Holidays in Hell: In Which Our Intrepid Reporter Travels to the World's Worst Places and Asks, "What's Funny About This" Read Free Page B

half
their time burning Old Glory and the other half waiting for green
cards.
    Other ubiquitous spectacles of our time include various panics-AIDS, PLO terror and owning U. S. dollars predominate at the
moment-and postcards of the Pope kissing the ground. There's
little ground left unkissed by this pontiff, though he might think
twice about kissing anything in some of the places he visits. (Stay
away from Haiti, San Francisco and Mykonos, J.P., please.)
    Then there's the squalor. This hasn't changed since 1867, but
tourists once tried to avoid it. Now they seek it out. Modern tourists
have to see the squalor so they can tell everyone back home how it
changed their perspective on life. Describing squalor, if done with
sufficient indignation, makes friends and relatives morally obligated to listen to your boring vacation stories. (Squalor is conveniently available, at reasonable prices, in Latin America.)
    No, the Grand Tour is no longer a stately procession of likeminded individuals through half a dozen of the world's major
principalities. And it's probably just as well if Mark Twain doesn't
come back from the dead. He'd have to lead a huge slew of
multinational lunatics through hundreds of horrible countries with
disgusting border formalities. And 1980's customs agents are the
only thing worse than 1980's tourists. Damn it, give that back! You
know perfectly well that it's legal to bring clean socks into Tanzania. Ow! Ouch! Where are you taking me!?
    Of course you don't have to go to Africa to get that kind of
treatment. You can have your possessions stolen right on the Piccadilly Line if you want. In fact, in 1987, you can experience
most of the indignities and discomforts of travel in your own
hometown, wherever you live. Americans flock in seething masses
to any dim-wit local attraction-tall ships making a landing, short
actors making a move, Andrew Wyeth making a nude Helga
fracas-just as if they were actually going somewhere. The briefest
commuter flight is filled with businessmen dragging mountainous
garment bags and whole computers on board. They are worst pests
than mainland Chinese taking Frigidaires home on the plane. And
no modern business gal goes to lunch without a steamer trunk-size
tote full of shoe changes, Sony Walkman tapes and tennis rackets.
When she makes her way down a restaurant aisle, she'll crack the
back of your head with this exactly the same way a Mexican will
with a crate of chickens on a Yucatan bus ride.

    The tourism ethic seems to have spread like one of the new
sexual diseases. It now infects every aspect of daily life. People
carry backpacks to work and out on dates. People dress like
tourists at the office, the theater and church. People are as rude to
their fellow countrymen as ever they are to foreigners.
    Maybe the right thing to do is stay home in a comfy armchair
and read about travel as it should be-in Samuel Clemenss
Huckleberry Finn.

     
A Ramble Through Lebanon

    OCTOBER 1984
    I visited Lebanon in the fall of '84, which turned out to be pretty
much the last time an American could travel in that country with
only a risk (rather than a certainty) of being kidnapped. I was just
taking a vacation. Somehow I had convinced Vanity Fair magazine
to let me do a piece on the holiday pleasures of Beirut and its
environs. What follows is, with a few parenthetical addenda, the
article I wrote for Vanity Fair, an article that they-wisely, I thinkdecided was much too weird to publish.
    "Bassboat." "Bizport." "Passboot." "Pisspot." It's the one
English word every Lebanese understands and no Lebanese can
say. The first, deepest and most enduring impression from a visit to
Lebanon is an endless series of faces, with gun barrels, poking
through the car window and mispronouncing your travel documents.
    Some of these faces belong to the Lebanese Army, some to the
Christian Phalange, some to angry Shiites or blustering Druse or
grumpy Syrian draftees or