Nicholson Baker: Checkpoint

JAY: No, I don’t believe I did.

BEN: Oh, this is your kind of thing. They’d take a psychic — in other words, they’d take some deluded person who thought he was a psychic, or some charlatan pretending to be a psychic — and they’d stick him in a room and give him some map coordinates. And these coordinates were very important, because they corresponded to a location in Russia that the CIA was curious about, where there was a research institute — probably a research institute very similar to the Stanford Research Institute. So the psychic was supposed to sit there and ponder these map coordinates, and tap into the paranormal world, and then he was supposed to draw the buildings that rose up in his mind.

JAY: Psycho-CAD! Nice. Edgy.

BEN: Yep.

JAY: I swear the CIA was a magnet for every drunk and every paranoid wack flake nutjob who’d gotten a college degree.

BEN: It does sometimes seem that way.

JAY: You know, I’m starting to see now that all the totally off-the-wall conspiracy theories, all of them, are true. It’s not just that Roosevelt knew about Pearl Harbor. It’s not just that Japan was ready to stop fighting before we dropped the bomb. It’s that — all right — you’ve got AIDS developed as part of those germ-warfare experiments in Africa, those monkeys that escaped.

BEN: Jumping species, well, yeah, there’s some evidence—

JAY: That’s definitely CIA. And then there’s the whole thing where we dropped bombs full of bugs and germs on the North Koreans. Another little CIA venture. And the POWs at the time said, Um, yes, we dropped bugs, and an international panel said, Yes, they dropped bugs, and then the professional discreditors went into high gear and came up with that whole rigmarole about “brainwashing,” right? — that the POWs who confessed to dropping the bugs must have been subjected to sinister Russian methods of interrogation.

BEN: Mm-hm, I’ve actually—

JAY: And abstract art! I mean, that was — that was really the last straw for me with the CIA. Abstract painting, promoted by spooks in the federal government to prove how tolerant our democracy is of ugliness. All that awful art, that makes you puke uncontrollably even to be in the same room with it, for all those decades — five long decades — pushed on us by that sorry crew of goofballs at the Central fucking Intelligence Agency! I mean, it’s nuts! It’s totally and completely wiggy! And yet it’s true.

BEN: I’ve actually met some of those professional discreditors at conferences. Somebody will present the results of years of painstaking research, careful sifting and weighing of documentary evidence, and these guys pop up and they start tag-teaming: Pish, posh, shoddy research, conspiracy theory, Grassy Knoll, beneath contempt.

JAY: Yeah, well, people really have a desperate need to keep the lid clamped on for as long as possible, because when that kettle blows, and that foulness spews up toward the sky, then we’re going to see how rotten it’s been in Denmark this whole time. A great and shining nation. It’s total tripe, it’s forcemeat — it’s BAD SAUSAGE, man. We’re a bunch of greedy meddlers who don’t know the first thing about the countries we’re dealing with.

BEN: Generally we know the first thing, but not the second and third.

JAY: Somebody has to be held accountable. Every covert action we’ve ever engaged in has made the world worse. Every one.

BEN: Are you sure it’s every one? Albania, sure.

JAY: Yes, it’s every single one. Every shark that we propped up, every progressive we pushed down. And that’s because it’s systemic. That’s what I’m beginning to recognize. The people who are drawn like moths to covert action, the guys who want to lie and spoof their way through life — they’re obviously going to be your sneaks and wackos and paranoids. Or they’re depressives who keep trying to lift their mood with higher and higher stakes, like that guy who blew himself away at the top of the stairs.

BEN: Who’s that?

JAY: That guy you once told me about.

BEN: You mean Frank Wisner?

JAY: Wisner, yes! So then you have a whole government agency filled to the gills with sneaks and wackos. And the money is flowing like wine. Obviously they’re going to screw it up every single time. Look how many years the CIA was in there with the Taliban. Years and years.

BEN: Ah, that was thanks to the Carter administration, that was Zbigniew Brzezinski. Then Reagan and Bush ramped it up hugely. You don’t want to think about all that too much, though, because then you get cranky. You want to keep focused, keep to a small canvas.

JAY: Man, I know what you mean about cranky. I get so cranked up. I mean — so what you’re saying basically is that the CIA gave us urban sprawl? Jesus, man, that’s — whoo!

BEN: Well, no, no, be careful, now, I wouldn’t go that far. There may be some institutional overlaps, that’s all I’m saying. But what I’m hoping is that some of the people who did these sprawl studies may still be around, and they may still be sharp enough to shed some light on the fine structure of the events they were part of.

JAY: You want to interview them.

BEN: Yeah, and that’s always the painful part of doing Cold War research. You find the number and call, and maybe a son or daughter answers, or maybe a nurse’s aide, and then after a long wait your man comes to the phone. He’s got a reedy, old-man’s voice: “Hello?” He’s a guy who once, long ago, had strong, tough feelings toward the Russians, and now he doesn’t remember too well what was going on back then, what the motives were, why there was all this bustle and activity. He’s probably got pale blue pants on and he’s probably not wearing a belt. He’s become an outsider in his own life. It seems rude to interview him, and yet—

JAY: And yet you have to, you have to. Don’t you? You have to pick up the phone and call him up.

BEN: If you want to tell the story, you at least have to try to talk to him.

JAY: Right. That’s right. So you’re, ah, sunk pretty darn deep into the fifties and sixties now.

BEN: I am, and I do enjoy learning more and more tiny things — stacking new tidbits onto the tidbits that I’ve already got stacked. A lot of material was declassified under Clinton. That may be the best thing he did — he didn’t like secrecy, except of course in some areas. So yes, I’m still interested in the Second World War, of course, but the fifties lure me as well. But okay, I see where you’re going.

JAY: Where am I going? I don’t know where I’m going.

BEN: You’re wanting to imply that there’s equally entrancing material for study right here and now.

JAY: Well—

BEN: And that we can understand it in a fuller way because we’re living through it, and that we should be spending time on our time, and not peeling away at these cold, dead onions. That’s what you’re thinking, isn’t it?

JAY: Well, no. Well, sure, yeah. I mean, it is sometimes frustrating to see a person like yourself who is willing to poke and poke into the “fine structure” of stuff that happened back in 1944 or 1954, but who’s uninterested in 2004, you know? Here’s this whole funky truckload of horror that’s going on right now! And yet the digging on the part of the real historians is minimal.

BEN: You try it. Try it with 2004. Be my guest. Blow the lid off it, my man. You’ll find it’s difficult to do.

JAY: I know it’s difficult.

BEN: People are still very much in the middle of their careers, so they’re guarded all down the line, and not only is everything classified, but it still feels to them like it needs to be classified, which isn’t true about secrets from fifty years ago. And it’s so huge, because it’s all happening now.