I've read most of Vachss's books, but there's one I missed, called Another Chance to Get It Right: A Children's Book for Adults, that was just reissued in a stunning new edition. It's a short read, with gorgeous illustrations, most of them graphic-novel style, and deals with Vachss's signature subject of child protection.
I've been getting a lot of good feedback about Livia Lone, including comparisons to Vachss's work, which is enormously flattering to me. Various people, moved by the story, have asked how they can fight human trafficking and child abuse. Well, unsurprisingly, the best child-protection initiative I’m aware of has been spearheaded by Vachss himself. It’s called The Legislative Drafting Institute for Child Protection, and anyone who wants to help protect children from the sorts of horrors I depict in Livia Lone can do simply by financing the work of the LDICP. I’ve done so myself and hope anyone reading this post will do so, too. For a few mouse clicks and whatever money you can spare, you can help accomplish a lot of good in the world. Do it now, while it's on your mind. You can think of it as another chance to get it right.
I've been writing about this since 2009. Obama had a duty to prosecute torture; instead, he decided to "look forward as opposed to looking backward," rendering torture a de facto policy choice instead of a crime.
If President X has the power to prohibit torture, it follows that President Y has the power to permit it. Well, now we have President Y. This was not only predictable; it was predicted.
I urge you to read this article by Alice Speri in the Intercept. 89,000 people jailed--no, not per year, per day. The war on some drugs is fantastically cruel, counterproductive, self-inflicted insanity. If it were enforced across the board--rather than disproportionately against minorities--two thirds of America's adult population would be in prison. People who support this madness: would you feel the same way if your kid decided to try a joint and wound up arrested, tried, imprisoned, permanently denied the right to vote even after released and with a permanent felon record afterward? Could you really support prohibition if you knew it would do all that to your own child, rather than assuming that kind of thing only happens to the children of others? I wish someone would ask this of candidates for high office. But we can at least ask ourselves.
Yes, the 1950's level of fear-mongering and bullshit is part of what makes this Diane Feinstein op-ed such an embarrassment. But the real propaganda lies in what's missing: zero consideration of the costs of the status quo the senator prefers--AKA, prohibition. When rational people evaluate policies, they intuitively know to weigh the costs and benefits of the available alternatives. When someone insists on discussing only the (arguable) costs of only one of the alternatives, that person has abandoned rationality--or is a deliberate propagandist. Californians, ignore the fear-mongering and the bullshit and the unreason. Rebuke the dinosaurs. Vote YES on Proposition 64 on Nov. 8.
Gripping drama, potent activism—guest blogging about Oliver Stone’s Snowden biopic over at BoingBoing today.
"The movie succeeded splendidly as popular entertainment. But there’s another level worth discussing, too. "Logically, it shouldn’t particularly matter who Snowden is. His background, his formative experiences, his motivations, his life—none of these is relevant compared towhatwe’velearnedfrom him: that the US government developed and deployed an unprecedented and illegal system of mass surveillance, foreign and domestic; that the head of the US intelligence apparatus was lying about this system in sworn testimony before a Senate oversight committee; that the NSA has been subverting the very encryption standards upon which Internet security—banking, shopping, medical, everything—depends. And so much more. In the face of government actions as toxic to democracy as these, who brought the actions to our attention seems of distinctly secondary importance. "And yet, I know as a novelist that we humans are wired to focus more on who than we are than what. If I can get you to care sufficiently deeply about my characters, for example, I can afflict them with only the most trivial travails and you’ll still be entertained. Conversely, if you don’t care about my characters, I can put in play the fate of all of civilization and you probably won’t even finish the book. There’s something about our species that makes us understand “what” at least partially through the prism of “who.” This is why so many people give the candidate of their preferred party so much latitude to violate their own party’s stated principles. When your party’s the one doing it, it just feels different. "So it's no surprise that..." Read the whole thing over at Boing Boing.
The other day, I stumbled across an excellent documentary called Deep Web, about the Ross Ulbricht/Silk Road prosecution. I'd followed the story somewhat at the time, but not closely, and the film illuminated a lot of aspects worth considering--including the societal and individual costs of drug prohibition; the dangers of prosecutorial overreach; and the ways people try to create communities beyond governmental intrusion and inanity. Fascinating and highly recommended.
From my op-ed in Time Magazine urging Obama to pardon Snowden: "In other words, Snowden followed his conscience. Authoritarians might condemn such a choice. Americans should celebrate it. After all, in his seminal essay “Civil Disobedience,” Henry David Thoreau wrote, “It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right.” And indeed, if people were intended to only and always obey the law, why would we have been given the power—and burden—of conscience? Similarly, if the president were intended always to hew to the law even at the expense of justice, why would the founders have vested the office of the president with the power of pardon?" Read the whole thing here. And please consider adding your name to this worthy effort.
Guest-blogging today over at Boing Boing: If you were the government and wanted to maintain a state of perpetual war, how would you go about it? First, you'd need an enemy, of course, but that part would be pretty straightforward. After all, if the US government could convince the citizenry that Iraq was the 9/11 enemy but that Saudi Arabia was our friend when nineteen out of the twenty 9/11 highjackers were Saudi, it's fair to say that just about anything is possible. But the next part would be harder. On the one hand, you'd have to claim progress in the war so that the citizenry would maintain its support for the war. On the other hand, you couldn't actually defeat the enemy, lest the war end. That is to say, you'd have to maintain a longterm, delicate balance: we would always be winning in the war, but would never actually win the war. With that balance in mind, your propaganda would likely be some version of, "Today, our military forces have achieved a significant victory. Of course, the enemy is insidious and resilient, and there is much hard work still ahead." Which brings us to the latest in All The News That's Fit To Print... Read the rest over at Boing Boing.
Based on dramatic revelations from a post-Snowden whistleblower and written by Jeremy Scahill and other Intercept writers, The Assassination Complex: Inside the Government's Secret Drone Warfare Programprovides a long-overdue window into America's vast killing machine: who makes the decisions on who will be killed; how those decisions are made; how the strikes are carried out; most of all, in a thoughtful foreword by Edward Snowden and afterword by Glenn Greenwald, the implications for a democratic society of all this due-process-free, non-battlefield killing.
In addition to its substantive appeal, the book is beautifully laid out and includes numerous graphs, photographs, and text inserts that render some of the more complex aspects of the topic (such as the communications infrastructure and other logistics of drone strikes) easy to follow. The inserts on the Orwellian language of drone strikes were particularly good. Did you know the military laments the difficulty of killing far-away people as "the tyranny of distance"? It takes a special sensibility to refer to obstacles to killing people as a form of "tyranny," but those are your tax dollars at work. Also, when an intended target is killed, that's called a "jackpot," but when an unintended target is killed, that's called an "EKIA," or Enemy Killed in Action. So no matter who is killed, the government always wins. It's both amusing and dispiriting to consider that the people behind this "heads I win, tails you lose" nomenclature also probably roll their eyes at the notion of children getting a "participant" ribbon just for entering a competition, with no need to actually win anything. I'm a little surprised the book has received only four Amazon customer reviews since coming out ten days ago. I have a feeling the relative paucity might have something to do with Americans not wanting to know about the tyrannical powers our government has arrogated to itself and now exercises in secret, with no accountability or meaningful public debate. The attitude seems to be, "Do whatever you think you must to keep us safe; just don't tell us the disturbing details, lest we have to grapple with the legality, morality, and effectiveness of these far-reaching policies, and accept responsibility for them." There are a lot of things that might be said about such an attitude. "Consistent with the long-term health of a democracy" isn't one of them.
Been a busy month promoting God's Eye. In case you missed these: I did this "Five Questions on Publishing" interview with author Chris Jane at Jane Friedman's blog. We cover a lot of ground; here's just a sample:
By the way, another bit of establishment publishing propaganda is the notion that the publisher is losing money until the author earns out. This bit of bullshit is intended to make authors feel guilty and beholden about their advances. But it isn’t true, and here’s a quick logic experiment to prove it:
Imagine a scenario in which the author receives a 99 percent royalty. The author would earn out her advance very quickly, right? But the publisher would make almost no money and remain in the red long after the earn-out.
Conversely, imagine a scenario in which the author receives a 1 percent royalty. The author would probably never earn out the advance, but the publisher would quickly recoup its investment and make bank after that.
And in fact, superstar authors typically receive advances so large they’re designed not to be earned out, but function instead as a de facto higher-than-normal digital royalty rate (the technique is a way of evading the digital royalty “most favored customer” clauses that are common in publishing contracts). And even though these huge advances never earn out, the publisher still makes money.
So while there might be some loose correlation between the author earning out and the publisher making money, the notion that they’re one and the same is false and misleading. Publishers typically start to make money on a book before the author earns out, and even if the author never earns out at all.
And an audio interview on God's Eye and more with Speaking of Mysteries: And another audio interview with Author Link. And now I better get back to writing the next book. :)
Last week, while on tour promoting The God's Eye View, it was a thrill and an honor to appearonDemocracy Now! and The Young Turks, two great shows that have had a huge influence on my political outlook. We talked about the Apple/FBI standoff; why abolishing the CIA isn't a radical position;why Clinton's rhetoric, votes, and policies qualify her as a Neocon; and why subsequent events so often prove my novels (depressingly) prescient.
Yesterday, I gave
a talk to the San Francisco chapter of the Former Intelligence Officers Association.
In front of about a hundred former CIA, FBI, and NSA operatives, including former
head of the CIA and NSA Michael Hayden, I talked about bulk surveillance, whistleblowing,
and why intelligence professionals need to take especially great care not to let
propaganda pervert their intelligence. I think the crowd was initially skeptical,
but warmed as I went along. In the end, quite a few people came up afterward to
thank me for my candor. The whole thing was fun and a little surreal, and if I got
a few people to look at these issues in a somewhat different light, I’m glad. You
can read the basis for my remarks at Freedom of the Press Foundation and Boing Boing.
Unfortunately,
the format was such that no real debate with Hayden was possible. Which was frustrating,
because, for example, at one point during his Q&A, Hayden opined that Iran
is the world’s greatest purveyor of terrorism. If I could have responded, I would
have wondered aloud, as I like to do from time to time, how I’d explain an assertion
like that to a Martian:
Martian: We on Mars are confused by your General Hayden’s
comment. He is speaking of Iran, is that correct? A country with the GDP of Finland?
Martian: But then America’s wars must not be terrorism.
Me: Right.
Martian: That is fortunate, for our understanding
on Mars is that America spends more on its military than the next eight nations
on earth combined—five of which are American allies.
Me: Yes, we do have a large military.
Martian: Do you not maintain over 800 military bases—more than any other nation
in your planet’s history?
Me: Yes, that’s true.
Martian: Watching from Mars, we have always associated
overseas military bases with what you on earth call “empire.”
Me: Americans don’t want an empire.
Martian: Why then do you maintain so many overseas
military bases, as empires do?
Me: We just want to keep the peace.
Martian: By making war?
Me: It’s...complicated. But really, America is
a peace-loving culture.
Martian: But you have more wars than anyone. On Mars,
this does not seem peaceful.
Me: Okay, but it’s not terrorism. Terrorism is
when, you know, you terrorize people.
Martian: But did you not, alone among the peoples
of your planet, use atomic weapons against your fellow humans, when you bombed Hiroshima
and Nagasaki?
Me: Only to end the war.
Martian: Did you not kill at least 600,000 civilians in your war in Vietnam?
Me: We did.
Martian: Did you not kill at least 100,000 civilians in your latest war in Iraq, and
turn four million people in that war into refugees?
Me: We did.
Martian: And did not your former Secretary of State
Madeleine Albright declare that a half million Iraqi children starved to death because
of American sanctions was “worth it”?
Me: She did say that, though she took it back
afterward.
Martian: And is it not the case that—
Me: Okay, look, I get it. America does more wars
and violence than anyone else. But it’s not about terrorizing people, okay?
Martian: But are not the people you kill terrorized?
And what about the parents of dead children, the children of dead parents, and the
burned, blinded, brain-damaged, crippled, maimed, and mutilated by your weapons?
Our understanding of humans is that you are terrorized by such things.
Me: I guess so. But it’s not like we’re trying
to terrorize.
Martian: But did you not call your own tactics in
your second war in Iraq “Shock and Awe”?
Me: Well, yeah. We were trying to, you know,
shock and awe them.
Martian: Perhaps the problem is our imperfect renderings
of Earth languages. In Martian, we cannot distinguish between terrorizing with bombs,
and shocking and awing with them.
Me: Look, I see where you’re trying to go with
this, okay? But we’re not like ISIS and other terrorist groups. I mean, you know
what ISIS does? ISIS burns people alive. That’s terrorism.
Martian: But do you not currently deploy what your
refer to as thermobaric weapons?
Me: I don’t know that word.
Martian: It is derived from two Greek words meaning
“heat” and “pressure.” In English, it refers to a type of explosive that produces
an exceptionally hot and powerful blast. The lucky victims are obliterated. The
less lucky suffer terrible agonies before they die.
Me: Well, I’m sure that isn’t our intent.
Martian: But you have named one such weapon the “Hellfire”
missile. Does this not mean you are well aware that the missile burns
your fellow humans with fire? Was it not in fact designed to do so?
Me: I guess it just comes down to that terrorists
want to kill innocent people. But America doesn’t. When we kill innocent people,
we call it “collateral damage.” Do you know that phrase?
Martian: We do, but our translators have struggled
with it. For a long time, we failed to understand why a people who are ordinarily
so plain-spoken would devise such a vague phrase. Then we realized, you Americans
find such a phrase preferable to something like, “the burning to death of innocent
human beings, the blowing into tiny scraps of meat and bone ordinary people just
trying to live their lives, the ripping asunder of the limbs of children, the blinding
and mutilation of baby humans—”
Me: Right, I get it. But, yes, it’s not like
we want those things to happen. When we do them, they’re tragic accidents.
That’s the difference.
Martian: This is interesting. You mean terrorists
want to kill innocents, while you Americans are mere willing to kill
innocents.
Me: Something like that, I think. Yes.
Martian: Perhaps we Martians are simply dense. It
seems that terrorists have goals for which they will kill. Is that not also true
for your country?
Me: Yes, but again, the terrorists want
to kill innocent people.
Martian: It is difficult for we Martians to understand
the difference. Presumably these people you call terrorists simply want to achieve
certain geopolitical goals that they believe require killing innocent people. Presumably
if they believed they had another way to achieve these goals, they would not feel the need to
kill innocent people.
Me: I don’t understand.
Martian: I mean, perhaps terrorists are killing people
pragmatically. In other words, for terrorists, killing people is a means, not an
end.
Me: So what?
Martian: I am trying how to understand how it is different
for you, given that you are the “good guys,” to use your Earth phrase. Do you not
also, in all your wars, kill people as a means?
Me: But we don’t want to.
Martian: In such circumstances, it is sometimes difficult
for we Martians to distinguish between the concept of “want” and the concept of
“willing.” For in the service of the geopolitical goals you seek to achieve through
the means of violence, is it not an empirical and historical fact that inevitably
you will kill hundreds of thousands of innocent people, inflict the most horrific
injuries on hundreds of thousands more, and turn millions of people into stateless
refugees, with all the terrorizing that such events necessarily entail?
Me: I guess.
Martian: But this is not terrorism.
Me: No. Not when we do it.
Martian: I confess I am more perplexed now than when
we started. I do not understand how the nation that commits the most violence and
causes the most terror can claim other nations are the most terroristic. We Martians
will have to study this question more closely.
Well, maybe they’ll
invite General Hayden and me back. But we’d probably need a Martian to translate.
This
is the kind of thing I’m starting to think of as Peak Economist—when the
magazine can’t come up with an argument even marginally new, insightful, or useful
about one of the wars it’s constantly calling for, and so defaults to the kind
of sober- and serious-sounding but substantively vapid bromides that have
become the trademark of its warmongering.
So
let’s pause for just a moment—longer, apparently, than the Economist allotted
itself before publishing that marvelous bit of self-important onanism—to
consider a bit of what’s so embarrassingly stupid about it.
First,
why should “doing nothing” be inherently suspect—especially when the only alternatives
The Economist seems able to imagine all
involve war? Now, in fairness to The
Economist, war is only called war with regard to the “Libyan Civil War.”
Western bombings and invasions are instead understood to be mere “intervention.”
Seriously—“war” is used three times in the article, and only about the Libyan
civil war. Intervention is used four times, and only about a western attack. In
fact, I just decided on the spot to make “intervention” one of my favorite
war-mongering euphemisms ever, reserved only for the noble actions of the
beneficent west and denied to our adversaries such as the Iranians, who can
only “meddle” in countries adjacent to them after the west has “intervened” there.
(For
some of the best war euphemisms ever, including wars that aren’t wars but are
instead merely instances of “marching” and “pressing forward” and “continuing,”
see former CIA clandestine service chief Jack Devine and former “dean of the
Washington Press corps” David Broder in The
Definition of Insanity.)
Sorry,
I digress…we were talking about why “doing nothing” should be inherently
suspect when all The Economist’s
alternatives are so demonstrably awful. A question: is The Economist arguing that it would have been worse to have done
nothing in Iraq rather than invading and occupying the country, killing well
over 100,000 civilians and displacing
another four million in the process?
(Think
about those numbers for a moment. Even accounting for all our imperialistic
privileges and American Exceptionalism and all that, you could argue that’s
kind of a lot of human beings to slaughter and turn into stateless refugees,
and that it might possibly have been better to “do nothing” instead.)
Or would
“doing nothing” have been worse in Libya in 2011, when our war (sorry,
“intervention”) destroyed
the country and turned it into a breeding ground for ISIS? After all, if
we’d “done nothing” last time, we probably wouldn’t need another war this time.
Though in fairness to The Economist,
which does seem excessively fond of war and frightened of what might happen if
we were ever to Do Nothing instead, that last point might not be terribly
persuasive.
We
have a Hippocratic Oath in medicine. Why would the concept be applicable to
medical interventions, but not to military ones?
I
know, I know…they never really come out and definitively say “doing nothing”
would be the worst option. Instead, it’s “doing nothing may be the worst option.” Sure, it might be! But it might be the
best option, too. Or something in the middle. In the vacuum that passes for The Economist’s reasoning, who can
really say? But for God’s sake, if you really don’t know, if something “may” be
worse, or better, or whatever, what kind of sick mind would want war to be the default option?
Of
course, this whole “war or nothing” framework is itself bullshit, driven either
by ignorance or propaganda. Now, I don’t think the people who write these
articles at The Economist are so
dim-witted that they actually can’t imagine a way of conducting foreign policy
other than War/Do Nothing. So either they’re so morbidly attracted to war that
their desire for more of it is blunting
their imagination and occluding their reason, or they know full well that a
country as disproportionately powerful and influential as America has countless
tools at its disposal—War and Nothing being only two of them—and are
deliberately misleading their readers in the hope they’ll be able to gin up
another of the wars they seem to crave.
Watch
out, by the way, anytime someone tries to limit the discussion to only two
crappy alternatives while positioning theirs as the marginally less worse one.
I come across this with regard to torture fairly regularly—“Well, if we can’t
torture them, what are we supposed to do, offer them tea and crumpets?”—
because, right, no one has yet figured out a way to interrogate a criminal
suspect or captured enemy that doesn’t involve either waterboarding, on the one
hand, or finger sandwiches, on the other. Whether done cynically or clinically,
the technique is just a way to pull you into the confines of the box that
limits the other person’s thinking, and force a result that logic and reason
would otherwise reject.
The
final paragraph is like a microcosm of everything that’s wrong with the article
itself. It quotes a couple of think tank people to create the appearance of
balance and a modicum of thoughtfulness, and these people offer the kind of
stunningly fresh insights that only a seasoned think tank denizen could come up
with, such as that a western invasion of Libya might be “unwise and risky” (Really?
Another western invasion of a Muslim country might entail some risks? Are you
sure?), and even that the west might “need to proceed carefully” (Solid
advice—thank you!). These “balanced” asides are served up not to persuade
anyone that another war in Libya might not be such a great idea, but rather to
steer readers to the gloriously sane, serious, sober, centrist option The Economist is hankering to make real—air
strikes in support of small commando units.
Those
are your only options, people: a full-scale invasion and occupation; the
dreaded “do nothing” option; or some nice, sanitary air strikes and a handful
of semi-secret troops. Which is it going to be—one of the two really shitty
options, or the one that sounds a little less shitty by comparison?
If
this all feels as manipulative as a game of Three-card Monte, it’s because it
is. Pundits who want wars can’t get them unless they convince the public to go
along for the ride. And if that involves subterfuge, well, it’s all for the
greater good, right?
If The Economist gets its way and the west
does another “intervention” in Libya, and the latest “intervention” produces
results as horrifically counterproductive as the last one, and ISIS or an
ISIS-successor bogeyman then pops up in Algeria or Egypt or wherever, there’s
one thing I’m sure we can count on. The
Economist will tell us yet again that “doing nothing” will be—sorry, “may”
be—worse than yet another of their cherished “interventions.”
Based on the revelations of whistleblower Edward Snowden, the book has been well received so far: a boxed starred review in Publisher’s Weekly ("Eisler’s expert knowledge of spy craft and hand-to-hand combat combine with his ultra-deep distrust of government intelligence to propel this suspenseful yarn into the front ranks of paranoid thrillers”); ); a starred review in Booklist (“When Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove was having its run, service people left the theater muttering, 'That wasn’t a satire. That’s what they’re like.' So it is with Eisler’s fine thriller…”); kind words from people like imprisoned journalist Barrett Brown, imprisoned whistleblower Chelsea Manning, and many others.
Here’s a short interview I did about the book with Kirkus (which also had a great review):
I’m excited to be talking to a number of terrific journalists and activists as part of the tour—Mike Masnick of Techdirt in San Francisco; Xeni Jardin of Boing Boing and Freedom of the Press Foundation in LA; Jeremy Scahill of The Intercept and Dirty Wars in NYC; Stephen Walt, Professor of International Affairs at the Harvard Kennedy School, and a few other university people, in Boston. Details below and on my website (with updates as more events get added); hope to see you on the road!
NSA director Theodore Anders has a simple goal: collect every phone call, email, and keystroke tapped on the Internet. He knows unlimited surveillance is the only way to keep America safe.
Evelyn Gallagher doesn’t much care about any of that. She just wants to keep her head down and manage the NSA’s camera network and facial recognition program so she can afford private school for her deaf son, Dash.
But when Evelyn discovers the existence of an NSA program code-named God’s Eye, and connects it with the mysterious deaths of a string of journalists and whistleblowers, her doubts put her and Dash in the crosshairs of a pair of government assassins: Delgado, a sadistic bomb maker and hacker; and Manus, a damaged giant of a man who until now has cared for nothing beyond protecting the director.
Within an elaborate game of political blackmail, terrorist provocations, and White House scheming, a global war is being fought—a war between those desperate to keep the state’s darkest secrets, and those intent on revealing them. A war that Evelyn will need all of her espionage training and savvy to survive. A war in which the director has the ultimate informational advantage: The God’s Eye View.
Conversation with Stephen Walt, Professor of International Affairs, Juliette Kayyem, Lecturer in Public Policy, and Michael Sulymeyer, Director of the Cybersecurity Project, Harvard Kennedy School; and Yochai Benkler, Professor for Entrepreneurial Legal Studies, Harvard Law School
Malkin Penthouse, Littauer Building, Harvard Kennedy School
Novelist Josie Brown
asked a ton of great questions—so many
that TBT felt some of the conversation had to be cut. Here’s what didn’t make it
in: my thoughts about what we the people can do to safeguard our rights in the face
of continual governmental overreach, and on why the whole book ecosystem would be
healthier if organizations like the “Authors Guild” would stop pretending to be
other than lobbying arms for establishment publishing. Enjoy.
Your background gives you keener insights than most on our government’s geopolitical
realities and political fallacies. What do you feel is the future of the US government’s
surveillance? What role do you feel the public needs to take in order to safeguard
its rights?
...So what is the future of a dynamic wherein
the people know less and less about the government and the government knows more
and more about the people? That depends on us. If we let propagandists stupefy us
with stories about how The Terrorists™ are going to kill us all in our beds unless
we surrender even more of our civil liberties (and really, given how much liberty
we’ve given up since 9/11, if the “less liberty=more safety” equation had anything
to it, wouldn’t the big bad Global War on Terror have long since been won?), the
future will be increasingly jingoistic and authoritarian, with the Constitution
more and more “just window dressing now, the artifacts of an ancient mythology, the vestments
of a dead religion,” as one of my characters put it in Inside Out.
What can we do if we want to maintain the
government as the servant of the people, with limited powers? Speak up. Support
organizations like the ACLU, EFF, and Freedom of the Press Foundation; independent
journalism like Democracy Now and Wikileaks; whistleblowers like Chelsea Manning. Don’t be taken in
by “lesser of two evils” bullshit designed to get you to always vote for one or
the other wing of the war party (or by the notion that we need a “third party”—sure,
maybe, but to start with we could use a second). You’re not “throwing your vote
away” if you cast it for an independent. You’re throwing it away if you cast it
for one of the two relatively interchangeable candidates America’s oligarchy wants
you to believe is your only real choice.
Don’t believe what the government tells
you. I.F. Stone said, “All governments lie,” and can anyone deny this is true? When
we encounter a liar in our personal life, we know to discount everything he says
that hasn’t been independently verified. Yet we continue to uncritically accept
the same government assurances, mostly having to do with how we have to give up
more freedoms and drone, invade, and occupy more countries, no matter how many times
the government is caught lying. But shouldn’t we at least be cautious when someone
urges a course of action by which he stands to benefit? When a salesman on commission
tells you a suit looks great on you, you know to be suspicious. And yet we’re infinitely
credulous when the government tells us how we need to be afraid—even though fear
increases government power and frequently leads to war, where fortunes are made
by the very people agitating for hostilities. In any other context, fear-mongering
and war would be instantly and rightly recognized as a racket. But it’s psychologically painful to accept that the interests in control
of your country are other than benevolent, so we shy from the obvious truth and
cling to comforting lies.
If there were one (or two, or three) things you could change about the publishing
industry and the novelist’s role within it, what would it be?
The first thing
I’d like to change is the popular perception that organizations like the Authors
Guild and Authors United primarily represent authors rather than establishment publishers.
I have no problem with organizations advocating for publisher interests, but the
dishonest way in which the AG and AU go about their publishing industry advocacy
misleads a lot of authors. I could go on at length about this topic and in fact
I have—so for anyone who wants to better understand the real agenda and function
of these “author” organizations, I’d recommend starting with this article I wrote
for Techdirt, Authors Guilded, United, and Representing…Not
Authors.
Hah, the AG going after publishers is like
Hillary Clintongoing after Wall Street. I’ve had a lot to say about this, including
the comments I wrote in response to this post at The Passive Voice. For anyone who’s curious, just search for
my name and you’ll find the comments, the gist of which is, when the AG wants
to accomplish something, it names names and litigates; when it wants authors to
think it’s trying to accomplish something but in fact isn’t (or, more accurately, when what it’s trying to
accomplish is maintenance of the publishing status quo), it talks.
When the AG talks, it’s a
head fake. The body language is what to look for in determining the
organization’s actual allegiances and priorities.
Another thing I’d like to change is the
generally abysmal level of legacy publisher performance in what at least in theory
are legacy publisher core competencies. Whether it’s cover design, the bio, or fundamental
principles of marketing, legacy publishers are content with a level of mediocrity that would
be an embarrassment in any other industry. I’ve seen little ability within legacy
publishing companies to distill principles from fact patterns (particularly patterns
involving failures) and then apply those principles in new circumstances. Institutional
memory and the transmission of institutional knowledge and experience are notably
weak in the culture of the Big Five. My guess is that the weakness is a byproduct
of insularity and complacency brought on by a lack of competition.
Agreed. Having spent fifteen years in advertising
before becoming a novelist, I was abhorred as to what passed for “marketing and
promotion.”
I'd also like to increase awareness of the
danger a publishing monopoly represents to the interests of authors and readers.
No, I’m not talking about Amazon; “Amazon is a Monopoly!” is a canard and a bogeyman. I’m talking about
the real, longstanding monopoly in publishing (or call is a quasi-monopoly, or a
cartel), which is the insular, incestuous New York Big Five. An important clue about
the nature of the organization is right there in the name, no? See also the Seven Sisters…
Okay, another thing (and then I’ll stop
because I could go on about this stuff forever): I’d like to see more choices for
authors; new means by which authors can reach a mass market of readers; and greater
diversity in titles and lower prices for readers.
Wait, that last set of wishes is already
happening, courtesy of self-publishing and Amazon publishing—the first real competition
the Big Five has ever seen, and a boon to the health of the whole publishing ecosystem.
There are a lot of terrific blogs out there on the world of writing, but Heart of the Matter isn't one of them. HOTM primarily covers politics, language as it influences politics, and politics as an exercise in branding and marketing, with the occasional post on some miscellaneous subject that catches my attention.
HOTM has a comments section. Sounds simple enough, but as even a cursory glance at the comments of most political blogs will show, many people would benefit from some guidelines. Here are a few I hope will help.
1. The most important guideline when it comes to argument is the golden rule. If someone were addressing your point, what tone, what overall approach would you find persuasive and want her to use? Whatever that is, do it yourself. If you find this simple guideline difficult, I'll explain it slightly differently in #2.
2. Argue for persuasion, not masturbation. If you follow the golden rule above, it's because you're trying to persuade someone. If you instead choose sarcasm and other insults, you can't be trying to persuade (have you ever seen someone's opinion changed by an insult?). If you're not trying to persuade, what you're doing instead is stroking yourself. Now, stroking yourself is fine in private, but I think we can all agree it's a pretty pathetic to do so in public. So unless you like to come across as pathetic, argue to persuade.
3. Compared to the two above, this is just commentary, but: no one cares about your opinion (or mine, for that matter). It would be awesome to be so impressive that we could sway people to our way of thinking just by declaiming our thoughts, but probably most of us lack such gravitas. Luckily, there's something even better: evidence, logic, and argument. Think about it: when was the last time someone persuaded you of the rightness of his opinion just by declaring what it was? Probably it was the same time someone changed your mind with an insult, right? And like insults, naked declarations of opinion, because they can't persuade, are fundamentally masturbatory. And masturbation, again, is not a very polite thing to do on a blog.
Argue with others the way you'd like them to argue with you. Argue with intent to persuade. Argue with evidence and logic. That shouldn't be so hard, should it? Let's give it a try.
