TODAY’S CREATIVE LOVING PROFILE
Counter intelligence
I hate to come down too hard on the FBI. For all I know, the Atlanta office is the pride of the bureau. But on this particular sleepy afternoon, near the end of Year Two of the Constitution-strangling USA Patriot Act, the phone rang at last and lured a pair of under-worked agents to an assignment that was not their finest moment.
The story belongs to Marc Schultz, a 25-year-old bookstore employee, a freelance writer who studied with Tony Earley in the creative writing program at Vanderbilt. Carrying a clear conscience, Schultz wasn't anxious when his mother called him at work to say the FBI was looking for him. He was curious. Like most of us, he was burdened with a stereotype of G-men on the job -- "Matrix-like figures in black suits and opaque sunglasses" standing in his mother's doorway.
When the agents showed up at the bookstore, one was dressed in a sports jacket and T-shirt -- "like an Atlanta version of Miami Vice," Schultz told me. The other wore rumpled shorts. They looked like anybody, only larger. They were civil, but it didn't take long to establish that he was the man they were after.
Now alarmed and bewildered, Schultz tried to recall his movements on the previous Saturday. Had he stopped at the Caribou Coffee on Powers Ferry? Yes. Did he carry anything into the shop? Reading material? No -- wait. OK, he was reading an article his father had printed off the Web -- "a scathing screed focusing on the way corporate interests have poisoned the country's media," as he described it later in a Creative Loafing article.
Schultz couldn't even remember who wrote the "screed" in question. But some unnamed patriot in the coffee shop had found Schultz and his reading material so terrifying he called the FBI.
"We'd just like to get to the bottom of this," said one agent. "Now if we can't, then you may have a problem. And you don't want that."
We don't want that. My purpose here is not to embarrass the agents any more than they've embarrassed themselves. The new congressional report on its pre-9-11 performance has given the bureau all the image problems it can handle. It's possible -- I can't seem to establish this -- that regulations, or the Patriot Act, compel the FBI to investigate every earnest complaint from a paranoid citizen, even a citizen with a fascist chip on his shoulder and a brain the size of a mayapple. But a long, dark shadow has fallen across the republic -- and our sweet sunny South -- when complaints of this caliber result in travesties like the harassment of Marc Schultz.
Imagine a rural South in more innocent times, and a similar complaint registered with a different set of law enforcement officers. Mayberry's resident Chicken Little bursts into Sheriff Andy Taylor's office on fire with the news. A suspicious stranger is reading Communist propaganda in broad daylight, let's say in one of the waiting chairs at Floyd's barbershop. Deputy Fife starts to hyperventilate and reaches for the single bullet Andy allows him -- or maybe for the phone to call in the FBI.
The sheriff freezes Barney with a raised hand -- "Now calm down" -- and slowly turns his chair in the direction of the gibbering snitch, all the while rearranging his face into that tired, patient half-smile that never shows his teeth. The smile he reserves for hysterics and crackpots.
Andy rises, places a hand on the informer's elbow. He leads him out of the office and down the block to the drugstore, where he buys him a Nehi and inquires into the health of his family -- and, with infinite tact, into the status of his medications.
Case closed, in Mayberry. You can object that it was TV. But when was "Andy Griffith" more fantastical than "The FBI," a show personally edited by J. Edgar Hoover? Griffith's show was a fantasy of law enforcement in a sane, sober and self-confident society, where free speech blesses all reading material, and finks and snitches are the ones who have to explain themselves. A society, unfortunately, nothing like the United States of America since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11.
I'd like to assume everyone who reads this will sympathize with Marc Schultz, and no one with the nameless sneak who turned him in. I sympathize with Schultz especially because I wrote the subversive essay he was reading. It was called "Weapons of Mass Stupidity." It was about America's amazing gullibility, about the hapless majority that George Bush and Rupert Murdoch find so easy to bully and deceive.
A "scathing screed" it may have been -- I hope so -- but far short of a radical manifesto. More disparaging assessments of the president's integrity can be found this week in Harper's and the New York Times. And if the FBI can spare the time to read 25 years of political commentary published under my byline, they'll find me uniquely consistent on the subject of terrorism. I always maintained that terrorists are common murderers, regardless of their causes or their politics, and merit no more respect or glamour than a monster who kills one child at a time. That sets me at sharp odds with such Bush lieutenants as Richard Perle and Admiral Poindexter, supporters, even paymasters, of terrorists like the Nicaraguan contras who were perceived to be on "our side."
Marc Schultz's chief misfortune, besides drinking coffee in close proximity to a head case, was his physical appearance. "Yeah, I'm kind of a lefty-looking guy," he told me. "I'm dark, fairly long black hair, a beard. I'm Jewish. Maybe the sight of a dark, bearded man reading in public is enough in itself to strike fear into the heart of a patriotic citizen."
Most victims of the Patriot Act have been Muslims and Arabs. With appearance profiling, the next wave of suspects will be Jews, Greeks, Italians and Latinos, and so on until no one's safe unless he looks like a Viking, which takes us back to Aryan supremacists and Hitler's master race. In America. I don't know about you, but members of my family have fought in every U.S. war in the past century. They didn't fight for that weasel's right to finger people who look insufficiently Nordic, or who might read something to the left of the New York Post.
Schultz asked me if I thought it was wise to go public with his grievance. I told him what I believe to be true for myself and for anyone the government might lean on: Daylight is the best defense. Injustice flourishes in the dark. There's an imbalance of power in any society, and of people who abuse it. Add fear -- the legacy of 9-11 -- and you have a climate where freedoms are fragile. Add secrecy and you have the recipe for despotism, for gulags and Gestapos.
Marc Schultz was one of the fortunate suspects. He's middle class, educated and articulate, connected through his father, a lawyer, to people with influence. Not so fortunate was a middle-aged man identified only as M., profiled in the current Harper's. Arrested by the FBI on no charge (a co-worker said he wore a surgical mask "more than necessary") and denied bail, M. spent five months in a New Jersey jail with rats, roaches and rapists, by his description. He was released still uncharged, $30,000 in debt from the experience, guilty only of being a resident alien and a Pakistani.
The cover headline is "Lost in Ashcroft's Dungeons." Under the abominable Patriot Act, Franz Kafka's The Trial is coming true in America, just under the mass media radar, just off the front page.
We're fast becoming the Saddam Husseins, the Robert Mugabes we pretend to deplore. The Justice Department reported 1,182 arrests under the act; from those prisoners, its inspector general received 1,072 accusations that FBI agents and other department employees had violated their civil liberties, and in many cases physically abused them.
That's not a left-wing rumor. That's a secret police state that's encroaching, case-by-case, on the smug, affluent America where most of us live. You think you're exempt? In Tampa (according to a source I trust), a retired naval officer was interrogated by FBI agents because he e-mailed the White House to protest the invasion of Iraq. In Atlanta, a retired attorney of impeccable reputation was arrested for trying to take photos of some storage tanks. An amateur art photographer, he admired the patterns of light and shadow.
As for me, purveyor of subversion and sedition, I've heard nothing from the FBI -- just a friendly nibble from cable news and a lot of "give 'em hell" encouragement from fellow citizens, including a pair of congressmen. I would, if I could, overthrow this government by force of argument. I believe from the bottom of my non-partisan heart that the George Bush wolfpack is the most dangerous, least honorable, least sensible gang of thugs and cynics to ever aim America's Big Gun at a trembling planet.
I saw a bumper sticker I endorse -- "Any Other Whore in 2004." But the USA Patriot Act has to be retired before the 2004 elections. Stand up, speak out -- don't hunker down and wait for those bruisers in the cargo shorts to come looking for your son.
Hal Crowther is a columnist for Creative Loafing in Charlotte. Creative Loafing Senior Editor John Sugg is on vacation; his column will resume shortly.
