by Neil Strauss
However, when I called Pareles to discuss the possibility of another attack in New York, he seemed nonchalant.
“Aren’t you worried living there now?” I asked. “I mean, it’s the terrorists’ number one target. And it’s a small island with only a few bridges and tunnels for escape. It would be easy for terrorists to shut it down or take it out.”
As if the answer were obvious, he replied, “Who wants to live in a world without New York?”
I suppose, then, that there are two types of people in the world: the captains, who go down with their ship, and the rest of us, who jump off with our loved ones.
In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, my plan was to stay on the ship. Not only did I halt my fast-growing collection of anti-American propaganda, but I began to feel, for the first time, a sense of patriotism welling inside me.
I first noticed it when I heard friends from other countries calling Americans obese, rude, or uneducated. Instead of agreeing, I found myself arguing with them. Suddenly, negative stereotypes of Americans seemed not only dehumanizing, but also dangerous.
When I spent six months working in Nashville for the Times, I found it odd that people there identified themselves as Southerners. After all, growing up in the North, we never thought of ourselves as Northerners. We were simply Americans.
But after 9/11, I understood why Southerners were so proud. As Northerners, we’d never been marginalized in our lifetime, so we’d never had to unite and prove ourselves to anyone. Now, as Americans, we were marginalized, and it was time to prove to the world that it was wrong about us.
Unfortunately, that’s not what happened.
I was eleven years old when I first learned about the Holocaust. I may have heard the word before, but I’d never really understood what it was until Mrs. Kaufman put it in context.
Though Mrs. Kaufman was grayhaired, wrinkled, and probably a grandmother, she had the most tremendous breasts any of us sixth graders had ever seen on a teacher. Even her thick cardigans were unable to conceal their enormity.
I can’t remember the name of our history textbook, except that it had a red cover, an ominous thick black swastika in the middle, and, on the inside of the back cover, a detail I added: twenty-five numbered illustrations of different sizes and varieties of breasts.
During the second week of class, Mrs. Kaufman drew a timeline on the board. It began in 1933, with Hitler’s appointment as German chancellor and the boycotting of Jewish professional services. Below the year 1935, she wrote “The Nuremberg Laws,” which stripped Jews of their citizenship. Now she was at 1938. “Jewish passports stamped with J,” she wrote. Then, on the line underneath, she wrote “Kristallnacht” in big letters.
“Can anyone tell me what Kristallnacht was?”
As the class clown, it was my duty to come up with a joke response to every question. But instead, I listened transfixed, imagining myself suffering each successive indignity. I don’t know why, but when studying literature and history in school, I never identified with the oppressor—only with the victim. Perhaps because that was also my role in the social pecking order of sixth grade: the small, funny kid who was bad at sports, awkward around girls, and fell over easily when pushed, especially when carrying books.
Penny, a transfer student who was blond and smart and perfect, raised her hand. “It was the night the Nazis rioted against the Jews,” she said, the kiss-ass.
“That’s right.” Mrs. Kaufman nodded approvingly. “Hundreds of synagogues were destroyed, thousands of Jewish homes and businesses were ransacked, and Jews were beaten and murdered in the streets.”
We’d already learned, a week earlier, the end of the story: ghettos, concentration camps, gas showers, and a new and ugly word I’d been taught: genocide.
“Why did they stay?” I blurted.
“What do you mean?” Mrs. Kaufman asked. It was impossible to look at anything but her breasts when she spoke.
“When things were getting so bad, why would any Jew stay in Germany?”
“A lot of people didn’t think things would get any worse,” she answered. “And by that point, it was harder for Jews to leave.”
As the Holocaust was retaught with further elaboration in each successive European history class, I found myself more and more amazed that people would willingly remain in a country that was stripping them of their rights and homes.
And I told myself the same thing every time: If that ever starts happening here, I’m not going to wait around, thinking things can’t get any worse. I’m getting out, before it’s too late.
STEP 4: NOVEMBER 3, 2004
It’s incredibly safe. We’ve never had terrorist threats or hijackings here. We’re like a forgotten country because we’re so far from everyone. We don’t worry about security like in America. And we don’t invade countries on false pretexts and make the whole world mad at us.”
Jane, a girl from Sydney I’d briefly dated, was trying to convince me to move to Australia, where the coastline is beautiful, the crime rate is low, and the people are easygoing and friendly.
I racked my brain to think of a hole in her argument. “But you’re pretty close to Indonesia. And the terrorist group that bombed the Bali nightclub a couple years ago is there. Doesn’t that worry you?”
“When the Bali bombing happened, a lot of Australians stopped traveling to Indonesia,” she answered, unfazed. “But as a country we don’t have any problems with Indonesia. I think the media and your president like creating fear in people, because when people are in fear, they remain docile. They don’t question things and are grateful to the government for protecting them. Over here, it’s like a little paradise. We enjoy what we have and don’t ask for anything more.”
“Well, there’s an election coming up here.” I found her enthusiasm endearing, though I didn’t take it seriously. Not yet. “So let’s see what happens. Maybe things will get better.”
“If you want somewhere even safer,” she said as I hung up, “there’s always New Zealand.”
On November 3, 2004, the New Zealand immigration service received 10,300 hits from the United States on its website—more than four times its daily average—while calls and e-mails from Americans inquiring about immigration skyrocketed from an average of seven a day to three hundred.
One of those inquiries was from me.
For the first four years of the Bush administration, we were blameless. After all, we hadn’t technically elected the president. And back then we had no idea that he would lead us into an unnecessary war, bring the budget from a $236 billion surplus to the highest deficit in U.S. history, strip away civil liberties in the name of national security, and disregard international treaties, the United Nations, and the Constitution.
After the 2004 election, however, everything was different. This time, Bush had actually been voted into office. And the message that sent to every other country in the world was that the people of America condoned his actions. Thus, it was no longer Bush who was stupid in the eyes of the rest of the world, it was us.
The cover of Britain’s Daily Mirror said it all: “How Can 59,054,087 People Be So DUMB?” (It failed to mention the more than 79 million Americans who were even dumber and, though eligible to vote, didn’t.)
For historical-precedent-obsessed Americans like me, though, this was about more than George W. Bush. Just as the attacks of 9/11, though they were far from traditional warfare, showed Americans that war could happen here, the national security clampdown of the Bush administration—though far from actual authoritarianism—showed Americans that fascism could happen here. After all, to make an extreme comparison, even Mussolini and Hitler came to power legally in democratic governments.
And so I lay on my bed that afternoon, stared at the white plaster ceiling, and thought about what I could do. I’d had my chance during the 2000 election: the thirty-five days between the end of polling and the final announcement of the victory were one of those pivotal moments in American history where a single
person could have made a difference. And I had a better opportunity than many. As a reporter for the Times, all I had to do was fly to Florida, find the right story, and expose it before a decision was made. Instead, like most other Americans, I watched TV and waited for someone else to do it.
Despite my disillusionment, I didn’t believe that Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld were incarnations of evil, looking to create martial law or a police state. But they were so zealously pursuing such a narrow set of priorities that they were doing more harm than good.
Whatever store of cultural or political goodwill we had acquired over the years was mostly squandered in Iraq. In 2000, 75 percent of Indonesians—the country with the world’s largest Muslim population—viewed Americans favorably. After the invasion of Iraq, that number dropped to 15 percent, with 81 percent of the population saying they feared a U.S. attack. Even South Koreans, who once considered North Korea their biggest threat, were now more afraid of the United States. And across Europe, South America, and the rest of the world, leaders who openly collaborated with our government lost popularity and elections.
The day the results of the 2004 election were announced was the first time I seriously considered leaving America. I felt alienated from the majority of the country, worried about the damage four more years of the same administration would do, and concerned about a backlash from the rest of the world.
Recently, I’d left the New York Times, hoping to move on to bigger and better things. But those things hadn’t come. And now, more than ever, I doubted myself. At the newspaper I’d been thought of as the young guy, with my finger on the pulse of popular culture. But the election had proven that my finger wasn’t on the pulse. I was just feeling the surface of the skin and imagining a heartbeat that wasn’t actually there.
In 1990, before the Internet, e-mail, cell phones, and laptop computers were mainstream, Jacques Attali, an adviser to the French president, wrote a book called Millennium, in which he predicted that human beings would evolve into technological nomads. Because technology was making work and communication possible in any location, he elaborated, we’d no longer need to stay in one place.
Perhaps my disillusionment was also an opportunity to pick up my laptop and cell phone, leave the rat race, and become a technological nomad. So that night, with my conversation with Jane in Australia echoing in my head, I checked the immigration websites for Australia and New Zealand.
They required foreigners to live there two to three years before granting them citizenship. That didn’t sound unbearable. They also offered citizenships to people in “exceptional circumstances” who will provide “some advantage or benefit” to the country. Unfortunately, my credentials—writing books with drug-addicted rock and porn stars—seemed more likely to hurt than help.
Then again, the governor of my home state was a former bodybuilder who’d admitted to using anabolic steroids, attending orgies, and smoking marijuana (in his words, “that is not a drug—it’s a leaf”). So maybe there was a chance.
But when all the buildings around you are still standing; when you can flip on the TV at any hour and watch a reality show; when you can go out at night and drink and dance and flirt and eat a cheeseburger in a diner as the sun rises, it’s hard to imagine that anything has really changed or ever will.
The price of my hesitation would be high. By the time I was ready to take action, New Zealand had changed its citizenship requirement from three years of residency to five and Australia had increased its minimum from two years to four. I should have paid better attention to the lesson I’d learned from Mrs. Kaufman: the more people want to leave, the harder it becomes to get out.
I realized then why the Jews in Nazi Germany had stayed: They had hope, which can sustain us in the worst of times but can also be the cruelest of human emotions in uncertain times. And I clung to the hope that we were America and if anything happened, our government would protect us.
STEP 5: AUGUST 29, 2005
I’m a runner.
The security line stretched across the second-floor balcony of the terminal, wound around the check-in counters downstairs, then continued for another hundred feet outside the door. It was clear that it would be at least an hour and a half before any of us arrived at our gates.
I was on my way to New York to promote a book I’d written, The Game. Though I was worried no one in the media would care about my adventures with a cabal of pickup artists, fortunately my schedule was packed with press: Good Morning America, The View, Anderson Cooper 360°, and dozens of radio shows across the country. Ultimately, most of those shows would be canceled or pre-empted. A new catastrophe was about to shock the nation.
I ran to my grandmother’s house when Michael Zucker threatened to beat me up after school. I ran to a hotel to hide from the wrath of a jealous girlfriend when she caught me talking to an ex. I ran over fallen protesters to avoid the spray of rubber bullets when a police riot broke out during a concert I was covering outside the Democratic National Convention.
As I waited in the security lane, I realized that the America we grew up in is not the same America that exists now. Most tourists have horror stories of customs agents unnecessarily detaining, mistreating, humiliating, or refusing entry to them or their friends. Several travelers, with all their papers in order, have even died in custody.
We’ve become our own worst ambassadors.
When danger occurs, the fight or flight instinct kicks in. And since I’m a small person with little fists and a quiet voice, fleeing offers my best option for survival.
As I neared the checkpoint, I overheard a young, doughy security guard talking about a high-speed lane.
“I don’t mean to interrupt, but is there a faster line?” I asked hopefully.
“They’re making one,” he said.
“Great.”
“All you have to do to use it is register for it.”
“How do I do that?”
“You go down to a special office, get a background check, get fingerprinted, and get an iris scan.”
I’m not proud to be a runner. A real man, according to action movies and most women, stays and fights. A wimp runs.
My heart froze. The words “iris scan” filled my mind with images of the movie Gattaca, along with dozens of other Orwellian dystopias. The thought of moving to another country came roaring back to me.
But I’d rather be a living wimp than a dead hero.
How many baby steps into the abyss would it take before I finally had the courage to climb out?
I imagined the Mrs. Kaufmans of the future writing a timeline of events leading to America’s abandonment of the promise stated in its pledge of allegiance, “liberty and justice for all”:
2001: 9/11 terrorist attacks; 1,200 people arrested and held indefinitely without charge; Bush signs USA PATRIOT Act, allowing the government to secretly wiretap and search the personal records of citizens without a warrant; war in Afghanistan begins; no-fly list created, eventually growing to over a million names.
As a child, I used to collect War Cards. I’d seen them advertised on TV and talked my parents into ordering them. Every month, a new set of index cards arrived in the mail, detailing different aspects of World War II.
2002: Male immigrants and visitors from over twenty-five countries required to register with the U.S. government; more than thirteen thousand registrants face deportation; Department of Justice allows FBI to spy on religious and political groups without probable cause; Bush doctrine of preemptive war announced; Homeland Security Act passed; Department of Justice memo authorizes torture up to “serious physical injury” in overseas interrogations.
My parents probably thought the cards were educational. They didn’t realize that each War Card formed a new scar in my imagination:
2003: Iraq War begins; Department of Homeland Security established; Operation Liberty Shield detains visitors seeking asylum from thirty-four Muslim countries; Bush continues to centralize and expand power through the unprecede
nted use of executive privilege and signing statements, which enable him to ignore or reinterpret bills that have passed Congress.
As I read War Cards about the Allied bombing that destroyed the city center of Dresden, the Battle of Okinawa that left nearly one-third of the civilian population dead, and the Nazi siege of Leningrad that took the lives of 1.5 million residents, I prayed I would never get crushed by the same sledgehammer of history.
2004: Department of Homeland Security begins affixing electronic monitoring ankle bracelets to thousands of illegal immigrants; government outsources domestic intelligence collection to private companies to circumvent laws restricting spying on citizens; US-VISIT system requires all foreign visitors to be digitally photographed, fingerprinted, and checked against a computer database on entry; photos of prisoners tortured in Abu Ghraib prison surface; subsequent Red Cross investigations find evidence of prisoners being sexually abused, set on fire, and forced to eat a baseball at Guantánamo Bay.
Like friendly fire in combat, the government’s war on terrorism had wounded its own country instead. And, consequently, every terrorist had won. Even the bungling shoe-bomber Richard Reid had affected the lives of millions of Americans, making it necessary to remove our shoes every time we pass through airport security.
When I turned eighteen, I received another type of war card in the mail. The government sent me a white postcard with a picture of a birthday cake on the front. On the back I was ordered to report to my local post office to register in case a draft was instituted. I went to sleep countless nights over the next seven years hoping our country wouldn’t get swept into another major war. I didn’t want to end up as a statistic on a War Card of the future.