By high school, I knew that communism had gone away, but never learned what communism had actually been (“bad” was enough). I read Invisible Man, but the only black people I knew were the ones on TV shows, or, again, on the news—like Yusef Salaam, one of the accused boys in the Central Park jogger case, his beautiful face instantly looking guilty to a stupid white girl because he dared to be proud. I am not sure I had any idea whatsoever what Islam was. Yusef Salaam was just a funny black name to me. Religion, politics, race—they washed over me like fuzzy things, troubled things that obviously meant something to someone somewhere but that had no relationship to me, to Wall, to America. I certainly had no idea that most people in the world felt those connections deeply.
Racism, anti-Semitism, prejudice—those things, however, on some unconscious level, I must have known. Those things were expressed in the fear of Asbury Park, which was black; in the resentment of the towns of Marlboro and Deal, which were known as Jewish; in the way Hispanics seemed exotic. Much of the Jersey Shore was segregated as if it were still the 1950s, and so prejudice was expressed through fear of anything outside of Wall, anything outside of the tiny white world in which we lived; people who live in such towns can go their whole lives without knowing about anyone different from them, aside from the racist, prejudiced, exotic representations they see on TV. If there was something that saved us from being outwardly racist, it was that in small towns like Wall, especially for girls, it was important to be nice, or good, and so this pressure tempered tendencies toward overt cruelty when we were young.
I was in high school for the Rwandan genocide and the war in Bosnia, but I was conscious of none of it at the time. During my senior year, I learned twentieth-century American history through the lyrics of Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire.” The song lists the world’s horrors and accomplishments—Joe McCarthy, Richard Nixon, Studebaker, Television—and then, in a way, exonerates Americans of all of it. We didn’t start the fire / No we didn’t light it / But we tried to fight it. Many years later, I unearthed a research project I made about the song. It looked depressingly like an elementary school art project. No doubt I’d used an encyclopedia to discover the events related to the lyrics: 1967, the Israeli-Palestinian war; 1968, the My Lai massacre. The stranger thing to me, however, at that time, was not even how bare-bones my description of each of these massive events had been—two lines for the H-bomb—but rather that I’d ever known about them at all. History, America’s history, the world’s history, would slip in and out of my consciousness with no resonance whatsoever.
I was lucky that I had a mother who nourished my early-onset book addiction, an older brother with mysteriously acquired progressive politics, and a father who spent his evenings studying obscure golf antiques, lost in the pleasures of the past. In these days of the One Percent, I am nostalgic for Wall’s middle-class modesty and its sea-salt Jersey Shore air. But as a teenager I knew that the only thing that could rescue me from the Wall of fear and Billy Joel was a good college. I wish I had paid more attention to that history lesson, though. At least then I would have known what “Nasser” meant before I went off to college, which was in the Ivy League.
I went to the University of Pennsylvania. The lack of interest in the world that I’d known in Wall found its reflection in Penn, although here the children were wealthy, highly educated, and apolitical. During orientation, the Wharton School told its students they were “the smartest people in the country,” or so I had heard. (Donald Trump Jr. was there then, too.) At Penn, in 1999, everyone wanted to be an investment banker, and many would go on to bring down the world economy a decade later. But they were more educated than I was; in American literature class, they had even heard of William Faulkner. When my best friend from Wall revealed one night that she hadn’t heard of John McEnroe or Jerry Garcia, some boys on the dormitory hall called us ignorant, and white trash, and chastised us for not reading magazines. We were hurt, and surprised; white trash was something we said about other people at the Jersey Shore. My boyfriend from Wall accused me of going to Penn solely to find a boyfriend who drove a Ferrari, and the boys at Penn made fun of the Camaros we drove in high school. Class in America was not something easily delineated by large categories, certainly not ones most of us had any structural or intellectual understanding of; class was a constellation of a million little materialistic cultural signifiers, and the insult, loss, or acquisition of any of them could transform one’s future entirely. In the end, I chose to pursue the new life Penn offered me. The kids I met had parents who were doctors or academics; many of them had already even been to Europe! Penn, for all its superficiality, felt one step closer to a larger world.
Still, I cannot remember any of us being conscious of foreign events during my four years of college (1995 to 1999), except the first months of freshman year, when Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated. I hadn’t known who he was. There were wars in Eritrea and Nepal; Afghanistan, Kosovo, East Timor, Kargil. Embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam were bombed. Panama, Nicaragua—I couldn’t keep Latin American countries straight—Osama bin Laden, Clinton bombing Iraq—nope. Maybe I knew “Saddam Hussein,” which had the same evil resonance of “communism.” I remember Wag the Dog, a satire of how Americans started a fake war with “terrorists”—a word I never paused to question—to distract from domestic scandals, which at the time was what many would accuse Clinton of doing in Afghanistan during the Monica Lewinsky affair. I never thought about Afghanistan. What country was in Wag the Dog? Albania. There was a typical American callousness in our reaction to the country they chose for the movie, an indifference that said, Some bumblefuck country, it doesn’t matter which one they choose.
I became an adult in the go-go 1990s, the decade when, according to America’s foremost intellectuals, “history” ended, America triumphant, the Cold War won by a landslide. The historian David Schmitz writes that by that time, the idea that America won because of “its values and steadfast adherence to the promotion of liberalism and democracy” was dominating “op-ed pages, popular magazines, and the best-seller lists.” These ideas were the ambient noise, the elevator music, the echoes of my most formative years. But for me there was also an intervention—a chance experience in the basement of Penn’s library.