B4
K B
KLMNO
SUNDAY, JUNE 20, 2010
An oil spill, or another plot twist?
narrative from B1
control of our own destiny.” But much of the reaction to the speech,
rather than focusing on the plight of shrimpers or the legislative agenda, cri- tiqued the address as a new panel in the ongoing Obama storyboard. On CNN, for example, White House correspondent Ed Henry complained that Obama had not discussed how much oil is leaking into the gulf, “perhaps because it doesn’t fit into his narrative that the government is all over this.” In this particularly meta moment, the
overarching Obama story line hovers a level above events, distracting from the disaster in the gulf, glossing over the question of whether the government’s concrete actions are sufficient, removing readers and viewers and listeners from reality. The narrative has been constantly updated — Obama’s a hero one day, a goat the next — as ravenous news cycles and impatient audiences demand con- clusions, and attention-starved media outlets can no longer subsist on the mod- est first drafts of history. “We are struggling to sustain a narra- tive concept in an age of contemporane- ity,” said David Shi, the president of Fur- man University in South Carolina, who is writing the ninth edition of “America: A Narrative History,” a popular college textbook. “The demand for analysis and meaning of things right away puts real narrative under attack.” All of this undermines the traditional notion of a narrative as a slowly devel- oping arc that requires perspective to be properly observed. “A narrative in the true sense means a beginning, a middle and an end,” said Robert A. Caro, the two- time Pulitzer Prize winner whose biogra- phies of Robert Moses and Lyndon John- son are touchstones of the narrative non- fiction genre. “That’s a story.”
xelrod acknowledged that the Oba- ma campaign may have created a bit of a Frankenstein’s monster in telling such a compelling story to begin with. “He told that story and told that story
A CHIP SOMODEVILLA/GETTY IMAGES
well,” Axelrod said. The problem, he added, is that the
story about the story is mainly what jour- nalists care about now. The administra- tion’s actions certainly have political im- plications and often political motives, but the media’s default setting is to proc- ess every policy proposal, diplomatic ges- ture, government appointment and, now, national disaster through that prism. “Events occur that don’t fit neatly into a narrative,” Axelrod said. “But that doesn’t mean you can defer them, or place em-
ASTORIED JOURNEY: From President Obama’s visits to the Gulf Coast to his address to the nation,many news reports have framed his oil spill response as a crisis point in his story line — and a chance to reevaluate the protagonist.
phasis on the storytelling and not the problem-solving.” To a certain extent, though, the White
House is perpetuating the problem. In order to protect the president’s political persona, the administration insulates him from unpredictable news conferenc- es and limits access to decision makers
with potentially independent views. In an effort to circumvent competing story lines, background quotes are whispered and
WhiteHouse.gov blog posts are for- ever spinning the Obama yarn. But the tighter the administration holds onto information and the message, the more members of the media write
about the one thing to which they have unfettered access: the narrative. Obama reacts — getting tougher on BP, feeling the pain of shrimpers — and journalists, including some of the most acute observ- ers in the profession, see a change before them. They amend the narrative some more, or suggest that the narrative itself
CHUCK KENNEDY/THE WHITE HOUSE
is what really matters. “As much as we talk about ideology and competence, our judgment of presi- dents doesn’t hinge on either of these things in isolation,” wrote Matt Bai in the New York Times this month. “What mat- ters is the perception — or perhaps the il- lusion — that one is shaping events, rath- er than being shaped by them.” But with the distance of decades, the magnitude of this enterprise becomes clear.
Caro, who is working on the fourth vol- ume of “The Years of Lyndon Johnson,” said he is in the process of digging through Johnson-era newspaper clips. “The things that occur at the moment, they seem terribly important,” he said. “But a week later, the columnists that were authoritatively saying one thing were saying the opposite in an equally authoritative voice.” “It was always like this,” he added. “Only slower.” More recent history foreshadowed the
CHUCK KENNEDY/THE WHITE HOUSE
current obsession. In a 1993 New York Times Magazine piece, the late Michael Kelly skewered the Washington press corps, to which he belonged, for its obsession with “percep- tion.” Among his peers, he noted a de- pressing self-awareness that the impor- tant action in government was occurring behind the scenes and outside of their grasp. As a result, he wrote, “reporters fashion reality out of perceptions.” To demonstrate how pervasive the practice had become, Kelly cited “bits of fatuous- ness” in which Washington news ac- counts focused on perceptions of the Clinton administration, all unexception- al but for one fact: He was the author. (In the spirit of such self-disclosure, this re- porter is responsible for such additions to the narrative canon as “But a contrar- ian narrative is emerging” and “That nar- rative will only become more ingrained.”) And now the “narrative” tic is starting
to get on people’s nerves. An article in the May issue of Cam- paigns & Elections magazine headlined “The Narrative’s Narrative” offered a crit- ical look at the rise of a “political buzz- word.” In March, Reason magazine’s Matt Welch worried about “ ‘narrative’ creep” in an article titled “The Obama ‘Narra- tive’ Narrative.” And in the New York Re- view of Books last month, Joe Lelyveld expressed frustration with the ubiquity of the “Obama narrative” by wondering “what the so-called ‘narrative’ of the mo- ment, any moment, actually amounts to (or even how the academic concept ‘nar- rative’ had crept into the reporting of sto- ries).”
One reason for the narrative creep, ac- cording to Shi, the historian, is that we are living in a time “punctuated by dra- matic intensity,” with a raft of existential issues central to America’s future all coming to the fore at once. And smack in the middle of this is a president who in- spires imaginative leaps by all those around him.
“Obama has a great deal of dramatic
reserve,” explained Harold Bloom, a Yale University literary critic. He said the combination of the memoirist in chief ’s status as the most literate president since Abraham Lincoln and his inscrutable steeliness amounted to irresistible ma- terial for the “frustrated writers” in the press corps. “You have a touch of a Shake- spearean character, and people start con- structing narratives.”
horowitzj@washpost.com
I didn’t fear violence. It had already found me. terror from B1
I was planning to become a chemist, but then I got seduced by curiosity about violence. I was both repulsed and fasci- nated. I skipped the war parts in “War and Peace” but wrote a doctoral dis- sertation on chemical weapons that fo- cused mainly on the mechanics of vio- lence, with little attention to the human toll.
Ultimately, I became an expert on ter- rorism. I wrote my first article on the prospects for terrorists to attack chem- ical plants or use toxic chemicals in 1983. At the time, working on this issue wasn’t a wise career move. Very few peo- ple took the threat seriously. Still, I be- lieved that terrorism would become in- creasingly important, and I continued to focus on it. I started out doing technical work related to weapons, but eventually I gave in to an intense curiosity about terrorists themselves. In that work I made use of a personality quirk, rather than my academic training. I am fasci- nated by the secret motivations of vio- lent men, and I’m good at ferreting them out.
When I’m in a frightening situation, I
can go into a kind of altered state. I do not feel afraid. I do not get angry. I am interested, a spy. For my most recent book on terrorism,
I traveled throughout the Middle East and Asia, including a trip to Muridke, in Pakistan’s Punjab province, where I met with Lashkar-i-Taiba operatives and the leader of the group, recently implicated in the 2008 attacks in Mumbai. I once went to the home of Masood Azhar, lead- er of the extremist group Harkat ul-
Mujaheddin and a friend of Osama bin Laden. I was able to silence judgment as I lis- tened, to stop myself from feeling horror. If I allowed myself to feel only curiosity and empathy — not to be confused with sympathy — the terrorists would want to talk to me. Nonetheless, fear does find me. The buzzing of fluorescent lights or the click of a turn signal in a car can set my teeth on edge. The sound of fireworks makes me want to pull the covers up over my head. I do not like to be in crowds, espe- cially at night, when there might be a frisson of sexuality in the air. But in truly frightening situations, I
retain my composure. For example, when I was facedown on the floor in the middle of an armed rob- bery, a sense of calm enveloped me. I didn’t panic when I returned once to my hotel room in Lahore to find Pakistani intelligence officials rifling through my luggage. I assumed that my unusual re- sponse to danger was unique to me. I had no idea that these reactions were well-studied aftereffects of trauma. I consulted a therapist, not about my lack of feeling, but because I wanted to feel even less. It seemed to me that feel- ings got in the way of life. She told me that some of the qualities I assumed I had been born with — including height- ened sensitivity to sudden movements, scents, sounds and light — were actually markers of trauma. She suggested that I might have post-traumatic stress dis- order. I did not believe it. I knew about PTSD from working with soldiers, and I could not imagine that my own life experience
would result in similar symptoms. I had long ago brushed the memory of my rape aside; I thought I had “moved on.” I wanted to contribute to society rather than remain stuck in the past, cringing in terror. And yet, terror had become my central
preoccupation. I felt compelled to un- derstand the deeper motivations of those who hurt others. Instead of feeling terror, I studied it.
fter I completed my second book on terrorism, I realized that I wanted to understand what had happened to me during and after my rape, a time I scarcely remembered. I had started another project, this time about the role of fear in how people re- spond to terrorist strikes. I needed an example of what it feels like to be scared to death. I thought of my own experience —a forced march through the house un- der threat of death from a gun-wielding rapist. In 2006, I requested a complete copy of the police report. Until then, I had never connected my work on terrorism with my own experience of terror. Before I could see the file, the police had to redact the other names in it. As they read through it, they realized that a child rapist might still be at large. Pedo- philes grow old like the rest of us, but they often continue committing the same crimes unless they are physically stopped. The police required my help. But I also needed theirs. Just as I wanted to under- stand the motivations of the terrorists I interviewed, I found myself needing to understand my rapist, as a way to tame a
A
terror that I was beginning to feel for the first time. I felt compelled to answer questions I had spent my professional life asking about terrorists: What happened to the boy who grew up to become my rapist? Was there anything in his life story that might explain, at least in part, why he would want or need to hurt us? What happened to him afterward? The police and I, working together, were able to find out a great deal about the man who attacked my sister and me. We discovered that between 1971 and 1973, he raped or attempted to rape 44 girls, 20 of them in one eight-block area near Harvard University. He was con- victed of three of these rapes and was sent to prison for 18 years, only 10 days after he attacked us. Although the police knew of this man at the time and had in-
discovered had probably been abused by a priest, that I thought more about the connection between the terrorized and the terrorists. I realized the possible im- portance of the frequency of rape of stu- dents at the radical madrassas I studied in Pakistan. I have felt, in my interviews of terrorists, that there was an element of sexual humiliation at work, but it was rarely more than an intuition on my part. Could sexual traumas contribute to contemporary terrorism? Today, my work is moving in a new di-
rection. A group of psychologists at Chil- dren’s Hospital Boston has been study- ing the health issues of Somali American youth, with a focus on trauma. I am working with the group to study a ques- tion of recent national concern: why some Somali youth in this country run away from home to join al-Shabab, a So-
Why does the threat of violent death alter some of us, even if subtly, forever?
formation on a remarkably similar series of crimes that took place in the Boston area two years prior to our rape, they did not put the pieces together. For 33 years, most of these crimes remained unsolved. The rapist committed suicide several years before I began this investigation. I had questions beyond the identity of
my attacker as well: Why does the threat of violent death alter some of us, even if subtly, forever? Why does it make us un- usually numb or calm when we ought to feel terrified? It was only after I began research into my own rapist, whom the police and I
mali terrorist group that claims to be aligned with al-Qaeda. Is there a link be- tween trauma and alienation and vul- nerability to terrorist recruitment? Could terrorism sometimes reflect a kind of perverse post-traumatic evolu- tion? I have never had a problem talking to terrorists bearing Kalashnikovs. But I was petrified to talk to victims, afraid that their terror might elicit feelings I’d long avoided. After interrogating my own past, I am not avoiding them any- more.
info@jessicasternbooks.com
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77 |
Page 78 |
Page 79 |
Page 80 |
Page 81 |
Page 82 |
Page 83 |
Page 84 |
Page 85 |
Page 86 |
Page 87 |
Page 88 |
Page 89 |
Page 90 |
Page 91 |
Page 92 |
Page 93 |
Page 94 |
Page 95 |
Page 96 |
Page 97 |
Page 98 |
Page 99 |
Page 100 |
Page 101 |
Page 102 |
Page 103 |
Page 104 |
Page 105 |
Page 106 |
Page 107 |
Page 108 |
Page 109 |
Page 110 |
Page 111 |
Page 112 |
Page 113 |
Page 114 |
Page 115 |
Page 116 |
Page 117 |
Page 118 |
Page 119 |
Page 120 |
Page 121 |
Page 122 |
Page 123 |
Page 124 |
Page 125 |
Page 126 |
Page 127 |
Page 128 |
Page 129 |
Page 130 |
Page 131 |
Page 132 |
Page 133 |
Page 134 |
Page 135 |
Page 136 |
Page 137 |
Page 138 |
Page 139 |
Page 140 |
Page 141 |
Page 142 |
Page 143 |
Page 144 |
Page 145 |
Page 146 |
Page 147 |
Page 148 |
Page 149 |
Page 150 |
Page 151 |
Page 152 |
Page 153 |
Page 154 |
Page 155 |
Page 156 |
Page 157 |
Page 158 |
Page 159 |
Page 160 |
Page 161 |
Page 162 |
Page 163 |
Page 164 |
Page 165 |
Page 166 |
Page 167 |
Page 168 |
Page 169 |
Page 170