Peace Kills by P. J. O’Rourke

cab licenses in New York, thereby bringing that city to a halt again.)
    An English friend asked me, “Would a bald chap who was sunburned and was gardening and put a tea towel on his head be in trouble in America?”
    My plane was two thirds empty. But the unflappable British flight crew was unflapped. I was not subjected to the indignity that an acquaintance suffered on a flight from New York to Chicago. He was made to press the flight attendant call button and identify himself before being allowed to go to the bathroom. This—for a drinking man in the enlarged-prostate years—is a serious violation of civil rights.
    The people I know in Great Britain were in the same state of shock and anger as the people I know in America. And, like my American friends, they weren’t particularly frightened of a second terrorist strike or of poison gas or germ warfare. But this may be a matter of being old smokers and drinkers, of an age for cardiac arrest and malignancy, with children they’d like to see grow up or at least get a damn job, and retirement funds that had gone to hell during the previous year. How much more frightening can life get?
    The Brits, however, were more likely to raise the subject of the IRA and say a word about America leading the fight against terrorism while letting the NORAID cans be passed in the bars of Southie and the Bronx. I blamed the Kennedys—always a safe course when questions of bad U.S. political policies are raised. Meanwhile, it’s the Britishthemselves who were at the negotiating table with my moron cousins from Ulster. Personally, I’d start the war on terrorism with Gerry Adams. At least we know where he is.
    Incidentally, it’s ridiculous if you’re Irish to claim that you can’t fathom the mind-set behind the wild destruction of innocents, the casual self-murder, and the bathos of martyrdom on September 11. Al Qaeda probably has a Yeats of its own—” A terrible beauty is born.”
    But there was something going on in Great Britain, among the people I
don’t
know, that was more troubling than Northern Ireland home-rule concessions. The September 17 issue of
The New Statesman
ran an amazing editorial leader:
    Look at the pictures on pages 6-7, showing Americans running in terror from the New York explosions and then ask yourself how often in the past (particularly in Vietnam and more recently in Iraq) you have seen people running in terror from American firepower. American bond traders, you may say, are as innocent and as undeserving of terror as Vietnamese or Iraqi peasants. Well, yes and no.
    To quote more might set off a wave of retribution in America against people wearing derby hats.
    I had dinner with the critic and television commentator Clive James and his assistant. The assistant was an able and well-educated young woman who could not be convinced by Clive that, in the matter of moral values, there was such a thing as a superior culture. “They cover their women in the ballroom drapes!” Clive said. “Your dad can have you stoned to death for not marrying some old goat!”
    â€œI wouldn’t call it an inferior culture,” his assistant said.
    â€œWhat about Somalia?! What about clitoridectomies?!”
    â€œOf course I’m a feminist,” his assistant said. “But I resist the idea of an inferior culture.”
    It’s usually Clive and I who have the arguments. He’s a liberal democrat. But he’s my age; he remembers when the whole point of being on the left was the effort (alas, misplaced) to forge a superior culture.
    I was a guest on a BBC radio phone-in talk show. If the world is mad at America for anything, it should be for invention of the phone-in talk show. The idea of a news broadcast once was to find someone with information and broadcast it. The idea now is to find someone with ignorance and spread it around. (Being ignorant myself, I’m not mad personally.)
    A