Of Swagger in International Politics

Writing of the "Machiavellian" Renaissance princes and their advisers, not least Niccolo Machiavelli himself, H.G. Wells remarked in The Outline of History that these were all "scheming to outdo one another, to rob weaker contemporaries, to destroy rivals, so that they might for a brief interval swagger"--no more.

Reading that I am not sure Wells' assessment was altogether fair, not least in regard to Machiavelli, whom he characterizes as having presented his vision of a united Italy in The Prince as simply "a great opportunity for a prince" rather.

Still, there is no denying that the stupid desire of heads of government and the elites behind them and the courtiers of all these to swagger plays its part in international politics--a frighteningly, distressingly, large part, especially in this era in which self-satisfied vulgarian clowns delighting in their own offensiveness to others increasingly seem to hold the highest offices, as the world media indulges the absolute worst of their behavior; and that same media, among much, much else to its absolute discredit, increasingly treats the Unthinkable as the Very Much Thinkable (to such a degree that it lavishes Oscars on movies about it While Completely Missing the Point).

Of "Swagger"

The word "swagger," according to Google's Oxford Language-based dictionary, denotes a person's conducting themselves in a "typically arrogant or aggressive way."

Basically, someone who swaggers acts like an "asshole."

Yet one finds that the word "swagger" tends to be used much less pejoratively than "asshole"--indeed, used admiringly in regard to such behavior.

Where does that come from? Quite simply there is the way that people are relentlessly encouraged to identify upwards, with those who have power and status. To think what they do necessarily commendable and worthy of emulation, to try and do it themselves when they can, to fancy themselves doing the same thing in their position when they cannot--to vicariously live through their supposed superiors, and in this case, swagger vicariously through them.

It all betrays the delusions of men who are little in every sense of the word--and in this failing all too commonplace.

Remembering H.G. Wells' "The Land Ironclads"

Those who delve into the history of tank warfare are likely to learn that H.G. Wells' short story "The Land Ironclads" was an important anticipation, and even influence on, the development of the technology--Winston Churchill (and likely others besides) having remembered the story when he backed the development of the tank during World War I.

Still, I have no idea how many have actually read the story in a very long time, let alone appreciated it as more than a piece of "gadget fiction" of the Gernsbackian type. The story is not only about a tool of war but an expression of a broader understanding of modern war, as we see when we consider not the soldiers facing the oncoming "land ironclads" but the drivers of those vehicles. In modern war, Wells shows us, loudmouthed jingoism, stupid swagger and martial melodramatics ("bawling patriotism," "truculent yappings," "petty cunning," "that flapping strenuousness of the half-wit in a hurry" all too proud of its "brute" character) count for far less than the intelligent deployment of science to the ends in question--which civilized intelligence is, not incidentally, apt to sincerely, not hypocritically, find a disagreeable necessity at best when really and truly forced upon it, rather than a thing to celebrate (but all the same, do it more efficiently than the barbaric opponents who force war upon them).

A century on it can seem that many, especially among those situated in high places and with very public platforms to express their views, have yet to learn that lesson--in just one more testament of how it is not those who think as Wells did who triumphed in the battle of ideas this past century.

The Appropriation of the Nerd Image as Meritocratic Propaganda

Not long ago I remarked the class overtones of the stereotypical image of the "nerd" and the disdain for those adhering to it--the upper-class resentment of those who challenged their entitlement by trying to get ahead on the basis of diligence and education. Belonging to a world of aristocratic privilege and its defense, the ways of rationalizing inequality have long since changed to claims for society as meritocratic--and unsurprisingly, attitudes toward the "nerd" have changed in some ways. Especially with the neoliberal era seeing the exaltation of the self-made inventor-businessman--the tech billionaire as usually presented to the public--as the supreme example of the meritocrat, there has over recent decades been much talk of the "revenge of the nerds," "nerd pride" and so forth.

It is all quite silly, really, as silly as any of the other neoliberal propaganda out there, the true stories of these things not usually what they are made out to be. (Indeed, looking at many a "self-made" fortune today, as much as in any other time, one constantly finds Josiah Bounderby-like distortion of the facts, not least regarding the share of that critical feature of technical ability in the making of a billionaire.)

Meanwhile, given all the baggage attaching to the term "nerd," so-called attempts to "reclaim" nerdiness and "take pride" in nerdiness ring hollow indeed, with this exemplified by how those who can seem the very faces of the propaganda actually act in real life. Far from embracing their nerdy image, many seem to go to great lengths to discard it--not least by in middle age deciding to enter martial arts tournaments in which they are publicly humiliated by abler opponents.

Coolness, Nerdiness and Pseudo-Maturity

Not long ago I had occasion to write about just what "coolness" tends to come down to--foolish posturing as untouchably above everything, especially by those who are absolutely conventional and conformist, but richer and freer than everyone else, such that it is easy for them to appear "confident," extroverted, even stupidly swaggering. Among the young, pseudo-maturity tends to play a significant part in this--the "cool kids" the ones who can pose as more adult than the others, in part because they are more indulged than the others. (For instance, they might drive to school a car their teachers can only envy, as many of their peers take the bus or, more comfortable if looking less independent, get driven to school.)

Being the opposite of cool on these points would seem to have a lot to do with the nerdy image. Instead of stupid pretenses to being everything and untouchable the nerd is stereotypically shy and timid--and often less than conventional and conformist and free. And far from conveying an impression of pseudo-maturity the nerd stereotype suggests immaturity--persons who are less physically and socially developed than they ought to be at their age (hence the nerd as scrawny and awkward), who are more attached to childish things (the conventional view of the "geek" culture of science fiction, comic books, video games, etc. has long been that these things are childish), and less independent than their cool counterparts (prone to stay at home, more attached to and deferential toward their parents).

Given the media's vehemence in associating intelligence with wealth it today seems commonplace to make the nerdy kid a rich kid--but especially given the class baggage that plausibly played its part in the development of conceptions of "nerdiness," it does not seem a stretch to think that the conception of the nerd as we know it is significantly a legacy of a time when it was not those born to privilege but those less well-positioned in society by birth and trying to get ahead who hit the books hardest, and whose social origin constrained them to playing it safe.

Is the "Nerd" Stereotype Classist and Racist? (In a Word, "Yes")

The origins of the image of the "nerd" in American culture are hazy, with the etymology of the term and all associated with it substantially matters of speculation. Still, it has a certain undeniable charge. The concept seems undeniably anti-intellectual--and indeed it seems no coincidence that the term "nerd" was popularized in the thoroughly anti-intellectual atmosphere of the 1950s.

However, there are other charges as well, which can seem to reflect far older roots than that. Consider those two crucial nerd traits--the combination of intellectualism with social awkwardness. Looking back at early modern history one defining social conflict, amid this period in which the feudal nobility was declining, the bourgeoisie rising, and new career opportunities sought after by both groups in the emergent state apparatus, was the attitude of aristocrats who regarded themselves as entitled to preferment in civil service and military posts over "commoners" who were trying to get ahead in the race for such jobs on the basis of education, diligence, knowledge--such that one can picture the sneer of the nobleman at these bookish middle class types they regarded as lacking the graces by which the aristocrats defined themselves, and despising them for the book learning they did have. All of this, in fact, became quite serious at times--the clash over posts intensifying in France in the years before the revolution of 1789 (as seen in the regressive 1781 law that required an army officer candidate to have four generations of nobility behind him, shutting out not just the bourgeoisie, but recent nobility of the "robe" rather than the "sword" that had risen from the middle class).

One can also see something of such sentiment in later times, as with the idea of the "gentleman's C" at college. The whole idea of the gentleman's C was that it was beneath a gentleman--the son of wealth--to spend his time "grinding" away at his studies. That was for the ambitious, striving, lower orders, again looked down upon for their origin, and resented for their trying to get ahead rather than keep their place in the social hierarchy--the more in, again, as those who had been born privileged saw in them a threat to their own personal ambitions.

Alongside this upper class resentment of persons they saw as beneath them challenging their position on meritocratic grounds there is, too, what the fuller nerd image entails--and the other stereotypes it evokes. Consider the image of the nerd as not only intellectual and socially awkward, but unathletic, near-sighted, and perhaps also physically repellent in appearance and in other ways, perverse, "creepy." All of this corresponds to a package of stereotype historically associated with more than one ethnic group over the years--quite nastily. Indeed, it can seem that in this era where the bar for taking offense at perceived invocation of stereotype can seem so low that we do not hear more about this.

My guess is that for various reasons those preoccupied with the politics of status and identity have simply not found it convenient to take up this particular side of the matter.

Of Cell Phones in the Classroom: A Few Thoughts

Not long ago I remarked Joe Blevins' discussion of the less than happy realities of teaching he found reflected in the 2011 Jake Kasdan-Cameron Diaz comedy Bad Teacher.

At the time the one that interested me most was the extent to which teaching is, for many teachers, not a first choice of occupation, and many who are not well-suited to it end up doing it for at least a time. However, considering the matter of cell phones in the classroom I do find one other bit relevant: what he had to say about fighting " a battle of wits or wills" with students being "a lose-lose situation."

After all, it seems common for instructors to think cell phones in the classroom are a problem--students paying attention to their phones rather than the lecture or discussion, causing distraction, etc., perhaps in ways that make their job harder. (They weren't listening the first time, they brazenly say if called on. Can you repeat that whole thing again? Like, the whole fifty minute lecture?) However, trying to enforce a ban on cell phone use in class makes for just such a battle of wits and wills as Blevins described.

Moreover, what Blevins described at the middle school level is worse at the college level. At that stage there is no calling their parents or giving them detention. There is also a very good chance that they have very easy access to the instructors' boss--maybe easier access than the instructor themselves--and make full use of it to lodge their complaints. And of course, in college the burden of teaching, especially the toughest teaching where instructors are most likely to encounter problem students--those first-year general ed courses--falls disproportionately on adjuncts who are both overworked and insecure, vulnerable to being let go at any time without due process, often not being so much fired as simply, when they should have got word of the next semester's assignment, no phone call ever coming. Least of all can they afford such "battles of wits or wills"--and so the students do what they want.

Bad Teacher, Revisited

Some years ago I presented some thoughts about Jake Kasdan's 2011 film Bad Teacher--the kind of mediocre comedy that made me think of the kind of material he satirized in his earlier The TV Set (a flawed film, about the long-overdone subject of Hollywood, but at its best a good deal better-crafted and wittier than this one).

Especially as the plans for a franchise fizzled, with the sequel unmade and the TV spin-off airing only a few episodes before CBS dropped it from its line-up, I have not had occasion to really think about it since. Still, running into Joe Blevins' piece for Vulture about the movie (which he regards himself as able to say something about because he, too, was a suburban Cook County junior high school teacher who had been less than ideal in the job) did seem to me to make a few interesting points about the bits of truth within the pile of nonsense that was that film, at times rather wittily. (Blevins likens his experience of teaching "to being a standup comic at an endless open mic night in Hell," which I think those who have been teachers will understand, anyone who did the job long having had an experience describable in such terms.)

Of principal importance here is his admission about how and why he ended up a teacher--a refreshing break from society's general demand that teachers be perfect models of "convenient social virtue" (devotion to the job because it is their true vocation rather than because the non-rich must do something to pay the bills), and the readiness of most teachers to at least pretend to be such. As Blevins admits, he had simply gone to college, "taken nothing particularly useful," and ended up going into education "with absolutely zero enthusiasm" for lack of other options--Blevins, in contrast with those for whom teaching is a "fallback career" (as with so many writers), having no alternative to the "Plan B." Sure enough, he proved to have "no aptitude for this work," and walked away from the job soon enough, even if less equipped than others to do so. (Blevins explains that he became an office temp.)

Here we see a number of underappreciated realities acknowledged--namely the extent to which, given the demand for teachers and the actual supply of people who really want to do the job on the existing terms rather than something else, teaching is often not a first choice of occupation for those who do it; many who end up "falling back" here find that they are not well-suited to the very demanding work, and do not get better (the needs of society as determined by those who make the decisions simply do not align with the supply of talent any more than they do with the supply of willingness); and, contrary to what many of the professional teacher-bashers ever eager to put down the nation's faculty say, those who do not really want the job and do not do the job well often take themselves off to some other occupation that they can do better before very long. It may not seem like much--but it is a far better basis for thinking about problems like the recruitment and assessment and retention of teaching faculty than the prevailing conventionalities.

A Word on Ben Affleck, Two Decades After Gigli

While the entertainment media's talking up Hollywood celebrities and then turning against them is tiresomely routine, but some examples have been especially striking.

One is the way the media turned hostile to Anne Hathaway circa 2013, because it was so abrupt and forceful and without the usual preparation.

Another is that against Ben Affleck, because of how long it went on--and because of the particular circumstances that provided a convenient point of comparison. The big moment in his case came with 2003's Gigli. It was not a good film by any means--but its badness struck me as banal, the badness of any number of crappy independent films that the critics ordinarily treat far more kindly. After that flop the press came after both Affleck, and Jennifer Lopez--and if the backlash against Lopez proved relatively short-lived, the actress and singer's career going on its way, with 2005's Monster-in-Law already becoming a hit in spite of critics' unkindness toward that movie, the hatred for Affleck endured.

Granted, that hatred did ease, but only late, and slowly. I remember, for example, how Affleck drew some positive notices for Hollywoodland (2006)--but this was only a beginning, and that over three years after the release of Gigli. Affleck's turn behind the camera helped, Affleck landing some positive notices for directing The Town (2010), and Argo (2012), but there were distinct limitations to that--of which it can seem telling that while the Academy gave Argo Best Picture, it did not even bother with a Best Director nomination for Affleck, a reminder that approval of the film translated over to him only so far. It also seemed to me to be there in the hostility to Affleck's being cast as Batman in the DC Extended Universe, and the excessive nastiness toward 2003's Daredevil. And so on and so forth.

Rather than a bump in the road it has been a major drag--one that did not prevent him from having what most would regard as a commercially and critically enviable career as director and actor on the whole, but all the same, significant, longstanding damage from a hostility that, I think, has not been helped but cannot be wholly accounted for by the messiness of his personal life. (Foolish as a good deal of his behavior has been, others are forgiven much worse all the time.) It all leaves the element of sheer media stupidity the more blatant.

Remembering the Extreme Stupidity of "Hathahate" on the Eve of The Idea of You

A decade ago, we were told, there was an upsurge of hatred of Anne Hathaway, which seems to be getting some attention again these days--mostly, I think, as part of the publicity for the upcoming release of her romantic comedy The Idea of You.

By the time Hathahate rolled around I had long since realized that the claqueurs of the entertainment media, in their extreme vileness, breathlessly talk up particular figures in the film industry--and then start talking them down at some point, with the presumption involved that said claqueurs are reflecting "everyone's" opinion.

Still, the attacks on Ms. Hathaway did not seem to me to conform to the usual pattern. Often the claqueurs begin the attack on the targeted figure after some big movie of theirs flops (the way, for example, the claqueurs came after Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez following the failure of Gigli). Or they make some public faux pas, however small and however much it has to be blown out of proportion. There had been nothing of the kind in her case, making the turn seem especially strained and artificial.

Considering these disgusting episodes I do not doubt that they serve particular agendas--business and personal. For instance, the Suits need someone cut down to size--maybe many someones--and they get the media to do their bidding, very easily. (Certainly I recall, and think everyone should recall, how the press dutifully played its part when the studios wanted to break the power of the auteur filmmakers of the New Hollywood era.) But even after these years I have no notion of what the agenda might have been in her case, and remember how if something must have been behind it it still felt like a totalitarian thought-control experiment--seeing just how much control they had over the entertainment news audience by seeing just how much they could turn her against Ms. Hathaway on no grounds whatsoever.

I have no idea how many people who are not part of the media actually responded to that--but the thought that any of them did is exceedingly depressing.

The Elephant in the Room During Last Year's Hollywood Labor Battles

Last year the first Hollywood double-strike (of the writers, and actors) since 1960 was big news. Some aspects of the conflict got a bit of discussion--like concern over how working writers' and actors' labors could be used to train Artificial Intelligence (AI) software which would be used to put them out of a job (quite naturally, amid the insane hyping of AI that continues to the present moment).

However, other aspects of the matter did not. Not the least of these--perhaps because fewer appreciated it then, and few still do now--is the likely contraction of the business. While in late 2022 it looked like the American box office was returning to its pre-pandemic norm (about 4 ticket sales per capita in North America, and $14 billion a year grossed domestically in today's money), after what we saw in 2023, and given what we can expect of 2024 (confirmed by what we have seen of it up to the present) what seems to be happening is its stabilizing at a well-below-pre-pandemic level (perhaps 50-70 percent of the pre-pandemic level). Meanwhile with Hollywood having a harder time in the Chinese market, and the streaming bonanza drawing to an end, all this is suggestive of a tighter market--one where profitability can only be sustained by cutting back on production.

The result is a smaller volume of business--a smaller pie--over which all concerned have been fighting, even before one gets into the "What might bes" of artificial intelligence.

How Often Will Americans Go to the Movies From Here on Out?

In considering the North American box office few bother to acknowledge just how much more avid North Americans have long been about moviegoing compared to their counterparts even in other comparably affluent advanced industrialized countries. After the bottoming out of the post-TV crash in theater attendance in the 1960s they averaged around 4 trips to the theater per capita for a half century, up to the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. By comparison Germans and Japanese were making less than 2 and usually more like 1 trip to the theater each year.

The result is that it was easy to picture Americans' moviegoing falling off significantly--with potentially huge implications for the size of the American box office, their attendance coming to look like that of Germans or Japanese reducing the grosses by half, two-thirds or even more, and indeed I wondered if we could not expect this to eventually happen.

My earlier expectation was that there would be a gradual decline, but instead we had the dramatic shock of 2020--and if subsequent years saw recovery that recovery still seems only very partial. As it happened in 2023 North Americans averaged just a little over two trips to the theater per year--still going more often than the pre-pandemic (and current) norm in Germany and Japan. Considering that by that year Americans' habit of moviegoing seemed to no longer be inhibited by the pandemic, while the year had a pre-pandemic-like slate of blockbusters, it seems plausible to think of it as (flops and all) constituting a "new normal"--the box office essentially stabilized at its current level (2023's take a bit under two-thirds of the pre-pandemic level in real terms, with a little less predicted for 2024).

That being the case the question becomes whether Hollywood can adjust to a new situation where the domestic box office is, thanks to the reduction in the number of American trips to the theater, 50-70 percent of what it was just a few years ago. Thus far I see little acknowledgment of the reality, let alone plans to make accommodation for it--just box office commentators grading the box office performance of big movies on a curve in line with their duties as claqueurs.

Book Review: Craig Thomas' Winter Hawk

By 1987 Craig Thomas had been putting out his thrillers annually for a decade--by which point most genre authors working at such a pace are getting less innovative, and more likely to repeat themselves. Thomas' Winter Hawk was certainly consistent with that tendency to repetition. A second sequel to his 1977 thriller Firefox, it once again had Western intelligence officials alarmed by a Soviet aerospace breakthrough threatening the global balance of military power sending Mitchell Gant sneaking into the Soviet Union on a mission taking advantage of both his flying skills and his Russian language skills in which he is expected to escape the Soviet Union in a stolen Soviet aircraft. In its repetition of earlier themes Winter Hawk, one might add, reused elements of other non-Mitchell Gant, but still "Aubreyverse," work, specifically the plot of Thomas' earlier and less well-known novel Snow Falcon (1979), in which, just as in this book, the civilian leadership of the Soviet Union is making a historic arms control agreement with the West and a Soviet military establishment firmly opposed to the concessions the agreement entails is plotting to sabotage it with a grand display of Soviet military power--with the power struggle inside the Soviet establishment, down to the activities of the Soviet counter-spies looking to stop the subversion, comprising as great a part of the narrative as the doings of the Western agent who is the story's hero. (There even seems a parallel in the titles, both of them two-word titles which are the names of birds of prey, with the first word in their name specifically evoking the coldest season of the year.) The difference here is that the Soviet military's stroke will not occur on Earth, but in space--Thomas in this book seizing on the then-fashionable theme of the Strategic Defense Initiative a year before Clancy's The Cardinal of the Kremlin and Dale Brown's Silver Tower with a scenario in which the Soviets plan to have in orbit a constellation of laser-armed battle stations able to completely neutralize the West's strategic capability.

The result is a much more "big picture"-oriented, and lengthy, narrative than either the original Firefox (tightly focused on Gant's sneaking into the Soviet Union to steal the titular jet in the first half, and in the second flying his stolen plane out), or the 1982 sequel Firefox Down (a combination of man-on-the-run story and salvage job)--the book at 525 pages in the original hardback edition nearly twice the length of the first (288-page) Gant novel.

Meanwhile, as might be guessed from the sheer mass of the book, the number of years which Thomas had been writing, and for that matter the precedent on his more relevant preceding works (like, besides Snow Falcon, 1981's submarine thriller Sea Leopard), the result is less than perfectly even. Like many a maturing author Thomas increasingly inclined to prolixity, and indeed became prone to overwriting, in this case to the point of producing unnecessary incidents, written up lengthily. Exemplary of this is an early episode in which the transport aircraft delivering the two Hind helicopters that Gant and his colleagues will be using in the mission (entering Soviet-controlled airspace by way of Afghanistan, they are supposed to pick up a defector with key intelligence about the Soviet military space program from a safe house outside its great complex at Baikonur) runs into trouble far short of the launch point for the mission in Pakistan. It serves no purpose plot-wise, laying no groundwork for anything that happens later, and mainly ends up dragging things out by throwing an additional obstacle in the heroes' way, one which further suffers from lacking the dramatic interest of enemy action. (One can say for it is that it helps establish how when faced with problems of that kind Gant displays considerable independence, daring, practical ingenuity, though in fairness that becomes apparent in more dramatic ways soon enough, so that again, Thomas fails to justify its inclusion.) At the same time, if some bits are unnecessary other elements that seem necessary appear to have been left out--with Thomas' relation of the Soviet side of the intrigue not so much drawing to a conclusion by the story's close as stopping after Gant's fate has been made clear. (What ever happened to KGB Colonel Dimitri Priabin after the dramatic events earlier in the book, and the two preceding it? We never find out here.) One wonders about other aspects of the continuity, too, with, even as Thomas makes heavy use of some aspects of the prior books (like Priabin and his desire for revenge against Gant), others are totally neglected. (In this Aubreyverse novel not a word is spoken about Kenneth Aubrey, or British intelligence and its role in Gant's prior missions; while we also do not hear a word about the Firefox fighter Gant risked his life to steal and the revolutionary engine, stealth and neural control technologies, let alone see a single Firefox in the air as Gant crosses through so much of Soviet airspace with the Soviet air force determinedly hunting him down.)

One may also add that Thomas' research into his subject did not seem to get much more thorough over the years. (To cite one of the more obvious failings here Thomas seems to think that helicopters carry air search radars as a matter of course, and includes them in models of helicopter where they are most certainly not installed as a matter of course--and that aircraft radars as a matter of course provide the 360 degree coverage provided by ground-based radar.) However, from the standpoint of pure reading experience it may be more important that Thomas did get better at sustaining suspenseful scenes, and writing spectacular action, as simply the distance between the first and second Firefox novels shows (the aerial battle opening the second book far outdoes anything in the first), while if Thomas can be very good with the on-the-ground part of the adventure, he also benefits from keeping Gant in the cockpit of his aircraft for as much of the adventure as possible. Those early troubles getting the helicopters into place apart, just about everything to do with this part of the story works, and works well, with, if one does not nit-pick the technical details, Thomas here second to none at bringing together technology and aerial action with a measure of literary flair--and this extending to characterization, with it mattering both that Mitchell Gant is far more compelling than the Jack Ryans and others who headline most techno-thrillers, and that in characterizing the Soviets as well Thomas by this point has come a long way from the Cold War caricature of the Soviet figures on which he earlier relied to present them as actual human beings leading human lives. The result is that while this book remains an action-adventure-oriented thriller first and foremost Thomas manages to wring some human drama out of his premise. His strength on both scores means that in spite of its shortcomings Winter Hawk actually proved to be the strongest of the three Mitchell Gant novels overall—and one of the richer and more robust works to come out of the techno-thriller genre's '80s-era boom.

A Word on Craig Thomas' Soviet Characters

Big-screen film adaptations of successful books, especially when they are major feature films of the summer blockbuster type, are famously unfaithful to their source material. However, Clint Eastwood's adaptation of Craig Thomas' novel Firefox was very faithful--with that faithfulness extending to what many might be inclined to see as the book's flaws.

Worth considering here is what the New York Times' Vincent Canby said of the movie, which is just as sayable of the book--that the film "expresses a most cavalier attitude toward the lives of its supporting characters," with all those who aid Mitchell Gant in stealing the Firefox fighter jet killed off "in such numbers, and with so little emotion, that even the screenplay seems to become selfconscious about it," Acknowledging the fact itself. Thus a Gant bewildered by the readiness of the helpers that British intelligence recruited to lay down their lives this way comes out and asks one of them what motivates them--and in the film the answer he gets is that "'It's a small thing compared to my resentment of the K.G.B..'"

All of this may have been congenial to those taking a hard-liner's view of the Cold War, but as this reviewer for the by no means radical New York Times makes clear, it was as unsatisfying dramatically as it was implausible in this more complex reality. And as it happened, Thomas' handling of his Soviet characters in his subsequent books, like the Firefox sequels, increasingly moved past the anti-Communist cliché that dominated the first book, in 1983's Firefox Down, and still more 1987's Winter Hawk. If still not the deepest, most-nuanced or well-balanced picture of Soviet life, here the Soviet Union at least appears a place where, for all the imperfections of their system, there is, just as in Gant's own less-than-perfect Clarksville, a normal, daily life, in which people have families and all their baggage, and personal affections and antipathies, which figure significantly in the elaborate intrigues that play out among the Soviet leadership (and how Gant endeavors to get back out of the Soviet Union again after having got himself into it), Thomas managing to generate some real personal tension here out of the interactions of the Soviet principals in a way novels like these rarely manage to do (the Soviet general in charge of the space-based laser program, his ruthless and ambitious subordinate, the KGB man dogging them), and the book better off for it.

A Word on Craig Thomas' Mitchell Gant

It is one of the ironies of the military techno-thriller genre that while the form was not only invented by British writers in the nineteenth century but revived by them in the twentieth it is Americans who did best out of that revival--as shown by the career of Tom Clancy.

Still, those British writers were a presence on American bestseller lists for all that, with Craig Thomas no exception, and helped by the fact that he was not only ahead of most of the competition here (1977's Firefox long preceding the aviation-themed stories of Coonts and Brown and the rest, and 1981's Sea Leopard beating Clancy's Hunt for Red October to the punch by many years), but that there were ways in which he tended to outdo them. Others came in ahead of Thomas when it came to the scale and intricacy of scenario, or the scale and elaborateness of the action, or the rigor of their research and knack for blending technical detail with story, but Thomas tended to be the superior storyteller and literary craftsman, with characterization one of the areas where he showed this.

In considering that it may seem natural that Thomas was able to make his spymaster Kenneth Aubrey compelling--as an older man with a long life and career behind him, whose conditions of work in London afford him more opportunity to be "complicated" than the younger people physically engaged out in the field and so apt to have their minds on personal survival above all else. Still, Thomas also managed to make that man out in the field, Mitchell Gant, also an interesting creation.

It seems to me that this was partly because he took a different approach to the character. Clancy's Jack Ryan and company tend to be idealized, often to the point of, as action heroes so often are, appearing to be their creators' Gary Stus (and as a consequence, as genially bland as they are hypercompetent). By contrast, from his first appearance in the original Firefox Gant appears as a deeply damaged and troubled man, burdened not only by what he did, witnessed and suffered in the Vietnam War, but a less than picture-perfect family background in a small town in the middle of nowhere that he had ever since striven to escape. Gant's hatred of his domineering and violent drunk of a father down to the moment when he switched off life support for the man as he lay on his deathbed (the end of "an impatient wait with release and the throwing off of hatred at the end of the tunnel"), his both loving and despising his "untidy slut" of a sister who married a drunk like not-so-dear-old-dad, his disdain for and desire to escape his "roots" in Clarksville rather than romanticism about them (to say nothing of the drug use that played its part in his being shot down, or much, much else in his backstory), were not the sort of thing with which American techno-thrillers were likely to saddle their heroes, or for that matter very prominent in their pictures of America. This, too, had its part in making Gant who he is--an "emotional cripple" in the view of the Air Force's psychological profilers (as he discovered to his distress after breaking into the office containing the records during the war).

Unsurprisingly, in spite of the qualities that permitted him to be so accomplished in the cockpit, he had a less than glamorous post-service life, working as a garage hand (seemingly just a notch above a John Rambo who, as the cinematic version announced in the first film's closing monologue, couldn't even get that job) when he was recruited back into the Air Force for service in the kind of elite unit to which his abilities were of particular value. Also unsurprisingly, he is not a natural "organization man," or always likable, Gant cynical and flippant toward everyone he deals with, both authority and less-experienced colleagues--such that it was easy indeed to picture Clint Eastwood in the role. (In fact reading the third book in the Gant series, 1987's Winter Hawk, I wondered if Eastwood's having played Gant in the 1982 film did not, consciously or unconsciously, encourage Thomas in making Gant hew more closely to the Eastwood persona, and especially Eastwood at his more sneering.)

In considering that it is worth acknowledging that there was no political criticism involved in Thomas' taking a different tack. Going by what I have read of his books Thomas appears a conventional, anti-Communist, anti-Soviet Cold War conservative, and to such a degree that in Firefox he can picture British intelligence seemingly having an easy time finding well-placed Soviets who so hate their government they are ready to lay down their lives to help some foreigners steal a fighter jet from their country (something even the reviewer for the far from radical New York Times had a hard time swallowing). In ways even more pointed the later Sea Leopard gives the impression of a man with little use for leftists, college students and intellectuals. And all the while Thomas consistently appears respectful of security state officialdom and the armed services, and on the whole well disposed to America and Americans in good, "Atlanticist" fashion.*

Still, the fact that Thomas was a Briton writing about a hero of another nationality, and a civilian rather than the veteran most of the techno-thriller writers were writing about an Air Force pilot, may have meant that pieties about the armed forces, American small towns, etc. may have had less grip on him--freeing him to create a complex character, and to good result. Where reading the books by Clancy and company I usually found in the "character stuff" just something to endure until the story got to "the good part" in Thomas' books the character stuff held my interest, and made what I usually thought of as the "good part" better--rather than a gesture toward literary standards on the part of a teller of an action story, just as in David Morrell's First Blood or Robert Ludlum's The Aquitaine Progression the damage and baggage helping to make the adventure of the hero when on the run a fresher, more nuanced, more living, more gripping thing than it would otherwise have been.

* As the Times' Vincent Canby explains, in the film (as in the book) "nearly everyone who assists in the planenapping is promptly bumped off"--killed "in such numbers, and with so little emotion, that even the screenplay seems to become selfconscious about it" to go by Gant's asking his helpers how they can sacrifice their lives like this (with the same sayable of the book, to which the film adaptation was faithful in this as in so many other respects).