Idiot America by Charles P. Pierce

Author:Charles P. Pierce
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2009-06-02T04:00:00+00:00

IN Derby Line in Vermont, they put their public library on the ground floor of the old opera house, cleanly melding public information and public entertainment. Curiously, though, down the middle of the library runs the border between the United States and Canada, indicated by a black line running across the library floor. (The line was drawn in the 1970s, after a fire, in order to demarcate the respective responsibilities of American and Canadian insurance companies.) If you want to borrow a book, you go to the stacks in Stanstead, Quebec, to find it, and then back to Derby Line, Vermont, to check it out.

For decades, it was a point of civic pride for the people in both towns that they lived right atop one of the friendliest stretches of one of the friendliest borders in the world. People wandered down the tiny, shady backstreets of the place, passing back and forth between the two countries without ever really noticing. By 2007, though, the Gut had come to rule in the United States. Borders were now dangerous places, shadowy and perilously permeable at any moment by international terrorists or illegal immigrant gardeners, or both. “They’re proud of their history,” an official of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police told the New York Times. “But because of what happened on September 11, 2001, we cannot do nothing. We have to react when there’s a threat.” The border authorities in both countries moved quickly to restrict access along the side streets in Stanstead and Derby Line. As part of the plan, it was proposed that anyone parking a car outside the library on the Canadian side might well have to pass through a port of entry before walking up the front steps, which are on the American side.

Of course, all of this brought the media, which fit Derby Line and Stanstead into the ongoing market-tested, focus-group national narrative of terror, adorned with ominous logos, laden with dark brooding music, and pitched for six years by relentless anchorpeople wearing their looks of geopolitical concern and their flag pins. “It was okay,” says Mary Roy, a librarian in Derby Line, of the town’s sudden celebrity. “But it was sort of like, ‘Can’t you guys get together and get it once, because you’re all asking the same questions?’

“That one night we were on the seven o’clock news, NBC there, Brian Williams and, probably at seven fifteen, we got a telephone call from a gentleman calling from Pennsylvania, totally irate that the government was going to not be strong on [border security in the library], and what could he do. Wasn’t there a blog, or a citizen’s advocacy group he could join. This was the most ridiculous thing he’d ever heard.”

It has not been an easy decade for libraries. A national network of libraries had been operated for decades by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency; the Bush administration closed it, destroying a number of documents in the process. The USA Patriot Act, passed in the immediate aftermath

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