Jim Bovard

Sunni: I for one think you splendidly achieved what you set out to do. Being a former researcher myself, I can understand digging into the history of bureaucracies like the USDA or FDA, but I don't think even my very strong stomach could handle what you must've waded through to write Feeling Your Pain, Terrorism and Tyranny, The Bush Betrayal, and Attention Deficit Democracy. What keeps you digging into that muck?

Jim: It takes little to amuse the simple, as my father always said. I enjoy the challenge of discovering what the feds are up to, and then explaining it in a way that helps other people recognize the abuses or the absurdities. It is fun to watch someone read something I wrote, and to see their eyes widen and their forehead shift at the moment they get it.

Sunni: It's got to be very rewarding to see that, too. What are a few of the things you've found while doing book research that have disgusted or angered you most?

Jim: Geez. You got space limitations for this interview, right?

Sunni: Nope—expound away!

Jim: Over the years, there have been many things that made my jaw drop. Researching Waco provided plenty of out-loud groans. I was amazed when the U.S. Marshals Service gave its highest valor awards to the marshals that killed 14-year-old Sammy Weaver—after they killed his dog.

Sunni: Oh boy. We could spend all day on Waco and Ruby Ridge. Have you come up with any explanation for how so many Americans could see those events and not, at the very friggin' least, display a little concern at what the federal government was doing? I gave up trying before I got to one ...

Jim: I thought Waco should have been the most important public education lesson of the 1990s. Instead, it was brushed aside. The only time that it was fashionable in Washington to talk about it was the months between the Republican takeover of Congress in November 1994 and the Oklahoma City bombing in April 1995. The Clinton administration managed to turn the Republicans into quivering jello on this issue. I recall talking to some of the Republican congressional staffers during the House hearings on Waco in July 1995. One of the young staffers, with a look of great distress, pointed to boxes of documents from the Justice Department and ATF on Waco that had been sent over at the last minute. The staffer whined that they didn't know what to do with them. I asked, Have you thought about reading them? I forget the staffer's response, but there is little evidence that they even bothered sifting through the evidence. This is one of the unrecognized elements of Attention Deficit Democracy: congressmen and their staffers often have no idea in hell what they are doing.

Sunni: If I were to do the kind of writing you do, I'd have gotten high blood pressure after the first book; by the third or fourth, I'd be such a raving nutjob the men in white coats would be called to take me away. How do you manage to keep your sanity while tackling such depressing subjects?

Jim: What's your definition of sanity? Are you grading on a sliding scale? There is an element of sport to some of these investigations—some cat and mouse elements. I was digging into AmeriCorps in 1999 and came across a thumbnail of a Mississippi Delta program that sent AmeriCorps members door to door to sign people up for food stamps. The program description perked up my ears, so I filed a Freedom of Information Act request, read through their grant applications and quarterly reports to AmeriCorps headquarters, and then went down to the Delta to pay them a visit. The lady I interviewed was very cagey—but made one concession after another about what they were up to. After I got back to DC, I had a chat with the AmeriCorps Inspector General office. They launched an investigation, the FBI joined in, and it turned out this particular program had some small town mayors and others as ghost employees. The lady in charge was convicted and sent to prison. So every now and then there is a happy ending.

Sunni: Ha! I bet that was quite satisfying.

Jim: It would have been far more satisfying if AmeriCorps itself had gotten sent up the river and sunk. On the bright side, when Bush was pushing to rapidly expand AmeriCorps just after 9/11, a number of the opponents of such bloating were tapping into my writings for evidence of AmeriCorps' follies and frauds.