Battlefields Made From Monuments

Great restaurants start with great chefs, one of my favorites being Patrick Gwynn-Jones, owner of Pomegranates in London. He has a way of keeping things in perspective. One holiday season, in with some friends one evening for a fairly early dinner before a play, the burly Welshman came to our table and one of my guests had the temerity to ask about his specials.

“Damned if I know, Old Boy,” the obviously tipsy Gwynn-Jones explained, “I’ve just finished lunch an hour ago. I was thinking about curried goat, but that doesn’t seem very Christmas-y, now does it?”

I still don’t have a Christmas tree, so I guess I’m not very Christmas-y either. The Immortal Tomato is doing fine, so I may reward him yet with a flocking and an honored spot by the fireplace.

This is nothing unique to me, even in Lake Charles, but the terrorist attacks in India struck a little close to the mark. Many years ago I went to Bombay (as Mumbai then was) on business. When I inquired of a friend who had been there about the hotel I had booked, he referred to it as “the second-nicest hotel in Bombay.” I stayed at the Oberoi Towers. I had preferred the Taj Mahal Hotel, but it was full. Both were the targets of attacks last week in which almost 200 people were killed.

My first view of the Oberoi was its Sikh bodyguard at the door, an imposing six-foot-plus guy with a full beard, turban, and sword. He looked fierce to my Western eyes; certainly he wasn’t; and certainly he was no match for a machine pistol. The hotel itself was okay. My best memory of it is the shopping center, which was attached. The ceilings were low to my Western sensibilities and things felt a little “close.” Didn’t see the shops mentioned in the accounts of the attack. It would have been a nightmare under any circumstances, of course, but imagining the crowd in that place and those narrow, low corridors gave me a shiver or two.

Strictly as a tourist, I did make my way to the Taj, which is next door to the Gate of India, the archway seen on television footage of the violence used by Indian soldiers as a sniper post. The Taj was beautiful. Full cricket field out back, gin-and-tonic bar right out of a Merchant-Ivory production. Now a battlefield.

My worry this season is that we will see more and more battlefields made from monuments. Like many others, my primary emotions when the World Trade Center was bombed, and the Towers fell, lay with those innocents who died in the smoke and rubble, or worse, broke high windows and jumped to avoid a fiery death. We could identify with them, in part because so many of us had been there.

I went to the WTC many times, for business and other reasons, but remember most the lunch I tried to have with Allen Gerson, a Manhattan lawyer friend, at Windows on the World. Allen is now a member of the New York City Council from Greenwich Village and bears responsibility for part of the reconstruction efforts at Ground Zero. At the time it was bombed, I had a case with a lawyer from New York who was standing in line to vote when he heard the plane go overhead and strike its target. His voting precinct was in one of the Towers. His apartment, child’s school, and law office were all within three blocks. All were closed for over a year after the attack.

I’ve been lucky to have traveled far and extensively, most of the time under a now-long-gone penumbra of protection I believed I had as an American citizen. We have gone from bulletproof to targets in the last 30 years for many reasons, some from us, some not. Clearly, the world has changed for everybody. But maybe more for Americans.

We don’t believe we should be hated. As a people, we are sure we always have the best of motives, the purest intentions, the most money to give and the loosest pockets for those in trouble, a light and a magnet for the world. That belief, it must be pointed out, is mostly generated here. As late as the end of 2006, only 20 percent of our citizens possessed a passport. Today, a year after travel restrictions tightened sufficiently to require that document to travel even within the Western Hemisphere, only a third have one. In other words, we know what we think of ourselves, but by and large, little appreciation for how the rest of the world sees us.

I was watching a comedy special last night in which Ricky Gervais, an English actor, made a snide remark about the value of the dollar and asked his American audience how they liked being a third world country. Certainly we’re not there yet, and the advantage we have over the Europeans in our current financial straits is that American ingenuity, commercial innovation, ambition, and old-fashioned hard work will get us farther along than most of the government-based solutions advocated by others. We will never be anything other than a first-rate power in the world.

But that status paints a target on our back as surely as it provided a bulletproof vest 30 years ago. I love my country, and I am proud of my countrymen, but I fear greatly for them. Let us pray, in this season of peace, for wisdom and courage for our new President to show our best face to the world and for trouble to our enemies.

And this column was about as Christmas-y as curried goat. Hope you got something out of it.

Kiss your family and draw them tightly to you over the season, eat lots of great food, and. . .I’ll see you guys on the flip.

Merry Christmas.