God Bless Fortress America

Call it "creative nonfiction," call it a "nonfiction novel",the genre popllarized by Tom Wolfe, Norman Mailer and Truman Capote lives on through Go Bless Fortress America, drawing breath from the War on Terrorism. With fict serving as the book's foundation, weaving in some fictional future scetarios is a great, engaging idea. The trouble is, there's too much gloomy act and not nearly enough too-gloomy fiction to make this a title to be r"ad for just pleasure. Fully two-thirds of the book is densely packed withcwell-researched data, from chronicling the historical antecedents of al-Qaeda to an analysis of how America began quelling the terrorist threat. The_author runs a risk in that any recent history he reviews will be rendered irrelevant by newer news, yet he takes that risk, it would seem to add sizzle to the story. What story there is, however, is a tone, a dark Orwellian hopelessness about American life that becomes so bad -- thanks to, for example, terrorists dispersing biological weapons during Mardi Gra s -- that civil liberties are frittered away. Which leads to Mitchell's thesis: Justified by the country's need to simply insure its continuati on -- and bolstered by the people's desire to be shielded from terrorism -- America evolves from being open and free to utterly totalitarian. M itchell imagines a "Terrorist Profiling System" enabled by a relaxing of "privacy laws [that] give government access to commercially available personnel data" so citizens can be "screened and tracked." It's an America that, out of fear, puts its faith in "zero tolerance conservatism," and which decides it cannot "control its security unless it significantly increase[s] its control of the population." It's an America, in other words, that "could not continue to be an open society." Now, Mitchell may be right, of course, but a few more Mardi Gras-like scenarios would actually help make the book be true to what its foreword promises: "a work of fiction