Deaths of tourists in Florida - 17 September 1993

Of course the stunning news of the American week, perhaps of the worlds week, was a picture, a truly moving picture we all saw on television the eerie, not to believed sight of a president of the United States gently touching the shoulder blade of a prime minister of Israel as he advanced and shook the hand of Yasser Arafat. Looking at that incredible image on the box, a friend said, "have you ever seen anything like it".

It seemed tasteless at the time to say what went through my mind, but I thought of a scene equally preposterous, equally improbable but because we'd not been warned about it, it was even more literally shocking. It was a day when on our evening news, I saw at the door of 10 Downing Street about to receive a warm handshake from Prime Minister Callaghan the in Britain anyway, the loathed former head of the Irgun terrorist gang that blew up the King David Hotel, none other than Menachem Begin.

I mention my stunned feelings the next day to an American friend, an amiable cynic, and he said, "Wait a while, 10 years from now Yasser Arafat will be a guest at the White House". Well no commentary of mine is likely to improve on other commentators or on the sombre warning note of Mr Rabin who before the night was out said "the best thing you could feel was hope".

Let's turn to a topic that touches more people abroad than anything else I can think of that's happened here, it will be no news to you that tourism is the nub the backbone of the economy of Florida. A fact, which I must say in passing I never, can comprehend considering the immense variety of superior touring delights throughout many of the other 49 states and I can only attribute Florida's conspicuous success as a tourist Mecca to the triumph of a cliché, namely the unchanging lush stereotype of the Florida advertising posters folders and television commercials. A famous old economist long gone included in his masterwork, which was on the economic geography of north America, a photograph of four palm trees throwing deep shadows on a sandy beach and a half dozen lazing tourists and far off in the blue green sea a scatter of happy swimmers. The caption under the photograph read "'Florida's chief crop and chief source of income, the healthy condition of these few small palm trees is prove that repeated photographing does not injure a tree".

The fact is and it's a puzzle to the states that have the luck to contain great scarlet canyons or majestic alps or even like upstate New York forests and mountain valleys and gorges and great lakes. The fact is that the Florida Chamber of Commerce, it's called a "department" has been probably the most successful of all the states in touting itself as a tourist paradise 31,000 million or $31 billion a year is the normal revenue from tourists, or was.

No wonder the secretary of the Florida Department of Commerce called the twin killings of a German and then of a British tourist in one week "catastrophic for tourism", the first calls abroad indicated that there might be as high as 30% cancellations, so he with the permission of the governor and other state officials announced a step that I doubt any other country attractive to tourists has ever taken. Florida has indefinitely suspended all its tourist advertising both here and abroad and around the country. The knife has been turned in that wound by newspapers reproducing the New York Times's big story with an inset map of the state and a memorial list of the nine victims of random shooting since last September, four Germans, two Englishmen, two Canadians and a Venezuelan diplomat on a stopover to his post in Switzerland.

Many of us, however, outraged by the killings themselves must have felt sorry for the governor of Florida standing before a microphone trying to sound authoritative taking charge, what could he say other than make a general promise to bring criminals to justice to stamp out crime, how do you do that?

For the time being, he has ordered all rest areas lay-bys on the interstate highways to be guarded and closed at night and that should take quite a bite out of the tourist's revenue in a state which is twice the size of Scotland. What else could he do? The stable resident population of Florida is 13 millions; every year 42 million outsiders visit the state. Since most of them go there, as the saying goes, to have fun, the outlook for general peace and domestic tranquillity is pretty dim. To be brutally thoughtful, it seems surprising to me that given the dense congestion of the races, 80% white, 20% black or Hispanic, the vast numbers of people employed in serving up all sorts of pleasure, the gamey air of Miami, the existence of many young gangs with whom as in Los Angeles the police can barely cope, it is surprising that there is so little casual murder.

Now this thought is I realise no help to the family and friends of the nine shot in one year or to the family and friends of the others who will likely be shot in the coming year, less publicised but hardly less hurtful to their families are the many more victims of hotel assaults, sniping attacks on motorists in the north of the state, which provoked another precident that made the travel agents wince. The American Automobile Association put out a general alert to all travellers on the Florida highways. Something occurs to me, I think of my early sorties into the, well, it would misleadingly melodramatic to say the underworld of various American cities, I'm thinking of times in my early days when I visited certain cities Memphis, New Orleans, East St Louis, Chicago with the single purpose of checking out their jazz dives.

And in the 1930s certainly, if dance orchestras in the big hotels weren't your bag, you naturally went into dark town the black quarters and came on the great men you knew or had heard about and unless they were Duke Ellington they played on upright pianos in smoky bars or in dubious roadhouses. It never crossed anyone's mind at the time not to go there. Whereas today, I cannot think of any white friends in their right minds who would dream of going up to Harlem for an evening's fun and the same goes for the dark towns of a score of cities, but in two successive years when I roamed the country and again twice during the Second War, I never had the slightest misgiving in wandering through these places and often sitting in a corner the only white man.

Now in saying that you never dreamed of violence or danger I am not saying there was less than now though attacks by blacks on whites for instance I'm sure were very rare or maybe I should say rarely reported that's the run. I wonder how many random murders there were in southern Florida in the sunshine gambling belt in the 1930s and '40s. My hunch is that there must have been as many hushed up as ever reported and hunted down, but today there is television. In Los Angeles, remember there was a home-movie camera and I should guess that there could hardly be a kind of murder more difficult to hush up than the murder of a tourist. Every one of those nine in Florida last year, the scene, the suspects, the police follow-up has been televised by night and day and seen around the world.

In the 1870s there was a massacre in Wyoming by cowboys of an entire town of homesteaders, the news of it didn't reach the outside world till 10 years later. Today, it would be as notorious and as universally pictured as the massacre of that cult in Waco Texas. All I'm saying is that television makes us aware that evening of any public murder of a kidnapping of a big fire anywhere in Europe or the Americas and it leaves us from time to time with a picture of a world going down in flames or the smoke of gunfire.

Another example, in the past year, there have been a dozen or so murders, rapes at various spots along the 100-odd miles of Long Island. The other Sunday there was a cover story in the New York Times's Sunday magazine, the whole piece on Long Island as an island of crime much to the annoyance disgust even of those of us who lived there. Pick out four or five rapes, three or four murders in a population of three quarters of a million and they've all had exhaustive and exhausting coverage on television and in the local press, put them together make a piece about them and you I'm sure leave an indelible impression with strangers of Long Island, not as a splendid ocean playground for the residents of Brooklyn and Queens, not as a beautiful fishing ground 100 miles or more of the sound, 30 miles of a landlocked bay, 100 miles of ocean and the big boys, the stripe bass, and further out the plunging swordfish, or a place of many music centres much theatre, four universities. At Flushing Meadows 30,000 people hoarse over the tennis championships, no no in this version Long Island is a haven for the assassin and the pervert. I'm quite sure that has done our tourist business no good.

For the first time, I met a visiting Englishman who raised an eyebrow at the mention of a home on Long Island he had read the New York Times, so though I know it will not be a consoling thought to the family of those nine slain tourists, I think somebody ought to point out to intending visitors that Florida is a great many other things than random highway shootings and that nine in 42 million is a very low incidence of crime in hectic pleasure seeking land.

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