t it? We think war is a John Wayne movie. We think life is a John Wayne movie—with good guys and bad guys, as simple as that. Well, you know something, Mister Limey Poofter? You’re right. And let me tell you who those bad guys are. They’re us. WE BE BAD.

“We’re the baddest-assed sons of bitches that ever jogged in Reeboks. We’re three-quarters grizzly bear and two-thirds car wreck and descended from a stock market crash on our mother’s side. You take your Germany, France, and Spain, roll them all together, and it wouldn’t give us room to park our cars. We’re the big boys, Jack, the original, giant, economy-sized, new and improved butt kickers of all time. When we snort coke in LA, people lose their hats in Portland, Maine. And we’ve got an American Express card credit limit higher than your pissant metric numbers go.

“You say our country’s never been invaded? You’re right, little buddy. Because I’d like to see the needle-dicked foreigners who’d have the guts to try. We drink napalm to get our hearts started in the morning. A rape and a mugging is our way of saying ‘Cheerio.’ Hell can’t hold our sock hops. We walk taller, talk louder, spit farther, fuck longer, and buy more things than you know the names of. I’d rather be a junkie in a New York City jail than king, queen, and jack of all you Europeans. We eat little countries like this for breakfast and shit them out before lunch.”

Of course, the guy should have punched me. But this was Europe. He just smiled his shabby, superior European smile. (God, don’t these people have dentists?)