Suddenly Surrounded

 Yesterday, driving through the deep South, I was pulled over by someone representing himself as a member of the county sheriff's "counter-narcotics" team. He ended up searching my vehicle, lining up and photographing the covers of some novels and nonfiction political books I had with me in the car, and berating me about going to a protest. 

"Why not just say you're heading to a protest? That's your right. But we've got people trafficking drugs. We've got people trafficking human beings. We've got people trafficking terrorism. Why not just be honest with me? You're going to a protest. Doesn't it feel better to be honest with me? Don't you feel better?"

I did not feel better in that moment. 

To the contrary, I felt like Tomas Tranströmer, as he writes in one of his poems: "I was nobody: / a boy in a playground, suddenly surrounded." (Robertson trans.)

Writing this encounter up in detail afterwards, to have a record for friends and family, I struggled to make it sound like anything but a comedy of errors. It was indeed a scene from the theater of the absurd, and even I was tempted to laugh about it after the fact. Me, of all people? A drug smuggler? It was ludicrous. 

But meanwhile, I was actually being paid to attend a leftist organizing event, so in some hilarious sense the guy was not entirely off-base, according to the tenets of what appeared to be his own red-pilled conspiratorial worldview. He'd caught a real live left-wing George Soros "paid agitator" on a Mississippi highway, and so why wouldn't he be reluctant to let me go once I'd been hooked? 

Obviously, I got out of the encounter with my life and (for now) freedom intact. I have a white skin, speak English without an accent, have an Anglo last name, and could show him a Florida bar card proving I'm a licensed attorney in good standing. If I did not have these markers of privilege, this encounter might have ended quite differently. 

So, big deal, some might say. I'm hardly the first person with out-of-state plates to be pulled over and interrogated by some petty sadist in the deep South (or in any other part of the country). Quizzing me about First Amendment–protected activities like protests and what church I was heading to felt new; but maybe it's less new than I like to think.

What's hard to convey to people in the retelling, though, is that when you're in the midst of these encounters, you don't actually know how they are going to end. It may seem like "no big deal" in retrospect. But standing on the side of an interstate while he searched my car, my throat suddenly very dry, I didn't know if I would be spending the night in a Mississippi jail cell instead of my hotel. 

I didn't know if he would plant drugs on me, and then call his buddy down the road to "find" them. I didn't know if he would send my name to some federal Stephen Miller–run secret watchlist of suspected "Antifa terrorists." (Maybe he has done that, for all I know?) He asked for information that cops don't ordinarily want or need—like my cell phone number. He took my photo on his phone with and without glasses. 

Was I about to be NSPM-7-ed? 

I wasn't at all sure at the time, then, that I would eventually be allowed to get back on the road and leave that day. All I knew was that I was completely at the mercy of an armed human being, with the force of the state behind him. Someone, moreover, who seemed to have a bunch of political views I didn't share, and who was clearly regarding me with hostility and suspicion. 

There didn't seem to be any upper limit on how bad this could get. 

This was the first time in my life I actually tasted that distinct dryness in one's mouth that is said to accompany terror. It was that boy-surrounded-in-the-playground feeling that Tranströmer describes. 

As a character says in Ryszard Kapuściński's Shah of Shahs, upon being ordered to report to the secret police, "For the first time in eight years he felt true terror, and he realized instantly that such terror can never be outgrown[.]"

Joan Didion writes of glimpsing a man in El Salvador—during the country's bloody civil war—whom she thinks for a moment could be a death squad assassin. "Nothing came of this," she writes; "but I did not forget the sensation of having been in a single instant demoralized, undone, humiliated by fear," which, she says, is how she "came to understand in El Salvador the mechanism of terror." 

I know that we don't yet have it as bad as the Salvadorans did in the 1980s, or the Iranians under the Shah (or the current Iranian regime). I know that we still have stronger constitutional protections in this country, especially for people with as much privilege as me. 

For that matter, it's even still better to be a "paid leftist agitator" driving through the Deep South with out-of-state plates in 2026 than it was to be the same in 1963. At least I didn't end up shot and dumped in a ditch on the side of the road, or taken to a field at night to be tortured for information by men in white hoods. 

But as Arthur Koestler—who spent time in enough fascist prisons and internment camps to know what he was talking about—reminds us: we shouldn't "think of fascism as of something solid, palpably different from our forms of life. It would be more correct to compare it with a gas which can be put into any container regardless of shape." 

All authoritarian regimes exist on a spectrum of "successive degrees of unfreedom," he writes—not a binary switch of either democracy or totalitarianism. 

"Let us […] get it straight," Koestler writes, "that Hitler too has a parliament which is theoretically free to sack him any time; that under Horthy’s rule the Hungarian Labour Party was allowed to remain legal and even to publish a daily paper until a few months ago; and that the most democratic constitution in the world, the Soviet constitution of 1936, is apparently compatible with a one-party system and the banning of all oppositional activities. […[ In other words, one can’t rely on constitutional guarantees and use them as an excuse for complacency."

I don't say, then, that my encounter with the sheriff marked some concrete Rubicon between the republic we had and the fascist state we are becoming. All I say is that I used to feel I could drive anywhere in this country and assume that no armed agents of the state would take any interest in the books I was reading, the church I attend, or the ways in which I express nonviolent dissent from government policies. 

The fact that I can apparently no longer proceed with that assumption does indeed feel like a change. We have ratcheted up one notch at least in the "successive degrees of unfreedom."