THE GREAT AMERICAN SALOON SERIES: Another Dateline Please, Bartender
Hitchens, Christopher
Another Dateline Please, Bartender BY CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS aging through the worthy turgidity of the New York Times a few weeks ago, I fell into a sudden reverie. An article about the...
...All at once, I pitied myself for being sentimental, and also pitied those who would not find this name piercingly evocative...
...The hot-spot or crisis bar has sometimes been cynically baptized as "Mahogany Ridge," in memory of all the eyewitness war stories filed from the relative comfort of the slumped-over position...
...Georges" still have power to bring moisture to the rheumy eye...
...Georges was replaced by the Commodore as the place to sit out bombardments, and to pick up anything from a hot tip to a ride on a Learjet, but in the end the Hizbollah moved in and broke all the bottles in the bar, and a pall descended that has never lifted to this day...
...This cavernous modernist hulk became the clearing-house for every kind of defector, rumor-monger, movie director and gunrunner...
...Many's the time I have seen an intrepid correspondent walk into a bar, obviously elated by some march stolen on the competition, and actually refuse to share the scoop even when offered free champagne...
...It was encouraging to see the old mixture taking form as if in a familiar cocktail-shaker...
...There are others I can remember, like the Camino Real in San Salvador or Meikles in former Salisbury, "Rhodesia," or the Tivoli or the Bel Canto during the Portuguese revolution, or the Europa in Belfast, where a whiff of Rick's Casablanca could yet be detected...
...But this is an unfairness...
...Spooks, diplomats, hacks, spongers, gossips, an attentive and garrulous staff: All the fixings...
...Unfettered and loose-tongued reporters, in their untamed habitat, make much better sources...
...It met all the qualifications of a Levantine drinking establishment, once defined-by me, if I may say so-as the spot where the upper middle class meets the lower Middle East...
...Much of the talk around the bar was of different types and densities of flak-jacket, a fashion element that became de rigueur at about that time...
...Even so, one learned that the people signing this garbage didn't always believe it...
...While in Washington, D.C., my home town, there has been nothing even remotely resembling a journo-bar since the old "Class Reunion" on H Street closed its doors in the early Reagan days...
...Habemus candidatum...
...In the great scorebook of journalists' hangouts, the very words "St...
...On the other hand, there was the old Ledra Palace Hotel in Cyprus-now taken over as the headquarters of the U.N...
...Another Dateline Please, Bartender BY CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS aging through the worthy turgidity of the New York Times a few weeks ago, I fell into a sudden reverie...
...Or even, paradoxically, with proximity...
...Perhaps the pressure to conform diminishes with distance from the home office...
...An article about the reconstruction of Beirut mentioned a quixotic attempt to reopen the Hotel St...
...Nowadays, with newspapers relocated to the outer fringes of the city, and columnists e-mailing their stuff from home, London's press lacks a heart and a heartbeat that it did, in living memory, possess...
...Here I noticed the unhypocritical way in which the management would demand advance payment in cash, on the grounds that one never knew who would be next to drive over a mine or be hit by a sniper...
...it meant that things were beginning to happen...
...L...
...Hack behavior, however, need not be pack behavior...
...L old "Class Reunion" on H Street closed its doors in the early Reagan days...
...Seeing a favored client fallen into a refreshing slumber over his unfinished yet urgent copy, Savvas would take it to the telex office, blue-pencil any obvious mistakes, and file it on time to Fleet Street-often with a crisp closing paragraph of his own composition...
...Actually this isn't always true even when it is: In the Sheraton Wayfarer in Manchester, New Hampshire, in 1992 I got a sense of how the reporters were buckling to their editors in deciding that there was an exciting "New Democrat" named Bill Clinton and no need to look further...
...There's nothing like encountering "information" in its raw and untreated state...
...peacekeepers-where the storied barman Savvas was known as "the night editor...
...The era of electronic filing and satellite phones has somewhat diminished the need for the collectivized souk-cumbordello on which "the hacks," as the foreign press corps still call themselves, used to depend...
...Georges...
...There are press bars that I only know by reputation, or visited when their glory days had gone, like the Floridita in Havana and the Aletti in Algiers...
...We shall not see again the horrifically accurate scene painted by Evelyn Waugh in Scoop, where the pride of the international scribbling community eavesdropped on one another, interviewed the landlady as a "prominent local hostess," and bought each other large rounds of drinks on their employers' tabs...
...Only last year, in the most unpromising city in the worldTHE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 0 Summer Reading Issue 2001 115 The St...
...Battered and charred by the war that engulfed the city after 1975, the St...
...Still, as recently as the war in Bosnia in the mid-1990s, journalists were forced to stick together in one of the most amazing information-marts at which I have ever been privileged to raise an elbowthe Holiday Inn in Sarajevo...
...Here was the bar where, in the brave days before civil war and religious factionalism, Kim Philby would come to splash his four salaries (one from British intelligence, one from the KGB, one from the London Observer and one from the Economist...
...And all I can say, viewing the mainstream journalistic product of the city, is that it shows...
...the whole subversive culture of Private Eye, which made secret-keeping and soft-censorship almost impossible, arose from this one wondrous fact...
...In old Fleet Street a reporter with a spiked story could go across the road to ElVino and spread the word by other means...
...one of the reasons I became a journalist was that I didn't want to rely on the newspapers for disclosure...
...And all I can say, viewing the mainstream journalistic product of the city, is that it shows...
...Georges met all the qualifications of a Levantine drinking establishment: Spooks, diplomats, hacks, spongers, gossips, an attentive and garrulous staff...
...Pyongyang, North Korea-I found that the bar in the ghastly Koryo Hotel was slowly taking on the aura of a hangout, with chancy businessmen and visiting hacks posing as tourists, and odd young men with the business cards of Chinese and other "news agencies...
...Here I met a Frenchman, later much-mangled in a car wreck, who solemnly handed me a card giving his profession as "specialiste de la violence...
Vol. 34 • July 2001 • No. 6
