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Q&A: Gary Greenberg on Small-Town Democracy, Why Politicians are Sociopaths, and More

In the Kindle Single Scotland, Gary Greenberg writes about his time as the zoning board commissioner in the tiny town of Scotland, Connecticut. Greenberg did not grow up in Scotland, but has lived there for the past thirty years. The episode at the center of his (all true) tale is one that feels straight out of Hawthorne.

A rehabilitation organization for intellectually disabled adults buys a house in the town and plans to move in. The small group of disabled adults who will live in the house, along with their round-the-clock supervisors, happen to be registered sex offenders. Neighbors catch wind of this plan, misinformation and rumors spread, and hysteria begins to brew. Greenberg decides to hold a public meeting on the plan, which does not bring the calm he had hoped; in fact, it brings the town’s anger and fear to a head, with Greenberg as its target. His neighbors and former friends demand his resignation.

I spoke with him over the phone this week about what we can take away from his story. (An epilogue on Greenberg’s blog also relays what has happened since he published his piece.)

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Why did you decide to publish this?

I think it’s just a good story. You know, slapstick is funny as long as it’s not happening to you, so readers might be entertained by what happened to me. It might also resonate more deeply with people. It captures an awful lot of things about what’s wrong, and right, with small-town America.

You wrote about how this episode represented what fear can do to a community—the fear of being unsafe or victimized, and the fear of the “other” coming in. Do you see that as a purely small-town experience, or could we expand that, and see that as a national phenomenon?

It’s just easier to see in a context like this, because it’s so focused and concentrated. But yeah, look at some of the pathologies of modern American culture: the xenophobia behind the immigrant problem, the various kinds of polarization that are based on dehumanizing others—whether it takes the form of economic oppression, or racial oppression, or just how the people in Congress gets along. At this point, it’s infused political culture, and that’s one of the reasons that we’re so paralyzed.

The meeting was my idea. And I’m not young, and I’ve seen plenty. And I’m a therapist, so I know what people are capable of. But I thought—I really thought—that if we just got together and talked about this stuff, that people would settle down. I thought they’d feel better, and then they would move on. And I have to say, I was shocked. I was stunned, at the completely wrong impression I had.

And in that respect, my expectations were not unlike the expectations that Barack Obama had coming into office. I mean, I never liked the guy all that much, he’s certainly preferable to his predecessor, but I never saw him as more than an appealing but centrist figure. So I didn’t have high expectations. But I was somewhat heartened by his interest in achieving consensus. He really believed that you can sit down with people, talk with them, find your common ground, and move out from there.

He discovered that that’s simply not possible, and his reaction to that has been completely ineffectual—maddeningly so. It’s clear that behind that expectation lay a crazy belief that your ability to reason with people and understand people, would be reciprocated by their willingness to reason and understand. There’s something very narcissistic in that, and I can take responsibility for that on my part.

Do you think the meeting itself was a factor here? We’ve all been to community meetings or school board meetings that got out of hand. Sometimes when people start to express their fears or anger out loud, it can have a galvanizing effect on the whole crowd. Then the pitchforks come out, so to speak.

I think these meetings are increasingly the only possible expression of true democracy that we have now. I live in this little town that’s governed by the town meeting; we don’t have a representative democracy. So we have a somewhat more pure version of it than you may have in other places. Nonetheless, whenever you have people in a public forum, confronting their public officials over matters of public interest, that is a pure form of democracy. And there’s always been a thin line between democracy and mob rule.

So I think what you have here is a kind of over-determination: you have a pent-up wish for power—citizen power. And you have relatively few outlets for that, and the outlets you have tend to be about the things that are the most important to you. For many people, safety from sexual predators is of paramount importance. It’s even more important than whether someone’s going to build a condominium in your back yard or something. So that increases the stakes.

Another factor in this over-determination is that the rules of engagement are not very clear anymore. I’ve been really angry in public meetings before, on both sides of the fence. But it’s never occurred to me not to be civil. And that’s not because I’m a nice guy! It’s just seems to be not in my interest; it seems stupid to be uncivil. And yet, that’s what happened in this case. Not only are we not playing by the same set of rules, but there’s a set of rules that says it’s actually obligatory to be nasty. I mean, look at Sarah Palin. Her appeal is how nasty she is, how spiteful she is. So I think if you put all those things together, the pent-up demand, the opportunity, the emotional appeal of it, and then the recent sanctioning of nastiness….well, in retrospect it’s not like I can’t see how this would happen.

So, for people like you, who take on the extra time and work, to volunteer in your local government, and put yourself…

…in the line of fire?

Yes, exactly! In the line of fire. You wrote that you had enjoyed participating in civic life because it gave you a real sense of belonging in your community. But then, through this series of events, you became a scapegoat, and a target for people’s anger. (You called it your “Hester Prynne moment,” or your “Shirley Jackson’s ‘The Lottery’” moment.) So, do you have any regrets? Or any advice for other people considering it?

Well, I’m still evaluating this. I mean, we’ve had a few board meetings since this happened, and I’ve found that I’m a much less open, agreeable person. I’m much less informal than I used to be, I’m watching myself. And that’s not fun. So if it’s not fun, and if it’s actually frightening, you lose your motive to do stuff like that.

As far as what I would advise people…don’t pretend that you don’t know what could happen. This is a cautionary tale. I’ve had people angry with me before, but now that I know just exactly how it can be, I have to say that if I continue to do this, it’s in the knowledge that this could happen again. It’s sort of sad. I’d like to say, “Don’t worry about it, you should still participate in civic life anyway.” But there wasn’t a person in that room during that meeting who would say, “Gee, I wish I had his job!”

So why do it?

Well, that’s the problem, isn’t it? And it’s getting harder and harder to find people, whether at this level, or almost any level of public service. Just look at the way we pillory public figures. You have to have a thick skin. It ends up that the people who do it aren’t just the people who have thick skin and strong egos, but the people who are impervious. And people who are impervious, well, that’s when you start getting to the sociopath end of the spectrum! Taking public office…who would do this job?

There are two parts of your piece that I really love, but that also felt somewhat contradictory. Of the fear factor, you write: “Tight-knit New England towns can’t exist without someone or something to hate.” But in another section, you describe the time when you drove the ambulance when a neighbor had had a stroke in his home—a neighbor whom you knew was a member of the KKK: “I thought about how emergency had obliterated a natural enmity, and how community is a response to the prolonged emergency of being alive.”

There’s a tension between those two, for sure, I don’t think it’s a contradiction. I think you’re united, and you pull together, especially in an emergency. Rebecca Solnit’s book A Paradise Built in Hell is about this, the idea that these terrible events bring us together. The whole idea of a volunteer fire department is that a disaster will happen, and everyone comes together to mitigate it. But over the long haul, that’s not what’s going to hold a community together.

Over the long haul, the community needs to have an “other.” There has to be an outside as well as an inside. That’s certainly documented through the entire written history of the human race, at least the one I’m familiar with. There’s always an inside, and an outside, and then there’s the interface between them.