The recent arrest of ten alleged Russian spies, agents who were said to be on a years-long deep-cover operation in which they were expected to assume American identities and lives, was cause for amusement. A typical reaction came from the teen-aged neighbor of one of the couples. Standing outside their neatly landscaped house in suburban New Jersey, the girl cracked, "They couldn't have been spies. Look what she did with the hydrangeas." The New York Times followed this up the next day with a piece wondering why the Russians even bothered, as there was no evidence the spy ring uncovered anything that you couldn't get, at much less time and expense, by surfing the web. 

In fact, the main thing the Russians seem to have discovered is a genuine appreciation for the American dream. When they wanted to buy a house and their bosses objected, a couple known as "the Murphys" explained, "From our perspective, purchase of the house was solely a natural progression of our prolonged stay here. It was a convenient way to solve the housing issue, plus to 'do as the Romans do' in a society that values home ownership." Other acquisitions included an inflatable Santa that decorated one front yard, a pair of Schnauzers, and an MBA from Columbia Business School. 

The more I read about the accused spies, the more I recognize my own life. I own a home, I have pets, my brilliant and charming wife has a law degree,  and I've worked for over 15 years for various corporations, forsaking my high school teaching credential. In the morning, before leaving for my job, I water the flowers in the garden. We don't have a lawn (or hydrangeas) since we live in San Francisco, and what flowers we do have are mostly due to the gardener who comes once a month, but in no way is it not a middle-class garden. 

But most similar to the alleged spies, I am also writing reports on life in America and sending them off to agents I've never seen. I call these reports novels, and the agents are literary agents, but it's pretty much the same thing. There's a reason censorship and control of the press is a standard feature of totalitarian societies: it's hard to distinguish writers from spies. 

Several years ago when my life was somewhat more bohemian (but still in a mostly middle-class way), I was in Queer Nation and went to demonstrations. That was the early 1990s, the heyday of queer, and someone was putting together a short story anthology the premise of which was that queers were spies in straight society.  I wrote a short story for the collection, but it wasn't a good story, and I'm not sure the anthology ever came out anyway. But the concept was a good one: Hidden among the squares, in plain sight, is an army of subversives who don't buy the verities of the American dream, who want something different.

Somewhere along the line that sense of separateness turned into a demand for marriage and inclusion in the military, two institutions that uphold the status quo. Maybe, like the Russians, we came to value quiet home life, pets, 401k accounts (one of those arrested was a financial planner), hydrangeas. We no longer want something different; now we want the same as everyone else. 

So I keep working on my novel, hoping that in the end, despite my long, stable relationship (we recently celebrated our 24th anniversary), our seemingly never-ending mortgage (we're 16 years in, and I can report that the garden does look nice), and my corporate job (I just got a raise), art still has the power to be subversive.