George Packer is a modern-day George Orwell. Like the author of Homage to Catalonia, the places he writes about are never stages for personal or ideological heroism. They are always real and full of frustrating facts that expose both liberal and conservative absolutism as reckless attempts to deny reality. Interesting Times should be read not just as an antidote to contemporary media poison, but as a testament to the values of moral seriousness in a troubled age. Journalist George Packer served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Togo.
George Packer Chronicles a Turbulent 21st Century in his new book "Interesting Times"
Fall Guide: George Packer Chronicles a Turbulent 21st Century
By Jed Lipinski
Tuesday, September 8th 2009 at 4:00pm
In 2007, when George Packer asked Iraqis what kind of government they had expected to replace Saddam's regime, they confessed they'd never really thought about it. "They just assumed that the Americans would bring the right people, and the country would blossom with freedom, prosperity, consumer goods, travel opportunities," Packer writes in "Betrayed," which first appeared in The New Yorker. "In this, they mirrored the wishful thinking of American officials and neoconservative intellectuals who failed to plan for trouble."
Packer's new book, Interesting Times: Writings From a Turbulent Decade, due out in November, is a collection of previously published essays and reportage chronicling the stormy period from September 11 to the rise of Obama. Dwelling heavily on the relationship between the privileged and the desperate, it demonstrates Packer's tolerance for the chaos of political unrest, in places as varied as Iraq, the Ivory Coast, Rangoon, and Appalachia. What he calls, in the introduction, V.S. Naipaul's lack of illusions and ability to register the injustice of things could as easily apply to him.
On a recent morning, at a coffee shop in Prospect Heights, Packer touched on his early exposure to political thought: "My parents were both intense liberals," he said with a grin, adding, "They met because they both loved Adlai Stevenson." Raised in the '60s at Stanford, where his mom and dad taught writing and law, respectively, he went on to study at Yale. He then spent two years as a Peace Corps volunteer in Togo, in West Africa. The experience led to his 1988 debut, the travel narrative The Village of Waiting. Two novels, one play, and three works of nonfiction followed, including 2005's The Assassins' Gate, which explored the abstract motives and glaring ineptitude of the U.S. occupation of Iraq.
Though much of Interesting Times was written during the early days of the War, the material feels timelessly relevant. These pieces capture the national anxiety in its raw form, without the convenience of hindsight. And they're filled with accurate forecasts. In "On the Morning After Saddam," written in March of 2003, he speaks with Hussein Ibish, the director of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, who tells him, "This war will only reinforce the Arab feeling of humiliation and impotence. It could be a giant television commercial for Al Qaeda."
Those articles that don't deal with the war take up similar concerns, namely the unforeseen consequences of American-style good intentions. "The Children of Freetown" features a New York prosthetist named Matthew Mirones and his quest to make artificial limbs for children in Sierra Leone whose arms and legs have been severed by rebel soldiers. Mirones succeeds, temporarily housing the children in Staten Island, but he fails to envision the next step: Should the kids return, their prostheses might simply be stolen, or it might give the rebels cause for retribution.
"Idealism is not something I want to see die out in the world," Packer says, admitting that Mirones was a good man. "But in the aftermath of the Bush years, some people have decided that idealism is selfish and narcissistic, if not downright imperialistic."
What many forget is that "our sense of selfless purpose," as he describes it in the book, has also resulted in a longstanding generosity to developing nations. Adopting a jaded stance toward American naïveté, he suggests, shortchanges our country's power to inspire the oppressed.
George Packer is a modern-day George Orwell. Like the author of Homage to Catalonia, the places he writes about are never stages for personal or ideological heroism. They are always real and full of frustrating facts that expose both liberal and conservative absolutism as reckless attempts to deny reality. Interesting Times should be read not just as an antidote to contemporary media poison, but as a testament to the values of moral seriousness in a troubled age. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 496 pp., $30
