I got my start in journalism in the final days of the 20th century, assigned to an unusual beat: school shootings. I was a recent high school graduate, a young journalist, and the editors in the newsroom came to me for an explanation after Columbine. I told them I was horrified, but not surprised. There were a lot of angry white kids in America at the time (Limp Bizkit fans, mostly) and this mounting angst had found a release valve. Over the next year, as school shootings became almost commonplace, my beat took on a different shape. It wasn’t about the shootings any more, but trying to explain the phenomenon of angry, white, suburban and rural youth. Was it a demographic issue, as the U.S. was quickly becoming a minority majority country? Was it an existential biproduct of the overabundance of the late 90s, highlighted in movies like Fight Club and The Matrix (both came out the same year as Columbine)? Was the problem that this was the first American generation who didn’t have a war to go to?
Earlier this year, when rioters stormed the Capitol to overturn an election, some of them hoping to kill the Vice President, I looked into the faces of these mostly 40-something, mostly white agitators and I realized they were the same kids I was writing about 20 years prior (Limp Bizkit fans, mostly), all grown up.
Of course, on the morning of September 11th, the Titanic deck chairs were rearranged a bit. And my beat changed. In fact, a whole new beat had to be invented: “Young at War.” I was assigned to profile young veterans, young people who were deported under the Patriot Act, and the campus protest movement that arose in response to all the new wars. School shootings dipped and military enlistment shot up. The kids came back suicidal (if they were lucky enough to come back).
I wrote a commentary for Salon on September 12 with the headline, “Call me American,” saying that for the first time in my life, I felt patriotic and I was ready to fight for my country. I wasn’t alone. Of course, even on September 12, the cynicism creeped in and I concluded that “If I join the Army, I’ll probably end up doing airport security until I’m 35, rummaging through baby strollers with an M-16 on my back.” I was basically Nostradamus.
Three years later, in a review of Michael Moore’s documentary Fahrenheit 9/11, I wrote a piece with the headline, “Call me a Terrorist,” dismissing my earlier piece as a “confused rant” and concluding that “terrorism works and I’m tired of feeling powerless,” adding, “I hope I get arrested for writing that.” Thankfully, my public voice lost some of the histrionic hyperbole and in 2004, I went looking for truth on the campaign trail.
It was a good time for fundamentalism. The war in Iraq had reached its crescendo of mayhem, when “Mission Accomplished” became “maybe this wasn’t such a good idea” and finally, “MY GOD, they’re hanging Marines from light posts and beheading civilians on the internet.” It makes sense that so many people responded by digging deeper into their dogmas and ethos. The bad luck of the thing was that the architects of our global war were Evangelical Christians defined by, bent on, in love with the apocalypse. The Rapture wasn’t something to be feared, but prompted and praised on arrival. The majority of Americans believed that the events in Revelation would actually occur. How else could we make sense of an apocalypse-obsessed president with his finger on the button? Our leaders were drafting the war plans with The End of Days as a possible outcome. We were living in a doomsday machine. The thinking trickled down to the populace. There was nobility in fundamentalist thinking: it gave you a worldview.
At the time, United States was waging a global Holy War. Incidentally, our populace was at the apex of millennial political apathy, a rocketing parabola with plot points like The Battle in Seattle, Columbine, hanging chads and the yellowcake fiction. I chose to embrace a wasted kind of nihilism that turned inward and became self-destruction. It was different from apathy because I cared about what was going on, I just didn’t think it meant anything. We were all experiencing such intense trauma and instability that nihilism and substance abuse, even apathy, just seemed like reasonable responses. I couldn’t make sense of all the carnage of those times taking place in a moral world, so I lapsed into and out of a perspective that made sense to me: there was no right or wrong or ultimate meaning. How could there be?
During the years of the Iraq War, I continued to document the role of my generation in the Age of Fear. In addition to the teenaged veterans, young deportees, and college-aged anti-war activists, I also told the stories of the more incidental casualties of that time: young men returning to impoverished communities from prison and victims of police brutality and gang violence. In this time, I also gave myself over to a manic spiral of drugs, alcohol, aimless travels, lies, women, gambling, and debt. I genuinely believed that the world was going to end, that I was powerless to stop it and only by becoming a part of the chaos could I find peace.
There is a moment in Truffaut’s film Jules and Jim where Jules pauses long enough to posit, as if he were skywriting, “What’s appalling about war is that it denies a man his own personal war.” Brad Pitt, shirtless and bloody, passed this observation through a post-modern prism 50 years later in Fight Club. “We have no Great War. We have no Great Depression. Our Great War is a spiritual one. Our Great Depression is our lives.”
As part of my reporting on young men returning to their communities from the criminal justice system, I spent weeks with a barrel-chested, baby-faced kid named Julian on his stoop in Hunters Point. We sat behind a gate and talked while he sold drugs through the bars and sent neighborhood kids to the corner store to buy him Cutty Bang: a mixture of Red Bull, Pineapple Juice and Bacardi in a plastic bag which he sipped with a straw. “It’s the system that fucks you up. I’ve been locked up 12 times and I’m only 18.” I asked him about his neighborhood: “People gotta get as far away from this shit as possible. I’d rather be going to college or something. Maybe in the South or something. But you gotta have money to do things like that.”
The day the story went to print, Julian was shot in the head while he waited in line to pay his cell phone bill.
* * *
Every night, I’d get high and watch Headline News on CNN, which people used to call McNews. It worked for me because the pacing was clearly for traveling businessmen drinking alone in hotel bars, which made it perfect people whose brains were slowed by other drugs. The programming repeated itself with minor updates every half hour: sports scores, top 5 pop songs, 75 dead in car bombing in Basra, death count from Iraq, violence in the west bank, commercials for diet pills, inside a faith based prison in Florida, Cincinnati officials ask Guardian Angels for help enforcing curfew after riots, Iraqi insurgents stockpiling weapons in Mosques, Australian band Jet talks about their sophomore album: “There’s an expectation that rock records evolve but rappers can put out the same record over and over like ‘look at my chick, look at my ride’, but first: numbers of illegal immigrants on the rise? Headline News gave you the feeling that you were channel surfing without having to change the channel. It felt like the inside of my brain.
I got earaches every few months back then. A deep, throbbing pain would start in my ear and spread to my brain until I was forced to make an appointment with my nurse practitioner Mona. She was kind but stern, with dark freckles and smooth skin. I started to look forward to the appointments because I felt so out of control that I needed to check in with someone. I could tell her I thought I was drinking too much and smoking too much and not taking care of myself. The last time we met, she was annoyed with me.
My untied Timberland boots swung back and forth as I sat on the examination table. It felt safe in there. I wanted to cry because I didn’t think I could do it any more. It, it IT: showing up to life every day. “I’m not suicidal, but I want to go to Iraq and I think that I might die there and I’m okay with that.” She didn’t respond with the same care that she usually did. “Your problem isn’t earaches. You’re depressed and you’re not taking care of yourself and your body’s weak point is your ears.” I told her I wasn’t depressed. In fact, sometimes I felt happier and more energetic than I’d ever been. She shook her head. “When you’re manic, it’s not that you’re not depressed, it’s that the volume is turned up so loud in your head that you can’t tell you’re depressed” She told me to call the number on my health insurance card and make an appointment with a psychiatrist, then she wrote out my prescription for antibiotics and walked out of the room.
* * *
It was an election year, so I became wrapped up in that. I thought if I could go out on the campaign trail and go to Iraq and talk to people and have no loyalties and write down what I saw, some truth would emerge. I knew the President wasn’t a villain and insurgents weren’t villains and Christian fundamentalists weren’t villains, there was too much uncertainty in the world to villainize anybody, we were all just all people trying to make sense out of the world, telling a story to ourselves about what was important because otherwise, we’d just be hungry ghosts floating around out there. My only loyalty would be to the elusive Truth, the drive to get as close to the vibrating central energy of the world, the front lines, a presidential election, a war, and extract meaning from the carnage and deliver it not to the world, really, necessarily, maybe just to myself.
In this blind search for an indefinable truth, I became a sort of fundamentalist myself. There is a tremendous amount of faith involved in throwing yourself at a global nightmare and believing that you’ll return a prophet. Faith is one word for it, anyway. Delusion is another.
In a late night of manic typing, I drafted a proposal to go to Iraq and return in time to cover the presidential election. The next morning, I gave it to my editor, Sandy, a gruff sort of cryptic genius who moved through our office barefoot with a bird perched on her shoulder. She was encouraging but said the agency didn’t have all the money I’d need. She gave me the names of project managers at foundations who I could ask for “advice,” which in the non-profit world was code for “money.”
The project was titled “Young at War” and I said I’d capture the mythical youth vote and write profiles of young American service members in Iraq. Project managers were responsive and I managed to raise enough money for the trip, partly because I planned to do everything cheaply and dangerously.
I learned from a reporter friend who was in Baghdad when the war started that you could fly into Jordan and hire a car to drive you across the border and straight to Baghdad nonstop. He said they carried gas cans in the car so they could lean out the window and refuel while they drove without stopping. All you needed was airfare, cash to hire the car and “robber money”, which you kept in your pocket so you could hand it over easily when you got robbed.
The Siege of Fallujah was a month before I was supposed to leave for Iraq and the photos of mutilated American bodies hanging from a bridge over the Euphrates River dramatically changed people’s perception of the war. Soon after, an American contractor named Nic Berg was kidnapped and beheaded on video. We watched it in the newsroom, gathered around a laptop with our hands on our knees and our hands on our mouths and our hands on our hips. The project manager who awarded my grant called that afternoon to tell me they wouldn’t fund the Iraq leg of the trip out of concern for my safety.
This meant I had to extract the same level of human profundity from two scripted, media-swamped public relations events: The Democratic National Convention in Boston and The Republican Convention in New York City. I tacked on reporting trips to Milwaukee, Miami and DC, strategically important cities where I thought I might be able to get at the inextractable truth.
Needless to say, I did not extract any inextractable truths. George W. Bush was re-elected and our nutty turd of a global war continued to circle the bowl. I wrote things on Twitter like, “Drinking Red Bull, watching Fox News,” and “He was orphaned by civil war. You were orphaned by indifference.” I wrote letters to John Walker Lindh in prison.
* * *
Things all settled down, of course. Apathy died down long enough for us to elect a president who excited us. I watched the inauguration on TV, as George W Bush took off Tolkien’s Ring and jammed it down onto Barack Obama’s finger. Chris Matthews called it an Excalibur moment, like little Arthur yanking that broad sword from a mossy rock. Either way, there was majesty there.
Early in his presidency, Obama declared an end to combat operations in Iraq. Two years later, in a much stranger development, I learned that Bin Laden had been killed. Naval officers washed his body and placed him in a white sheet. They read some words in Arabic and tipped him over the side of an aircraft carrier into the sea.
On television, I saw people dancing and celebrating, some of them clearly drunk. A quote in the newspaper the next morning was from a woman who survived the attack on the towers and she said “ I can’t bring myself to be happy about one more person dying, even if it is Osama bin Laden.”
Barack Obama’s election and the official end of the Iraq War and the death of Osama bin Laden brought me no peace. So I fell in love, which was the only way to pry divinity from the clasped claw of irreverence.
Falling in love meant frolicking in the snow in Lower Manhattan from Sofia’s apartment to the bar on the Seaport and back again every night, making snow angels and singing show tunes and dancing among the cobblestones. Waiting for Sofia outside Duane Reade one drunk night past 4am, I saw a little Jewish boy with fire eyes and a poncho and ghost rider hair and soft red cheeks. I knew where he was. He knew I knew. “I’m trippin my balls off, man.” In an effort to reclaim his sanity from the LSD, he was smoking a joint. So I joined him. As we smoked, Sofia came outside, tap dancing and carrying a large animatronic Santa Claus and I asked the little cherub if he had any more acid. He nodded and took out a box of Sour Patch Kids, taking two of the candies from the box. He handed them to me and I ate one and handed the other one to Sofia and I was just so silly and drunk and old that I didn’t believe that people were putting acid on Sour Patch Kids and handing them out on the streets of the financial district at four in the morning.
We said good night and skipped back to her apartment and took the elevator to the 17th floor and flopped into bed, kissing and holding each other. We curled up to fall asleep, and after a while I didn’t want to be the first one to say that I couldn’t fall asleep. I thought “Man, I really haven’t smoked weed in a long time. I am crazy high right now” and then our eyes popped open and we said, “Wait. Are we on acid right now?”
The apartment windows faced east over Brooklyn and we watched the sun explode on the bridge and the river and we jumped on the bed and danced as the clocks were replaced by mirrors. Sofia suggested that we have a cigarette up on the roof, but the roof was closed, so we went downstairs and walked outside of the apartment building onto the street.
It was 8am on a Tuesday morning, a block from Wall Street and we were immediately taken into the human swarm. There were centrifugal shadows, as if we were our own sun being orbited and the shadows got longer and longer and the sounds were muffled but very busy. The chatter of the street was turned way down but the variety of the chatter was turned way, way up and we felt had to look these ear-muffed people in the eye: the hand-crankers of the garbage economy were running late and it was a very Melanie Griffith affair.
We tried to offset the sounds by offering strangers one dollar if we could listen to a song on their iPod. We walked up to a dozen people with a dollar bill extended and said “a dollar for a song! Please!”
We turned left on Fulton Street and there it was, staring at us, still kind of hollow because it wasn’t finished yet: the Freedom Tower, the new World Trade Center just at the end of Fulton there, and it became a homing beacon, taunting and confronting us like the monolith in 2001. We floated toward it, with our feet dangling, past three crowded Dunkin Donuts and thousands of sulking humans, bouncing out of gyms and ducking into office buildings, holding their coffee cups with both hands.
When we reached Broadway, we arrived at little St Paul’s Church, the spiritual recovery center for cops and fireman in the days and weeks after The Event. We noticed a group of schoolchildren being herded by one adult down busy Broadway toward their big “911 experience”. They were all boys, 10 and 11. They weren’t even born in 2001. The herder of the children raised his right hand limply and all of the boys moved into neat rows. As he lowered his wrist, the boy’s mouths all opened into the same shape and made one soft, wonderful sound. They were singing. “Let there be peace on earth, and let it begin with me. Let there be peace on earth, the peace that was meant to be.”
We cried. I draped my arms over Sofia’s shoulders and we hiccupped our cries and swayed back and forth like seaborne lovers. The tears dropped off of my chin and onto her jacket and then rolled down the front of her jacket and onto her hands, which were folded just below her waist. The herder lowered his hand again and the song was done, so the boys broke formation and continued walking down Broadway.
Sofia and I walked into St Paul’s and looked at the memorial photos and held hands and kissed each other so intensely that the security guard reminded us that it is “a family place”. And we even giggled a little bit, delighted in our discovery. We saw an empty firefighter’s uniform, resting on a pew with boots standing on the floor, as if a fireman had been sitting there praying and suddenly vanished, sucked up into the great beyond. We laughed. We laughed because we could imagine his soul spiraling up and we liked it. It was the loveliest thing we had ever imagined. And we saw all the other spiraling souls that danced around in that cloud.
We stepped out the back door of the church into a tiny, ancient cemetery. We held hands, beaming, and looked up in the skyline, where we could see her apartment building. All we wanted was to be back in that warm bed, on each other. We stood facing the building and holding hands with our chins pointed up, both of us expecting that we would lift off the ground slowly and float back to the apartment over the swarm and slip into her bedroom through the window and curl up inside of each other and be warm. And then we realized that of course we couldn’t fly and what a funny thing that we both thought that was what was going to happen. We laughed until our stomachs hurt until we were holding our sides and wiping the tears from our eyes and through the huh-huh-huhs, Sofia said, “Seriously though, how are we supposed to get back?”
