Where the right to a position or some other such good is concerned people often speak of having "paid their dues."
One might take this to mean their having earned the position through evident preparations for that position's tasks and demonstrations of the relevant competences gained thereby--as with an artisan who completed apprenticeship and wander year, produced a "masterpiece," and thus has shown their worthiness to stand with the other masters in a guild, with all the rights (and responsibilities) pertaining to that.
However, the demonstration of actual merit is not what the phrase "paying one's dues" calls to mind. Rather it makes one think of membership in an exclusive social club--but they are, of course, not usually looking to get into a social club per se, or paying money to do it. However, that word "pay" still seems relevant, calling to mind how people used to buy offices, and why they were prepared to do so, namely to make money out of that office, commonly by taking bribes.
As in that case, those who speak of having "paid their dues" have let others exploit them in the past so that they can be in the privileged position where they get to exploit others later in their turn.
It is an essentially nasty concept--the kind of nastiness quite natural to the mediocre conformist mind that believes in "playing the game."
Saturday, April 20, 2024
When Should a Blogger Call it Quits?
As I have remarked in the past on this blog (and elsewhere), blogging seems to me an activity in decline as the way in which people use the Internet moves on--and arguably also as the Internet decays into a state we can hardly predict now. Those who have tried blogging, and not got the results they hoped for (for instance, with regard to building an audience online), have to know that the going is probably just going to get tougher as all of this continues.
Might it then be that the rational thing is to quit now?
I won't say that--or even pretend that I can even make figuring out the answer easy. But I do think that it is possible to at least suggest a starting point for figuring it out with this question: Does what I am doing here have intrinsic value to others or myself? In other words, does what you are putting out there deserve to be out there for its own sake, even if in the end it is possible that the world will not notice? Are you, for example, saying something that others need to hear even if they are not hearing it--because it is that important, and others are not saying it? Absent that, even if others do not hear it, do you find that it at least satisfies your need to speak--even if others do not seem to hear?
If a blog does that then I think one can justify continued plugging away even in the face of an indifferent world. If it does not, then it might be time to at least think about at least cutting back on the time and attention you put into your blog, if only for the sake of your own well-being.
Might it then be that the rational thing is to quit now?
I won't say that--or even pretend that I can even make figuring out the answer easy. But I do think that it is possible to at least suggest a starting point for figuring it out with this question: Does what I am doing here have intrinsic value to others or myself? In other words, does what you are putting out there deserve to be out there for its own sake, even if in the end it is possible that the world will not notice? Are you, for example, saying something that others need to hear even if they are not hearing it--because it is that important, and others are not saying it? Absent that, even if others do not hear it, do you find that it at least satisfies your need to speak--even if others do not seem to hear?
If a blog does that then I think one can justify continued plugging away even in the face of an indifferent world. If it does not, then it might be time to at least think about at least cutting back on the time and attention you put into your blog, if only for the sake of your own well-being.
Peer Review in the Age of Automated Scholarship
I have personally been on both sides of the peer review process, in more than one field. I thus know something of not just its virtues but its limitations and vulnerabilities firsthand. Altogether it seems to me rather a fragile thing, belonging within an earlier, slower-paced era in which the academic world was smaller and "clubbier." (Indeed, on more than one occasion reading my peer reviewer's comments I made guesses about who wrote the feedback--on one occasion having the guess confirmed as correct.)
In an era of chatbot-powered paper mills supplying a much more thoroughly global community of scholars living by "publish or perish" rules content to submit to the explosion of increasingly fee-charging journals that system seems too fragile to survive, as, indeed, absurdities break through its barriers to deluge us all in even worse nonsense than before. Much as elitists whine about the openness of the Internet (which I think a good thing on the whole, of which we unfortunately have had less these many years), the fact remains that even at its worst what we had on that open Internet was at least humans putting up content, rather than very incomplete artificial intelligences slapping words together; and those who put together an academic journal adhered to some minimum standard, especially because they expected subscribers, not authors, to pay for that journal's operation out of finite resources, which meant there was some filtration, far from perfect, but not wholly unhelpful, with all it means for even those journals where peer-review will still be effective (even their efforts tarnished).
I suspect the only real solution will mean effectively automating the examination of all this material--helping us weed out what is illegitimate--in step with the automation of its production. However, just as it seems that the effectual editing of content is a much higher-level skill than just churning stuff out, any such adaptation lies a long way away, leaving us making do as best we can with our old devices in the meantime.
In an era of chatbot-powered paper mills supplying a much more thoroughly global community of scholars living by "publish or perish" rules content to submit to the explosion of increasingly fee-charging journals that system seems too fragile to survive, as, indeed, absurdities break through its barriers to deluge us all in even worse nonsense than before. Much as elitists whine about the openness of the Internet (which I think a good thing on the whole, of which we unfortunately have had less these many years), the fact remains that even at its worst what we had on that open Internet was at least humans putting up content, rather than very incomplete artificial intelligences slapping words together; and those who put together an academic journal adhered to some minimum standard, especially because they expected subscribers, not authors, to pay for that journal's operation out of finite resources, which meant there was some filtration, far from perfect, but not wholly unhelpful, with all it means for even those journals where peer-review will still be effective (even their efforts tarnished).
I suspect the only real solution will mean effectively automating the examination of all this material--helping us weed out what is illegitimate--in step with the automation of its production. However, just as it seems that the effectual editing of content is a much higher-level skill than just churning stuff out, any such adaptation lies a long way away, leaving us making do as best we can with our old devices in the meantime.
The Crisis of Academic Publishing
These days we are hearing quite a bit about the turmoil within academic publishing--the explosion of dubious journals, the article processing fees (running into the thousands of dollars) scholars and scientists are now expected to pay for the privilege of presenting their work through journals old and new, the inundation of even the most reputable journals with "paper mill" and now artificial intelligence-generated content, much of it of risible quality, some of which makes it into print, on top of the abundance of problems the scholarly and scientific world already faces (like the ongoing crises of particular fields, such as medicine's "crisis of reproducibility" of research results).
To be frank, it leaves me that much more deeply disinclined to go back to submitting to academic journals, and that much more inclined to simply publish my working papers through the Social Science Research Network and leave them at that (especially given how having the official stamp of passage through a peer-reviewed publication now means less than it used to for those counting on being "led by Authority" to make up for their inability to judge a piece of scholarship on its own merits for themselves). Still, if it is enough for my purposes--indeed, very handy for my purposes (I no longer have to worry about items being too long or learn they were "not quite right" for a particular journal's range of concerns after many months of waiting, etc.)--I know that this does not answer all needs by a long way, and I can only wonder how, or even if, the system will come to cope with the new reality.
To be frank, it leaves me that much more deeply disinclined to go back to submitting to academic journals, and that much more inclined to simply publish my working papers through the Social Science Research Network and leave them at that (especially given how having the official stamp of passage through a peer-reviewed publication now means less than it used to for those counting on being "led by Authority" to make up for their inability to judge a piece of scholarship on its own merits for themselves). Still, if it is enough for my purposes--indeed, very handy for my purposes (I no longer have to worry about items being too long or learn they were "not quite right" for a particular journal's range of concerns after many months of waiting, etc.)--I know that this does not answer all needs by a long way, and I can only wonder how, or even if, the system will come to cope with the new reality.
Of the Term "NIMBY"
I have never cared for the use of the term "NIMBY" (an acronym for "Not In My Back Yard"), which is typically as a sneer at those who object to some large piece of construction that might interfere with their lives. What it comes down to, after all (and this is the clearer when one considers the bad faith of the kind of people who like to attack others for not wanting things in their backyard) is sanctimonious contempt for people who think they have a right to a say in what goes on in their neighborhoods and communities; the idea that those who may want to build something in a particular place may not unreasonably be expected to go partway in making concessions to those people into whose lives they mean to bring what may well be large changes.
All of this has very pointed political implications--and as is usually the case when people gloss over them in this way, not pleasant ones.
All of this has very pointed political implications--and as is usually the case when people gloss over them in this way, not pleasant ones.
Of the Word "Pundit"
The word "pundit" is ultimately derived from the Sanskrit word "pandita" meaning "learned."
Today, however, in English the word is usually used in reference to the members of the media commentariat, particularly those more prominent members of the commentariat known to the mainstream.
Given the quality of the comment that we get from the mainstream media it seems fair to say that the word has come to denote the extreme opposite of its original meaning.
For nothing can be further from "learned" than those the conventional hail as "pundits" today.
Today, however, in English the word is usually used in reference to the members of the media commentariat, particularly those more prominent members of the commentariat known to the mainstream.
Given the quality of the comment that we get from the mainstream media it seems fair to say that the word has come to denote the extreme opposite of its original meaning.
For nothing can be further from "learned" than those the conventional hail as "pundits" today.
Writers Write About Writing
It is notorious that fiction, not least that fiction produced by Hollywood, rarely depicts work in a convincing way, even when the depiction is at the level of mere reference, never mind a much more detail-intensive dramatization. Whether the person we see is a lawyer or police officer, a journalist or a scientist--a tinker, tailor, soldier, spy--we can usually count on their job being depicted in a risibly false manner, and it is occasion for impressed comment when they do not depict it in a risibly false manner.
But it has always seemed to me that their false depiction of the writing life has been particularly egregious--because where most writers know nothing of those other jobs, they should know about the one they actually do, else their name would not ordinarily be in the credits of the movie or show we are looking at. Indeed, because they are themselves writers one would think that, like most other people, they would be irritated by how movies and TV get their job wrong--with this carrying over to how they present writers of print fiction, given that so many of those who write for TV and film have at least some experience of that endeavor.
However, they instead flog the same stale and profoundly misleading clichés.
There is the extreme simple-mindedness of their handling of the creative process--reflected in the trite references to "writer's block.
There is the way they gloss over the sheer hell that is the effort to publish what one has written.
There is the absence of any reference to revision and editing, and the wretchedness to which they so often reduce writers.
And of course, there are the endless scenes of "successful" authors smugly signing copies of their book for adoring fans.
All this should be the easier as so often the character who is a writer is that not because the plot really needs them to be one, but because writers rather lazily settle on that occupation for protagonists as simply "what they know"--allowing them to easily eschew the clichés, maybe provide a reference to the reality here and there. Alas, all this has proven far, far beyond them.
But it has always seemed to me that their false depiction of the writing life has been particularly egregious--because where most writers know nothing of those other jobs, they should know about the one they actually do, else their name would not ordinarily be in the credits of the movie or show we are looking at. Indeed, because they are themselves writers one would think that, like most other people, they would be irritated by how movies and TV get their job wrong--with this carrying over to how they present writers of print fiction, given that so many of those who write for TV and film have at least some experience of that endeavor.
However, they instead flog the same stale and profoundly misleading clichés.
There is the extreme simple-mindedness of their handling of the creative process--reflected in the trite references to "writer's block.
There is the way they gloss over the sheer hell that is the effort to publish what one has written.
There is the absence of any reference to revision and editing, and the wretchedness to which they so often reduce writers.
And of course, there are the endless scenes of "successful" authors smugly signing copies of their book for adoring fans.
All this should be the easier as so often the character who is a writer is that not because the plot really needs them to be one, but because writers rather lazily settle on that occupation for protagonists as simply "what they know"--allowing them to easily eschew the clichés, maybe provide a reference to the reality here and there. Alas, all this has proven far, far beyond them.
Those Lives in Which Chance Plays No Part
In Lost Illusions Balzac remarks that "there are lives in which chance plays no part"--such that those "despair[ing] of a life become stale and unprofitable in the present" find no relief in "outlook for the future," having as they do "nothing to look for, nothing to expect from chance."
Writing of one particular character that matter of chance comes up again and again, with that specific word "chance" coming up at least three dozen times in the text. Certainly as discussed here again and again chance means the "lucky break," the "big break," that make for high position and glorious careers of the kind that have the conventional conformist idiot most people with any sort of public platform seem to be taking mediocrities are superhumans of Renaissance Man versatility--as people who might prove themselves actual geniuses go through their lives thought idiots and treated as worthless because they were among those in whose lives chance played no part.
As Balzac made clear here, chances are not at all equally distributed--with chance overwhelmingly enjoyed by the privileged, the connected, the kind of people for whom the activity of "networking" actually has meaning, because they are in a position to network with people who have the power to do something for them, and could be induced to use it, because they in turn can do something for them.
For the rest of the world, alas, "chance" is too likely to simply mean "mischance"; mean disaster striking, and their "becoming a statistic."
Considering their lot I find myself thinking of the self-help drivel about "stepping outside your comfort zone," and "being open to new experiences." As things already are most people are pretty uncomfortable--and unprotected from life's shocks and their terrors, rather than failing to be "open to new experience." What they want, for perfectly good reason, is some comfort, and some protection; some security and some control of the kind of which they have too little, a reality to which the outside-their-comfort-zone-stepping, open-to-experience advice-purveying privileged nitwits are profoundly oblivious.
Writing of one particular character that matter of chance comes up again and again, with that specific word "chance" coming up at least three dozen times in the text. Certainly as discussed here again and again chance means the "lucky break," the "big break," that make for high position and glorious careers of the kind that have the conventional conformist idiot most people with any sort of public platform seem to be taking mediocrities are superhumans of Renaissance Man versatility--as people who might prove themselves actual geniuses go through their lives thought idiots and treated as worthless because they were among those in whose lives chance played no part.
As Balzac made clear here, chances are not at all equally distributed--with chance overwhelmingly enjoyed by the privileged, the connected, the kind of people for whom the activity of "networking" actually has meaning, because they are in a position to network with people who have the power to do something for them, and could be induced to use it, because they in turn can do something for them.
For the rest of the world, alas, "chance" is too likely to simply mean "mischance"; mean disaster striking, and their "becoming a statistic."
Considering their lot I find myself thinking of the self-help drivel about "stepping outside your comfort zone," and "being open to new experiences." As things already are most people are pretty uncomfortable--and unprotected from life's shocks and their terrors, rather than failing to be "open to new experience." What they want, for perfectly good reason, is some comfort, and some protection; some security and some control of the kind of which they have too little, a reality to which the outside-their-comfort-zone-stepping, open-to-experience advice-purveying privileged nitwits are profoundly oblivious.
Book Review: Harold Coyle's Trial By Fire
Like the other authors who became really Big Names in the techno-thriller field, Harold Coyle made his name with Cold War stories, starting with 1987's Team Yankee, which depicts a NATO-Soviet clash in Central Europe as seen by an American tank crew. However, the end of the Cold War compelled him to shift to other themes, with his first post-Cold War book Trial by Fire, presenting a scenario based on U.S. relations with Mexico. Here, in the wake of a takeover of Mexico by a military junta--the "Council of Thirteen" intent on saving the country from corruption, crime and poverty--a Mexican crime boss driven into flight and exile by the Council's crackdown (Hector Alaman) manufactures a series of violent incidents on the U.S.-Mexico border that he intends for the U.S. to blame on the new Mexican regime, compelling the United States government to drive it from power, and giving him the opportunity to resume his old position within the country.
As might be guessed from that scenario--and for that matter, experience of post-Cold War techno-thriller writing generally--Coyle had to make a good deal more effort than before to develop the scenario that leads to the fighting (in comparison with his simply borrowing John Hackett's scenario for the armored warfare in 1987's Team Yankee, for example, or his only slightly written background to the Soviet invasion of Iran in 1988's Sword Point). What was less predictable was the level of adroitness Coyle would display in both choosing his scenario, and developing it. In envisioning a crisis of this kind with Mexico Coyle set up a situation in which the United States government may be overwhelmingly more powerful with regard to conventional military capability, such that it can destroy Mexico's armed forces with ease, but at the same time not manage to get what that government actually wants--security along its two thousand mile border with the vast and populous neighbor to its south, tasks requiring levels of military manpower far, far beyond what the U.S. has at its disposal. (In one of the more memorable scenes Coyle's military officer protagonists explain the numbers to a stupid, sarcastic politician with little apparent ability or willingness to process the obvious.) Moreover, Coyle displays some nuance in depicting how the situation unfolds--not least in an alertness to the vulnerability of governments to being manipulated by parties, foreign and domestic, for their own ends; how prejudice, media sensationalism, political hucksterism can easily combine with the demand of some to "do something" and the plain and simple happenstance that throws sparks into a tinderbox to push policymakers who are supposed to "know better" into disastrous courses (with one aspect of note how the politics of border states like Texas color national policy in this area); how as crises escalate, and missions "creep," political objects become ambitious beyond anyone's actual ability to realize them, with this particularly happening when soldiers win a conventional battle with ease only to find themselves stuck trying to hold territory and impose their political will on its inhabitants in an era of what Rupert Smith called "war amongst the people," and find that task nowhere near as easy. (Indeed, much more than is the case with most techno-thrillers, the policymakers and "pundits" in Washington would have had a chance to learn something if they picked it up--to the extent that they have the faculty to learn at all.)
Coyle's strengths here also extend to the depiction of the fighting itself, which here has the kind of grit one is unlikely to see in the more high-tech stories of aviators in super-planes--or of those writers of fighting on the ground inclined to present perfectly competent super-people rather than real human beings (for instance, one techno-thriller writer whose prose on this level was rightly compared with that of a "Victorian boy's book"). When America and Mexico do go to war here American officers do not always prove wise, strong or noble in making their decisions, or dealing with their consequences, which can and do include subordinates losing their lives. At the same time Coyle treats the Mexican characters on the opposite side of the battle from those Americans with a level of respect far from standard in the genre, the military officers of the Council sincerely acting as patriots, and intelligent ones, who have good reason to bristle at how their neighbor to the north sees them. (Where this rather nationalistic genre tends to treat foreigners' criticisms of the U.S. and its treatment of them as sanctimoniousness and worse, when Colonel Alfredo Guajardo complains that American representatives to his country lecture, threaten and dictate rather than talk to them we are getting his honest and not necessarily invalid appraisal of the relationship--while in making Guajardo the Council's "face" in America there is no sense that their view that his being of visibly European rather than indigenous descent would be advantageous for public relations with the United States government and the American public is at all an unfair assessment of racial attitudes in America on their part.)
Of course, for all that the tale has its implausibilities—and its limitations. Even as Mexico's domestic troubles--not least, its poverty--loom large as a theme within the book, Coyle does not go into any great depth in discussing these, and his vision of the Council's attempt to redress the problems can seem a bit muddled. (The Council does not breathe a word about nationalizations and the renunciation of foreign debt the way a left-wing government might, while instead planning painful austerity measures the way a right-wing government would; but also uses price controls and backs them up with drumhead justice in a manner not easily reconciled with the demands of the "Washington Consensus" to which it seems the Council means to accommodate the country.) There is, too, the way that Latin America and the Caribbean (including close, longtime U.S. allies such as Panama) line up behind Mexico against the U.S. in the crisis (a turn critical to even the very limited extent to which Mexico is able to throw up a conventional defense against the U.S. intervention).
Meanwhile, getting away from the construction of the scenario that is on the whole one of the book's strengths there is much that is less than ideal. Like many an author a few books into their career an initial tendency toward spare prose gives way to prolixity--and not always to good effect. In contrast with a Clancy Coyle, if hardly likely to offer a warts-and-all view of life in uniform, is still at least prepared to acknowledge its more human side, with its moments of silliness and pettiness--an officer's awkward fumbling after a dropped uniform clip, arguments among units about the order of precedence at a ceremonial parade, an officer's foul mood after he is bested by a colleague in a training exercise, the disrespect that personnel of different ranks and specialties often feel for each other--all of which lends the story even more verisimilitude than the greatest exactness in describing the fire control systems of armored vehicles, and matters the more in a tale where attention to character is more than an authorial piety. Still, Coyle is only so successful in mining the quotidian for interest (a feat few writers ever really pull off), the more in as there is so much of it this time around--extended considerably by the prominent subplot about the then-fashionable topic of whether women should be allowed to serve in the armed forces' combat units by making a major character the first assigned to command an infantry platoon as part of an experimental program which proves plodding and predictable. (Did anyone picking this up in the '90s ever doubt that Lieutenant Nancy Kozak would prove herself as a combat officer and show up the naysayers?) Indeed, the only real spark of human interest this side of the book had to offer was in a very minor character--a harassed trucker called back to National Guard duty whose time in the story is concluded within a mere forty pages of his first appearance. Meanwhile what we see outside of uniform--the depictions of the media's coverage of the crisis by way of the adventures of Dixon's lover, reporter Jan Fields, and the inevitable inside-the-Beltway stuff--fall as flat as these things usually do in books like this one. (Fields seems to operate in a very different media business than the one we know, where reporters are free to follow stories without regard for pressures or interference from commercially- and politically-minded higher-ups, with the sensationalization of the crisis that helps escalate it somehow having nothing to do with her, never confronting her with a single dilemma; while the D.C. goings-on have the same sanitized quality.)
All of this contributed to the book's feeling cluttered and overlong in that way that gives one the impression that the author in this case was not "cutting to the chase" because there really was just not much "chase," the political scenario, after all, still used as the basis not of a political thriller but a military techno-thriller which ends up with few military techno-thrills. The 446 page book, in which not the Mexican Council but the criminal Alaman is the real villain, gives the heroes what is in military terms a very small-time opponent indeed by the genre's standards, while the action is also "small-time," consisting mainly of a few episodes of small unit-level violence on the border functioning mainly as dramatizations of Alaman's plot, and a few glimpses of the principal "set piece" of the novel, the "Battle of Monterey" following from U.S. forces' attempt to establish a security zone along the southern side of the Mexican border (the mortaring of a truck convoy, an anti-armor ambush against a tank battalion)--a Lilliputian affair next to the battles in Coyle's earlier Sword Point, in between two very limited-scale air assaults. Meanwhile, just as Jack Ryan quickly became too senior to get into the action very much, his "Coyleverse" counterpart Army officer Scott Dixon, now a Lieutenant Colonel on a divisional staff, is a non-participant (rather realistically denied permission when personal motives impel him to try and play action hero near the end), denying the fighting some of what personal edge it may have had. The result is that, even if the book is a much more than usually intelligent treatment of its principal theme, its particular dramas lent themselves less well to the constraints and demands of the techno-thriller form than those of a few years earlier--and in fact I can imagine that a more satisfying novel might have come had there not been an attempt to accommodate it to the genre and its requirements.
As might be guessed from that scenario--and for that matter, experience of post-Cold War techno-thriller writing generally--Coyle had to make a good deal more effort than before to develop the scenario that leads to the fighting (in comparison with his simply borrowing John Hackett's scenario for the armored warfare in 1987's Team Yankee, for example, or his only slightly written background to the Soviet invasion of Iran in 1988's Sword Point). What was less predictable was the level of adroitness Coyle would display in both choosing his scenario, and developing it. In envisioning a crisis of this kind with Mexico Coyle set up a situation in which the United States government may be overwhelmingly more powerful with regard to conventional military capability, such that it can destroy Mexico's armed forces with ease, but at the same time not manage to get what that government actually wants--security along its two thousand mile border with the vast and populous neighbor to its south, tasks requiring levels of military manpower far, far beyond what the U.S. has at its disposal. (In one of the more memorable scenes Coyle's military officer protagonists explain the numbers to a stupid, sarcastic politician with little apparent ability or willingness to process the obvious.) Moreover, Coyle displays some nuance in depicting how the situation unfolds--not least in an alertness to the vulnerability of governments to being manipulated by parties, foreign and domestic, for their own ends; how prejudice, media sensationalism, political hucksterism can easily combine with the demand of some to "do something" and the plain and simple happenstance that throws sparks into a tinderbox to push policymakers who are supposed to "know better" into disastrous courses (with one aspect of note how the politics of border states like Texas color national policy in this area); how as crises escalate, and missions "creep," political objects become ambitious beyond anyone's actual ability to realize them, with this particularly happening when soldiers win a conventional battle with ease only to find themselves stuck trying to hold territory and impose their political will on its inhabitants in an era of what Rupert Smith called "war amongst the people," and find that task nowhere near as easy. (Indeed, much more than is the case with most techno-thrillers, the policymakers and "pundits" in Washington would have had a chance to learn something if they picked it up--to the extent that they have the faculty to learn at all.)
Coyle's strengths here also extend to the depiction of the fighting itself, which here has the kind of grit one is unlikely to see in the more high-tech stories of aviators in super-planes--or of those writers of fighting on the ground inclined to present perfectly competent super-people rather than real human beings (for instance, one techno-thriller writer whose prose on this level was rightly compared with that of a "Victorian boy's book"). When America and Mexico do go to war here American officers do not always prove wise, strong or noble in making their decisions, or dealing with their consequences, which can and do include subordinates losing their lives. At the same time Coyle treats the Mexican characters on the opposite side of the battle from those Americans with a level of respect far from standard in the genre, the military officers of the Council sincerely acting as patriots, and intelligent ones, who have good reason to bristle at how their neighbor to the north sees them. (Where this rather nationalistic genre tends to treat foreigners' criticisms of the U.S. and its treatment of them as sanctimoniousness and worse, when Colonel Alfredo Guajardo complains that American representatives to his country lecture, threaten and dictate rather than talk to them we are getting his honest and not necessarily invalid appraisal of the relationship--while in making Guajardo the Council's "face" in America there is no sense that their view that his being of visibly European rather than indigenous descent would be advantageous for public relations with the United States government and the American public is at all an unfair assessment of racial attitudes in America on their part.)
Of course, for all that the tale has its implausibilities—and its limitations. Even as Mexico's domestic troubles--not least, its poverty--loom large as a theme within the book, Coyle does not go into any great depth in discussing these, and his vision of the Council's attempt to redress the problems can seem a bit muddled. (The Council does not breathe a word about nationalizations and the renunciation of foreign debt the way a left-wing government might, while instead planning painful austerity measures the way a right-wing government would; but also uses price controls and backs them up with drumhead justice in a manner not easily reconciled with the demands of the "Washington Consensus" to which it seems the Council means to accommodate the country.) There is, too, the way that Latin America and the Caribbean (including close, longtime U.S. allies such as Panama) line up behind Mexico against the U.S. in the crisis (a turn critical to even the very limited extent to which Mexico is able to throw up a conventional defense against the U.S. intervention).
Meanwhile, getting away from the construction of the scenario that is on the whole one of the book's strengths there is much that is less than ideal. Like many an author a few books into their career an initial tendency toward spare prose gives way to prolixity--and not always to good effect. In contrast with a Clancy Coyle, if hardly likely to offer a warts-and-all view of life in uniform, is still at least prepared to acknowledge its more human side, with its moments of silliness and pettiness--an officer's awkward fumbling after a dropped uniform clip, arguments among units about the order of precedence at a ceremonial parade, an officer's foul mood after he is bested by a colleague in a training exercise, the disrespect that personnel of different ranks and specialties often feel for each other--all of which lends the story even more verisimilitude than the greatest exactness in describing the fire control systems of armored vehicles, and matters the more in a tale where attention to character is more than an authorial piety. Still, Coyle is only so successful in mining the quotidian for interest (a feat few writers ever really pull off), the more in as there is so much of it this time around--extended considerably by the prominent subplot about the then-fashionable topic of whether women should be allowed to serve in the armed forces' combat units by making a major character the first assigned to command an infantry platoon as part of an experimental program which proves plodding and predictable. (Did anyone picking this up in the '90s ever doubt that Lieutenant Nancy Kozak would prove herself as a combat officer and show up the naysayers?) Indeed, the only real spark of human interest this side of the book had to offer was in a very minor character--a harassed trucker called back to National Guard duty whose time in the story is concluded within a mere forty pages of his first appearance. Meanwhile what we see outside of uniform--the depictions of the media's coverage of the crisis by way of the adventures of Dixon's lover, reporter Jan Fields, and the inevitable inside-the-Beltway stuff--fall as flat as these things usually do in books like this one. (Fields seems to operate in a very different media business than the one we know, where reporters are free to follow stories without regard for pressures or interference from commercially- and politically-minded higher-ups, with the sensationalization of the crisis that helps escalate it somehow having nothing to do with her, never confronting her with a single dilemma; while the D.C. goings-on have the same sanitized quality.)
All of this contributed to the book's feeling cluttered and overlong in that way that gives one the impression that the author in this case was not "cutting to the chase" because there really was just not much "chase," the political scenario, after all, still used as the basis not of a political thriller but a military techno-thriller which ends up with few military techno-thrills. The 446 page book, in which not the Mexican Council but the criminal Alaman is the real villain, gives the heroes what is in military terms a very small-time opponent indeed by the genre's standards, while the action is also "small-time," consisting mainly of a few episodes of small unit-level violence on the border functioning mainly as dramatizations of Alaman's plot, and a few glimpses of the principal "set piece" of the novel, the "Battle of Monterey" following from U.S. forces' attempt to establish a security zone along the southern side of the Mexican border (the mortaring of a truck convoy, an anti-armor ambush against a tank battalion)--a Lilliputian affair next to the battles in Coyle's earlier Sword Point, in between two very limited-scale air assaults. Meanwhile, just as Jack Ryan quickly became too senior to get into the action very much, his "Coyleverse" counterpart Army officer Scott Dixon, now a Lieutenant Colonel on a divisional staff, is a non-participant (rather realistically denied permission when personal motives impel him to try and play action hero near the end), denying the fighting some of what personal edge it may have had. The result is that, even if the book is a much more than usually intelligent treatment of its principal theme, its particular dramas lent themselves less well to the constraints and demands of the techno-thriller form than those of a few years earlier--and in fact I can imagine that a more satisfying novel might have come had there not been an attempt to accommodate it to the genre and its requirements.
William Thackeray's The Luck of Barry Lyndon: A Few Reflections
Today, I suppose, Thackeray's reputation rests above all on his novel Vanity Fair. Still, if his earlier The Luck of Barry Lyndon is less well-known, it comes right after it in renown.
Reading the two one finds Lyndon quite the contrast with Vanity Fair--that earlier book a picaresque recalling an earlier, less genteel, era of literature in its account of Lyndon's adventures as soldier and gambler and fortune-hunter. Indeed, with about half the book set in early modern Germany amidst a major war, and an exceedingly vain, clueless and unreliable first-person narrator describing the proceedings to us, it had me thinking far less of that writer to whom Thackeray is so often compared, Balzac, than Grimmelshausen.
Personally speaking, Lyndon suited me better than Vanity--the tale livelier and brisker, while it was more fun to laugh at Lyndon's blatantly stupid narrator than laugh with Vanity Fair's rather self-satisfied one.
Reading the two one finds Lyndon quite the contrast with Vanity Fair--that earlier book a picaresque recalling an earlier, less genteel, era of literature in its account of Lyndon's adventures as soldier and gambler and fortune-hunter. Indeed, with about half the book set in early modern Germany amidst a major war, and an exceedingly vain, clueless and unreliable first-person narrator describing the proceedings to us, it had me thinking far less of that writer to whom Thackeray is so often compared, Balzac, than Grimmelshausen.
Personally speaking, Lyndon suited me better than Vanity--the tale livelier and brisker, while it was more fun to laugh at Lyndon's blatantly stupid narrator than laugh with Vanity Fair's rather self-satisfied one.
A Few Thoughts on Stendhal's The Red and the Black: A Chronicle of the Nineteenth Century
Reading that book it is easy to see why. Stendhal's novel is not just "realistic" in the sense of adhering to tenets of realism (in its intensively detailed, supernatural-excluding and fairly cold-eyed portrayal of what for the author and his audience were everyday reality) but its fierce anti-Romanticism. The protagonist of the book, Julian Sorel--a carpenter's son from provincial France--in the wake of the Revolution and all it brought (contrary to the sneer of the historically illiterate yet historical epic-addicted Ridley Scott, a genuine transformation of the structure of French society), envisions himself as having a grand "career" ahead of him, and stops at nothing to realize that vision. Unlikely as it seems, the profoundly deluded and foolish Sorel actually does in his fumbling way end up on the cusp of achieving everything he had ever desired (marriage to the daughter of a rich and powerful Parisian nobleman, property of his own, a military commission, and even a fake aristocratic lineage to round out his new image) when the revelation of a skeleton in his closet turns it all to dust, leading to a murder attempt against the former lover who exposed him--and leading Sorel to the gallows in the extreme opposite of where his journey was "supposed" to take him.
This combination of delusion and denouement is pretty standard in French realist literature of this era, with Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary perhaps the most famous example, and parallels quite easy to see in the tales of Balzac's "Human Comedy." (Here Eugene Rastignac may indeed make it to the top--but it seems significant that he has no romantic illusions about himself as he pursues his advancement, whereas that all too impressionable youth who did have illusions, Lucien du Rubempre of Lost Illusions and its sequel, alas, comes to an end even more poignantly tragic than Sorel.)
For my part, I would rate those other authors and works more highly from the standpoint of storytelling and literary craftsmanship. In contrast with Stendhal's "chronicle" we have much more tightly constructed plots and flowing narratives, as well as displays of that acme of narrative skill that is "dramatization" (what crude doctrinaires champion as "Show, don't tell"). There is also, in Balzac's case, his breadth and depth of attention to what Henry James called the "machinery of civilization"--all as the time Stendhal spent in Sorel's endlessly scheming mind got a bit wearing in a way that those other authors' intense attentiveness to the goings-on in their own protagonists' thoughts never did. Nevertheless, as is so often the case, if others told this sort of tale more impressively, Stendhal gets the laurels for doing it first, paving the way for these later titans who did so much to make French literature, and modern world literature, what it has become.
The Degeneration of Classical Education
The "Classical" education is, of course, largely a thing of the past, certainly in its more substantive forms--and not at all surprisingly.
There was a time when, for example, the study of Latin was eminently practical. In a period when the vernacular languages of the present were localized and unstandardized Latin had the virtue of being a highly standardized language that was internationally known by the educated elite of the Western world. It lent thus itself better to use when precision was called for, and when people were trying to communicate with others from outside their country, or even their village, than their native languages--and thus was the language of law, administration, diplomacy, science, scholarship, religion, higher culture across the culture region, the more in as the Roman legacy loomed so large in all these areas. (Thus, as late as 1687, did Newton write his Principia in that language.)
Of course, even by early modern times this was beginning to change, with the vernacular languages increasingly liable to precise and wide use--to national use, and even international use, and get used as such, with the fifteenth century seeing English come into its own, for example, and the sixteenth giving the English language the Tyndale Bible and Shakespeare, with all this proceeding through subsequent centuries there and everywhere else. The role of Latin in daily life shrank, and its prominence in education was increasingly a legacy of the past, surviving on inertia and, in the case of those discomfited by liberal and radical currents in the present day, rejection of the modern (preferring as they did the conservatism of what survived of the Ancients to the Enlightenment of their own time).
That made it a more strained, artificial, thing, and unsurprisingly a less successful thing, such that a Coleridge was to quip that a youth was no longer to be assumed capable of thinking in Latin--and increasingly, a Classical education's principal "benefit" the ability to superciliously toss about Latin tags, to the bewilderment and embarrassment of peers who had not had the "benefit" of an upbringing such as theirs. (Indeed, in such a manner did Percy Sillitoe in a now notorious tale find himself snubbed by the overgrown public school students of whom he found himself in charge--as head of Britain's Security Service!) By that point the fondness for the Classical languages as centerpieces of elite education was harder than ever to deny as plain and simple snobbery, with such episodes showing it.
There was a time when, for example, the study of Latin was eminently practical. In a period when the vernacular languages of the present were localized and unstandardized Latin had the virtue of being a highly standardized language that was internationally known by the educated elite of the Western world. It lent thus itself better to use when precision was called for, and when people were trying to communicate with others from outside their country, or even their village, than their native languages--and thus was the language of law, administration, diplomacy, science, scholarship, religion, higher culture across the culture region, the more in as the Roman legacy loomed so large in all these areas. (Thus, as late as 1687, did Newton write his Principia in that language.)
Of course, even by early modern times this was beginning to change, with the vernacular languages increasingly liable to precise and wide use--to national use, and even international use, and get used as such, with the fifteenth century seeing English come into its own, for example, and the sixteenth giving the English language the Tyndale Bible and Shakespeare, with all this proceeding through subsequent centuries there and everywhere else. The role of Latin in daily life shrank, and its prominence in education was increasingly a legacy of the past, surviving on inertia and, in the case of those discomfited by liberal and radical currents in the present day, rejection of the modern (preferring as they did the conservatism of what survived of the Ancients to the Enlightenment of their own time).
That made it a more strained, artificial, thing, and unsurprisingly a less successful thing, such that a Coleridge was to quip that a youth was no longer to be assumed capable of thinking in Latin--and increasingly, a Classical education's principal "benefit" the ability to superciliously toss about Latin tags, to the bewilderment and embarrassment of peers who had not had the "benefit" of an upbringing such as theirs. (Indeed, in such a manner did Percy Sillitoe in a now notorious tale find himself snubbed by the overgrown public school students of whom he found himself in charge--as head of Britain's Security Service!) By that point the fondness for the Classical languages as centerpieces of elite education was harder than ever to deny as plain and simple snobbery, with such episodes showing it.
Of "Caveat Emptor"
The Latin tag "caveat emptor" is commonly rendered in English as "Buyer beware."
The term is usually taken to indicate that the buyer bears "personal responsibility" for making sure the seller does not cheat them.
Given the respect with which the words "personal responsibility" are treated in this culture few dare criticize the principle.
Still, in spite of the pieties about the market that few are brave enough to challenge in the mainstream (James Galbraith's remark about being expected to "bend a knee and make the sign of the cross" when publicly using the word "market" is all too accurate), one imagines many have quite other feelings about the matter. The relation between buyer and seller is by no means consistently an equal one. Quite the contrary, it is often extremely unequal, especially in an age of complex products, and Big Business--such that the buyer, especially one of limited means, who can little afford to lose out in any market transaction and for whom any such transaction is full of fear and trepidation, is apt to feel themselves thrown to the wolves in such a situation by those in power who say "Caveat emptor," especially when they understand fully that in the contest between seller and buyer Authority is on the other party's side against the lowly consumer.
The term is usually taken to indicate that the buyer bears "personal responsibility" for making sure the seller does not cheat them.
Given the respect with which the words "personal responsibility" are treated in this culture few dare criticize the principle.
Still, in spite of the pieties about the market that few are brave enough to challenge in the mainstream (James Galbraith's remark about being expected to "bend a knee and make the sign of the cross" when publicly using the word "market" is all too accurate), one imagines many have quite other feelings about the matter. The relation between buyer and seller is by no means consistently an equal one. Quite the contrary, it is often extremely unequal, especially in an age of complex products, and Big Business--such that the buyer, especially one of limited means, who can little afford to lose out in any market transaction and for whom any such transaction is full of fear and trepidation, is apt to feel themselves thrown to the wolves in such a situation by those in power who say "Caveat emptor," especially when they understand fully that in the contest between seller and buyer Authority is on the other party's side against the lowly consumer.
An Education Befitting a Fourteenth Century Gentleman
Told that a student has attended an expensive private school--let us make it an expensive private school in continental Europe--and there had a curriculum that included Latin, fencing and horse-riding different people react in different ways.
The person of conventional mind will be awed by the combination of upper classness with unfamiliarity (Latin, fencing, riding remote from their daily life), and, believing the rich superior and their educations superior and being impressed by anything associated with other, will feel themselves inferior.
By contrast the person of really practical mind will not be awed, but rather dubious about the training a person of the twenty-first century for the demands of the fourteenth century, when Latin, the sword, horsemanship, were genuinely important to the career of a man of gentle birth. They might take an ironic attitude toward it, but alternatively they might be anxious at the implications for the larger world--which will have an elite whose incapacities to fulfill its tasks will thus include a thoroughly out of date preparation for life. (Thus did George Orwell speak of politicians who could quote Horace but had never heard of algebra.)
Those inclined to the left's view of where the wealth for such educations come from could be expected to react more strongly still. That the great wealth underwriting these educational absurdities is not a "meritocratic" reward for "hard work" and talent but the proceeds of "primitive accumulation," "surplus labor," and "financial parasitism," makes such usage of their money all the more grotesque--while seeming to them yet another discredit of the elite the conventional so respect.
Persons who think that way should be unintimidated by the presumed superiority of those with elite educations, the poses they strike, and the Oohs and Ahhs of the credulous at the thought that here is someone who was taught to handle a foil in school. Still, open contempt is a rarity, with few displaying it quite like an Upton Sinclair as he lamented that Woodrow Wilson, from whom so many expected so much in the years of the First World War and after, had been studying ancient languages and "imbecile" theology instead of getting the training--in economics, in sociology, in geography--to grapple with the real problems of that moment, with consequences that Sinclair was far from alone in deeming disastrous for the world.
The person of conventional mind will be awed by the combination of upper classness with unfamiliarity (Latin, fencing, riding remote from their daily life), and, believing the rich superior and their educations superior and being impressed by anything associated with other, will feel themselves inferior.
By contrast the person of really practical mind will not be awed, but rather dubious about the training a person of the twenty-first century for the demands of the fourteenth century, when Latin, the sword, horsemanship, were genuinely important to the career of a man of gentle birth. They might take an ironic attitude toward it, but alternatively they might be anxious at the implications for the larger world--which will have an elite whose incapacities to fulfill its tasks will thus include a thoroughly out of date preparation for life. (Thus did George Orwell speak of politicians who could quote Horace but had never heard of algebra.)
Those inclined to the left's view of where the wealth for such educations come from could be expected to react more strongly still. That the great wealth underwriting these educational absurdities is not a "meritocratic" reward for "hard work" and talent but the proceeds of "primitive accumulation," "surplus labor," and "financial parasitism," makes such usage of their money all the more grotesque--while seeming to them yet another discredit of the elite the conventional so respect.
Persons who think that way should be unintimidated by the presumed superiority of those with elite educations, the poses they strike, and the Oohs and Ahhs of the credulous at the thought that here is someone who was taught to handle a foil in school. Still, open contempt is a rarity, with few displaying it quite like an Upton Sinclair as he lamented that Woodrow Wilson, from whom so many expected so much in the years of the First World War and after, had been studying ancient languages and "imbecile" theology instead of getting the training--in economics, in sociology, in geography--to grapple with the real problems of that moment, with consequences that Sinclair was far from alone in deeming disastrous for the world.
Of Bitterness
When spoken in reference to a person the word "bitterness" denotes an individual's anger or disappointment over some aspect of their life, especially an enduring and likely personal outlook-defining anger and disappointment over an aspect likely to have been unimportant.
A person's being bitter is commonly considered a failing on that person's part.
Of course, I will not deny that bitterness can be toxic. But were that merely the issue I do not think that there would be so much opprobrium toward persons who give evidences of being bitter.
After all, consider what we associate bitterness with--a sense on the part of person feeling that way that others have treated them less than justly. Implicit in this is an indictment of those others, and perhaps of society itself, and this is a thing that people of conventional mind cannot countenance, and accordingly dismiss or attack anyone whose speech or action even hits at such indictment. The fault must not be with society, but with the individual, making their feeling illegitimate. And even if they really were unjustly treated in a way that cannot be denied, they think the person who suffered the injustice at others' hands should simply "Whatever. Get over it!"
As an attitude toward another individual is concerned it is not empathetic or sympathetic, respectful or tolerant. As an attitude toward society it is, at best, complacent in the extreme--and for those whose opinions generally count, which is to say the privileged and elite, the authority-holding and the comfortable, selfish and self-serving in the extreme, with all that tends to flow from that, including the ready demand of "convenient social virtue" on the part of others as they brush off any and every problem in a manner not only callous toward others, but inimical to any enlightened conception of their own self-interest.
Considering all that the very least one should do is stop and think before they rush to condemn others merely for feeling something less than convenient to the comfortable. Indeed, they should recall that if people have any right to a subjectivity whatsoever that includes the right to be bitter, the more in as bitterness may well be a valid response to life experience--and that denying those already mistreated that right too can scarcely be expected to do anything but add to their bitterness.
A person's being bitter is commonly considered a failing on that person's part.
Of course, I will not deny that bitterness can be toxic. But were that merely the issue I do not think that there would be so much opprobrium toward persons who give evidences of being bitter.
After all, consider what we associate bitterness with--a sense on the part of person feeling that way that others have treated them less than justly. Implicit in this is an indictment of those others, and perhaps of society itself, and this is a thing that people of conventional mind cannot countenance, and accordingly dismiss or attack anyone whose speech or action even hits at such indictment. The fault must not be with society, but with the individual, making their feeling illegitimate. And even if they really were unjustly treated in a way that cannot be denied, they think the person who suffered the injustice at others' hands should simply "Whatever. Get over it!"
As an attitude toward another individual is concerned it is not empathetic or sympathetic, respectful or tolerant. As an attitude toward society it is, at best, complacent in the extreme--and for those whose opinions generally count, which is to say the privileged and elite, the authority-holding and the comfortable, selfish and self-serving in the extreme, with all that tends to flow from that, including the ready demand of "convenient social virtue" on the part of others as they brush off any and every problem in a manner not only callous toward others, but inimical to any enlightened conception of their own self-interest.
Considering all that the very least one should do is stop and think before they rush to condemn others merely for feeling something less than convenient to the comfortable. Indeed, they should recall that if people have any right to a subjectivity whatsoever that includes the right to be bitter, the more in as bitterness may well be a valid response to life experience--and that denying those already mistreated that right too can scarcely be expected to do anything but add to their bitterness.
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