No Service

The checks, or as the English write, the cheques, have arrived. I've been waiting many months for my goodbye money from CNN, which canceled television's best news magazine and thus me last January. I've been waiting almost as long for a promised advance from HarperCollins. You'd think Ted Turner (or whoever owns his company now) and Rupert Murdoch have enough money to pay a writer with five children on time. Maybe it's not them. It could be the bookkeepers hanging onto rich men's money as long as possible so that poor men do not earn interest on it. Anyway, I can now repay what I had to borrow plus interest (probably to banks owned by Murdoch and Turner) to survive for the last six months, and am free to hit the road for my book.

There is much to escape. The builders are here, ostensibly repairing the roof. Actually, they were here yesterday, didn't show up today and I wouldn't give better than even money they'll return tomorrow. I've also been having problems with British Telecom, from whom I attempted to buy a telephone a couple of weeks ago. When I placed the order on Tuesday, they said they would send it on Wednesday via a service called Parcel Force. Great. What time? Between 8 in the morning and 8 at night. That, I said, is a wide window. I duly remained at home the requisite 12 hours. No phone arrived. I called back. They promised delivery the next day, Thursday, same spread of time. Again, another 12-hour vigil, and no phone. Next day, BT blamed Parcel Force and told me to take it up with them. I called Parcel Force, who said they had not received an order from BT until that day. So, if I wouldn't mind waiting at home tomorrow between the hours of 8 a.m. and 8 p.m., the telephone handset would be mine. I waited. At 8 p.m., I went out. It was a bit like escaping from prison. Anyway, next day, BT told me that Parcel Force had attempted to deliver the telephone at 8.20 p.m. After a few more conversations with both companies, I canceled the order and bought a telephone from a local shop.

It gets better. I asked the saleswoman for the address of corporate headquarters. When she passed my inquiry to her supervisor, I heard the supervisor answer, "Tell him to look it up in the phone book."

That day, while waiting for builders and a telephone not to show up, no water dripped from the taps for my morning bath. I do not live in Chad, where wells occasionally run dry. I live in London, where it rains 300 days a year. I called Thames Water?like BT, a privatized monopoly?whose official explained that a broken main had stopped the water supply to London postal districts W2 and W9. I do not live in either W2 or W9. She said, uh-oh, maybe there's another burst pipe in your area. That would make the second in the last three weeks, I said, not a very good service. She defended her employers, telling me that it was not the responsibility of Thames Water to guarantee me a steady supply of water. It isn't? What is its bloody job then? To plug me into the Internet? She sounded just like the excuse-makers for Britain's privatized train companies, who do not believe they have any responsibility to move people along rails from one destination to another.

You see why I want to get out of town. With the advance banked, I can get away to research a sequel to my travel book, Tribes with Flags, which Atlantic Monthly Press published in 1990. That was about a trip from Alexandretta to Aqaba along the eastern Mediterranean shore and down to the Red Sea. It ended abruptly in Beirut, where I had a misunderstanding with young Shiite Muslim gentlemen of the Hezbollah militia. This book is a sequel, The Tribes Triumphant: Aqaba to Checkpoint Charlie. I'll finish the original trip, but in reverse.

They call themselves nation states out there. They are what my old friend, the Egyptian diplomat Tahseen Basheer, called tribes with flags. In the Levant, tribalism is winning. It triumphed a long time ago, but it seems to be overtaking the Middle East's one modern society, Israel. Maybe it's inevitable. In his One Palestine, Complete, the Israeli historian and journalist Tom Segev quotes an old book (I'm not sure how old, but I'd guess 19th century), George Adam Smith's Historical Geography of the Holy Land: "Palestine is emphatically a land of tribes. The idea that it can ever belong to one nation, even though this were the Jews, is contrary to both nature and the Scripture."

The ancient Hebrews divided themselves into 12, usually warring, tribes. Bernard Avishai, writing in Britain's Prospect magazine this month, says there are now five tribes in Israel: the educated descendants of the old European Labor Zionist establishment; the Mizrahim, or immigrants from North Africa; the institutional Orthodox; the Russian immigrants, many of whom are not Jewish; and Israel's Arabs. It's a hell of a mix, as is the whole region around Israel and the territories its army and settlers occupy. And the Arabs are not short of tribes themselves.

Wandering around the Middle East will beat hell out of waiting for builders, telephones and the water to come back on.