Chi-Raq

So I saw Chi-Raq yesterday. I went to bed still thinking about it, woke up still thinking about it, and though I need to keep cranking on the new novel, I can see I’m not going to get much done until I exorcise these Chi-Raq thoughts.

CHI-RAQ Trailer from 40 Acres and a Mule Filmworks on Vimeo.

First, let’s just get out of the way that the movie is extraordinary. On a variety of levels, but maybe most of all in the range of its tone. It moves repeatedly and effortlessly from satire, camp, and fourth-wall-breaking sequences, including some almost hallucinatory dance numbers, to gut-wrenching, cinema-vérité style human drama. I’ve never seen a movie that had me alternately laughing so much at its antics with language and imagery, then crying so hard at its tragedies. I think part of the reason it affected me so much is that the satire was making me drop my guard. And every time I went for the over-the-top head fake, Spike Lee launched an incredibly real shot right up the middle that landed like a blow.

So yeah, Samuel L. Jackson is a scenery-chewing joy as a one-man Greek chorus, and the poetry of the dialogue is exuberant, and David Patrick Kelly’s out-of-the-blue nod to Dr. Strangelove is crazy and hilarious…and then you watch a lone Jennifer Hudson sobbing while she tries to scrub her recently murdered daughter’s blood from the pavement; or listen to John Cusack’s tremendous centerpiece as a Chicago pastor whose oratory channels tragedy into outraged determination; or see Angela Basset’s face dissolve in grief and fury at an insurance salesman’s attempt to capitalize on Chicago’s murder demographics; or realize from the look in his eyes that Nick Cannon’s conscience is belatedly asserting itself…and you just go to pieces.

Pray 4 My City (explicit version) - Nick Cannon from 40 Acres and a Mule Filmworks on Vimeo.

Not that the movie’s aim and impact should be so terribly surprising: it clearly and powerfully signals where it’s going right from the opening credits, via a giant blinking all-caps red message on a black screen: THIS IS AN EMERGENCY. THIS IS AN EMERGENCY. Yes, it is. And it’s mind-blowing that a society could treat tens of thousands of annual gun deaths as anything but.

Overall thoughts: the writing, especially the poetry, is incredibly inventive; the direction, from an initial tracking shot following an L train down to neighborhood street level and into a nightclub, is virtuoso; Teyonah Pariss’s performance is a jaw-dropping tour de force (and that smile...my God); the theme song, Pray 4 My City, is still in my head…but these already impressive pieces add up to something much larger than the sum of their parts. More than anything else, Chi-Raq is a political movie, a story about the human impact of gun violence, societal neglect, and fucked-up governmental priorities. Some people won’t approve of that. I wish there were more movies like it.

How Those Pakistanis Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Our Drones

A few days ago, I watched a video of a remarkable debate between Intercept journalist Glenn Greenwald and C. Christine Fair, Associate Professor of Peace and Security Studies at Georgetown University, moderated by Al Jazeera’s Mehdi Hasan. I say “remarkable” because of the astonishing mental gymnastics Fair had to perform in support of her argument that Pakistanis welcome being droned by America. The debate was precipitated by a huge Intercept report, based on documents provided by a new, post-Snowden whistleblower, concluding that as many as nine out of ten people killed in our drone strikes weren’t the intended targets.

Well, mistakenly killing nine people for every one you kill on purpose might sound pretty bad, but Fair argued that actually it’s all pretty good because: (i) Pakistanis who say they don’t like their country being droned don’t count because they live in cities and are “cosmopolitan elites;” (ii) all polls and other studies suggesting Pakistanis don’t like being droned are unreliable because of various biases and methodological flaws; (iii) no one who believes that droning Pakistan is counterproductive knows the country sufficiently well to have a valid opinion; and (iv) we don’t know who’s been targeted and we don’t know who’s been killed, but we do know the program is working (this last one is especially puzzling, mostly in an internally contradictory kind of way).

Now, I admit I don’t know much about the region. I don’t speak any of the languages, and I’ve never traveled there. I haven’t read the Koran—not even a translation. So I’m clearly unburdened by the kind of erudition that seems to be the source of Fair’s confidence in her opinion that Pakistanis actually like it when America blows them up with sky robots.

What I do bring to the discussion, maybe, is some minimal insight into human nature of the sort we novelists like to flatter ourselves into believing is an important part of our work. And so, with no more than those embarrassingly scant credentials as my basis and with an even more minimal claim to some rudimentary common sense, I have to ask what’s probably a terribly un-nuanced and unsophisticated question. Which is:

How likely is it that any group of humans anywhere would appreciate a foreign power taking control of their skies and for years blowing up at will people the foreign power adjudged undesirable?

For example, you might believe street crime is out of control in America, or that a parasitical one percent is sucking the country dry, or that neo-hippy or minority protesters have it all wrong and are ruining everything, or that the Democrats are to blame for all the country’s ills, or that the problem is in fact the Republicans. But no matter what you believe, you probably don’t wish Russia or China or Iran or France or whoever would start patrolling the skies over your neighborhood and blowing up whatever Americans are vexing you. And you’d probably get a touch irate if one of those foreign countries went ahead and started up a drone program in America anyway. You’d probably resent such a foreign program under any circumstances, but if the program were blowing up nine people accidently for every one it killed on purpose, including at weddings and funerals, you might get so resentful you’d find yourself invested in getting some payback.

This is one of those things about human nature that’s super-obvious unless you deploy a lot of special learning to obscure it. As a species, we seem to have a deep-seated need to repay violence—especially violence by an out-group on our in-group—with violence of our own. See, for example, America’s ongoing response to 9/11.

So, being a somewhat simple man, I tend to figure that if I would hate something (invasion, occupation, robot airplane assassination campaign, that kind of thing) and react a certain way to it (by fighting back, for example), probably other people would react the same way were the shoe on the other foot. Even if they’re from faraway, exotically different countries—even countries impossible to understand except by data-driven PhD-credentialed area experts who have transcended the sorts of biases blinkering the benighted—I figure that our common human nature will provide a decent roadmap to understanding their behavior.

It occurs to me there’s even a name for this concept: I think I’ve heard it referred to as the Golden Rule. Or the Hillel the Elder version: “What is hateful to you, don’t do to others.”

But maybe what those rules really mean is, “Unless they’re Pakistani, because they’re different”? It could be that. I admit I’m one of those people who doesn’t know Pakistan well enough to say for sure. Plus I’m biased and don’t have good data.

And, in fairness to Fair and her learned, data-driven theories that Pakistanis welcome being droned—that the experience even reminds them of an uplifting story from the Koran!—it turns out there’s a long list of other peoples who, as it happens, were untroubled by foreign-inflicted violence and killing. So I am forced to acknowledge that Fair’s approach to justifying western violence does have a long and colorful history.

But wait, there’s still more…

Yesterday, Fair followed up her debate points with a post in the blog Lawfare. The additional points she made there are in their own way as interesting as the ones she made in the debate itself, while also perhaps shedding some light on how she’s able to maintain convictions about Pakistan that seem at odds with basic tenets of human nature. And so, a few thoughts in response…

Glenn Greenwald has tirelessly flogged the use of armed drones with Crusader-like conviction.

This one I just thought was funny. Someone who’s against bombing, invading, and occupying Muslim countries strikes Fair as some sort of Crusader? Holy backward historical references, Batman!

I was equally confused as to why the show was going to focus upon Pakistan, when the latest tranche of pilfered documents released by The Intercept promises to detail “the inner workings of the U.S. military’s assassination program in Afghanistan, Yemen, and Somalia.”

We’ll come back to Fair’s notion of “pilfered documents.” Here, I’m more interested in the source of her confusion—apparently, the possibility that reactions in country X to a foreigner-run robot airplane assassination program might offer clues about reactions in country Y. Instead, Fair seems to cling to the notion that Pakistan is sui generis, somehow existing apart from aspects of human nature we can readily observe everywhere else.

The Intercept has set up a secure drop box to facilitate government employees’ illegally providing classified information to the organization.

Is it just me, or is anyone else getting the feeling that Professor Fair really doesn’t like leaks?

There’s a lot to be said about a mindset like this one. First, it’s authoritarian. Second, it’s weird, focusing as it does on the rare whistleblower rather than on rampant secrecy metastasis—akin to complaining about the brief drizzle we just had here in the Bay Area while ignoring the effects of a four-year drought. Third, it’s selective. Authoritarians like Fair never use words like “pilfer” or “illegal” to describe the kinds of leaks that are probably a thousand times more common than those of The Intercept’s new whistleblower: the ones offered up by insiders to pet reporters to make the government look good. We’ll come back to that last point in a second.

Mr. Greenwald and his associates refer to these persons as “whistleblowers.”

Well, yes, but only in the dictionary sense.

(Also, a parenthetical plea: can we eliminate the word “persons” from the lexicon, except maybe when used ironically, and learn to love the standard plural “people,” instead? We could then move on to “monies,” at which point we’d be on a roll and people might start writing more the way they talk.)

Empirically, the documents that have been leaked are riven with selection bias; leakers, driven by whatever personal motives, often selectively leak specific documents.

You have to be suffering from some pretty nuclear-grade selection bias of your own to make this point about a whistleblower and not apply it to the thousands of government officials who leak secrets in a way that’s favorable to the government (no illegal pilfering there!) every. Single. Day.

In fairness, the most invisible biases, and therefore the most dangerous, are always the ones that affect ourselves. Which would explain how Fair is able to simultaneously criticize other people for their alleged biases while turning an apparent discussion of a Koran passage by host Mehdi Hasan—something about unbelievers being unintelligent cattle—into an approving “cite.” It sounded like bullshit even before I looked closer. It was. Watch the video yourself. At their impressive best, Hasan’s remarks are laudable—who would argue that anyone should cede the moral high ground? At their occasional worst, they come across as the Islamic equivalent of neo-Atheist self flattery, or American exceptionalism or other nationalism. If Fair’s aside wasn’t a deliberate smear, it could only have been the result of intellectually crippling bias—the kind she readily perceives in everyone who doesn’t agree with her.

Consumers of these documents have no idea of how representative this sample is of all information that exists about the drone program. There are most certainly classified reports that positively describe the program’s utilization in specific theatres, but these documents have not apparently been leaked.

True, if by “have not apparently been leaked” Fair means to exclude New York Times articles like this one:

Drone Strikes on Al Qaeda Are Said to Take Toll on Leadership in Pakistan

LONDON — Revelations of new high-level losses among Al Qaeda‘s top leadership in Pakistan‘s tribal belt have underscored how years of American drone strikes have diminished and dispersed the militant group’s upper ranks and forced them to cede prominence and influence to more aggressive offshoots in Yemen and Somalia.

While the C.I.A. drone strike that killed two Western hostages has led to intense criticism of the drone program and potentially to a reassessment of it, the American successes over the years in targeting and killing senior Qaeda operatives in their home base have left the militant group’s leadership facing difficult choices, counterterrorism officials and analysts say.

And hey, guess what those anonymous counterterrorism officials were doing? They were leaking—AKA pilfering and illegally providing classified information to the media.

But they sure weren’t whistleblowing. Maybe this is why Fair hasn’t noticed.

In fact, given Mr. Greenwald’s evangelical zeal against the various uses of drones, I doubt that if the organization received such reports, it would publish them.

Why would it bother? For the publication of self-interested, government-revering leaks, we already have the New York Times and many other access-journalism addicts consistently happy to violate their own rules on the use of anonymous sources to curry favor with the powerful. Fair acts as though the government doesn’t already leak like a ruptured colostomy bag when doing so serves its own interest. The government does so constantly and pervasively, and suggesting that an investigative outfit like The Intercept should provide the government yet more assistance in promoting self-interested leaks is at best bizarre.

And if it did publish such exculpatory documents, would The Intercept’s writers simply dismiss them as “rank propaganda”?

Only if they wanted to accurately characterize government leaks justifying government programs, I imagine.

Second, these leakers are always anonymous, for obvious reasons: they do not want to be prosecuted for breaking the law. However, anonymous sources cannot be vetted for the sagacity of their interpretation or for their motives…Obviously, someone who is breaking the law to provide these documents must be presumed to be completely honest and factually correct in his assessments. [I think that last part is sarcasm]

I don’t want to belabor this point, but…again, government-serving leaks are probably a thousand times more common than government-critical ones. Fair is applying her principle to the .1% of critical leakers while giving a pass to the 99.9% wink-and-nod variety. The selective concern would be strange under any circumstances. That she manages to do it while lecturing others on the dangers of bias is stunning.

In its most recent product, “The Drone Papers,” The Intercept tells readers that the leaker was moved by his moral outrage. But is it not possible that less noble motivations compelled the leaker to provide these particular documents? If the motive was espionage or work-place dissatisfaction, does that change our perception of the documents and the leaker’s explanation of them?

For someone ordinarily so quick to dismiss everything that isn’t “data,” Fair’s pivot here to the mushy realms of the workings of the human heart is deft enough to make a novelist blush.

Sure, we should always factor in what we can know of a person’s motives (which often isn’t much). Which is why the government worked so hard (and ultimately unsuccessfully) to brand Snowden as a narcissist. What’s really odd, though, isn’t that people who hate whisteblowers always try to impugn their motives. It’s that such people never question the motives of the countless officials whose leaks amplify the government’s preferred narrative.

So if you leak to challenge power, there must be something nefarious going on. If you leak to burnish power, you’re just doing God’s work.

Nope, no bias there.

A third problem is the presumption that classification confers some standard of quality.

I see none of this in The Intercept’s reporting and can only surmise that Fair is either projecting or trying to set up a straw man. Pretty obviously, the point isn’t that secret documents are some kind of holy scripture, but rather that the documents in question are ones the government itself relies on, and as such are noteworthy regardless of their underlying “standard of quality.”

In my experience, classified products are rarely worth the effort to obtain and read.

Which might make one wonder why Fair is so upset about the pilfering and illegality and all that.

The Intercept claims that the documents it received “show that during a five-month stretch of the campaign [Operation Haymaker], nearly nine out of 10 people who died in airstrikes were not the Americans’ direct targets.” This is not the same as being “innocent.”

I find myself wondering a bit about someone whose attempt at exculpation is, “Hey, the person we accidentally blew up wasn’t ‘innocent!’” It seems maybe a bit like saying, “Hey, that guy we executed for a murder he didn’t commit? Well, turns out he might have had a couple outstanding parking tickets. Dude had it coming to him!”

Luckily, I secretly love when life imitates art, because this all reminded me of Agent Rogersz from Repo Man, responding to concerns about an innocent man being tortured by declaring, “No one is innocent!”

With respect to Pakistan, there is one study that actually comes to the exact opposite conclusion as the one put forward by Mr. Greenwald…Excluding one catastrophically disastrous strike which inflicted one of the worst civilian death tolls since the drone program started in Pakistan, nearly 90 percent of the people killed were militants.

Leave aside whether “We don’t accidentally kill as many people as you claim” can best be characterized as “the exact opposite conclusion.” Apparently the really catastrophically disastrous strikes don’t have catastrophically disastrous effects. In fact, catastrophically disastrous strikes shouldn’t be counted at all. And, once we’ve magically gerrymandered out those catastrophically disastrous strikes, we can explain away a dozen studies, polls, and informed commentary (and this one, too) and focus only on the one report we like, citing it for the counterintuitive proposition that Pakistanis welcome a drone assassination program that mistakenly kills only one innocent (whoops, I mean non-targeted) Pakistani out of ten and that the program is working as advertised.

Mr. Greenwald also cited the opinions of well-regarded generals such as General Stanley McChrystal, the former commander of NATO troops in Afghanistan [“The resentment created by US drones is much greater than the average American appreciates. They are hated on a visceral level”]. Mr. Hasan also cited the views of retired U.S. Lt. General Michael Flynn, former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency [“Even when it works, even when we take out a big name, it makes us all feel good for 24 hours. And you know what? It doesn’t matter. It just makes them a martyr, they get replaced, it just creates a new reason for all of them to fight us harder”]… it should be emphasized that the opinions offered by any generals, unless supported by data and rigorous analysis, are simply opinions.

Fair also claimed during the debate that “He [General Flynn] doesn’t have data. He has no data.”

I just want to say that I hope the guy who used to run the DIA had access to some data. You’d generally want heads of the DIA and other such massive intelligence bureaucracies to stumble across a little data from time to time as they’re formulating their opinions. Otherwise our tax dollars are being wasted even more than I suspected.

As for McChrystal, during the debate he had the honor (along with investigative reporter Jeremy Scahill, author of the drones-and-related topics book Dirty Wars: The War is a Battlefield and subject of an accompanying Oscar-nominated film of the same name) of being one of the many people Fair claimed “actually doesn’t know Pakistan.” Someone better tell that to McChrystal, because he seems to have written a whole book on the topic, a topic he probably had a hard time avoiding during his time as the commander of US and NATO forces in neighboring Afghanistan.

By the way, another data-challenged person ignorant of all things Pakistani who might have come up but didn’t was Admiral Dennis Blair, former Director of National Intelligence, who claims drone strikes are “the politically advantageous thing to do—low cost, no US casualties, gives the appearance of toughness. It plays well domestically, and it is unpopular only in other countries. Any damage it does to the national interest only shows up over the long term.”

Mr. Greenwald and Mr. Hasan also asserted vigorously that drones make more terrorists than they kill. To support this claim, Mr. Greenwald cited the opinions of several well-known persons. First, he cited Malala Yousafzai, the teenage girl whom the Pakistani Taliban shot for her promotion of female education…Ms. Yousafzai is a courageous young woman. She is not, however, representative of Pakistani thought…She’s also no expert on the matter at hand, her good intentions notwithstanding. Leaving aside her personal tragedy and perseverance, Ms. Yousafzai lived in Malakand, not in the tribal areas where drones exclusively operate…

It’s a little surreal to listen to a white chick from Georgetown explain how an actual Pakistani’s views on drones don’t count because the Pakistani isn’t representative of Pakistani thought, isn’t an expert, and didn’t live in the right part of Pakistan. But it is consistent with Fair’s overall theme that everyone who disagrees with her—NGOs, army generals, ex-heads of intelligence agencies, the British government, Pew polling, various actual Pakistanis—knows Pakistan so little, is so deprived of meaningful data, or is so crippled by bias, that they can’t understand the unique Pakistani appreciation of being droned by a foreign power.

There was also some discussion during the debate about whether—law and morality aside—drone strikes are ever effective. I want to say just one thing about this. Which is:

Of course drones sometimes take out an intended target. But then, so do chemical weapons. So do nukes. So would a flamethrower, if you deployed one against a house fly. “Effective” in this context is as misleading as the question of whether “torture ever works.” Anything can “work,” anything can be declared effective, if you exclude every side effect and other cost from your calculations. But destabilizing a nuclear-armed country and turning material numbers of its population into militants in order to kill a few fungible individuals might on balance be considered an odd definition of “effective.” It might even be considered insane.

Beyond which, as Greenwald himself points out during the debate, we’ve been waging a global war against terrorism for over fourteen years now and there’s no sign anything is getting better—in fact, every western government says things are getting worse. All of which even without more should make claims of drone “effectiveness” somewhat suspect.

I knew it [the debate] had aired only when Mr. Greenwald’s legion of acolytes began trolling me on Twitter with the familiar litany of often-misogynist rants.

Strangely enough, I think the key to Fair’s inability to understand that people don’t like being bombed by foreigners is contained in that one short sentence.

First, though, I want to congratulate Greenwald on having acquired a legion of acolytes. As someone who can legitimately lay claim only to a small cadre of people I sometimes flatter myself to think of as “fans” and no acolytes at all that I know of, I am humbled—and a little envious. I’m disappointed, though, that Fair missed the alliterative possibilities in something like Legion of Lackies. Well, maybe she’ll write another Lawfare post.

Anyway, I didn’t see the tweets in question, but I spend a decent amount of time on Twitter and so have no trouble believing that various people addressed Fair in demeaning, belittling, insulting ways, some of them misogynist. No doubt, there’s a lot of ugliness on the Internet.

Yet in her own tweets, Fair has taken to calling Greenwald “GeeGee.” There are too many to link to; if you’re curious, just search for it on her Twitter page.

Calling someone named Glenn Greenwald something like GG on Twitter could be easily explained as a way of saving scarce characters. But “GeeGee”? Come on. Everyone knows that conferring a nickname on a stranger—especially any kind of diminutive—is inherently insulting, and there’s no question that in resorting to this embarrassingly childish behavior, Fair is trying to insult Greenwald.

What’s so revealing here is that Fair knows she herself doesn’t like being insulted (unless she’s that rare individual who welcomes litanies of misogynist rants). And yet she seems incapable of what should be only the smallest of imaginative leaps: if she doesn’t like being insulted, probably other people don’t like being insulted, either. If she doesn’t think people should do it to her, probably she shouldn’t do it to other people. That Golden Rule thing again.

And though it’s a trivial instance of the phenomenon, the broad dynamics are similar: this is the same person who must know she would hate it if a foreign power started droning her neighborhood—but who can’t imagine that other peoples might feel the same way she would.

Sad to see so much learning get in the way of something so obvious. Sadder still to know how many people have to suffer and die because of intellectual and imaginative occlusions like Fair’s.

Don't Know Who You Assassinated? Must Have Been a Bad Guy

The Intercept has a bombshell new report today on Obama's drone assassination policies. It's based on documents provided by a new whistleblower--not Edward Snowden. Courage really is contagious.

I was horrified to read that when the military kills someone but doesn't know who, it labels the body an "Enemy Killed in Action." Not a bad way of ensuring that drone strikes are kept "surgical," right? Even though it turns out that as many of 90% of these strikes kill unintended people.

Horrifying, but alas not surprising. The first excerpt is from my novella London Twist, published in 2013. The second is from The Intercept, published today.

I've said it before: the government does so much that's a boon to thriller writers but that's terrible for America. I wish my fiction could be more fictional, but I don't see the government letting that happen anytime soon.

Vachss and Vachss

Updated Below

I’ve been a fan of novelist Andrew Vachss for about a quarter century now, and anyone who knows Vachss’s Burke books will recognize how they’ve influenced my own. I wrote about all this at length in my entry for the International Thriller Writers’ Thriller: 100 Must Reads:

I first heard of Vachss in 1989, when, as a new covert recruit with the CIA, I was reading a lot about crime, violence, and the street. Vachss was mentioned in the bibliography of what remains one of the best self-defense books I’ve ever read, Cheap Shots, Ambushes, and Other Lessons, by Marc “Animal” MacYoung. MacYoung praised Vachss as one of the few novelists who really understood and was able to accurately portray the way the street works: the hits, the scams, the freaks, the whole ugly symbiosis between the criminal world and the civilian. Because MacYoung was clearly a man with his own intimate acquaintance with Vachss’s world, I decided to give Vachss a try...

Today, when people ask me to name some of my literary influences, Vachss is always on the shortlist. He’s the author who opened my eyes to the dramatic possibilities of dropping fictional characters into nonfictional settings and circumstances. He awakened a latent love of clipped dialogue and bleak prose. He implicitly instructed me on how to make the bad guy good: understand him profoundly, make sure that beneath his dark carapace lie certain core qualities the reader can respect and even admire, drop him into a world whose moral palette consists only of the bleakest shades of gray, and populate that world with people even worse than he.

Fast forward to this summer, when I read Vachss’s excellent latest novel, SignWave, his second book about Dell, a former French legionnaire and contract killer. I meant to write a review, but kept getting distracted by other books, including an older Vachss entry called A Bomb Built in Hell that for whatever reason I hadn’t heard of until I was online looking for a link for SignWave. So of course I had to get that one (Phil Gigante/Andrew Vachss is one of the great audiobook combinations of all time, up there with Blair Brown/Isabel Allende and James Ellroy/Craig Wasson).

And then in the course of research for the novel I’m working on now, I came across a book by Vachss’s wife Alice Vachss: Sex Crimes: Ten Years on the Front Lines Prosecuting Rapists and Confronting Their Collaborators. It blew me away. And I thought, the hell with it, I’m just going to do a post on both Vachsses. So here we are.

Okay, Dell first. The structure of SignWave was unusual, in that the villain is off-screen for most of the book and the real pleasure is in Dell’s meticulous preparations for his hits and in his relationship and repartee with his wife, Dolly, who’s as tough as he is, albeit not as adept with violence. And the plot was something of a departure, as well. Like the novelist himself, Vachss’s characters are almost always focused on the welfare of children—protecting them from human predators when possible; avenging them otherwise. But here, the threat was to Dolly. Not a good idea to be a threat to Dell’s wife, given the way the man solves problems. And indeed, his solution was a pleasure, as was the revelation it led to in the last paragraph of the book. Now I’m hoping for a third Dell book—and more.

Now, A Bomb Built in Hell. Assassin Wesley was one of my favorite characters from the early Burke books—maybe my very favorite (though the Mole was pretty awesome, too). So stumbling across this Wesley book—and an origin story, too!—was a great surprise. Wesley is a relatively peripheral character in the early Burke books—mysterious, feared, respected, and legendarily lethal. In other words, not an easy character to do justice to in an origin story. But this one completely delivered: Wesley’s experience in war and demonstrable ease with killing, even outside the rules of engagement; his mentorship in prison at the hands of a Mafioso lifer; his emergence as an unstoppable and increasingly uncontrollable contract killer.

There were bonuses, too: Vachss’s prescient observations about publishing in the foreword; the way the story was integrated with and prefigured elements of the early Burke books. I’ve missed Wesley, and it was great to join him on one last, wild ride.

Finally, Sex Crimes. This is a harrowing account of Alice Vachss’s decade as chief of the Special Victims Bureau in the Queens (New York) District Attorney’s office—harrowing not just because of the horrible crimes Vachss prosecuted, but also because of the politics and bullshit that hindered her efforts. Vachss built the Queens SVB into a force feared by rapists and child molesters, and then lost an epic battle to save the bureau from politics. The story is nonfiction that reads like a thriller: high stakes, a lone hero, a powerful villain (more than one, in fact).

I came away from the book in awe of the stakes a prosecutor like Vachss faces. If I have less than my best day, the writing won’t be what I had aimed for—and the next day I get to make it better. If a sex crimes prosecutor fails, a rapist goes free—a horrible twist of the knife to his previous victims, and a likely guarantee of future victims, as well.

There is so much I could quote from Sex Crimes, but maybe I’ll just go with this from the afterword, regarding the collaborators of the book’s title:

We have allowed sex crimes to be the one area of criminality where we judge the offense not by the perpetrator but by the victim…

Collaboration is a hate crime. When a jury in Florida acquits because the victim was not wearing underpants, when a grand jury in Texas refuses to indict because an AIDS-fearing victim begged the rapist to use a condom, when a judge in Manhattan imposes a lenient sentence because the rape of a retarded, previously victimized teenager wasn’t “violent,” when an appellate defense attorney vilifies a young woman on national TV for the “crime” of having successfully prosecuted a rape complaint, when a judge in Wisconsin calls a five-year-old “seductive,”—all that is collaboration, and it is antipathy toward victims so virulent that it subjects us all to risk.

Vachss’s thoughts on the causes and consequences of collaboration—on why society tolerates rapists in a way it doesn’t tolerate, say armed robbery—are as thought-provoking as they are sobering.

Reading Vachss’s tough, clipped, no-nonsense prose, I realized I’m not the only writer her husband has influenced. And I enjoyed the periodic aside hinting at the supportive relationship between these two warriors on behalf of the powerless. During one of Alice’s toughest battles with the politicians intent on dismantling the SVB, Andrew took to leaving her notes here and there, including this one referring to one of Alice’s office enemies, who he called the toad:

If your eye is on the sky
you may crunch the toad in the road—
which is how we measure progress.

If you love the Burke books, you know the Prof is smiling somewhere.

Update: Someone just pointed out on Facebook that SignWave is the third Dell book, not the second. Somehow I missed AfterShock, the first, and thought SignWave was the second after ShockWave. Well, much as I hate screwing up like that, here it’s good news...means I have another Dell book to read.

Life Depressingly Imitating My Art

Here’s an interesting story from the Intercept on how Robert Litt, the general counsel in the office of the Director of National Intelligence, told colleagues that Congressional support for anti-encryption legislation “could turn in the event of a terrorist attack or criminal event where strong encryption can be shown to have hindered law enforcement.” More:

A senior official granted anonymity by the Post acknowledged that the law enforcement argument is “just not carrying the day.” He told the Post reporters: “People are still not persuaded this is a problem. People think we have not made the case. We do not have the perfect example where you have the dead child or a terrorist act to point to, and that’s what people seem to claim you have to have.”

And here’s Theodor Anders, Director of the NSA in my new novel The God’s Eye View, available February 2, 2016:

In the car on the way back to Fort Meade, Anders thought of the images he’d seen on CNN that morning. It was unfortunate, but on balance he believed it would be beneficial. In so many ways, a country was like a person—which made sense, after all, because a country was in the end just a collection of people. And people were always concerned about their health, and rightly so, but not always properly solicitous of it. A man might therefore visit the dentist and be warned he needed to floss more often to prevent gum disease, and the man, in the immediate aftermath of his run-in with the pick and the drill, would promise himself that this time, he would be more diligent about his dental hygiene. And he might even follow through, brushing more conscientiously, flossing more regularly, for a few days, perhaps even for a week. But inevitably, as the dentist’s warning and the discomfort induced by her instruments receded into the distance, the man would revert to laziness, complacency, denial. The simple truth was, twice a year just wasn’t enough to make the average person take better care of his teeth. And similarly, the occasional random terror attack demonstrably wasn’t enough to keep the citizenry properly vigilant. An occasional supplement might be required, and while that supplement might involve some unpleasant inherent side effects, surely those side effects were nothing compared to the actual disease they were required to protect against?

He wished the supplements weren’t necessary. He wished the country could grasp the nature of the threat, as he did, and give him without question the tools he needed to combat it. But he supposed he couldn’t blame them. They didn’t have access to the information he did, they didn’t understand just how dangerous the world was, they didn’t know what was needed to keep that danger at bay. 

Well, they knew slightly better today than they had the day before. And that was something, anyway.

Earlier in the book, Anders muses:

For a moment, Anders was irritated at all the trouble he had to go through just to confirm a single person’s location. It would be so much easier, and better, if everyone were fitted with a microchip. He’d read an article somewhere about how a dog had slipped away from its home in Pennsylvania, and how it had been discovered months later in Oregon—all because a shelter technician had read the microchip her owners had implanted in her. There might be some resistance to the notion of doing something like this to people, of course, but he imagined if it were billed as insurance against kidnapping . . . and if a high-profile kidnapping could be arranged to be foiled—a child saved from the worst depravity, its parents from bottomless horror and grief, solely because the child’s loving parents had possessed the foresight to implant a chip while the child was an infant—it wouldn’t be long before all parents would feel criminally negligent for failing to implant their children. He wondered if a law could be passed, the way there had been for car seats and bicycle helmets. But no, it probably wouldn’t even be necessary. The fear of a kidnapping coupled with a Why, why did we not have the microchip done? would be more than sufficient.

He shook off the daydream, knowing he had to work with the tools available to him today. Tomorrow was another matter.

Reality has long had a way of catching up to my fiction: pacemaker hacks, nuclear safety coverups in Japan, government kill lists, etc. But usually reality waits until after the book is published. It’s getting harder for art to stay ahead of life. Given the types of stories I write, I wouldn’t call that good news.

Authors Guild Report: AG Membership Impoverishes Authors (And It’s Amazon’s Fault)!

Updated Below

People sometimes tell me I’m too hard on the Authors Guild and that I should cut them some slack. And I’d like to. I really would. But it would help if the organization would try to meet me half way, or even a quarter way, instead of continuing to pump out the kind of incoherent bullshit I’m going to examine in this post.

Okay, the latest. Apparently the Authors Guild has done a study in which it concludes that “the majority of authors would be living below the Federal Poverty Level if they relied solely on income from their writing...not only are many authors earning little, they are, since 2009, also earning less.”

Now I’m no statistician (though I doubt I’m any more statistically challenged than anyone at the Authors Guild), and regardless picking apart the report’s basis isn’t what primarily interests me today. But I do have to note one thing just as an aside. Which is: it’s fascinating that the Authors Guild could rely on respondents only from its own membership—89% of whom are over 50, 64% of whom have never even experimented with self-publishing, and only 4% of whom have eschewed legacy publishing entirely—and then use these responses to draw conclusions about what’s going on for all authors.

You don’t need to be an expert in self-selection bias and non-probability sampling to understand that the AG’s stunt would be a devastating methodological flaw in any study (as it is regarding reports of Association of American Publisher earnings—don’t miss the latest must-read AuthorEarnings report). But given that the most innovative and entrepreneurial writers in publishing today look at the Authors Guild as at best a punch line, the error is a showstopper. If the report demonstrates anything at all, it’s that a declining poverty-line subsistence correlates with membership in the Authors Guild. Not exactly a ringing endorsement, and maybe this is why the organization is eager to treat its respondents as somehow representative of authors generally, including authors who would laugh at the notion that they should join. Or maybe the conflation is just an unconscious attitude, a kind of “l’état, c’est moi” reflex. Either way, what the Authors Guild has done here is the equivalent of polling a group of grandparents, then using their responses to conclude something like, “No one at all can figure out how to use a remote control.”

All this is bad enough, obviously, but things actually go downhill from there. Here’s how executive director Mary Rasenberger explains the bad news:

Citing a swirl of factors, from online piracy to publisher consolidation to the rise of Amazon (and the shuttering of brick and mortar bookstores), Rasenberger said the takeaway from the survey is that authors should be receiving higher royalties from publishers. “Authors need to be cut in more equitably on the profits their publishers see, or we’ll stop seeing the quality of work the industry was built on.”

This isn’t an argument, or anything else that might be potentially useful. It’s gibberish, the flotsam and jetsam of a self-interested ideology dedicated to a conclusion and free of supporting facts. To see why, let’s just assume that the kind of author impoverishment the AG claims to have uncovered really does exist, and examine the causes the AG alleges and the solutions it suggests.

Piracy is impoverishing authors. This is such a persistent piece of foolishness that Joe Konrath and I have it cued up as one of our ongoing Zombie Meme posts (I wish we’d written the piracy post already because then I could link to it to save time, which is half the point of the Zombie Meme series). If Rasenberger has some evidence that piracy is harming authors, she should share it because simply repeating something again and again isn’t ordinarily by itself enough to make it so. As it stands, there’s no logical or empirical reason to believe piracy harms authors. And if you think I cherry-picked that link by searching for “piracy doesn’t harm authors,” I urge you to do your own search for “piracy harms authors,” which will be at least equally revealing.

Publisher consolidation is impoverishing authors. While I doubt publisher consolidation is much good for authors (which is why I’ve wondered aloud from time to time why this organization calling itself the Authors Guild has never done anything worthwhile about it), I also think that if Rasenberger has reason to believe publisher consolidation is actually impoverishing authors, she could at least share her evidence. Is consolidation correlated with fewer books being purchased, fewer authors being published, or something along those lines? If so, Rasenberger might have something worthwhile to say. As it stands, the claim is pretty feeble.

Amazon is impoverishing authors. If the previous claim was merely feeble, this one is actually insane. As a bookstore, Amazon sells more books than anyone. As a publisher, it pays higher royalties than anyone. So Rasenberger would have you believe that selling more books and paying higher royalties is impoverishing authors. Does she therefore believe that authors would be better off if Amazon sold fewer of their books and paid them lower royalties? I guess she must.

An argument this backward should function as a straight-up disqualification of anyone trying to make it. Instead, it’s reported with uncritical reverence in Publishers Weekly, which apparently is more interested in providing PR and stenographic services to groups like the AG than it is in performing actual journalism. Seriously: read the article, and ask yourself whether even one thing about it would be different if it appeared as a direct press release on the AG’s own website. My guess is, the bargained-for consideration in an exchange like this goes like, “As long as we get a sneak peek, AG, we’ll publish anything you want to say without any pushback, critical commentary, or anything else that might be confused with actual journalism.”

Though fear not, PW; in pretending to do journalism while instead performing PR and propaganda, you are of course in excellent company.

The shuttering of brick-and-mortar bookstores is impoverishing authors. Well, now I’m really confused…a minute ago, authors were being impoverished by the rise of a bookstore; now they’re impoverished when bookstores close? It’s almost as though the impoverishment is caused by everything, no matter what!

In fact, new indie bookstores are opening all the time, so the notion that on balance bookstores have been shuttering since Borders went bankrupt nearly five years ago is factually inaccurate. If Rasenberger has information about, say, Barnes & Noble reducing the amount of shelf space devoted to books, that might be a meaningful data point. Or again, even more useful would be information on the numbers of books being purchased generally, given that how many books are being purchased would seem a more meaningful metric with regard to alleged author impoverishment than where books are being purchased. And how big is the size of the book market generally? Maybe the pie is growing, but the top one percent of that market is making less, leading the one percent to feel they’re being impoverished (hint: there’s a lot of support for this notion). But something like that would require actual data and modicum of thought, which is why we’re repeatedly subjected instead to tired, internally contradictory bromides in these AG pronouncements.

Now let’s examine the proposed solution to the causes of all this author impoverishment: “Authors need to be cut in more equitably on the profits their publishers see, or we’ll stop seeing the quality of work the industry was built on.”

Wait, I thought the rise of Amazon—the publisher that pays higher royalties than any other—was impoverishing authors. How is that possible, if the solution to author impoverishment is higher publisher royalties? It’s all just so confusing…!

But okay, no doubt it’s an outrage that legacy publishers are making more and more and sharing with authors less and less—which again makes all the more remarkable the AG’s failure to do anything about it beyond than the odd supplicatory blog post. But what does any of that have to do with piracy and all the rest? It’s like Rasenberger is throwing up a bunch of distracting chaff instead of saying what’s simply and glaringly obvious: if legacy authors are being impoverished, it’s because their publishers are keeping an ever-larger share of the profits. It has nothing to do with piracy, or consolidation, or with some bookstores rising and others opening and closing. Legacy publishers make too much and share too little.

It’s hard to understand why Rasenberger seems so intent on nonsense that obscures this obvious truth. My guess is that if the Authors Guild spoke a little more plainly, more people might wonder why the organization does virtually nothing to address the actual problem the organization itself has identified.

By the way, I confess I especially loved that bit of “we’ll stop seeing the quality of work the industry was built on” drama, as though only impoverished legacy authors write quality books (readers, apparently, disagree, which I can imagine might sting a bit among a certain class of writers). Do you hear that, ungrateful society? Après moi, le déluge!

Just to forestall any distracting silliness in the comments: I’m not arguing that the Authors Guild does absolutely nothing for authors (the truth is a bit more nuanced than that). But what mysterious force is preventing the AG from doing anything meaningful about what the organization itself claims is the cure for author impoverishment? Here, an easy idea for you, AG: contact the Justice Department. And no, not with a plea to help authors by dismantling the bookstore that sells more books than any other and the publisher that pays authors higher royalties than any other—Authors United has already cornered the market on that insanity, with your help. But rather, say, with an argument that the whole legacy industry is built on illegal tying and needs to be dismantled:

Tying…is the practice of selling one product or service as a mandatory addition to the purchase of a different product or service. In legal terms, a tying sale makes the sale of one good [say, paper distribution] to the de facto customer [here, the author] conditional on the purchase of a second distinctive good [here, all the other publishing services that would otherwise be available elsewhere, such as editing, copyediting, proofreading, cover design, marketing, PR, and advertising]…

Some kinds of tying, especially by contract, have historically been regarded as anti-competitive practices. The basic idea is that consumers are harmed by being forced to buy an undesired good (the tied good) in order to purchase a good they actually want (the tying good), and so would prefer that the goods be sold separately. The company doing this bundling may have a significantly large market share so that it may impose the tie on consumers, despite the forces of market competition. The tie may also harm other companies in the market for the tied good, or who sell only single components.

One effect of tying can be that low quality products achieve a higher market share than would otherwise be the case [which might explain why legacy publishers notoriously suck at, for example, cover design]...

Tying may also be used with or in place of patents or copyrights to help protect entry into a market, discouraging innovation [which might explain why legacy publishers are well known for innovating…nothing].

Tying is often used when the supplier makes one product that is critical to many customers [again, think paper distribution]. By threatening to withhold that key product unless others are also purchased, the supplier can increase sales of less necessary products.

In the United States, most states have laws against tying, which are enforced by state governments. In addition, the U.S. Department of Justice enforces federal laws against tying through its Antitrust Division [good news, Authors Guild—a lever by which you can pressure legacy publishers into sharing a bit more of the wealth!].

Accusing legacy publishers of tying is a significantly more coherent argument than accusing Amazon of being a monopoly. And the “Amazon is a monopoly” gambit is just a ploy anyway. As Lee Child of Authors United has acknowledged:

I don’t expect anything substantive [to come from Authors United’s letter to the Justice Department accusing Amazon of running an illegal monopoly], but books are generally seen as vaguely important, so the initial think-of-the-children rhetoric might get attention, and then maybe there might be a back-channel whisper…

If these organizations can use a ploy as weak as “Amazon is a monopoly” to try to pressure Amazon into the behavior they want, what’s keeping them from using an actual legal argument to the same end with regard to legacy publishers? Only psychological thralldom, I would argue. And certainly an appeal to the DOJ about legacy tying would be more effective than the “pretty please” blog posts and interviews which, when it comes to the legacy industry, the AG pretends are its only weapons.

One other bit of fascinating bullshit from this Publishers Weekly/Authors Guild joint press release:

Noting that both “copyright law and policy” need to be “tailored to put authors’ concerns at the forefront,” Rasenberger said the Guild hopes the survey will allow it to “more effectively advocate for working authors.”

What does copyright have to do with the author impoverishment the AG alleges? Copyright term has long since metastasized to mean functionally forever, which might be good for authors (if less so for society)—except that publishers routine require authors to assign by contract their rights for the entire length of those “forever” terms. Rasenberger’s copyright! argument is therefore at best a non sequitur. Worse, it’s a dodge, intended to obscure the Authors Guild’s obligation (at least judging from the organization’s mission statement) to actually do something beyond the odd blog post about those legacy publisher “forever” terms. What is she proposing, that someone lobby Congress to amend copyright law and policy (whatever she means by drawing that distinction) to make copyright even more favorable for authors? Even if such a chimerical approach (akin to a politician claiming to support some constitutional amendment, knowing it’ll never happen) might accomplish anything, it would have zero impact on the real problem—which is, again, that whatever rights authors have in their works, legacy publishers gobble up everything anyway via lockstep draconian contractual requirements.

It’s fascinating. The Authors Guild knows what’s the real problem—it’s just that the organization is unwilling to actually do anything about it. When pressed, its spokespeople resort to what’s familiar and comfortable—piracy is bad, Amazon is bad, copyright isn’t working—no matter how irrelevant or untrue these beliefs are repeatedly proven to be. It reminds me of recent establishment media coverage of Jeremy Corbyn’s huge Labour win in Britain—perseverating that Corbyn is “radical” and “divisive” even as he wins unprecedented majorities and brings to Labour tens of thousands of new members. How do they know someone who just won Labour’s leadership by a landslide and is swelling the party’s rank-and-file membership in the process is radical and divisive? They just do! Who are you going to believe—that comforting feeling, or that annoying combination of facts and logic?

I’ve argued before that an Authors Guild worthy of the name would display a little less dedication to the interests of legacy publishers and a little more to, you know, authors. But maybe there’s a separate problem. Maybe the organization really does want to help authors. Maybe it even knows how it could do so and is just too fearful. In other words, maybe what the AG lacks isn’t brains; it’s balls. Whether it’ll ever grow a pair remains to be seen, but I wouldn’t bother with these posts if I didn’t live in hope.

Update: Nate Hoffelder at the Digital Reader has a great analysis of what the AG numbers really mean. Among other things: “Far from showing the demise of the American author, this survey actually shows that the youngest authors are better off than they were before…”

The Authors Guild. Even worse than you thought.