I Think You're Totally Wrong

by David Shields

  DAVID: The waitress saying, “Pie like grandma makes it,” the American flag, the salute to our troops, the motorcycles parked like horses outside—I dig it all.

  CALEB: Imagine that’s your house.

  DAVID: I could do it. My neighbor, Sandy, is a lawyer in her mid-sixties. Her daughter has a lesbian partner, and the two of them are raising a kid in Bloomington, Indiana. Sandy is selling her house and moving there to be a grandmother. I could do that. If Natalie were living in Indiana, raising a family, and Laurie and I decided to move there to be near her, I’d be fine. Part of me pretends to crave New York, but I really don’t. I’m an incredibly simple person. This is beautiful country.

  CALEB: Eula Biss dedicated Notes from No Man’s Land to her future son. After the interview, we chatted and I asked if she had had the son yet. She had. I asked if she was going to have another. She was leaning toward no. She teaches at Northwestern and feared she wouldn’t have time to write. The more successful the writer becomes, the less time for other things. I wondered if I could make these sacrifices for my art. Publication, attention, success—how does it change you?

  DAVID: To be honest, the last thing I ever feel is “successful.” There’s no guarantee; every book is—

  CALEB: You win the NBCC award, like Eula did: your next book’s guaranteed.

  DAVID: Not really.

  CALEB: You may say “no guarantee.” Let me tell you about “no guarantee.”

  DAVID: When Laurie and I had the debate whether to have a second child, I had published four books. Remote had just come out. It’s not as if Remote set the world on fire, but it did get a lot of attention. I was an associate professor, with tenure, at the UW. I had found my métier: I was working on Black Planet and I thought, man—

  Train whistle blows.

  DAVID: Baroooouh!

  It does feel selfish. Everything is selfish. If you have four children, you’re doing it for yourself. You’re doing it for them, but you’re doing it for your own self-fulfillment. I feel okay about it. It’s not as if, you know—did I let Laurie down?

  CALEB: You want the kid entering the world to a welcome.

  DAVID: I’m sure, if we had had a second child, it would have brought greater complexity and joy into our lives. It was mainly a financial thing.

  CALEB: If you knew you’d be making a hundred and twenty-five grand in the future—

  DAVID: I was making about thirty-five, and Laurie was making twenty-five, and I wanted to be able to pay for Natalie’s education.… Ah, here’s the meth lab house.

  DAVID: I can see how, in the construction business, cocaine must be a bit of an occupational hazard.

  CALEB: I worked in Snohomish with this Coupeville guy who blew almost his entire paycheck on crack. He’d cook rock on the job. Smart guy, though. I’m in college and by the time I graduate he’s leading a crew, youngest guy on the job, but loved the drug. Then got into meth. He’s now doing time in Monroe. Barouh’s stayed away from that kind of trouble.… Okay, we got Barouh’s map. Let’s see, Highway 2—this trail takes us to Dorothy Lake.

  DAVID: We have to drive, then hike?

  CALEB: Seven miles of bad dirt road, then an hour hike. Here’s my Washington State Parks pass.

  DAVID: Is it a tough hike?

  CALEB: A lot of up and down.

  DAVID: That’s fine.

  CALEB: A man’s hike!

  DAVID: A mile each way?

  CALEB: Two.

  DAVID: Basically, with my back, I can’t do a lot of bending, but I’m up for exploring.

  Driving very slowly on a U.S. Forest Service dirt road.

  CALEB: How do you say it?

  DAVID: Deus ex machina—god from the machine. In ancient Greek plays, a god would descend from above the stage and come to the rescue.

  CALEB: Sometimes I watch TV with Terry, and every time a deus ex machina pops up to save the day and get the writer out of a jam, I point this out. She tells me to shut up and enjoy the show. (phone rings) Speak of the devil.

  CALEB: Did my mother hug you yesterday?

  DAVID: Maybe she craves touch.

  CALEB: Terry’s parents are divorced and remarried, so I have two fathers-in-law. My mother freaks them both out with her hugging.

  DAVID: Don’t they give her a little leeway?

  CALEB: It still freaks them out.

  CALEB: George Bush is not really evil.

  DAVID: He’s not?

  CALEB: I would say not.

  DAVID: You don’t think what he did in Iraq is evil?

  CALEB: And I imagine you think Cheney is even—

  DAVID: Of course.

  CALEB: My friend Vince and I were talking about George Bush. He listed the usual: no weapons of mass destruction, oil, Halliburton, revenge for his father, and then he said that even though he’s against capital punishment, he would have liked to see George Bush assassinated. That’s just odd.

  DAVID: I very strongly want Bush to feel the awfulness of what he’s done. I wanted Checkpoint—

  CALEB: —Checkpoint?

  DAVID: —Nicholson Baker’s fantasy about Bush getting assassinated. I wanted it to end with Bush dead.

  CALEB: Hillary Clinton signed on. The U.S. didn’t do it alone. It was multilateral; a lot of nations signed on.

  DAVID: Not really.

  CALEB: Bush is many things, but he ain’t “evil.”

  DAVID: He’s the embodiment of evil.

  CALEB: In that chapter of yours, you portray him as likable on the airplane.

  DAVID: I say that someone else found him likable, and in another chapter I try to find a connection between some of his minor character flaws and my own. It’s a literary gesture.… Do you know the names of these mountains? They’re so beautiful.

  CALEB: We’d have to grab the map.

  DAVID: I just don’t see how the killing of tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians—how is George Bush not evil? Do you think the Iraq War was justified?

  CALEB: Was Hillary Clinton evil for supporting the Iraq War?

  DAVID: I see what you mean. At what point does it go all the way down?

  CALEB: For George Bush to be evil you have to assume that he knew, with absolute certainty, that they were all straw-man arguments. That some aide said, “Mr. President, we’ve found no weapons.” And Bush said, “Then we have to lie so we can go to war against Iraq and I don’t care how many Iraqi civilians we kill.”

  DAVID: I would say that’s pretty close to what happened, although of course it would never be spelled out that explicitly. I’m sure you’ve seen the supposedly funny video [that the Bush administration produced for a White House correspondents’ dinner] of Bush trying and failing to find weapons of mass destruction. Looking in a closet: “Can’t find any weapons of mass destruction here!” Looking under the bed: “Can’t find any weapons there!” Ha ha. You don’t think there was at a bare minimum a willful ignorance on Bush’s part? The moment 9/11 happened, Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld went to the CIA and said, almost literally, “Find us evidence to link Saddam to this event. Just find it.” It’s pretty clear to me Bush doesn’t have a conscience.

  CALEB: Do you think he’s a psychopath?

  DAVID: I wrote that Bush chapter as a conscious attempt to understand a person who daily just absolutely made me crazy. I tried to ask myself, “What points of connection can I make with him?” Because he’s unable to make any points of connection with any person who’s not in his very gilded cage. Would you at least agree that he’s a very, very immoral politician?

  CALEB: There’s ambiguity and dubiousness to his moral character.

  DAVID: Did you vote for him?

  CALEB: Gore. Kerry. Obama.

  DAVID: You see Bush as simply misguided?

  CALEB: I find him genuine.

  DAVID: Remember Karla Faye Tucker?

  CALEB: Executed when Bush was governor.

  DAVID: Bush was asked, “What do you think Karla Faye Tucker would say if she could speak to you?” Bush s
aid, (nasal tone) “Help me! Help me!” That, to me, is evil.

  CALEB: How familiar are you with that case?

  DAVID: Not very.

  CALEB: She did it.

  DAVID: She did? How do you know?

  CALEB: Death penalty cases rivet me. She and her boyfriend went to rob a house and ended up killing this guy with a hammer and a pickaxe. After noticing a girl hiding in the room, Karla killed her with the pickaxe; she embedded multiple blows. Later she said the killing made her feel multiple orgasms.

  DAVID: Thank god for small pleasures.

  CALEB: She was into drugs and prostitution. Now, she should be in prison for life, sentenced to death by old age, no perks, but that’s a different argument. Everything they brought up afterward—her redemption, her conversion to Christianity—is all bullshit. There was no debate of guilt or innocence, and if that issue’s gone, then if you’re for the death penalty, you should have no remorse. And if you’re against it, then come up with better reasons than “she converted” or “she truly feels sorry.”

  CALEB: Would you call Obama evil because he’s continuing the war in Afghanistan and bombing Libya?

  DAVID: I get it. It’s a continuum. But killing for simple political—

  CALEB: There’s a difference between willingness to commit collateral damage versus the willingness to target civilians.

  DAVID: And I think this willingness is pretty high with Bush and Cheney.

  CALEB: I’d agree. Still, anyone who thinks Bush is “evil” does so out of political bias.

  DAVID: I’m no Obama or Hillary or Bill fan, if that’s what you’re saying. People who kill for political gain—

  CALEB: Nothing wrong with cynicism.

  CALEB: Why didn’t we just drop a bomb on Mount Fuji?

  DAVID: In ’45?

  CALEB: A few people lived in the mountains. Nothing like Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We could have sent a message: “We have the bomb. We can waste your cities.” If they didn’t surrender, we could have dropped a bomb on one of their sparsely populated islands, kill a few hundred people, but not seventy thousand. They’d have gotten the message.

  DAVID: You’re backforming history.

  CALEB: Here’s a genocidal dictator, Saddam Hussein, who killed Kurds and Marsh Arabs. He sent his people to die in an absurd war against Iran—U.S.-backed, I know, but Hussein went too far. People on the far right think it’s a closed case. Their reasoning is not completely off. They found chemical weapons. He was saber-rattling, acting as if he had weapons, kicking inspectors out. He’d been given many chances. Many chances.

  DAVID: So you actually supported the war?

  CALEB: I thought the cons outweighed the pros, but I did see pros.

  DAVID: We’re taking slightly different positions than I thought we would. I would have thought you’d have gotten on your high moral horse about the war. What did you think of Christopher Hitchens’s waterboarding article?

  CALEB: A pompous screed. Of course waterboarding is torture, but so is cleaning up vomit, watching Glee, or going to Disneyland. He never was in danger.

  DAVID: He’s a pussy?

  CALEB: The Taliban take five guys, pick one, make the other four watch as they pull out nails, flay, and decapitate. Then they ask the other four if they’d like to talk. That’s torture. Enhanced interrogation? At Guantánamo they made prisoners listen to the Barney theme song.

  DAVID: I love that song.

  CALEB: Van Halen and Metallica and Barney 24/7. Or they’d take a little meat, vegetables, and potatoes, blend it into a disgusting mush, and serve it. Hitchens’s essay would have been a lot different had he written about sitting in a room, listening to Barney, and eating mush. Guantánamo’s no resort, but those prisoners play soccer.

  At the trailhead.

  CALEB: (to DVR) Friday, September 30th, David Shields and Caleb Powell are at the beginning of the trail to Dorothy Lake in the Cascade Mountains. Here’s a brief tourism pitch for the state of Washington: Parks and Forestry does a pretty good job maintaining the trails. For thirty bucks you can visit unlimited for a year. The pass generates a lot of revenue for the parks. I think they’ve sold over 500,000 passes so far. The mountains are gorgeous. According to the sign, Dorothy Lake is a mile and a half away. I think it’s longer.

  DAVID: How does anyone know we have the pass?

  CALEB: It’s on the rearview mirror. Cars without the pass risk a ticket.… Return to Hitchens and torture and evil.

  DAVID: Hitchens has learned nothing from the history of war. Any war can be defended. “Tyranny.” “Communism.” “Fascism.” Just as I can harm you only as an act of self-defense, a nation ought to fight only when directly threatened. 9/11 wasn’t the first strike of an air war. To treat it as such was wrong. My ruling principle is “First do no harm.”

  CALEB: I don’t think we should have gone to Iraq. I just think the pro-war crowd had a valid argument. And Hitler’s justification wasn’t Churchill’s.

  DAVID: I like that moment in Fahrenheit 9/11 when Michael Moore asks various congressmen if their sons and daughters are serving in Iraq. Am I willing to serve in the armed forces or send Natalie to Iraq or Afghanistan or Libya? Of course not.

  CALEB: Me neither.

  DAVID: Must not be very necessary, then. And that’s why World War II was such an interesting case.

  CALEB: I’d have felt compelled to enlist.

  DAVID: I hope I would have, too. At some point philosophical ambiguity becomes moral cowardice.

  CALEB: Thoreau said, “I prefer the philanthropy of Captain [John] Brown to that philanthropy which neither shoots nor liberates me.”

  DAVID: Right, but there isn’t a country in the world the U.S. should now be at war with.

  CALEB: The only legitimate reason to intervene is for humanitarian reasons, to stop suffering.

  DAVID: Caleb! Can’t you hear how double-speak that sounds?

  CALEB: Real life is contradictory.

  CALEB: The hike’s up and down all the way, but not too steep. Let me take a picture. In your sunglasses, you look like a spy.

  DAVID: About twenty years ago, I went through a Hitchens phase. I love his long essay on Isaiah Berlin: he shows how Berlin’s devotion to ambiguity in literature and philosophy wound up turning him into someone who waffled in real life. He couldn’t say no to LBJ and supported the Vietnam War. It’s a nice reading of Berlin, and I would take that critique, turn it 180 degrees, and apply it to Hitchens.

  His father was career British Navy, Hitchens never saw any action, he’s incredibly bellicose and opportunistic, and his entire career—from attacks on Clinton to Kissinger to female comedians to God to supporting the Iraq War—is held together by one thread: what places Christopher Hitchens in the center of conflict?

  CALEB: Even when he’s wrong, he engages the opposition and does his reading. For him to go after Mother Teresa, I’m down with that. I wrote an essay that questioned Rushdie, self-censorship, the media double standard that attacks Christianity but won’t defend a Danish cartoonist. Hitchens beat me to it, though—covering the same territory in a piece for the Nation. My editor paid me a kill fee. She told me it was in my best interest that no editor or publisher read my article. Some women have balls; she wasn’t one of them.

  CALEB: There’s an argument to be made, and Cheney has been making it, that the Iraq invasion helped bring about the Arab Spring.

  DAVID: It’s just too easy to play fast and loose with other people’s lives like that.

  CALEB: I half agree with you. I can’t imagine losing a daughter to a bomb in the name of collateral damage. NPR had a show, “Widows of Afghanistan.” One woman had lost her husband and four children in a missile attack. The entire interview was her bawling.… Hey, this is a nice waterfall. I’m going to take a bunch of pictures.

  DAVID: It’s really beautiful. Did you read that book by Samantha Power?

  CALEB: A Problem from Hell.

  DAVID: She looks at genocide, from Armenia to Bos
nia to Rwanda, and how we fail to act. She makes a case that action could prevent atrocity, and I think she’s had a huge influence on how Obama—

  CALEB: That could be good or bad. I think a Taliban-type government does not do wonders for their people.

  DAVID: I disagree with Power. The U.S. has a lot of people who need saving. Forty million people don’t have health care. I’d rather take all that money overseas and bring it back here. This whole country is in danger of becoming Third World.

  CALEB: America a Third World country? My ass. David Shields, meet Dar es Salaam, Karachi, Manila, and Kampala. Seattle has one homeless for every twenty middle class; Cambodia has one middle class for every twenty dirt-poor quasi-homeless.

  DAVID: You looked that up?

  CALEB: I’m a World Almanac guy. The letter of the stat might be off, but the spirit nails it.

  DAVID: Natalie went to TOPS, an “alternative” public school, for kindergarten through fifth grade. For a while it was a great school, supposedly among the best or at least “highest-performing” elementary schools in the state, even the country. Every parent was required to volunteer thirty hours a year. Many parents gave much more. I’d come in to Natalie’s class and talk about themes in Jerry Spinelli or Junie B. Jones or whatever. I gave a class on Ichiro. It was a kick. Then the school district came to resent that there was this school of mainly white, educated, professional, UW-ish parents who had taken a public school and made it a model. They brought in different teachers, a black principal, bused in Asian-immigrant, black, and Hispanic kids, most of whose parents didn’t even pretend to be interested in fulfilling the volunteer requirement. They didn’t have the time, the flexibility at work, they didn’t speak the language, or they just didn’t place a very high value on education, if that isn’t too racist a thing to say.