Speaking Truth to Power

By James M. Jackson

After deciding to become a published author, I made a conscious decision to avoid politics in my blogs and online commentary. Because I have an interest in finance, many of my early blogs related to financial topics with an emphasis on personal finance. Those blogs were fact-based, and although they expressed my opinions, they avoided espousal of any political views.

As my writing turned more toward fiction, so did my blogging and online commentary. Again, I avoided politics, instead concentrating on the craft and business of writing.

I continued to use my financial knowledge, especially regarding Social Security, Medicare, and pension plans, to address factual errors I saw in others’ blogs and social media posts. It didn’t matter to me whether I agreed with the other person’s position; what I tried to do was point out factual misunderstandings. Similarly, I used my MBA and general business knowledge to shed light on the financial concerns of writers.

I was born a numbers guy. My mother taught high school math. My father was a statistician, and from him I learned at a young age the difference between correlation and causation. In a college course Dad taught, he had a slide that showed the correlation between the number of stork nests in some European city (Rotterdam?) and the number of births in the city. Turned out that the more stork nests there were, the more babies were born. The correlation was huge and continued for years!

Did storks deliver babies in that city? (The purported causality.) No. Rotterdam babies came into the world in the normal way. The connection between these two sets of highly correlated statistics occurs because the city constructed houses with flat roofs—perfect conditions for storks to build nests. As the population of the city grew, the number of human births grew, the number of flat-roofed houses grew, and the number of stork nests grew.

Mark Twain attributed to British Prime Minister Disraeli the quote that there are “lies, damned lies, and statistics.” To that I would like to add an amendment: There are lies, damned lies, statistics, and politics using statistics. By politics, I include politicians and those who frame political arguments, be they think-tanks, “news” media, or so-called influencers.

In 1955, The American Friends Service Committee issued a publication Speak Truth to Power: A Quaker Search for an Alternative to Violence[i]. It addressed peacemaking in a world of violence. The phrase, speaking truth to power, has been picked up and used/misused by many organizations and movements since then. The introduction to the 1955 publication indicates the idea of speaking truth to power is taken from the charge given to 18^th century Friends to make the effort to speak from the deepest insight of the Quaker faith.

In the publication, the Friends claimed to speak to power in three senses:

• To those who hold high places in our national life and bear the terrible responsibility of making decisions for war or peace.
• To the American people who are the final reservoir of power in this country and whose values and expectations set the limits for those who exercise authority.
• To the idea of Power itself, and its impact on Twentieth Century life.

While I do not share the Quaker faith, I have come to realize I do feel strongly about speaking truth. There should and must be free discussion about what policies our governments—local, state, and federal—should implement. As a fiscal conservative and social liberal, I may or may not agree with those policies. That is of little importance, because, through our representative election process over time, the body politic at large decides policies. What is critically important to me is that when discussing actual or proposed policies, those in power, politicians and media, use facts to argue the merits of the policies. Facts about our current situation. Facts about the effect of the proposed policy.

I feel called to speak to power when politics uses statistics and lies to obfuscate the truth behind the policies.

If this decision adversely affects my writing business, so be it.

Does this mean my future Writers Who Kill blogs will be political, speaking truth to power? No. They will be about my writing world, just as this blog is about my writing world. And yet, that, too, is part of speaking to power.

I look forward to your comments.

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[i] Speak Truth to Power: A Quaker Search for an Alternative to Violence https://quaker.org/legacy/sttp.html?form=MG0AV3

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James M. Jackson authors the Seamus McCree series. Full of mystery and suspense, these thrillers explore financial crimes, family relationships, and what happens when they mix. To learn more information about Jim and his books, check out his website, https://jamesmjackson.com. You can sign up for his newsletter (and get to read a free Seamus McCree short story).

Fire and Ice

by Jim Jackson

Here’s a YouTube version of Robert Frost’s short poem, “Fire and Ice,” which was first published in Harper’s Magazine in 1920 and later incorporated in the Pulitzer-winning book New Hampshire. It’s a short poem, and I give you permission to do a quick listen before reading the rest of this blog.

With all the bloviating going on between the heads of state of North Korea and the United States, I was reminded of Frost’s poem, written not long after the end of World War I, but well before the nuclear attacks by the U.S. on Japan at the end of World War II.

I grew up in the age of “duck and cover.” [Oh heck, I just Goggled the phrase and came up with this nine-minute 1951 Civil Defense film featuring Bert the Turtle.] I remember in school curling into a ball under my desk, covering my head and neck with my arms. Other times we filed into the hallways and, making sure not to be opposite a door where flying glass would be a problem, we impatiently sat covering our heads with our hands. The assumption was we should do everything possible to survive an enemy attack.

My house and school were about six miles away from Kodak Park in Rochester, New York. Kodak Park would have been a very likely target in a nuclear war with the USSR because of its film production and processing capabilities. At the time, all the spy-plane cameras and film were produced by Kodak or Polaroid (also a Rochester company back then).

What no one told us back then was that a typical mid-sized hydrogen bomb when exploded in the atmosphere would have a blast zone of nearly seven miles and a thermal radiation hot zone of fifteen miles. That would have been the effect if either of the four megaton H-bombs the US accidentally dropped on North Carolina on January 24, 1961 when a B-52 broke apart had exploded. Although three of the four “fail-safe” devices on one of the bombs did fail, the fourth held and the devices didn’t trigger an explosion. [i]

The world for me would have ended in fire. Crushed or not, I would have been toast.

For those not so near a likely target, the world might have ended in ice. For many years, “experts” predicted a nuclear winter would follow an all-out nuclear war. The hypothesis was that the firestorms caused by the nuclear bombs would combine to throw so much soot into the atmosphere it would block sufficient sunlight to cause a significant temperature drop and induce a permanent winter—at least until the soot precipitated out of the atmosphere.

Hey good news: we have a cure for global warming—a global nuclear war! While generally discredited now because models show cities won’t burn as originally anticipated and therefore not produce enough atmospheric debris,[ii] it struck a chord of plausibility as the world has experienced global cooling because of atmospheric soot. In 1816 the northern hemisphere suffered a “volcanic winter” generally attributed to the ash plume from the 1815 eruption of Mount Tambora in the East Dutch Indies. In the Berkshires and upstate New York where my ancestors lived there, was wide-spread crop failure as snow fell as late as June and frost occurred throughout the summer.[iii]

As a child, I was never scared of nuclear war. It had no meaning for me. The drills were just one of the things you did, like saying the pledge of allegiance every morning. You didn’t think about the meaning of either one. That changed for me in October 1962 during the Cuban missile crisis. It’s the first international news event that I really recall (I turned twelve while it was going on), and I remember it because of the palpable fear I sensed from adults around me. I remember watching the news with my family as President Kennedy announced on live television the embargo of Cuba. I had to ask my parents where “Cuber” was (and learned about New England accents!) I remember the huge typeface of the newspaper that included the critical word: BLOCKADE.

Negotiations worked that time, but there was a subsequent boom in backyard bunker building.

Now it seems some of the 1% are preparing for all kinds of potential disaster with luxury bunkers.[iv] I have neighbors who are contemplating how they could become subsistence farmers and hunt the woods for their meat. My neighbors have armed themselves in preparation of that dystopian future; they would surely have to defend their supplies and food from those who won’t be prepared.

I am making no such preparations, and I frankly have no fears of a nuclear holocaust. When I think of what it would take to survive a nuclear war or collapse of our food supplies, whatever the cause, I realize I don’t want to be a survivor. Maybe it’s because I’m on the downward slope of life. Maybe it’s because I am so distraught about our continual worldwide inhumane treatment of our fellow humans that I secretly think the world might be better off if our species became extinct.

I admit to being a chicken when it comes to death. I’d prefer it to happen with no pain and in my sleep. If it comes to a great disaster, I’d rather go in the fire of one big flash and know nothing of it than by the slow freeze of ice.

I have been thinking about the collapse of our food supplies, but in a fictional sense. It’s the proximate trigger for a future I am sketching out for a possible trilogy. I’ll let you know how that works out.

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[i] Forbes Magazine “This Is What Happens When An H-Bomb Explodes Over North Carolina” – September 25, 2013

[ii] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_winter

[iii] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_Without_a_Summer

[iv] http://www.cnn.com/2017/03/20/luxury/doomsday-luxury-bunkers/index.html

Remembering Pearl Harbor

War is caused either by an imperialistic stance by an aggressor, a failure of nations to successfully negotiate their differences, or a combination of the two, which is how the United States ended up in World War Two.

When Japan invaded Manchuria (imperialism), the United States reacted by refusing to sell Japan oil. This was no small matter for Japan, who bought 80% of its oil from U.S. companies. When the terms the U.S. required to begin shipping oil to Japan were too high for the Japanese government to accept and still maintain face—a commodity more important to politicians than to the millions of regular people who suffer when nations resort to war—Japan attacked the U.S. at Pearl Harbor on a date that FDR decried would live in infamy.

In two hours, Japan sank most of our battleships, numerous other vessels, and killed 2,400 people. As battles go, the material losses were major (although temporary, as most of the battleships were raised to fight again). In comparison to other battles, the human loss was small. On a single day at the battle of Antietam (Sharpsburg, MD) nearly 23,000 soldiers died. The atomic bomb dropped at Hiroshima killed over 40,000 people that day and 50,000 -100,000 more in the next four months.

I know all those statistics, but what resonated most with me as I toured Pearl Harbor, part of the World War II Valor in the Pacific National Monument (including the USS Arizona memorial), is the virulent hate so many immediately felt toward those of Japanese heritage living in the United States. In Executive Order 9066, FDR set in motion what would become the mass internment of Americans with Japanese ancestry. In the mainland U.S., over 100,000 were interned. In Hawaii, with a population of over 150,000 individuals with Japanese ancestry, fewer than 2,000 were interned!

Did you know the disparity of treatment of between locations? I did not. This was racism, pure and simple.

Fear allows presidents to take actions that would otherwise be unconstitutional. FDR subjected citizens of Japanese ancestry to the loss of property, freedom, all citizen rights, simply because of fear that they might conspire against their country.

President Lincoln suspended habeas corpus soon after the start of the hostilities now referred to as the Civil War, the War Between the States, or the War of Northern Aggression. The Judiciary determined that the right to suspend habeas corpus resided in Congress, not the President. Lincoln ignored the court order.

Lincoln was wrong to ignore the courts. FDR was wrong to tar all those with Japanese heritage with a single brush. Yet, in surveys, Lincoln and Roosevelt are considered two of our greatest presidents. For example, in the Siena College Research Institute, Presidential Expert Poll of 2010, Lincoln was rated #3, FDR was #1[1].

During the McCarthy era, political persuasion (and sometimes only presumed political persuasion) was cause for citizens to lose their jobs, to be blacklisted by industries regardless of whether they had ever committed any act against the interests of the United States.

This is our past. We should not run away from it. We must remember it to avoid repeating it.

We feared Native Americans and tried to exterminate them, or at least confine them to reservations. We feared Southern sympathizers and allowed presidential power to trump the checks and balances of our three branches of government. We feared the Japanese and illegally interred 100,000 fellow Americans.

Our current president uses fear of race, religion, and national origin to pit U.S. citizen against U.S. citizen. In our society, I am lucky to be privileged: an Anglo-Saxon male with sufficient financial means that I don’t need to rely upon charity to live. From the perspective of those in power, I should be concerned about losing all that I value because of the growing influence of those who are “not our kind.”

They are correct that I am concerned about losing what I most value. However, we have very different concepts about what has greatest value.

If I do not stand with Muslims and Jews and Blacks and Mexicans, if I do not stand with the poor regardless of race or religion; if I don’t object when others’ rights are diminished in response to fear promulgated for political gain; if I allow anyone to trample the inherent worth and dignity of another, I have lost my own soul.

~ Jim

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[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_rankings_of_presidents_of_the_United_States#Siena_College_Research_Institute.2C_Presidential_Expert_Poll_of_2010

Unreliable Narrators

The problem with unreliable narrators is that even when they are telling an important truth, you can’t quite believe them. Unreliable narrators have become quite fashionable of late. Jan and I were turned on to the television show Mr. Robot by her children. They told us we needed to see season one to understand the background and make sense of the current season two.

We watched the first season utilizing Netflix and now are working our way through recorded shows of the second season. [To avoid commercials and their phalanx of unreliable narrators, I watch almost nothing live.] I won’t give away the plot, but suffice it to say, there is at least one major character the viewer needs to treat with a salt lick’s worth of skepticism.

Back a couple of years ago, two “Girl-titled” books included largely unreliable narrators. Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl told the story through the unreliable eyes of both Nick and Amy Dunne. In Girl on the Train, Paula Hawkins created the unreliable Rachel and used her narrative for us to understand or try to understand what happened.

Unreliable narrators aren’t anything new. Humbert in Nabokov’s Lolita is unreliable. So is Alex in Anthony Burgess’s Clockwork Orange. Holden Caulfield tells us up front in JD Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye that “I am the most terrific liar you ever saw in your life.” I’d be willing to argue that even that is a lie.

I frankly don’t like unreliable fictional narrators. I feel as though the author is using a cheap device to trick me. Now that’s just me; the authors have won prizes and millions of satisfied readers, so I’m clearly the troglodyte when it comes to using the technique. (Gone Girl has over one million Goodreads ratings of “really like it” or “it was amazing.”[i])

I worry that we’ve become used to the technique in television and novels, and when it appears in real life, we just dump it into the bucket “unreliable narrator” and move on. Consider the two major party candidates for President of the United States.

As of this writing, PolitiFact has rated 253 Donald Trump statements[ii]. Only thirty-eight were “True” or “Mostly True,” leaving 215 as half-truths or worse. How much worse? They labeled fully 53% of his statements as “False” or “Pants on Fire.” (Pants on Fire statements are both false and make a ridiculous claim.) As I write this blog on Friday, Trump again uttered his claim that Clinton’s 2008 campaign started the (Obama) birther controversy. I’d be willing to bet that even the fictional narrators I labeled as unreliable would score better than Trump.

Hillary Clinton has her own unreliable narrator issues. Of the 252 Clinton statements PolitiFact has checked[iii], 127 or slightly more than 50% were “True” or “Mostly True.” That’s better than three times as many as for Trump. On the negative side, only 13% of Clinton’s statements were labeled as “False” or “Pants on Fire.” While that’s only a quarter of Trump’s fabrications, it’s still pretty bad: one of every eight statements test is untrue. If I had lied that often to my parents my butt would still be sore from my punishment, and justifiably so. Even with a (relatively) better record of telling the truth, it's hard to trust her when she can’t even fess up to having pneumonia.

We citizens of the United States shake our heads and tell pollsters we dislike both candidates (and Trump only a bit worse than Clinton). But we tend to take our candidate’s lies at face value and jump all over the other candidate’s prevarications. It’s just politics, we say.

The only beneficiary I can see in this whole mess is Congress. What? Yep, Congressional approval ratings, which had dropped in 2015 to a low of 11% (that’s only 1 in 9 people approve), have recently increased to 30%[iv]. Compared to the drumbeat of lies from the presidential primaries and race, Congress is starting to look good?

I still don’t like unreliable narrators. I don’t know what they are going to do. That may be okay for fiction, but in real life it’s a problem—and I am not a happy camper.

~ Jim

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[i] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/19288043-gone-girl

[ii] http://www.politifact.com/personalities/donald-trump/

[iii] http://www.politifact.com/personalities/hillary-clinton/

[iv] http://www.gallup.com/poll/195632/approval-congress-inches-september.aspx

Can a Novel Be Developed From Essays?

President Obama signaled his intention to focus more of his attention toward Asia, where the geopolitics is heating up. Today's Salad Bowl Saturday guest, Richard Brawer, turned his attention toward Japan and China well before the president's espoused focus and turned his research into a thriller. Today he tells us the how and why and provides some links for added information.

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Newspaper stories reporting a crime most often describe the scene, the motive and the perpetrator, generally enough information to create a fictional plot and characters. However, opinion pieces and essays generally focus on a subject. Is there enough depth in that single subject to form a plot? Is there enough information to create a protagonist and antagonist?

I think the answer to both of these questions is, yes. A novelist is a person with an extraordinary imagination, a person who is profoundly curious, a person who asks questions, a person who is widely read on many subjects and can use his/her knowledge to create plots, scenes and characters.

There have been many stories in the newspapers about China’s fast growing military and how China is menacing its neighbors, especially Japan. I wondered if I could create a novel from these stories.

I thought about Japan’s and China’s 750 years of hostilities. In 1274 and 1281 under Kublai Khan, China tried to invade Japan and failed both times. More recently, Japan defiled China with the Rape of Nanking and other atrocities during WWII.

Knowing China is still fuming over Japan’s brutality for which Japan never apologized, I asked myself, as China’s military grows stronger, would China try to exact its revenge on Japan? 

But how could China attack Japan with the U.S. vowing to defend Japan? Which brings up another interesting question: Despite U.S. bluster about China’s aggression will the U.S. go to war with China to protect its Asian allies?

To me such a war with China would be like Napoleon’s invasion of Russia. China is too vast, the lines of supply extremely long and China’s military technology is advancing rapidly. It seems like a no win situation for the U.S. or, alternately, will result in a total nuclear war.

Therefore I wondered, would Japan continue to put its survival in the hands of an uncertain ally? Or, would Japan fend off the potential threat from China by building nuclear weapons? 

Being a novelist, as I read more articles about China’s advances in their military prowess, Japan’s anguish over China’s growing harassment of Japan’s businesses within China, and their dispute over two small islands both countries claim, I concluded Japan would build nuclear weapons.

Japan already has vast uranium enriching facilities for their nuclear power plants and could easily enrich uranium to bomb quality in a short time. Japan also has a space program so they have ICBMs that can deliver the bombs.

However, when the U.S. administration realizes Japan is building nuclear weapons it would certainly demand Japan cease and desist. After all, with the U.S. insisting North Korea and Iran abandon their nuclear weapons programs, how could the U.S. allow Japan to go forward without a word?

Would Japan obey the U.S. or would Japan have anticipated drawing the ire of the U.S. and be prepared to thwart the U.S. demands? How would Japan do that? 

The 2010 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Citizens United vs. Federal Election Commission eliminated the amount of money businesses and political action committees could donate to politicians and political parties. That ruling became the basis for my story.

Japan could build a huge political action committee (PAC) to influence politicians to stifle the administration demands on Japan. But Japan is a foreign country. Despite the ruling, their businesses in the U.S. are not allowed to donate to political campaigns. Thus Japan would have to build their PAC clandestinely so it would look like only 100% owned American companies were donating to politicians.

But I still didn’t have much more than a dissertation on Japan/China/U.S. relationships. What I needed were characters. What makes a riveting novel are characters in conflict. It’s how the characters resolve their conflicts that keeps the readers turning the pages. Here is the final plot and characters I developed.

Toshio Nagoya, descended from a long line of samurai and the ultra-nationalist CEO of Japan’s largest Keiretsu, plots to build nuclear weapons to protect his country from a menacing China. Using his cousin, John Nagoya, a lawyer and second generation Japanese-American, they build a large PAC (political action committee) to thwart the expected United States’ cease-and-desist demands.

That’s the catalyst that draws three families, Toshio’s, John’s and Senator Morrison’s, intertwined by blood and marriage into conflict with each other, and how conspiracy, lust, infidelity, revenge, betrayal and murder destroy those families.

After I had written the book I worried if it really was believable or would readers say, “Ridiculous.” The PAC Conspiracy is contemporary fiction, not fantasy. The plot and the characters have to have some merit of believability.

The PAC Conspiracy came out in December 2012. Six months later this story broke in the newspaper:

“Japan Nuclear Plan Unsettles U.S.” The Wall Street Journal, May 1, 2013

From the article: “Japan is preparing to start up a massive nuclear-fuel reprocessing plant over the objections of the (U.S.) administration…The Rokkasho reprocessing facility is capable of producing nine tons of weapons-usable plutonium annually, enough to build 2000 bombs.”

The article goes on to say how the administration objects to this reprocessing. “Allowing Japan to acquire large amounts of plutonium without clear prospects for a plutonium-use plan is a bad example for the rest of the world.” (NOTE: This isn’t much of a demand for Japan to cease and desist.)

A few months later this story broke: “Taiwan Says China Threat is Growing” The Wall Street Journal October 9, 2013.

From the article: “China will have the military capability by the year 2020 to fend off any foreign effort to stop it from invading Taiwan, the island’s defense minister said.”

In my opinion, after taking Taiwan, China will set its sights on Japan, which is why Japan will build nuclear bombs soon.

You don’t have to read the newspapers to learn about the arms race in Asia. The PAC Conspiracy explains it all in a “compelling political thriller.” Enjoy!

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After graduating the University of Florida and a six month basic training tour in the National Guard, Richard Brawer worked 35 years in the textile and retail industries. Always an avid reader, he began writing mystery, suspense and historical fiction novels in 1994. When not writing, he spends his time sailing and growing roses. He has two married daughters and lives in New Jersey with his wife.

The PAC Conspiracy (released late 2013) is available from Amazon for Kindles or any device with a Kindle app. The novel is currently on sale at a special price of $0.99.

To learn more about Richard, the inspiration for The PAC Conspiracy or his other books, visit his website www.silklegacy.com.

Bubble Wrap Politics

Bubble Wrap Politics

I recently had a conversation with a friend in New Zealand who commented that he had to be careful with what he said to Americans about the presidential election because people for both candidates are easily offended.  I think he’s right.  It seems to me that many people in both camps have locked themselves into a way of perceiving the election, and maybe the whole world, in a way that discounts any information or opinion that diverges from their preconceptions.  Many of us are like separate bubbles in a sheet of bubble wrap, i.e., we feel complete and whole. We don’t acknowledge our common connections. 

I believe the last time the American population was as polarized as now was shortly before the Civil War. 

Governor Romney’s error during the second presidential debate in stating President Obama did not immediately denounce the killings in Libya as, an “act of terror” could be a reflection of the current state of politics. Apparently there was, and may still be, statements on right-wing blogs that the President did not use that language until weeks after the tragic events in spite of the transcripts and videotape showing that he did. The actual statement was ignored because it did not fit the stereotype of the president as weak on foreign policy. 

Putting politics aside for the moment, logically why wouldn’t President Obama describe act of terror as acts of terror?  If Governor Romney had been president, I believe he would have used such language.  I can’t think of any past president of the United States who would not. 

Some time ago a friend of mine mistakenly said Governor Romney told the press he had not taken part in the war in Viet Nam because he was personally “too valuable.” to risk his life in a war he had supported.  I’ll give my friend credit for admitting and correcting the statement, which originated from a politically satirical source.  Of course, Mr. Romney didn’t say anything like that. Who would?  It went around as a rumor because it fit the stereotype of the Governor as an unusually privileged person.

I have heard comments suggesting that each contestant has a close personal tie with the devil.

It is comfortable and comforting to interact with people who share our values and beliefs.  It’s reassuring to interact and have our beliefs supported. But when we exclude people with other ideas and values we risk ending up with perceptions that are more idealized and/or demonized than realistic.

Do you agree?