Free American Subversive by David Goodwillie Page A

the lights of Manhattan as we drank from bottles of wine we’d smuggled out at closing time. And that’s where I found her that Tuesday morning, up there with dozens of others, staring out across the East River at a scene we’d never fathomed. A few people were taking pictures, but there wasn’t much talking. That would come later, and last for months. At some point the wind stiffened, and with it came that awful burning smell. Most everyone went back downstairs, but some of us stayed. We stayed and watched the towers fall. We stayed and watched streams of men and women course across the Brooklyn Bridge. We stayed and picked through flying papers—business cards, tax forms, résumés—shreds of people’s lives, former lives. No longer strangers, we stayed on the roof and held each other, wondering how the world would change.
    We all remember what happened next, the days of mourning, not only for the lost, but for our newly vulnerable selves. As the rest of America found solace in blind patriotism, we New Yorkers, momentarily sincere, gazed inward. It was time to revisit the past—old girlfriends, shelved plans. For me that meant journalism. The world, through loss, had suddenly become a fascinating place, acerbically intriguing, almost open-ended. Who wouldn’t want to play a role in the remodeling? That winter, I applied to Columbia and NYU. Uptown and down, I could have gone either way, but only NYU said yes. I took out a student loan (my father had retired from financing my education), picked up more shifts at the bar, and spent the months before grad school lost in a haze of hipster nights.
    At NYU, I enrolled in classes with glamorous-sounding names—International Reporting, Politics and the Press, Investigative Techniques. It should have been a thrilling time. On the far side of the globe, reporters were camping out with rebels and embedding themselves in Humvees. The present—right then!—was teeming withjournalistic opportunities, but the lectures and textbooks watered down any sense of adventure. Other people’s stories, other people’s wars. Terrorists, generals, presidents: they all blurred together in an endless time line of privileged impropriety. And the reporters, they were just middlemen, information runners, bending the news to their personal beliefs. I don’t know, I just wasn’t getting the bug. These, remember, were the days leading up to Iraq, and at NYU—and everywhere else in New York—you were either against the war or you were an idiot. There was never room for debate, and that bothered me. It’s not that I was a Republican. Far from it. The GOP, with its religious posturing and bullshit moral high-ground, was dangerously out of touch. At least they stood for something, though. The Democrats lived for polls. They ran scared, and voted that way, too.
    Was I disillusioned with the system or just lazy? Sitting in the back of class one day, I listened to a former UN diplomat compare Guantánamo to the Gulag, and I realized I was a million miles from either place, from decisions that mattered, events of consequence. I’d grown up with parents who’d once believed change was possible, if only in increments, small measures and token gestures. But the increments never added up. The sixties drifted further into the past, its idealism became the material of memoir—
this is what we did before we grew up
. My father gave in. My mother became irrelevant. What was the lesson in all this? That you couldn’t shape the world in your image. And it was a waste of time to try. Life would roll along as scheduled, and all a journalist could do was shine a weak light on the passing trains. I guess my problem—or as I saw it then, my saving grace—was that I didn’t think American life in 2003 was so bad. Just look at us, I thought. We were still the most profitable nation in the world, our major cities thriving, our