Politique Internationale/Stoned in Beirut
Taki
(both characters well played by Martin Sheen in the lamentable film versions of the two books) are incarnations of evil on the Right. A more complex messiah of darkness appears in The Stand (1978),...
...As in Firestarter and The Dead Zone, an instantly recognizable assortment of media cliches structures the 800-plus pages of The Stand (which nonetheless was cut 20 percent before publication...
...The surviving good guys group in Boulder, Colorado, and prepare for battle against one Randall Flagg and his forces of evil based in Las Vegas...
...Then there are the Moslems, mostly Sunnis and the Shiites, a minority (thank God) everywhere else in the Arab world, but (typically) a majority in Lebanon...
...Incidentally, the boat was carrying a full load of heroin, destination unknown...
...Lebanon today is a bit like seventeenth-century Italy, but without the manners...
...C'est lout...
...In fact, my opus was reprinted in an Egyptian rag and all hell broke loose...
...The impression is of an exciting new dramatic series about young investigative journalists in search of corruption: a cross, perhaps, between "Lou Grant" and "The Mod Squad...
...He declined the offer, saying that he wasn't sure the color was right...
...They are, after all, as much into cement as Jimmy Hoffa once was...
...The show itself is not quite as depraved as the credits promise, but it comes close...
...Like a good Lebanese, Amin quickly got on the telephone and rang his old enemy-friend Walid...
...Oh, yes, I almost forgot...
...Jason Robards thumbing through the rubble...
...Ever since the Lebanese "civil" war began back in 1975, people have wondered at the ability of the Lebanese to equip private armies with the latest weaponry, and to make use of that weaponry in a manner so profligate it would make a World War I general feel like Silas Marner...
...Okay, okay," came the presidential reply...
...Not that obviously commercial concepts necessarily make for bad television...
...Perhaps this is true, but what King's best-selling political horror novels have proved is that the monsters of America, at least over the last two decades, are simply the cartoon nightmares made familiar by Hollywood and the daily press...
...One thing American intelligence has known all along is that drug peddlers are the main bankers of the various militias, but just as it has been unable to stem their flow into the U.S., it is hard pressed to do anything about them in a place like Lebanon...
...King has referred to it as "my own little Vietnam," written at a time when "we had just witnessed the sorry end of the Nixon administration...
...Las Vegas self-destructs in a local nuclear holocaust, leaving the children of the aging hippies in Boulder and the gentle reader with a heartwarming antinuke lesson worthy of "The Day After": "Don't play with these toys, dear children, please, not ever...
...If you doubt it, take a look at "West 57th," CBS's new prime-time newsmagazine...
...The Syrian High Command takes a healthy cut, and it is rumored that the Syrian chief of staff rivals Khashoggi in wealth and selfindulgence as a result...
...that the Egyptians had sent the Achille Lauro murderers out of the country, and that although the U.S...
...What's going on...
...Murrow, his biographer assures us, was no more comfortable chatting up the likes of Marilyn Monroe than Dwight Eisenhower was comfortable filming sixty-second advertisements for himself...
...A hopped-up retread of "60 Minutes" aimed squarely at the Yuppie market, "West 57th" is quite possibly the single most blatantly commercial endeavor ever undertaken by a network news department, give or take Barbara Walters...
...The nicest thing they said about me was their wish that the fleas of a thousand camels should infest my armpits...
...And the news content of the broadcast is, not surprisingly, nil...
...As Malcolm Muggeridge once said, everything is true except the facts...
...But Edward R. Murrow (who, lest we forget, was canned by William Paley for excessive editorializing) was more than just a nattily dressed war correspondent and the chain-smoking host of "See It Now...
...What they have to do with is drugs, pure and simple...
...One of his most compelling stories, "Apt Pupil" (in Different Seasons), portrays an "allAmerican" high school boy who becomes obsessed with the life of an elderly former Nazi hiding in America because, as he says, "I really groove on that concentration camp stuff...
...1i...
...They actually said I was a...
...NBC took "Hill Street Blues," changed the setting to a Boston hospital, and came up with "St...
...A more complex messiah of darkness appears in The Stand (1978), a huge, ambitious novel in which all but a fragment of the United States population has been wiped out by a germ warfare accident...
...Except for you know what...
...My friend Anthony Haden-Guest, who recently spent over six months in that happy country researching a book on the drug trade and being kidnapped by one group and then another, told me the following story...
...Do you have to wait for me to get to speed...
...The Druse are led by the Gene Wilder look-alike, Walid Jumblat...
...The inhabitants of the Boulder "Free Zone," on the other side, readopt the Constitution, warble about liferaft earth, and rail against the era of technology and "rationalism" that has produced the plague and Randall Flagg, the ultimate nuclear terrorist: `At the end of all rationalism, the mass grave...
...Flagg is the anti-Christ, a magical amalgamation of marine renegade, Ku Klux Klan killer, and Weatherman revolutionary (he has been acquainted with mass murderer Charlie Starkweather, Lee Harvey Oswald, and SLA terrorist Donald DeFreeze...
...Randall Flagg is a wonderfully drawn figure...
...Rather, it underlines the fact that Hitler's genocide is the horror story of modern times and gives a different dimension to King's often repeated claim that good horror is allegorical and strives to "form liaisons between the real and the unreal...
...Jumblat is reputed to be a bit like Frank Perdue...
...The current by Terry Teachout joke making the rounds is that CBS originally planned to call the show "60 Seconds...
...Lebanese politics have as much to do with the science and art of government as the Ayatoilet has in common with compassion...
...Let me explain...
...Like better known heroes of the counterculture who are now among the leading entrepreneurs of capitalist piggism, King has discovered that liberal cliches are the true junk food of his generation...
...The sainted editor of TAS was called names that even I would dare not repeat, and the poor little Greek boy fared worse, much worse...
...There are the Druse, too, whom other Moslems claim to be infidels, and even the Christians do not claim as their own...
...great unwashed as is ABC, the network that made David Hartman and Geraldo Rivera household words...
...From the above sects spring tens of other smaller groups, like the 32 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1985 Hozballah-party of God-and, of course, the Palestinians...
...Nor money sent home from Lebanese workers abroad...
...Well, operating in Lebanon under cover is not exactly like trying to catch the senior senator from Massachusetts with a blonde on his arm...
...Elsewhere...
...Taki Theodoracopulos is a European editor of The American Spectator...
...He likes and uses his own product, which explains Jumblat's infamous disappearances during "frank" discussions between himself and the rest of the warlords...
...Certainly not through Soviet credits...
...Both Mossad and Israeli army intelligence are well connected with Lebanese shenanigans, but they use their information selectively when it comes to telling Uncle Sam...
...Haden-Guest himself was offered Lebanese hospitality in the form of $500,000 of counterfeit money in exchange for $20,000 of the real thing...
...One recent episode featured segments about a football player who used steroids, the PCP market in Washington, D.C., a young deaf actress, a music video set in Viet nam, and George Romero, director of the movie Night of the Living Dead...
...The stories are shorter and far more visually oriented than their "60 Minutes" counterparts...
...THE NATION'S PULSE...
...STONED IN BEIRUT It was two years ago that I reported from Cairo that Hosni Mubarak would rather live than lead, and that life in Cairo was almost not worth living...
...Little did I realize at the time that The American Spectator is as avidly read among those who wear pyjamas all day while eating their dates, as it is popular in Washington, D.C...
...The story does not reduce the significance of the Holocaust...
...Needless to say, no selfrespecting Arab would ever admit that drugs play the major role in the Lebanese conflict...
...It is now 1985-or, as he renames it a la Pol Pot, "the Year One, year of the plague"and his time has come...
...In each of these three novels, King brilliantly exploits the rudimentary intelligence of his average reader, trained by a diet of newscapsules and prime-time docudrama to salivate upon recognizing certain themes and, most of all, certain pictures...
...It is the most dangerous game in the world, and the only ones who can and do play it well are the Israelis...
...The boat was allowed to go free, and the bombardment stopped as if it were November 11, 1918 on the Western front...
...The Druse are not so lucky...
...The rest of the players do not even bother to give themselves labels...
...Not ever again...
...liar...
...with insert shots in which they breathlessly tell each other about the stories to be covered that evening...
...As Muggeridge said, everything they say is true...
...he screamed above the din...
...Extremely funny when one comes to think of it...
...Each episode, for example, begins with a flashily edited credit sequence that intercuts footage of the program's four correspondents standing in a control room mouthing videofluent jabber ("Let's prepare for a twomachine roll...
...They are simply into the drug trade...
...As he has remarked, Hitler knew how to "unleash and feed the werewolf in us...
...The "60 Minutes" framework is obvious enough, but the choice of material is suggestive: All five stories are either about young people or about subjects which young people tend to find interesting...
...As there is as much tax collection in Lebanon as there are traffic jams in Albania, the various warlords have to have a front that is legit, just as our own beloved Mafia over here has...
...as such, he suggests that King's imagination works best, not just at the borders of the grotesque (rotting corpses, vampire attacks), but also at the borders of human evil, whatever its political denomination...
...Most of all, King feeds the American appetite for consumable goods, all the edible items and events of our ghoulish pop culture...
...The theme music is synthesized rock...
...They have clearly been cast not for reportorial ability but for visual appeal, 33 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1985...
...He was "busted in the Great Chicago Pig Convention of 1968" and went underground, biding his time...
...But he did it anyway, and it made him rich...
...The Franjiehs call themselves cement tycoons, and they are probably correct in doing so...
...Lying in the Middle East is like sex, practiced by everyone in every walk of life, except the newborn and the very, very old...
...One, led by Danny Chamoun, could conceivably be said to be pro-Israeli...
...The political overtones, such as they are, are glibly left ish...
...Yes, of course, good triumphs again...
...The Shuf Mountains are hostile places for the poppy, therefore the enterprising Druse import it and act simply as middle men...
...You've got one of my boats down in the harbor," answered Walid...
...It is no secret, then, that the "plague" that has destroyed America is something of a metaphor...
...At least we don't have Dr...
...POLITIQ UE IIVTERNATIONALE...
...It is a gangster state, run by Taki by gangsters who finance their activities through the drug trade...
...Let's not say that King himself, however much he grooves on terror, feeds any such werewolf...
...But there was a funny side to these cowardly attacks...
...About six months ago, Amin Gemayel's palace was rocked by persistent cannon fire coming down from the Druse stronghold...
...The boy ends by becoming a sadistic murderer...
...Any resemblance between the first three minutes of "West 57th" and of a conventional network news program is clearly accidental...
...Given this, why has the U.S...
...There is the pro-Syrian one led by expresident Franjieh, and there is the Falange, whose leader is the titular president of Lebanon, Amin Gemayel...
...And CBS, Murrow tradition or no Murrow tradition, is every bit as obedient to the implicit commands of the Terry Teachout is an assistant editor of Harper's...
...Incidentally, as this is being written it is now clear that it was the Israelis who signaled to the U.S...
...DREAM STREET The news division at CBS takes itself very seriously indeed...
...This is where government announcements make anything the Egyptians say sound like the Sermon on the Mount...
...In the case of The Stand, however, King's very real talents and his fascination with evil are matched against his instinctual drive toward the happy ending and the triumph of liberal virtues...
...and] been resoundingly defeated in Southeast Asia...
...You can guess the rest...
...The Gemayels are into protection, as legitimate a profession in Lebanon as banking is on Wall Street...
...The great majority of the arms are bought through arms dealers in the open market, and as everyone knows the open market means cool, hard cash...
...But "West 57th" is startling in the naked candor of its motivational appeals...
...He was also the star of "Person to Person," the fifties talk show that was a sort of Pleistocene version of "Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous...
...Monstrosity "appeals to the conservative Republican in the three-piece suit who resides within all of us," he has argued, "because it is a reaffirmation of the order we all crave as human beings...
...0...
...been consistently caught off guard in that unhappy land...
...at first demurred at intercepting the plane, it came around once the wily Israelis made it clear its refusal would be leaked to the press...
...Where "60 Minutes" emphasizes the star quality of its veteran reporters, "West 57th" deemphasizes its four novices to the point of fungibility...
...Flagg is the American Mussolini, his trains running on time, his stockpiles of weapons all in order...
...There are three Christian groups...
...I need that boat badly...
...Where does the cash come from...
...Now an Arab calling a non-Arab a liar is akin, say, to Alexander Cockburn saying he hates rich women, or Christabel Hitchens denying she loves hirsute men...
...Ask any employee about the "Murrow tradition" and you're liable to come away with an earful of slimy cant...
...His fascination with Hitler (almost as omnipresent as Nixon) is meant to improve, not contaminate, us...
...Actually, it comes in for the most part through the drug trade, a trade, incidentally, that puts Colombia and Bolivia to shame, not to mention Cuba and that other socialist republic, Bulgaria...
...The moral here is that the difference between news and entertainment on television is-let's just call it subtle...
...Which brings me to the place a little ways up the coastline, Beirut to be exact...
...among foreign agents, the British spy network, and English queers...
...The party of God (God forgive me) controls the Bekaa Valley and deals in heroin...
Vol. 18 • December 1985 • No. 12
