Imagine two politicians today. One of them preaches fear and draconian security measures. The other is someone like me, who tells people that terrorism is a negligible risk, that risk is part of life, and that while some security is necessary, we should mostly just refuse to be terrorized and get on with our lives.

Fast-forward 10 years. If I’m right and there have been no more terrorist attacks, the fear preacher takes credit for keeping us safe. But if a terrorist attack has occurred, my government career is over. Even if the incidence of terrorism is as ridiculously low as it is today, there’s no benefit for a politician to take my side of that gamble.

I agree with the tone of that sentiment, but disagree with the content – not because it’s too cynical, but because it isn’t cynical enough.

If the attack on the World Trade Center constitutes an intelligence failure, what politician paid the price for it? George Tenet, Director of the CIA, kept his job for three years after the attacks. And he was a political appointee: first in, last out. Which elected politicians got canned for being asleep at the switch? Richard Shelby, then head of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, still serves. Porter Goss, then head of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, served until 2004, at which time he resigned to take Tenet’s old job.

(I don’t know if Schneier meant “politicians” to include political appointees, the bureaucrats who actually execute government policy. I read it to mean elected legislators)

There’s this recurring notion, peddled openly on the right and cynically on the left, that a politician who isn’t sufficiently “strong” on the War on Terror will lose their seat. Are there any examples to support this notion?

Anyone who’s read this blog for longer than eighteen months knows what I think of the TSA, and what I think of the sanctity of institutions in general. I’ve written and spoken approvingly about the use of civil disobedience, artful rulebreaking, and just plain cussedness in expressing dissent from social and legal trends. The person who wrote and said such things should have sided one hundred percent with the traveler, not at all with the uniformed bureaucrats. And yet, conscious as I was of that at the time, I couldn’t stop myself from thinking, “Oh, just shut up, you asshole.”

You’d be hard pressed to find someone with a greater gulf between his professed admiration for rule breakers and his actual disdain for them^*. It grates on me to no end. To see someone get away with breaking the rules, or even raise a fuss about how stupid the rules are, riles me up. My jaw clenches; I start glancing around for an authority figure to put this person in their place. This happens every time, even as I tell myself how silly it is. It can be the most trivial infraction – sneaking a beer into a concert, standing in the aisle of a plane while the Seat Belt light is fastened, making an illegal right turn on red when there’s no traffic – and it doesn’t matter. I hate to see someone getting away with it, while I sit with my hands folded, doing as I’m told.

This doesn’t make me unique. It doesn’t even make me a criminal. History is made by men like me: the idle bystanders, the quiet frowners, the people who like liberty but love civility more. Yes, it’s awful how those black children are treated in Alabama, but why do they have to make such a fuss about it? No, I don’t approve of rounding people up, but you know sometimes those Jews go a little too far. Sure, what the banks got away with is terrible, but why do those hippies have to block traffic? And so on.

It’s the hypocrisy of which I’m most aware and with which I’m least comfortable, though perhaps the one guarantees the other. And I don’t know the cure.

* Outside of The New Republic, that is.

I guess this is cool? Using homeless people as a means to teach a brand you’ll never buy a lesson they won’t hear? I guess?

I’m all for trolling giant corporations, don’t get me wrong. But if some bearded guy with a camera came up to me and said, “Hey! This retailer said only ‘cool people’ should wear their clothes! So put this T-shirt on! That’ll show ‘em!”, I wouldn’t feel like I was in on the joke.

Anthony Foxx, the mayor of Charlotte and Obama’s pick for the next Secretary of Transportation, issued two city proclamations yesterday. One of them recognized the National Day of Prayer; the other one declared the day to be a Day of Reason. The second proclamation noted that the country was founded on the principles of reason and that “it is the duty and responsibility of every citizen to promote the development and application of reason.” Even though we have no evidence that Mayor Foxx was taking a passive-aggressive swipe at the folks at Fox News, they decided to take it as an affront anyway, bringing on Penny Nance, the CEO of Concerned Women for America, to worry that once you start using reason, next thing you know, you’re committing a mass genocide and starting a world war: “You know the Age of Enlightenment and Reason gave way to moral relativism. And moral relativism is what led us all the way down the dark path to the Holocaust.”

- Amanda Marcotte

I don’t remember most of the books I read, but one of the most profoundly affecting experiences in my college career was on the last day of my final Honors seminar class in my junior year. Freshman year was the classical tradition; sophomore year, the Renaissance through the Nineteenth; junior year, the Twentieth Century. Our professor had been in the habit of beginning every class with some piece of music – a movement from a symphony, some old jazz recording, anything that could be defined as a “classic.” Never having been intimately acquainted with classical music, most of it was new to me, but on the final day he played us a tape of the fourth movement from Beethoven’s Ninth – the “Ode to Joy.”

(youtube link)

“This,” the professor said after the tape ended, “is considered one of the best performances of Beethoven’s Ninth ever recorded. It was performed by the Berlin Philharmonic, conducted by Wilhelm Furtwängler, in March 1942. The performance was reprised one month later for Hitler’s birthday.

“One of the great challenges of teaching history and philosophy,” he went on, “has been reconciling the beauty and enlightenment of the tradition of reason with the horrors of the Twentieth Century. How could a culture which produced such works as this also – not sequentially but simultaneously – engage in the extermination of millions? I haven’t found a satisfactory answer, and I don’t expect you to have one yet. But it’s what we’ve been grappling with all semester.”

That’s the first thing that popped in my mind when hearing about what some pundit on Fox News said about the Holocaust. As with most cultural content on the Internet, I heard about it from its sneering detractors first. And let me take nothing away from Marcotte or “Blue Texan” or any of the friends you’ll see linking this on Facebook. Nance’s assertion is uniquely stupid: the Holocaust sprang not from moral relativism but, if anything, a moral absolutism; “moral relativism,” as conservatives typically mean it, is a post-WW2 invention; the very act of forming the logical connections (as shoddy as they are) between cause and effect that Nance engages in is itself evidence of the utility of reason, and so forth.

But there’s an opportunity here to grapple with one of the great mysteries of the Twentieth Century – if the classical Western tradition did not dissuade millions of Germans from going joyfully along as their neighbors were immolated, what the hell good was it? – that’s being swept aside unexamined. It’s ignorant to say that reason caused the Holocaust, but the Age of Enlightenment certainly didn’t stand in its way.

“How?” asked the staring Professor. “Why?”
“Because I am afraid of him,” said Syme; “and no man should leave in the universe anything of which he is afraid.”

- G.K. Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday

Jacob Bacharach observed something on his blog the other day that prompted a reminiscence of my own: my lingering fondness for Catholic novelists. G.K. Chesterton, Graham Greene, C.S. Lewis, Walker Percy, Tim Powers, Walter M. Miller: I could pick up any of the novels of theirs I own and read them again today, for unexamined pleasure, no matter how many times I’ve read the book I pick^*. They’ve survived for me, while the catechism has dwindled.

Why is that? Part of it involves the gentle wit of their style. Maybe they’re all cribbing Chesterton and Lewis, condemning the excesses of the secular world with sardonicism and a touch of smugness. A more savage satire would be off-putting, given its source, and that sort of bitterness gets tiring in heavy doses. It speaks to the snob in me, the man who’s been affecting world weariness for half his life, and it makes me feel like less of a boor for doing it.

Part of it likely involves their flavor of mid-century Catholicism. Late 20th-century readers, familiar with the Church of Rome only through encyclicals and headlines, wouldn’t recognize Catholicism the way it’s portrayed at the Order of Leibowicz or on Malacandra. It admits that, no, faith doesn’t make a great deal of sense, but what in secula seculorum does? Given the last century’s few benighted attempts at letting the intellectuals run the show, I can’t deny the appeal. There’s something Byronic in that doomed romanticism, something existentialist in the willingness to push on even in the absence of reason. The new atheists have yet to achieve such sentiment, anyway.

“One word. All you’ve been saying is quite right, I shouldn’t wonder. I’m a chap who always liked to know the worst and then put the best face I can on it. So I won’t deny any of what you said. But there’s one thing more to be said, even so. Suppose we have only dreamed, or made up, all those things – trees and grass and sun and moon and stars and Aslan himself. Suppose we have. Then all I can say is that, in that case, the made-up things seem a good deal more important than the real ones. Suppose this black pit of a kingdom of yours is the only world. Well, it strikes me as a pretty poor one. And that’s a funny thing, when you come to think of it. We’re just babies making up a game, if you’re right. But four babies playing a game can make a playworld which licks your real world hollow. That’s why I’m going to stand by the play-world. I’m on Aslan’s side even if there isn’t any Aslan to lead it. I’m going to live as like a Narnian as I can even if there isn’t any Narnia. So, thanking you kindly for our supper, if these two gentlemen and the young lady are ready, we’re leaving your court at once and setting out in the dark to spend our lives looking for Overland. Not that our lives will be very long, I should think; but that’s a small loss if the world’s as dull a place as you say.”

- C.S. Lewis, The Silver Chair

The third part, of course, is nostalgia.

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* Which isn’t to say I’m oblivious to their flaws: Chesterton’s tendency to pass paradox off as wisdom, Lewis’s bogus apologia, and so forth.

Another stumbling block was that a lot of the critical writing I’d seen of the lockdown (Clark at Popehat being a widely cited example) focused on the financial cost of a day of lost labor. This sort of economic determinism always bugs me, whether from the right or left; it leads to bad policy and worse cable news. “Yes, three lives were lost and dozens horrifically maimed, but has anyone thought about the GDP?” It bothers me because, as soon as the debate is framed that way, the question becomes “how much did it actually cost?” Someone asserts it cost a billion dollars; Matthew Yglesias counters that no, it probably cost less. Frankly, I think that’s the wrong debate to have. So I struggled to find a way to voice my issues while distancing myself from that sort of bean-counting.

The last obstacle that kept me from publishing my first draft of this post is that the entire operation feels like such an unqualified victory. Especially in the greater context of the War on Terror, starting eleven and a half years ago with a horrific act of destruction, an act avenged by declaring war on every country except the ones where the responsible parties came from, wars that have cost thousands more lives, tens of thousands if you count non-Americans. Contrast this to last week: shocking tragedy on Monday, planes are in the air again by Tuesday, suspects identified on Thursday, caught on Friday. And we even got a day off work^*! A lone 19-year-old bringing a major American city to a standstill may seem like a Pyrrhic victory, but compared to what nineteen hijackers brought us to, it’s a bargain.

But it’s that last observation that actually spurred me onward. I worry whenever people become inured to the use of power. Over the last ten years, American citizens have gone from outrage to discomfort to indifference at bag checks on the subway, gropings at the airport, and men with assault rifles and Kevlar meandering through public. Now a city gets locked down to find one man. It’s easy to cheer this as a victory. The hard part is playing with hypotheticals: what if it took longer than a week to catch him? What if they got the wrong man? What if this level of police coordination were used to crack down on protestors rather than terrorists? When we reach the point at which armored SUVs become objectionable to us, will there be too much precedent to object?

Seth Godin, in a much lighter context, wrote:

“You can’t argue with success…”

Of course you can. What else are you going to argue with? Failure can’t argue with you, because it knows that it didn’t work.

The art of staying successful is in being open to having the argument. Great organizations fail precisely because they refuse to do this.

American federal agencies and news bureaus^** pounce heaviest on perceived failures in counterterrorism and turn hagiographic eyes on successes. If progress were the goal, it would be the other way around, to keep success from creating blinders and to keep fear of failure from encouraging the wrong behavior.

This is why, in the face of what’s apparently an overwhelming success in the War on Terror, I remain reticent.

Everyone has their own image of “what makes America great.” You can almost picture the montage: Little League baseball, fast cars on mountain highways, construction workers building skyscrapers, business executives shaking hands, kids on field trips seeing historical landmarks. When a major American city gets locked down, none of that is on display. I fear a generation that, when asked what makes America great, answers, “the ability to deliver swift, overwhelming force.” And I hate having to choose between those visions.

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* For knowledge workers, of course, there’s no such thing as a day off, not where wi-fi and 4G yet cast a shadow.

** But I repeat myself.

In 2001, my father worked in the DC area, sometimes commuting into the city depending on his work schedule. Obviously nothing happened any nearer than Arlington on September 11th of that year, but in the first couple hours we didn’t really know what was going on. When Seung-Hui Cho shot up the Virginia Tech campus in April 2007, he happened to pick a day when my brother didn’t have any classes. Yesterday, a series of explosions went off just two miles from my office, maiming dozens and killing (as of this writing) three. Terror has stalked my family like a hyena for the last eleven years, for no better reason than that we live on the East Coast.

“They’re trying to kill me,” Yossarian told him calmly.
“No one’s trying to kill you,” Clevinger cried.
“Then why are they shooting at me?” Yossarian asked.
“They’re shooting at everyone,” Clevinger answered. “They’re trying to kill everyone.”
“And what difference does that make?”

- Joseph Heller, Catch-22

In the shadow of a tragedy like this, anger is a frequent response. I’ve already seen it a couple places on Twitter, Facebook, and the like. I understand the temptation: a day like this makes people feel weak. But lashing out blind doesn’t make you strong, especially if you already had the bigger stick. There are better ways to be strong:

Here’s where I get tripped up: every article I’ve read on the subject refers to ASMR as “self-described” or “self-diagnosed.” The Wikipedia page calls it a claimed biological phenomenon. Boing Boing, citing the NPR segment, refers to it as “self-diagnosed” and links to a British professor who “doesn’t discount the possibility that it’s real.” There’s no outright skepticism, but everyone who reports on it seems to stand in the doorway, one hand on the frame, their mouth half-open and their head cocked.

From a certain perspective, though, isn’t every pleasure/pain phenomenon self-reported? Isn’t this why ERs still use 1-10 pain scales on admission forms, rather than hooking patients up to the agonometer and taking a reading? If thousands of people are independently claiming to get totally high on the sound of someone brushing a towel over a microphone, why qualify it as “apparent”? Do reporters think they’re lying?

• Is Batman a Virgin?: Examining how Batman subverts the usual action hero trope of superior virility.
  

• Suits and the Unsustainable Premise: How long can a show’s core premise strain our suspension of disbelief before breaking? And why do we let them get away with it?
  

• Mass Effect 3 and the Ethics of Revolutionary Choices: In which we talk about the ending of ME:3.
  

• The Evitability of Football Narratives: Why the stories we craft around sports – particularly football – are built differently from all other stories.

1. I believe it’s important to challenge the notion that self-publishing is not a viable means of releasing a book, and hard numbers are the only way to do that (“the plural of anecdote is data!”);
   

2. It’s so hard to get sales data for any books – self-published or traditionally published – that any data is useful data.

Enough throat clearing! The numbers:

From December 2011 through November 2012 – twelve calendar months of sales – Too Close to Miss sold 2728 copies. That’s across Amazon Kindle, Barnes & Noble Nook, various Smashwords platforms (primarily iTunes’ iBookstore), and hard copies on Amazon via Createspace. Total royalties, in my pocket, were $3984.

What does this mean?

• I had to give away 100,000 copies free to sell those 2700. It’s impossible to say how many fewer copies I’d have sold without that bump in rankings, but, going off the trends of the months leading up to May and June (when I saw the biggest spike in Amazon), I’ll say at least 800 fewer units. I don’t know if this is a sustainable pattern of promotion; I suspect not.
  

• Four grand ain’t enough to live on, at least not anywhere nicer than Cape Verde.
  

• This is 2700 copies sold on primarily word of mouth. I bought no ads, did no interviews, and held no book release parties. I had several very nice reviews, but nothing in huge, traditional venues. I find this pretty reassuring.
  

• If I had sold Too Close to Miss to a traditional publisher in November 2011 – meaning, if I’d lucked out and found a buyer the same month I put it on the market, which is akin to a winning Powerball ticket – I’d have most likely netted a $5,000 advance. There’s no database of average advances for first-time, non-celebrity authors, but anecdotes I’ve heard (blog posts, conference speakers) say that $5000, if not less, is a good benchmark. And I wouldn’t have even received it all at once. And Too Close to Miss wouldn’t even be in print right now (lead time between signing a contract and seeing the actual book in stores ranges from 12-18 months, if not more).
  

• More to the point, Too Close to Miss would have been a terrible investment for a publishing house of any real size. 2700 copies in a year? Which publishers do print runs of fewer than five thousand?
  

Self-publishing Too Close to Miss was the right call. If a traditional publisher had bought Too Close to Miss, I would likely have made less money, made fewer sales, and wouldn’t even have the book in print yet. This way, it’s trucking along at its slow and steady pace, getting my name out there and generating interest in the Mara Cunningham series.

Too Close to Miss, the first Mara Cunningham novel, is still available just about anywhere you can buy books online – Amazon, Barnes & Noble, iTunes, and other stores. The second Mara Cunningham novel, Too Hard to Handle, is also available in select stores.