Carlo Rotella is one of the most exciting thinkers I’ve ever met. He’s a professor, writer, and public intellectual, and his mind ranges everywhere: from boxing to the blues and free play to fantasy novels.

A couple of weeks ago, Rotella wrote a brilliant column in the Boston Globe about the challenge of conveying nuanced ideas in media formats which value glib summaries above all else. (Even the title – “Why Academics Turn Into Robots on TV” – was great.)

I emailed Rotella, and he agreed to talk some more about his ideas. I called him a few days later, and I did my best to follow his fertile mind as it criss-crossed acres of political and cultural terrain.

Carlo Rotella

MB: In a recent essay in the Boston Globe, you talked about the relative absence of experts on TV and radio who are capable of articulating complicated ideas in a digestible way. You suggested that there’s a “sweet spot between the eminent scholar who had so much to say but couldn’t find a way to say it and the media pro who didn’t have much to say but managed to get it said memorably in a few seconds of airtime.”

It sounds like you’re lamenting a lack of real public intellectuals. Who do you think of as the best occupants of that sweet spot right now?

CR: Well, at the risk of starting up by saying, “Well, Matt, it’s complicated,” let me just amend the first part of that. I think there are a lot of people who can do it on both sides. That is, there are a lot of academics who are able to talk to a general audience and who have an ambition to make things more complicated than they often come out in the press. And on the other side, there are a lot of people in the writing trades and journalists who are interested in what academics have to say, and are familiar with that world and want the academics to give them that material.

So, a lot of what I’m talking about is actually the technical difficulty of squeezing it in to the niches that are made available to do it. Even with goodwill on both sides, sometimes it’s hard to do, right? So I’m not lamenting the lack of people who can do this; I’m saying that it’s hard to do and it’s a very specific skill, separate from having something to say. And so, it often doesn’t work even when there are good intentions on all sides.

MB: So the problem is two-fold. Sometimes, media outlets aren’t interested in nuanced discourse. And even when they are, there’s this second challenge of actually being able to do it.

CR: Right. I’ll give you an example of someone who I thought did it quite well. So when Kim Jong-Il died, there were a very small number of Korea experts who ended up getting interviewed a lot in print and on TV. (And let me just add that generally, the more capital that goes into producing whatever it is, the harder it is to squeeze in the complexity. So it’s easier, for example, being interviewed for a magazine piece than it is if you’re doing your 20 seconds on TV or whatever.)

But there’s this guy, Brian Myers, he’s at a university in Korea. I don’t know him but I was very impressed by his ability to navigate exactly that tightrope that I was talking about in the piece, which is to meet people where they are and use the language that people who don’t know a lot about North Korea will recognize, but to use that language to say something other than what everybody else is saying.

And what struck me particularly is that everybody who doesn’t know much about Korea, which is almost all of us, was amazed and aghast that people seemed so upset that Kim Jong-Il had died. And Myers had this great line where he said, “Well, just think about a country where a lot of the work that is done by the popular culture in our country is done by official political culture, and think about all those people who seemed to get overly excited about Michael Jackson’s death.”

And just that line performed that difficult feat which is it’s not just a sound bite; it’s a big argument about what happens when official culture is popular culture. It’s a big argument but the Michael Jackson reference caused the whole point to click into place. So it’s definitely doable; it’s quite hard to do and it’s a strange little skill that’s certainly not taught anywhere.

MB: You mention specifically that academics and scholars aren’t trained to do this well. My sense is that much of academia functions as a relatively closed, tradition-bound world in which this skill isn’t prized particularly highly. Is this the sort of thing that you think should be taught to rising scholars?

CR: At least in the humanities, I would say that the movement over time has actually been towards this kind of thinking. The professional rewards for being obscure have been reduced, I think, for a lot of reasons.

One of them, for instance, is the change in academic publishing that says that if you want to publish a book with a first-rate academic press, you need to publish something that feels like a book, that somebody can just pick up and read because they are interested in the subject. And that still drives a lot of tenure and promotion decisions – who publishes where.

That and a lot of other things including intellectual reasons. For people under 40 in particular, the pendulum has begun to swing considerably back towards just being plain and clear and making yourself understood to anybody who’s interested. And if you’re in a big enough department, that includes your colleagues. If you’re a specialist in American popular culture, you need to make yourself understood to the medievalist, and that’s good practice for making yourself understood to people who’ve never even heard of what you do.

So there’s a whole suite of skills. What we’re talking about with this kind of punditry is an extreme example, which is encapsulating academic arguments into short paragraphs and using narrative and characters more than abstractions in order to make an argument. That is, showing how characters live the consequences of an argument. And punditry is a one way to do it. I think writing for trade publications is another.

So there’s a lot of cross-training you can do to do this. So when I think about skills and where I get chances to work on them, it’s undergraduate lecturing, writing for magazines, giving public talks. In all of those places, you’re working on a set of chops.

One of the best ones is undergraduate teaching, to be able to do this on your feet to a large group of people, who, like radio listeners, feel that it matters and then need to be convinced of your argument.

MB: You mentioned narrative above. Let’s talk more about that, and in particular, about your recent essay on “The Wire.” You suggest that the show is able to provide real insights about our political culture “by showing how people worth caring about, people who happen to be fictional, live the consequences of the mess we’ve made.”

It sounds like you’re making a point that’s bigger than the show – about the power of narrative to illustrate things we know to be true but don’t know how to talk about in standard political discourse.

CR: I think that’s about right. And some people – in some fields, people have a leg up on this. Historians, for instance – it’s their job to tell stories about people, in addition to accounting for change over time. But especially over in my end of the academy, which is more American studies/English, there tends to be less of a tradition of doing that. And the thing that I object to and the thing that I’ve tried to get rid of is this misunderstanding that it’s easier to tell stories about people to dumb down or make more accessible or cosmetically improve the cuteness quotient of your argument.

What I’m saying instead is that actually one of our most potent forms of argument is telling stories about people, telling stories about characters, and that it’s not dancing around the argument so that people won’t be afraid of your argument, but rather, it’s a really strong way to argue.

And here we’re moving away from punditry, because here we’re talking, almost by definition, about a kind of a longer form, which depicts the time the character lived in three dimensions and sets that character against a big picture.

And some pundits are so good at that that they can do it in 40 seconds, but I think that that’s also the purview of the magazine profile and then all the way up to the biography, the scholarly biography. It’s to put that character in motion against the background, in such a way that you explain something big that’s behind the character by way of following the character’s movements. That’s a kind of achievement of humane letters that I think is coming slowly; the pendulum is beginning to swing slowly back towards that kind of work.

MB: I think what you just said almost perfectly explains why so many people found themselves loving these characters – like Omar Little, for example, someone who does really despicable things. It’s precisely because they’ve been made so live, so 3D and robust and contextualized that we can actually see them as real human beings and not just carriers of a failed morality or something like that.

CR: Right – or as dupes or as just metaphors. I mean part of what I think is really important in, let’s say, writing a magazine profile that carries over into scholarship is that another thing about those characters is that they are messy, they’re not neat. They have aspects that don’t fit into your argument perfectly, whatever argument you happen to be making. To me, that’s usually a sign that a character is alive enough, is complex enough to sort of stand on its own two feet, and so that they’re not just this kind of cut-out character who is there to illustrate the point, whatever the point is.

And Omar is different from some of the other characters in “The Wire” because he’s actually from another genre – he’s from the western and he sort of just showed up in “The Wire.” But there are other characters who are just very messy, complicated, compromised, inconsistent characters who are caught up in the bigger picture. My favorite example is the team, Herc and Carver, who are in some ways terrible cops, but as you follow their bumbling in one way or another and then Carver’s dawning enlightenment, they become perfect illustrations of what it means to be caught up in the perfect catch-22 of the war on drugs. And it’s beautifully done, because they’re so messy that the big forces playing upon them become clearer and clearer. And another character like that—I’m now forgetting his name, one of the corner guys from the first season, the one who becomes the most thoughtful and ends up making it almost to the end before he was killed in the final season.

MB: I can’t think of the name either. [It's Wallace.]

CR: So he starts out, he’s just kind of a monster, and then the moment when he can’t kill his friend at the end of the first season, and Poot does it for him, he starts to become complicated in that same way and he’s sort of living the contradictions from the other side of the street as Herc and Carver. And it’s that messiness that in fact makes them extremely precise instruments for advancing an argument.

MB: What we’re talking about unfolds over the course of lots of episodes – even whole seasons. But you mentioned a minute ago how, when pundits are very good, they’re actually capable of delivering compelling narratives in 30 or 40-second bites. I’m thinking about when politicians do something similar: the quick anecdote about a real American -“Joe McKnight from Peoria is working two jobs and trying to send his kids to college,” that kind of thing. Sometimes it’s effective, but other times it feels insincere, even exploitative.

CR: And it also feels so formulaic at this point. In fact, I remember some Saturday Night Live parody of it, where the average American that he mentioned had gone through a series of spectacularly improbable industrial accidents which he went into in great detail, precisely to point out that you just glaze over.

MB: It’s funny though, because I want to say that it’s not just the politician’s fault that we glaze over. Maybe they’ve overused that little anecdotal genre or whatever, but it’s not that they’re necessarily trying to do something illegitimate. It’s the timeframe. There’s something about trying to do it so quickly, trying to compress someone’s life – and the meaning of that life – into a 12-second political point. It just doesn’t seem to work. I want politicians to be able to think and talk about real human narratives, but I’m not sure always sure what that looks like.

CR: Yeah. Structurally, this is difficult to do. If Bill Clinton has a problem doing it, then chances are, there’s a high degree of difficulty in this dive.  And I think actually Clinton was better at it than either Bush or Obama, because he had the added advantage, spurious or not, of being able to persuade at least part of his audience that while he was encapsulating the person’s life into something very compact, he himself was sort of feeling it and it was resonating with his own experience in such a way that encouraged you to feel it too. So you’re actually empathizing with Bill Clinton responding to the person’s story, whereas in their various ways Bush and Obama are much more detached emotionally from the person they’re telling the story about.

With Clinton, what he was really doing was saying, “I’m reacting powerfully to this story and I invite you to react along with me.” You know, like a character in a Steven Spielberg movie – the main thing characters in Steven Spielberg movies do is stand there with their mouths hanging open, gaping at whatever this incredible spectacle is that he’s putting on the screen, so that we’re encouraged to do that too: “Oh, look, a dinosaur!”

But with Clinton, it wasn’t so much a storytelling ability as a kind of emotive expression or acting ability, whatever you want to call it. It’s hard to do. But let’s just remember that telling stories about people isn’t the only way to do it. It’s possible to do it purely on the analytical level and in doing it, you come up against two different models of culture.

One is the prison-house of language model, which says if you use the same old words to try and say something new, you’re just going to end up saying the same old thing, right? And the other is the idea that you can go into the same old language and by brilliantly using your recombinant skills get it to make something entirely new.

I’m just not sure where I come down on it. What you’re talking about is a pretty good illustration of the prison-house of language argument. You’re saying the same old things, “Yeah, I know he’s from Ohio. I know he’s had a hard time recently. You know, there’s a loan involved, and a mortgage,” and as I said you kind of glaze over.

But then the recombinant argument is like this historian that I was thinking about in Korea, Brian Myers. Just by injecting the name of Michael Jackson at a crucial moment, you kind of crack open the language like a shell; something new came out of the egg, which was a different understanding of how popular culture works in North Korea.

So I think it is possible to do. Maybe in the State of the Union Address, it’s impossible, but I know it is possible in a magazine-length article, and what you’re talking about is, “Is it possible at some length in between those two?”

MB: I think I’ve seen it from Obama – for example, at the Gabby Giffords speech a year ago. In short anecdotes, he was talking about moments in these citizens’ lives, and he seemed to achieve something Clintonesque to me. But it was a bit different, because with Clinton, it was all pathos and empathy; ideas weren’t involved in the same way. With Obama, I get the sense that there’s real empathy and pathos, but there’s also a clearer set of convictions and ideals.

CR: Well, it’s a little a bit like comparing Spock to Kirk, right? I mean, what is it you’re after? But with Clinton, what was underneath the impulse was analytical. He had a great analytical mind and he was after advantage in a kind of incredibly purposeful and calculated way. It’s just that he had a range of skills on the performing emotive side that gave him certain advantages, right?

I think that’s different from the talking heads. The talking head can stand back a little bit from that kind of point-scoring and make a purely analytical point. They actually have one fewer onus on them, but on the other hand they have a more complicated objective than the politicians, which is just to win the news cycle or to win the point, whatever it is.

Yup, not a typo. Romney made those remarks in an interview with Soledad O’Brien this morning.

After all, he said, “We have a very ample safety net and we can talk about whether it needs to be strengthened or whether there are holes in it.”

Several things. First, it shouldn’t really be up for debate: there are massive holes in the social safety net, and millions of people go without the basic assistance they need. This should be a starting point for any discussion about poverty in this country, not a point that we have to continually bring up.

Second, Romney seems to think it’s not his or his party’s job to talk about the poor. 

“We will hear from the Democrat party the plight of the poor,” he said. “And there’s no question it’s not good being poor and we have a safety net to help those that are very poor. But my campaign is focused on middle income Americans…”

Since when do we ask our president to outsource dire social problems to the other party?

Third, why does Romney think he has to choose between concern for the poor and concern for middle-income folks? In political campaigns, he says, “you can choose where to focus. You can focus on the rich – that’s not my focus. You can focus on the very poor – that’s not my focus. My focus is on middle-income Americans.” Shouldn’t his focus be on all Americans, and particularly the ones facing terrifying economic circumstances?

Fourth, when Romney says he’s focused on “the very heart of America, the 90 percent, 95 percent of Americans who right now are struggling,” you have to wonder what he means by “struggling”. We’re not all in the same boat. Folks in the 5th income percentile and folks in the 95th income percentile don’t face anything close to the same set of problems.

Fifth, there’s way more poverty than Romney seems to realize. Again, 15% as of a couple of months ago.

I try not to use this blog as an outlet for re-posts, but this article screams to be shared. In it, The New Yorker‘s Adam Gopnik describes the intense, time-warping agony of life in prison:

“It isn’t the horror of the time at hand but the unimaginable sameness of the time ahead that makes prisons unendurable for their inmates.

“That’s why no one who has been inside a prison, if only for a day, can ever forget the feeling. Time stops. A note of attenuated panic, of watchful paranoia—anxiety and boredom and fear mixed into a kind of enveloping fog, covering the guards as much as the guarded…What prisoners try to convey to the free is how the presence of time as something being done to you, instead of something you do things with, alters the mind at every moment.”

Later in the piece, Gopnik focuses on the even more profound inhumanity that is extended solitary confinement:

“Every day, at least fifty thousand men—a full house at Yankee Stadium—wake in solitary confinement, often in “supermax” prisons or prison wings, in which men are locked in small cells, where they see no one, cannot freely read and write, and are allowed out just once a day for an hour’s solo “exercise.” (Lock yourself in your bathroom and then imagine you have to stay there for the next ten years, and you will have some sense of the experience.)”

*     *     *

Our discourse around torture tends to revolve around questions of physical pain. Remember all the commentators who mocked the idea that many of the Bush Administration’s “enhanced interrogation” techniques really counted as torture? Their logic seemed to go as follows: if it doesn’t cause immediate and excruciating physical pain, then it doesn’t qualify. (The Bush Justice Department actually went further in its famous “Torture Memos“.)

By this logic, sensory deprivation isn’t torture. But of course, we know better. Torture isn’t just a matter of physical sensations: it’s also – and perhaps primarily – a matter of mental experience. (Which means, of course, that physical sensations aren’t just physical either.) The Bush Administration – like other practitioners of torture – knew this. And as Mark Bowden has written, our government has known it for nearly half a century:

“For most people severe sensory deprivation quickly becomes misery; the effects were documented in the notorious 1963 CIA manual on interrogation, called the Kubark Manual…The manual cites a 1954 study at the National Institute of Mental Health…in which two volunteers attempted to see how long they could stay suspended in water wearing blackout masks and hearing only the sound of their own breathing and “some faint sounds of water from the piping.” Neither lasted more than three hours. According to the study, “Both passed quickly from normally directed thinking through a tension resulting from unsatisfied hunger for sensory stimuli and concentration upon the few available sensations to provide reveries and fantasies and eventually to visual imagery somewhat resembling hallucinations.” John Marks reported in his book that in a similar experiment a volunteer kicked his way out of a sensory-deprivation box after an hour of tearful pleas for release had been ignored.

“The summary of another experiment concluded,

“‘The results confirmed earlier findings. 1) The deprivation of sensory stimuli induces stress; 2) the stress becomes unbearable for most subjects; 3) the subject has a growing need for physical and social stimuli; and 4) some subjects progressively lose touch with reality, focus inwardly, and produce delusions, hallucinations, and other pathological effects.’”

*     *     *

I’m not suggesting that prison is equivalent to sensory deprivation (though I suspect solitary confinement comes close and ends up destroying minds in a similar way). In fact, what I’m saying is pretty basic. Prison tends to prevent inmates from fulfilling basic human needs for physical and social contact, and many suffer profound psychological consequences as a result.

With all of this in mind, it’s worth thinking about the goals that we use to justify incarceration. Typically, these aims break down into two categories: rehabilitation and punishment.

But given what Gopnik has written – and given what we know about the effects of long-term social isolation and relative sensory deprivation – it should be clear that prison isn’t particularly good at either one. If the goal is rehabilitation, then putting people in cages with little or nothing but their own thoughts isn’t likely to be successful. What prisoners try to convey to the free is how the presence of time as something being done to you, instead of something you do things with, alters the mind at every moment.  And if the goal is punishment, then for a large range of cases, prison is far, far too harsh. It is long-form torture, no less severe or destructive for its silence.

______________________________________________

*A few weeks ago, I spent about four hours in a cell at a police station in New Hampshire. Not for a moment would I compare my experience to anything approaching full-time confinement in prison. Still, it’s worth saying that even those few hours messed with my head. I felt foggy and small, restless and bored, jumpy and exhausted, anxious and depressed. I didn’t know how long it would last or when it would end. And while I knew that each minute brought me closer to my release, it wasn’t clear how much closer – which meant that the passage of time couldn’t provide much solace.

Check out the brand-new Wheat and Chaff Podcast. First episode? An interview with convicted super-lobbyist Jack Abramoff. Click above to play. And of course, let us know what you think.

You can also download the podcast here.

Over the past several days, I’ve been astonished at the response to my arrest at a Mitt Romney event in New Hampshire. Folks from around the country have written with offers of legal assistance, and the incident has sparked intense discussions around civil liberties and campaign tactics across the internet. It’s been tweeted thousands of times and shared on a variety of social networks even more. Here’s just a sampling of the coverage:

Huffington Post. (Over 1,300 comments!)

Buzzfeed.

Buzzfeed again. (This time with comments from teh arresting officer.)

Nashua Telegraph. (The story made the front page of Saturday’s edition.)

CBS Boston. (The facts in this account are incorrect; I was never given a chance to speak to the owners of Gilchrist.)

Concord Monitor.

Commonweal.

Common Dreams. (Front page.)

DailyKos. (Thousands of shares, 400+ comments.)

DailyKos follow-up. (100+ comments.)

ActNow.

FireDogLake.

Somerville Journal.

On January 15, I was a guest on AWOP (A World of Progress) Radio.

This site alone has received more than 25,000 unique visitors in the week since my arrest. And countless other blogs – across a variety of political positions – have reposted the story.

* * *

I’ve spent the last week doing almost nothing other than responding to blog comments and trying to make sense of what all of this means. Many more thoughts to come on all of that.

I just sent the following email to press@mittromney.com and info@mittromney.com about my arrest on Monday. I’ll update with any responses I receive.

Dear Romney staff,

My name is Matt Bieber, and I’m a divinity school student with a keen interest in politics. On Monday, I was removed from Gov. Romney’s event at the Gilchrist Metal Fabricating Company and then arrested. According to the arresting officer, someone on the campaign had ‘identified’ me as a protester at the governor’s offices in Manchester. This was news to me – I hadn’t even been aware that there’d been protests at his offices!

I hadn’t come to New Hampshire to protest, but to listen and learn (and to share some of my experiences on my blog). In fact, I’d come to your offices on Friday to pick up some literature (where I had a pleasant conversation with a young volunteer). I’d also attended Saturday’s debate watch party and had a great time talking with your supporters and staff. I was hoping Monday’s event might be a nice opportunity to see and hear Governor Romney in person.

I’ve written about Monday’s events, but I wanted to offer you the opportunity to respond. Can you please explain why I was removed from the event, and why no one from the campaign was willing to speak to me? If I try to attend another Romney event in the future, can I expect the same treatment?

Yours sincerely,

Matt Bieber

[For those who've read the previous post, please know that about half of this material is repeated.]

On Friday, January 6, I took a bus from my home in Boston to Manchester, NH. I was planning to attend a few Republican primary events, write a few posts for this blog, maybe cross-post them on HuffPo, and head home the next day.

But the famous retail politics atmosphere of New Hampshire was exhilarating. I was watching the candidates up close, trading notes with citizens and reporters about the campaigns, and then slurping up diner food while I processed my thoughts. I decided to stick around for a few more days, so I rented a car and found a family friend in Nashua who offered a spare bed.

On Monday, January 9, I drove a couple of towns over to see Mitt Romney speak at the Gilchrist Metal Fabricating Company in Hudson, NH. I walked into the big machine shop, put my backpack and jacket down on a seat near the stage, asked a neighbor to watch them, and went off to find a restroom. Afterward, I was chatting up a campaign staffer when a police officer approached. Sir, we have to ask you to leave the premises.

“Sir, is this about my backpack? I’d be happy to show you – there’s nothing dangerous in there.”

“No, sir – we’ll explain it to you outside.”

I gathered my things and walked past a group of citizens and press, humiliated and confused.

Outside, the officer said, “Sir, the campaign has identified you as someone who was at a protest at Romney’s office in Manchester.”

Now I was really confused. Protest? I didn’t even know there had been protests at Romney’s headquarters, and if there had been, I certainly hadn’t been at them. (Later, after I got out of jail, I looked on the web; I still haven’t found any news stories about protests at Romney’s offices here, though Occupy protesters have attended several of his events.)

I explained to the officer – his name was Lamarche, and his partner’s was Ducie – that there must have been some misunderstanding. Could I speak to someone from the campaign to clear this up? No. I’d have to leave immediately.

I asked about his authority to remove me. “We’re working for the Romney campaign,” he said. I asked if he was on-duty; he said he was. My confusion deepened. So was he working for the town of Hudson today, or for the campaign? “Both.” (Later, I think I got it straight: the campaign hired the police for the day, sort of like a private security detail.)

I thought about Romney’s campaign staff inside. They had mistaken me for someone else, and that was enough – I was out. They had imagined trouble and whisked it away, out of sight. And the police – my police – were being paid to do their bidding.

I asked again to speak to someone from the campaign or the company who owned the plant. The officer refused; the company had delegated authority to the campaign, and the campaign had authorized the police to remove anyone the campaign didn’t want present. But wouldn’t it be simple for me to just talk to someone and explain the mistake? Too many people around, the cop said. Apparently it would be too big a bother. I either had to leave the company’s property or face charges for criminal trespass.

My reason-seeking brain couldn’t take in what was happening. I had come here to be a part of the primary process, to see it first-hand and to write about it. I had already attended events with Rick Santorum, Rand Paul, and Newt Gingrich (and I would later see Ron Paul and Buddy Roemer). In each of these instances, I had come to understand the candidates and their views better and had developed greater respect for each of them. And I fully expected that the same would happen with Romney.

In other words, I came because I was curious, and on my own nickel. I wasn’t part of any protest group or in anyone’s employ. Couldn’t we just have a reasonable conversation and figure this out?

I asked another question or two, and the cop had had enough: “You’re under arrest.” He took my things, handcuffed me behind my back, searched me, and tucked me into a nearby cruiser. I could overhear him talking about going through my things, and he answered a question from the media. I was “the subject.”

A few minutes later, an officer removed me from the cruiser and had me lean up against another police car and spread my legs for a second search. Two or three TV crews had their cameras trained on us; I felt ashamed in a wholly unfamiliar way. I wanted to look directly at the cameras and explain what had happened, but I feared the police officers’ reaction.

I was tucked into the second cruiser and driven away. The camera crews continued filming. A protester – oh, did I mention that there was an actual protest there? – yelled, “Free the prisoner.”

***

The holding cell at the Hudson Police Department. (I was allowed to use my own phone to make phone calls, and I snapped these pictures as well.)

At the police station, an officer put me in a cage and asked to remove my shoes, belt, and sweatshirt and place them on the floor between us. He asked me to lift my feet so he could inspect them. He did so tentatively, from a distance.

An officer named Manni and another officer processed my paperwork. As they did so, they told me not to go back to “that area” when I was released. I indicated that I understood I wasn’t permitted to be on the company’s land or in their facilities, but surely I could go back to the street if I so chose – it’s public property, after all. Don’t go back to that area, they said. If you go back, you might cause a disturbance or a riot, and you could be arrested for disorderly conduct.

I tried to keep calm and ask even-keeled questions. Were they telling me I wasn’t even permitted in the street near the facility? And if so, on what grounds? (I wondered, Is the Romney campaign just permitted to cordon off a whole neighborhood?)

And then the following exchange took place. I began to ask, “If I express my First Amendment freedoms –

And Officer Manni interjected, “You’ll probably be arrested.”

I couldn’t locate words. (I’m not entirely sure he said ‘probably,’ but I want to give him the benefit of the doubt.)

It was clear to me that the two officers had no interest in discussing what the law actually said, or what my rights actually entailed. I was paperwork, and they wanted to get it over with. I kept asking questions, and at one point, one of them opened up the New Hampshire legal code and read me the definition of disorderly conduct. He read the words dully, as if they were just syllables, with no interest at all in what they meant.

I asked the officer if he could help me connect what he’d just read with my situation and understand why it would be a problem to return to the street outside the event. He told me that I might return and say things that “aren’t what others think.” [It might have been "aren't what others believe" or "aren't what most others believe." I'm not 100% sure.] It was incredible – he actually paused before he said those words, as if searching for something politically correct to say. I don’t think he realized that the words he found had so little to do with the letter and spirit of our laws and Constitution.

***

My cell was down the hall and to the left.

An officer returned, and I given a choice: I could either post bail or spend the night at a nearby jail and see a judge for an arraignment in the morning. Neither option seemed particularly fair: I could either pay money for not having done anything wrong, or I could go to jail and take my chances with a judge for not having done anything wrong. I wasn’t sure I’d hold up very well in jail. I was already shaken and lightheaded, and my heart was still going hard.

I opted for bail, and I was brought back out to the holding cell for mug shots. (Officer Manni made sure that I knew not to smile. “The court doesn’t like that. They take it as an insult.”) He then took a second set of mug shots in a different room. (The first, if I remember correctly, were for the local police department’s records. The second would be sent to other state and local law enforcement agencies and the FBI.)

Last came fingerprints. The prints involved no ink; instead, a digital machine captured my “finger slaps.” Each time the laser-reader scanned my fingerprints and recorded the image, it read “Scan Complete!”

Officer Manni put me back in the holding cell to wait for the bail bondsman, and I sat there for the next couple of hours. At some point, he offered to let me make a call, and he allowed me to use my own phone to do so. “Can I make more than one?” I asked. He didn’t care: “You’re not a murderer.”

So I called a journalist friend, hoping she was nearby. (I only had $16 in my wallet, and I wasn’t sure if I’d need help making bail.) I called my dad, too, and a couple of other friends. Then, remembering I had internet access, I searched for news of the arrest. It had been reported by a local CBS affiliate.  Unfortunately, the reporters (or the police with whom they interacted) had gotten the facts wrong. (Contrary to what the story had indicated, I had never spoken with the owner of the company where the event had been held. In fact, I had asked Officer Lamarche for that very privilege and been denied.)

I was humiliated again. There was a picture of me looking like a thousand other pictures I’d seen, being cuffed and taken away. I saw myself like I imagined others did: Just some jerk who refused to play by the rules and got himself arrested by good, upstanding policemen. And I was in a cage with no way to respond.

I sat and talked with Officer Manni. After what had felt like a tense conversation earlier, he was friendly with me – I was freezing in the holding cell, and he let me have my sweatshirt and jacket. We chatted about his time as a cop in Boston, and we joked about Hahvahd. He answered my questions about what might happen at the arraignment as best he could.

Eventually, nearly four hours after Officer Lamarche had first taken me aside, the bail bondsman appeared. He was friendly enough, though he – like some of the other policemen at the station – seemed to think I had been protesting down at the event. I explained otherwise, and he brushed it aside. What had happened or hadn’t happened wasn’t his concern; he was interested in getting through the procedure and making sure I didn’t get in any more trouble.

He issued me an order to appear at an arraignment in Nashua on January 26th; I would face a charge of criminal trespass. I told him I didn’t have enough money to pay my bail, but that I’d be happy to go to a nearby ATM and get it. He offered me a ride, and we chatted along the way.

I liked him. He didn’t seem to think I was a bad guy, and he treated the whole thing matter-of-factly. I asked if there was any way this wouldn’t appear on my record, and he said no. Make sure you appear at that court date, he said. He explained how things might shake out at the arraignment – what my plea options were, that kind of thing. He seemed to genuinely want things to go well for me. And when he dropped me off at my car, he had some last words of advice, “Don’t hang around this area.” Apparently, even hours after the event had ended, the Romney campaign and the local police were still present, nibbling away at my freedoms.

[Update: coverage roundup.]

[Update: my letter to the Romney campaign.]

[Update: more reflections.]

I’d been in New Hampshire for the past several days to follow the campaign and see some of the candidates in-person. Yesterday morning, I was chatting up a Romney campaign staffer before an event at the Gilchrist Manufacturing Company in Hudson, NH, when a police officer approached. Sir, we have to ask you to leave the premises.

“Sir, is this about my backpack? I’d be happy to show you – there’s nothing dangerous in there.”

“No, sir – we’ll explain it to you outside.”

I gathered my things and walked past a group of citizens and press, humiliated and confused.

Outside, the officer said, “Sir, the campaign has identified you as someone who was at a protest at Romney’s office in Manchester.”

Now I was really confused. Protest? I didn’t even know there had been protests at Romney’s headquarters, and if there had been, I certainly hadn’t been at them. (Later, after I got out of jail, I looked on the web; I still haven’t found any news stories about protests at Romney’s offices here, though Occupy protesters have attended several of his events.)

I explained to the officer – his name was Lamarche, and his partner’s was Ducie – that there must have been some misunderstanding. Could I speak to someone from the campaign to clear this up? No. I’d have to leave immediately.

I asked about his authority to remove me. “We’re working for the Romney campaign,” he said. I asked if he was on-duty; he said he was. My confusion deepened. So was he working for the town of Hudson today, or for the campaign? “Both.” (Later, I think I got it straight: the campaign hired the police for the day, sort of like a private security detail.)

I thought about Romney’s campaign staff inside. They had mistaken me for someone else, and that was enough – I was out. They had imagined trouble and whisked it away, out of sight. And the police – my police – were being paid to do their bidding.

I asked again to speak to someone from the campaign or the company who owned the plant. He refused; the company had delegated authority to the campaign, and the campaign had authorized the police to remove anyone the campaign didn’t want present. But wouldn’t it be simple for me to just talk to someone and explain the mistake? Too many people around, the cop said. Apparently it would be too big a bother. I either had to leave the company’s property or face charges for criminal trespass.

My reason-seeking brain couldn’t take in what was happening. I had come here to be a part of the primary process, to see it first-hand and to write about it.

My reason-seeking brain couldn’t take in what was happening. I had come here to be a part of the primary process, to see it first-hand and to write about it. I had already attended events with Rick Santorum, Rand Paul, and Newt Gingrich (and I would later see Ron Paul and Buddy Roemer). In each of these instances, I had come to understand the candidates and their views better and had developed greater respect for each of them. And I fully expected that the same would happen with Romney.

In other words, I came because I was curious, and on my own nickel. I wasn’t part of any protest group or in anyone’s employ. Couldn’t we just have a reasonable conversation and figure this out?

I asked another question or two, and the cop had had enough: “You’re under arrest.” He took my things, handcuffed me behind my back, searched me, and tucked me into a nearby cruiser. A few minutes later, an officer removed me from the cruiser and had me lean up against another police car and spread my legs for a second search. Two or three TV crews had their cameras trained on us; I felt ashamed in a wholly unfamiliar way. I wanted to look directly at the cameras and explain what had happened, but I feared the police officers’ reaction.

I was tucked into the second cruiser and driven away. The camera crews continued filming. A protester – oh, did I mention that there was an actual protest there? – yelled, “Free the prisoner.”

***

The holding cell at the Hudson Police Department. (I was allowed to use my own phone to make phone calls, and I snapped these pictures as well.)

At the police station, I was put in a cage and asked to remove my shoes, belt, and sweatshirt. An officer named Manni and another officer processed my paperwork. As they did so, they told me not to go back to “that area” when I was released. I indicated that I understood I wasn’t permitted to be on the company’s land or facilities, but surely I could go back to the street if I so chose – it’s public property, after all. Don’t go back to that area, they said. If you go back, you might cause a disturbance or a riot, and you could be arrested for disorderly conduct.

I tried to keep calm and ask even-keeled questions. Were they telling me I wasn’t even permitted in the street near the facility? And if so, on what grounds? I thought: I’m not planning on starting any trouble, but if I wanted to go and express myself by talking to the media about what had happened, wasn’t that my right?

And then the following exchange took place. I began to ask, “If I express my First Amendment freedoms –

And Officer Manni interjected, “You’ll probably be arrested.”

I couldn’t locate words. (I’m not entirely sure he said ‘probably,’ but I want to give him the benefit of the doubt.)

It was clear to me that the two officers had no interest in discussing what the law actually said, or what my rights actually entailed. I was paperwork, and they wanted to get it over with. I kept asking questions, and at one point, one of them opened up the New Hampshire legal code and read me the definition of disorderly conduct. He read the words dully, as if they were just syllables, with no interest at all in what they meant.

I asked the officer if he could help me connect what he’d just read with my situation and understand why it would be a problem to return to the street outside the event. He told me that I might return and say things that “aren’t what others think.” [It might have been "aren't what others believe" or "aren't what most others believe." I'm not 100% sure.] It was incredible – he actually paused before he said those words, as if searching for something politically correct to say. I don’t think he realized that the words he found had so little to do with the letter and spirit of our laws and Constitution.

***

My cell was down the hall and to the left.

Nearly four hours after all of this began – after time spent in an actual cell, and then even more time back in the cage – the bail bondsman arrived. He set up an arraignment date, drove me to an ATM so I could extract the $40 bond, and dropped me off at my car. And as he let me out of the car, he repeated the officers’ advice from earlier: “Don’t hang around this area.” Apparently, even hours after the event had ended, the Romney campaign and the local police were still present, nibbling away at my freedoms.

The first time that the Gingrich campaign played Joe Esposito’s “You’re the Best,” (viz. Karate Kid) I thought, This is going to be all right. After all, that song is boss.

Newt grabs the mic...

This isn’t true of most of the songs you hear at campaign rallies. And there’s a reason for this: songs at campaign events tend not to be selected because they are good, but because they either a) are so bland as to have no chance of offending anyone born after 1911, or b) contain lots of lyrics about how awesome America is, and how much the singer loves it (especially the little things, like apple pie and WD-40 (really)). At today’s Gingrich event, Type B was the more popular of the two.

I suppose I was a little surprised (but not upset) that the Gingrich campaign hadn’t loaded up on Hispanic music – I think it might have heightened the awkwardness of an event in which almost all of the attendees (including the media) were white and almost all of the restaurant employees were Hispanic.

Still, the songs they chose weren’t much better. (And by the way, Gingrich campaign – it’s time to throw a few more songs on your playlist; the third time I heard “You’re the Best,” I began having doubts about whether Joe Esposito really was the best recording artist of the 1980’s.)

The thing is, no one really likes Ameri-rock, because most of it isn’t meant to be enjoyed (at least not primarily). Instead, it’s meant to make a point. And that point is: America is super-cool, and I feel really sentimental about it – do you hear the orchestral buildup and the nostalgically yearning guitars?

...and lets the crowd react.

And I’m down with that – I’m down with recognizing America’s greatness andgetting in touch with the profundity of citizenship. I’ve had some seriously deep moments looking up at the flag with my fellow Americans, hands over hearts.

But that’s a special kind of civic space, and you can’t just create it at will. And you definitely can’t throw on some third-rate Bocephus wannabe and then try to associate the whole incompletely-created-mood with your campaign. It feels fake and dissonant and manipulative.

Which is a particularly weird thing from Gingrich, given how little interest he displays in glad-handing and sentimentalizing. (Whatever else you can say about him, he’s not super-heavy on the pandering.) At today’s event, an Hispanic man praised Gingrich profusely for his “character” and his views on immigration. The man spoke passionately, pounding his own chest for emphasis. Gingrich responded with almost no emotion at all, as if he were teaching a seminar and the end of the semester were near.

So maybe the Gingrich camp needs a different kind of theme music – something more in keeping with the man himself. Given Gingrich’s poll numbers, though, Joe Esposito’s timeless lyrics might be just the thing to buoy his spirits:

Try to be best
‘Cause you’re only a man
And a man’s gotta learn to take it

Try to believe
Though the going gets rough
That you gotta hang tough to make it

History repeats itself
Try and you’ll succeed

Never doubt that you’re the one
And you can have your dreams!

You’re the best!
Around!
Nothing’s gonna ever keep you down
You’re the Best!
Around!
Nothing’s gonna ever keep you down
You’re the Best!
Around!
Nothing’s gonna ever keep you dow-ow-ow-ow-own

I was in Manchester, NH for one of Santorum’s “Faith, Family, and Freedom” town hall meetings. As the event was getting underway, I asked Bill Boyd, one of Santorum’s spokesmen, about an event earlier in the day in which college students in Concord had confronted the senator about his views on sexuality. With the country moving away from Santorum on LGBT rights, how did the Senator hope to reach his fellow Americans on these issues?

Boyd remarked that Santorum is tolerant of other views, and that he hopes Americans will extend Santorum the same courtesy and respect. “But the Senator has compared loving homosexual relationships to bestiality,” I remarked. Boyd apologized; he wasn’t “informed about that quote.”

As the event wound down, I started to ask Santorum the same question. He broke in – “Read the quote.” He hadn’t compared the two, he claimed.

I was bewildered. Of course he has – it’s well-documented. How is this even up for debate? I pressed back, but he wasn’t having any of it. “Read the quote.” One of his staffers turned to me, and with the sanctimonious expression of a parent reprimanding a child, exhorted me to do the same.

I felt embarrassed. Had I misremembered the quote? Worse, had I swallowed some leftist propaganda about the guy and then thrown it at his feet?

So I sat down and re-read the quote. It’s from a 2003 interview with USA Today, and while the entire second half of the transcript is illuminating, the most damning quote is this:

“In every society, the definition of marriage has not ever to my knowledge included homosexuality. That’s not to pick on homosexuality. It’s not, you know, man on child, man on dog, or whatever the case may be. It is one thing.”

I then stumbled across an interview from a couple of days ago, in which Santorum denies that he was associating homosexuality with pedophilia or bestiality. CNN’s John King reads the quote to Santorum, and Santorum responds: “Hold on one second, John. Read the quote. I said it’s not. I didn’t say it is. I did not connect them. I specifically excluded them.”

In other words, Santorum is claiming that the “It’s not” is meant to distinguish homosexuality from “man on child” and “man on dog.” He wasn’t equating homosexuality with pedophilia or bestiality, he says. He was separating the two.

But of course, that’s not what he was doing. If you read the whole interview, (or any number of other Santorum quotes) you’ll see that he’s not shy about his views on homosexuality. In his world, there is one acceptable kind of sex – between a married man and woman – and everything else is dangerous and unacceptable.

More galling, though, is his attempt to re-parse this quote now that he’s running for president. Because of course, his re-reading of the quote makes little sense. Take another look:

“In every society, the definition of marriage has not ever to my knowledge included homosexuality. That’s not to pick on homosexuality. It’s not, you know, man on child, man on dog, or whatever the case may be. It is one thing.”

The “It’s not” here doesn’t refer to “homosexuality.” It refers to “the definition of marriage.” Follow it through: The definition of marriage is not, you know, man on child, man on dog, or whatever the case may be. The definition of marriage is one thing.

At one level, none of this matters. Santorum’s disdain for homosexuality is clear, and I doubt many voters are going to weigh their support for him based on whether he actually equated gay Americans with people who have sex with dogs.

On the other hand, that’s what he did, and nobody should let him get away with pretending otherwise.