War didn't come up much. On television it showed up in MASH. We once had a guest visit us from out-of-town who wanted especially to visit the Naval Academy at Annapolis. So, we took him, and he loved it. The day was sunny. The sailboats were out. The mast of the U.S.S. Maine stood proudly as a monument to war propaganda, though I had no idea what it was. I just knew that I was visiting a beautiful, happy place where great resources were put into training people to engage in mass-murder. I became physically ill and had to lie down.
What had the biggest impact, I think, on my view of foreign policy, was going somewhere foreign. I had a Latin teacher named Mrs. Sleeper who was about 180 years old and could teach Latin to a horse. Her class was full of shouting and laughing, signals from her like kicking the trashcan if we forgot the accusative case, and warnings that "tempus is fugitting!" She took a group of us to Italy for some weeks junior year. We each stayed with an Italian student and their family and attended Italian high school. Living briefly in another place and another language, and looking back on your own place from the outside ought to be part of every education. Nothing is more valuable, I think. Student exchange programs merit all the support we can find them.
My wife and I have two sons, one almost 12, one almost 4. The little one has invented an imaginary machine that he calls a nexter. You pick it up, push some buttons, and it tells you what you should do next. It's seriously helpful throughout the day. Perhaps I should have had a nexter to use when I graduated from high school. I really had no idea what to do next. So, I went back to Italy for a full school year as an exchange student through the Rotary Club. Again, the experience was invaluable. I made Italian friends I still have, and I've been back a number of times. I also made friends with an American stationed there in the military at a base whose expansion I've been back to protest years later. I'd skip school, and he'd skip whatever soldiers do in a peaceful Renaissance city, and we'd go skiing in the Alps. One Italian friend, whom I've not seen since, was at that time studying architecture in Venice, and I'd tag along for that too. When I got back to the U.S. I applied to and began attending architecture school.
By that time (1988) most of my friends were off at second-rate colleges studying the effects of high-consumption of alcohol. Some had already bailed out on college. Some who'd gotten great grades through high school were seriously studying. One was hoping to get into the military. None had been attracted by the peace movement's billion-dollar recruitment campaign which didn't exist.
I did a year of architecture school in Charlotte, North Carolina, and a year-and-a-half I think at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York. The former was by far the better school. The latter was in by far the more interesting location. But my interest went to reading, as it never had before. I read literature, philosophy, poetry, history. I neglected engineering in favor of ethics, which was unlikely to make any buildings stand up for long. I dropped out, moved to Manhattan, and taught myself what I took to be a liberal arts education sans tuition, supported by my parents. The First Gulf War happened at this time, and I joined in protests outside the United Nations without giving the matter much thought. That just seemed the decent, civilized thing to do. I had no notion of what one might do beyond that. After a while I moved to Alexandria, Virginia. And when I'd run out of ideas, I did again what I'd done before: I went to Italy.
First I went back to New York City and took a month-long course on teaching English as a second language to adults. I got a certificate in that from Cambridge University, which I've never been to in my life. It was a very enjoyable month spent with would-be teachers and English students from around the world. Before long I was in Rome knocking on the doors of English language schools. This was before the EU. To get a job, I didn't have to be able to do anything a European couldn't do. I didn't have to have a visa to legally be there, not with white skin and a pre-war-on-terra U.S. passport. I just had to do an interview without seeming too shy or nervous. That took me a few tries.
Eventually, I found that I could share an apartment with roommates, work half-time or less, and devote myself to reading in and writing in English and Italian. What eventually sent me back home, back to Reston, was not, I think, a need to get onto something serious so much as a need to not be a foreigner. Much as I loved and still love Europe, much as I loved and love Italians, as long a list as I could make of things I believe are done better there than here, as much progress as I made toward speaking without an accent, and as huge an advantage as I had over my friends from Ethiopia and Eritrea who were randomly harassed by police, I was forever at a disadvantage in Italy.
This gave me some insight into the lives of immigrants and refugees, just as exchange students at my high school (and my being an exchange student abroad) had done. Being treated like a 13-year-old when I was 18, and a 15-year-old when I was 20, just because I looked like that, gave me some slight notion of discrimination. Being resented by some African Americans in Brooklyn whom I believed I'd never done anything cruel to helped as well. The piles of novels and plays I read, however, were the primary means of opening my eyes to many things, including the vast majority of people on earth who'd gotten a worse deal than I had.
It must have been at least late 1993 when I was back in Virginia. My parents wanted a place in the country to build a house and move to. Utopia had turned to sprawl. Reston had become a mass of weapons makers, computer companies, and high-end condominiums, with the Metro train set to be built out to there any moment, just as they'd been saying for two decades. I proposed the area of Charlottesville. I wanted to study philosophy with Richard Rorty who was teaching at the University of Virginia. My parents bought land near there. I rented a house nearby. They paid me to cut down trees, build fences, move dirt, etc., and I signed up for a class at UVa through the school of continuing education.
I had no Bachelor's degree, but I got professors' approval to take graduate school classes in philosophy. Once I'd taken enough, I got their approval to write a thesis and pick up a Master's degree in philosophy. I found much of the course work quite stimulating. It was the first school experience at least in many years I'd found to be so stimulating, and non-insulting. I simply adored the UVa Honor Code, which trusted you not to cheat. But I also found a lot of the stuff we studied to be sheer metaphysical bunk. Even ethics courses that sought to be useful, did not always seem aimed at determining the best thing to do so much as determining the best way to talk about, or even to rationalize, what people were already doing. I wrote my thesis on ethical theories of criminal punishment, rejecting most of them as unethical.
Once I'd done the Master's degree, and Rorty had transferred elsewhere, and nothing interested me more, I proposed to move to the building next door and do a PhD in the English Department. Sadly, that department let me know that first I'd need a Master's in English, which there was no way to get without picking up a Bachelor's first.
Goodbye, formal education. It was nice knowing you.
While I'd studied at UVa I'd worked in the library and at local stores and restaurants. Now I looked for more fulltime work and settled on newspaper reporting. It paid terribly, and I discovered that I was allergic to editors, but it was a way into some kind of career in putting words on paper. Before I recount that career, I should mention two other developments in this period: activism and love.
At UVa I took part in a debating club, which made me comfortable with public speaking. I also took part in a campaign to get the people working at UVa cooking food and emptying trashcans paid a living wage. This got me involved with living wage activists around the country, including those working for a national group called ACORN, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now. I didn't start the living wage campaign at UVa. I just heard about it, and immediately joined in. Had there been some sort of campaign to end war, I would no doubt have jumped into that as well, but there wasn't.
Also during this time, I was falsely accused of a crime. Because I had my parents' help in finding lawyers and experts and other resources, I was able to minimize the damage. The primary result, I think, for me was a greater awareness of the incredible injustices experienced by a great many people as a result of deeply flawed systems of criminal punishment. Certainly the experience influenced my choice of articles to pursue as a newspaper reporter, where I came to focus on miscarriages of justice. Another possible result may have been some contribution to my turn away from autobiography. You can't mention a false accusation of a crime without people believing you really did it. The most painful experiences in my life have always been the experience of not being believed. You also can't mention a false accusation of a crime without people believing that you're taking some sort of cartoonishly simple position that all such accusations are always false against everyone. Why get into such stupidity? And if you can't mention something important to your story, you certainly can't write an autobiography.
I said something about love, didn't I? While I'd always been shy with girls, I'd managed to have some short-term and long-term girlfriends during and since high school. While I was at UVa I learned about the internet, as research tool, as discussion forum, as publishing platform, as activism tool, and as dating site. I met several women online and then offline. One of them, Anna, lived in North Carolina. She was great to talk to online and on the phone. She was reluctant to meet in person, until the day in 1997 that she phoned me late at night to say she'd driven to Charlottesville and been calling me all evening. We stayed up all night and drove up to the mountains in the morning. We then started driving four hours, one of us or the other, each weekend. She eventually moved in. In 1999 we got married. Best thing I've done so far.
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