Republican Party Reptile(56)

I got into bed at 4:00 that morning with an uneasy mind. There are supposed to be U.S. spy satellites that can read the headlines on newspapers. I know there are radio listening posts all over the Middle East, and the Amal guys were on their walkietalkies all night. Every would-be Jimmy Carter antonym on the National Security Council must have heard about the dinner at the Summerland by now. It would be just like U.S. foreign policy to send Delta Force in an hour late. I could see it all—concussion bombs in the swimming pools, Hueys tangled in the beach umbrellas, and hyperadrenalinized Marine sergeants indiscriminately rescuing the wrong people from a bunch of sleepy room-service waiters. I left the door to my balcony open. If I was going to be dragged to safety and someplace American Express could find me, the last thing I wanted was a six-by-four-foot broken glass slider added to my hotel bill.

At the end of the Friday-night dinner the Summerland Hotel staff had brought out a huge cake with chocolate lettering across the top: “Wishing you all a happy trip back home.” Saturday morning the U.S. State Department announced the hostages’ release. So did the Syrian government. Various networks and wire services carried the story. It seemed like a lot of people were getting their news from cake frosting.

In fact, nobody had gone much of anywhere. The thirty-two dinner hostages and the plane crew had been gathered in a school in a Shiite slum, the Burj Barajna. But the extraradical Hizbullah Shiites were refusing to cough up the four extra hostages they had stashed in a basement somewhere.

Hizbullah wouldn’t release the other four because . . . well, you have to understand Lebanese politics. It’s sort of like a gang war because the militias are organized in normal Mediterranean friends-of-Frank-Sinatra style and control the drug traffic and smuggling. It’s sort of like a real war because Syria, Israel, the PLO, etc. are irked at each other and commit most of their irksomeness on Lebanese territory. It’s sort of like a race riot because every religious group thinks it’s being treated like niggers and thinks every other group should be. And it’s sort of like an American presidential election because most of the worst things in life are. It’s insane. It’s incomprehensible. Everybody in the place ought to be whacked over the head. The whole business is almost as horrid as New York City during rush hour. (Though not, I think, as horrid as New York would be if our national system of checks and balances called in sick and Syria, Israel, Russia, the United States, Iran, and North Korea gave everybody who could make a flag free guns and a dump truck full of money.)

Beats me. I went out to the airport and watched hot, grumpy photographers on stakeout at the TWA jet. I stood on top of the control tower and got something—a pistol, a finger, a rolled-up copy of the TWA in-flight magazine—pointed at me from the cockpit window. There were a lot of reporters and TV producers talking into paper bags. This is because the militiamen call you a spy if you have a two-way radio, and also because the militiamen love two-way radios and calling you a spy at gunpoint is a good way to get a free one.

Nothing happening here. I went back to the Summerland and poked around in the ABC office. A newsroom had been created by hauling the beds out of five hotel rooms and shipping in 2,500 kilos of electronic gear. There were three bureau chiefs in the place, and correspondents, producers, editors, technicians, camera crews, drivers, and money men all yelling orders at each other while the open phone lines disgorged useful suggestions from the ABC brass in New York:

“Hello, Beirut. We have a report from the Muncie, Indiana, Advertiser-Wasp that the hostages have been moved to Senegal. Would you confirm?”

“Hello, Beirut. Is Kahlil Gibran still alive? Could we get him on the wire for a Good Morning America phoner?”

“Hello, Beirut. Radio New Zealand says five of the hostages have mumps.”

I’m used to the quiet life of free-lance writers where we just go home and make things up. This looked more like the time my little sister knocked my ant farm off the dresser.

I sat down in one of the five hotel rooms and watched the tapes ABC was sending out, like I’d watch pay TV in any hotel room except with a mess of old coffee cups, wine bottles, room-service trays, and cigarette butts even worse than the one I usually accumulate. There was gunfire on the screen, gunfire outside too. Weird. Reminded me of those sixties acid wallows where, you know, like this is the movie and you’re watching it, but, like, you’re in it and . . . The medium is the message, indeed.

Darn good coverage, though, I thought: swell get-a-load-of-this-guy smile from Captain Testlake with that gun-waving Hizbullah bunny behind him, nice earnest hostage interviews (one guy told his wife to pay the mortgage, though I don’t think that got on the air), and deeply important (if slightly dull-o) talks with Nabih Berri (who doesn’t speak English worse than most people who’ve lived in Detroit).