The Intriguing Mr. Ambler
My Bad is So Fun
9/11/01
All in This Together
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The Intriguing Mr. Ambler 

This article first appeared in Crime Spree magazine for January, 2006 and is reprinted by permission. 

Many years ago I went to a book signing held by one of my favorite authors, the late Ross Thomas. I had recently discovered Thomas's smart, funny, cynical political thrillers, and I was excited about meeting him and hearing what he had to say about writing. Thomas did intrigue: jaded, knowing tales of good old-fashioned dirty dealing in politics or on its fringes, often in a foreign setting, and he did it as well as anybody has ever done it. Intrigue as a genre, alas, does not seem to occupy the place of honor it once did (the knife in the back, metaphorical or otherwise, is less cinematic than a fireball) but it was once a craft practiced by masters.

And much to my delight, Ross Thomas began his remarks that day by acknowledging one of those masters as a major inspiration. "When I was a boy in Oklahoma," Thomas said, "much of what I learned about the world came from the books of Eric Ambler."

I recognized a kindred spirit, because Ambler had done the same for me as a boy in rural Illinois. I can remember curling up on the sofa with A Coffin for Dimitrios, rows of corn visible through the window, and being absolutely transported to Istanbul in the 1930's. No author has ever had a better gift for evoking place; no author has ever given a better sense of the inner workings of security services, shady political organizations, dubious business concerns or dysfunctional countries. To read Ambler is to learn about the practical matters of the world, especially as they stray from the straight and narrow.

Ambler, who died in 1998, is often credited with inventing the modern espionage novel. Whatever merit such claims may have (some would say Somerset Maugham did it with Ashenden), Ambler undoubtedly set the tone for the modern genre with a series of seminal books in the nineteen-thirties. Before Ambler, spy fiction was dominated by melodrama, the cloak and dagger, the fiendish plot, the cackling arch-villain. Ambler brought spy fiction into the real world, the world of jealously guarded industrial processes, patiently cultivated informants, tangled bureaucratic thickets. He showed us that espionage is often concerned with the mundane. The mundane, however, is never dull, not with the scent of violence hanging faintly in the air.

Ambler's career as a novelist had two distinct phases: before and after the Second World War. In the mid and late thirties he produced his genre-changing classics, including Background to Danger, Cause for Alarm, A Coffin for Dimitrios, and Journey into Fear. These books capture the fatalism and decline of the thirties, with fascism on the rise and war looming. The setting is mainly eastern or southern Europe, those countries where society was failing and the thugs were taking over. Dimitrios sketches the political history of the Balkans through the story of a writer researching the life of a dead Greek criminal; Cause for Alarm shows a politically naive British engineer confronting fascism in Mussolini's Italy.

The inevitable war interrupted Ambler's career: he enlisted in the British army, and, after a short spell in the artillery, spent the rest of the war making training films. After the war he turned to screenwriting for a few years, even receiving an Oscar nomination for his adaptation of Nicholas Monsarrat's The Cruel Sea. He did not resume writing novels until 1951, when Judgment on Deltchev appeared.

The second phase of Ambler's career tracked the Cold War through its hottest decades. Deltchev recounted a show trial in an unnamed communist country, Passage of Arms the fate of a cache of illegal weapons hidden by a Southeast Asian guerrilla band. Nearly thirty years before Saddam Hussein became a household name in the west, A Kind of Anger depicted the spillover of violent Iraqi/Kurdish politics into European streets. Ambler's interests ranged the world: State of Siege and Passage of Arms take place in Southeast Asia, Dr. Frigo in the French Antilles. Most of the books, however, are set somewhere within an easy drive of the Mediterranean. The Balkans, Turkey, Greece, southern France: that's what I think of as Ambler territory.

Ambler always rooted his stories in a real political situation; from the Balkan chaos of the twenties to the rise of Palestinian terror in the seventies, the real world was always a vivid presence in Ambler's novels. Politically, Ambler territory is the society threatened by political violence. Unstable countries, guerrilla movements, dictatorships: Ambler heroes negotiate perilous waters. While he had inclined to the left in the nineteen thirties, Ambler's books never took a partisan political position. Ambler was too good a novelist to do anything other than observe with his skeptical eye and show the political world in all its folly and duplicity. If there is a political stance in Ambler's work, it is opposition to extremism, whether of the right or the left. (Both sides supply villains in the Ambler corpus.)

Ambler heroes are never intelligence professionals, though the professionals usually take the stage at some point after the hero has gotten in over his head. Engineers, journalists, and writers are heavily represented; other protagonists include a plantation manager, a physician, a lawyer, and, in a wonderful departure from form, a less-than-successful swindler. Ambler's heroes are typically drawn into intrigue by the skills they possess: an engineer finds he has knowledge coveted by intelligence agencies, a journalist hired to track down a celebrity fugitive does his job all too well. Along the way we learn as much about diverse trades and rackets as we do the business of espionage, which is a key element of Ambler's appeal.

The fascination is in the details: the vicissitudes of running a trading company headquartered in Beirut or the complexities of a legal case spanning two continents. Ambler shows us a spy's patient procedure for suborning an employee of the Yugoslav Ministry of Marine and the significance of ballistic data from an Italian arms factory. We see how journalists cultivate sources and how arms dealers solve logistics problems. We learn about the mechanics of blackmail and international banking.

I had always assumed that this intimate knowledge of Turkish police stations, Italian arms factories, Malay rubber plantations, Paris news bureaus and other arcana must have been the result of extensive personal experience. I guessed Ambler was a former intelligence officer (like David Cornwell, a.k.a. John LeCarré) or perhaps a world-ranging journalist. When I first read his biography, I was surprised to find out that he was nothing of the sort. He was in fact born into a show-business family, started out as a music-hall comedian, and worked mainly in advertising before moving to Paris to dedicate himself to writing (though he did study engineering and worked briefly for an electrical equipment firm as a young man). When he wrote A Coffin for Dimitrios with its vivid evocation of intrigue on the Bosphorous, he had never been to Istanbul.

This amazed me. I had always supposed that good writing had to be based on personal experience, that authenticity rested on having been there and done that. As I learned more about Ambler, I realized that an author's material need not be limited to personal experience, that a writer who pays attention and does his homework can convey a sense of authenticity even if he has never left his armchair. Convincing writing is simply writing that respects the reader's sense of plausibility. Above all, what satisfies the reader is the old-fashioned literary virtues: plot, pacing, character, a lively style.

And Ambler was expert in these. He was a productive professional writer with experience in many genres: plays, short stories, screenplays and novels, not to mention the advertising copy, army training films and other menial labor that taught him to pound the keys on deadline. The lesson Ambler teaches is that what makes a good writer is mastery of the craft of writing, whatever the real-world experiences of the writer.

Even more than his revelation of unsuspected aspects of the real world, then, Ambler's continuing appeal rests on the perfectly tuned suspense of his plotting and the elegant concision of his prose. His dialogue is marked by its economy; it always moves the story, without being pedestrian. Dialogue is not the centerpiece of an Ambler novel, the way it is in an Elmore Leonard book. The most interesting voice in an Ambler novel is always that of the narrator. Many of the books are told in the first person; in the third-person narratives the tone is wise, detached, amused. An Ambler story is told, whether in first person or third, by an ironic voice, knowing and insouciant, frequently quite funny. Consider, for example, the wonderful opening lines of The Care of Time:

The warning message arrived on Monday, the bomb itself on Wednesday. It became a busy week.

Or the credo of Ambler's Anglo-Egyptian anti-hero Arthur Abdel Simpson, who appears in The Light of Day and Dirty Story: I was too young when my father was killed to have known him well; but one or two of his pet sayings have always remained in my memory... One, I remember, was "Never volunteer for anything," and another was "Bullshit baffles brains."

Ambler was a master of conveying character through description:

The Greek was a dark, lean man of middle age with intelligent, rather bulbous eyes and a way of bringing his lips together at the end of a sentence as though amazed at his own lack of discretion. (A Coffin for Dimitrios)

Miss Lipp made me think of twenty-eight. In fact she was thirty-six; but I only found that out later. She looked twenty-eight to me. She was tall with short brownish-blond hair, and the kind of figure that you have to notice, no matter what dress covers it. She also had the sort of eyes, insolent, sleepy, and amused, and the full good-humored mouth which tell you that she knows you can't help watching the way her body moves, and that she doesn't give a damn whether you do so or not; watching is not going to get you anywhere anyway. (The Light of Day)

Ambler was also a stylistic experimenter, trying out differing points of view, offbeat voices and sleights of hand such as making English dialogue sound French. Several of the books feature substantial passages consisting of letters, transcripts or reports, as in an epistolary novel. This does not make them dull:

Dear Mr. Halliday,

On its way to you by post there is a parcel wrapped in ordinary brown paper. However, in order to distinguish it from any other parcel you might happen to receive at about the same time, this one is sealed with black electrical tape. The consequences of your trying to open this parcel yourself would be disastrous for both of us... (The Care of Time)

As for the vivid sense of place in an Ambler novel, I was surprised on going back to look at the novels at how light the author's touch is. An Ambler book leaves the reader with an impression of having breathed in great drafts of atmosphere, but that quality is created in an extremely economical way, with mostly sparse descriptive passages. In fact it was never accomplished simply with a list of physical features:

In that kind of hotel almost everything except the outside walls has been modified over the years by owners trying, usually without success, to keep pace with changing standards of comfort and convenience. The quest for space in which to install more bathrooms and utility ducts has always been hard on stairwells. This one seemed to have been remodeled for the use of mountain goats. (The Care of Time)

Lunch at the Ajoupa can never be entirely enjoyable. At its best the food may be just palatable, but the restaurant service is always bad. All the competent waitresses work in the more profitable bar areas. Those in the restaurant are either languid beauties who do nothing but admire themselves in the mirrors or boisterous village girls who shout a lot at one another, bang their hips against the furniture and drop things. They are largely unsupervised. The chefs de rang supposedly in charge are hard-faced women who patrol their tables looking not for inadequacies in the service, but for dissatisfied guests whom they can intimidate. (Dr. Frigo)

Ambler knew that readers have little patience with description unless it is in itself entertaining or illuminating; he also knew that places are inhabited by people, which is the key to their distinctiveness. He was above all an observer of people and how they make the world we live in.

That is the key to Ambler's influence and enduring popularity- he paid attention. He talked to people and explored the places they live in, and he learned practical things about the way the world works. When you read an Ambler book you encounter not just the built-in drama of espionage and intrigue, but also the routine drama of people at work, the world going about its business. Ambler knew that the essence of literature was to make the world interesting, and he was expert enough at the craft of writing to accomplish that. Over a fifty-year career he produced one of the great bodies of work in crime fiction or any other kind of fiction and permanently changed a genre. Best of all, his urbane, witty voice kept us up too late turning pages. If you haven't read Ambler yet, please refill your glass and make yourself comfortable: I have a proposition that may intrigue you.

Sam Reaves counts Eric Ambler among his most important influences.

I'm not going to appeal to your better nature. I'm not going to coax or cajole. I'm not going to tell you that you should avoid grammar mistakes because good grammar is the sign of an orderly mind or that language is what unites us and needs to be conserved. I'm not even going to tell you that you should improve your English in order to sound more educated, or because it will improve your job prospects or help you to impress people. That's probably not true anyway.

No, I'm not going to waste my time with any of that. I'm going to be blunt. Every time you say "My bad!" you sound like an idiot.

That's right. You sound like an idiot. You heard me.

Unfortunately, you have a lot of company. Most of the population of the United States sounds like a bunch of idiots these days. We hear things like "That was so fun!" and "Between you and I, it's a problem." We hear "The thing is, is that I don't have access to the file," and "The meeting will be chaired by John and myself."

Don't worry, I can help. But you have to want to change. You have to want to stop sounding like an idiot. If you're happy sounding like an idiot, you can stop reading now and go on doing what you're doing. Most likely nobody will ever comment on the way you talk, because they're all talking the same way. So who cares? Only those of us who know how to talk right. There aren't many of us left, but we know who we are. And we are laughing at the rest of you because you sound like idiots.

Now, if you're tired of sounding like an idiot, you're going to have to pay attention for a little while. Not long, probably not as long as you would pay attention to an episode of Jerry Springer or Survivor, but a few minutes anyway. You're going to have to give a few seconds' thought to things you should have learned in grade school but didn't because you were daydreaming about Menudo or trying to hit your friend Mikey with an eraser. It will take a little effort, but then probably much less effort than you'd put into beating Grand Theft Auto.

If you can't face that effort, quit now. Nobody will care. Least of all me, believe me. I couldn't care less. You heard me: I could not care less. Your mother will still love you if you keep on saying "my bad" or "let Susan and I do it." Your boss doesn't care if you say "Bill and myself are looking into that now." Keep reading only if you really want to stop sounding like an idiot. I can help you.

Now pay attention.

Saying "my bad" is like saying "her beautiful" or "his smart". It doesn't make sense. It sounds like a two-year-old just learning to talk. It sounds like a pocket translator that fell into the toilet and got soaked. It sounds as if you just got off the boat and know seventeen words of English. It sounds as if you suffered a brain injury and are having to painstakingly re-learn your native language. It sounds ridiculous.

Look, bad is an adjective. Remember what that means? (I'm going to try to keep the terminology to a minimum here because I know you can't handle too much, but it helps to have a label for things. If I were teaching you to repair cars, you'd have to know what to call the carburetor, right? So make an effort.) Adjectives are words that describe things or people, like big, happy, red or tumescent. They don't name things; that would be a noun, like ball, car, John or death. Adjectives describe nouns, as in a red ball or John is happy. And a word indicating possession, like my, can only go before a noun, as in my accountant or your nose. We can't say my happy or our tired, because it makes no sense and sounds stupid. So why do you keep saying "My bad"?

I know the answer to that: because everyone else is saying it. And yeah, I know language changes and evolves, blah, blah, blah. But sometimes it evolves in stupid ways, and this is one of them.

There's a perfectly good noun which is what you really mean when you say "my bad." How about "my mistake?" Doesn't that make more sense? Of course it does. If that sounds too stilted to you, how about "my fault"? People used to say that all the time before some idiot started the fad for "my bad". Or if you are terrified of sounding too refined you could always say, "I messed up," or any of its variants with increasingly obscene verbs. Just do us all a favor and don't say "my bad" any more. It sounds stupid.

OK, adjectives and nouns again. I know this is going to come as a shock to you, but fun is a noun. That's right, it's the name of a thing, like joy, bliss, boredom or disgust. And when was the last time you heard somebody say "My husband is so disgust when he eats nachos," or "That movie is so entertainment." If you heard someone say those things you'd think they had a shaky handle on the English language. That's what I think when I hear you say, "The party was so fun."

What would be better? Try this on for size: "The party was such fun." To help you, try to remember this model: "What you are saying is such crap." I realize you are probably thinking that about me right now. Would you say it's "so crap"? Draw your own conclusions.

This one drives me nuts. It may be as stupid as "my bad". It may be worse, in fact. What makes it worse is the fact that people who say this think they are going out of their way to sound educated. In reality they sound like idiots. Now, I know where it comes from: when you were in grade school not paying attention, the one thing that sank in, the single thing your poor harried teachers accomplished in all those years, was to get you to stop saying "Me and Johnny are going to the park." Now, that was a good thing, because of course me is the object form, not the subject form. More terminology if you can stay awake for a few seconds: In the sentence John loves Mary, John is the subject and Mary is the object. If you substitute pronouns (don't ask) for the names, it becomes He loves her. Got that? Not Him loves she, because that would be stupid. Well, when you say "Between you and I, this is a problem," or "Please allow my wife and I to express our deepest condolences," you sound just that stupid, because you are using the wrong form of the pronoun. You are using the subject form, I, where you need the object form, me. "Me and Johnny are going to the park" is wrong because you are using the object form where you need the subject form, while "Let Mary and I do it" is wrong for the opposite reason.

What happened was that you over-generalized from being scolded about "Me and Johnny are going to the park" and decided, for reasons that are frankly beyond me, that "me and Johnny" is always wrong and you should always say "Johnny and I". But that's stupid. Sometimes "me and Johnny", or if you prefer, "Johnny and me", is right.

If all this talk about subjects and objects is too much for you, try this simple test: leave out Johnny. Whenever you are in doubt about whether to use I or me, just leave out the other guy and ask yourself if you would say "Allow I to express my condolences" or "The new schedule is a problem for I." Of course you wouldn't. That would sound unbelievably stupid. So why does adding Johnny change anything? It doesn't. There's no excuse for this one.

Here's what Tony Blair said the other day, which should put the last nail in the coffin of the idea that the British speak English better than we do: "First of all, let me say that President Musharraf and myself have had an excellent meeting together." (I'm not even going to get into the question of whether they could have had an excellent meeting apart.) Now, I can see you scratching your head and wondering what I'm ranting about now, because that sounds perfectly all right to you. So myself is going to have to demonstrate. If yourself went around saying things like, "Myself has to work today," or "Can yourself make myself another vodka martini please?" or "Susan can't come to the phone because herself is in the bathroom," I bet that would sound stupid even to yourself. That's because there's no reason in these sentences to use the "self" form instead of a plain old pronoun like I or you or she.

There are only two excuses for using a "self" pronoun (I'll spare you the technical term). The first is when it is the object and happens to refer to the same person as the subject, as in "John cut himself shaving," or "I like myself better now that I've lost fifty pounds." The second is when you want to emphasize the person you have just named, as in "You yourself admitted that this disaster was your idea," or "God Himself couldn't figure out these instructions." That's it. Period. Any other use of a "self" pronoun is stupid.

If Tony Blair had stood up in front of a thicket of microphones and said, "Myself has had a good meeting with President Musharraf," even the TV people might have looked faintly puzzled, and God knows TV people have even less of a clue about proper English than you do. So why does mentioning the poor hapless president of Pakistan in the same breath trigger the irresistible urge to say "myself"? There is nothing at all wrong with saying "President Musharraf and I have had an excellent meeting." Absolutely nothing. In fact it's a whole lot better than saying "President Musharraf and myself have had an excellent meeting."

I think this particular idiocy is another effect of the profound pronoun trauma that schoolchildren throughout the English-speaking world have apparently suffered at the hands of all those teachers trying to get them to stop saying "Johnny and me". Tony Blair was so traumatized that he is now terrified not just of "me" but also of "I". He's so utterly confused about his pronouns that he's simply ditched the vexatious question of choosing between "me" and "I" and opted for a whole new class of pronouns in the vain hope that fudging the question will make him sound smarter.

Unfortunately, it didn't work. It made him sound stupider. (Yes, you're right. Stupider isn't a word. You're starting to pay attention.) Tony, get a clue. If you can say "I had a good meeting," you can say "Johnny and I had a good meeting." Adding the other guy doesn't change a thing. I thought I already told you that.

I'm old enough to remember when people still said, "I couldn't care less" when something didn't concern them. That was a useful way of putting things, and perfectly logical. And then, some time in the late sixties, somebody started saying, sarcastically, "I could care less" when they meant they didn't care, and it caught on. And then pretty soon everybody forgot the original expression, and now all you hear is "I could care less," when what people obviously mean is that they couldn't. They are saying the opposite of what they mean, and apparently they couldn't care less. Or perhaps they truly don't understand what they are saying, which is a more frightening but, come to think of it, more plausible hypothesis.

Do I really have to explain? Sadly, given the prevalence of "my bad", I probably do. Look, if you don't care at all about something, then it is not possible for you to care any less about it. I repeat, not possible. The expression is negative. "I could not care less about this," i.e. it does not concern me at all. Perhaps at this point people are just too lazy to put in the extra syllable, as if saying couldn't instead of could were especially taxing. Perhaps they are saving their energy for Grand Theft Auto.

We are a nation of stutterers, apparently, judging by how often I hear this bonehead utterance. Somebody launches into an explanation, usually posing as an expert, and says something like, "The thing is, is that when interest rates go up..." and so forth. Now ask yourself, would you say, "My car is, is a Chevy," or "Mary is, is the vice-president"? Of course not. That would be pointless. It would sound, excuse me for repeating myself, stupid. So why do you insist on saying "The thing is, is that..."? What on earth is wrong with "The thing is that when interest rates go up..."? Nothing is wrong with it. It is, in fact, correct. It has a subject, the thing, and a verb, is, just like "My house is on fire" and "Mr. Jenkins is a transvestite." All you need is one is. So why do you go around throwing in the second one?

I'll tell you why, but you have to pay attention again. A similar construction you may have heard is: "What it is, is that when interest rates go up..." Now this also is perfectly correct. The subject of this sentence is the clause what it is. In English a clause, i.e. a subject and verb together (forget it, you won't be tested), may serve in the place of a noun. Not surprisingly, it is then called a noun clause. When you ask someone "Can you tell me where the bus stops?" you are using the noun clause where the bus stops as the object of the sentence. And when you say "What keeps me awake at night is the thought of a Jeb Bush/Hillary Clinton race in 2008," you are using the noun clause what keeps me awake at night as the subject of the sentence. And when you say, "What it is, is a failure to communicate," you are using what it is as the subject, followed immediately by the verb, which just happens to be is. (Strictly speaking we don't need the comma, but since people usually pause between the two is-es when they speak, it may help to have it there.) And the coincidence of having two perfectly legitimate is-es in a row seems to have blown people's circuits and made them unable to recognize the thing for what it is, namely a plain old noun that only needs one verb after it, just like any other noun. So the thing is, apparently, that people are incapable of thinking about what comes out of their mouths.

Now, don't get me wrong. I'm not especially a purist when it comes to grammar. I'm not one of these people who insist that you have to answer "It is I," when somebody asks you who's at the door. I'm perfectly happy answering "It's me, for God's sake. Open up!" (Purists will note a number of technically incomplete sentences in this article, for example, due to its conversational tone. Deal with it.) There's room for argument about English usage, and I'm inclined to go with popular usage most of the time.

Except when it's stupid. The above examples are instances of faddishness or mere slovenliness overcoming our logic or our native speaker's intuition, what you might call our linguistic common sense. There's nothing illogical about saying "It's me." The choice of pronoun here is arbitrary. The French are the prissiest language purists on the face of the earth, and in French you say "C'est moi", not "C'est je." What's good enough for the Academie is good enough for me.

But nobody says "A letter came for I." Nobody. Because we know that I stands in the object position and therefore requires the object pronoun me. And there is no reason on the face of the earth, none, to say I instead of me just because the letter was addressed to both you and your wife. People do that because of a glitch in the educational system, not because of anything in the logic of the language. And the rest of the examples are similar. They are things people say because they are not thinking about what they say, and that's a bad sign.

Language does change and evolve, and I may be losing the battle on some fronts. Fun seems well on its way to acceptance as an adjective, particularly before the noun, as in "Phil's a fun guy." That may not bother me as much as "The party was so fun," maybe because the latter still sounds like "That's so nonsense" to me. But I'll be damned if I'm going to say, "My bad." Ever.

Finally, an apology for the hectoring tone. I don't really think you're an idiot, and I don't really feel superior to you. I'm sure you know much more about your field, whatever it may be, than I do, and you're probably a wonderful human being to boot. Some of my closest friends, indeed some of my nearest and dearest, make these mistakes sometimes. But I've had auto mechanics smirk because I didn't know what was going on under the hood of my car and computer whizzes snicker because I couldn't figure out how to format a document, so indulge me here. This is my field. I'm a published author and a long-time English teacher, and I know the language. And it bugs me when people use it in a way that outrages the linguistic common sense that we all have. We just have to dig down through the layers of muck deposited by bad teaching and trash culture to recover that common sense. So I know you're not really an idiot.

It's just that you sound like one so often.

I don't know why I'm going through all this-- maybe to avoid thinking about the thousands of people under all that rubble. I guess I'm just trying to reassure myself that we are entitled to our outrage, entitled to our defense, entitled for that matter to some pretty effective offense given the proper target. I hope that we do not stain our honor again in our response. I think we have stained it too often before, at Hiroshima, My Lai, etc. etc. Even Kosovo was too much for me. But no nation has ever kept its honor totally pure. Human life is too messy for that. And it would be folly to lose sight of the fact that nobody on earth offers better prospects for human advancement than we and our western allies do. Even the people gloating over our misfortune today must know that on some level-- world migration patterns are an infallible guide. Our civilization is worth defending.

As you know, I've never been much of a flag-waver; I consider patriotism to be fairly low on my scale of values, a minor virtue at best, like family loyalty. But I put out the flag yesterday and today. Why? I guess I'm just trying to participate. I'm inviting anyone who comes along to acknowledge our kinship. We need things that unite us in this country; we are a diverse and unruly people. Normally I don't worry about unity too much; one of the glories of our country is that you can march to your own drummer here. And we do have a common culture that is fairly powerful, if not always what you'd consider high culture. But right now I want to cast a public vote for considering us one people with a society worth defending. I guess that's what the flag is about. My liberal friends don't get it, of course. (Why have liberals conceded the flag to conservatives? The national flag should not indicate one's stance on partisan politics. Probably for the same reason conservatives have conceded human rights organizations to liberals-- narrowness of vision. There's no good philosophical reason for either abdication.)

Blathering again. Trying to stave off the horror, I guess. I haven't been able to work for two days. It seems utterly frivolous to sit and make up stories with images of thousands of people dying fresh in my mind. I know it will pass, but I don't know how to make it pass faster. I find myself wanting desperately to get to New York somehow, to find a way to help. Not an option, I guess. We sent money to the Red Cross, the best we could do. I got an e-mail today soliciting donations of clean white socks for the rescue workers, apparently a great need. Maybe tomorrow.

I guess I'm just not in the mood right now to hear what's wrong with us. Does anybody really believe that Bin Laden would have called off the attack if we'd signed the land mine treaty? Or hung in there at the racism conference? Or even if we cut off aid to Israel? We could ditch our "arrogance" tomorrow, shuffle meekly around every UN conference doling out money and signing on to every unenforceable treaty anybody comes up with, and we would still represent something that fundamentalist Islam, in common with other totalitarian ideologies, cannot tolerate: the open society. Anybody who doubts the value of the open society, as embodied in Western Europe, North America, and a few other places around the world (many the heirs of the much-sneered-at "Anglo-Saxon" tradition) needs to go live in a country outside those regions for a while for a reality check. Again, migration patterns are a nice empirical guide.

And hey, while we're at it, let's talk about Israel. I have criticized Israeli policy many times in the past and no doubt will again. Israel has acted very ruthlessly at times, usually after extraordinary provocation. But I have also taken a close look at the other side, and it scares me to death. Arab political culture is authoritarian, violent, inegalitarian, mendacious and cynical. This doesn't mean that Arabs have no rights or legitimate grievances, but it does mean that their own governments are not the best bet for protecting the former and remedying the latter. The Palestinians gained more from the Oslo accords (signed under U.S. aegis) than they did in forty years of war prior to that, and they threw it all away. Egypt got the Sinai back at Camp David, under U.S. auspices. U.S.-supported initiatives have gained infinitely more for the Palestinians and other Arabs than the murderous campaigns they so exuberantly celebrate. The U.S. has no need to apologize for having supported Israel. We support Israel because it forms part of our civilization, and while that presents us with great difficulties in reconciling its legitimate interests with the legitimate interests of the Arab population of Palestine, our support in and of itself is no crime against anyone.

I'm trying to work out what I really think about all this. It is important to be guided by clear principles in complex times. Mine have taken shape gradually over the years; I've moved around the political map a bit, and here's where I've wound up: I value this country and its role in the world not out of reflexive patriotism, but because we are the prime exemplar of the open society. In the current crisis, with the danger of jingoistic backlash on one hand and the murmuring in some quarters on the other hand that in some way we had it coming, it's important to be clear on just what is at stake. It was the open society that was attacked last Tuesday, and if you don't want to wave the flag, that's fine with me. Just remember why it was us. It wasn't because of McDonald's.

We will be hated by some as long as we remain the leading nation of western civilization, by which I mean that group of countries that practice a high (if imperfect) degree of capitalist economic development, political democracy, and social tolerance. These three things all rest on the principle that freedom of individual action is the best path to collective welfare. We may roll our eyes when politicians talk about freedom, but the philosophical, economic and moral case for a high degree of freedom in all fields of human activity is very strong. Thus it is not just a politician's cliche. Unfortunately, capitalism, democracy and tolerance also threaten people. They are messy, and some people cannot stand messiness. Capitalism means we have to let obnoxious people get rich; democracy means we have to listen to people we think are fools; and social tolerance means we have to let people with strange beliefs and customs live next door. Even in western nations there are people who cannot accept these things, but western nations have institutions that limit the damage those people can do. Western civilization is not a closed club-- anyone can join (see Japan). I would hope that some day even Muslim nations might adopt the attitudes and institutions that would admit them to the club. (Turkey is close, if not quite there.) But some people (and not just Muslims) have chosen not to join the club but rather to try to destroy it. I respect anyone's right not to participate in the civilization I value, but if they are going to declare war on it, I am going to defend it, not just because it is mine but because I believe it is a good thing for humanity. Forgive me for going on like this-- as you can imagine, I have been thinking a lot about all this. I have long been aware, perhaps more than most Americans, of how we are viewed in the world and why. It is frustrating to try to explain to people why the U.S. government acts as it does sometimes; it is even more difficult to explain why I think that despite all our faults we have been good for the world. The Roman empire was ruthless and oppressive, but it was an advance for civilization. The American "empire" has crimes on its conscience and stains on its honor, but I think it will be remembered as an advance for civilization.

The following was written in response to a Chicago Tribune column commenting on the shooting of two unarmed African-American citzens by two Chicago Police officers, also African-American. 

The fact that the officers involved in the recent police shootings of LaTanya Haggerty and Robert Russ were, like their victims, African-American has not prevented commentators such as Laura Washington (Chicago Tribune, Perspective, June 27) from trying to make these appalling incidents fit a notion of implacable white racism as the root cause of all police violence.  According to Washington, police officers "represent a power structure created and controlled by white males"; thus blacks cannot expect fair treatment even from black officers.  There are several objections to this view, which rests on an essentially collectivist attitude that judges people on the basis of their membership in groups rather than according to their individual behavior.  
First, this explanation is highly contrived; Washington herself characterizes the officer in the Haggerty shooting as "a devastated young officer who allegedly made a terrible mistake."  Isn't it then at least questionable to read more into the incident than an ill-trained reaction to a stressful situation?  Given the absence of racial difference here, is it not tendentious to saddle this incident with all the baggage of racial tension?  
Further, this approach de-legitimizes the efforts of black police officers, most of whom I suspect would prefer to be judged, both in their successes and failures, as individuals rather than as racial symbols.  Have we progressed at all beyond skin color if we view black police officers merely as ciphers in a "white power structure" rather than as individuals struggling with the extraordinary demands of a stressful job?
To characterize police work as "institutionalized white male supremacy" (the quote is not Washington's, but she does not contest it) is radically and unnecessarily divisive. The implication is that police work is a zero-sum game in which blacks and whites must struggle over a limited quantity of justice, that whites must somehow cede ill-gotten privileges in order for blacks to gain justice.  This formulation seems calculated to discourage white support of reforms from which all will benefit.  In fact, the interests of blacks and whites are, as in most matters, identical: a well-trained and regulated police force.  It would be better to say that policing is a set of institutional arrangements that has been historically controlled by white males but has nothing intrinsically white or male about it.  Thus reform becomes a matter of the politically possible, and blacks can focus their outrage (with white support) where it belongs: on institutional flaws and individual misbehavior rather than ill-defined notions of "power structures" which by their vagueness discourage specific action and encourage generalized rage and hopelessness.  
The contention that "the system has stereotyped minority communities as monolithic centers of crime" seems to suggest that there is no basis in fact for the fear on the part of the officers involved that evidently played a large part in both these incidents.  It is regrettable that discussion of high crime rates in some sectors of the African-American community (please note the qualification) should be subject to taboo.  There is no need to resort to racist theories to explain these high rates; indeed it would be amazing if a community so marginalized and oppressed over the years did not show high crime rates.  Is it not better to discuss frankly the historical sources of black crime than to deny that it exists and that it might play a role in police perception of African Americans?  In fact, there is an evident tension at the heart of Washington's argument, for she claims to deplore what she calls "racial profiling" while admitting that she along with everyone else engages in it. I have no doubt that despite her protestations Washington will continue to make judgements about people according to their appearance; she would be foolish if she did not.  She misses the distinction between dubious police policies which codify racial distinctions as predictors of crime (the original meaning of "profiling") and the sort of practical common-sense judgements that we all make every day.  To deny that people are acting rationally when they decide where to sit on the El according to the appearance of the other passengers is to live in cognitive dissonance.  The truth is that living in the real world involves an endless series of tough calls; the intelligent approach is to insist on the highest possible standards of judgement, in ourselves and in the police, rather than to deny that the tough calls exist.
Of course black fear and resentment have a basis in experience; it would be foolish to deny that the type of indignity Washington cites in her personal experience should have an effect on black perception of the police.  But it is equally foolish to deny that experience has an effect on police perceptions and behavior, and it is ironic that African-American commentators, who ought to be most insistent on the judgement of individuals according to the content of their character and the nature of their behavior, should be so ready to cast even black police officers as symbolic racial types in tragedies where individual failings far outweigh any racial element.