Packer - Interesting times: writings from a turbulent decade

Also by George Packer

NONFICTION

The Assassins Gate

Blood of the Liberals

The Village of Waiting

FICTION

Central Square

The Half Man

PLAYS

Betrayed

AS EDITOR

Facing Unpleasant Facts: Narrative Essays by George Orwell
All Art Is Propaganda: Critical Essays by George Orwell
The Fight Is for Democracy: Winning the War of Ideas
in America and the World

Interesting Times

Writings from a Turbulent Decade

GEORGE PACKER

Farrar, Straus and Giroux
New York

Farrar, Straus and Giroux
18 West 18th Street, New York 10011

Copyright 2009 by George Packer
All rights reserved
Distributed in Canada by D&M Publishers, Inc.
Printed in the United States of America
First edition, 2009

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following publications, in which these essays originally appeared, in slightly different form: The Boston Globe, Dissent, The Fight Is for Democracy (Harper Perennial, 2003), Mother Jones, The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, and World Affairs.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Packer, George, 1960

Interesting times : writings from a turbulent decade / George Packer.

p. cm.

ISBN: 978-0-374-17572-6 (hardcover : alk. paper)

1. Packer, George, 1960 2. AuthorsPolitical and social views. I. Title.

PS3566.A317I58 2009
814'.54dc22

2009010186

Designed by Jonathan D. Lippincott

www.fsgbooks.com

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

For Bill Finnegan

The decade covered by this collection of essays is actually seven years, from the morning of September 11, 2001, to the night of November 4, 2008. The margins of a historical period dont conform to the turning of a new zero; eras are defined less precisely but more truly by events, a prevailing moral atmosphere, what it felt like to live during a certain time. With just a little simplification, its possible to see from a distance that the thirties began on October 24, 1929, and ended on December 7, 1941; that the sixties began on November 22, 1963, and ended onwell, maybe on December 6, 1969 (the Altamont Speedway concert), or January 27, 1973 (the signing of the Paris Peace Accords), or August 9, 1974 (Nixons resignation). (It is easy to see the beginnings of things, Joan Didion wrote, and harder to see the ends.) Only a year on, is it too soon to define the period between the attacks on American soil and the election of Barack Obama as a distinct era? Im going to anyway. It was the era of terror and of waste, when America, at the dizzying height of its powers, was given a chance to change the world in a new direction, failed miserably, and responded to the failure by changing itself. The era began with an unprecedented American tragedy; it ended, and a new era began, with one of those occasional moments of national renewal that have been among our saving graces.

These seven years, following an earlier time of domestic tranquillity and triviality, were crowded with drama: wars, suicide bombings, secret prisons, partisan combat, wild gyrations in the stock market, economic collapse, the disappearance of entire industries, political transformation. In retrospect, all this agitation had the quality of the various stages of some prolonged illness, during which the patient sweated, tossed, became delirious with visions incubated by a strange logic, spoke incomprehensibly, suffered delusions of possessing enormous strength, inflicted inadvertent pain on himself and others, collapsed and lay prostrate, and slowly began to recover. When I was in Baghdad in 2007, I had lunch in the Green Zone with an American official who said to me, Do you think this is all going to seem like a dream? Is it just going to be a fever dream that well wake up from and say, We got into this crazy war, but now its over? It isnt over, but now that the country has begun to emerge, we can look back and ask: What was it all about? Perhaps those seven years were the last spasm of the worlds greatest power at its apogee, the beginning of its slow decline. Perhaps they were a painful working out of certain malignancies that had been dormant within the country for years, while other malignancies erupted around the world. History confers on events the ex post facto aura of narrative coherence and inexorabilityperhaps it was all accident and needless folly.

For most Americans, September 11 and all that it unleashed dominated the decade. This revealed, among other things, our besetting narcissism, the vice that leads us to imagine ourselves the best or the worst but at any rate the center of every thing. The shock of that morning can still be felt years later, but for an Iraqi or a Congolese the human loss on September 11 would have been, proportionate to population, an average day. Its just that we hadnt seen it coming and never felt so helpless before. I had erroneously and perhaps inappropriately hoped that the force of the blows would jolt America out of the long daydream of the Reagan and Clinton years, into a consciousness of responsibility at home and abroad. Things didnt quite work out that wayAmericas reputation sank to a fathomless global low. And yet, partly for this reason, the years right after the attacks saw a period of unusual openness to the world on the part of this most insular nation. Until we grew weary of the bad news and set up real and mental barriers to the world, Americans expressed a willingness to learn about other countries and to understand why so many people regarded us with ambivalence, if not outright fury. Oprah devoted a show to Islam, and the front page of The New York Times ran story after story, year after year, under unpronounceable headlines.

But because Americans do nothing in restrained measures, the news of the world was swallowed in great gulps, large quantities of it on the Web and cable networks as well as more established outlets, often without the help of background or context. The torrents of images from alien places pouring into the minds of Americans and everyone else, pictures of air strikes, beheadings, charred corpses, terrified children, elicited anguish and outrage but above all the consciousness of being unable to do anything about it. Too much information and not enough understanding or power: globalization and violence merged to create a particular kind of psychosis, with well-founded fears and judgments warped into paranoia and hallucination by nonstop media saturation. The world beyond your street was never closer, and never more out of reach.

The years after September 11 saw, strangely enough, a golden age of American journalism, a late-life flowering even as the traditional news business was dying thanks to the Internet. Not in Washingtonwhere the press covered the Bush presidency the way its covered politics for the past several decades, as entertainment and sports, even when the story was as serious as war and a corps of insiders with high-level access failed to see what was under their nosesbut in Jalalabad and Jeddah and Falluja. During these years, the curiosity of readers and generosity of editors allowed me to travel to foreign places that ordinarily didnt show up on the map of the American media, and to devote considerable time, resources, and words to conveying the stories of their obscure inhabitants as something more than exotica or horror show. Long-form narrative journalism, that luxury of an earlier, slower time, like the three-volume novel or the three-martini lunch, turned out to be the means by which much of the reading public at the start of the twenty-first century started to understand what had been done to America and what America was doing in return. On the surface, all was chaos and violenceif causes and truths lay anywhere, they were down below. And now that the country is pulling inward again, to its habitual focus on its own concerns, we may soon look back at the period after September 11 as a rare moment when Americans became interested in people other than themselves.