Bin Laden Assination

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http://nyti.ms/1KmJfm4 FOOD Not Enough Cooks in the Restaurant Kitchen By JULIA
MOSKIN OCT. 20, 2015 The drumbeat began about five years ago, as the restaurant
industry started to recover from the recession. The sound was faint, but chefs
noticed. Openings for junior jobs like prep cook and line cook were taking longer to
fill, and the applicants had weaker skills. Cooks with just one or two years of
experience were applying for jobs better suited to 10year veterans. Stagiaires,
aspiring cooks who once begged for unpaid internships, were leaving after a day of
work, or not showing up at all. But the chefs’ concern was muted: After all, the
industry was surging back, producing more ambitious restaurants, new culinary
destinations, higher check averages and ever more culinary school graduates, all
driven by Americans’ heightened interest in food and the glamorous image of the
professional kitchen. In the last year, though, the sound has become deafening. At
conferences, over beers and on social media, chefs and restaurateurs are openly
worrying (not to say complaining) about a crisislevel shortage of cooks. In scores of
interviews via phone and email, chefs and restaurateurs confirmed that the
shortage has affected their hiring. They included Christopher Kostow of the
Restaurant at Meadowood in the Napa Valley, Dominique Crenn of Atelier Crenn in
San Francisco, Jeff Michaud of Vetri Family Restaurants in 10/21/2015 Not Enough
Cooks in the Restaurant Kitchen The New York Times
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Philadelphia and Andrew Carmellini of Locanda Verde in New York, and largescale
restaurateurs like Ralph Scamardella of Tao Group, Kevin Boehm of Boka Restaurant
Group in Chicago and Chris Himmel of Himmel Hospitality Group in Boston. For
some, it has even affected their food, forcing them to simplify dishes, to focus on
basic, scalable restaurant concepts like pizza or burgers, and to hire virtually
anyone who walks through the kitchen door. “I have given up expecting that every
single one of my line cooks will be able to season correctly or understand heat,”
said Hooni Kim, who owns Danji and Hanjan in Manhattan, where he has added
dishes that he can cook himself, in advance, so that his line cooks need only heat
and serve. On a much larger scale, Mr. Scamardella, a partner in the Tao empire,
with restaurants in New York and Las Vegas and 4,000 employees, said the
company compensates for the shortage by deliberately overhiring. “We see who of
our new hires work out and weed out those who don’t make the cut,” he said.
Whether you call them aspirational or ambitious or chefdriven, these are the

restaurants that lead the food world, and all of them report that hiring is a pain
point. Up the scale from fast food or casual chains like Applebee’s, they range from
seasonal cafes and wine bars to the priciest and most heralded establishments.
Patrick O’Connell, the chef and owner at the Inn at Little Washington in Virginia, said
even the prestigious Relais & Châteaux properties no longer attract enough talent;
most of them now have a fulltime recruiter on the payroll. He is the group’s
president for North America. But what feels like a crisis in the kitchen may be more
like growing pains for an industry that has expanded rapidly over the last decade.
“There has always been a limited supply of good cooks,” said Doug Crowell, who
owns Buttermilk Channel and French Louie in Brooklyn. “Once it 10/21/2015 Not
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was because a handful of highend restaurants competed for a small pool of skilled
labor. Now the labor pool and the industry have both exploded.” As food has
become a national obsession, more ambitious restaurants are opening, and in more
places. The demand is up for chefs who can produce elegant food and know their
way around a pair of tweezers, but many young cooks reject entrylevel kitchen jobs
— with their harsh conditions, low pay and long hours — where those skills are
taught. And so, there are more stations in restaurant kitchens than there are bodies
to stand in front of them. To hire, restaurateurs have been forced to lower their
standards, or at least their expectations. And to effect change, they say, they will
soon be forced to raise prices. Can restaurants make great food if they have to
settle for fewer, or weaker, cooks? Prestigious kitchens like the Restaurant at
Meadowood and Per Se in Manhattan will continue to hire the best young cooks and
teach them to be even better. But at places like Easy Bistro in Chattanooga, Tenn., it
isn’t as easy. “We’ve been open 10 years, and I just now have a fully professional
crew; no students or hired guns,” said Erik Niel, the chef and owner, referring to line
cooks looking for maximum pay and minimum commitment. “It slowed my
development as a chef and manager.” For diners, this gap between what the chef
wants to do and what the cooks can execute explains why many new places offer
dazzling menus but disappointing food. According to national data from the Bureau
of Labor Statistics, more new fullservice restaurants opened from 2004 to 2014 than
in any other segment of the industry, including fast food. The bureau’s Employment
Projections program anticipates about 15 percent growth through 2025 in the
number of Americans working in those restaurant kitchens; nearly 200,000 more
line cooks and chefs will be needed. 10/21/2015 Not Enough Cooks in the

Restaurant Kitchen The New York Times
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Those new restaurants are no longer concentrated in just a few places. “It used to
be that you would work in one of a handful of cities to cut your teeth as a young
cook,” according to Daniel Holzman, a chef and an owner of the Meatball Shop
restaurants. “Now the concentration of great restaurants is spreading to more and
more places.” The rising cost of living in culinary destinations like New York City and
San Francisco has contributed to this redistribution of talent. “They move away to
Portland or Seattle; places where the lifestyle is more affordable,” said Ms. Crenn in
San Francisco. Places like Nashville; Houston; Savannah, Ga.; and Washington D.C.
have become incubators of culinary talent. Chefs may see a shortage of cooks, but
the overall picture is one of growth. “I think the chefs who see a shortage are
actually responding to a skills gap,” said Alice Cheng, the founder of Culinary
Agents, a LinkedInlike hub for culinary jobs. “They assume that someone applying
for a certain job should have a particular set of skills and experience, but today’s
young chefs have different expectations.” Just 10 or 15 years ago, the model for
restaurant kitchens was still a military one: The grunt’s job was to keep his head
down, follow orders and be loyal to his commander and his squad. Generations of
chefs in Europe worked within the apprentice system, starting out by peeling
potatoes all day at age 16 and rising — slowly — to positions as souschefs and chefs
de cuisine. In many countries, those are stable, lifelong jobs. But today’s ambitious
young chefs are hungry for more. “In this informed era, it is a lot to ask of someone
to cook a section for 25 years and be happy with it,” said Christian Puglisi, a revered
chef in Copenhagen who is a veteran of Noma and has his own restaurants, Relae
and Manfreds. YouTube, Facebook and the global media coverage of events like the
10/21/2015 Not Enough Cooks in the Restaurant Kitchen The New York Times
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World’s 50 Best Restaurants awards have provided new ways for chefs to learn
from, follow and connect with one another. Companies like Twitter are dipping into
the pool of culinary talent, luring chefs to feed their employees; places like Whole
Foods and Sweetgreen offer chefs the same pay as fullservice restaurants and
better hours. Delivery startups like Blue Apron, Quinciple and Plated are generating
jobs. And entrepreneurship matters: Culinary school graduates are driving sandwich
trucks, opening bakeries and making charcuterie. In short, the modern world has
arrived in the archaic precincts of the restaurant kitchen, and the resulting
disruption is feeding the tension between chefs and their subordinates. Cooks

joining the profession now are more particular about the kitchens they want to work
in, better equipped to move from job to job and from city to city, less willing to work
long hours for low wages and more impatient to rise. “I see people my age and
younger jumping around, thinking they can learn to cook fish in a month, pasta in a
month, and then open their own restaurant,” said Matthew Ruzga, a souschef at Del
Posto, who is 32. “The tradition is that you work at least a year for each chef.” Most
executive chefs take a dim view of the new approach. They see young cooks as not
committed to the craft. “They want the success,” said Matt Jennings of Townsman in
Boston, a defender of the old system. “But when they realize it’s a 90hour week,
filled with unglamorous moments and insurmountable challenges, they flee.” Many
chefs blame television for presenting unrealistic versions of life in restaurant
kitchens, and they are outraged that the skills they have mastered over decades are
viewed as optional by the new generation. “Wanting to create a positive kitchen
culture and also to have unforgiving, 10/21/2015 Not Enough Cooks in the
Restaurant Kitchen The New York Times
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exacting standards is a hard balance to strike,” said Mr. Kostow of the Restaurant at
Meadowood. “There needs to be some understanding that this is a hard job that
might well suck for several years. Period.” However, these chefs also understand
that establishing humane working conditions is part of a sea change that is already
transforming the industry. The shortage is forcing them to respond to a longstanding
reality: To attract talented employees, to earn their loyalty and to bring their
businesses into line with modern workplace standards, the tradition of overworking,
underpaying and hazing kitchen workers until they learn to cook will have to end.
“Until we determine a fair and equitable way to provide greater compensation for
restaurant cooks, we will continue spinning our wheels as an industry,” said Mr.
Himmel, a longtime operator of successful restaurants like Grill 23 and Harvest in
the Boston area. In a speech at last year’s Roots of American Food conference, Mark
Canlis, the fourthgeneration owner of Canlis in Seattle, called the restaurant
industry “a broken place,” citing high levels of addiction, poverty and burnout in
professional kitchens. Women, especially, tend to abandon the culinary work force
before they can rise, partly because most restaurants demand work hours that are
inflexible and incompatible with raising children. Industry leaders envision kitchens
where no cooks have to work 11hour shifts six days a week just to keep their jobs;
where they earn a living wage with paid vacations, sick days and medical benefits;
where longterm employment seems not only viable, but desirable. Leading

restaurateurs have begun to attack the problem from several directions. They are
offering farm trips and teaching butchery, paying for professional courses in topics
like wine and cheese tasting and working with high schools to identify and educate
the cooks of the future. “Working with kids who have a real hunger to learn and
investing in them 10/21/2015 Not Enough Cooks in the Restaurant Kitchen The New
York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/21/dining/restaurantkitchenchefshortage.html 7/8 is key,” said Marcus Samuelsson, the chef and owner of Red
Rooster in Harlem. Most significant, of course, are measures that directly increase
salaries. At her new restaurant, Petit Crenn, Ms. Crenn has eliminated waiters
altogether and put the cooks and sommeliers to work in the dining room to funnel
more money to the kitchen. She is among several influential restaurant chefowners
— like Thomas Keller, Grant Achatz and Daniel Patterson — who have started
charging diners a flat fee or service fee instead of accepting tips. The additional
revenue is repurposed as additional pay for kitchen workers, who have long earned
less than their counterparts in dining rooms. Last week, the restaurateur Danny
Meyer announced that all the restaurants in his empire would make the change by
the end of the year. During his three decades in the business, he said, the average
compensation for cooks has gone up just 25 percent, while servers are making 200
percent more than they did in 1985. Redistributing tips from customers is one way
for restaurateurs to increase compensation to the back of the house, but it comes at
a price, as do other measures, like paid time off and dental benefits. Recent
changes in federal immigration enforcement, individual states’ minimum wage
levels and local ordinances like New York City’s new law mandating paid sick leave
are among the regulatory pressures making workers ever more expensive. Many
owners warn that improved workplace conditions for cooks will inevitably bring
higher prices to menus. Most also say that if restaurants are to continue to flourish,
diners and owners have no other choice. Kris Schlotzhauer, a chef in Toronto, posted
an urgent plea to chefs on Facebook last month. 10/21/2015 Not Enough Cooks in
the Restaurant Kitchen The New York Times
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“Change the industry and maybe, one day soon, we will start to attract new talent
again,” he wrote. “Go to your owners and ask for more money for your cooks, they
deserve it, so find a way to make their lives better. Because if we have no cooks, we
have no industry. We are at the tipping point, and it’s gonna take an industrywide
culture change to fix it.” A version of this article appears in print on October 21,
2015, on page D1 of the New York edition with the headline: Help Wanted . © 2015

The New York Times Company

The Panic of Influence
A.O. Scott
FEBRUARY 10, 2000 ISSUE
Brief Interviews with Hideous Men

by David Foster Wallace
Little, Brown, 273 pp., $24.00
The Broom of the System

by David Foster Wallace
Avon, 467 pp., $14.00 (paper)
Girl with Curious Hair

by David Foster Wallace
Norton, 373 pp., $12.00 (paper)
A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again

by David Foster Wallace
Back Bay, 353 pp., $13.95 (paper)
Infinite Jest

by David Foster Wallace
Little, Brown, 1079 pp., $17.00 (paper)

1.
David Foster Wallace’s most recent book presents itself as a collection of
stories, but you don’t have to read very far to discover that conventional notions
of “story” don’t exactly apply. The first piece is called “A Radically Condensed
History of Postindustrial Life,” and it consists, in its entirety, of the following
two paragraphs:
When they were introduced, he made a witticism, hoping to be liked. She
laughed extremely hard, hoping to be liked. Then each drove home alone,
staring straight ahead, with the very same twist to their faces.
The man who’d introduced them didn’t much like either of them, though he
acted as if he did, anxious as he was to preserve good relations at all times. One
never knew, after all, now did one now did one now did one.
This “history” is printed on page zero. On page 159, in a story called “Adult
World (II),” the reader encounters the following passage:
3d. Narr intrusion, expo on Jeni Roberts [same flat & pedantic tone as å¦s 3, 4 of
‘A.W.(I)’ PT. 3]: While following F.L.’s teal/ aqua Probe down xprswy, J. hadn’t
‘changed mind’ about having secret adulterous sex w/F.L., rather merely ‘…
realized it was unnecessary.’ Understands that she has had life- changing
epiphany, has ‘…bec[o]me a woman as well as a wife’ & c. & c.
3d(1) J. hereafter referred to by narr as ‘Ms. Jeni Orzolek Roberts’; hsbnd
referred to as ‘the Secret Compulsive Masturbator.’
Scattered through the volume are three stories with the title “Yet Another
Example of the Porousness of Certain Borders”; apparently, there are many
more examples, since the entries provided are numbers eleven, six, and twentyfour in a series. There are also four pieces that share the title of the book, and
that are themselves divided into nonsequential numbered sections, as though
they were culled at random from a vast repository of transcripts. Brief
Interviews with Hideous Men also includes a story in the form of a futuristic
dictionary entry, a Hollywood pastiche of Ovid’s Metamorphoses and the

Nibelungen Saga called “Tri-Stan: I Sold Sissee Nar to Ecko,” and a great many
footnotes.
At first glance, then, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men looks like newfangled
fiction of a rather old-fashioned kind—the kind that used to advertise itself, in
the 1960s and 1970s, as “experimental.” David Foster Wallace, who was born in
1962 and who published his first novel, The Broom of the System, when he was
twenty-five, has been widely hailed since then as the heir to such postmodern
old masters as John Barth, William Gaddis, and Thomas Pynchon. But Wallace
possesses a high degree of generational self-consciousness, and his relationship
to his precursors—to the purveyors of “R&D” (research and development)
fiction, as Gore Vidal dubbed them, none too kindly, in these pages a quartercentury ago—is, to say the least, ambivalent. In interviews, in essays, and in his
fiction, Wallace has acknowledged his debt to the self-styled renegades whose
books had become, by the time he encountered them, staples of the academic
curriculum. But like many other Americans who grew up in the wake of the
1960s, he seems haunted by a feeling of belatedness: he came of age in a world
in which revolt, to paraphrase the poet Thom Gunn, had once again become a
style. And while he admires the radical panache of his literary fathers, Wallace
cannot help but regard them with an envious, quasi-Oedipal hostility: “If I have
a real enemy,” he once told an interviewer, “a patriarch for my patricide, it’s
probably Barth and Coover and Burroughs, even Nabokov and Pynchon.”
The fretful embrace and guilty recoil that typify Wallace’s relationship with his
literary antecedents are classic symptoms of what Harold Bloom has called the
anxiety of influence. And Wallace has a bad case: anxiety may not be a strong
enough word; panic is more like it. Consider, among many available examples,
“Octet,” a frantic, fragmentary story from the new collection: it is made up of
four nonconsecutively numbered “Pop Quizzes,” the last and longest of which
(number 9, to confuse matters further) begins, “You are, unfortunately, a fiction
writer.” “You” find yourself at work on a series of short pieces a lot like the one
you are in the middle of reading, and things are not going very well:
> You decide to try to salvage the aesthetic disaster of having to stick in the first
version of the 6th piece by having that first version be utterly up front about the
fact that it falls apart and doesn’t work as a ‘Pop Quiz’ and by having the
rewrite of the 6th piece start out with some terse unapologetic acknowledgment

that it’s another ‘try’ at whatever you were trying to palpate into interrogability
in the first version. These intranar-rative acknowledgments have the additional
advantage of slightly diluting the pretentiousness of structuring the little pieces
as so-called ‘Quizzes,’ but it also has the disadvantage of flirting with
metafictional self-reference—viz. the having ‘This Pop Quiz isn’t working’ and
‘Here’s another stab at #6’ within the text itself—which in the late 1990s…
might come off lame and tired and facile, and also runs the risk of
compromising the queer urgency about whatever it is you feel you want the
pieces to interrogate in whoever’s reading them. This is an urgency that you, the
fiction writer, feel very…well, urgently, and want the reader to feel too—which
is to say that by no means do you want a reader to come away thinking that the
cycle is just a cute formal exercise in interrogative structure and S.O.P. metatext.
However urgent this dilemma, it is one Wallace has dramatized many times
before. It’s hard to think of another writer of any generation who has written
more prolifically about the obstacles to writing, or who has lampooned the selfdramatizing frustrations of the creative process with such inexhaustible,
maniacal conviction.
Wallace is deeply suspicious of novelty, even as he scrambles to position
himself on the cutting edge. His earlier collection of short fiction, Girl With
Curious Hair (1989), concludes with a novella called “Westward the Course of
Empire Takes Its Way,” which is at once a scabrous satire on the academic
authority of the ci-devant avant-garde and a virtuoso compendium of tried and
true avant-garde techniques. It features authorial intrusions in the manner of
John Barth; whimsical collages of wild fabulation and deadpan realism that
recall Richard Brautigan, or maybe middle-period Kurt Vonnegut; and long,
long sentences in the style of Donald Barthelme. The proceedings are shot
through with an air of wild Pynchonian intrigue.
The story’s initial setting is a creative writing department on Maryland’s Eastern
Shore, though it makes its way, for murky allegorical reasons, to the central
Illinois township of Collision. Its heroes, more or less, are a group of disaffected
graduate students, and the villain, more or less, is a creative writing teacher and
literary huckster named Professor Ambrose, a thinly disguised (that is, a
blatantly obvious) rendering of Barth, for some years the head of the creative

writing program at Johns Hopkins. Ambrose, like Barth, is the author of a
legendary, endlessly self-referential work called Lost in the Funhouse, and he is,
throughout the story, an object of both veneration and rage—admired and
resented not only by his students but also by the narrator, who, at one point,
under the heading “A Really Blatant and Intrusive Interruption,” launches into a
breathless two-page rant on the state of literary production in the United States.
Part of its first sentence is worth quoting in the only way Wallace’s prose allows
itself to be quoted—at nerve-wracking length:
As mentioned before—and if this were a piece of metafiction, which it’s NOT,
the exact number of typeset lines between this reference and the prenominate
referent would very probably be mentioned, which would be a princely pain in
the ass, not to mention cocky, since it would assume that a straightforward and
anti-embellished account of a slow and hot and sleep-deprived and basically
clotted and frustrating day in the lives of three kids, none of whom are all that
sympathetic, could actually get published, which these days good luck, but in
metafiction it would, nay needs be mentioned, a required postmodern
convention aimed at drawing the poor old reader’s emotional attention to the
fact that the narrative bought and paid for and now under time-consuming
scrutiny is not in fact a barely-there window onto a different and truly diverting
world, but rather in fact an “artifact,” an object, a plain old this-worldly thing,
composed of emulsified wood pulp and horizontal chorus-lines of dye,
and conventions, and is thus in a “deep” sense just an opaque forgery of a
transfiguring window, not a real window, a gag, and thus in a deep
(but intentional, now) sense artificial, which is to say fabricated, false, a fiction,
a pretender-to-status, a straw-haired King of Spain—this self-conscious
explicitness and deconstructed disclosure supposedly making said metafiction
“realer” than a piece of pre-postmodern “Realism” that depends on certain
antiquated techniques to create an “illusion” of a windowed access to a “reality”
isomorphic with ours but possessed of and yielding up higher truths to which all
authentically human persons stand in the relation of applicand—all of which the
Resurrection of Realism, the pained product of inglorious minimalist labor in
countless obscure graduate writing workshops across the U.S. of A., and called
by Field Marshal Lish (who ought to know) the New Realism, promises to show
to be utter baloney, this metafictional shit….

And so on. Wallace soon disavowed “Westward,” confessing to an interviewer:
“I got trapped…just trying to expose the illusions of metafiction the same way
metafiction had tried to expose the illusions of the pseudo-unmediated realist
fiction that had come before it. It was a horror show. The stuff’s a permanent
migraine.”
It is also, to Wallace and his readers, a recurrent one. Wallace’s most rigorous
attempt to cure his aesthetic headache and wriggle free of the metafictional trap
is an essay called “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction,” originally
published in The Review of Contemporary Fiction in 1993 and reprinted in a
collection of his criticism and reportage called A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll
Never Do Again (1997). The essay argues that the critical potential of
postmodern fiction has been defused not only by the passage of time but by
television, which has transformed postmodernism’s trademark irony from an
attitude of dissent into a mode of oppression. Television, as it has matured and
come to occupy more and more cultural space and personal time (Wallace cites
a study that calculates the average American’s intake at six hours a day), has
become relentlessly self-mocking and preemptively self-critical. It thus neuters
and domesticates the wild, insurgent energies of the literary avant-garde, and
makes it impossible for young writers to match the achievements of their elders:
…The rebellious irony in the best postmodern fiction wasn’t just credible as art;
it seemed downright socially useful in its capacity for what counterculture
critics called “a critical negation that would make it self-evident to everyone
that the world is not as it seems” [the quote is from music critic Greil Marcus].
Kesey’s black parody of asylums suggested that our arbiters of sanity were often
crazier than their patients. Pynchon reoriented our view of paranoia from
deviant psychic fringe to central thread in the corporo-bureaucratic weave;
DeLillo exploded image, signal, data and tech as agents of spiritual chaos and
not social order. Burroughs’s icky explorations of American narcosis exploded
hypocrisy; Gaddis’s exposure of abstract capital as deforming exploded
hypocrisy; Coover’s repulsive political farces exploded hypocrisy.
But nowadays, Wallace claims, the hypocrisy of television is so overt, its
explosions so carefully programmed, that it turns revolt into cynicism. In his
account, which borrows from the work of media critics such as Todd Gitlin and
Mark Crispin Miller, television has made us into passive, alienated consumers

of the very forces that pacify and alienate us. If fiction is to recapture its ethical
function—its ability to brush the culture against the grain, rather than merely
reaffirm its commonplaces—serious young writers will have to abandon irony
in favor of…well now, that’s a tough one:
It’s entirely possible that my plangent noises about the impossibility of rebelling
against an aura that promotes and vitiates all rebellion say more about my
residency inside that aura, my own lack of vision, than they do about any
exhaustion of US fiction’s possibilities. The next real liter- ary “rebels” in this
country might well emerge as some weird bunch of anti-rebels, born oglers who
dare somehow to back away from ironic watching, who have the childish gall
actually to endorse and instantiate single-entendre principles. Who treat of plain
old untrendy human troubles and emotions in US life with reverence and
conviction. Who eschew self-consciousness and hip fatigue.
These anti-rebels would be outdated, of course, before they even started. Dead
on the page. Too sincere. Clearly repressed. Backward, quaint, naïve,
anachronistic. Maybe that’ll be the point. Maybe that’s why they’ll be the next
real rebels. Real rebels, as far as I can see, risk disapproval. The old postmodern
insurgents risked the gasp and squeal: shock, disgust, outrage, censorship,
accusations of socialism, anarchism, nihilism. Today’s risks are different. The
new rebels might be artists willing to risk the yawn, the rolled eyes, the cool
smile, the nudged ribs, the parody of gifted ironists, the “Oh how banal.”
As cultural history—for that matter, as literary criticism—“E Unibus Pluram”
has its weaknesses. For one thing, Wallace’s discussion of television is, as
discussions of television often are, maddening in its blithe, judgmental
generality. “Television” is about as useful a category in the analysis of
contemporary life as “print”: at long last, sir, the medium is not the message.
What’s more, Wallace accepts (or at least appears to accept) a rather
melodramatic account of the impact of R&D fiction, which depends on the
assumption that the world of letters, to say nothing of the world at large, was
until the advent of postmodern-ism dominated by hypocrisy, naive realism, and
widespread credulity about the benevolence of capitalism and the state. In or
around 1960, thanks largely to the efforts of a brave cadre of novelists, most of

them employed in universities, all of this changed, with enormous and farreaching (though curiously short-lived) social consequences.
For all the shortcomings of this account, Wallace’s anatomy of the predicament
facing young writers after postmodernism is in many ways persuasive; if he
can’t quite capture the grand dialectic of contemporary culture, such as it is, he
at least has a feel for its mood swings. He might even be credited with a degree
of foresight, both about the ascendance of a certain knowing, allusive, worldweary superciliousness—“E Unibus Pluram” was composed just
asSeinfeld began to epitomize the prime-time Zeitgeist—and about the
simultaneous emergence of a defiantly plainspoken sensibility ranged against it.
The anti-metafictional jeremiad in “Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its
Way” ends with a paean to the New Realism, which offers “some of the most
heartbreaking stuff available at any fine bookseller’s anywhere.”
While the designation “New Realism” may already be dated, the steady
outpouring in recent years of earnest, heartbreaking memoirs and short,
sensitive story collections by ever younger writers might be taken to bear out
Wallace’s intuitions. The backlash against irony has recently found a spokesman
in the person of Jedediah Purdy, a twenty-four-year-old product of Exeter,
Harvard, and West Virginia home schooling who, with his ambiguously
provincial background and his faintly allegorical name, might have escaped
from a David Foster Wallace story. In any case, For Common Things,* Purdy’s
much-discussed manifesto, argues precisely for renewed attention to “old
untrendy human troubles” and for the virtues of “reverence and conviction.”
(Purdy’s book has been greeted, as Wallace might have predicted, with a fair
amount of eye-rolling and rib-nudging.)
It is therefore at least arguable that we have lately witnessed the emergence of a
group of anti-ironic anti-rebels. But is David Foster Wallace among them? Are
his harangues against the tyranny of irony meant to be taken in earnest, or are
they artfully constructed simulacra of what a sincere anti-ironist might sound
like? Or both? If one way to escape from the blind alley of postmodern selfconsciousness is simply to turn around and walk in another direction—which is
in effect what Purdy advises, and what a great many very interesting writers,
without making a big deal about it, simply do—Wallace prefers to forge ahead

in hopes of breaking through to the other side, whatever that may be. For all his
impatience with the conventions of anti-realism, he advances a standard
postmodern view that “the classical Realist form is soothing, familiar and
anesthetic; it drops us right into spectation. It doesn’t set up the sort of
expectations serious 1990s fiction ought to be setting up in readers.” Wallace,
then, is less anti-ironic than (forgive me) meta-ironic. That is, his gambit is to
turn irony back on itself, to make his fiction relentlessly conscious of its own
self-consciousness, and thus to produce work that will be at once unassailably
sophisticated and doggedly down to earth. Janus-faced, he demands to be taken
at face value. “Single-entendre principles” is a cleverly tossed off phrase, but
Wallace is temperamentally committed to multiplicity—to a quality he has
called, with reference to the filmmaker David Lynch, “bothness.” He wants to
be at once earnest and ironical, sensitive and cerebral, lisible and scriptible,
R&D and R&R, straight man and clown, grifter and mark.

2.
Because of Wallace’s manifest interest in philosophical conundrums and
language games, it is tempting to judge his ambitions on their logical merits,
and to declare that, on theoretical grounds, he can’t have it both ways. But since
he is, after all, a fiction writer, it may be wiser to judge his output with reference
to that hoariest of creative-writing-workshop questions: Does it work? In the
case of Infinite Jest (1996), Wallace’s longest, boldest fiction so far, the answer
is yes, it works; it works too damn hard.
Infinite Jest might be subtitled “A Radically Expanded History of Postindustrial
Life.” It takes place in a future meant to represent a logical extension of the
present. The trend toward corporate sponsorship, which has in the real world
given new names to college bowl games and professional sports stadiums, has,
in the novel, colonized time itself: around 1997, it seems, the numerical
calendar was scrapped, and chapter headings indicate that action is taking place
in the “Year of the Tucks Medicated Pad” or the “Year of the DependAdult
Undergarment.” (The excremental associations of the products in question—a
hemorrhoid medication and an adult diaper, respectively, in case you don’t pay
attention to the commercials during the evening news—are indicative of one
aspect of Wallace’s sense of humor.) And the colonization of all aspects of life

by the entertainment industry—currently a source of endless handwringing in
the journals of opinion—here takes a lethal turn. “Infinite Jest” is the name both
of a lost masterpiece of experimental cinema and a video cartridge that, wired
directly into the viewer’s nervous system, produces an overpowering, instantly
addictive stimulus leading irreversibly to drooling, catatonic paralysis.
“Infinite Jest” is also, of course, a description of the novel’s structure. The book
is almost eleven hundred pages long, but it feels even longer, owing in part to
several hundred footnotes, which disrupt the reader’s attention and send it
looping backward and forward in an effort to maintain continuity. Even without
the distraction of the footnotes—which sometimes consist of pseudoscholarly
apparatus, sometimes of extended narrative tangents, sometimes of humorous
asides—the text itself is simultaneously fragmentary and recursive. Story lines
alternate wildly; some resume after long digressions, some turn out to be
nothing more than digressions themselves, and the connections between the
proliferating threads are persistently elusive, and just as persistently hinted
at. Infinite Jest is, to my knowledge, the longest novel about tennis ever
published. It is also a dystopian political satire set on a North American
continent menaced by paraplegic Quebecois terrorists and splintered into new
territorial arrangements, the most wildly metaphorical anatomy of drug abuse
since William Burroughs’s Naked Lunch, and a tender, heartfelt, coming-of-age
story.
The novel’s Pynchonesque elements—the fact that part of the United States is
now a federation called O.N.A.N., the symbiotic relationship between terrorists
and law enforcement agencies, the shadowy career of underground filmmakerturned-tennis-coach James Incandenza—feel rather willed and secondhand.
They are impressive in the manner of a precocious child’s performance at a
dinner party, and, in the same way, ultimately irritating: they seem motivated,
mostly, by a desire to show off. And some of the novel’s broad satirical
intentions—to warn us that corporations control everything and that
entertainment is a drug—are familiar bromides decked out in gaudy comic
dress.
But along with its fast-fading pyrotechnics, Infinite Jest also offers some
genuine illumination. In the two main plotlines, which trace the adolescent

travails of tennis prodigy Hal Incandenza and the struggle for survival of Don
Gately, who works in a halfway house for recovering addicts, Wallace’s
relentless intelligence yields some old-fashioned novelistic insights into
characters, events, and places. Wallace is blessed with a brilliant ear not only for
the noise in his own head—he is surely one of our most gifted self-mimics—but
for the harsh polyphonies of contemporary American speech. And in the selfcontained vignettes of chemical dependency and clinical depression that
punctuate the proliferating subplots, Wallace’s style at last finds a substance it
can use. In “E Unibus Pluram” he made some sweeping claims about the
addictive powers of the entertainment media:
It’s tough to see how…having more “control” over the arrangement of highquality fantasy-bits is going to ease either the dependency that is part of my
relation to TV or the impotent irony I must use to pretend that I’m not
dependent…. My real dependency here is not on a single show or a few
networks any more than the hophead’s is on the Turkish florist or the Marseilles
refiner.
The strongest parts of Infinite Jest suggest that this observation is less
interesting as a statement about television than as a statement about dependency
as such. The novel’s most serious and sustained conceit is that allencompassing, self-renewing need is the organizing principle of contemporary
culture and the structuring psychopathology of everyday life—that we are,
individually and collectively, trapped in endless cycles of compulsion, selfdelusion, and denial. What we need is ultimately less important than how we
need it. Our daily lives are organized around a repertoire of stratagems designed
to feed our habits in the name of breaking them:
> This last time, he would smoke the whole 200 grams—120 grams cleaned,
destemmed—in four days, over an ounce a day, all in tight heavy economical
one-hitters off a quality virgin bong, an incredible, insane amount per day, he’d
make it a mission, treating it like a penance and behavior-modification regimen
all at once, he’d smoke his way through thirty high-grade grams a day, starting
the moment he woke up and used ice water to detach his tongue from the roof of
his mouth and took an antacid—averaging out to 200 or 300 heavy bong-hits
per day, an insane and deliberately unpleasant amount, and he’d make it a
mission to smoke it continuously, even though if the marijuana was as good as

the woman claimed he’d do five hits and then not want to take the trouble to
load and one-hit any more for at least an hour. But he would force himself to do
it anyway. He would smoke it all even if he didn’t want it. Even if it started to
make him dizzy and ill. He would use discipline and persistence and will and
make the whole experience so unpleasant, so debased and debauched and
unpleasant, that his behavior would be henceforward modified, he’d never even
want to do it again because the memory of the insane four days to come would
be so firmly, terribly emblazoned in his memory. He’d cure himself by excess.
This nameless character’s doomed, misguided, yet oddly convincing plan to rid
himself of his marijuana habit bears an unmistakable resemblance to Wallace’s
own repeated attempts to cure himself of his interlocking addictions to irony,
metafiction, and the other cheap postmodern highs. If I blow my mind on selfconsciousness this one last time, Wallace resolves over and over, I’ll never go
near it again. But he always comes back for more. The addict is like an
ineducable rat caught in a cruel behaviorist maze of his own devising, and so,
much of the time, is the strung-out post-metafictionist. But in a passage like this
one, Wallace happens upon an unexpected exit from the cul de sac of
postmodern mannerism—a breakthrough into something that is not oldfashioned illusionistic realism but that is nonetheless alive with captured reality.
And he accomplishes this breakthrough by applying the spiraling, recursive
logic of his own fictional self-examinations to another person, a person who
couldn’t care less about literary fashion.
One of the critical commonplaces about Pynchon, Gaddis, et al.—a
commonplace to which Wallace clearly subscribes—is that their stylistic and
formal inventions were created under pressure of lived experience. What made
realism untenable for these writers, according to the conventional wisdom
Wallace has absorbed, was reality itself: Pynchon’s involuted, encrypted
sentences, Barth’s blatant narrative intrusions, Coover’s self-consuming artifacts
—all of these were designed to explode the hypocrisies and jar the
complacencies of a monstrously complex society whose deepest workings could
not be represented by traditional narrative means. But what these writers passed
on to their students and followers was, for the most part, the habit of formal and
stylistic invention for its own sake, an empty set of quotation marks, a selfconsciousness without selves. In my opinion, a lot of Wallace’s earlier work,

including much of Infinite Jest, slips back toward that abyss—an
epistemological black hole as comfortable and familiar as a worn-out couch in a
graduate student lounge. And many of the stories in Brief Interviews with
Hideous Men, which gathers together the shorter fiction Wallace has written
over the past ten years, read like bravura classroom performances—footnotes to
his earlier annotations of the experimental tradition.
But a handful, most of them composed since the appearance of Infinite Jest,
recover some of the squandered and compromised satirical energies of that
tradition by suggesting that meta-metafiction, or post-postmodernism, or
whatever you want to call it, is a form of realism after all. The feedback loop of
irony and sincerity which animates so much of Wallace’s writing turns out not to
be an artifact of literary R&D, but a fact of human nature, or at least a salient
aspect of the way we live now:
Please believe me. The whole reason I’m having us talk about my record and
what I get afraid might happen is that I don’t want it to happen, see? that I don’t
want suddenly to reverse thrust and begin trying to extricate myself after you’ve
given up so much and moved out here and now I’ve—now that we’re so
involved. I’m praying you’ll be able to see that my telling you what always
happens is a kind of proof that with you I don’t want it to happen. That I
don’t want to get all testy or hypercritical or pull away and not be around for
days at a time or be blatantly unfaithful in a way you’re guaranteed to find out
about or any of the shitty cowardly ways I’ve used before to get out of
something I’d just spent months of intensive pursuit and effort trying to get the
other person to plunge into with me. Does this make any sense? Can you believe
that I’m honestly trying to respect you by warning you about me, in a way? That
I’m trying to be honest instead of dishonest? That I’ve decided the best way to
head off this pattern where you get hurt and feel abandoned and I feel like shit is
to try to be honest for once? Even if I should have done it sooner? Even when I
admit it’s maybe possible that you might even interpret what I’m sayingnow as
dishonest, as trying somehow to maybe freak you out enough so that you’ll
move back out and I can get out of this? Which I don’t think is what I’m doing,
but to be totally honest I can’t be a hundred percent sure?
This is from one of the “Brief Interviews” in the current book—an incomplete,
shuffled set of seventeen conversations of varying length between a silent,

apparently female questioner, represented by the letter “Q,” and her unnamed
subjects, some of whom are strangers, some, like this one, lovers. A number of
the men have bizarre tics and predilections: one of them involuntarily shouts
“Victory for the Forces of Democratic Freedom!” every time he ejaculates;
another recounts how an elaborate childhood masturbatory fantasy (highly
reminiscent, perhaps inadvertently, of Nicholson Baker’s novel The Fermata)
became so philosophically vexing that it drove him to a life of celibacy; and still
another explains how his grotesquely deformed arm gets him “more pussy than
a toilet seat, man. I shit you not.”
But while many reviewers have been captivated by the more outré specimens of
hideous manhood, what is most striking about the interview subjects, and what
they ultimately have in common, is their slippery, narcissistic ordinariness.
Number 11 dumps Q on the pretext that he can no longer tolerate her suspicion
that he’s about to dump her. Number 31 explains that the best way for a man to
please a woman is not to perform oral sex on her (a common misconception,
apparently), but to trick her into performing it on him, which is what she really
wants. The interviews hold up to hilarious, disturbing scrutiny the endlessly
inventive duplicity that animates men’s single-minded pursuit of sex.
Acknowledging what louts they are becomes another weapon in the arsenal of
loutishness.
The most important thing is sincerity. If you can fake that, you’vegot it made.
Wallace’s “Interviews” apply Laurence Olivier’s cynical show-business truism
to the theater of sexual conquest and betrayal. Or, as pop singer Nick Lowe put
it a few years back, “All men are liars, and that’s the truth.” Wallace’s Q,
intrepidly documenting this version of the Cretan liar’s paradox (the corollary of
which is that all men are cretins), seems to have stumbled upon an unnerving
Darwinian insight. If, that is, male behavior has evolved through a series of
adaptations meant to maximize opportunities for copulation, then the ability to
use “honesty” as a strategic form of deceit—an infinitely reusable capacity, at
least for some—may have evolved not in the laboratory environment of recent
US fiction but in the primordial wild. This, at any rate, is something like what
two of Q’s interlocutors (identified in interview #78 as “E” and “K”) seem to
think:

> E——: ‘Plus remember the postfeminist girl now knows that the male sexual
paradigm and the female’s are fundamentally different—’
K——: ‘Mars and Venus.’
E——: ‘Right, exactly, and she knows that as a woman she’s naturally
programmed to be more highminded and long-term about sex and to be thinking
more in relationship terms than just fucking terms, so if she just immediately
breaks down and fucks you she’s on some level still getting taken advantage of,
she thinks.’
K——: ‘This, of course, is because today’s postfeminist era is also today’s
postmodern era, in which supposedly everybody now knows everything about
what’s really going on underneath all the semiotic codes and cultural
conventions, and everybody supposedly knows what paradigms everybody is
operating out of, and so we’re all us individuals held to be far more responsible
for our sexuality, since everything we do is now unprecedentedly conscious and
informed.’
E——: ‘While at the same time she’s still under this incredible sheer biological
pressure to find a mate and settle down and nest and breed, for instance go read
this thing The Rules and try to explain its popularity any other way.’
K——: ‘The point being that women today are now expected to be responsible
both to modernity and to history.’
E——: ‘Not to mention sheer biology.’
K——: ‘Biology’s already included in the range of what I mean by history.’
E——: ‘So you’re using history more in a Foucaultvian sense.’
K——: ‘I’m talking about a history being a set of conscious intentional
responses to a whole range of forces of which biology and evolution are a part.’
E——: ‘The point is it’s an intolerable burden on women.’

K——: ‘The real point is that in fact they’re just logically incompatible, these
two responsibilities.’
E——: ‘Even if modernity itself is a historical phenomenon, Foucault would
say.’
K——: ‘I’m just pointing out that nobody can honor two logically incompatible
sets of perceived responsibilities. This has nothing to do with history, this is
pure logic.’
E——: ‘Personally, I blame the media.’
This is a fine parody of a graduate school bull session—“Foucaultvian” is an
especially deft touch. It is also, of course, a knowing self-parody on Wallace’s
part. The effect, and perhaps the intention, of his habit of turning his jokes
around on himself is to short-circuit criticism, much in the way that the hideous
men’s confessions of their own dishonesty are meant to make them appear,
ultimately, sincere. But the effect of this kind of heavily defended discourse—
whether metafictional or “real”—is ultimately to prevent communication, just as
the impeccably logical seductions and repulsions of the hideous men are
designed to protect them from the illogical messiness of genuine human contact.
Wallace, of course, knows this too, and the best story in Brief Interviews with
Hideous Men conveys the terrible emptiness that lurks behind our era’s rituals of
compulsive self-reflection. The story is called “The Depressed Person,” and it
describes, in the flat, clinical language of psychotherapy, the life of a woman
whose unhappiness is not so much the result of any particular trauma as the
wellspring of her identity. She is depressed because she is the Depressed Person,
and vice versa. The joke of the story is that the woman is sent into paroxysms of
navel-gazing agony by trivialities—by the memory of her pampered childhood
or her parents’ relatively harmonious divorce, or as a result of overhearing an
insensitive remark about a woman she barely knows—while her therapist and
the friends she refers to as her “support network” fall victim to tragedy, disease,
and death. Which makes her feel even worse—about herself:
At this point in the sharing, the depressed person took a time-out to solemnly
swear to her long-distance, gravely ill, frequently retching but still caring and

intimate friend that there was no toxic or pathetically manipulative selfexcoriation here in what she (i.e., the depressed person) was reaching out and
opening up and confessing, only profound and unprecedented fear: the
depressed person was frightened for herself, for as it were “[her]self“—i.e. for
her own so-called “character” or “spirit” or as it were “soul” i.e. for her own
capacity for basic human empathy and compassion and caring—she told the
supportive friend with the neuroblastoma. She was asking sincerely, the
depressed person said, honestly, desperately: what kind of person could seem to
feel nothing—“nothing,” she emphasized—for anyone but herself? Maybe
not ever?
This story is the most brilliant dissection I have seen of what Christopher Lasch
once called “the banality of pseudo-self-awareness.” And there is probably no
writer whose work makes a stronger case, twenty years after Lasch wrote the
book on it, that we still inhabit a culture of narcissism. Does Wallace’s work
represent an unusually trenchant critique of that culture or one of its most florid
and exotic symptoms? Of course, there can only be one answer: it’s both.

JEAN BAUDRILLARD - THE SPIRIT OF TERRORISM
TRANSLATED BY DR. RACHEL BLOUL
LE MONDE 2 NOVEMBER 2001
We have had many global events from Diana's death to the World
Cup, or even violent and real events from wars to genocides. But not
one global symbolic event, that is an event not only with global
repercussions, but one that questions the very process of
globalization. All through the stagnant 90s, there has been "la greve
des evenements" (literally "an events strike", translated from a
phrase of the Argentino writer Macedonio Fernandez). Well, the
strike is off. We are even facing, with the World Trade Center & New
York hits, the absolute event, the "mother" of events, the pure event
which is the essence of all the events that never happened.
Not only are all history and power plays disrupted, but so are the
conditions of analysis. One must take one's time. For as long as
events were at a standstill, one had to anticipate and overcome them.
But when they speed up, one must slow down; without getting lost
under a mass of discourses and the shadow of war ("nuage de la
guerre": literally clouds announcing war), and while keeping
undiminished the unforgettable flash of images.

All the speeches and commentaries betray a gigantic abreaction to
the event itself and to the fascination that it exerts. Moral
condemnation and the sacred union against terrorism are equal to
the prodigious jubilation engendered by witnessing this global
superpower being destroyed; better, by seeing it more or less selfdestroying, even suiciding spectacularly. Though it is (this
superpower) that has, through its unbearable power, engendered all
that violence brewing around the world, and therefore this terrorist
imagination which -- unknowingly -- inhabits us all.
That we have dreamed of this event, that everybody without
exception has dreamt of it, because everybody must dream of the
destruction of any power hegemonic to that degree, - this is
unacceptable for Western moral conscience, but it is still a fact, and
one which is justly measured by the pathetic violence of all those
discourses which attempt to erase it.
It is almost they who did it, but we who wanted it. If one does not
take that into account, the event lost all symbolic dimension to
become a pure accident, an act purely arbitrary, the murderous
fantasy of a few fanatics, who would need only to be suppressed. But
we know very well that this is not so. Thus all those delirious,
counter-phobic exorcisms: because evil is there, everywhere as an
obscure object of desire. Without this deep complicity, the event
would not have had such repercussions, and without doubt, terrorists
know that in their symbolic strategy they can count on this
unavowable complicity.
This goes much further than hatred for the dominant global power
from the disinherited and the exploited, those who fell on the wrong
side of global order. That malignant desire is in the very heart of
those who share (this order's) benefits. An allergy to all definitive
order, to all definitive power is happily universal, and the two towers
of the World Trade Center embodied perfectly, in their very doubleness (literally twin-ness), this definitive order.
No need for a death wish or desire for self-destruction, not even for
perverse effects. It is very logically, and inexorably, that the (literally:
"rise to power of power") exacerbates a will to destroy it. And power
is complicit with its own destruction. When the two towers collapsed,
one could feel that they answered the suicide of the kamikazes by
their own suicide. It has been said: "God cannot declare war on
Itself". Well, It can. The West, in its God-like position (of divine
power, and absolute moral legitimacy) becomes suicidal, and
declares war on itself.
Numerous disaster movies are witness to this phantasm, which they
obviously exorcise through images and submerge under special
effects. But the universal attraction these movies exert, as
pornography does, shows how (this phantasm's) realization is always
close at hand -- the impulse to deny any system being all the stronger
if such system is close to perfection or absolute supremacy.

It is even probable that the terrorists (like the experts!) did not
anticipate the collapse of the Twin Towers, which was, far more than
(the attack of) the Pentagon, the deepest symbolic shock. The
symbolic collapse of a whole system is due to an unforeseen
complicity, as if, by collapsing (themselves), by suiciding, the towers
had entered the game to complete the event.
In a way, it is the entire system that, by its internal fragility, helps the
initial action. The more the system is globally concentrated to
constitute ultimately only one network, the more it becomes
vulnerable at a single point (already one little Filipino hacker has
succeeded, with his laptop, to launch the I love you virus that
wrecked entire networks). Here, eighteen (dix-huit in the text)
kamikazes, through the absolute arm that is death multiplied by
technological efficiency, start a global catastrophic process.
When the situation is thus monopolized by global power, when one
deals with this formidable condensation of all functions through
technocratic machinery and absolute ideological hegemony (pensee
unique), what other way is there, than a terrorist reversal of the
situation (literally 'transfer of situation': am I too influenced by early
translation as 'reversal'?)? It is the system itself that has created the
objective conditions for this brutal distortion. By taking all the cards
to itself, it forces the Other to change the rules of the game. And the
new rules are ferocious, because the stakes are ferocious. To a system
whose excess of power creates an unsolvable challenge, terrorists
respond by a definitive act that is also unanswerable (in the text:
which cannot be part of the exchange circuit). Terrorism is an act
that reintroduces an irreducible singularity in a generalized exchange
system. Any singularity (whether species, individual or culture),
which has paid with its death for the setting up of a global circuit
dominated by a single power, is avenged today by this terrorist
situational transfer.
Terror against terror -- there is no more ideology behind all that. We
are now far from ideology and politics. No ideology, no cause, not
even an Islamic cause, can account for the energy which feeds terror.
It (energy) does not aim anymore to change the world, it aims (as any
heresy in its time) to radicalize it through sacrifice, while the system
aims to realize (the world) through force.
Terrorism, like virus, is everywhere. Immersed globally, terrorism,
like the shadow of any system of domination, is ready everywhere to
emerge as a double agent. There is no boundary to define it; it is in
the very core of this culture that fights it - and the visible schism (and
hatred) that opposes, on a global level, the exploited and the
underdeveloped against the Western world, is secretly linked to the
internal fracture of the dominant system. The latter can face any
visible antagonism. But with terrorism -- and its viral structure --, as
if every domination apparatus were creating its own antibody, the
chemistry of its own disappearance; against this almost automatic

reversal of its own puissance, the system is powerless. And terrorism
is the shockwave of this silent reversal.
Thus, it is no shock of civilizations, of religions, and it goes much
beyond Islam and America, on which one attempts to focus the
conflict to give the illusion of a visible conflict and of an attainable
solution (through force). It certainly is a fundamental antagonism,
but one which shows, through the spectrum of America (which
maybe by itself the epicentre but not the embodiment of
globalization) and through the spectrum of Islam (which is
conversely not the embodiment of terrorism), triumphant
globalization fighting with itself. In this way it is indeed a World
War, not the third one, but the fourth and only truly World War, as it
has as stakes globalization itself. The first two World Wars were
classic wars. The first ended European supremacy and the colonial
era. The second ended Nazism. The third, which did happen, as a
dissuasive Cold War, ended communism. From one war to the other,
one went further each time toward a unique world order. Today the
latter, virtually accomplished, is confronted by antagonistic forces,
diffused in the very heart of the global, in all its actual convulsions.
Fractal war in which all cells, all singularities revolt as antibodies do.
It is a conflict so unfathomable that, from time to time, one must
preserve the idea of war through spectacular productions such as the
Gulf (production) and today Afghanistan's. But the fourth World War
is elsewhere. It is that which haunts every global order, every
hegemonic domination; -if Islam dominated the world, terrorism
would fight against it. For it is the world itself which resists
domination.
Terrorism is immoral. The event of the World Trade Center, this
symbolic challenge is immoral, and it answers a globalization that is
immoral. Then let us be immoral ourselves and, if we want to
understand something, let us go somewhat beyond Good and Evil. As
we have, for once, an event that challenges not only morals, but every
interpretation, let us try to have the intelligence of Evil. The crucial
point is precisely there: in this total counter-meaning to Good and
Evil in Western philosophy, the philosophy of Enlightenment. We
naively believe that the progress of the Good, its rise in all domains
(sciences, techniques, democracy, human rights) correspond to a
defeat of Evil. Nobody seems to understand that Good and Evil rise
simultaneously, and in the same movement. The triumph of the One
does not produce the erasure of the Other. Metaphysically, one
considers Evil as an accident, but this axiom, embedded in all
manichean fights of Good against Evil, is illusory. Good does not
reduce Evil, nor vice-versa: there are both irreducible, and
inextricable from each other. In fact, Good could defeat Evil only by
renouncing itself, as by appropriating a global power monopoly, it
creates a response of proportional violence.

In the traditional universe, there was still a balance of Good and Evil,
according to a dialectical relation that more or less insured tension
and equilibrium in the moral universe; - a little as in the Cold War,
the face-to-face of the two powers insured an equilibrium of terror.
Thus, there was no supremacy of one on the other. This symmetry is
broken as soon as there is a total extrapolation of the Good (an
hegemony of the positive over any form of negativity, an exclusion of
death, of any potential adversarial force: the absolute triumph of the
Good). From there, the equilibrium is broken, and it is as if Evil
regained an invisible autonomy, developing then in exponential
fashion.
Keeping everything in proportion, it is more or less what happened
in the political order with the erasure of communism and the global
triumph of liberal power: a fantastical enemy appeared, diffused over
the whole planet, infiltrating everywhere as a virus, surging from
every interstice of power. Islam. But Islam is only the moving front of
the crystallization of this antagonism. This antagonism is everywhere
and it is in each of us. Thus, terror against terror... But asymmetrical
terror... And this asymmetry leaves the global superpower totally
disarmed. Fighting itself, it can only founder in its own logic of
power relations, without being able to play in the field of symbolic
challenge and death, as it has eliminated the latter from its own
culture.
Until now this integrating power had mostly succeeded to absorb
every crisis, every negativity, creating therefore a deeply hopeless
situation (not only for the damned of the earth, but for the rich and
the privileged too, in their radical comfort). The fundamental event is
that terrorists have finished with empty suicides; they now organize
their own death in offensive and efficient ways, according to a
strategic intuition, that is the intuition of the immense fragility of
their adversary, this system reaching its quasi perfection and thus
vulnerable to the least spark. They succeeded in making their own
death the absolute arm against a system that feeds off the exclusion
of death, whose ideal is that of zero death. Any system of zero death
is a zero sum system. And all the means of dissuasion and
destruction are powerless against an enemy who has already made
his death a counter-offensive. "What of American bombings! Our
men want to die as much as Americans want to live!" This explains
the asymmetry of 7, 000 deaths in one blow against a system of zero
death.
Therefore, here, death is the key (to the game) not only the brutal
irruption of death in direct, in real time, but also the irruption of a
more-than-real death: symbolic and sacrificial death - the absolute,
no appeal event.
This is the spirit of terrorism.
Never is it to attack the system through power relations. This belongs
to the revolutionary imaginary imposed by the system itself, which

survives by ceaselessly bringing those who oppose it to fight in the
domain of the real, which is always its own. But (it) moves the fight
into the symbolic domain, where the rule is the rule of challenge, of
reversal, of escalation. Thus, death can be answered only though an
equal or superior death. (Terrorism) challenges the system by a gift
that the latter can reciprocate only through its own death and its own
collapse.
The terrorist hypothesis is that the system itself suicides in response
to the multiple challenges of death and suicide. Neither the system,
nor power, themselves escape symbolic obligation -and in this trap
resides the only chance of their demise (catastrophe). In this
vertiginous cycle of the impossible exchange of death, the terrorist
death is an infinitesimal point that provokes a gigantic aspiration,
void and convection. Around this minute point, the whole system of
the real and power gains in density, freezes, compresses, and sinks
in its own super-efficacy. The tactics of terrorism are to provoke an
excess of reality and to make the system collapse under the weight of
this excess. The very derision of the situation, as well as all the piled
up violence of power, flips against it, for terrorist actions are both the
magnifying mirror of the system's violence, and the model of a
symbolic violence that it cannot access, the only violence it cannot
exert: that of its own death.
This is why all this visible power cannot react against the minute, but
symbolic death of a few individuals.
One must recognize the birth of a new terrorism, a new form of
action that enters the game and appropriate its rules, the better to
confuse it. Not only do these people not fight with equal arms, as
they produce their own deaths, to which there is no possible response
("they are cowards"), but they appropriate all the arms of dominant
power. Money and financial speculation, information technologies
and aeronautics, the production of spectacle and media networks:
they have assimilated all of modernity and globalization, while
maintaining their aim to destroy it.
Most cunningly, they have even used the banality of American
everyday life as a mask and double game. Sleeping in their suburbs,
reading and studying within families, before waking up suddenly like
delayed explosive devices. The perfect mastery of this secretiveness is
almost as terrorist as the spectacular action of the 11 September. For
it makes one suspect: any inoffensive individual can be a potential
terrorist! If those terrorists could pass unnoticed, then anyone of us
is an unnoticed criminal (each plane is suspect too), and ultimately,
it might even be true. This might well correspond to an unconscious
form of potential criminality, masked, carefully repressed, but always
liable, if not to surge, at least to secretly vibrate with the spectacle of
Evil. Thus, the event spreads out in its minutiae, the source of an
even more subtle psychological (mental) terrorism.

The radical difference is that terrorists, while having at their disposal
all the arms of the system, have also another fatal weapon: their own
death. If they limited themselves to fighting the system with its own
weapons, they would be immediately eliminated. If they did not
oppose the system with their own death, they would disappear as
quickly as a useless sacrifice; this has almost always been the fate of
terrorism until now (thus the Palestinian suicidal attacks) and the
reason why it could not but fail.
Everything changed as soon as they allied all available modern
means to this highly symbolic weapon. The latter infinitely multiplies
their destructive potential. It is the multiplication of these two
factors (which seem to us so irreconcilable) that gives them such
superiority. Conversely, the strategy of zero death, of a technological,
'clean' war, precisely misses this transfiguration of 'real' power by
symbolic power.
The prodigious success of such an attack poses a problem, and to
understand it, one must tear oneself away from our Western
perspective, to apprehend what happens in terrorists' minds and
organization. Such efficacy, for us, would mean maximal calculation
and rationality, something we have difficulties imagining in others.
And even then, with us, there would always be, as in any rational
organization or secret service, leaks and errors.
Thus, the secret of such success is elsewhere. The difference, with
them, is that there is no work contract, but a pact and an obligation
of sacrifice. Such obligation is secure from defection and corruption.
The miracle is the adaptation to a global network, to technical
protocols without any loss of this complicity for life and to the death.
Contrary to the contract, the pact does not link individuals -- even
their 'suicide' is not individual heroism, it is a collective, sacrificial
act, sealed by demanding ideals (I'm a bit free here but I feel it
corresponds better to what is meant by 'exigence ideale'). And it is
the conjunction of these two mechanisms, born of an operational
structure and of a symbolic pact, which makes possible such an
excessive action.
We have no idea anymore of what is such a symbolic calculation, as
in poker or potlatch, with minimal stakes and maximal result. That
is, exactly what terrorists obtained in the attack on Manhattan, and
which would be a good metaphor for chaos theory: an initial shock,
provoking incalculable consequences, while American gigantic
deployment ("Desert Storm") obtained only derisory effects -- the
storm ending so to speak in the flutter of butterfly wings.
Suicidal terrorism was the terrorism of the poor; this is the terrorism
of the rich. And that is what specially frighten us: they have become
rich (they have every means) without ceasing to want to eradicate us.
Certainly, according to our value system, they cheat: staking
(gambling?) one's own death is cheating. But they could not care less,
and the new rules of the game are not ours.

We try everything to discredit their actions. Thus, we call them
"suicidal" and "martyrs". To add immediately that such martyrdom
does not prove anything, that it has nothing to do with truth and
even (quoting Nietzsche) that it is the enemy of truth. Certainly, their
death does not prove anything, but there is nothing to prove in a
system where truth itself is elusive -- or are we pretending to own it?
Besides, such a moral argument can be reversed. If the voluntary
martyrdom of the kamikazes proves nothing, then the involuntary
martyrdom of the victims cannot prove anything either, and there is
something obscene in making it a moral argument (the above is not
to negate their suffering and their death).
Another bad faith argument: these terrorists exchange their death for
a place in Paradise. Their act is not gratuitous, thus it is not
authentic. It would be gratuitous only if they did not believe in God,
if their death was without hope, as is ours (yet Christian martyrs
assumed just such sublime exchange). Thus, again, they do not fight
with equal weapons if they have the right to a salvation we can no
longer hope for. We have to lose everything by our death while they
can pledge it for the highest stakes.
Ultimately, all that -- causes, proofs, truth, rewards, means and ends
-- belongs to typically Western calculation. We even put a value to
death in terms of interest rates, and quality/price ratio. Such
economic calculations are the calculation of those poor who no
longer have even the courage to pay (the price of death?).
What can happen, apart from war, which is no more than a
conventional protection screen? We talk of bio-terrorism,
bacteriological war or nuclear terrorism. But none of that belongs to
the domain of symbolic challenge, rather it belongs to an
annihilation without speech, without glory, without risk -- that is, to
the domain of the final solution.
And to see in terrorist action a purely destructive logic is nonsense. It
seems to me that their own death is inseparable from their action ( it
is precisely what makes it a symbolic action), and not at all the
impersonal elimination of the Other. Everything resides in the
challenge and the duel, that is still in a personal, dual relation with
the adversary. It is the power of the adversary that has humbled you,
it is this power which must be humbled. And not simply
exterminated... One must make (the adversary) lose face. And this
cannot be obtained by pure force and by the suppression of the other.
The latter must be aimed at, and hurt, as a personal adversary. Apart
from the pact that links terrorists to each other, there is something
like a dual pact with the adversary. It is then, exactly the opposite to
the cowardice of which they are accused, and it is exactly the
opposite of what Americans do, for example in the Gulf War (and
which they are doing again in Afghanistan): invisible target,
operational elimination.

Of all these vicissitudes, we particularly remember seeing images.
And we must keep this proliferation of images, and their fascination,
for they constitute, willy nilly, our primitive scene. And the New York
events have radicalized the relation of images to reality, in the same
way as they have radicalized the global situation. While before we
dealt with an unbroken abundance of banal images and an
uninterrupted flow of spurious events, the terrorist attack in New
York has resurrected both the image and the event.
Among the other weapons of the system which they have co-opted
against it, terrorists have exploited the real time of images (not clear
here if it is real duration, real time or images in real time), their
instantaneous global diffusion. They have appropriated it in the same
way as they have appropriated financial speculation, electronic
information or air traffic. The role of images is highly ambiguous.
For they capture the event (take it as hostage) at the same time as
they glorify it. They can be infinitely multiplied, and at the same time
act as a diversion and a neutralization (as happened for the events of
May 68). One always forgets that when one speaks of the "danger" of
the media. The image consumes the event, that is, it absorbs the
latter and gives it back as consumer goods. Certainly the image gives
to the event an unprecedented impact, but as an image-event.
What happens then to the real event, if everywhere the image, the
fiction, the virtual, infuses reality? In this present case, one might
perceive (maybe with a certain relief) a resurgence of the real, and of
the violence of the real, in a supposedly virtual universe. "This is the
end of all your virtual stories -- that is real!" Similarly, one could
perceive a resurrection of history after its proclaimed death. But does
reality really prevail over fiction? If it seems so, it is because reality
has absorbed the energy of fiction, and become fiction itself. One
could almost say that reality is jealous of fiction, that the real is
jealous of the image... It is as if they duel, to find which is the most
unimaginable.
The collapse of the towers of the World Trade Center is
unimaginable, but that is not enough to make it a real event. A
surplus of violence is not enough to open up reality. For reality is a
principle, and this principle is lost. Real and fiction are inextricable,
and the fascination of the attack is foremost the fascination by the
image (the consequences, whether catastrophic or leading to
jubilation are themselves mostly imaginary).
It is therefore a case where the real is added to the image as a terror
bonus, as yet another thrill. It is not only terrifying, it is even real. It
is not the violence of the real that is first there, with the added thrill
of the image; rather the image is there first, with the added thrill of
the real. It is something like a prize fiction, a fiction beyond fiction.
Ballard (after Borges) was thus speaking of reinventing the real as
the ultimate, and most redoubtable, fiction.

This terrorist violence is not then reality backfiring, no more than it
is history backfiring. This terrorist violence is not "real". It is worse
in a way: it is symbolic. Violence in itself can be perfectly banal and
innocuous. Only symbolic violence generates singularity. And in this
singular event, in this disaster movie of Manhattan, the two elements
that fascinate 20th century masses are joined: the white magic of
movies and the black magic of terrorism.
One tries after the event to assign to the latter any meaning, to find
any possible interpretation. But there is none possible, and it is only
the radicality of the spectacle, the brutality of the spectacle that is
original and irreducible. The spectacle of terrorism imposes the
terrorism of the spectacle. And against this immoral fascination
(even if it engenders a universal moral reaction) the political order
can do nothing. This is our theatre of cruelty, the only one left to us,
-extraordinary because it unites the most spectacular to the most
provocative. It is both the sublime micro-model of a nucleus of real
violence with maximal resonance - thus the purest form of the
spectacular, and the sacrificial model that opposes to historical and
political order the purest symbolic form of challenge.
Any slaughter would be forgiven them if it had a meaning, if it could
be interpreted as historical violence -- this is the moral axiom of
permissible violence. Any violence would be forgiven them if it were
not broadcast by media ("Terrorism would be nothing without the
media"). But all that is illusory. There is no good usage of the media,
the media are part of the event, they are part of the terror and they
are part of the game in one way or another.
Repressive actions travel the same unpredictable spiral as terrorist
actions -- none can know where it may stop, and what reversals may
follow. At the level of the image and information, there are no
possible distinctions between the spectacular and the symbolic,
between "crime" and repression.
And this uncontrollable unraveling of reversibility is the true victory
of terrorism. It is a victory visible in the underground and extensive
ramifications of the event - not only in direct, economic, political,
market and financial recessions for the whole system, and in the
moral and psychological regression that follows; but also in the
regression of the value system, of all the ideology of freedom and free
movement etc... that the Western world is so proud of, and that
legitimates in its eyes its power over the rest of the world.
Already, the idea of freedom, a new and recent (sic) idea, is being
erased from everyday lives and consciousness, and liberal
globalization is being realized as its exact reverse: a 'Law and Order'
globalization, a total control, a policing terror. Deregulation ends in
maximal constraints and restrictions, equal to those in a
fundamentalist society.
Production, consumption, speculation and growth slowdowns (but
not of course corruption!): everything indicates a strategic retreat of

the global system, a heart-rending revision of its values, a regulation
forced by absolute disorder, but one the system imposes on itself,
internalizing its own defeat. It seems a defensive reaction to
terrorism impact, but it might in fact respond to secret injunctions.
Another side to terrorist victory is that all other forms of violence and
destabilization of order favor it: Internet terrorism, biological
terrorism, anthrax terrorism and the terrorism of the rumor, all are
assigned to Ben Laden. He could even claim natural disasters. Every
form of disorganization and perverse exchange benefits him. The
structure of generalized global exchange itself favors impossible
exchange. It is a form of terrorist automatic writing, constantly fed
by the involuntary terrorism of the news. With all its consequent
panics: if, in that anthrax story, intoxication happens by itself, by
instantaneous crystallization, like a chemical solution reacting to the
contact of a molecule, it is because the system has reached the critical
mass that makes it vulnerable to any aggression.
There is no solution to this extreme situation, especially not war that
offers only an experience of deja-vu, with the same flooding of
military forces, fantastic news, useless propaganda, deceitful and
pathetic discourses and technological deployment. In other words, as
in the Gulf War, a non-event, an event that did not happen...
There is its raison d'etre: to substitute to a real and formidable,
unique and unforeseeable event, a repetitive and deja-vu pseudoevent. The terrorist attack corresponded to a primacy of the event
over every model of interpretation. Conversely, this stupidly military
and technological war corresponds to a primacy of the model over
the event, that is to fictitious stakes and to a non-sequitur. War
extends/continues the absence at the heart of politics through other
means.
Baudrillard, Jean. "The Spirit of Terrorism." Le Monde 2 November
2001. Available:

M

ark Bowden was watching a ballgame — the

Phillies versus the Mets — on the night of May 1, 2011, when the
network cut away to President Obama in the East Room of the White
House. “Tonight,” the president said, ‘‘I can report to the American
people and to the world that the United States has conducted an
operation that killed Osama bin Laden, the leader of Al Qaeda and a
terrorist who’s responsible for the murder of thousands of innocent
men, women and children.’’
Five minutes or so after the president wrapped up his brief remarks,
as thousands of Americans gathered in front of the White House and
at ground zero chanting ‘‘U-S-A! U-S-A!’’ Bowden’s cellphone rang. It
was Mike Stenson, the president of Jerry Bruckheimer Films.
Bowden had worked with Bruckheimer on the film adaptation of his
1999 best seller, ‘‘Black Hawk Down.’’

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‘‘Mike said, ‘Look, Mark, Jerry wants to make a movie about this bin
Laden thing, and he wants to put together all of the people who made
‘Black Hawk Down,’ ’’ Bowden told me over lunch recently. ‘‘ ‘He
wants to know: Would you be willing to write the script?’ ’’
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Bowden said absolutely, count him in.
He quickly reached out to Jay Carney, Obama’s press secretary at the
time, to ask for an interview with the president. Bowden was friendly
with Carney from a profile he wrote of Vice President Joseph R.
Biden Jr. for The Atlantic. Still, he was surprised to hear back from
him almost right away. It was an encouraging response, especially
given the deluge of requests Bowden knew the president must be
receiving. Carney said that he couldn’t make any promises but that
he would definitely advocate on his behalf.
The next day, Stenson called back: Bruckheimer had changed his
mind.
Bowden considered for a second and decided he would write a book
instead. In some ways, it was a perfect match of author and subject.
Bowden specializes in chronicling covert operations. In addition to
‘‘Black Hawk Down,’’ which told the story of a 1993 raid in Somalia
by U.S. Army Rangers and Delta Force teams that went disastrously
awry, he has written books about the failed mission to rescue the
American hostages in Iran in 1980 and the long manhunt for the
Colombian drug kingpin Pablo Escobar.
His method in those books was to combine exhaustive reporting with
vivid storytelling. It helps that Bowden tends to write about historical
events a long time after they take place. People are typically eager to
sit down with him, and they are usually able to speak freely. One
interview subject leads to another, who leads to another, and so on.
It’s a process that can take years.

The bin Laden book proved to be a very different sort of undertaking.
Bowden was trying to tell the story just months after it happened.
And only a small number of people — a handful of senior
administration and military officials and the Navy SEALs who
carried out the operation — had been privy to the events of that
evening. There was virtually no paper trail for Bowden to follow; the
government had classified all the documents relating to the raid,
including the record of the C.I.A.’s search for bin Laden. Bowden had
to request interviews through official administration channels and
hope for the best.
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His book, ‘‘The Finish,’’ was published in the fall of 2012, and the
story it tells is one that is by now familiar. The C.I.A., working in the
shadows for many years, had identified a courier whom agency
officers eventually traced to a large compound in Abbottabad,
Pakistan. Agents studied this compound for months via distant
satellite cameras but couldn’t be certain that bin Laden was inside. If
he was — a 55/45 percent proposition, Obama said later — the
president did not want to let him slip away. The safe play was to
reduce the compound to dust with a bomb or missiles, but this would
risk civilian casualties and also make it impossible to verify the kill
with any certainty. Obama instead sent in a team of 23 Navy SEALs
in two Black Hawk helicopters. The whole mission almost fell apart
when one of the helicopters had to crash-land near an animal pen
inside the compound. But the SEALs adapted on the fly and were
soon making their assault, breaching gates and doors with C-4
charges and, eventually, killing their target. Before leaving, they blew
up the damaged Black Hawk. As they flew off, a giant fire raged
inside the compound. The Pakistani government was none the wiser
until the SEALs were long gone.
This irresistible story would be told in many different forms in the
months and years that followed. Bowden’s was one of several books,
but there were also countless newspaper articles, magazine features,
television news programs and ultimately the 2012 movie ‘‘Zero Dark
Thirty,’’ which billed itself as the narrative of ‘‘the Greatest Manhunt
in History.’’ In this sense, the killing of bin Laden was not only a
victory for the U.S. military but also for the American storytelling
machine, which kicked into high gear pretty much the moment the
terrorist leader’s dead body hit the floor.
Last spring, Bowden got another unexpected call on his cellphone.
He was on his way home to Pennsylvania from a meeting in New
York with his publisher about his next book, the story of the Battle of

Hue in the Vietnam War. On the other end of the line was Seymour
Hersh, the investigative reporter.
Hersh was calling to ask about the photographs of bin Laden’s burial
at sea — carried out, the U.S. government said, in accordance with
Islamic custom — that Bowden had described in detail at the end of
‘‘The Finish,’’ as well as in an adaptation from the book that
appeared in Vanity Fair. ‘‘One frame shows the body wrapped in a
weighted shroud,’’ Bowden had written. ‘‘The next shows it lying
diagonally on a chute, feet overboard. In the next frame, the body is
hitting the water. In the next it is visible just below the surface,
ripples spreading outward. In the last frame there are only circular
ripples on the surface. The mortal remains of Osama bin Laden were
gone for good.’’
Hersh wanted to know: Had Bowden actually seen those photos?
Bowden told Hersh that he had not. He explained that they were
described to him by someone who had.
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Hersh said the photographs didn’t exist. Indeed, he went on, the
entire narrative of how the United States hunted down and killed bin
Laden was a fabrication. He told Bowden that he was getting ready to
publish the real story of what happened in Abbottabad.
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Bowden said he found Hersh’s claims hard to believe. Hersh tried to
sympathize. ‘‘Nobody likes to get played,’’ he said, adding that he
meant no offense.
‘‘I said, ‘No offense taken,’ ’’ Bowden recalled. ‘‘I told him that he
was, after all, Seymour Hersh, and that he ought to do whatever he
thought best. But that in this case, I feared he was mistaken.’’
It’s hard to overstate the degree to which the killing of Osama bin
Laden transformed American politics. From a purely practical
standpoint, it enabled Obama to recast himself as a bold leader, as
opposed to an overly cautious one, in advance of his 2012 re-election
campaign. This had an undeniable impact on the outcome of that
election. (‘‘Osama bin Laden is dead and General Motors is alive,’’
Joe Biden was fond of boasting on the campaign trail.) Strategically,
the death of bin Laden allowed Obama to declare victory over Al

Qaeda, giving him the cover he needed to begin phasing U.S. troops
out of Afghanistan. And it almost single-handedly redeemed the
C.I.A., turning a decade-long failure of intelligence into one of the
greatest triumphs in the history of the agency.
But bin Laden’s death had an even greater effect on the American
psyche. Symbolically, it brought a badly wanted moment of moral
clarity, of unambiguous American valor, to a murky war defined by
ethical compromise and even at times by collective shame. It
completed the historical arc of the 9/11 attacks. The ghastly image of
collapsing towers that had been fixed in our collective minds for
years was dislodged by one of Obama and his senior advisers
huddled tensely around a table in the White House Situation Room,
watching closely as justice was finally brought to the perpetrator.
The first dramatic reconstruction of the raid itself — ‘‘Getting bin
Laden: What Happened That Night in Abbottabad’’ — was written by
a freelancer named Nicholas Schmidle and published in The New
Yorker just three months after the operation. The son of a Marine
general, Schmidle spent a couple of years in Pakistan and has written
on counterterrorism for many publications, including this magazine.
His New Yorker story was a cinematic account of military daring,
sweeping but also granular in its detail, from the ‘‘metallic cough of
rounds being chambered’’ inside the two Black Hawks as the SEALs
approached the compound, to the mud that ‘‘sucked at their boots’’
when they hit the ground. One of the SEALs who shot bin Laden,
Matt Bissonnette, added a more personal dimension to the story a
year later in a best-selling book, ‘‘No Easy Day.’’ Bowden focused on
Washington, taking readers inside the White House as the president
navigated what would become a defining moment of his presidency.
And then there was ‘‘Zero Dark Thirty,’’ which chronicled the often
barbaric C.I.A. interrogations that the agency said helped lead the
United States to bin Laden’s compound.
Photo

CreditIllustration by Javier Jaén
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The official narrative of the hunt for and killing of bin Laden at first
seemed like a clear portrait, but in effect it was more like a composite
sketch from multiple perspectives: the Pentagon, the White House
and the C.I.A. And when you studied that sketch a little more closely,
not everything looked quite right. Almost immediately, the
administration had to correct some of the most significant details of
the raid. Bin Laden had not been ‘‘engaged in a firefight,’’ as the
deputy national-security adviser, John Brennan, initially told
reporters; he’d been unarmed. Nor had he used one of his wives as a
human shield. The president and his senior advisers hadn’t been

watching a ‘‘live feed’’ of the raid in the Situation Room; the
operation had not been captured on helmet-cams. But there were
also some more unsettling questions about how the whole story had
been constructed. Schmidle acknowledged after his article was
published that he had never actually spoken with any of the 23
SEALs. Some details of Bissonnette’s account of the raid contradicted
those of another ex-SEAL, Robert O’Neill, who claimed in
Esquire and on Fox News to have fired the fatal bullet. Public
officials with security clearances told reporters that the torture
scenes that were so realistically depicted in ‘‘Zero Dark Thirty’’ had
not in fact played any role in helping us find bin Laden.
Then there was the sheer improbability of the story, which asked us
to believe that Obama sent 23 SEALs on a seemingly suicidal
mission, invading Pakistani air space without air or ground cover,
fast-roping into a compound that, if it even contained bin Laden, by
all rights should have been heavily guarded. And according to the
official line, all of this was done without any sort of cooperation or
even assurances from the Pakistani military or intelligence service.
How likely was that? Abbottabad is basically a garrison town; the
conspicuously large bin Laden compound — three stories, encircled
by an 18-foot-high concrete wall topped with barbed wire — was less
than two miles from Pakistan’s equivalent of West Point. And what
about the local police? Were they really unaware that an enormous
American helicopter had crash-landed in their neighborhood? And
why were we learning so much about a covert raid by a secret specialoperations unit in the first place?
American history is filled with war stories that subsequently
unraveled. Consider the Bush administration’s false claims about
Saddam Hussein’s supposed arsenal of weapons of mass destruction.
Or the imagined attack on a U.S. vessel in the Gulf of Tonkin. During
the Bay of Pigs, the government inflated the number of fighters it
dispatched to Cuba in hopes of encouraging local citizens to rise up
and join them. When the operation failed, the government quickly
deflated the number, claiming that it hadn’t been an invasion at all
but rather a modest attempt to deliver supplies to local guerrillas.
More recently, the Army reported that the ex-N.F.L. safety Pat
Tillman was killed by enemy fire, rather than acknowledging that he
was accidentally shot in the head by a machine-gunner from his own
unit.
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These false stories couldn’t have reached the public without the help
of the media. Reporters don’t just find facts; they look for narratives.

And an appealing narrative can exert a powerful gravitational pull
that winds up bending facts in its direction. During the Iraq war,
reporters informed us that a mob of jubilant Iraqis toppled the statue
of Saddam Hussein in Firdos Square. Never mind that there were so
few local people trying to pull the statue down that they needed the
help of a U.S. military crane. Reporters also built Pvt. Jessica Lynch
into a war hero who had resisted her captors during an ambush in
Iraq, when in fact her weapon had jammed and she remained in her
Humvee. In an Op-Ed essay in The Timesabout the Lynch story in
2003, it was Bowden himself who explained this phenomenon as
‘‘the tendency to weave what little we know into a familiar shape —
often one resembling the narrative arc of a film.’’
Was the story of Osama bin Laden’s death yet another example of
American mythmaking? Had Bowden and, for that matter, all of us
been seduced by a narrative that was manufactured expressly for our
benefit? Or were these questions themselves just paranoid?
‘‘The story stunk from Day 1,’’ Hersh told me. It was a miserably
hot summer day in Washington, and we were sitting in his office, a
two-room suite in an anonymous office complex near Dupont Circle,
where Hersh works alone. There’s no nameplate on the door; the
walls of the anteroom are crowded with journalism awards. ‘‘I have a
lot of fun here,’’ he said, amid the clutter of cardboard boxes and
precariously stacked books. ‘‘I can do whatever I want.’’
Within days of the bin Laden raid, Hersh told me, ‘‘I knew there was
a big story there.’’ He spent the next four years, on and off, trying to
get it. What he wound up publishing, this May in The London Review
of Books, was no incremental effort to poke a few holes in the
administration’s story. It was a 10,000-word refutation of the entire
official narrative, sourced largely to a retired U.S. senior intelligence
official, with corroboration from two ‘‘longtime consultants to the
Special Operations Command.’’ Hersh confidently walked readers
through an alternate version of all the familiar plot points in a
dispassionate, just-the-facts tone, turning a story of patient
perseverance, careful planning and derring-do into one of luck (good
and bad), damage control and opportunism.
Hersh, who is 78, was reluctant to cooperate when I told him that I
was interested in writing about his article. (‘‘I’ve gotta bunch of
problems with your request,’’ his first email to me began.) He wanted
me to follow up on his reporting instead and suggested that I might
start by looking into Pakistan’s radar system, which he said was far
too sophisticated to allow two U.S. helicopters to enter the country’s
airspace undetected. (‘‘Those dimwitted third-world guys just can’t
get anything right,’’ he wrote sarcastically, meaning of course the

Pakistanis would have been aware of two military helicopters flying
into the heart of their country.) Hersh, who worked at The New York
Times for seven years in the 1970s, didn’t think the paper would
allow me to take his claims seriously. ‘‘If you did so,’’ he wrote, ‘‘you
better be sure not to let your wife start the car for the next few
months.’’ But after a little prodding, he relented and spent the better
part of a day with me, describing his reporting as thoroughly as he
felt he could without compromising his sources.
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Hersh’s most consequential claim was about how bin Laden was
found in the first place. It was not years of painstaking intelligencegathering, he wrote, that led the United States to the courier and,
ultimately, to bin Laden. Instead, the location was revealed by a
‘‘walk-in’’ — a retired Pakistani intelligence officer who was after the
$25 million reward that the United States had promised anyone who
helped locate him. For that matter, bin Laden was hardly ‘‘in hiding’’
at all; his compound in Abbottabad was actually a safe house,
maintained by the Pakistani intelligence service. When the United
States confronted Pakistani intelligence officials with this
information, Hersh wrote, they eventually acknowledged it was true
and even conceded to provide a DNA sample to prove it.
According to Hersh’s version, then, the daring raid wasn’t especially
daring. The Pakistanis allowed the U.S. helicopters into their
airspace and cleared out the guards at the compound before the
SEALs arrived. Hersh’s sources told him the United States and
Pakistani intelligence officials agreed that Obama would wait a week
before announcing that bin Laden had been killed in a ‘‘drone strike
somewhere in the mountains on the Pakistan/Afghanistan border.’’
But the president was forced to go public right away, because the
crash and subsequent destruction of the Black Hawk — among the
rare facts in the official story that Hersh does not dispute — were
going to make it impossible to keep the operation under wraps.
As if those assertions weren’t significant enough, Hersh went on to
make some even wilder claims. He wrote, for instance, that bin
Laden had not been given a proper Islamic burial at sea; the SEALs
threw his remains out of their helicopter. He claimed not just that
the Pakistanis had seized bin Laden in 2006, but that Saudi Arabia
had paid for his upkeep in the years that followed, and that the
United States had instructed Pakistan to arrest an innocent man who
was a sometime C.I.A. asset as the fall guy for the major in the
Pakistani Army who had collected bin Laden’s DNA sample.

What was perhaps most shocking of all, though, was that this
elaborate narrative was being unspooled not by some basement
autodidact but by one of America’s greatest investigative reporters,
the man who exposed the massacre of hundreds of Vietnamese
civilians in the village of My Lai (1969), who revealed a clandestine
C.I.A. program to spy on antiwar dissidents (1974) and who detailed
the shocking story of the abuses at Abu Ghraib (2004). Could the bin
Laden article be another major Hersh scoop?
‘‘It’s always possible,’’ Bowden told me. ‘‘But given the sheer number
of people I talked to from different parts of government, for a lie to
have been that carefully orchestrated and sustained to me gets into
faked-moon-landing territory.’’ Other reporters have been less
generous still. ‘‘What’s true in the story isn’t new, and what’s new in
the story isn’t true,’’ said Peter Bergen of CNN, who wrote his own
best-selling account of the hunting and killing of bin Laden,
‘‘Manhunt.’’ And government officials were least receptive of all. Josh
Earnest, then the White House spokesman, said Hersh’s ‘‘story is
riddled with inaccuracies and outright falsehoods.’’ Col. Steve
Warren, a Pentagon spokesman, said it was ‘‘largely a fabrication.’’
(There were ‘‘too many inaccuracies to even bother going through
them line by line.’’) The administration pretty much left it at that,
though some of Hersh’s critics have pointed to classified documents
made public by Edward Snowden revealing a long history of C.I.A.
surveillance of the Abbottabad compound as proof that its location
hadn’t simply been revealed by a walk-in.
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This sort of reception is nothing new for Hersh. A Pentagon
spokesman at the time of Abu Ghraib, Lawrence Di Rita, described
one of his many (now unchallenged) articles for The New Yorker on
the scandal as ‘‘the most hysterical piece of journalist malpractice I
have ever observed.’’ Still, Hersh got worked up in some of the
interviews he gave after the publication of the bin Laden piece. ‘‘I
don’t care if you don’t like my story!’’ he told a public-radio host
during one grilling. ‘‘I don’t care!’’ But with time, his petulance
cooled into a kind of amusement. ‘‘High-camp’’ was one adjective he
used to describe the administration’s version of the events.
At one point in our conversation, I reminded Hersh that I wasn’t
going to offer a definitive judgment on what happened. I didn’t want
to reinterview the administration officials who had already given
their accounts of the events to other journalists. I saw this as more of
a media story, a case study in how constructed narratives become
accepted truth. This felt like a cop-out to him, as he explained in a

long email the next day. He said that I was sidestepping the real
issue, that I was ‘‘turning this into a ‘he-said, she-said’ dilemma,’’
instead of coming to my own conclusion about whose version was
right. It was then that he introduced an even more disturbing notion:
What if no one’s version could be trusted?
‘‘Of course there is no reason for you or any other journalist to take
what was said to me by unnamed sources at face value,’’ Hersh wrote.
‘‘But it is my view that there also is no reason for journalists to take
at face value what a White House or administration spokesman said
on or off the record in the aftermath or during a crisis.’’
For those in and around the news business, the fact that Hersh’s
report appeared in The London Review of Books and not The New
Yorker, his usual outlet, was a story in its own right, one that hasn’t
been told in full before. (Editors and reporters may not be as
secretive as intelligence officials, but they like to keep a tight lid on
their operational details, too.)
A week or so after the raid, Hersh called The New Yorker’s editor,
David Remnick. In 2009, Hersh wrote a story for the magazine about
the growing concern among U.S. officials that Pakistan’s large
nuclear arsenal could fall into the hands of extremists inside the
country’s military. Now he let Remnick know that two of his sources
— one in Pakistan, the other in Washington — were telling him
something else: The administration was lying about the bin Laden
operation.
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One of The New Yorker’s staff writers, Dexter Filkins, was already
planning a trip to Pakistan for a different assignment. It is rare, but
not unprecedented, for The New Yorker to run double-bylined
articles, and the magazine decided to pursue one. It paired Filkins
with Hersh, asking Filkins to report the Pakistani side — in
particular, the notion that Pakistan had secretly cooperated with the
United States — while Hersh would keep following leads from

Washington. But Filkins, who covered Afghanistan and Pakistan for
The Times before moving to The New Yorker, spent about a week
running the tip by sources inside the Pakistani government and
military with little success.
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‘‘It wasn’t even that I was getting angry denials,’’ Filkins told me. ‘‘I
was getting blank stares.’’ Filkins said the mood on the ground
completely contradicted Hersh’s claim; the Pakistani military seemed
humiliated about having been kept in the dark by the Americans.
Remnick told him to move on. He ended up writing about a Pakistani
journalist who was murdered, probably by the country’s intelligence
service, the I.S.I., after detailing the links between Islamist militants
and the Pakistani military.
In the meantime, The New Yorker published Schmidle’s account of
the bin Laden raid, and, soon after, brought Schmidle on as a staff
writer. (In an email, Schmidle told me his subsequent reporting has
only confirmed his initial account. Regarding the possibility ‘‘that
some inside the Pakistani military or intelligence services knew that
bin Laden was living in that house, I think it’s entirely plausible,
though I’ve not seen any proof,’’ he wrote.)
Hersh plowed ahead by himself, working his sources, trying to flesh
out his counternarrative. Three years later he sent a draft to The New
Yorker. After reading it a few times, Remnick told Hersh that he
didn’t think he had the story nailed down. He suggested that Hersh
continue his reporting and see where it took him. Instead, Hersh
gave the story to The London Review of Books.
Hersh has never been on The New Yorker’s staff, preferring to
remain a freelancer. But he has strong ties to the magazine. He
published his first article there in 1971 and has written hundreds of
thousands of words for the magazine since then, including, most
recently, an essay about visiting My Lai with his family that was
published only weeks before his London Review of Books article on
bin Laden. (His son Joshua, now a reporter for Buzzfeed, was a New
Yorker fact-checker for many years.) Remnick has published some of
Hersh’s most provocative articles and, for that matter, plenty of other
major national-security stories that the government would have
preferred to keep buried.
But the bin Laden report wasn’t the first one by Hersh that Remnick
rejected because he considered the sourcing too thin. In 2013 and
2014, he passed on two Hersh articles about a deadly sarin gas attack

in Syria, each of which claimed the attack was not launched by the
Assad regime, the presumed culprit, but by Syrian rebels, in
collaboration with the Turkish government. Those articles also
landed in The London Review of Books. Like the bin Laden article,
each was widely questioned upon publication, with critics arguing
that the once-legendary reporter was increasingly favoring
provocation over rigor. (Hersh still stands by both stories.)
The media would certainly have treated Hersh’s bin Laden story
differently if it had been published in The New Yorker, which is
highly regarded for its thorough review process. But Hersh insists
that the L.R.B. was just as thorough, if not more so. His editor,
Christian Lorentzen, told me that three fact-checkers worked on the
bin Laden article, and he also spoke directly to Hersh’s key sources,
including the retired American intelligence official identified in the
article as the ‘‘major U.S. source for the account.’’
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Even if the fact-checking process at The London Review of Books was
as thorough as Hersh and the magazine say, we are still left trusting
his unnamed sources. Should we? Hersh’s first Abu Ghraib article
was based on an internal Army report, but many of the most
important revelations in his work come from midlevel bureaucrats,
ambassadors, C.I.A. station chiefs and four-star generals whose
identities are known to only his editors and fact-checkers. The
promise of anonymity is an essential tool for reporters. It changed
the course of history (in Watergate, most prominently) and helped
make Hersh’s illustrious career. But it also invariably leaves doubts
about the motivation of the sources and thus their credibility.
Hersh’s instincts — to him, every story stinks from Day 1 — have
served him well. But there are inherent perils in making a career of
digging up the government’s deepest secrets. National-security
reporters are almost never present at the events in question, and they
are usually working without photos or documents, too. Their hardest
facts consist almost entirely of what (unnamed) people say. It is a
bedrock value of journalism that reporters must never get facts
wrong, but faithfully reproducing what people tell you is just the
beginning. You have to also decide which facts and which voices to
include and how best to assemble this material into an accurate,
coherent narrative: a story. In making these judgments, even the best
might miss a nuance or choose the wrong fact or facts to emphasize.
As Steve Coll, a New Yorker staff writer and the dean of the Columbia
University Graduate School of Journalism, told me, ‘‘You’d want an

investigative reporter’s reputation to not be 100 percent right all of
the time, but to be mostly right, to be directionally right.’’
Hersh may have been the first journalist to write that a secret
informant had steered the United States to bin Laden’s compound,
but he was by no means the only one who had heard this rumor. Coll
was another. ‘‘In my case, it was described to me as a specific
Pakistani officer in the intelligence service,’’ Coll, the author of a
Pulitzer Prize-winning book about the C.I.A. and Afghanistan, told
me one afternoon in his office at Columbia. ‘‘I even had a name that
I’ve been working on for four years.’’
Intuitively, the notion of a walk-in makes sense. Secret informants
have led the United States to virtually every high-value terrorist
target tracked to Pakistan, including Ramzi Yousef, the first World
Trade Center bomber, and Mir Aimal Kansi, who killed two C.I.A.
employees in an attack on Langley in 1993. ‘‘The idea that the C.I.A.
stitched this together, and torture worked and they found the car and
they found the courier, then they found the license plate and they
followed it to the house — that had always seemed to those of us on
the beat like it was very elaborate,’’ Coll said.
But Coll has never been able to confirm the tipper story. The closest
he came was a conversation with an American intelligence officer
who had worked with the man said to have been the informant. ‘‘I
said, ‘Do you know this guy?’ ’’ Coll recalled. ‘‘He said: ‘Yeah, I do
know him. I used to work very closely with him.’ I said, ‘Is this bio
that I’ve been given accurate?’ He said, ‘Yeah, it’s accurate.’ I said,
‘I’ve been told he took the $25 million and is in witness protection.’
He paused, and he said, ‘Hmm, that’s the sort of thing he would do.’ ’’
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From the beginning, it seemed hard to believe that high-level
Pakistani officials weren’t aware of bin Laden’s presence in their
country; several U.S. officials even publicly said as much in the
aftermath of the raid. Pakistan conducted its own secret investigation
into the matter, which was leaked to Al Jazeera in 2013. The
Abbottabad Commission Report, as it was known, found no evidence
that Pakistan was harboring bin Laden. Instead, it concluded that the
world’s most wanted man was able to move freely around the country
for nine years because of widespread incompetence among military
and intelligence authorities.
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RECENT COMMENTS

Cheekos
3 hours ago
When a story has Seymour Hersh's name even mentioned in it, and you have an
interest in Foreign Affairs, you had better read it. He is, by...

Jim
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I've long thought that Seymour Hersh, at 78, is long past his prime and is mostly
trafficking in rumor and innuendo now. His exceptionally...

Jim
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Read Mark Bowden's response to this story:
http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2015/10/mark-bowden-bin-laden-capture-con...Seymour
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The most detailed exploration of the question of Pakistani complicity
in sheltering bin Laden appeared in this magazine in March 2014. It
came from a book written by a Times correspondent, Carlotta Gall,
who reported that a source inside the I.S.I. told her that Pakistan’s
intelligence service ran a special desk assigned to handle bin Laden.
‘‘The desk was wholly deniable by virtually everyone at the I.S.I. —
such is how supersecret intelligence units operate — but the top
military bosses knew about it, I was told,’’ Gall wrote.
More controversial is Hersh’s claim that Pakistan knew in
advance about the SEAL team raid and allowed it to proceed, even
helped facilitate it. This is the starkest departure from the standard
story as it was reported previously. Logically, it would require us to
accept that the U.S. government trusted the Pakistanis to help it kill
bin Laden, and that the humiliation that Pakistan’s military and
intelligence reportedly felt in the aftermath of the raid was either a
ruse or the product of some even deeper U.S.-Pakistani intrigue. Is
there any evidence to support this claim or, really, anything we can
latch onto beyond Hersh’s unnamed sources?
Eleven days after the raid, an unbylined story appeared on
GlobalPost, an American website specializing in foreign reporting.
The dateline was Abbottabad; the story was headlined: ‘‘Bin Laden
Raid: Neighbors Say Pakistan Knew.’’ A half-dozen people who lived
near bin Laden’s compound told the reporter that plainclothes
security personnel — ‘‘either Pakistani intelligence or military
officers’’ — knocked on their doors a couple of hours before the raid

and instructed them to turn the lights off and remain indoors until
further notice. Some local people also told the reporter that they
were directed not to speak to the media, especially the foreign media.
When I contacted the chief executive of GlobalPost, Philip Balboni,
he told me he considered trying to aggressively publicize this
narrative when he first posted it. ‘‘[B]ut that would have required
resources that we did not possess at the time, and the information
against it was so overwhelming that even we had to wonder if our
sources were right,’’ he wrote me in an email.
Balboni put me in touch with the reporter, Aamir Latif, a 41-year-old
Pakistani journalist. Latif, a former foreign correspondent for U.S.
News and World Report, told me that he traveled to Abbottabad the
day after bin Laden was killed and reported there for a couple of
days. I asked him if he still believed that there was some level of
Pakistani awareness of the raid. ‘‘Not awareness,’’ he answered
instantly. ‘‘There was coordination and cooperation.’’
Photo

The investigative reporter Seymour Hersh.CreditGabriella Demczuk for The New York
Times
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Latif, who kept his name off the original post because of the
sensitivity of the subject in Pakistan, said that people in the area told
him that they heard the U.S. helicopters and that surely the Pakistani
military had, too: ‘‘The whole country was awake, only the Pakistani
Army was asleep? What does that suggest to you?’’ Gall has also
written that bin Laden’s neighbors heard the explosions at the
compound and contacted the local police, but that army commanders
told the police to stand down and leave the response to the military.

The SEALs were on the ground for 40 minutes, but the Pakistani
Army didn’t arrive until after they had left.
Gall’s best guess (and she emphasizes that it is just a guess) is that
the United States alerted Pakistan to the bin Laden operation at the
11th hour. ‘‘I have no proof, but the more I think about it and the
more I talk to Pakistani friends, the more I think it’s probably true
that Kayani and Pasha were in on it,’’ Gall told me, referring to Gen.
Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, who was then the chief of the army staff, and
Gen. Ahmed Shuja Pasha, then the director general of the I.S.I. As for
killing bin Laden, she said: ‘‘The scenario I imagine is that the
Americans watched him and tracked him and never told the
Pakistanis because they didn’t trust them, but when they decided to
go ahead with the raid, I think they might have gone to Kayani and
Pasha and said, ‘We’re going in, and don’t you dare shoot down our
helicopters or else.’ ’’ (I should note that not every national-security
reporter, including some at The Times, agrees with Gall about the
likelihood of high-level Pakistani complicity in either harboring bin
Laden or helping kill him.)
Following Gall’s scenario to its logical conclusion, Pakistan would
have faced an unappealing choice after the raid: acknowledge that it
had cooperated and risk angering hard-liners for betraying bin
Laden and abetting a U.S. military operation on Pakistani soil, or
plead ignorance and incompetence.
‘‘The Pakistanis often fall back on, ‘We were incompetent,’ ’’ Gall
said. ‘‘They don’t want their countrymen to know what they’re
playing at. They fear there will be a backlash.’’
Where does the official bin Laden story stand now? For many, it
exists in a kind of liminal state, floating somewhere between fact and
mythology. The writing of history is a process, and this story still
seems to have a long way to go before the government’s narrative can
be accepted as true, or rejected as false.
‘‘It’s all sort of hokey, the whole thing,’’ Robert Baer, a longtime
C.I.A. case officer in the Middle East (and the inspiration for the
George Clooney character in the movie ‘‘Syriana’’) told me of the
government’s version of the events. ‘‘I’ve never seen a White House
take that kind of risk. Did the president just wake up one morning
and say, ‘Let’s put my presidency on the line right before an
election?’ This guy is too smart to put 23 SEALs in harm’s way in a
Hollywood-like assassination. He’s too smart.’’ Still, none of Baer’s
old friends inside or outside the agency have challenged the
administration’s account.
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Over time, many of Hersh’s claims could be proved right. What then?
We may be justifiably outraged. Pakistan, our putative ally in the war
on terror and the beneficiary of billions of dollars in U.S. taxpayer
aid, would have provided refuge to our greatest enemy — the author
of the very act that prompted us to invade Afghanistan. The
audacious raid on bin Laden’s compound, our greatest victory in the
war on terror, would have been little more than ‘‘a turkey shoot’’
(Hersh’s phrase). Above all, our government would have lied to us.
But should we really be shocked by such a revelation? After all, it
would barely register on a scale of government secrecy and deception
that includes, in recent years alone, the N.S.A.’s covert wiretapping
program and the C.I.A.’s off-the-books network of ‘‘black site’’
prisons. ‘‘White House public-affairs people are not historians, they
are not scholars, they are not even journalists,’’ Steven Aftergood,
director of the Project on Government Secrecy for the Federation of
American Scientists, told me. ‘‘They are representing a political
entity inside the United States government. Telling the whole truth
and nothing but the truth is not their job, and even if it were their
job, they would not necessarily be able to do it.’’
Hersh’s version doesn’t require us to believe in the possibility of a
governmentwide conspiracy. Myths can be projected through an
uncoordinated effort with a variety of people really just doing their
jobs. Of course, when enough people are obscuring the truth, the
results can seem, well, conspiratorial. Hersh is fond of pointing out
that thousands of government employees and contractors
presumably knew about the N.S.A.’s wiretapping, but only one,
Edward Snowden, came forward.
We can go a step further: The more sensitive the subject, the more
likely the government will be to feed us untruths. Consider our
relationship with Pakistan, which Obama clearly had on his mind in
the aftermath of the raid. In his address to the nation, Obama
expressed his gratitude: ‘‘Over the years, I’ve repeatedly made clear
that we would take action within Pakistan if we knew where bin
Laden was. That is what we’ve done. But it’s important to note that
our counterterrorism cooperation with Pakistan helped lead us to bin
Laden and the compound where he was hiding.’’
Either the line in Obama’s statement wasn’t truthful or the
administration’s subsequent disavowal of it wasn’t. But in either
case, it’s hard to imagine that telling the whole truth was more
important to Obama, or should have been more important, than
managing America’s relationship with this unstable ally.

There’s simply no reason to expect the whole truth from the
government about the killing of bin Laden. If a tipper led the United
States to his compound in Abbottabad, the administration could
never say so without putting that individual’s life at risk and making
it virtually impossible for the C.I.A. to recruit informants in the
future. If Pakistan didn’t want us to acknowledge its cooperation
with the raid, we wouldn’t, for fear of igniting the militant backlash
Gall mentioned. Hersh himself has written — in The New Yorker —
that there is a credible danger of extremists inside Pakistan’s military
staging a coup and taking control of its large stockpile of nuclear
weapons.
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Reporters like to think of themselves as empiricists, but
journalism is a soft science. Absent documentation, the grail of
national-security reporting, they are only as good as their sources
and their deductive reasoning. But what happens when different
sources offer different accounts and deductive reasoning can be used
to advance any number of contradictory arguments? How do we
square Latif’s reporting in Abbottabad and Baer’s skepticism with the
official story that Bowden and many others heard?
‘‘As a reporter in this world,’’ Bowden told me, ‘‘you have to always
allow for the possibility that you are being lied to, you hope for good
reason.’’
We may already know far more about the bin Laden raid than we
were ever supposed to. In his 2014 memoir ‘‘Duty,’’ the former
secretary of defense, Robert M. Gates, wrote that everyone who
gathered in the White House Situation Room on the night of the raid
had agreed to ‘‘keep mum on the details.’’ ‘‘That commitment lasted
about five hours,’’ he added, pointing his finger directly at the White
House and the C.I.A: ‘‘They just couldn’t wait to brag and to claim
credit.’’
The problem is that amid all of this bragging, it became impossible to
know what was true and what wasn’t. Recall ‘‘Zero Dark Thirty,’’
which grossed $130 million at the box office and was in many ways
the dominant narrative of the killing of bin Laden. The filmmakers,
in numerous interviews, went out of their way to promote their
access to government and military sources: The opening credits
announced that the film was based on ‘‘firsthand accounts of actual

events.’’ And, as a trove of documents made public via the Freedom
of Information Act amply demonstrated, the C.I.A. eagerly
cooperated with the filmmakers, arranging for the writer and
director to meet with numerous analysts and officers who were
identified as being involved in the hunt for bin Laden. The director,
Kathryn Bigelow, has described the film as ‘‘the first rough cut of
history.’’
This was a story that was so good it didn’t need to be fictionalized, or
so it seemed. It began with a series of C.I.A.-led torture sessions,
which the movie suggested provided the crucial break in the hunt for
bin Laden. Only they didn’t, at least according to a report conducted
over the course of many years by the Senate Intelligence Committee
(and others with access to classified information). Senator Dianne
Feinstein, who oversaw the report as the committee’s chairwoman,
said she walked out of a screening of the film. ‘‘I couldn’t handle it,’’
she said. ‘‘Because it’s so false.’’ The filmmakers’ intent had
presumably been to tell a nuanced story — the ugly truth of how we
found bin Laden — but in so doing, they seem to have perpetuated a
lie.
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It’s not that the truth about bin Laden’s death is unknowable; it’s
that we don’t know it. And we can’t necessarily console ourselves
with the hope that we will have more answers any time soon; to this
day, the final volume of the C.I.A.’s official history of the Bay of Pigs
remains classified. We don’t know what happened more than a halfcentury ago, much less in 2011.
There are different ways to control a narrative. There’s the oldfashioned way: Classify documents that you don’t want seen and, as
Gates said, ‘‘keep mum on the details.’’ But there’s also the more
modern, social-media-savvy approach: Tell the story you want them
to believe. Silence is one way to keep a secret. Talking is another. And
they are not mutually exclusive.
‘‘I love the notion that the government isn’t riddled with secrecy,’’
Hersh told me toward the end of our long day together. ‘‘Are you
kidding me? They keep more secrets than you can possibly think.
There’s stuff going on right now that I know about — amazing stuff
that’s going on. I’ll write about it when I can. There’s stuff going out
right now, amazing stuff in the Middle East. Are you kidding me? Of
course there is. Of course there is.’’
Jonathan Mahler writes about the media for The New York Times and is a longtime
contributor to the magazine.

The Lonely Death of George Bell

Each year around 50,000 people die in New York, some alone and unseen. Yet death
even in such forlorn form can cause a surprising amount of activity. Sometimes, along
the way, a life’s secrets are revealed.

By N. R. KLEINFIELDOCT. 17, 2015
Photo

Sniffing a fetid odor, George Bell's neighbor called 911. Once firefighters had
jimmied the door, the police squeezed into a beaten apartment groaning with
possessions. CreditJosh Haner/The New York Times

They found him in the living room, crumpled up on the mottled
carpet. The police did. Sniffing a fetid odor, a neighbor had called
911. The apartment was in north-central Queens, in an unassertive
building on 79th Street in Jackson Heights.

The apartment belonged to a George Bell. He lived alone. Thus the
presumption was that the corpse also belonged to George Bell. It was
a plausible supposition, but it remained just that, for the puffy body
on the floor was decomposed and unrecognizable. Clearly the man
had not died on July 12, the Saturday last year when he was
discovered, nor the day before nor the day before that. He had lain
there for a while, nothing to announce his departure to the world,
while the hyperkinetic city around him hurried on with its business.

Neighbors had last seen him six days earlier, a Sunday. On Thursday,
there was a break in his routine. The car he always kept out front and
moved from one side of the street to the other to obey parking rules
sat on the wrong side. A ticket was wedged beneath the wiper. The
woman next door called Mr. Bell. His phone rang and rang.
Then the smell of death and the police and the sobering reason that
George Bell did not move his car.
Each year around 50,000 people die in New York, and each year the
mortality rate seems to graze a new low, with people living healthier
and longer. A great majority of the deceased have relatives and
friends who soon learn of their passing and tearfully assemble at
their funeral. A reverent death notice appears. Sympathy cards
accumulate. When the celebrated die or there is some heart-rending
killing of the innocent, the entire city might weep.
A much tinier number die alone in unwatched struggles. No one
collects their bodies. No one mourns the conclusion of a life. They are
just a name added to the death tables. In the year 2014, George Bell,
age 72, was among those names.
George Bell — a simple name, two syllables, the minimum. There
were no obvious answers as to who he was or what shape his life had
taken. What worries weighed on him. Whom he loved and who loved
him.
Like most New Yorkers, he lived in the corners, under the pale light
of obscurity.
Yet death even in such forlorn form can cause a surprising amount of
activity, setting off an elaborate, lurching process that involves a

hodgepodge of interlocking characters whose livelihoods flow in part
or in whole from death.
With George Bell, the ripples from the process would spill
improbably and seemingly by happenstance from the shadows of
Queens to upstate New York and Virginia and Florida. Dozens of
people who never knew him, all cogs in the city’s complicated
machinery of mortality, would find themselves settling the affairs of
an ordinary man who left this world without anyone in particular
noticing.
In discovering a death, you find a life story and perhaps meaning.
Could anything in the map of George Bell’s existence have explained
his lonely end? Possibly not. But it was true that George Bell died
carrying some secrets. Secrets about how he lived and secrets about
who mattered most to him. Those secrets would bring sorrow. At the
same time, they would deliver rewards. Death does that. It closes
doors but also opens them.

The apartment belonged to a George Bell. He lived alone.CreditJosh Haner/The New
York Times

ONCE FIREFIGHTERS had jimmied the door that July afternoon,
the police squeezed into a beaten apartment groaning with
possessions, a grotesque parody of the “lived-in” condition. Clearly,
its occupant had been a hoarder.
The officers from the 115th Precinct called the medical examiner’s
office, which involves itself in suspicious deaths and unidentified
bodies, and a medical legal investigator arrived. His task was to rule

out foul play and look for evidence that could help locate the next of
kin and identify the body. In short order, it was clear that nothing
criminal had taken place (no sign of forced entry, bullet wounds,
congealed blood).
A Fire Department paramedic made the obvious pronouncement that
the man was dead; even a skeleton must be formally declared no
longer living. The body was zipped into a human remains pouch. A
transport team from the medical examiner’s office drove it to the
morgue at Queens Hospital Center, where it was deposited in one of
some 100 refrigerated drawers, cooled to 35 degrees.
It falls to the police to notify next of kin, but the neighbors did not
know of any. Detectives grabbed some names and phone numbers
from the apartment, called them and got nothing: The man had no
wife, no siblings. The police estimate that they reach kin 85 percent
of the time. They struck out with George Bell.
At the Queens morgue, identification personnel got started.
Something like 90 percent of the corpses arriving at city morgues are
identified by relatives or friends after they are shown photographs of
the body. Most remains depart for burial within a few days. For the
rest, it gets complicated.
The easiest resolution is furnished by fingerprints; otherwise by
dental and medical records or, as a last resort, by DNA. The medical
examiner can also do a so-called contextual ID; when all elements
are considered, none of which by themselves bring certainty, a sort of
circumstantial identification can be made.
Fingerprints were taken, which required days because of the poor
condition of the fingers. Enhanced techniques had to be used, such
as soaking the fingers in a solution to soften them. The prints were
sent to city, state and federal databases. No hits.
ONCE NINE DAYS had elapsed and no next of kin had come forth,
the medical examiner reported the death to the office of the Queens
County public administrator, an obscure agency that operates out of
the State Supreme Court building in the Jamaica neighborhood. Its
austere quarters are adjacent to Surrogate’s Court, familiarly known
as widows and orphans court, where wills are probated and battles
are often waged over the dead.

Each county in New York City has a public administrator to manage
estates when there is no one else to do so, most commonly when
there is no will or no known heirs.
Public administrators tend to rouse attention only when complaints
flare over their competence or their fees or their tendency to oversee
dens of political patronage. Or when they run afoul of the law. Last
year, a former longtime counsel to the Bronx County public
administrator pleaded guilty to grand larceny, while a bookkeeper for
the Kings County public administrator was sentenced to a prison
term for stealing from the dead.
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Recent audits by the city’s comptroller found disturbing dysfunction
at both of those offices, which the occupants said had been
overstated. The most recent audit of the Queens office, in 2012,
raised no significant issues.
The Queens unit employs 15 people and processes something like
1,500 deaths a year. Appointed by the Queens surrogate, Lois M.
Rosenblatt, a lawyer, has been head of the office for the past 13 years.
Most cases arrive from nursing homes, others from the medical
examiner, legal guardians, the police, undertakers. While a majority
of estates contain assets of less than $500, one had been worth $16
million. Meager estates can move swiftly. Bigger ones routinely
extend from 12 to 24 months.
The office extracts a commission that starts at 5 percent of the first
$100,000 of an estate and then slides downward, money that is
entered into the city’s general fund. An additional 1 percent goes
toward the office’s expenses. The office’s counsel, who for 23 years
has been Gerard Sweeney, a private lawyer who mainly does the
public administrator’s legal work, customarily gets a sliding legal fee
that begins at 6 percent of the estate’s first $750,000.
“You can die in such anonymity in New York,” he likes to say. “We’ve
had instances of people dead for months. No one finds them, no one
misses them.”
The man presumed to be George Bell joined the wash of cases, a
fresh arrival that Ms. Rosenblatt viewed as nothing special at all.

Meanwhile, the medical examiner needed records — X-rays would do
— to confirm the identity of the body. The office took its own chest Xrays but still required earlier ones for comparison.
The medical examiner’s office had no idea which doctors the man
had seen, so in a Hail Mary maneuver, personnel began cold-calling
hospitals and doctors in the vicinity, in a pattern that radiated
outward from the Jackson Heights apartment. Whoever picked up
was asked if by chance a George Bell had ever dropped in.
THREE INVESTIGATORS work for the Queens County public
administrator. They comb through the residences of the departed,
mining their homes for clues as to what was owned, who their
relatives were. It’s a peculiar kind of work, seeing what strangers had
kept in their closets, what they hung on the walls, what deodorant
they liked.
On July 24, two investigators, Juan Plaza and Ronald Rodriguez,
entered the glutted premises of the Bell apartment, clad in billowy
hazmat suits and bootees. Investigators work in pairs, to discourage
theft.
Bleak as the place was, they had seen worse. An apartment so
swollen with belongings that the tenant, a woman, died standing up,
unable to collapse to the floor. Or the place they fled swatting at
swarms of fleas.
Yes, they saw a human existence that few others did.
Photo

Ronald Rodriguez is one of three investigators for the Queens County public
administrator's office. He combs through the residences of the departed,
documenting what they owned and seeking clues to who their relatives
were.CreditJosh Haner/The New York Times

Mr. Plaza had been a data entry clerk before joining his macabre field
in 1994; Mr. Rodriguez had been a waiter and found his interest
piqued in 2002.
What qualified someone for the job? Ms. Rosenblatt, the head of the
office, summed it up: “People willing to go into these disgusting
apartments.”
The two men foraged through the unedited anarchy, 800 square feet,
one bedroom. A stench thickened the air. Mr. Plaza dabbed his
nostrils with a Vicks vapor stick. Mr. Rodriguez toughed it out. Vicks
bothered his nose.
The only bed was the lumpy foldout couch in the living room. The
bedroom and bathroom looked pillaged. The kitchen was splashed
with trash and balled-up, decades-old lottery tickets that had failed
to deliver. A soiled shopping list read: sea salt, garlic, carrots,
broccoli (two packs), “TV Guide.”
The faucet didn’t work. The chipped stove had no knobs and could
not have been used to cook in a long time.
The men scavenged for a will, a cemetery deed, financial documents,
an address book, computer, cellphone, those sorts of things.
Photographs might show relatives — could that be a mom or sis
beaming in that picture on the mantel?
Portable objects of value were to be retrieved. A Vermeer hangs on
the wall? Grab it. Once they found $30,000 in cash, another time a
Rolex wedged inside a radio. But the bar is not placed nearly that
high: In one instance, they lugged back a picture of the deceased in a
Knights of Malta outfit.
In the slanting light they scooped up papers from a table and some
drawers in the living room. They found $241 in bills and $187.45 in
coins. A silver Relic watch did not look special, but they took it in
case.
Fastened to the walls were a bear’s head, steer horns and some
military pictures of planes and warships. Over the couch hung a

photo sequence of a parachutist coming in for a landing, with a
certificate recording George Bell’s first jump in 1963. Chinese food
cartons and pizza boxes were ubiquitous. Shelves were stacked with
music tapes and videos: “Top Gun,” “Braveheart,” “Yule Log.”
A splotched calendar from Lucky Market hung in the bathroom,
flipped open to August 2007.
Hoarding is deemed a mental disorder, poorly understood, that stirs
people to incoherent acts; sufferers may buy products simply to have
them. Amid the mess were a half-dozen unopened ironing board
covers, multiple packages of unused Christmas lights, four new tirepressure gauges.
The investigators returned twice more, rounding up more papers,
another $95. They found no cellphone, no computer or credit cards.
Rummaging through the personal effects of the dead, sensing the
misery in these rooms, can color your thoughts. The work changes
people, and it has changed these men.
Mr. Rodriguez, 57 and divorced, has a greater sense of urgency. “I try
to build a life like it’s the last day,” he said. “You never know when
you will die. Before this, I went along like I would live forever.”
Photo

Juan Plaza, another investigator, says the solitude of so many deaths wears on
him.CreditJosh Haner/The New York TimesPhoto

“I try to build a life like it’s the last day,” Mr. Rodriguez said. CreditJosh Haner/The
New York Times

The solitude of so many deaths wears on Mr. Plaza, the fear that
someday it will be him splayed on the floor in one of these silent
apartments. “This job teaches you a lot,” he said. “You learn whatever
material stuff you have you should use it and share it. Share yourself.
People die with nobody to talk to. They die and relatives come out of
the woodwork. ‘He was my uncle. He was my cousin. Give me what
he had.’ Gimme, gimme. Yet when he was alive they never visited,
never knew the person. From working in this office, my life
changed.”

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He is 52, also divorced, and without children, but he keeps
expanding his base of friends. Every day, he sends them motivational
Instagram messages: “With each sunrise, may we value every
minute”; “Be kind, smile to the world and it will smile back”; “Share
your life with loved ones”; “Love, forgive, forget.”
He said: “When I die, someone will find out the same day or the next
day. Since I’ve worked here, my list of friends has gotten longer and
longer. I don’t want to die alone.”
IN HIS QUEENS CUBICLE, wearing rubber gloves, Patrick
Stressler thumbed through the sheaf of documents retrieved by the
two investigators. Mr. Stressler, the caseworker with the public
administrator’s office responsible for piecing together George Bell’s
estate, is formally a “decedent property agent,” a title he finds useful
as a conversation starter at parties. He is 27, and had been a
restaurant cashier five years ago when he learned you could be a
decedent property agent and became one.
He began with the pictures. Mr. Stressler mingles in the leavings of
people he can never meet and especially likes to ponder the
photographs so “you get a sense of a person’s history, not that they
just died.”
The snapshots ranged over the humdrum of life. A child wearing a
holster and toy pistols. A man in military dress. Men fishing. A young
woman sitting on a chair in a corner. A high school class on a stage,
everyone wearing blackface. “Different times,” Mr. Stressler mused.
In the end, the photos divulged little of what George Bell had done
across his 72 years.
The thicket of papers yielded a few hazy kernels. An unused passport,
issued in 2007 to George Main Bell Jr., showing a thick-necked man
with a meaty face ripened by time, born Jan. 15, 1942. Documents
establishing that his father — George Bell — died in 1969 at 59, his
mother, Davina Bell, in 1981 at 76.
Some holiday cards. Several from an Elsie Logan in Red Bank, N.J.,
thanking him for gifts of Godiva chocolates. One, dated 2001, said: “I

called Sunday around 2 — no answer. Will try again.” A 2007
Thanksgiving Day card read, “I have been trying to call you — but no
answer.”
A 2001 Christmas card signed, “Love always, Eleanore (Puffy),” with
the message: “I seldom mention it, but I hope you realize how much
it means to have you for a friend. I care a lot for you.”
Photo

The kitchen was splashed with trash and balled-up lottery tickets, decades old, that
failed to deliver. The faucet did not work. The chipped stove had no knobs and could
not have been used to cook in a long time. CreditJosh Haner/The New York TimesPhoto

Shelves were stacked with music tapes and videos. CreditJosh Haner/The New York
TimesPhoto

Amid the mess were a half-dozen unopened ironing board covers, multiple packages
of unused Christmas lights, four new tire-pressure gauges. CreditJosh Haner/The New
York Times

Cards from a Thomas Higginbotham, addressed to “Big George” and
signed “friend, Tom.”

A golden find: H&R Block-prepared tax returns, useful for divining
assets. The latest showed adjusted gross income of $13,207 from a
pension and interest, another $21,311 from Social Security. The bank
statements contained the biggest revelation: For what appeared to be
a simple life, they showed balances of several hundred thousand
dollars. Letters went out to confirm the amounts.
No evidence of stocks or bonds, but a small life insurance policy, with
the beneficiaries his parents. And there was a will, dated 1982. It
split his estate evenly among three men and a woman of unknown
relation. And specified that George Bell be cremated.
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Using addresses he found online, Mr. Stressler sent out form letters
asking the four to contact him. He heard only from a Martin
Westbrook, who called from Sprakers, a hamlet in upstate New York,
and said he had not spoken with George Bell in some time. The will
named him as executor, but he deferred to the public administrator.
Loose ends began to be tidied up. The car, a silver 2005 Toyota
RAV4, was sent to an auctioneer. There was a notice advising that
George Bell had not responded to two juror questionnaires and was
now subpoenaed to appear before the commissioner of jurors; a
letter went out saying he would not be there. He was dead.
If an apartment’s contents have any value, auction companies bid for
them. When they don’t, “cleanout companies” dispose of the
belongings. George Bell’s place was deemed a cleanout.
Among his papers was an honorable military discharge from 1966,
following six years in the United States Army Reserve. A request was
made to the Department of Veterans Affairs, national cemetery
administration, in St. Louis, for burial in one of its national
cemeteries, with the government paying the bill.
St. Louis responded that George Bell did not qualify as a veteran, not
having seen active duty or having died while in the Reserves. The
public administrator appealed the rebuff. A week later, 16 pages
came back from the centralized satellite processing and appeals unit
that could be summed up in unambiguous concision: No.

Another thing the public administrator takes care of is having the
post office forward the mail of the deceased. Statements may arrive
from brokerage houses. Letters could pinpoint the whereabouts of
relatives. When magazines show up, the subscriptions are ended and
refunds requested. Could be $6.82 or $12.05, but the puny sums
enter the estate, pushing it incrementally upward.
Not much came for George Bell: bank statements, a notice on the
apartment insurance, utility bills, junk mail.
EVERY LIFE DESERVES to come to a final resting place, but
they’re not all pretty. Most estates arrive with the public
administrator after the body has already been buried by relatives or
friends or in accordance with a prepaid plan.
When someone dies destitute and forsaken, and one of various free
burial organizations does not learn of the case, the body ends up
joining others in communal oblivion at the potter’s field on Hart
Island in the Bronx, the graveyard of last resort.
If there are funds, the public administrator honors the wishes of the
will or of relatives. When no one speaks for the deceased, the office is
partial to two fairly dismal, cut-rate cemeteries in New Jersey. It
prefers the total expense to come in under $5,000, not always easy in
a city where funeral and burial costs can be multiples of that.
Photo

On Nov. 15, John Sommese of the Simonson Funeral Home settled into a rented
hearse, eased into the sparse traffic and drove George Bell's body to a
crematorium.CreditJosh Haner/The New York Times

Simonson Funeral Home in Forest Hills was picked by Susan Brown,
the deputy public administrator, to handle George Bell once his
identity was verified. It is among 16 regulars that she rotates the
office’s deaths through.
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George Bell’s body was hardly the first to be trapped in limbo. Some
years ago, one had lingered for weeks while siblings skirmished over
the funeral specifics. The decedent’s sister wanted a barbershop
quartet and brass band to perform; a brother preferred something
solemn. Surrogate’s Court nodded in favor of the sister, and the man
got a melodious send-off.
The medical examiner was not having any luck with George Bell. The
cold calls to doctors and hospitals continued, but as the inquiries
bounced around Queens, the discouraging answers came back slowly
and redundantly: no George Bell.
In the interim, the medical examiner filed an unverified death
certificate, on July 28. The cause of death was determined to be
hypertensive and arteriosclerotic cardiovascular disease, with obesity
a significant factor. This was surmised, based on the position in
which the body was found, its age, the man’s size and the statistical
likelihood of it being the cause. Occupation was listed as unknown.
City law specifies that bodies be buried, cremated or sent from the
city within four days of discovery, unless an exemption is granted.
The medical examiner can release even an unverified body for burial.
Absent a corpse’s being confirmed, however, the policy of the
medical examiner is not to allow cremation. What if there has been a
mistake? You can’t un-cremate someone.
So days scrolled past. Other corpses streamed through the morgue,
pausing on their way to the grave, while the body presumed to be
George Bell entered its second month of chilled residence. Then its
third.

IN EARLY SEPTEMBER last year, a downstairs neighbor
complained to the public administrator that George Bell’s
refrigerator was leaking through the ceiling and that vermin might be
scuttling about.
Grandma’s Attic Cleanouts was sent over to remove the offending
appliance. Diego Benitez, the company’s owner, showed up with two
workers.
The refrigerator was unplugged, with unfrozen frozen vegetables and
Chinese takeout rotting inside. Roaches had moved in. Mr. Benitez
doused it with bug spray. He plugged it in to chill the food and rid it
of the smell, then cleaned it out and took it to a recycling center in
Jamaica. A few weeks later, Wipeout Exterminating came in and
treated the whole place.
Meanwhile, the medical examiner kept calling around hunting for
old X-rays. In late September, the 11th call hit pay dirt. A radiology
provider had chest X-rays of George Bell dating from 2004. They
were in a warehouse, though, and would take some time to retrieve.
Weeks tumbled by. In late October, the radiology service reported:
Sorry, the X-rays had been destroyed. The medical examiner asked
for written confirmation. Back came the response: Never mind, the
X-rays were there. In early November, they landed at the medical
examiner’s office.
The X-rays were compared, and bingo. In the first week of
November, nearly four months after it had arrived, the presumed
corpse of George Bell officially became George Bell, deceased, of
Jackson Heights, Queens.
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COLD OUT. Streaks of sunshine splashing over Queens. On
Saturday morning, Nov. 15, John Sommese settled into a rented
hearse, eased into the sparse traffic and drove to the morgue. He
owns Simonson Funeral Home. At age 73, he remained a working
owner in a city of dwindling deaths.
At the morgue, an attendant withdrew the body from the drawer, and
both medical examiner and undertaker checked the identity tag.

Using a hydraulic lift, the attendant swung the body into the wooden
coffin. George Bell was at last going to his eternal home.
The coffin was wheeled out and guided into the back of the hearse.
Mr. Sommese smoothed an American flag over it. The armed forces
had passed on a military burial, but George Bell’s years in the Army
Reserves were good enough for the funeral director, and he abided by
military custom.
Next stop was U.S. Columbarium at Fresh Pond Crematory in Middle
Village, for the cremation. Mr. Sommese made good time along the
loud streets lined with shedding trees. The volume on the radio was
muted; the dashboard said Queen’s “You’re My Best Friend” was
playing.
While the undertaker said he didn’t dwell much on the strangers he
transported, he allowed how instances like this saddened him — a
person dies and nobody shows up, no service, no one from the clergy
to say a few kind words, to say rest in peace.
The undertaker was a Christian, and believed that George Bell was
already in another place, a better place, but still. “I don’t think
everyone should have an elaborate funeral,” he said in a soft voice.
“But I think burial or cremation should be with respect, or else what
is society about? I think about this man. I believe we’re all connected.
We’re all products of the same God. Does it matter that this man
should be cremated with respect? Yes, it does.”
Photo

Several days after George Bell's cremation, the superintendent at U.S. Columbarium
took an urn shaped like a small shoe box down to the storage area. CreditJosh
Haner/The New York Times

He consulted the mirror and blended into the next lane. “You can
have a fancy funeral, but people don’t pay for kindness,” he went on.
“They don’t pay for understanding. They don’t pay for caring. This
man is getting caring. I care about this man.”

At U.S. Columbarium, he steered around to the rear, to the unloading
dock. Another hearse stood there. Yes — a line at the crematory.
Squinting in the sun, Mr. Sommese paced in the motionless air. After
15 minutes, the dock opened up and the undertaker angled the
hearse in. Workers took the coffin. Mr. Sommese kept the flag.
Normally, it would go to the next of kin. There being none, the
undertaker folded it up to use again.
The cremation process, what U.S. Columbarium calls the “journey,”
consumed nearly three hours. Typically, cremains are ready for
pickup in a couple of days. For an extra $180, the columbarium
provides same-day express service, which was unneeded in this case.
Some 40,000 cremains were stored at the columbarium, almost all of
them tucked into handsome individual wall niches, viewable through
glass. Downstairs was a storage area near the bathrooms with a
bronze tree affixed to the door. This was the Community Tree.
Behind the door cremains were stacked up and stored out of sight.
The budget alternative. Names were etched on the tree leaves. Some
time ago, when the leaves filled up, doves were added.
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Several days after the cremation, the superintendent stacked an urn
shaped like a small shoe box inside the storage area. Then he nailed a
metal dove, wings spread, above the right edge of the tree. It
identified the new addition: “George M. Bell Jr. 1942-2014.”
ON ALTERNATE TUESDAYS, David R. Maltz & Company, in
Central Islip, N.Y., auctions off 100 to 150 cars; other days, it
auctions real estate, jewelry and pretty much everything else. It has
sold the Woodcrest Country Club in Muttontown, N.Y., four engines
from an automobile shredder, 22 KFC franchises. Items arrive from
bankruptcies, repossessions and estates, including a regular stream
from the Queens public administrator.
In the frosty gloom of Dec. 30, as a hissing wind spun litter through
the air, the Maltz company had among its cars a 2011 Mustang
convertible, multiple Mercedes-Benzes, two cars that didn’t even run
and George Bell’s 2005 Toyota. Despite its age, it had just over 3,000
miles on it, brightening its appeal.

In a one-minute bidding spasm — “3,000 the bid, 3,500, 35 the bid,
4,000…” — the car went for $9,500, beating expectations. After
expenses, $8,631.50 was added to the estate. The buyer was Sam
Maloof, a regular, who runs a used car dealership, Beltway Motor
Sales, in Brooklyn and planned to resell it. After he brought it back,
his sister and secretary, Janet Maloof, adored it. She had the same
2005 model, same color, burdened with over 100,000 miles. So,
feeling the holiday spirit, he gave her George Bell’s car.
Photo

On Dec. 30, David R. Maltz & Company, in Central Islip, N.Y., auctioned off George
Bell’s 2005 Toyota. Despite its age, the vehicle had just over 3,000 miles on it,
brightening its appeal.CreditJosh Haner/The New York Times

In a couple of weeks, the only other valuable possession extracted
from the apartment, the Relic watch, came up for sale at a Maltz
auction of jewelry, wine, art and collectibles. The auction was
dominated by 42 estates put up by the Queens public administrator,
the thinnest by far being George Bell’s. Bidding on the watch began
at $1 and finished at $3. The winner was a creaky, unemployed man
named Tony Nik. He was in a sulky mood, mumbling after his
triumph that he liked the slim price.
Again after expenses, another $2.31 trickled into the Bell estate.
On a sun-kindled day a week later, six muscled men from GreenEx, a
junk removal business, arrived to empty the cluttered Queens
apartment. Dispassionately, they scooped up the dusty traces of
George Bell’s life and shoveled them into trash cans and bags. They
broke apart the furniture with hammers. Tinny music poured from a
portable radio.
Eyeing the bottomless thickets, puzzling over what heartbreak they
told of, one of the men said: “Depression, I think. People get
depressed and then, Lord help them, forget about it.”
Seven hours they went at it, flinging everything into trucks destined
for a Bronx dump where the rates were good.
Some nuggets they salvaged for themselves. One man fancied a set of
Marilyn Monroe porcelain plates. Another worker plucked up an
unopened jumbo package of Nike socks, some model cars and some
brand-new sponges. Yet another claimed the television and an
unused carbon monoxide detector. Gatherings from a life, all worth
more than that $3 watch.
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A spindly worker with taut arms crouched down to inspect some
never-worn tan work boots, still snug in their box. They were a size
big, but he slid them on and liked the fit.
He cleaned George Bell’s apartment wearing the dead man’s boots.

THE PEOPLE NAMED to split the assets in the will were known
as the legatees. Over 30 years had passed since George Bell chose
them: Martin Westbrook, Frank Murzi, Albert Schober and Eleanore
Albert. Plus, there was a beneficiary on two bank accounts: Thomas
Higginbotham.
Elizabeth Rooney, a kinship investigator in the office of Gerard
Sweeney, the public administrator’s counsel, set out to help find
them. By law, she also had to hunt for the next of kin, down to a first
cousin once removed, the furthest relative eligible to lay claim to an
estate. They had to be notified, should they choose to contest the will.
There was time, for George Bell’s assets could not be distributed until
seven months after the public administrator had been appointed, the
period state law specifies for creditors to step forward.
Prowling the Internet, Ms. Rooney learned that Mr. Murzi and Mr.
Schober were dead. Mr. Westbrook was in Sprakers and Mr.
Higginbotham in Lynchburg, Va. Ms. Rooney found Ms. Albert, now
going by the name Flemm, upstate in Worcester.
They were surprised to learn that George Bell had left them money.
Ms. Flemm had spoken to him by phone a few weeks before he died;
the others had not been in touch for years.
A core piece of Ms. Rooney’s job was drafting a family tree going
back three generations. Using the genealogy company Ancestry.com,
she compiled evidence with things like census records and ship
manifests, showing Bell relatives arriving from Scotland. Her office
once produced a family tree that was six feet long. Another time it
traced a family back to Daniel Boone.
Ms. Rooney created paternal and maternal trees, each with dozens of
names. She found five living relatives: two first cousins on his
mother’s side, one living in Edina, Minn., and the other in
Henderson, Nev. Neither had been in contact with George Bell in
decades, and didn’t know what he did for a living.
On the paternal side, Ms. Rooney identified two first cousins, one in
Scotland and another in England, as well as a third whose
whereabouts proved elusive.
When that cousin, Janet Bell, was not found, protocol dictated that a
notice be published in a newspaper for four weeks, a gesture

intended to alert unlocated relatives. With sizable estates, the court
chooses The New York Law Journal, where the bill for the notice can
run about $4,000. In this instance the court picked The Wave, a
Queens weekly with a print circulation of 12,000, at a cost of $247.
The cousin might have been in Tajikistan or in Hog Jaw, Ark., or
even on Staten Island, and the odds of her spotting the notice were
approximately zero. Among thousands of such ads that Mr. Sweeney
has placed, he is still awaiting his first response.
Word came that Eleanore Flemm had died of a heart attack, on Feb.
3 at 66. Since she had outlived Mr. Bell, her estate would receive her
proceeds. Her heirs were her brother, James Albert, a private
detective on Long Island who barely remembered the Bell name,
along with a nephew and two nieces in Florida. One did not know
George Bell had existed.
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Death, though, isn’t social. It’s business. No need to have known
someone to get his money.
On Feb. 20, a Queens real estate broker listed the Bell apartment at
$219,000. It was the final asset to liquidate. Three potential buyers
toured it the next day, and one woman’s offer of $225,000 was
accepted.
Three months later, the building’s board said no. A middle-aged
couple who lived down the block entered the picture, and, at
$215,000, was approved. Their plan was to fix up the marred
apartment, turn their own place over to their grown-up son and then
move in, overwriting George Bell’s life.
Meanwhile, Mr. Sweeney appeared in Surrogate’s Court to request
probate of the will. Besides the two known beneficiaries, he listed the
possibility of unknown relatives and the unfound cousin. The court
appointed a so-called guardian ad litem to review the will on behalf
of these people, who might, in fact, be phantoms.
In September, Mr. Sweeney submitted a final accounting, the hard
math of the estate, for court approval. No objections arrived. Tallied
up, George Bell’s assets amounted to roughly $540,000. Bank

accounts holding $215,000 listed Mr. Higginbotham as the sole
beneficiary, and he got that directly. Proceeds from the apartment,
other accounts, a life insurance policy, the car and the watch went to
the estate: around $324,000.
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RECENT COMMENTS
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This story was so well written. Thank you for running it.
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I see an award, if not many, in your future NR Kleinfeld. Gorgeous, haunting portrait.
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I find it painful to see his room printed on page one knowing he hung a curtain inside his
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A commission of $13,726 went to the city, a $3,238 fee to the public
administrator, $19,453 to Mr. Sweeney.
Other expenses included things like the apartment maintenance, at
$7,360; a funeral bill of $4,873; $2,800 for the cleanout company;
$1,663 for the kinship investigator; a $222 parking ticket; a $704
Fire Department bill for ambulance service; $750 for the guardian ad
litem; and $12.50 for an appraisal of the watch that sold for $3.

That left about $264,000 to be split between Mr. Westbrook and the
heirs of Ms. Flemm. Some 14 months after a man died, his estate was
settled and the proceeds were good to go.
For the recipients, George Bell had stepped out of eternity and united
them by bestowing his money. No one in the drawn-out process
knew why he had chosen them, nor did they need to. They only
needed to know him in the quietude of death, as a man whose heart
had stopped beating in Queens. But he had been like anyone, a
human being who had built a life on this earth.
HIS LIFE BEGAN small and plain. George Bell was especially
attached to his parents. He slept on the pullout sofa in the living
room, while his parents claimed the bedroom, and he continued to
sleep there even after they died. Both parents came from Scotland.
His father was a tool-and-die machinist, and his mother worked for a
time as a seamstress in the toy industry.
After high school, he joined his father as an apprentice. In 1961, he
made an acquaintance at a local bar, a moving man. They became
friends, and the moving man pulled George Bell into the moving
business. His name was Tom Higginbotham. Three fellow movers
also became friends: Frank Murzi, Albert Schober and Martin
Westbrook. The men in the will. They mainly moved business offices,
and they all guzzled booze, in titanic proportions.
Photo

George Bell was especially attached to his parents. He slept on the pullout sofa in
the living room, while his parents claimed the bedroom, and he continued to sleep
there even after they died.

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“We were a bunch of drunks,” Mr. Westbrook said. “I’m a juicer. But
George put me to shame. He was a real nice guy, kind of a hermit.
Boy, we had some good times.”

In the words of Mr. Higginbotham: “We were great friends. I don’t
know if you can say it this way, but we were men who loved each
other.”
They called him Big George, for he was a thickset, brawny man,
weighing perhaps 210 pounds. Later, his ravenous appetite had him
pushing 350.
He had a puckish streak. Once a woman invited him and Mr.
Higginbotham to a party at her parents’ house. Her father kept
tropical fish. She showed George Bell the tank. When he admired a
distinctive fish, she said, “Oh, that’s an expensive one.” He picked up
a net, caught the fish and swallowed it.
One day the friends were moving a financial firm. After they had
fitted the desks into the new offices, George Bell slid notes into the
drawers, writing things like: “I’m madly in love with you. Meet me at
the water cooler.” Or: “There’s a bomb under your chair. Your next
move might be your last.”
Dumb pranks. Big George being Big George.
Friends, though, found him difficult to crack open. There were things
inside no one could get out. You learned to suppress your questions
around him.
He had his burdens. His father died young. As she aged, his mother
became crippled by arthritis. He cared for her, fetching her food and
bathing her until her death.
He was fastidious about his money, only trusted banks for his
savings. There was a woman he began dating when she was 19 and he
was 25. “We got real keen on each other,” she said later. “He made
me feel special.”
A marriage was planned. They spoke to a wedding hall. He bought a
suit. Then, he told friends, the woman’s mother had wanted him to
sign a prenuptial agreement to protect her daughter if the marriage
should break apart. He ended the engagement, and never had
another serious relationship.
That woman was Eleanore Albert, the fourth name in the will.

Some years later, she married an older man who made equipment for
a party supply company, and moved upstate to become Ms. Flemm.
In 2002, her husband died.
Photo

They called him Big George, for he was a thickset, brawny man, weighing perhaps
210 pounds. Later, his ravenous appetite had him pushing 350.

Distance and time never dampened the emotional affinity between
her and George Bell. They spoke on the phone and exchanged cards.
“We had something for each other that never got used up,” she said.
She had sent him a Valentine’s Day card just last year: “George, think
of you often with love.”
And unbeknown to her, he had put her in his will and kept her there.
Her life finished up a lot like his. She lived alone, in a trailer. She
died of a heart attack. A neighbor who cleared her snow found her.
She had gotten obese. Her brother had her cremated.
A difference was that she left behind debt, owed to the bank and to
credit card companies. All that she would pass on was tens of

thousands of dollars of George Bell’s money, money that she never
got to touch.
Some would filter down to her brother, who had no plans for it. A
slice went to Michael Garber, her nephew, who drives a bus at Disney
World. A friend of his aunt’s had owned a Camaro convertible that
she relished, and he might buy a used Camaro in her honor.
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Some more would go to Sarah Teta, a niece, retired and living in
Altamonte Springs, Fla., who plans to save it for a rainy day. “You
always hear about people you don’t know dying and leaving you
money,” she said. “I never thought it would happen to me.”
And some would funnel down to Eleanore Flemm’s other niece,
Dorothy Gardiner, a retired waitress and home health care aide. She
lives in Apopka, Fla., never heard of George Bell. She has survived
two cancers and has several thousand dollars in medical bills that
could finally disappear. “I’ve been paying off $25 a month, what I
can,” she said. “I never would have expected this. It’s crazy.”
IN 1996, GEORGE BELL hurt his left shoulder and spine lifting a
desk on a moving job, and his life took a different shape. He received
approval for workers’ compensation and Social Security disability
payments and began collecting a pension from the Teamsters.
Though he never worked again, he had all the income he needed.
He used to have buddies over to watch television and he would cook
for them. Then he stopped having anyone over. No one knew why.
Old friends had drifted away, and with them some of the fire in
George Bell’s life. Of his moving man colleagues, Mr. Murzi retired in
1994 and died in 2011. Mr. Schober retired in 1996 and moved to
Brooklyn, losing touch. He died in 2002.
Photo

George Bell and a fellow mover, Frank Murzi, in an undated photograph.

Mr. Higginbotham quit the moving business, and moved upstate in
1973 to work for the state as an environmental scientist.
He is now 74, retired and living alone in Virginia. The last time he
spoke to George Bell was 10 years ago. He used a code of ringing and
hanging up to get him to answer his phone, but in time, he got no
answer. He sent cards, beseeched him to come and visit, but he
wouldn’t. It was two months before Mr. Higginbotham found out
George Bell had died.

It has been hard for him to reconcile the way George Bell’s money
came to him. “I’ve been stressed about this,” he said. “I haven’t been
sleeping. My stomach hurts. My blood pressure is up. I argued with
him time and again to get out of that apartment and spend his money
and enjoy life. I sent him so many brochures on places to go. I
thought I understood George. Now I realize I didn’t understand him
at all.”
Mr. Higginbotham was content with the fundaments of his own life:
his modest one-bedroom apartment, his 15-year-old truck. He put
the inheritance into mutual funds and figures it will help his three
grandchildren through college. George Bell’s money educating the
future.
In 1994, Mr. Westbrook hurt his knee and left the moving business.
He moved to Sprakers, where he had a cattle farm. When he got
older and his marriage dissolved, he sold the farm but still lives
nearby. He is 74. It was several years ago that he last spoke to George
Bell on the phone. Mr. Bell told him he did not get out much.
He has three grandchildren and wants to move to a mellower
climate. He plans to give some of the money to Mr. Murzi’s widow,
because Mr. Murzi had been his best friend.
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“My sister needs some dental work,” he said. “I need some dental
work. I need hearing aids. The golden age ain’t so cheap. Big
George’s money will make my old age easier.”
He felt awful about his dying alone, nobody knowing. “Yeah, that’ll
happen to me,” he said. “I’m a loner, too. There’s maybe four or five
people up here I talk to.”
In his final years, with the moving men gone, George Bell’s life had
become emptier. Neighbors nodded to him on the street and he
smiled. He told lively stories to the young woman next door, who
lived with her parents, when he bumped into her. She recently
became a police officer, and she was the one who had smelled what
she knew was death.
But in the end, George Bell seemed to keep just one true friend.

He had been a fixture at a neighborhood pub called Budds Bar. He
showed up in his cutoff blue sweatshirt so often that some regulars
called him Sweatshirt Bell. At one point, he eased up on his drinking,
then, worried about his health, quit. But he still went to Budds,
ordering club soda.
In April 2005, Budds closed. Many regulars gravitated to another
bar, Legends. George Bell went a few times, then transferred his
allegiance to Bantry Bay Publick House in Long Island City. He
would meet his friend there.
Photo

Frank Bertone, 67, is a retired inspector for Consolidated Edison. During his last
decade he spent more time with George Bell than anyone, but didn’t feel he truly
knew him. “One thing about George is he didn’t get personal,” he said. “Not
ever.” CreditJosh Haner/The New York Times

THE SIGN at the entrance to Bantry Bay says, “Enter as Strangers,
Leave as Friends.” Squished in near the window was Frank Bertone,

sipping soup and nursing a drink. He is known as the Dude. George
Bell’s last good friend.
In the early 1980s, not long after moving to Jackson Heights, he
stopped in at Budds in need of a restroom. A big man had bellowed,
“Have a beer.”
That was George Bell. In time, a friendship was spawned, deepening
during the 15 years that remained of George Bell’s life. They met on
Saturdays at Bantry Bay. They fished in the Rockaways and at Jones
Beach, sometimes with others. Mr. Bell bought a car to get out to the
good spots, but the car otherwise mostly sat. They passed time
meandering around, the days bleeding into one another.
“Where did we go?” Mr. Bertone said. “No place. One time we sat for
hours in the parking lot of Bed Bath & Beyond. What did we talk
about? The world’s problems. Just like that, the two of us solved the
world’s problems.”
Mr. Bertone is 67, a retired inspector for Consolidated Edison. Over
the last decade, he had spent more time with George Bell than
anyone, but he didn’t feel he truly knew him.
“One thing about George is he didn’t get personal,” he said. “Not
ever.”
He knew he had never married. He spoke of girlfriends, but Mr.
Bertone never met any. The two had even swapped views on wills
and what happens to your money in the end, though Mr. Bertone did
not know George Bell had drafted a will before they met.
Mr. Bertone would invite him to his place, but he would beg off.
George Bell never had him over.
Once, some eight years ago, Mr. Bertone trooped out there when he
hadn’t heard from him in a while. George Bell cracked open the door,
shooed him away. A curtain draped inside the entryway had
camouflaged the chaos. Mr. Bertone had no idea that at some point,
George Bell had begun keeping everything.
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The Dude, Mr. Bertone, told a story. A few years ago, George Bell was
going into the hospital for his heart and had asked him to hold onto
some money. Gave him a fat envelope. Inside was $55,000.
Mike Kerins, a bartender, interrupted: “Two things about George. He
gave me $100 every Christmas, and he never went out to eat.” He
had confessed he was too embarrassed because he would have
required three entrees.
Photo

Several days after George Bell's cremation, the superintendent stacked an urn
inside the storage area, then nailed a metal dove, wings spread, above the door,
identifying the new addition. CreditJosh Haner/The New York Times

George Bell had diabetes and complained about a shoulder pain. He
took pills but skipped them during the day, saying they made him
feel like an idiot.

Both the Dude and Mr. Kerins sensed he felt he had been bullied too
hard by life. “George was in a lot of pain,” Mr. Kerins said. “I think he
was just waiting to die, had lived enough.”
It was as if sadness had killed George Bell.
His days had become predictable, an endless loop. He stayed
cloistered inside. Neighbors heard the regular parade of deliverymen
who brought him his takeout meals.
The last time the Dude saw George Bell was about a week before his
body was found. Frozen shrimp was on sale at the shopping center.
George Bell got some, to take back to the kitchen he did not use.
Mr. Bertone didn’t realize he had died until someone came to
Legends with the news. Mr. Kerins was there and he told the Dude.
They made some calls to find out more, but got nowhere.
CONTINUE READING THE MAIN STORY811COMMENTS

Why did he die alone, no one knowing?
The Dude thought on that. “I don’t know, man,” he said. “I wish I
could tell you. But I don’t know.”
On the televisions above the busy bar, a woman was promoting a
cleaning product. In the dim light, Mr. Bertone emptied his drink.
“You know, I miss him,” he said. “I would have liked to see George
one more time. He was my friend. One more time.”
Correction: October 17, 2015

Because of an editing error, an earlier version of a picture caption with this article
referred incorrectly to the transporting of George Bell’s body. It is shown being taken
to a crematorium, not to a morgue.
N.R. Kleinfield has written for The New York Times for nearly 40 years. Read his article
last year about a New York City firefighter’s first fire and other work by him.
A version of this article appears in print on October 18, 2015, on page A1 of the New
York edition with the headline: The Lonely Death of George Bell. Order
Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe
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