Now imagine that someone starts moving those fences closer together.
How you react—whether you even notice—depends entirely on how much you wandered beforehand. A lot of people never deviate from the center of the path their whole lives, wouldn’t deviate even if there were no fences. They’re the ones who can never understand what all those fringe radicals are whining about; after all, their lives haven’t changed any. It makes no difference to them whether the fences are right on the shoulder or out past the horizon.
For the rest of us, though, it’s only a matter of time before you wander back to a point you’ve always been free to visit in the past, only to find a fence suddenly blocking your way.
When that happens, you might be surprised at how close those things have crept when you weren’t looking. I know I was. I’m not what you’d call a hardened criminal. I’ve found myself in the little white room at US Customs somewhat more often than might be expected from a “random” selection process, but I suspect that’s just because your average customs agent doesn’t quite know what to make of the self-employed (“Biostatistical consultant and writer? What the hell is that supposed to be?”)[4] I may have once been guilty of associating with tewwowists, back when my dad was still alive—a retired preacher and the General Secretary of the Baptist Convention of Ontario and Quebec, I’m told he earned a CSIS[5] file for his efforts on behalf of unpatriotic groups like Amnesty International—but none of Obama’s flying terminators were likely to get all twinkly-eyed when they ran me through facial recognition.
Which is not to say that I was intellectually unaware of the ongoing erosion of civil rights on this continent. Only that, as a well-educated white dude with a relatively sheltered life, my awareness was more academic than visceral, more second- than first-hand. So while returning to Toronto with a friend after a trip to Nebraska, I expected to be stopped at the Canadian border, by Canadian Customs. I expected that if they decided to search the vehicle, they’d inform me first, and ask me to pop the trunk.[6]
And when none of this happened—when I was pulled over by US border guards two kilometres from the Canadian border, and looked over my shoulder to find eager guards already going through our luggage like a swarm of army ants—I expected no real trouble when I got out of the car to ask what was going on.
I imagine a number of readers rolling their eyes at this point. Well, of course. You never get out of a vehicle unless ordered. You never make eye contact. You never ask questions; if you do, you deserve what you get. I have nothing to say to these people. To the rest of you I say: see what we’ve come to. We have criminalized the expectation of reasonable communication with those who are supposed to protect us. And people approve.
(One of the things we tend to forget about Ray Bradbury’s classic Fahrenheit 451 is that the banning of books was not imposed against the will of the people by some tyrannical authority. The grass roots in that dystopian novel didn’t want to read.)
I learned more than I wanted to about Michigan’s legal system in the months that followed. I learned of a miraculous little statute—750.81(d) by name—which bundles everything from murder down to “failure to comply with a lawful command” into one felonious little package. It spends almost half a page defining what constitutes a “person”; nowhere does it define what makes a command “lawful.” If you happen to be crossing the border and a “person” tells you to get down on all fours and bark like a dog, you might want to keep that in mind. (Fun fact: according to US law, “the border” is actually a zone extending a hundred miles from the actual line on the map. The rights-free atmosphere one encounters at Customs—warrantless searches, detention without cause, the whole shebang—extends throughout that band. If the Border Patrol decides on a whim to kick in the door of some poor sap living in Potsdam, there’s not a lot anyone can do about it; it’s a “border search,” exempt from the usual checks and balances.)
In the end, of course, I was convicted. Not of assault, despite what you may have heard. The trial established that there was no aggression on my part, not so much as an expletive or a raised voice, despite prosecutorial allegations that I “resisted,” that I “choked an officer.”[7] What the prosecution fell back on, ultimately, was that just after I’d been repeatedly punched in the face and just before I got maced, I’d been ordered to get on the ground—and instead of immediately complying, I’d said, “What is the problem?” It didn’t matter that I had been punched in the face, or that the guards themselves had lied under oath. (The jury threw out their testimony wholesale because—as one of them stated on the record—“they couldn’t keep their stories straight.”) It didn’t matter that DHS itself, called up from Detroit in hopes of boosting the charges (my arrest sheet originally accused me of “Assaulting a Federal Officer”) refused to participate in the case once they’d interviewed those involved. It didn’t even matter that jury members publicly opined that the guards should have been the ones on trial. 750.81(d) forced them to convict regardless.
It’s important to note that what happened to me was not an abuse of the law. The law functioned exactly as it was supposed to; it gave carte blanche to authority, while criminalizing any act—even asking a question—short of immediate and unthinking compliance. We live in a society where laws are designed to protect not the populace, but the right to abuse the populace under almost any circumstance.
I’m focusing on the US here because that’s where I encountered my own personal fence; it’s also where most of you happen to live. But lest you think I’m just another smug Canuck taking a fashionable dump on the Ugly American, let me emphasize that I hold my own country in no greater esteem. The Canadian government routinely muzzles its own scientists and is currently busy dismantling even the rudimentary environmental protections with which we once made do. My home town of Toronto was the site of Canada’s largest violations of civil rights, during the G20 protests in 2010: over a thousand people arrested and detained, the vast majority of them without charge.[8] Hundreds kettled for hours in a freezing downpour: ordered to leave, prevented from leaving, arrested for noncompliance. Preemptive gunpoint roustings in private bedrooms, 4 a.m. arrests on the chance that some activist might otherwise commit a crime later in the day. And what kind of party would it have been without the traditional beating of unarmed, unresisting protestors by officers with obscured badge numbers, who then leveled charges of “assaulting police” on their victims? Thank the gods for cell-phone cameras. Thank the gods for YouTube.
Should you be tempted to suggest that North America—with all its authoritarian abuses—is still a paragon of liberty next to the likes of Iran or communist China or North Korea, I will not argue the point. In fact, I will emphasize it. From the saturation surveillance of central London to the Toronto PD arresting people for failure to obey search-and-seizure laws that don’t actually exist, the systemic abuse of civil rights seems to be a feature of freedom-loving democracies everywhere. This, apparently, is the best we can do.
I’m still quite a cheerful guy in person. Apparently people are surprised by this.
Especially now.
I’ve been asked if recent experience has altered my worldview, if my tango with the US justice system might birth even darker visions to come. I don’t think so. After all, it’s not as if I was unaware of this stuff before it happened to me; one or two journalists have even highlighted parallels between my real-life experiences and the things I’ve inflicted on fictional protagonists, as though my imaginings of police brutality were somehow prescient because they happened to occur in the future.
If anything, though, my perspective has brightened. I came out of it relatively unscathed, after all; I was convicted, but despite the prosecution’s best efforts I didn’t go to jail. I’m not welcome back in the US any time soon—maybe not ever—but at this point that’s more of a badge of honor than a professional impediment.
In a very real way, I won.
Most would not have. Most people, up against an enemy bureaucracy with deep pockets and only the most token accountability, would have been swallowed whole. There would have been surrender regardless of guilt; desperate plea-bargains to avoid crippling court costs. If the accused did somehow summon the audacity to fight back there would have been a lopsided battle and captivity and years of debt. Michigan bills you for your time behind bars: thirty bucks a day, as if you were staying at a fucking Motel 6, as though you’d chosen to bunk up for the room service and free cable. The longer you’re incarcerated, the higher the bill they shove in your face when you get out.
I’ve stopped getting those little yellow cards in the mail. Maybe they gave up, maybe they lost track of me when I moved, maybe the fact that I’m on the far side of an international boundary makes me not worth going after for the price of one measly night in the clink.[9] Those poor bastards I shared beans and Kool-Aid with, though: no protective borders, no sanctuary, no breaks for them. A year in jail and they walk out ten thousand dollars in debt. And even they have it pretty damn easy next to a family friend whose activist husband was disappeared in Latin America, who was gang-raped and gave birth in jail. Conversations with such folk leave you a bit less inclined to whinge about the injustice of Michigan’s legal leg-hold traps.
I had so much help. Half the internet woke up on my behalf. Thanks to Dave Nickle and Cory Doctorow and Patrick Nielson Hayden and John Scalzi—thanks to all the myriad folk who boosted the signal and chipped in to my defense fund[10]—I walked away no poorer than when it all began. I walked away heartened: look at all those friends I didn’t know I had. See how obviously corrupt the authorities were shown to be in the court of public opinion. See what outrage and anger can accomplish, when the rocks are kicked over and their undersides exposed to the light (Port Huron now posts signs warning travelers of upcoming exit searches; that’s something, at least). So many reasons for a white middle-class guy with influential friends to have hope.
And a lot of folks in this privileged demographic do seem to have hope. I once attended an event in which Cory Doctorow and China Miéville chatted about the inherent goodness of humanity, about their shared belief that the vast majority of people are decent and honorable. Another time I was the one on stage, debating Minister Faust on the subject of whether science fiction could be “a happy place,” and the same sentiment resurfaced: Minister attested that the vast majority of people he’d encountered were good folks. The problems we face as a species, he said—the intolerance, the short-sighted greed, the accelerating threats of climate change and strip-mined ecosystems and floating islands of immortal plastic garbage the size of the fucking Sargasso—are thanks to those few despots and sociopaths who sit atop the world’s power structures, shitting on the world for their own profit.
I concede the point, to some extent at least; even in the depths of the system arrayed against me, bright spots ignited where I least expected them. That one border guard who refused to fall in line with her fellows, who testified that she didn’t see me committing the acts of which I stood accused. The jurors who, having voted to convict, spoke out publicly on my behalf (one of them stood at my side during sentencing, in a show of support that netted her an extended ordeal of police harassment and home invasion). A judge who set me free with a small fine, admitting that I was the kind of guy he’d like to sit down and have a beer with.
Reasons to hope. The anger remains, though, even if all those other folks are right about the goodness of grassroots humanity. Especially if they’re right; because what do you call a world of decent folks ground beneath the boot-heels of despots and sociopaths if not dystopia? You can trot out your folksy tales of good hearts and personal redemption, your small hopeful candles flickering down at street level; I can’t help noticing the darkness pressing down from overhead, the global dysfunction that throws the world on its side despite the angels of our better natures. I don’t even entirely believe in those angels, not really, not even down here in the happy realm of the little people. Zimbardo and Milgram didn’t create thugs and torturers with their infamous experiments; they merely uncovered them. And it’s not just psychos and sickos who level the forests and flush their shit into the ocean and fire up their dinosaur-burning SUVs for a two-block drive to the local Target. Those plastic islands in the Pacific have grass roots all over them.
Down in the basement, my anger never goes away; and that’s informative in a way you might not expect, because I don’t believe true misanthropes generally feel that way. Bitter, sure. Cynical, deeply. But angry?
You may not think much of tapeworms, but you don’t generally get mad at them. You might wipe cancer off the face of the earth if you could, but not because the thought of cancer leaves you spluttering with rage. You don’t blame something for doing what it does, what it’s always done, what you expect it to do.
You only get mad if you expected better.
Apparently my writing spells misanthrope to a fair number of readers. It’s my anger, I think, that puts the lie to that label. It winds through so much of my fiction: in the collapsing civilization of the Rifters trilogy, in the Island’s betrayal of Sunday’s faith, in an anonymous ambassador’s paradigm-shifting realization that back-stabbing is just the way we do things out here. You wouldn’t find it in the work of a true misanthrope; such a person would just wrinkle his nose, shrug, turn away with contemptuous indifference. Well, of course. What did you expect?
It’s why I can’t pull off convincing villains. It’s why I got out of that car back in 2009 even though everyone knows the rules, even though we’ve all heard the stories: Don’t fuck with those assholes at the border, don’t even make eye contact with them. You should hear what happened to me last year…
It’s because down in my gut, I still can’t quite believe that villains do exist. No matter what I’ve read and heard, I just can’t believe that you could get shit-kicked for asking a simple, reasonable question.
Most of the time, of course, I’m dead wrong. And so I get angry, because I expected better. I still expect better, even now. And in what might be charitably characterized as an ongoing act of noblest stupidity, I continue to act as if people were better, in worlds both fictional and real.
You know what that makes me, by definition?
An optimist.
4
3 In more recent years—back before I was banned outright from entering your fine country—I just decided to have fun with it and list “masturbation” as one of my Professional Activities. In such cases it’s generally a good idea to show up at least four hours before departure.
5
4 Canada’s equivalent of the CIA, albeit with an annual budget of about $43.26. Known primarily for pulling into traffic after forgetting the briefcase full of national secrets they’d just parked on the roof of their shiny black sedan while unlocking the driver’s door.
6
5 Yes, this is the official protocol. It was confirmed on the record by a spokesperson for US Customs who was being interviewed about this very case.
7
6 To this day I remain puzzled as to why they’d even make those allegations in the first place; they must have known that my passenger saw the whole thing, and would call bullshit. Which is exactly what happened.
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8 From the Dept. of Small Worlds: there were books in my cell. Most had been picked over for use as pillows (which aren’t allowed in the St. Clair County Jail), but amongst the remaining dregs—