You see lots of crazy stuff on social media. My Facebook feed (and I am a relative newcomer to FB) alternates between regaling me with AI generated stories of family conflict which approach Greek tragedy in their proportions (who would have thought spending one kid’s college fund on another or wearing white to your stepsister’s wedding was such a common cause of drama?!?) and some very very politically incorrect memes and videos (the nicest one is an AI generated Bigfoot working as a barrista who throws some woke hipster through a window for using they/their as her pronouns).
I was on Google+ for six years, til it closed down in early 2019, precipitating my creation of this blog. Whilst, probably due to the lack of deep fake AI video and AI generated drama stories, it was not as puerile as what I waste my time doom scrolling on Facebook, some of the real authentic content generated by my fellow ‘Plussers’ was pretty bizarre.
One fellow who sticks out was on a mission, according to his G+ profile, to ‘return America to God’. He once asked people on our G+ community (I think I was on an American Conservative community) what sort of Bible was acceptable to read. You see, a preacher in the Deep South (whence he came) had warned people over the radio that if they read anything except the King James Version, then they would go to Hell….
And we claim that Forrest Gump is a fictional character.
This fellow also reacted rather weirdly to the death of popular American techno-thriller writer Tom Clancy, he of late Cold War classics like The Hunt For Red October and The Cardinal Of The Kremlin. Tom Clancy was in his late 60s, and died of complications from a heart condition. Or so we have been told. This KJV Bible thumper did not believe this. Obviously Tom Clancy was too young and too rich from his books and movie rights to die of natural causes before reaching his 90s. Ergo he had been murdered, either by the US Government or other sinister forces, because ‘he knew too much’.
[Really, I need to rejoin MeWe, where the really crazy people post online.]
Which is as good a place as any to reflect on Tom Clancy. I first was exposed to his writings through the great thriller film of Red October starring Sean Connery and Alec Baldwin circa 1989, followed by Patriot Games, which starred Harrison Ford. Soon after in September 1992, I acquired a copy of Clear And Present Danger in a giveaway from a bookstore in the CBD when I bought some other book. That more or less hooked me, and by August 1994 I had devoured the rest of the Jack Ryan novels to the point where I bought Debt Of Honour in hardback.
Debt Of Honour is where Tom Clancy started to get a little silly – his protagonist Jack Ryan transforms at this end of this novel from reluctant spy to accidental US President. The next few books cover his challenges as President.
I have occasionally said that if you want to understand the way the average middle class American’s mind works, you need to read Tom Clancy. I expect that Jack Ryan serves as an avatar for Clancy’s own beliefs, which are very much American, particularly on matters like abortion and the death penalty (state’s rights on the first, and generally pro on the second).
Tom Clancy’s views also changed over the course of his literary career. In Patriot Games, which was written in the mid 1980s, one character has to talk Jack Ryan down from killing some terrorists who had just tried to murder his family. The argument is that he needs to avoid vigilante action and trust in the Rule of Law (ie state sponsored executions) to do the job for him. Similarly, in Clear And Present Danger, Jack Ryan is the opponent of illegal black operations against the Columbian cartels sponsored by rogue elements in the NSC and CIA.
Put simply, bad guys deserve to be dead, but you do it within the law, not without some sort of Due Process.
But by the time he got around to writing his sequel series, his views had changed. He started a sequel series featuring a shadow agency supported secretly by Ryan as ex-President, containing a safe full of undated presidential pardons for immunity and funded by insider trading facilitated by the actual intelligence community. This series starred Ryan’s son and nephews as assassins employed to secretly take out terrorists and other enemies of the state.
This late conversion to vigilantism, along with the over the top nature of the latter books, lost me as a fan of Tom Clancy.
I recently dug out the last of my Tom Clancy novels, the hardbacks, from the box in the wardrobe in the back room which doubles as my study, and donated them to the street library in Canning Street. After all, I am not going to read them again, and I might need the room in the wardrobe for something else.
One of them, Executive Orders, is still there after an entire month – that is the one where Communist China and India and a reunified Iran-Iraq conspire to overthrow America. Which got me wondering as to how relevant Tom Clancy, former Cold Warrior, in the post Cold War world?
[Also, why is it the only one to remain, despite being free to take? Is it something to do with the US flag on the jacket in this hyper erratic second Trumpian presidency?]
Clancy was a late comer to Cold War spy literature, and the fall of the Berlin Wall meant that he had to transition across after only three novels. Len Deighton never really bothered to keep writing after the end of the Cold War, but he had done all his best work by then. And Frederick Forsythe, for all that his best work was in the 1970s, was able to focus on other issues than the Cold War.
Both however, in keeping the scale of their writings small, rather than grandiose, were able to avoid becoming increasingly preposterous the way that Clancy did. [Note that I don’t mention John LeCarre – I plan to read his Smiley novels now in retirement.]
I also note that only four of the novels got to film adaption – and Sum Of All Fears had to wait years after publication and then had a delayed release due to 9/11. I think that even Hollywood could not suspend disbelief in relation to what Clancy wrote in his later novels.
And thus I farewell Tom Clancy and his novels from my life, and hope that his posthumous ghost writers (I hope not literally) stop producing more utter tosh to clutter shelves in my local bookstore.
Lost For Words! 