[Continued from Folio 2]
I think what I realized is, there’s a lot to fear, but there’s actually very little that we need or can’t be without. I think once you kind of let go of the things you cling to no matter what and that you’re petrified of losing, that’s when you become a lot more powerful.
How does fear manifest itself with you? Like, what happens when you feel it?
Um, I mean, I just find myself drifting to a scenario—like, what it would be like if I get arrested, what it would look like, what it would feel like, what my physical environment would be. Just trying to game that all out. So you’re just walking down the street, and all of a sudden you’re imagining a twenty-year prison sentence for violation of the Espionage Act, right, where you’re convicted, and then your only other hope—like every other prisoner in the massive American prison leviathan—is some unseen appellate court that’s probably going to reject everything you say in like, three paragraphs, and then you’re just going to be confined to prison for the next twenty years, and how long twenty years would feel like. You know, you go through the whole scenario in your head, which is basically living negative outcomes that aren’t here, and then that in turn starts making you doubt whether or not you’re making the right choice.
Which is when your stomach goes into knots.
No, exactly. But I mean, at the same time, I don’t think courage is about an absence of fear; I think it’s about taking action despite fear, right? So I think it would be unhealthy and stupid of me to get on a plane back to America without contemplating all of those things, because in the event that they do happen, I want to be prepared.
And for the book tour, I’ve taken every precaution. Like, I have lawyers in every city. I have a whole chain of things that are going to happen if anything goes wrong, with all the right people who are immediately involved. So I’ve protected myself as best as I can.
How do you feel about the early presidential jockeying?
Hillary is banal, corrupted, drained of vibrancy and passion. I mean, she’s been around forever, the Clinton circle. She’s a fucking hawk and like a neocon, practically. She’s surrounded by all these sleazy money types who are just corrupting everything everywhere. But she’s going to be the first female president, and women in America are going to be completely invested in her candidacy. Opposition to her is going to be depicted as misogynistic, like opposition to Obama has been depicted as racist. It’s going to be this completely symbolic messaging that’s going to overshadow the fact that she’ll do nothing but continue everything in pursuit of her own power. They’ll probably have a gay person after Hillary who’s just going to do the same thing.
I hope this happens so badly, because I think it’ll be so instructive in that regard. It’ll prove the point. Americans love to mock the idea of monarchy, and yet we have our own de facto monarchy. I think what these leaks did is, they demonstrated that there really is this government that just is the kind of permanent government that doesn’t get affected by election choices and that isn’t in any way accountable to any sort of democratic transparency and just creates its own world off on its own.
Once the story shifted from Snowden to you, did you find yourself destabilized by the sudden attacks, the charges of traitor and the like?
If you’re a journalist, you say, “I want to challenge the powerful.” And I think it’s really easy to say that without actually thinking about what it means. Once the NSA fully understood the picture of what I intended to do, I knew that the attacks were going to be coordinated and very substantial, because that’s the nature of power, right? If they didn’t do that back to me, they wouldn’t be powerful.
What do your parents make of all of this?
They’re pretty typical parents, half supportive and half concerned. My father’s pretty conservative politically. He doesn’t really care about foreign policy or civil liberties. He mostly cares just about taxes. He’s an accountant. He believes taxes should be low. And you know, ordinarily what I’m doing would not be the kind of thing that he would support overall—taking a bunch of secrets from the government and just publishing them against their wishes, right? But it is interesting to watch the impulse of supporting your child overwhelm any kind of ideological resistance to it. So he’s been very supportive, but also very concerned. And my mother has been more of the same thing, very supportive but very concerned. Like, they think I shouldn’t come back to the U.S.
What is the nature of the threats you’ve received?
I get threatening e-mails, a few a week. But the threats I take much more seriously are the ones that are intended to be threats from people like James Clapper and Keith Alexander and Mike Rogers—you know, overt threats of prosecution and criminalization.
You mentioned before that you grew up poor. Can you describe what your childhood was like?
My father was a CPA, so he wasn’t super poor. But my parents divorced when I was 6. So my father moved out and remarried, and my mother was a typical 1960s, 1970s housewife who hadn’t gone to college. She had kids, didn’t have a career, didn’t work. She was a housewife. And so once my parents got divorced, my mother needed to work, because the child support and alimony that she was getting from my father was very minimal, and he then started having financial difficulties, because he had a second family that he was… You know, standard, typical kind of divorce situation. And so she was doing the only jobs she could. She worked for, like, two years as a cashier at McDonald’s, and I remember she would take home huge bags of those little scratch games where if you bought a Big Mac, you would get one of the things, and you would scratch it, and you could win a “Buy one Coke, get another Coke free,” or sometimes you’d win $5 or a $20 credit. So she would steal, like, thousands of them, and we would sit at the table, my brother and her. There was some big prize—$5,000 or whatever. And we would just scratch them all off and put them in little piles, and that was pretty much how we would eat. I wasn’t starving poor. I wasn’t living in an inner city. But it was very lower-middle-class to poor. There was no discretionary money. You know, there was just enough money to pay basic bills. And I think the sensation of poverty was enhanced because I went to this school with mostly rich kids. So there would be, like, field trips to Europe that they went on and I couldn’t. They all got cars, and I didn’t. Their houses were all nice, and mine was really old and dirty. So it felt probably more enhanced, even, than it really was.
And now your book has sold in twenty-four countries, so you’ve got these book advances, the job at The Intercept, and all sorts of other income sources.
There’s a movie deal. Somebody’s doing a movie.
I was gonna ask you about that. Do they have people attached?
We’re just signing the contract now. I mean, the producer who’s spearheading the project is Barbara Broccoli, whose father did all the Bond films, and she now produces the Bond films. So I was actually a little worried about that, because James Bond is stupid. But I haven’t seen her films, so I shouldn’t say that, but that’s my impression from a distance. But she’s a big mover in Hollywood, which is apparently important to, like, get a film done. And we want the film to be done, because, for me, like, when I was a kid, I was obsessed with All the President’s Men, the film. And you know, the ability to reach huge numbers of people who don’t stay online reading political writing is really important to everything we’ve done. [Ed. note: Sony didn’t respond to a request for comment.]
How did you decide to settle in Rio?
It was 2005, and two things happened: I’d gotten out of a really long-term relationship of eleven years, and I’d decided not to practice law anymore. I just wanted to come to Rio for seven weeks, because I wanted to figure out my life—and have fun. So I cleared my calendar, took my dog to a friend’s, rented a place. I got here, I went to bed, woke up, went to the beach right near my house, and that morning David was playing volleyball, and someone in his little volleyball thing hit a ball and almost knocked over my drink, or did knock over part of it. And he ran over to retrieve the ball and apologized, and we started talking and then from that point forward have been inseparable.
Are there moments, sitting here in Rio, when you think, How did I get here, in the middle of this firestorm?
Yeah, there’s a surreality to it, right? It’s been so global in scope. One of the things I used to love about being here was that I could just shut off the computer and all my work would disappear. None of my friends here know or care what I do. But because this story had such an important impact here and I’ve been on TV constantly, I lost all of that. Every time I make a choice to publish a story, it could disrupt diplomatic relations—I mean, it did disrupt diplomatic relations seriously between the U.S. and Brazil, the two largest countries in the hemisphere. And that’s happened in a lot of different places. There is a disconnect between sitting here on this veranda with my dogs, doing my work, and the implications in the world.
Right. You can hit “send” here in the jungle and set off your own nuclear weapon in whatever part of the world.
Right. And that part is difficult, because when everything you’re doing has such high stakes to it, there’s a lot of pressure. It’s why this book was so much harder to write than my prior ones, because I knew, with my prior ones, I was going to sell 30 to 40,000 copies and those books were mostly going to be read by my fans, people who were supportive of the work I was doing. The stakes weren’t high. Whereas this book is highly anticipated. People are going to be poring through it, looking for things to attack—and errors, right? It was just a lot more stressful.
Every journalist has stories where you have to make hard choices, things that you decide that can affect people one way or the other. Those are really stressful. But usually those are in isolation. You have one or two of those a year, right? I mean, I’ve had those every single day for ten months straight. And it isn’t just the countries you’re affecting and the governments you’re affecting, it’s the people with whom you’re working. It’s Snowden and his legal risk. It’s your own legal risks and your reputation, the media outlets who run your work in. I mean, there’s just a lot at stake in every single choice we’re making. And that does become a little bit of a burden.
Do you believe in God?
I mean, I grew up without organized religion. My parents tried to inculcate me a little bit into organized Judaism, but they weren’t particularly devoted to that, and my grandparents were, but it just never took hold. I wasn’t bar mitzvahed or anything. So I never had organized religion. I don’t really like aggressive atheists who are so convinced they know the answers to questions that they don’t actually know the answers to. Like, that level of hubris and certainty bothers me. They think they’re so scientific, and yet they’re asserting things that they don’t actually know without evidence. And I do believe in the spiritual and mystical part of the world. Like, obviously yoga is like a bridge into that, like a window into it. I think other things are as well. But my moral precepts aren’t informed in any way by religious doctrine or, like, organized religion or anything.
The dogs seem to play a huge role in your life.
One of the reasons I love dogs is because I think they perceive the world, things in the world, that we as humans don’t perceive. I think there’s something kind of just spiritual about it. They’re just completely in the experience. And so many times, we as human beings remove ourselves from the present by reliving the past or worrying about a future, neither of which we can control, and we destroy our present, and we lose all the power that we have, the ability to just be. That is really what I learn from dogs. That’s the thing that I would like to apprehend most about dogness.
Do you sometimes kick yourself and say, like, “Let’s get more ‘dog’ right now”?
Yeah, I do. I do. I mean, I really do.
Michael Paterniti (@MikePaterniti) is a GQ correspondent. He is the author of The Telling Room: A Tale of Love, Betrayal, Revenge, and the World’s Greatest Piece of Cheese, which is out this month in paperback.
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