Diary: Jeffrey Goldberg
A weeklong electronic journal.
By Jeffrey Goldberg
Slate, March 12, 1999
[Read this article at Slate’s website]
Posted Monday, March 8, 1999, at 7:00 PM ET
I don’t want to create the impression that I’m paranoid, but big black helicopters are circling my house as I write this. This is not an unusual occurrence. I don’t mean writing—which, these days, is highly unusual—but the big black helicopters.
When I covered night cops at the Washington Post, my colleagues and I, in the interest of reportorial efficiency, divided the city into two sectors. D.C. residents either lived on quiet, tree-lined streets or on trash-strewn, drug-infested streets. There was no such thing, in the night-cop playbook, as a quiet, drug-infested neighborhood, or a tree-lined, trash-strewn neighborhood.
But when we moved to American University Park (Motto: “A Second-Tier Neighborhood for a Third-Tier University”) a couple of years ago, I realized that there is such a thing in D.C. as a national security neighborhood. These neighborhoods are tree-lined and decisively un-trash-strewn, but they are not quiet, on account of the black helicopters.
I first thought we owed the sky patrol to the presence of Sandy Berger and, reputedly, Tony Lake—no one has ever seen him, so who knows?—in our immediate vicinity. Then I thought the helicopters had something to do with the naval security station a few blocks over on Nebraska Avenue. What the Navy does there is a mystery, but it involves large antennae that disrupt the smooth functioning of car alarms, and most probably cause the gradual liquefaction of vital bodily organs (where are Mulder and Scully when you need them?).
But then the guy who installed our fence, a retired NSA official—that’s what spies do when they retire, install fences—told me that our house sits directly below the route the Marines use to test the president’s helicopters. If this is true, then the president has something like five dozen helicopters.
I personally choose to believe that the black helicopters are the advance guard of the New World Order. Or that—and this is my standby explanation for anything creepy or unexplained—they’re out to get me because I’m Jewish.
There are advantages to living in a national security neighborhood. Most mornings, I can get a sense of Osama bin Laden’s plans simply by jogging near Sandy Berger’s house. If the security is especially tight, I know that it’s not a good time to visit the national monuments, or our embassy in Kampala.
Berger lives about three blocks away, between our house and Turtle Park, the playground that serves the local cell-phone and Land Rover set, and I don’t especially enjoy getting eyeballed by officers of the Secret Service Uniformed Division (one of Washington’s finest oxymorons), to say nothing of the ununiformed agents in black Ford Expeditions (black again!) who watch as I wheel the stroller down the street. But the earpieces are pretty low-key about their mission—they’re guarding a man who hasn’t taken his name and address out of the phone book, after all—and I’m not one to turn down the additional police protection a potentate brings to his neighborhood.
I am, you may be getting the idea, highly security-conscious, an outgrowth of my paranoia, which, truth be told, predates the appearance of Cossack-filled black helicopters hovering above my house.
Paranoia might be the wrong word, actually. I’m not so much a paranoid as I am a worrier. I come from a long line of worriers—my great-grandfather was the sainted Fretter of Minsk, and my grandfather, may his memory be a blessing, was to worrying what Mark Spitz was to swimming. Which is to say, the Jewish champion.
It’s appropriate that I disclose my propensity to worry on a Monday, because Monday is worry day for me. I have to worry about what I’m going to do the entire week. I have to worry about what I’m going to do next week. I have to worry about car-bombers parked somewhere between my front door and Turtle Park. I have to worry about security at our embassy in Kampala. You get the point.
I usually start worrying Sunday nights, except that last night I took a David Mamet line to heart and postponed worrying until this morning. The line was spoken by Richard Dreyfuss in Lansky. When asked if he worried, Lansky responded, “You show me someone who profited from it and I’ll do it.”
I had a very Mamet weekend. We saw The Old Neighborhood at Theater J at the DCJCC Saturday night, along with 200 other Jews, all of us paying to see tsoris we can get for free at home.
I have more to say about Mamet, but the black helicopters are back, and I can’t concentrate. I’m leaving now to do the only thing a man with security and Mamet on his mind can do, which is go to Virginia to shoot guns.
Posted Tuesday, March 9, 1999, at 6:30 PM ET
The place I usually go to shoot guns, the Blue Ridge Arsenal, is located in a boxy industrial park in Chantilly, Virginia, not too far from Dulles International Airport. When I first heard the name Blue Ridge Arsenal, I pictured some sort of slag-heap firing range in a smoky hollow frequented by toothless, gut-heaving rednecks who would say things like “Goldberg? What is that, a German name?” and then try to stomp the shit out of me, which I wouldn’t let them do because I am a badass Jew who is ready for gunplay.
So I was disappointed to find the Blue Ridge Arsenal a friendly, mainstreamish place where even Jews are welcome. I didn’t even have to flash my NRA card to buy ammo. This is not to say that Blue Ridge is the gun equivalent of Fresh Fields. They’re different out there—they drive pickups, they eat fried-pork products, they don’t get irony, but so what? I’m sick of irony. They don’t get shtick, or neurosis either—they certainly don’t get neurosis shtick—but who cares? Man does not live by shtick alone, even Jewish Man, though science hasn’t yet proved this last point.
I’m not actually a member of the NRA, mind you, it’s just that it keeps sending me these colorful hard-plastic membership cards as enticements to sign up. The NRA’s most recent solicitation arrived a couple of days after the ACLU’s most recent letter reached me. The NRA’s letter was better. For one thing, it was signed by Charlton Heston, whereas the ACLU letter was signed by Nadine Strossen. Also, the ACLU had the nerve to ask me to “accept this personal invitation to become a ‘card-carrying member,’ ” but then didn’t include a colorful hard-plastic card, like the NRA did. I love those plastic membership cards. I carried one identifying me as a member of the World Jewish Congress until the day I was getting on a plane to Afghanistan and realized that the Taliban most definitely doesn’t get shtick. (I actually cut up and threw away that card in Islamabad, and worried hard about whether Pakistani intelligence also doesn’t get shtick.)
But, guns. I will say that though I refuse to join the NRA on the grounds that it advocates nonsense, I do read the Second Amendment differently than most people I know do, which is to say, the Second Amendment allows citizens of the United States to bear arms. I’m not an activist in this cause—I’m more an activist in support of the Third Amendment, which, by my reading, is a constitutional safeguard against unwanted houseguests—but I feel strongly enough about this that I’m almost willing to move to Virginia from Washington. But not quite.
Lately, I’ve been working with a shooting instructor, who I’m hoping will certify me NRA-qualified, though I don’t know exactly what that will get me, except the chance to shock magazine editors and Reform rabbis by saying that I’m NRA-qualified.
This time, though, I was out on the range alone, firing the Glock 9-mm. What I wanted to do was fire 41 bullets as fast as possible. I’ve been thinking quite a bit about the Diallo shooting in the Bronx, and I’m trying to understand how four officers could fire 41 times without realizing that they’ve fired 41 times. This is what 41 shots sound like, more or less, because I had to reload a couple of times: bang-bang-bang-bang-bang-bang-bang-bang-bang-bang-bang-bang-bang-bang-bang-bang-bang-bang-bang-bang-bang-bang-bang-bang-bang-bang-bang-bang-bang-bang-bang-bang-bang-bang-bang-bang-bang-bang-bang-bang and bang.
Which, when the smoke cleared, made me think three things: One is, poor guy. Two is, just who was in charge of training those cops? It is one thing to fire on someone you think may be carrying a weapon, but it is another for you to empty your clip in him. Three is, I feel sorry for those cops. This wasn’t Abner Louima redux. This was a terrible mistake.
I spoke to Bill Bratton about this last week. He’s the former police commissioner in New York, and I asked him what he thinks happened. “No one can justify 41 shots in those circumstances,” he said. “This becomes a situation where panic comes into play.”
Pardon me for that little reporting diversion, but it proves a point: People who are properly trained in handgun use don’t generally make mistakes. This is what my gun-hating friends don’t realize. They think guns just go off. They don’t. I’m not entirely comfortable with American gun culture, but there’s a middle ground, inhabited by neither the ACLU nor the NRA.
I will say this, though: At least the gunnies have a sense of humor. A bumper sticker sold by Blue Ridge and stuck on the backs of some of the pickups outside reads: “Keep Honking While I Reload.” I live in an area in which the most popular bumper sticker seems to be, “Thelma and Louise Live,” followed by “Stop CVS.” I’ll take “Keep Honking While I Reload” over those.
Posted Wednesday, March 10, 1999, at 6:30 PM ET
A big, blowy snowstorm landed on Washington yesterday, and typically, things went haywire. Washingtonians can’t drive through slush without smacking into trees, so eight or ten inches of snow just lock the place down.
Except that I wasn’t locked-down, and neither were my fellow SUVers. The only things that bothered us yesterday were the low-axle, no-wheel-drive sedans getting in our way as we sped down snow-covered streets. As I was zipping down Connecticut Avenue yesterday in my Ford Explorer, I realized just how lucky I am, and how wrong Malcolm Gladwell is.
In The New Yorker last week, Gladwell argued that SUV drivers, no less than drunk drivers, are menaces to society. It is, Gladwell wrote, “abundantly clear that sport-utility vehicles and pickup trucks can—by virtue of their weight, high clearance, and structural rigidity—do far more damage in an accident than conventional automobiles can.” He goes on to call for a “prohibitive weight tax on sport utilities,” which would go to pay “the medical bills and compensate the family of anyone hit by some cell-phone-wielding yuppie in a four-wheeled behemoth.”
But Gladwell has it exactly wrong. The problem on the roads today is not too many SUVs, but too few.
It is the clearance and weight disparities between SUVs and smaller, low-riding sedans that Gladwell objects to, disparities that lead to frequent death among those sedan-drivers unfortunate enough to encounter us cell-phone-wielding maniacs head-on.
The solution, then, is not to ban SUVs, but to make them mandatory. Given that it is safer to drive an SUV (unless you’re the type who can’t handle curves) than a conventional automobile, and given that America and its automotive industry stand for progress and bigness, and given that there is now quite apparently too much gasoline in the world (78 cents a gallon in Virginia!), Gladwell shouldn’t be arguing for an SUV tax but for an SUV tax break.
Of course, Gladwell is a known Canadian who doesn’t even own a car, or, for that matter, a subway token. I happen to know from firsthand experience that the only car Gladwell ever owned was some sort of gas-sipping proto-Geo. He maintains that it was a Honda Civic Wagon, but I remember it as a Ford Escort, or perhaps an AMC Pacer.
I wish he had been with me yesterday, as I four-wheel-drived my way through snow-blanketed Washington, watching the little bunny cars like the one Gladwell used to drive slip and slide their way toward disaster. It was a day of vindication for me, because I’ve been on the defensive since I took the Explorer home—my wife thinks it’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever bought, at least since the time I bought an eight-pound Spanish-Mayan dictionary in Merida, Mexico, even though I speak neither Spanish nor Mayan.
But she will admit, in generous moments, that the Explorer is a safe way to transport our children. I will admit, in turn, that a poorly-driven Explorer—and especially a poorly-driven Expedition or Excursion, the new Ford SUV that, I’m not making this up, weighs 157 tons empty—could pose a danger to other people’s children, until the parents of said children receive the tax break (the “Gladwell exemption,” let’s call it) that will allow them to buy an SUV of their own.
The debate over SUVs reminds me of the split between public-health officials and physicians on the question of antibiotics. The public-health experts decry the overprescription of antibiotics, because antibiotic abuse weakens our collective immunity, but the job of a sick person’s doctor is to worry about that patient alone, and therefore to prescribe antibiotics even if there’s just a moderate chance the patient could be helped by them.
It’s the same with SUVs. On the one hand, as responsible members of society, we should strive toward vehicular socialism—if Congress won’t make SUVs mandatory, then we should all drive vehicles of similar weight and clearance, even if they’re smaller than my Explorer. But in the real world, my job as a parent is to protect my children, and, recognizing that there are lunatics on the road driving big and small cars (and big and small trucks), my responsibility is to surround my children with as much steel as I can afford.
End of rant. I have to go now and dig out my wife’s Camry.
Posted Thursday, March 11, 1999, at 6:30 PM ET
I have a good job, and I make a good wage (not to mention the $10,000 Slate is paying me for this diary), but what I really want to do—what I’d even take a pay cut to do—is write for Consumer Reports. It’s my favorite magazine, except for Soldier of Fortune and Cat Fancy.
But let me step back for a minute in order to provide some context. There are certain advantages associated with being a home-based writer. One is that I usually don’t shave until about 11:30 or so, which gives my skin time to wake up. On those days when I must appear in public early, I use the Gillette Mach 3, whose blades are inordinately expensive but thorough; on days when I don’t have to shave until the late morning (or the late afternoon), I use a disposable, because I’m cheap and because I like to check how fast my blood clots.
Working at home has other advantages: I get to see my children whenever I want, I get to watch CNBC obsessively, and every day is dress-down day.
There are disadvantages, to be sure, which include isolation, desolation, panic, and ennui, but these are made up for by one other advantage—weekday shopping. On those days when I don’t feel like dragging myself downtown for lunch, which, lately, is most days, I often use that window of time to shop, for a simple reason: Have you ever been to Price Club on Sunday afternoon? It’s madness. I’ve seen homicides committed at Price Club on Sunday afternoons.
The point is, since I work at home, it has fallen to me to do much of the family shopping. I didn’t like it at first. I was never a shopper, and, until recently, I never really owned anything. (Until about five years ago, all I owned was four shirts and a Walkman.) But now I’m something of an accumulator, and, dare I say it, a not-too-shabby shopper.
Which brings me back to Consumer Reports, which has replaced the personal finance magazines as my obsessional read.
Consumer Reports is an old-fashioned magazine; it lacks flash, and even bylines, and it provides pure information—it’s the Weather Channel of magazines. What other magazine provides so much pure information? The men’s magazines provide pure information about tits, and that’s it. Newsweek has replaced information gathering with buzz manufacturing. Even the proprietor of the fine magazine you’re now reading stated publicly that he’d prefer not to run scoops.
Here’s a scoop from a story about khakis in the latest issue of Consumer Reports: “$19 Farahs Held Up Better Than $55 Ralph Laurens and Looked as Good After Laundering.” Now, that’s investigative reporting. Eat your heart out, Isikoff.
Consumer Reports is an invaluable tool—its dissection of the complex diaper market was a classic of the genre—but I don’t picture myself hunkered down in the Consumer Reports laboratory, making toast over and over again before moving on to check whether 1,000 Flushes is really good for 1,000 flushes. I’d need big doses of Ritalin in order to accomplish that sort of reporting.
What I’d like to write instead would be a column called “The Shopping Avenger,” in which I would eviscerate stores and companies that provide poor customer service, and praise those that stand for such old-fashioned values as knowing what products they sell (heads up, “Toys ‘R’ Us”).
The breakdown in customer service is not the fault of the retail industry alone: My inner Giuliani loves to see jackass customers slapped around a bit by cashiers and salesmen. Barbarians among the ranks of consumers can ruin a fine shopping experience just as surely as any lunkhead salesman can. I would therefore devote a portion of “The Shopping Avenger” to the outing of evil consumers, in much the same way Ed Koch used to out johns.
“The Shopping Avenger” would be dedicated, in fact, to the cashier at my neighborhood Fresh Fields who, earlier this week, did something I’ve never seen before: scolded a customer for blatantly abusing the express checkout lane. The shopper in question wheeled up to the express lane—15 items max—with 30 (30!) separate items. The woman behind the register rang her up, but couldn’t contain herself: “This is 30 items,” she said. To which the shopping devil replied: “Oh, I’m usually good at figuring out how much stuff I have.” To which the clerk said, “What happened? Did you forget how to count today?”
I remain convinced that the abuse of express checkout lanes will one day be a Zoe Baird-style litmus test for those seeking public office, and so this encounter was the high point of my week so far—and it’s been a good week. Who knows what the rest of today holds? Maybe I’ll even leave the house.
Posted Friday, March 12, 1999, at 6:30 PM ET
I am writing in a real hurry this morning, because I am eager to plant myself in front of the television and watch the Dow break 10,000. I’m not sure what I’m going to do when the Dow breaks 10,000. Perhaps I will buy back—at $83 a share or so—the AT&T stock I sold last year for $40. That was a smart move. (Here’s my latest investment strategy: On New Year’s Eve, I’m going to invite all my friends over with their laptops. At midnight, we’ll turn the laptops on and see which ones explode. Then I’ll buy stock in the computer makers whose laptops survived.)
This is my last diary entry, and, as such, I think it’s important to report on what I’ve learned this week:
1) People read the diary. As evidence, I cite the impressive number of hostile e-mails I have received.
2) People who read the diary suffer from an acute irony deficiency. (Get it? Irony deficiency?)
3) Strike that—people who read the diary and then write hostile e-mails suffer from an acute irony deficiency. I have no knowledge about people who read the diary and then don’t write. I don’t even know if they exist.
The hostility has been focused on two particular points I raised this week: The first was my mild defense of the Second Amendment, which provoked, predictably, outrage. One e-mailer accused me of being a “brainwashed cracker.” Let me tell you something, buddy: I wear your scorn like a badge of honor. I’ve long fashioned myself a bit of a redneck (a “Jewneck” is what I call it), though I’m self-conscious about it, which I suppose negates any real redneckedness on my part. But I do feel genuine affection toward NASCAR, and I own a John Deere cap. Another writer suggested that, unlike his highly evolved self, I apparently didn’t care that children get shot in school. Let me make my position perfectly clear: I think that children getting shot in school is bad.
The hostility—more surprising to me, in this case—was also provoked by my vigorous defense of SUVs and the men who love them. One of my best friends, in fact, nearly stroked out when she read my pro-SUV tract. I told her what my friend Bill Powers told me in justifying the purchase of a Ford Explorer: As a parent, you are morally bound to take the Israeli position. Meaning, Israel does what it has to do to defend its people, and parents must do what they have to do to defend their children, and if that means protecting them from the world with two tons of steel, so be it. (When I mentioned the Israeli model of home defense to Malcolm Gladwell, who recently wrote an anti-SUV editorial in The New Yorker, he expanded on the theme, suggesting that the true Israeli position would be for me to preemptively slash the tires of any SUV in my neighborhood that is larger than my SUV. Let me state here, today, that if such an event occurs in American University Park in Washington, D.C., it wasn’t me).
Another correspondent tried the psychological approach on me, suggesting that I come to grips with my feelings of “male inadequacy” before I kill people in passenger cars. This criticism is off base, because I am not inadequate. I am semi-adequate.
An observation: SUVs are the new cigarettes. The cultural elite is turning on SUVs, and when the cultural elite turns against a product, it creates fertile ground for class-action lawsuits. Big Tobacco, meet Big Truck.
Truth be told, I’d rather be driving a minivan. There, I said it. How inadequate could I feel if I’m willing to admit that? Granted, I don’t want to drive up to the firing range in a Chrysler Town & Country, but I’ll get over it. Anyway, gasoline prices are creeping back up, and minivans get about 4 miles to the gallon, as opposed to SUVs, which get 4 gallons to the mile.
I have to go now—the market’s opening in a few minutes. I’m still not sure how I’m going to celebrate when the Dow breaks 10,000. Maybe I’ll go outside and shoot my SUV.