CK: A lot gets lost, or else mediated, through the filter of time. Original documents, what people wrote at the time, give incredible access to what it might have been like to live through eras different than our own. And of course now the culture is so overloaded that a half-decade is already historical time.

 

The inconsistencies in everyone’s behavior and thoughts were something I tried to recall and convey. Illogic being its own kind of logic. Why would we expect anyone, let alone people who are intermittently homeless, to be consistent? By writing about Paul Garcia’s experience from his point of view, I was trying to access the psychic atmosphere of underclass life. The few representations of underclass characters in contemporary literary fiction tend to be highly lyrical … in a way that is so far removed from conveying how experience shapes people’s minds.

 

AR: Of the Abu Ghraib scandal, Catt notes that Americans need a monster to blame and not a zombie like Lynndie England. Did Arendt’s concept of the banality of evil frame how you looked at the Abu Ghraib scandal?

 

CK: Arendt brilliantly made that connection during the Nuremburg Trials, but I think the desire to blame a monster for unspeakable crimes is ancient, it’s nothing new. It distances us from having to think about what kinds of behavior are possible from anyone, at any time. 

 

The show trials of Lynndie England, Sabrina Harmon, and Charles Granger revealed, perhaps unexpectedly, not just the systemic nature of torture within the US military chain of command, but more disturbingly, the kind of systemic numbness found among a cross-section of National Guard enlistees … white unemployed youths from backwater towns where the idea of any civic or cultural life has long since been trashed. No conscience without a conscious subject … Just seeing what people are like outside the upper-middle class cocoon we agree to define as ‘normal’ was a revelation.