I'm a Stranger Here Myself

by Bill Bryson

  But of course the police don’t shoot people here because they don’t need to because there is no crime. It is a rare and heartwarming example of a virtuous circle. We have grown used to this now, but when we were still new in town and I expressed wonder about it all to a woman who grew up in New York City but has lived here for twenty years, she laid a hand on my arm and said, as if imparting a great secret, “Honey, you’re not in the real world any longer. You’re in New Hampshire.”

  Here’s a fact for you: In 1995, according to the Washington Post, computer hackers successfully breached the Pentagon’s security systems 161,000 times. That works out to eighteen illicit entries every hour around the clock, one every 3.2 minutes.

  Oh, I know what you’re going to say. This sort of thing could happen to any monolithic defense establishment with the fate of the earth in its hands. After all, if you stockpile a massive nuclear arsenal, it’s only natural that people are going to want to go in and have a look around, maybe see what all those buttons marked “Detonate” and “Code Red” mean. It’s only human nature.

  Besides, the Pentagon has got quite enough on its hands, thank you, with trying to find its missing logs from the Gulf War. I don’t know if you have read about this, but the Pentagon has mislaid—irretrievably lost, actually—all but thirty-six of the two hundred pages of official records of its brief but exciting desert adventure. Half of the missing files, it appears, were wiped out when an officer at Gulf War headquarters—I wish I was making this up, but I’m not—incorrectly down-loaded some games into a military computer.

  The other missing files are, well, missing. All that is known is that two sets were dispatched to Central Command in Florida, but now nobody can find them (probably those cleaning ladies again), and a third set was somehow “lost from a safe” at a base in Maryland, which sounds eminently plausible in the circumstances.

  Now to be fair to the Pentagon, its mind has no doubt been distracted by the unsettling news that it has not been getting very reliable dispatches from the CIA. I refer to the recent news that, despite spending $2 billion a year monitoring developments in the Soviet Union, the CIA failed completely to foresee the breakup of the U.S.S.R., and this has naturally unnerved the top brass at the Pentagon. I mean to say, you can’t expect people to keep track of their wars if they’re not getting reliable reports from the field, now can you?

  The CIA, in its turn, was almost certainly distracted from its missions by the news—and again let me stress that I am not making any of this up—that the FBI had spent years filming one of the CIA’s agents, Aldrich Ames, going into the Soviet embassy in Washington with bulging files and coming out empty-handed but had not yet quite figured out what he was up to. The FBI knew that Ames was a CIA employee, knew he made regular visits to the Soviet embassy, and knew the CIA was looking for a mole in its midst but had never managed to make the leap of imagination necessary to pull these tantalizing strands together.

  Ames was eventually caught and sentenced to a zillion years in prison for passing information, but no thanks to the FBI. But then, to be fair, the FBI has been absolutely snowed under with screwing up everything it comes in contact with. First, there was its wrongful arrest of Richard Jewell, the security guard it suspected of last year’s bombing in Atlanta’s Olympic Park. Jewell, according to the FBI, planted the bomb and made a phone call alerting authorities, then raced a couple of miles in a minute or so in order to be back at the scene in time to be a hero. Even though there was not a shred of evidence to connect him with the bomb and even though it was conclusively demonstrated that he could not have made the call and returned to the park in the time alleged, it took the FBI months to realize it had the wrong man.

  Then in April came news that FBI forensic labs had for years been botching, losing, spilling, contaminating, stepping in and tracking out to the parking lot most of the vital evidence that came its way. Occasionally its agents just made things up. In one incident, a lab scientist wrote an incriminating report based on microscopic findings without actually bothering to look through a microscope. Thanks to the lab’s dogged and inventive work, at least one thousand convictions, and perhaps many thousands more, will now be subject to costly reviews and appeals. Among its other ongoing achievements, the FBI has still not found the perpetrator of the Atlanta bombing nor of a series of church bombings across the South, hasn’t arrested anyone in a mysterious fatal derailment of a passenger train in Arizona in 1995, failed to catch the Unabomber (he was turned in by his brother), and still isn’t able to say whether the crash of TWA flight 800 last year was a crime or an accident or what. (It later emerged that an FBI official had allowed a psychic to examine the crash site and the wreckage. Never let it be said that our tax dollars aren’t spent wisely.)

  A lot of people conclude from this that the FBI and its agents are dangerously inept. They are correct, of course, but there are extenuating circumstances for the bureau’s low morale and poor performance—namely, the discovery last year that there is a group of people even more astoundingly incompetent. I refer to America’s sheriffs’ departments.

  Space does not permit a comprehensive survey of the singular accomplishments of America’s sheriffs’ departments, so I will cite just two. First, there was the news that the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department set a departmental, and possibly national, record last year by incorrectly releasing no fewer than twenty-three prisoners, some of them quite dangerous and cranky. After the release of prisoner number twenty-three, a supervisor explained to reporters that a clerk had received papers ordering that the prisoner be sent to Oregon to serve out a long sentence for burglary and rape but, as could happen to anyone, had taken this to mean giving him back all his possessions, escorting him to the door, and recommending a good pizza place around the corner.

  Even better were the sheriff’s deputies in Milwaukee who were sent to the local airport with a team of sniffer dogs to practice hunting out explosives. The deputies hid a five-pound package of live explosives somewhere in the airport and then—I just love this—forgot where. Needless to say, the dogs couldn’t find it. That was in February, and they’re still looking. It was the second time that the Milwaukee sheriff’s department has managed to mislay explosives at the airport.

  I could go on and on, but I’m going to break off here because I want to see if I can get into the Pentagon’s computer. Call me a devil, but I’ve always had a hankering to blow up a minor country. It will be the perfect crime. The CIA won’t notice it, the Pentagon will notice it but will lose the records, the FBI will spend eighteen months investigating and then arrest Mr. Ed the Talking Horse, and the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department will let him go. If nothing else, it will take people’s minds off all these other things they have to worry about.

  Now here is something that seems awfully unfair to me. Because I am an American it appears that I am twice as likely as an English person to suffer an untimely and accidental death. I know this because I have just been reading something called The Book of Risks: Fascinating Facts About the Chances We Take Every Day by a statistical wonk named Larry Laudan.

  It is full of interesting and useful charts, graphs, and factual analyses, mostly to do with coming irremediably a cropper in the United States. Thus, I know that if I happen to take up farm work this year I am three times more likely to lose a limb, and twice as likely to be fatally poisoned, than if I just sit here quietly. I now know that my chances of being murdered sometime in the next twelve months are 1 in 11,000; of choking to death 1 in 150,000; of being killed by a dam failure 1 in 10 million; and of being fatally conked on the head by something falling from the sky about 1 in 250 million. Even if I stay indoors, away from the windows, it appears that there is a 1 in 450,000 chance that something will kill me before the day is out. I find that rather alarming.

  However, nothing is more galling than the discovery that just by being an American, by standing to attention for “The Star-Spangled Banner” and having a baseball cap as a cen
tral component of my wardrobe, I am twice as likely to die in a mangled heap as, say, Prince Philip or Posh Spice. This is not a just way to decide mortality, if you ask me.

  Mr. Laudan does not explain why Americans are twice as dangerous to themselves as Britons (too upset, I daresay), but I have been thinking about it a good deal, as you can imagine, and the answer—very obvious when you reflect for even a moment—is that America is an outstandingly dangerous place.

  Consider this: Every year in New Hampshire a dozen or more people are killed crashing their cars into moose. Now correct me if I am wrong, but this is a fate unlikely to await anyone in the United Kingdom. Nor, we may safely assume, is anyone there likely to be eaten by a grizzly bear or mountain lion, butted senseless by bison, seized about the ankle by a seriously perturbed rattlesnake, or subjected to an abrupt and startling termination from tornadoes, earthquakes, hurricanes, rock slides, avalanches, flash floods, or paralyzing blizzards— all occurrences that knock off scores, if not hundreds, of my fellow citizens each year.

  Finally, and above all, there is the matter of guns. There are 200 million guns in the United States and we do rather like to pop them off. Each year, 40,000 Americans die from gunshot wounds, the great majority of them by accident. Just to put that in perspective for you, that’s a rate of 6.8 gunshot deaths per 100,000 people in America, compared with a decidedly unambitious 0.4 per 100,000 in the United Kingdom.

  America is, in short, a pretty risky place. And yet, oddly, we get alarmed by all the wrong things. Eavesdrop on almost any conversation at Lou’s Cafe here in Hanover and the talk will all be of cholesterol and sodium levels, mammograms and resting heart rates. Show most Americans an egg yolk and they will recoil in terror, but the most palpable and avoidable risks scarcely faze them.

  Forty percent of the people in this country still don’t use a seat belt, which I find simply amazing because it costs nothing to buckle up and clearly has the potential to save you from exiting through the windshield like Superman. (Vermont, which is one of the few states to keep careful track of these things, reported that in the first ten months of 1998, eighty-one people were killed on the state’s roads—and 76 percent of those people were not wearing seat belts.) Even more remarkably, since a spate of recent newspaper reports about young children being killed by airbags in minor crashes, people have been rushing to get their airbags disconnected. Never mind that in every instance the children were killed because they were sitting in the front seat, where they should not have been in the first place, and in nearly all cases weren’t wearing seat belts. Airbags save thousands of lives, yet many people are having them disabled on the bizarre assumption that they present a dange.

  Much the same sort of statistical illogic applies to guns. Forty percent of Americans keep guns in their homes, typically in a drawer beside the bed. The odds that one of those guns will ever be used to shoot a criminal are comfortably under one in a million. The odds that it will be used to shoot a member of the household—generally a child fooling around— are at least twenty times that figure. Yet over 100 million people resolutely ignore this fact, even sometimes threaten to pop you one themselves if you make too much noise about it.

  Nothing, however, better captures the manifest irrationality of people toward risks as one of the liveliest issues of recent years: passive smoking. Four years ago, the Environmental Protection Agency released a report concluding that people who are over thirty-five and don’t smoke but are regularly exposed to the smoke of others stand a 1 in 30,000 risk of contracting lung cancer in a given year. The response was immediate and electrifying. All over the country smoking was banned at work and in restaurants, shopping malls, and other public places.

  What was overlooked in all this was how microscopically small the risk from passive smoking actually is. A rate of 1 in 30,000 sounds reasonably severe, but it doesn’t actually amount to much. Eating one pork chop a week is statistically more likely to give you cancer than sitting routinely in a roomful of smokers. So, too, is consuming a carrot every seven days, a glass of orange juice twice a month, or a head of lettuce every two years. You are five times more likely to contract lung cancer from your pet parakeet than you are from secondary smoke.

  Now I am all for banning smoking on the grounds that it is dirty and offensive, unhealthy for the user, and leaves unsightly burns in the carpet. All I am saying is that it seems a trifle odd to ban it on grounds of public safety when you are happy to let any old fool own a gun or drive around unbuckled.

  But then logic seldom comes into these things. I remember some years ago watching my brother buy a lottery ticket (odds of winning: about 1 in 12 million), then get in his car and fail to buckle up (odds of having a serious accident in any year: 1 in 40). When I pointed out the inconsistency of this, he looked at me for a moment and said: “And what are the odds, do you suppose, that I will drop you four miles short of home?”

  Since then, I have kept these thoughts pretty much to myself. Much less risky, you see.

  I recently learned from an old friend in Iowa that if you are caught in possession of a single dose of LSD in my native state you face a mandatory sentence of seven years in prison without possibility of parole.

  Never mind that you are, say, eighteen years old and of previous good character, that this will ruin your life, that it will cost the state $25,000 a year to keep you incarcerated. Never mind that perhaps you didn’t even know you had the LSD— that a friend put it in the glovebox of your car without your knowledge or maybe saw police coming through the door at a party and shoved it into your hand before you could react. Never mind any extenuating circumstances whatever. This is America in the 1990s and there are no exceptions where drugs are concerned. Sorry, but that’s the way it is. Next.

  It would be nearly impossible to exaggerate the ferocity with which the United States now prosecutes drug offenders. In fifteen states you can be sentenced to life in prison for owning a single marijuana plant. Newt Gingrich, the House Speaker, recently proposed that anyone caught bringing as little as two ounces of marijuana into the United States should be imprisoned for life without possibility of parole. Anyone caught bringing more than two ounces would be executed.

  According to a 1990 study, 90 percent of all first-time drug offenders in federal courts were sentenced to an average of five years in prison. Violent first-time offenders, by contrast, were imprisoned less often and received on average just four years in prison. You are, in short, less likely to go to prison for kicking an old lady down the stairs than you are for being caught in possession of a single dose of any illicit drug. Call me soft, but that seems to me a trifle disproportionate.

  Please understand it is not remotely my intention here to speak in favor of drugs. I appreciate that drugs can mess you up in a big way. I have an old school friend who made one LSD voyage too many in about 1977 and since that time has sat on a rocker on his parents’ front porch examining the backs of his hands and smiling to himself. So I know what drugs can do. I just haven’t reached the point where it seems to me appropriate to put someone to death for being an idiot.

  Not many of my fellow countrymen would agree with me. It is the clear and fervent wish of most Americans to put drug users behind bars, and they are prepared to pay almost any price to achieve this. The people of Texas recently voted down a $750 million bond proposal to build new schools but overwhelmingly endorsed a $1 billion bond for new prisons, mostly to house people convicted of drug offenses.

  America’s prison population has more than doubled since 1982. There are now 1,630,000 people in prison in the United States. That is more than the populations of all but the three largest cities in the country. Sixty percent of federal prisoners are serving time for nonviolent offenses, mostly to do with drugs. America’s prisons are crammed with nonviolent petty criminals whose problem is a weakness for illegal substances.

  Because most drug offenses carry mandatory sentences and exclude the possibility of parole, other prisoners are having to be r
eleased early to make room for all the new drug offenders pouring into the system. In consequence, the average convicted murderer in the United States now serves less than six years, the average rapist just five. Moreover, once he is out, the murderer or rapist is immediately eligible for welfare, food stamps, and other federal assistance. A convicted drug user, no matter how desperate his circumstances may become, is denied these benefits for the rest of his life.

  The persecution doesn’t end there. My friend in Iowa once spent four months in a state prison for a drug offense. That was almost twenty years ago. He did his time and since then has been completely clean. Recently, he applied for a temporary job with the U.S. Postal Service as a holiday relief mail sorter. Not only did he not get the job, but a week or so later he received by recorded delivery an affidavit threatening him with prosecution for failing to declare on his application that he had a felony conviction involving drugs.

  The Postal Service had taken the trouble, you understand, to run a background check for drug convictions on someone applying for a temporary job sorting mail. Apparently it does this as a matter of routine—but only with respect to drugs. Had he killed his grandmother and raped his sister twenty-five years ago, he would in all likelihood have gotten the job.

  It gets more amazing. The government can seize your property if it was used in connection with a drug offense, even if you did not know it. In Connecticut, according to a recent article in the Atlantic Monthly magazine, a federal prosecutor named Leslie C. Ohta made a name for herself by seizing the property of almost anyone even tangentially connected with a drug offense—including a couple in their eighties whose grandson was found to be selling marijuana out of his bedroom. The couple had no idea that their grandson had marijuana in the house (let me repeat: they were in their eighties) and of course had nothing to do with it themselves. They lost the house anyway.