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"No, I'm standing here to make the line more impressive," was the reply that leapt to mind, but of
course all I said was, "Yes, I am."
"Because you can have these," he said, and thrust two tickets at me.
My immediate thought, born of years of stupidly misreading situations, was that there must be some
catch. "How much?" I said warily.
"No, no, you can have them. For free. We can't go to the game, you see." He indicated a car outside
with the engine running and a woman in the passenger seat.
"Really?" I said. "Well, thank you very much." And then I was struck by a thought. "Did you make a
special trip here to give away two tickets?"
"They were going to go to waste otherwise," he said apologetically. "Enjoy the game."
Perhaps the most singular thing is that there is no crime here. I mean none. People will casually
leave a $500 bicycle propped against a tree and go off to do their shopping. If someone did steal it, I
am almost certain the victim would run after the thief shouting, "Could you please return it to 32
Wilson Avenue when you've finished with it? And watch out for the third gear-it sticks."
No one locks anything. I remember being astounded by this on my first visit when a realtor took me
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out to look at houses and she kept leaving her car unlocked, even when we went into a restaurant for
lunch and even though there was a mobile phone on the front seat and some shopping in the back.
At one of the houses, she discovered she had brought the wrong key. "Back door'll be unlocked," she
33 announced confidently, and it was. I subsequently realized that there was nothing unusual in this.
We know people who go away on vacation without locking their doors, don't know where their
house key is, aren't even sure if they still have one.
Now you might reasonably wonder why, then, this is not a thief's paradise. There are two reasons, I
believe. First, there is no market for stolen goods here. If you sidled up to anyone in New Hampshire
and said,
"Want to buy a car stereo?" the person would look at you as if you were out of your mind and say,
"No, I already have a car stereo." Then they would report you to the police and-here is the second
thing-the police would come and shoot you.
But of course the police don't shoot people here because they don't need to because there is no
crime. It is a rare and heartwarming example of a virtuous circle. We have grown used to this now,
but when we were still new in town and I expressed wonder about it all to a woman who grew up in
New York City but has lived here for twenty years, she laid a hand on my arm and said, as if
imparting a great secret, "Honey, you're not in the real world any longer. You're in New
Hampshire."
WHY EVERYONE IS WORRIED
Here's a fact for you: In 1995, according to the Washington Post, computer hackers successfully
breached the Pentagon's security systems 161,000 times. That works out to eighteen illicit entries
every hour around the clock, one every 3.2 minutes.
Oh, I know what you're going to say. This sort of thing could happen to any monolithic defense
establishment with the fate of the earth in its hands. After all, if you stockpile a massive nuclear
arsenal, it's only natural that people are going to want to go in and have a look around, maybe see
what all those buttons marked "Detonate" and "Code Red" mean. It's only human nature.
Besides, the Pentagon has got quite enough on its hands, thank you, with trying to find its missing
logs from the Gulf War. I don't know if you have read about this, but the Pentagon has
mislaid-irretrievably lost, actually-all but thirty-six of the two hundred pages of official records of
its brie f but exciting desert adventure. Half of the missing files, it appears, were wiped out when an
officer at Gulf War headquarters-I wish I was making this up, but I'm not-incorrectly downloaded
some games into a military computer.
The other missing files are, well, missing. All that is known is that two sets were dispatched to
Central Command in Florida, but now nobody can find them (probably those cleaning ladies again),
and a third set was somehow "lost from a safe" at a base in Maryland, which sounds eminently
plausible in the circumstances.
Now to be fair to the Pentagon, its mind has no doubt been distracted by the unsettling news that it
has not been getting very reliable dispatches from the CIA. I refer to the recent news that, despite
spending $2 billion a year monitoring developments in the Soviet Union, the CIA failed completely
to foresee the breakup of the U. S. S. R., and this has naturally unnerved the top brass at the
Pentagon. I mean to say, you can't expect people to keep track of their wars if they're not getting
reliable reports from the field, now can you?
The CIA, in its turn, was almost certainly distracted from its missions by the news-and again let me
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stress that I am not making any of this up-that the FBI had spent years filming one of the CIA's agents,
Aldrich
Ames, going into the Soviet embassy in Washington with bulging files and coming out empty-handed
but had not yet quite figured out what he was up to. The FBI knew that Ames was a CIA employee,
knew he made regular visits to the Soviet embassy, and knew the CIA was looking for a mole in its
midst but had never managed to make the leap of imagination necessary to pull these tantalizing
strands together.
Ames was eventually caught and sentenced to a zillion years in prison for passing information, but
no thanks to the FBI. But then, to be fair, the FBI has been absolutely snowed under with screwing
up everything it comes in contact with. First, there was its wrongful arrest of Richard Jewell, the
security guard it suspected of last year's bombing in Atlanta's Olympic Park. Jewell, according to the
FBI, planted
34 the bomb and made a phone call alerting authorities, then raced a couple of miles in a minute or
so in order to be back at the scene in time to be a hero. Even though there was not a shred of
evidence to connect him with the bomb and even though it was conclusively demonstrated that he
could not have made the call and returned to the park in the time alleged, it took the FBI months to
realize it had the wrong man.
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