So, of course, New York became the dream, the land of meaningful pursuits, a chance for absolution of my small-town sins. After college, I moved there and eventually got a job as a journalist at a weekly newspaper, The New York Observer, which was obsessed with New York. The newspaper was a formative journalistic experience, mainly because of its fatherly editor, Peter Kaplan, who wanted nothing more than for all of his kids to succeed. The month I started, in August 2004, the Republican Convention had come to New York. The Republicans’ arrival felt like an insult to the city’s liberals, those who had voted for Al Gore and were against the war in Iraq. As reporters, we crashed the parties and made fun of the rubes. But to me they didn’t look much different from the New Yorkers. The Republicans were the world’s warriors, another power elite. They had come to a city that not-so-secretly celebrated and worshipped the winners, no matter their deeds.
By then, New York had morphed, thanks to the Internet, into a cocaine-and-steroids version of itself. Working in the media offered a measure of civic responsibility and literary expression, but mostly, I discovered that for many it offered a somewhat respectable path to the new Internet-based celebrity. Young people at that time seemed desperate to be recognized by an external force, something beyond conventional notions of fame. The writer Alison Lurie compared this “celebrity complex” to the process by which totalitarian regimes render entire groups or ethnicities “nonpersons”; instead, in the “so-called advanced democratic societies,” she wrote, people did this to themselves. Only a few years after September 11, we had in fact become less introspective. The compassionate efforts to understand our new, uncertain world were replaced by an ever more certain set of ways to manage it—money, marriage, brownstone, children, organic market, Pilates—all of it fueled by a sleazily exuberant stock market. During that Gilded Age—perhaps the last true Gilded Age—poor people mysteriously disappeared as if in some dirty war, banks replaced any normal shop or café or restaurant on every block, there was a weird obsession with food, which—we didn’t know then—we would all soon be taking photos of and posting online. Social media didn’t even exist, yet I already knew aspiring writers and ordinary folks who lived to be mentioned on one of several New York websites; it was so obvious already that appearing in the print newspaper didn’t bring the same addictive thrill. Real life had taken on not only the speed and amnesia of the Internet, but the mania and madness of Wall Street, as the writer Frank Rich put it at the time. September 11 had been just another dip in the market. During the most catastrophic years of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, New York threw a giant party.
There was a terrible fissure between this surreal New York and the reality outside of it: the invasion of Iraq, this new terror war. The frantic scrambling to read books on the Taliban and Sayyid Qutb and Islam itself—which seemed to many not one of the world’s three main monotheistic faiths but a newly discovered alien philosophy—didn’t continue after the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. I don’t remember a whole lot of people buying books about Iraq at all, except for the ones that made the case for invasion, like Republic of Fear and The Threatening Storm. By 2005, the wars disappeared from television. Had the media become so elitist, so dominated by Harvard and Yale graduates, that none of us knew the soldiers fighting, didn’t feel impassioned by the wars? That very process I’d longed for when I moved to New York, the severing of my small-town identity, had only resulted in a new kind of ignorance, a disconnection from the rest of the country. To some sophisticates I met in New York, my apparent provinciality had been a kind of exoticism; I was a survivor of those horrible American places they glimpsed on Fox News. But New Yorkers were ignorant about them, too. And realizing this, suddenly, the New Yorkers I had so long admired and envied seemed to be the provincial ones—if they didn’t understand their own country, I wasn’t sure any of us could possibly understand the world.
The absence of genuine protest against the war in Iraq was explained away by the absence of a draft, as if our consciences would have been ignited if only someone else struck the match. What we didn’t know to ask was how we would be feeling or acting if we knew Iraqis. Not “knew” them as in calling an Iraqi on the phone, but knew them as in their history, their experience, their history and experience with the United States. I do not remember having a sense of the Iraqi people, of an Iraqi family, of an Iraqi man, a normal Iraqi man—a doctor or a postman or a teacher, like someone you grew up with. Even if I did, I am simply not sure my brain would have known to test itself with the potential horrors that might befall that man: if this person was ripped apart by a cluster bomb, tortured in a prison, shot at an intersection while driving, his brains blown apart, his leg torn from his side, his wife and daughter and son screaming and crying in pain, all because of your country’s military, your government, and because of you. Empathy was infrastructurally impossible. We couldn’t imagine a real war, a war that encompassed our lives, a war occupying our favorite Brooklyn street of restaurants, a war that slung up barricades and checkpoints and manned the corners with scary men in armored suits dripping with weapons and screaming in a language we didn’t understand. There simply was no way for the American mind, perhaps the white American mind, to imagine these things—not the horror, and not the responsibility—and so we did not.
For journalists this failure of imagination had larger repercussions, of course, because we informed the public, and because as the so-called liberal journalists we were extremely arrogant. We revered our supposedly unique American standards of objectivity, but we couldn’t account for the fact—were not modest enough to know—that an objective American mind is first and foremost still an American mind. In being objective, we were actually leaving our judgment vulnerable to centuries of ingrained prejudices and black holes of knowledge. We failed to interrogate not only our sources but ourselves. I was surrounded by the most progressive-minded people in the country, and that wasn’t enough. The problem wasn’t politics.