It’s time for a little recreational mental illness in New Jersey

There is a kind of silence that is specific to old suburbs, a tranquility that is vaster and more inherent than any disturbance that kind of place can cause. The place where I grew up is different in some ways than it was when I grew up there, but that fundamental tranquility is not disturbed. Things happen and make various sounds: you’ll hear a quick murmur of music as someone leaves a bar to smoke or as people come and go from one of the downtown restaurants, cars pass by and dogs get bossy on their walks and Freight trains chug and honk over New Jersey transit lines when commuter trains aren’t running. People still live there and people make noise. What is striking, and what strikes me every time I see my parents again in the house where I grew up, is how the totality of that suburban tranquility swallows all of this. It’s there and then it’s gone, and maybe the wind is left in the trees or just nothing at all.

I’ve lived in noisy places longer than I’ve lived in such quiet, but its appeal isn’t lost on me. I like how dark it gets there at night, and I like walking back from the train station along those quiet sidewalks and all the strange old shortcuts from my youth. The last few times I did this, I spooked some deer that were standing in a parking lot, as aimless and cautious as when I did the same thing as a teenager; They stared at me but didn’t run. I am aware that it is a pleasant place to live and that, ultimately, it is a perfect place to grow. I understand why people live there. I also have no illusions about how quickly and thoroughly I would go crazy if I tried to do it again.

While there is much that is not known about the stories of people, first in New Jersey and then elsewhere along the East Coast, reporting suspicious drones in the sky, it seems important to keep the latter in mind. Whatever these sightings are, and they seem to be mostly people mistaking airplanes or stars for some other, more terrifying thing to be determined, they also feel symptomatic of the combination of general malaise and all-consuming boredom of this larger moment and this particular environment. . “One thing we know is that humans, when they see something in the sky, are very bad at knowing how far away it is,” the communications director for flight tracker Flightradar24 told NJ.com. “Our depth perception is terrible, especially at night.” Another thing we know is that humans, when they are primed to believe that something is happening up there, but also in general, get weird and stay weird about more or less unpleasant things. Whether they are people expressing a desire to see the uneasiness they feel inside reflected in a world that otherwise does not recognize them or simply indulging in the classic suburban pastime of noticing something and then calling the police and/or or make some strange post online. In this regard, everything turns out more or less the same: people with garages who give each other a few cheeky bites of schizophrenia, as a gift.

The response to this has been quite revealing, without telling anyone anything new or useful. State and federal agencies have been collecting and investigating reports of drone sightings for nearly a month (the first sightings in New Jersey were reported on Nov. 18) and have found nothing significant. This has done nothing to stop people from wandering around their yards and taking and posting (and posting and posting) sub-Nightengaleian photographs and videos of the night sky. “Can you explain this?” say these concerned citizens, tossing the most horrifying photo you’ve ever seen… well, just tossing it outside, mostly. To an unfortunate neighbor, perhaps, but more likely to anyone passing by on some platform or another, and more generally at the direction of the media or the government. The lack of response, or the type of response, or the actual substance of the response, is, as one unemployed Maryland man put it, baffled by these. lights, “completely unacceptable.”

There is no answer to this that is sufficient or satisfactory, and there hasn’t been. On Thursday, the FBI and Department of Homeland Security said that “many of the sightings were manned aircraft operating legally” and could not confirm that any of the New Jersey sightings were anything more sinister. “We have no evidence at this time that these reported sightings pose a threat to national or public security or have a foreign nexus,” a White House National Security Council official told NBC News, which sounds pretty definitive and exactly the kind of thing one would expect the NSC to say if they wanted to take you out of the scenet of whatever you have discovered. Late last week, senators and members of Congress requested reports from federal agencies “to address these incidents,” and some received them. Those who have been informed, like New Jersey Rep. Josh Gottheimer, “do not believe there are immediate threats to public safety,” although he added that “the public needs to know more.”

Instead of the kind of public briefing Gottheimer called for, the public’s need to know more has been met more or less as expected. Newly elected New Jersey Senator Andy Kim took a walk with local officials and a NJ.com reporter in rural Hunterdon County last week. “It’s my responsibility to show the people of New Jersey that we’re being responsive,” Kim said. “They have every right to know.” Local police told Kim they typically see about 10 drones per shift, although “unfortunately, by the time we get there, they’re already gone.” Kim himself reported seeing some things (“these definitely don’t look like the ones from Best Buy”) and promised to “keep an eye on this and try to fix it.”

Another New Jersey elected official, Rep. Scott Van Drew, took a different approach. Van Drew, who calls himself an unusually unethical restaurateur and represents what is widely hailed as the most unhinged part of the state, appeared on Fox News on Wednesday to tell viewers concerned about drones what they wanted. listen, which is that they were You are absolutely right to worry about those drones. “Iran launched a mothership probably about a month ago that contains these drones,” Van Drew told Fox host Harris Faulkner, not a little cheerfully. “That mothership, I’ll tell you the deal, is off the east coast of the United States of America. They’ve launched drones.” When questioned, Van Drew uploaded a video to YouTube reiterating his claims. “We know that there is an Iranian drone ship that disappeared from its port,” he said. “And the moment of disappearance circumstantially coincides with the beginning of the appearance of these drones.” (“There are no Iranian ships off the coast of the United States,” a Pentagon spokesman said last Thursday, “and there are no so-called mother ships launching drones toward the United States.”)

One can see, in the respective responses of these representatives to this small outbreak of recreational mental illness, two divergent but not entirely opposing visions of government. Kim goes to great lengths to show that she takes these concerns seriously and admits that there may be something there before promising that she will do her best to find out what it is; Van Drew goes on TV and says the craziest nonsense he can, and then goes on YouTube, puts on a grim face, says “fear has no place in responsible leadership,” and keeps talking about it. I probably don’t need to tell you which political party each elected official belongs to, but it seems more salient and more concerning that it is almost impossible to imagine a way in which those two approaches to public service could come together collaboratively. , to this problem or really to any other. That doesn’t preclude some kind of action in response (and, frankly, we’re long overdue for a federal law making it legal for law enforcement officers to fire their weapons at passing planes if they believe it’s appropriate to do so), but it doesn’t preclude some kind of action in response. It doesn’t bode well for any kind of solution.

There is an overwhelming abstraction in American life; Institutions that are supposed to do one thing reliably and punitively do something resembling the opposite, and cause harm so reliably and effectively that it’s hard to imagine they could ever have had any other purpose. In the absence of a knowable and shared common reality, there is instead a fractured and burned desert of scams and fantasies, and that’s pretty much it. Nobody’s really even talking about trying to change that anymore, and the country’s business is increasingly about taking advantage of that unknowability, whether through familiar smash-and-grab tactics or marking a farm somewhere in that wasteland and seeing what could grow there. . There are strange lights in the sky and the police are chasing them; None of this is officially happening, and while the most likely explanation is that everything remains the same (trade routes or simply the skies) seen from far below, that doesn’t seem like enough, nor does it seem like much of an answer. Some politicians will come to flatter your discomfort, and others will come to feed it and investigate it until it disappears. It can be loud inside, but outside at night it’s so impossibly quiet that all you want to do is scream.