Wednesday, October 2, 2019

Eileen Pollack asks: Would you know a terrorist if you met one?

HALLIE EPHRON: If your neighbor were a home-grown terrorist, how could you not know? Eileen Pollack thrilling new novel, "The Professor of Immortality," sets up precisely this situation. It's inspired by the true story of American terrorist, the Unabomber.


Today we're delighted to welcome Eileen to Jungle Red, and looking forward to hearing the story behind her remarkable new book.

EILEEN POLLACK: My friends in Manhattan can’t understand how people can say they knew that the guy who went on a shooting spree was stockpiling weapons and spouting racist or anti-Semitic diatribes. Given that I spent 27 years living in the Midwest, they turn to me for an explanation. Is everyone out there a white supremacist?

No. To think so is its own kind of bigotry. The vast majority of people in this country are kind, tolerant, open-hearted. But plenty of right-wing extremists live between the coasts (and on the coasts) and predicting which ones might show up at the mall with an AK-47 isn’t always easy.

I moved to Michigan eight months before Timothy McVeigh blew up the Murrah Building in Oklahoma City. McVeigh had attended at least one meeting of something called the Michigan Militia. He practiced building bombs on a farm two hours’ north of my new home. A locksmith at the university where I taught was suspected of being McVeigh’s accomplice.

Alarmed, I spent the next decade researching the militias. This turned out to be surprisingly easy: the militias met as openly as the Rotarians. Not only was I welcome to hang out with the local branch to celebrate “Tax Blast” by nailing a 1040 to a tree and using it as a target, the group had set out a pan of kosher hot dogs for any Jews who might be attending. The moms and dads openly carried guns, but they would have welcomed anyone who helped them defend our state from an invasion by foreign terrorists, a round-up by agents of our own government, or a horde of starving black and brown people and white urban wusses who might, if the grid went down, swarm the countryside in search of food.

Puzzled as to how the lefties I knew in Ann Arbor could coexist with neighbors who saw the world through such a radically different lens, I wrote a novel in which a liberal California couple move to a cute Michigan town, only to find that most of their neighbors belong to the militia

The manuscript collected nothing but rejections. After all, the editors in New York thought white supremacists had gone extinct with the Ku Klux Klan in the 1950s. Not until years later did Breaking and Entering find a publisher. A group of “Christian warriors” called the Hutaree were arrested near Ann Arbor for conspiring to wage war on the police. None of my buddies from the Tax Blast belonged to the Hutaree, but my son attended high school with a member’s son.

Even at the university where I taught, I might have found a terrorist among my students. The Unabomber, as it turned out, had earned a math degree at the University of Michigan in the 1960s. The more I read about his life, the more Ted Kaczynski reminded me of dozens of my brilliant but disaffected white male students. Some wrote violent, misogynistic narratives because that was what they had grown up seeing in the movies, on TV, in video games and online porn. Some had been abused. Some were showing signs of mental illness. Should I have turned them in to the authorities? Urged them to seek counseling? 

I wrote The Professor of Immortality to explore such questions. Who are the terrorists among us? How can we distinguish them from our neighbors, students, and friends with whom we merely disagree?

HALLIE: If that isn't a question for our times, I don't know what is.   As someone who tries to be accepting of differences, what would it take for me to raise an alarm? How about you?

I, for one, am hoping Eileen tell us more about the research she did for writing the book. Did she talk to his neighbors??

Eileen Pollack is a writer whose novel Breaking and Entering, about the deep divisions between blue and red America, was named a 2012 New York Times Editor’s Choice selection.

She also is the author of Paradise, New York, a novel, and two collections of short fiction, In the Mouth and The Rabbi in the Attic, as well as a work of creative nonfiction called Woman Walking Ahead: In Search of Catherine Weldon and Sitting Bull (made into a major motion picture starring Jessica Chastain) and two innovative textbooks, Creative Nonfiction and Creative Composition.

41 comments:

  1. This is a chilling thought . . . I have no idea how to identify the one person among the disillusioned who will suddenly become the shooter on a rampage and the idea of a neighbor --- someone I know --- actually being that terrorist is positively terrifying.
    I’m definitely looking forward to reading Eileen’s book . . . .

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    1. I agree. And I always come to the defense of anyone who seems "different"... besides, any smart terrorist would work hard not to look different. The one thing you always hear is 'loner' - but the world is full of people who prefer their own company.

      Which reminds me, anyone else watching UNBELIEVABLE? It's about a serial rapist (in my mind a kind of terrorist) who flies under the radar because of who he seems to be. It's terrific.

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    2. The serial rapist, does he hand himself or become president?

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    3. I didn't write either novel as a guide to help readers identify those among us who might actually cross the line and become serial killers or domestic terrorists. I was more interested in trying to understand what is going on inside someone like Ted Kaczynski or one of my friendly neighbors in Michigan who belongs to a right-wing militia. In Kaczynski's case, I came to see how profoundly lonely he was. He had always been brilliant, but no one had taught him to get along with other people. He was bullied in high school. At Harvard, he was ostracized for being working class, the son of Polish immigrants. He was the subject of a series of crazy, sadistic experiments by a wacko psychology professor. And then, as a graduate student in Michigan, he was desperate to find love and companionship, desperate to find a girlfriend. He just snapped and became full of rage. Later, he channeled that rage into his ideology. But basically he was lonely and in pain, as so many young people, especially young men, are. I had many students like Ted.
      That's what I was trying to understand.

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  2. Well—that is terrifying. When you walk down the street now, are you suspicious? Processing and analyzing? How has writing this changed you personally? Wow.

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    1. As I tried to describe in my previous comment, I'm not trying to instill fear or make people suspicious of their neighbors as much as I'm hoping we all become more curious and interested in those around us, more eager to understand. When I wrote Breaking and Entering, I wanted to hang out with neighbors in the militia so I could understand what they were so afraid of, why they feared our own government (the president at the time was Clinton). Were they really afraid of Jews taking over and replacing them? Why? Were they afraid of me (I'm Jewish)? Were they really afraid that the grid would collapse and all the black (and white) people from Chicago and Detroit would come swarming into the countryside in search of food and water and try to kill them? Did they really think they were going to be protecting the rest us of us from ISIS invaders? And how were the people I met (many of whom were very kind people who would have done anything to help me, if I needed help) different from the militia members who turned out to be plotting to assassinate as many police officers as they could (the son of one such militia member had been in my son's homeroom in Ann Arbor for four years!).

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    2. and.... guess I'll have to read the book!

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  3. Welcome, Eileen. THE PROFESSOR OF IMMORTALITY sounds chilling, as is the question, " Who are the terrorists among us? How can we distinguish them from our neighbors, students, and friends with whom we merely disagree?"

    I think the short answer is we can't.

    I worked in some interesting populations in my time, and I'm pretty sure I can easily spot a substance abuser or someone who is mentally ill. I'm good at picking up on physical, emotional, sex abuse issues. But a terrorist? Outside of every two year old I've ever known, I couldn't tell a terrorist from apples.

    None the less, I am careful when in states who permit carrying a weapon, openly or concealed. I'm sure I profile, and I doubt people who say they don't. I really try not to.

    I also "reverse" profile! A couple of weeks ago we saw a man walking up and down our street for perhaps an hour, talking on his phone, up and down, up and down. I watched him for a bit, then saw the yarmulke. I heaved a sigh of relief. Much later I found out he was a young rabbi who had just moved into the neighborhood with his family.

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    1. Laughing... remembering the first person I saw "talking to himself" -- intensely. Of course he was on his phone but I couldn't see a phone or earbuds...

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    2. Exactly ... I think you need to be an FBI agent who is keeping tabs on who is buying bomb-making materials to really know what's going on. (In the case of the militia guys who lived near my in Ann Arbor and were up to no good, they got turned in by some of the saner militia guys in another group who overheard them plotting). I started to write the Professor of Immortality because Ted Kaczynski had been a student at the university where I had been teaching for 25 years, and he reminded me of so many brilliant but angry and withdrawn young white male students I had taught. As a writing teacher, you really get insights into your students that other people don't get. Sometimes, those students write scary stuff. Or they reveal how much pain they are in. When Ted K was a student, he was so lonely he went to see a psychiatrist with the intention of lying and convincing the doctors that he was transgender, so they would help him change from male to female. He thought that if he was a woman, he could put his own arms around himself and so be held by a woman. That broke my heart. Obviously, I don't condone the murders he committed after he snapped. But I think that kind of loneliness and pain gets translated into rage--at women, at oneself, at minorities and immigrants. So I wanted to understand what was going on.

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  4. Congratulations on your new release!
    In 2016, a driver jumped the curb and mowed down a row of political signs I had lined up--local, county, state, and federal elections. A neighbor called the police. I turned up minutes later, returning from walking the dogs. The officer and I found no damage to my trees or the green utility boxes. I asked the officer if I should take down the signs. I was worried about vandalism or fire bombs hurled through the windows. I treasure his response: "Ma'am, it is your legal right to post political signs during the campaign season, and the police will enforce your right."

    The situation escalated: my signs disappeared on a regular basis. The Democratic Ward Chair drove by every day, replacing them.

    The TVs at the Village Rec Center were turned to Fox News. All public political discussion in the Fitness Center were banned. I was identified as "one of the Hillary girls". Neighbors turned their backs, except for one Halloween night parent who whispered "I'm with you but I'm afraid to put up signs."

    The Village of Evendale, Cincinnati suburbs


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    1. I hear you! I think this is the case in many areas in our country. When I gave readings from Breaking and Entering, people would come up to me and tell me stories of their businesses being boycotted or their children being ostracized at school because they were perceived as too liberal, didn't attend the right church
      (or attend church at all), or were seen as supporting a woman's right to choose an abortion. A former student of mine who writes a column for a paper in Kentucky is subjected to truly shocking abuse for her liberal views. I don't think my friends in Manhattan have any idea of how hard it is to espouse even moderate views in some other parts of the country. But I also have to say that you wouldn't want to wear a MAGA hat in Manhattan, and I do think that the call-out culture on college campuses has put a damper on some students' and professors' abilities to speak honestly and ask honest questions.

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    2. How about MAGA hats in the National African-American Museum? Everyone stared and glared, no one said a word. With no reaction, the MAGA teen group soon left.

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  5. It IS chilling, and to know that there is the potential for violence, sometimes in our own family, is even worse.

    I've mentioned that we have a rural property in Kentucky, only 40 miles from our home in Cincinnati, but it might as well be the moon. Some of the people there, the second poorest county in the state, have never left their own town. That is how insular they are. One guy actually told me it would be great if the "island of California" sank into the ocean.

    On our three-mile long road there are three barns with Confederate flags, and we hear gunfire routinely, clearly target shooting, because it's often not hunting season when we hear it. Two different farms have cut Confederate flag shapes into their fields, as well. I have a very strong suspicion that the target practice is for their very hoped for revolution. And Trump's dog whistle tweets are not going to help this, not one bit.

    Needless to say, this has dampened my enjoyment of our once peaceful little retreat.

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    1. We live in such a liberal echo chamber in Massachusetts, this is good to be reminded of.

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  6. I'm going to have to read THE PROFESSOR OF IMMORTALITY as part of the research I'm doing right now into white supremacists, who are going to play a part in my tenth novel. I've long been fascinated with the Militias, who have been around much longer than the tiki-torch-carrying, chino-wearing Nazis who've emerged from the woodwork in recent years. The people Eileen talks about here, who have cheerful picnics while preparing to hold of the US Army with force of arms and who load up with goods at survivalist conventions.

    My take? People want to feel that they're part of something important, and that their lives have meaning. Most of us find it in our families, our work, and/or community and volunteer service. But that's not enough for some people (or maybe they aren't other-focused enough to let it be significant.) What gives their lives meaning is the fantasy that they're part of an existential struggle between liberty and oppression, and that they alone have gnostic knowledge of the coming end of the world. That's heady stuff, and it's one of the reasons it's so difficult to fight against the militia mindset. It's not just a political point of view; it's the foundation stone of their identity and their lives' meaning.

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    1. Julia, that makes so much sense to me. Goes along with the saying: the villain is the hero of his own story.

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    2. Eloquently said, Julia! Just one thing ... my earlier novel Breaking and Entering is the one that's about the militias. The new one is more about the Unabomber, ecoterrorism, domestic terrorists who might be acting out of rage at women ...

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    3. I totally agree with you, Julia. People who are suffering a disconnect from society need to feel their lives are important and matter.

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  7. It's a scary and relevant question. A couple years ago, a student went on a stabbing spree at a local high school. "He's just a quiet kid," was what everyone said, but in hindsight the signs were there. Are we so eager not to "stereotype" people that we overlook these signs, or are the signs so subtle that you don't see them until it's against a backdrop of violence? I really do not know.

    A college friend of mine knew Tim McVeigh as a teenager, her uncle was the priest at his church. She had no idea of what he'd turn out to be.

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  8. Thanks, Liz. I'm so sorry about the students who were hurt at your local high school ... But I'm not as concerned with trying to figure out who is the one kid who might snap and start to kill people as I am concerned with getting us all to recognize how many of our young people are lonely, confused, and in pain. Instead of devoting all our brain power to inventing the next gadget or teaching all our kids to code, we might devote more time and care to teaching them how to live. Most of my students are under intense pressure to succeed academically and get great jobs and earn a lot of money, as if that will assure them happy lives. Few of them are religious, few of them have been brought up to believe that joining the military or being a mom will instantly prove their worth to society and fulfill them as men or women, all of which is fine and understandable. But what else do they have? Are we teaching them how to develop strong friendships and romantic/sexual relationships? I think some of them are finding their own meaning in fighting social injustice and trying to save the environment, which, in a perverted way, Ted Kaczysnki ended up doing. But as someone who has worked with young people for most of my life, I'm not so much concerned with finding the next Unabomber as I am concerned with helping all the young people who are suffering much the same pain and loneliness but never actually snap and kill anyone.

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  9. At the risk of going on too long, I should add that in the novel, the protagonist, Maxine, is as worried about her own son as she is about the former student who went on to become a terrorist. Her son is a terrific kid, but he has always been so upset by the world's injustices she is afraid he might have slipped over the edge as well. If a young person knows that climate change is going to result in millions of deaths and the extinction of millions of nonhuman species, if technological changes are destroying our last shreds of privacy and changing the very essence of what it means to be human, what action is too radical to wake people up? Obviously, I don't advocate violence. But where is the line? Those are also issues that I'm trying to explore in Professor of Immortality.

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    1. What looks like heroics through one lens can look like terrorism seen through another.

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    2. Exactly. I think Richard Powers is tackling that same question in The Overstory, which I just read and loved.

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  10. Margaret, we had a similar number of incidents in Houston during a recent election year. Someone kept stealing a sign from a yard. Repeatedly. The thief was a very well-heeled woman from a snooty neighborhood who disapproved of this person's candidate. A local artist jumped in with over 50 political signs of said candidate and crafted a masterful, artistic display in the victim's yard. Of course it made the local news and no more sign stealing from that yard.

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  11. As for the question of how do we identify terrorists? I don't think we can. Your neighbor or family member may hunt and fish, talk with an accent, and grump about our political leaders, but that is no indication of a terrorist-to-be. A person may serve honorably in the military, break no laws, vote in the elections, and then out of the blue, snap. No one would see it coming. A kid in high school may grouse about life, make outlandish statements, complain about having no real friends, and absolutely nothing comes of it. Someone else in the same situation snaps. I just don't know what the answer is. My gut feeling is these people are emotionally disconnected from society. How do you get them back in the fold?

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  12. I grew up down the street from a house of two boys that had an arsenal in their basement. Very religious people and yet the boys' spent their times collecting automatic weapons and building pipe bombs. At the time, school shootings weren't a thing but now, I would definitely let local law enforcement know what was going on. As far as I know, neither of them got into any trouble but their obsession with weapons was disturbing. Very timely book, Eileen. I'm looking forward to reading it.

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    1. Jenn,

      That must have been scary! Were the two boys bullied at school or were they bullies themselves?

      Diana

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  13. You're all so astute! I agree completely, Pat D. Some of the militia members I met would have given their lives to save mine. And some of my very sweetest students have piercings and tattoos on every part of their body. I do think that if someone is stockpiling weapons and building bombs, we would do well to let someone know. But do we want to live in a society where we are always keeping tabs on each other? The mutual paranoia that develops in my novel Breaking and Entering turns out to be more harmful than most of the imagined threats in the community. (BTW, that novel is based on a friends' true experiences, living in a quaint but very conservative town.) I'm just interested in why so many of those straight white young men, who have so many advantages, are so very angry and feel so alone.

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    1. Perhaps a good clue would be if the potential terrorist talks about blowing up a car/ building ? If they are members of secret hatred groups. There are hints in the names of Facebook groups that use euphremisms?

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  14. Great questions! Are there warning signs? I have seen "religious" people who spew such hatred and I think they are the devils pretending to be Christian. I was reminded of an episode on Touched by an Angel series. John Schneider played the Devil pretending to be a Christian pastor and he was encouraging everyone in church to commit heinous acts against anyone who is different.

    Diana

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  15. The Professor of Immortality sounds riveting, Eileen. It sounds like you were well aware of these matters way before those who should have been were. As well as not knowing if a terrorist lives in one's neighborhood, who knows what will be the trigger that turns someone from a dangerous thinking person to a dangerous acting terrorist.

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  16. Like all of you, I worry about who will be the next victim of a bombing or shooting. But I am even more afraid by how divided we are. That was what initially got me researching and writing Breaking and Entering. I could understand how people with such radically different views of the world could live in the same town or city or state or country and make the community or state or federal government work. I can't understand how some people can recognize the terrible threat of climate change and other people NOT believe ... and call Greta Thunberg terrible names. To me, that's an even bigger threat to our wellbeing. That's why I wrote both books, to try to understand those who see the world so differently from the way I see it. Not sure I have any answers, but maybe if we understand each other's fears ...

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  17. Eileen, I appreciate all your insightful comments today, I will read both of your books that were discussed.
    I thought about the great divide a lot and I have concluded the roots of it are racism, education or lack of it and fear.
    The previous president scared the closet racists.
    Racism is so pervasive in our American culture.
    Some of us insulated liberals thought we were making progress but it was just hidden.
    The current president uses that fear and lies to retain his base. The other side is too nice and needs to project more strength. The current President has not been held accountable for his actions and the breach is so great I fear at some point the nation will became many.
    There is a strong movement in the west to form a new nation.
    I hope it does not come to that, but the other side is using the term civil war with greater frequency!

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    1. Thanks, Susan! I agree that liberals who live on either coast often get a skewed impression of the realities of their fellow citizens' lives.

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  18. It would help if counseling and therapy were viewed as positively as physical therapy is. Everyone could probably benefit from talking to a professional mental therapist.

    I also worry that we might over react to terrorists. Years ago, police came to the neighbor's house since a woman had a gun. Everything was OK but some places, there were shoot-outs that hurt innocent people and damaged property.

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  19. Did anyone see the Spanish movie Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown? A character had a boyfriend who was a terrorist.

    Diana

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  20. Thanks for your interest in my books and for your thoughtful comments. Best of luck on your own writing. Happy reading!

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