Well, my memory is, one of the reasons for setting the book in the future
was that ...
I'm now 40, so I was born in the early 60s.
and to an extent,
I think my generation tends to think of itself as as children still
and as people with parents
and I remember wanting to do
something about what would be
the situation of our children.
Kind of in the next generation.
Interviewer: And this child like thing
also has something.
There's one story
in "Interviews with Hideous Men",
where the oppressed person
is always talking about
the woman and the child.
Is that something that belongs together?
Or is this ...
Language like that,
the wounded inner child,
the inner pain is part of
a kind of pop psychological movement
in the United States that is a sort of
popular Freudianism that has its own paradox
which is that the more we are taught
to list and resent the things of which
we were deprived as children,
the more we live in that anger and frustration
and the more we remain children.
That's a very simple way of putting it,
but I think the character in that story
is sort of a compendium of
kind of all the worst and most painful features
of the popular psychology movement in the U.S.
And I don't know whether there's any analog to that
in Western Europe or not.
Interviewer: I think there is, actually.
To the extent that I understand it,
being what you call "grown-up"
isn't a lot of fun a lot of the time.
There are things you have to do.
There are things you want to do, that you can't do for a variety of reasons.
I think, for young people in America
there are very mixed messages from the culture.
There's a streak of moralism in American life
that extols the virtues
of being grown up and having a family and being a responsible citizen,
but there's also the sense of
do what you want, gratify your appetites,
because when I'm a corporation,
appealing to the parts of you that are selfish and self-centered
and want to have fun all the time is the best way to sell you things. Right?
Once reduced to talking about general terms,
like being grown-up
or a term that's rarely used here anymore.
And see, now I feel embarrassment,
because I'm going to sound like my grandfather or something.
But the word, "citizen," the idea of being a citizen,
it would be to understand your country's history
and the things about it that are good and not so good and how the system works
and taking the trouble to learn about candidates for political office,
which means often reading stuff which isn't fun.
Sometimes it's boring.
But when people don't do that, here's what happens:
the candidates win who have the most money to buy television advertisements,
because television advertisements are all most voters know about the candidates,
therefore we get candidates who are beholden to large donors,
and become, in some ways, corrupt, which disgusts the voters
and makes the voters even less interested in politics,
less willing to read and do the work of citizenship.
When I was a little boy,
there was a class called "citizenship".
Here are certain things about America and America's history.
Here's why it's important to vote.
Here's why it's important not to just go in and vote
for who the best looking candidate is.
Here's what's really interesting, and I don't know if you can translate this.
Talking about this now, I feel ashamed,
because my saying all this sounds to me like an older person saying this,
like a person lecturing, which in American culture sets me up to be ridiculed.
It would be very easy to make fun of what I'm saying.
It would be very easy to make fun of what I'm saying
and I can hear in my head a voice making fun of this stuff as I'm saying it.
And this is the kind of paradox, I think,
of what it is to be a halfway intelligent American right now
and probably also a Western European.
There are things we know are right and good
and would be better for us to do, but constantly it's like,
yeah, but you know it's so much funnier and nicer to go do something else.
And who cares?
And it's all bullshit anyway.
Sorry.
And, for me, personally, I don't know that it's really ever been all that different.
I think probably American education used to be a little bit better
and a little bit more difficult
and children had no choice but to realize that there were certain things
that were hard and involved a certain amount of drudgery
that were actually very satisfying at the end of it,
but for the most part I think in the U.S., people who have been doing
"serious stuff" which is harder and stranger,
have always played to a much smaller audience.
There's a difference though, I think, between being mildly bored
but then there's another kind of boredom that I think you're talking about.
Reading requires sitting alone by yourself in a quiet room
and I have friends, intelligent friends, who don't like to read,
because they get - it's not just bored - there's an almost dread
that comes up, I think, here about having to be alone
and having to be quiet.
And you see that when you walk into most public spaces in America.
It isn't quiet anymore. They pipe music through.
And the music is easy to make fun of,
because it's usually horrible music,
but it seems significant that we don't want things to be quiet ever anymore.
And to me, I don't know that I could defend it,
but that seems to me to have something to do with
when you feel like the purpose of your life is to gratify yourself
and get things for yourself and go all the time,
there's this other part of you
that's the same part that is almost hungry for silence and quiet
and thinking really hard about the same thing for maybe half an hour
instead of thirty seconds
that doesn't get fed at all.
It makes itself felt in the body and a kind of dread in here.
I don't know whether that makes a lot of sense,
but I think it's true that here in the U.S.,
every year the culture gets more and more hostile.
I don't mean hostile like angry.
It becomes more and more difficult to ask people to read
or to look at a piece of art for an hour
or to listen to a piece of music that's complicated
and that takes work to understand,
because - well, there are a lot of reasons - but because,
particularly now in computer and internet culture,
everything is so fast.
And the faster things go, the more we feed that part of ourselves,
but don't feed the part of ourselves that likes ... that likes quiet.
That can live in quiet.
That can live without any kind of stimulation.
It's an American idiom, "Going to hell in a handbasket".
Well, particularly if you have a remote control.
See, when that happens, you go to a different channel
and if you don't like that channel, you go to a different channel.
And one of the reasons I can't own a TV
is I've started having this thing where I become convinced
there's something really good on another channel and that I'm missing it.
And so instead of watching,
I'm scanning anxiously back and forth for this thing
that I think I want, that I don't even know what it is.
And so, I don't know whether German ...
Well, this is probably not a good thing to say on television,
but I don't know whether a similar thing happens in Germany,
but it's very stressful now.
And what it is, is too much good stuff
combined with my sick little head
that thinks there's always something a little better on the next ...
And all you have to do.
You don't have to get up now to change it.
That was the problem, when it became easy.
You just had to move your thumb and change it.
That's when we were screwed.
Interviewer:So do you think it's ...
Ninety-percent of this is going to be cut out, right?
Interviewer: Yeah, sure.
Yes? Okay.
[Awkward interviewer laughter]
Interviewer: I mean, not because I like it,
When I was younger, I used to ...
There's a way in which we in America are very comfortable.
And I used to think that some of the political and social answers
that I thought should be ...
Some of the political and social corrections that I thought should be brought about
would happen when there was some sort of cataclysm
or misfortune, where we weren't as comfortable any more.
The fact that ...
that we now have clear evidence that the way we live
and the relationships we have with various other countries
are causing some people to hate us so much that they want to kill us,
and may succeed in killing a great many of us,
frightens me only because ...
When I was growing up,
one of the mythological periods for us growing up is the Great Depression.
Weimar era.
Where the story goes, everyone pulled together.
There were hard times, and no one had enough,
but everyone pulled together.
It seems to me now,
that the country's reaction to feeling frightened and insecure
is to buy Sports Utility Vehicles that are large and massive and tank-like
and make individual people feel safer,
but also get four miles-to-the-gallon
in a country where gasoline is probably one-fifth as expensive as it ought to be.
There's a sanity in Europe about gasoline prices and fuel consumption
that there isn't here yet.
And yet, are voting for people who are deciding to go over
and very possibly kill hundreds of thousands of civilians
in order to kill a few enemies.
None of which is important,
but the fact that no one here is talking about the connection between
how we live and what we drive
and the things that are happening.
The speed with which it's become,
those bad people, those bad fanatics, they're evil,
what they really hate is our freedom and our way of life,
which is just hard to swallow, right? Who hates freedom?
People hate people, not freedom.
I now don't know what's going to happen.
And I am, as an American, as scared ...
Not since I was a little boy and I worried about the U.S. and the Soviet Union
having an intercontinental -
Not since that, have I been this scared.
And this is totally personally, but I'm more scared of us
than I am of anybody else.
That's a bleak place to be.
I'm not sure how I feel about ...
Well, you're going to use it if you want.
I don't think this is an evil country.
I don't think American people are evil.
I think we've had it very ...
I think we've had it very easy, materially, for a long time,
and we've gotten very little help in understanding
things that are important besides being comfortable.
I don't think anybody knows how we will react if things get really hard here.
The fact that we're strong militarily and economically is a good thing,
but it's also a frightening thing.
To some of us, as Americans.
Luckily, not a lot of Americans will see this in Germany.
Interviewer: Are there any means of rebellion?
Sure.
Interviewer: So, what would it be?
Well, there are people doing it all over the place.
I don't know about people rappelling down buildings and getting tear gassed and stuff.
The people I know who are rebelling meaningfully
don't buy a lot of stuff.
And don't get their view of the world from television.
And are willing to spend four or five hours researching an election
rather than going by commercials.
The thing about it is that
in America, we think of rebellion as this very sexy thing
and it involves action and force and looks good.
My guess is the forms of rebellion that will end up changing anything meaningfully here
will be very quiet and very individual.
And probably not all that interesting to look at from the outside.
I'm now hoping for less interesting, rather than more interesting.
Violence is interesting
and horrible corruption and scandals
and rattling sabers and talking about war
and demonizing a billion people of a different faith in the world.
Those are all interesting.
Sitting in a chair and really thinking about what this means
and why the fact that what I drive might have something to do with
how people in other parts of the world feel about me
isn't interesting to anybody else.
That was very close to the truth, but I don't think it's going to make much sense.
And plus, it's a little silly. I'm a writer.
I'm not a politician or a political thinker or whatever.
Just a scared little American.
Living in California.
Interviewer: Just one more question.