Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs by Kerry Howley

Author:Kerry Howley [Howley, Kerry]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2023-03-21T00:00:00+00:00

THE TIME FOR PARDONS

I have never felt safer than I felt as a twenty-one-year-old in Myanmar. I mean this sincerely, well aware of the privilege it entails. As a person not particularly subject to tyranny in a tyrannical state, I was a potential problem. Thus, I was always watched. I could walk streets alone, late at night, and never worry; I feared for the lives of many people, but questions of my own safety literally never came to mind. I remember distinctly coming back to D.C., twenty-two years old, walking down Sixteenth Street at 4:00 a.m., and as a car slowed and a man stared, realizing that the protective gaze was gone.

The gaze of the state was a comfort because the consequences appeared clear and unthreatening; if I crossed a boundary, I would simply be put on a plane and sent home. I would not feel a moment’s fear in Myanmar, until years later, when I flew back to Yangon, and as I made my way through passport control a half dozen airport personnel pulled me away and encircled me and shouted at one another in words I could not make out, and suddenly I did not understand the rules. I had published something critical of the government in a Saturday edition of the Los Angeles Times, I recalled as I waited for whatever was coming my way, but I wasn’t sure anyone read the Saturday edition of the Los Angeles Times, least of all the Myanmar junta. In later years the young publisher of our newspaper would be locked up for a full eight years under charges related to censorship, and a journalist from Michigan would be sent to Myanmar’s Insein prison under false pretenses. My sense of security all those years ago had never been warranted, the rules had never been clear, though I am glad to have been unaware of dangers that did not materialize. I was put on a golf cart and driven to a nearly full plane that had evidently not been allowed to leave until I was definitively denied entrance.

In 2008, while Joseph Biggs was still in Afghanistan, a reporter from GQ had embedded with his unit. Michael Hastings wrote about whistleblowers and deep-state operatives; his reporting would later lead to the resignation of General Stanley McChrystal from his post as commander in Afghanistan. Biggs, he of the “hard dick” who wanted to “fucking fight,” was skeptical of soft reporters, but Hastings appeared to be fearless, and the two became friends. Five years later, when Biggs was unemployed back in the States, Hastings wrote an email to his colleagues at BuzzFeed, and also to Biggs, that read, “The Feds are interviewing my ‘close friends and associates.’ ” He was “onto a big story.” He would go “off the rada[r] for a bit.” On the next day, speeding in a Mercedes through Hollywood, the car hit a palm tree and burst into flames. Hastings was dead.

Biggs did not think it was an accident. He had screamed

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