LEFTY
THRILLERS: Whatever happened to them?
According to my parents, when I was a
toddler, I was left handed. But traditional schooling forced me to write with
my "right" (as opposed to "wrong") hand. Ever since then,
I've been able to be ambidextrous with many tasks. Righty tennis, lefty
racquetball. I switch hit in varsity baseball my junior year. I even tried to
impress girls in high school chemistry class by writing out equations with both
hands simultaneously but mirror-imaged. Didn't seem to get me many
dates, sadly.
What I think it did do was allow me to see
multiple sides of an issue, which is, IMO, the core of what being
"liberal" should mean. A lefty tends to see from multiple
perspectives, and that is why they often identify with the oppressed, the poor,
the immigrant, and the "different", whatever that might mean in a
given context. Whatever his many faults, Bill Clinton symbolized that aspect of
liberalism: he felt your pain.
In the context of America's long "war
on terror" (whatever that means), it allows me to viscerally
understand the general conservative response, which has been one of fear,
suspicion, and circling the wagons. I understand that response because liberals
feel it, too.
Liberals Don't Forget Either
I was in New York City when the towers
fell. People in my community died. Toxic dust blew over us all. I saw the
legions of gray zombies flood from lower Manhattan. I knew what it was to be
locked down on the island like some version of I am Legend. My
kids' school had walls full of airplanes crashing into flaming buildings
colored in crayon.
It's hard not to get angry when I hear
certain idiots who call themselves conservatives blabber on about how liberals
don't get it. It is the liberal bastions of places like New York that are most
at risk of more terrorist attacks by a good margin. We get it, believe me, but
we're ambidextrous. We see a bigger, more nuanced picture. In the
long-term picture of where this nation is headed, conservatives ignore us at
their peril.
It is in fact this primitive response to
being attacked that gave birth to key characters and the core plot of my debut
novel,The Ragnarök Conspiracy. And I
can promise you, that response as captured in certain characters and plot
elements is far beyond anything any "reactionary" conservative has
ever dared say in public.
On the other hand,
I keep firmly in my mind what I hope to be as a person, and what I desire
America to be. The desires are for nothing new, but instead to live up
to the bedrock of unalienable rights that is the foundation of this nation:
commitments to societal and personal decency and respect hardwired into the
Constitution. These values also are integral to the characters and
choices in the narrative of my books.
It is concerns like these that motivated
my second thriller, Extraordinary
Retribution. In this novel, I focus on the evils our efforts to protect
ourselves can cause – have caused. I
ask the question: For the wrongs we have committed, what would happen if there
were payback?
Because I focus as much on American
morality as terrorist evils, my novels have been labeled by some conservatives
as “Moral Relativism at Its Worst” where I “play up the myth that
the greatest threat to world peace is an America that stands up for itself”.
Such reviewers mischaracterize my work because they prefer a less ambiguous
view of our post 9/11 actions as a nation. They believe many, if not most,
means necessary to protect the nation are justified. They don’t like an
ambidextrous view, a “liberal thriller.” They want a conservative one.
And they have
many authors to provide such thrillers. More liberal books by writers such as
Robert Ludlum, David Baldacci, John Le Carre, and John Grisham are in this age
vastly outnumbered.
Generally, these "conservative
thrillers" center on existential threats to America and "the American
way of life" (how that is defined is a critical aspect of my response to
this movement) involving extremist Islamic villains, at times aided and abetted
by villainous "liberal" Westerners who are either truly evil or, more
generously in some examples, woefully misguided.
In Full Black, the axis of evil
centers on a liberal billionaire named James Standing (think George Soros), who
advocates for higher taxes for the rich, more generous wages for the poor, and
greater government spending. In private, Standing is bankrolling terrorist
networks and plotting the assassinations of those who seek to expose
him."- Newsweek, "The Right’s Thriller
King"
All well and good: there are some nasty
Islamic extremists out there, and plenty of corrupt and nasty liberal
politicians or tycoons to make use of. I don't find such use necessarily
political in nature: it depends on the author and how things are presented.
However, there is a definite political
agenda that has entered. As the piece "The Beck Supremacy" makes
clear, some of the more extreme and influential conservative media outlets have
worked in concert with several of these "conservative thriller
writers" to promote their books.
When
Vince Flynn recently finished writing his eleventh novel, Pursuit of Honor, he
sent an advance copy to Rush Limbaugh, along with some special reading
instructions. Upon arriving at Chapter 50, he told the radio host in a note
inscribed on the chapter’s first page, “open one of your bottles of Lafite and
grab a cigar and savor these words.” Limbaugh, not surprisingly, was impressed.
On October 9, he told his listeners that, although he hadn’t yet read all of
Pursuit of Honor, “it’s going to be the best [Flynn book] ever.” And Rush
wasn’t the only conservative talker offering an aural blurb. On October 12,
Glenn Beck hosted Flynn on his Fox News TV show and lavished praise on his new
book--one part in particular. “Let’s just say Chapter 50, I don’t want to give
anything away, but let
me just say it’s almost conservative porn,” Beck gushed. - The New Republic, "The Beck Supremacy"
Still, no harm, no foul. Conservative
commentators can promote whatever they like to, just as their liberal
counterparts can do the same. I have no ax
to grind here, even if my politics lies in a different wavelength range of the
spectrum.
There ARE elements to the Far Right's
response to the terrorist threat that I do have major issues with, however. These
involve the violation of basic and taken-for-granted legal rights the American
system has always enshrined (if not always consistently supported).
This response from a vocal segment of the
conservative crowd (and, via Obama, recently more liberals as well) is in the
suspension of rights, the use of torture, the secretive accusations,
renditions, imprisonments, "enhanced interrogations", and
assassinations without a shred of due process. This response is considered part
of the "eye for eye", or "practically necessary" approach
to dealing with bad guys that, as I'll admit freely, don't play by our rules.
As thriller novelist Brad Thor notes:
“I don’t even think President Bush
went far enough in taking it to our enemies, Al Qaeda doesn’t abide by the
Geneva Conventions, so in my opinion, they should not be afforded the
protections of them." - Newsweek, 07/17/2011
My heartfelt,
indeed, angry response is: since when did right and wrong depend on what our
enemies do?
Why don't we listen to sometrue war heroes
about this issue:
“How shall a man judge what to
do in such times?”
“As he ever has judged,” said Aragorn.“Good and ill have not
changed since yesteryear; nor are they one thing among Elves and Dwarves, and
another among Men. It is a man's part to discern them, as much in the Golden
Wood as in his own house.” –World War I Veteran J.R.R. Tolkien, The Two Towers
"I don't mourn the loss of any terrorist's
life. Nor do I care if in the course of serving their ignoble cause they suffer
great harm. They have pledged their lives to the intentional destruction of
innocent lives, and they have earned their terrible punishment in this life and
the next. What I do mourn is what we lose when by official policy or official
neglect we allow, confuse or encourage our soldiers to forget that best sense
of ourselves, that which is our greatest strength--that we are different and
better than our enemies, that we fight for an idea, not a tribe, not a land,
not a king, not a twisted interpretation of an ancient religion, but for an
idea that all men are created equal and endowed by their Creator with
inalienable rights." - John McCain, Torture's Terrible
Toll
Regardless that as McCain also says, it's
unclear whether torture provides generally useful information, the question
to me is not one of practicality, but of identity.
Are we as a nation prepared to do ANYTHING
our enemies might? If so, how are our morals different from theirs? Do we have
the courage of our convictions? Or, when the times get ugly, so do we, and we
throw our principles under the bus?
Personally, I believe in a certain kind of
America, an America WORTH fighting and dying for, that is symbolized by our
Bill of Rights, due process, and decency. If we are willing to throw that away
because the bad guys are, well, BAD, they've defeated us in the worst
possible way, by turning us into hypocritical versions of themselves who wave
the flag but trample on what it has always stood for.
"Whoever fights
monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. For
when you look into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you."
-
Friedrich Nietzche
Liberals also fight for their families,
their nation, their ideals. But I don't want to become malignant myself. Before
I shoot, I'd better damn well know the bastard is guilty. I'd better act as if
I believe in the laws and principles we claim to be defending from those
monsters. I'd better walk that walk. At the very least, that should be the
target, the values we aim for.
In the end, in the worst case scenario,
where our adherence to honor is a form of courage that would get us killed, or
cause us to lose the war, I say it's a damn site better to die a free and
honorable man than to survive tarnished by dishonor.
And you can bet my books, in addition to
telling the most compelling stories I know how to tell, will be informed by
that ethos.
--Erec Stebbins
~~~
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