The Books: “All the Trouble in the World: The Lighter Side of Overpopulation, Famine, Ecological Disaster, Ethnic Hatred, Plague, and Poverty” (P.J. O’Rourke)

Next book in my Daily Book Excerpt. Onward into my ‘cultural commentary’ section.

Next book is All the Trouble in the World: The Lighter Side of Overpopulation, Famine, Ecological Disaster, Ethnic Hatred, Plague, and Poverty, by P.J. O’Rourke.

I love P.J. O’Rourke. This book was written in 1994, and while it is very enjoyable to read – it’s a bit odd to read, in light of September 11. O’Rourke’s whole point of the book is: Let’s stop it with all the doom and gloom. Let’s get some perspective on how bad things REALLY are, and you know what? Right now? They’re not so bad. The first couple sentences are: “This is a moment of hope in history. Why doesn’t anybody say so?” He writes it from the affluence “peaceful” perspective, and he is right on a lot of things. His book is a diatribe against the professional worrier types. You know the ones. The ones who can afford to worry about certain things only because they live such affluent privileged lives. It’s a FUNNY book. I love his prose, in general. At one point, he sees a sloth while he’s traveling through the Amazon. He stares at the sloth. He describes it thus: “Sloths move at the speed of congressional debate but with greater deliberation and less noise.” So while O’Rourke’s insistence that everything is going GREAT, so why worry? comes off as a bit naive, I don’t mind so much. A lot of thinkers and writers and world-watchers didn’t see it coming … (but a hell of a lot did!) – so if you read the book in the right spirit, it won’t matter. He’s right, he’s right on a LOT of things.

Besides of all of that, he’s one of my “freebies”.

The following excerpt is from his chapter on famine. He was in Mogadishu in 1992, and he describes it.

EXCERPT FROM All the Trouble in the World: The Lighter Side of Overpopulation, Famine, Ecological Disaster, Ethnic Hatred, Plague, and Poverty, by P.J. O’Rourke.

Some thirty of us — journalists, camera crews, editors, producers, money men, and technicians — were housed in this compound, bedded down in shifts on the floor of the old audience hall while our mercenaries camped in the courtyard.

It was impossible to go outside our walls without “security” (“security” being what the Somali gunmen — gunboys, really — liked to be called.) Even with the gunment along, there were always people mobbing up to importune or gape. Hands tugging at wallet pockets. Fingers nipping at wristwatch bands. No foreigner could make a move without setting off a bee’s nest of attention — demanding, grasping, pushing crowds of cursing, whining, sneering people with more and worse Somalis skulking on the fringes of the pack.

One of the first things I saw, besides guns, when I arrived in Mogadishu was a pack of thieves creeping through the wreckage of the airport sizing up our charter cargo. And the last thing I saw as I left was the self-appointed Somali “ground crew” running beside our taxiing plane, jamming their hands through the window hatch, trying to grab money from the pilot.

A trip from our compound to Mogadishu’s main market required two kids with AK-47s plus a driver and a translator who were usually armed as well. The market was walking distance but you wanted a car or truck to show your status. That there was a market at all in Mogadishu was testimony to something in the human spirit, though not necessarily something nice, since what was for sale was mostly food that had been donated to Somalia’s famine victims. CONTRIBUE PAR LES ENFANTS DE FRANCE said the stenciled letters on all the rice sacks. (Every French school child had been urged to bring to class a kilo of rice for Somalia.)

Meat was also available, though not immediately recognizable as such. A side of beef looked like fifty pounds of flies on a hook. And milk, being carried around in wooden jugs in the hundred-degree heat, had a smell that was the worse than the look of the meat. But all of life’s stapes, in some more or less awful form, were there in the market. If you had the money to get them. That is, if you had a gun to get the money. And a whole section of the market was devoted to retailing guns.

I wanted to buy a basket or something, just to see how the ordinary aspects of life worked in Somalia in the midst of total anarchy and also, frankly, to see if having my own gunmen was any help in price haggling. I was thinking I could get used to a pair of guys with AKs, one clearing a path for me and one covering my back. I’d be less worried about crime in the States, not to mention asking for a raise. And, if I happened to decide to go to a shrink, I’ll bet it would be remarkable how fast my emotions would mature, how quickly my insights would grow, how soon I’d be declared absolutely cured with two glowering Somali teens and their automatic weapons beside me on the couch.

They were, however, useless at bargaining for baskets. Nobody gets the best of a Somali market woman. Not only did the basket weaver soak me, but fifteen minutes after the deal had been concluded she chased me halfway across the marketplace screaming that she’d changed her mind. My bodyguards cringed and I gave up another three dollars — a sort of Third World adjustable basket mortgage.

She was a frightening lady. Ugly, too, although this was an exception. Somali women are mainly beautiful: tall, fine-featured, and thin even in fatter times than these. They are not overbothered with Muslim prudery. Their bright-colored scarves are used only for shade and not to cover elaborate cornrows and amazing smiles. Loud cotton print sarongs are worn with one shoulder bare and wrapped with purposeful imperfection of concealment. There is an Iman doppelganger carrying every milk jug. You could do terrific business with modeling agencies hiring these girls by the pound in Somalia and renting them by the yard in New York.

The men, perhaps because I am one, are another matter. They’re cleaver-faced and jumpy and given to mirthless grins decorated with the dribble from endless chewing of qat leaves. Some wear the traditional tobe kilt. Other dress in Mork and Mindy-era American leisure wear. The old clothes that you give to charity are sold in bulk to dealers and wind up mostly in Africa. If you want to do something for the dignity of the people in sub-Saharan countries, you can quit donating bell-bottom pants to Goodwill.

When we emerged from the market our driver was standing next to the car with a look on his face like you or I might have if we’d gotten a parking ticket just seconds before we made it to the meter wtih the dime. Shards of glass were all over the front seat. The driver had been sitting behind the wheel when a spent bullet had come out of somewhere and shattered the window beside his head.

Mogadishu is almost on the equator. The sun sets at six, prompt. After that, unless we wanted to mount a reconnaissance in force, we were stuck inside our walls. We ate well. We had our canned goods from Kenya, and the Somalis baked us fresh bread (made from famine-relief flour, no doubt) and served us a hot meal every night — fresh vegetables, stuffed peppers, pasta, lobsters caught in the Mogadishu harbor and local beef. I tried not to think about the beef. Only a few of us got sick. We had a little bit of whiskey, lots of cigarettes, and the pain pills from the medical kits. We sat out on the flat tile roof of the big stucco house and listened to the intermittent artillery and small-arms fire.

Down in the courtyard our gunmen and drivers were chewing qat. The plant looks like watercress and tastes like a handful of something pulled at random from the flower garden. You have to chew a lot of it, a bundle the size of a whisk broom, and you have to chew it for a long time. It made my mouth numb and gave me a little bit of a stomachache, that’s all. Maybe qat is very subtle. I remember thinking cocaine was subtle, too, until I noticed I’d been awake for three weeks and didn’t know any of the naked people passed out around me. The Somalis seemed to get off. They start chewing before lunch but the high didn’t kick in until about three in the afternoon. Suddenly our drivers would start to drive straight into potholes at full speed. Straight into pedestrians and livestock, too. We called it “the qat hour”. The gunmen would all begin talking at once, and the chatter would increase in speed, volume, and intensity until, by dusk, frantic arguments and violent gesticulations had broken out all over the compound. That was when one of the combat accountants would have to go outside and give everybody his daily pay in big stacks of dirty Somali shilling notes worth four thousand to the dollar. Then the yelling really started.

Qat is grown in Kenya. “The Somalis can chew twenty planes a day!” said a woman who worked in the Nairobi airport. According to the Kenyan charter pilots some twenty loads of qat are indeed flown into Mogadishu each morning. Payloads are normally about a ton per flight. Qat is sold by the bunch, called a maduf, which retails for $3.75 and weighs about half a pound. Thus $300,000 worth of qat arrives in Somalia every day. But it takes U.S. Marines to deliver a sack of wheat.