Interesting Times: Writings from a Turbulent Decade - Softcover

Packer, George

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0374532524 ISBN 13: 9780374532529

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010

Synopsis

The 2013 National Book Award Winner
A New York Times Bestseller

Throughout his career as a journalist, George Packer has always been attuned to the voices and stories of individuals caught up in the big ideas and events of contemporary history. Interesting Times unites brilliant investigative pieces such as "Betrayed," about Iraqi interpreters, with personal essays and detailed narratives of travels through war zones and failed states. Spanning a decade that includes the September 11, 2001 attacks and the election of Barack Obama, Packer brings insight and passion to his accounts of the war on terror, Iraq, political writers, and the 2008 election. Across these varied subjects a few key themes recur: the temptations and dangers of idealism; the moral complexities of war and politics; the American capacity for self-blinding and self-renewal.

Whether exploring American policies in the wake of September 11, tracking a used T-shirt from New York to Uganda, or describing the ambivalent response in Appalachia to Obama, these essays hold a mirror up to our own troubled times and showcase Packer's unmistakable perspective, which is at once both wide-angled and humane.

About this title

About the Author:

GEORGE PACKER is a staff writer at The Atlantic and the author of The Assassins’ Gate: America in Iraq, which received several prizes and was named one of the ten best books of 2005 by The New York Times Book Review. He is also the author of two novels, The Half Man and Central Square, and two other works of nonfiction, Blood of the Liberals, which won the 2001 Robert F. Kennedy Book Award, and The Village of Waiting. His play, Betrayed, ran for five months in 2008 and won the Lucille Lortel Award for Outstanding Play. His most recent book is Our Man: Richard Holbrooke and the End of the American Century. He lives in Brooklyn.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

1
In the minutes after the South Tower fell on September 11, 2001, an in­vestment banker had an epiphany. Having escaped with his life just ahead of the collapse, he wandered through the smoke and confusion of lower Manhattan until he found himself in a church in Greenwich Village. Alone at the altar, covered in ash and dust, he began to shake and sob. Feeling a hand on his shoulder, he looked up. It was a policeman.
“Don’t worry,” the cop said, “you’re in shock.”
“I’m not in shock,” the investment banker answered. “I like this state. I’ve never been more cognizant in my life.”
Around the same time that the banker noticed his changed conscious­ness and a hundred blocks north, I thought, or felt, because there were really no words yet: Maybe this will make us better. That was all; I didn’t know what it meant. The feeling made me ashamed because it seemed insuf.ciently horror-stricken. But like any repressed feeling, it continued to lurk. And in the hours and days that followed, it seemed to be borne out on the streets of New York.
I spent most of two days sitting on a sidewalk in downtown Brooklyn, waiting to give blood with hundreds of other people. I had long conversa­tions with those near me, in the temporary intimacy between strangers that kept breaking out all over the city. There was Matthew Timms, a twenty-eight-year-old unemployed video producer who had tried to . lm the attacks from across the East River in Williamsburg, only to . nd his camera battery had gone dead. His own detachment, he said—which extended to his whole life—so disturbed him that he wanted his blood drawn in order to overcome it. “I volunteered so I could be a part of some­thing,” he said. “All over the world people do something for an ideal. I’ve been at no point in my life when I could say something I’ve done has af­fected mankind. Like when the news was on, I was thinking, What if there was a draft? Would I go? I think I would.” Lauren Moynihan, a law­yer in her thirties, had traveled all over the city pleading with hospitals and emergency centers to take her blood and been turned away by all of them. As a “civilian,” without skills, she felt useless. “This is like a little bit short of volunteering to go for the French Foreign Legion,” said Dave Lampe, a computer technician from Jersey City who was wearing sus­penders decorated with brightly colored workman’s tools. A sixteen-year­old girl named Amalia della Paolera, passing out juice and cookies along the line, said, “This is the time when we need to be, like, pulling together and doing as much as we can for each other and not, like, sitting at home watching it on TV and saying, like, ‘Oh, there’s another bomb.’”
Everyone wanted to be of use and no one knew how, as if citizenship were a skilled position for which none of us had the right experience and quali.cations. People seemed to be feeling the same thing: they had not been living as they would have liked; the horrors of the day before had woken them up; they wanted to change. So they had come to stand in line, and they continued to wait long after it became clear that no blood was going to be needed.
The mood that came over New York after September 11—for me it will always be tied to the “Missing” picture posted at my subway stop of a young woman named Gennie Gambale, and then all the other pictures that appeared overnight around the city; the .ags sprouting in shop win­dows; the clots of melted candle wax on sidewalks; the bitter smell of smoke from lower Manhattan; the clusters of people gathering in the Brooklyn Heights Promenade or Union Square to sing or write messages or read them; the kindness on the subway; the constant wail of sirens for no obvious purpose; the .remen outside a station house in midtown ac­cepting .owers at midnight; the rescue workers at the end of their shift trudging up West Street with gray dust coating their faces and clothes; the people waiting at barricades on Canal Street with pots of foil-covered food; the garrulousness of strangers; the sleeplessness, the sense of being on alert all the time and yet useless—this mood broke over the city like a storm at the end of a season of languid days stretching back longer than anyone could remember. People became aware, as if for the . rst time, that they were not merely individuals with private ends. Whitman’s spirit walked down every street: “What is more subtle than this which ties me to the woman or man that looks in my face?” The embarrassment of strong emotions felt by sophisticated people in peaceful times dropped away, and strangers looked at one another differently. We became citizens.
This mood lasted around two weeks, then it began to fade. The cleanup was taken out of the hands of volunteers and entrusted to experts with heavy machinery. Elected of.cials told the public to resume normal life as quickly as possible. Average  people could show they cared by going out to dinner and holding on to stocks. Then came the anthrax scare, which created more panic than the air attacks had, replacing solidarity with hysteria; and then the Afghanistan war, which signaled the return of the familiar, since the public in whose name it was fought had no more to do with it than with other recent wars. By now, it’s hard to believe that anything as profound as the banker’s epiphany  really happened at all.
I thought that the attacks and the response would puncture a bloated era in American history and mark the start of a different, more attractive era. I thought that without some such change we would not be able to win this new war—that the crisis that mattered most was internal. One undercurrent of the mood of those days was a sense of shame: we had had it too good, had gotten away with it for too long. In the weeks afterward,
W. H. Auden’s poem “September 1, 1939” kept appearing in e-mails and on websites and on subway walls, with its suddenly apt . rst stanza:
I sit in one of the dives On Fifty-second Street Uncertain and afraid As the clever hopes expire Of a low dishonest decade: Waves of anger and fear Circulate over the bright And darkened lands of the earth, Obsessing our private lives; The unmentionable odour of death Offends the September night.
For at least a low dishonest decade, large numbers of Americans had been living in an untenable state, a kind of complacent fantasy in which the dollar is always strong; the stock market keeps going up; investments always provide a handsome return; wars are fought by other people, end quickly, and can be won with no tax increases, no civilian sacri. ces, and few if any American casualties; global dominance is maintained on the strength of technological and economic success without the taint or burden of an occupying empire; power and wealth demand no responsi­bility; and history leaves Americans alone. It didn’t matter whether a Democrat or a Republican was in the White House, or whether we were bombing some foreign country or not. Public concerns had nothing to do with politics or citizenship, those relics of the eigh teenth century, and every thing to do with the market—“Where,” Auden wrote, “blind skyscrapers use / Their full height to proclaim / The strength of Collec­tive Man.”
This fantasy took on its most lavish and triumphant expression in New York, and it was frozen in place there when the towers fell. Several weeks later, a journalist wandered into the ghostly executive dining room of Deutsche Bank, across Liberty Street from where the South Tower had stood, and noted the breakfast menu for September 11: smoked-salmon omelettes and chocolate-.lled pancakes. The remains of a meal for two— half-drunk juice turning dark, a mostly eaten omelette, withering fruit— sat abandoned on a table. The whole scene was .nely coated in the ubiquitous gray dust and ash, like the tableaux of Romans caught eating and sleeping by the lava of Vesuvius; except that Pompeii was entirely destroyed, whereas the American civilization at which the nineteen radi­cal Islamist hijackers aimed passenger planes still persists in roughly its old shape, though ragged at the edges and shaky in the nerves.
Political predictions usually come true when reality and wish coin­cide, and as it turned out, I was wrong. September 11 has not ushered in an era of reform. It has not made America or Americans very much better, more civic-minded. It has not replaced market values with dem o cratic values. It has not transformed America from the world’s overwhelming economic and military power into what it has often been in the past—a light of freedom and equality unto the nations. None of this has hap­pened, because America is currently governed by bad leaders, because the opposition is weak, because our wealth and power remain so enor­mous that even an event as dramatic as the terrorist attacks can’t fully penetrate them, because a crisis doesn’t automatically bring down the curtain on an era, because change usually comes in the manner of a cork­screw rather than a hammer.
Yet my .rst response on the morning of September 11 still seems the one worth holding on to. The investment banker jerked awake, the aspira­tions up and down the line of those wanting to give blood, revealed some­thing about the moral condition of Americans at this moment in our history. Like any crisis, the attacks brought buried feelings to the surface and showed our society in a collective mirror. That day changed America less than most people anticipated, but it made Americans think about change—not just as individuals, but as a country.
The hijackers believed they were striking a blow at a decadent civiliza­tion, and they were partly right. Islamic terrorists had been trying for years to make Americans aware o...

About this edition

• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 0374532524
• ISBN 13: 9780374532529
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 432