Read Online Holidays in Heck by P. J. O’Rourke - Free Book Online Page B

valley of the River Exe would be gone. The handsome agricultural landscape of which the British are so proud, carefully husbanded since Boudicca’s day, would be replaced by natural growth. The most likely growth is real estate developments. There’s room for any number of charming weekend getaway homes where the tired politicians of London could get some relaxation and perhaps provide their constituents with a bit of sport—of a noncontroversial kind. According to the Hunting Act, “The hunting of rats is exempt.”

5
M Y EU V ACATION
    Reading the European Constitution on a
French Beach, Guadeloupe, May 2005

    T he French referendum on the EU Constitution was a story that demanded to be viewed and understood from a thoroughly European perspective, so I went on vacation.
    Guadeloupe is a full-fledged
département
of metropolitan France. Here the European Union could be contemplated as the sociopolitico-economic masterwork of a civilization, an edifice of human hope. And never mind that previous attempts to unify Europe by Hitler, Napoleon, and Attila the Hun didn’t work out—it had been a cold, rainy spring in New England.
    At passport control there were two lines. One official sat complacently in a booth doing nothing until all the EU citizens had been processed at another booth by a secondofficial, who, in reciprocation, sat complacently doing nothing while the first official took his turn. When, at last, the first official deigned to examine a non-EU passport he walked across the aisle to the second official’s booth, borrowed the visa stamp, walked back, stamped the passport, and returned the stamp to his colleague. He did the same thing for each subsequent passport. At customs, on the other hand, there were no officials.
    All around the island billboards read “ OUI ” or “ NON .” They were equal in number and identical in color and typography. The fairness doctrine debates of the U.S. election must have hit home in the EU. Obviously rigorous, uniform rules on campaign media had been instituted. I mentally composed several indignant paragraphs about how John McCain will be advocating this soon in the United States before I noticed that the billboards were advertising a cell phone company. Say “ NON ” to service charges, “ OUI ” to free minutes.
    Real pro and con referendum posters had to be looked for. They were on special hoardings outside schools and municipal offices where the pasting up of expressions of free speech was officially sanctioned. Campaign rhetoric had a certain subtle European sophistication. At least I guess so. The slogan on one “Oui” poster was “
L’Europe—à besoin de notre
.” According to the dictionary I bought for high school French, this translates as “The Europe—to, at, in, on, by, or for need, want, or necessity of ours.”
    Guadeloupe is a volcanic island of soaring, majestic beauty upon which the French have turned their backs to build everything as close as possible to the damp-spritzed, wind-butted beaches with sand the color of Hyundai fakewood trim and a profusion of foot-piercing volcanic rocks. Also, what’s French for “Every litter bit hurts”? Some of the older buildings have a limbo-party-at-the-Phi-Delt-house charm. They will be torn down as soon as the French economy finally revives and more reinforced concrete is poured in the European Bauhaus style. Form follows function. The function is to grow tropical mold.
    That said, Guadeloupe’s main city, Pointe-à-Pitre, is nice enough, with no glaring slums, no glaring locals, and only the Caribbean minimum of starving stray dogs. Plenty of new Citroëns, Peugeots, and Renaults grace the traffic jams, although Guadeloupe’s per capita GDP is only $8,000. The people are sleek and fashionably dressed. The streets are well-swept by the standards of the tropics and well-paved by the standards of New