| Tuesday,
November 27, 2007
Subject: The Plame outing
Dr. Pournelle,
I greatly enjoy Harry Erwin's weekly contributions.
One section in the most recent installment puzzled me greatly:
> ...the US intelligence community is very unhappy
about the Plame outing. Apparently there are moves afoot to impeach Chaney.
I followed this case rather closely, and I shall try
to summarize what I know:
In November of 2003, veteran journalist Robert Novak
mentioned that Valerie Plame was a CIA operative in one of his columns. At
the time, Plame was working a desk job in the Washington area.
Novak would not publicly reveal his source, but rumors
were rampant that this was a political payback by the Bush administration.
There was enough outrage over this that Patrick Fitzgerald was appointed as
special prosecutor. The Left was dreaming of a Watergate redux.
They were badly disappointed. Finally, in August of
2006, former deputy secretary of state Richard Armitage admitted he was
Novak's source. The Left was distraught. There would be no Watergate sequel
here, because the state department in general and Armitage in particular
were no friends of the White House. Suddenly, the legal issue of "outing"
Plame seemed less important.
The serious legal issues (was Plame a "covert" agent
when Novak wrote his column?) would probably have simply evaporated except
that Patrick Fitzgerald was still the special prosecutor, and he needed to
convict SOMEONE after several years of investigation. He learned early in
his investigation that Armitage was Novak's source, and (for whatever
reason) he didn't want to prosecute Armitage. Fitzgerald eventually managed
to convict Scooter Libby in March of 2007 for making untrue statements while
being questioned during the investigation. Libby was not convicted for
outing Plame, or even being part of a conspiracy to out Plame (although
Fitzgerald very skillfully managed to imply that at trial). In fact,
Fitzgerald very carefully avoided accusing Libby of that, so the presiding
judge could never rule on whether revealing that Plame worked for the CIA
was a crime (since judges cannot rule on hypothetical charges). In the end,
Libby was convicted of making untrue statements in the investigation of what
may not have been a crime committed by someone he had no connection with.
Can someone explain how Cheney fits into this, other
than being Libby's boss?
Steve Chu
I have said about all I can about the
Plame affair. She wasn't a covert agent, and the genuine coverts I know
resent the holy hell out of her and her grandstanding. Libby probably
misrecalled events, which is easy enough to do. I don't remember everything
I have told people, even when I put it up here: I've more than once repeated
letters, as an example. Special Prosecutor was a stupid idea, the
Republicans have a death wish that this was in aid of, and I don't have any
idea why Cheney is supposed to be involved.
The weird part is that if you read
Wilson's report, it actually strengthens the notion that Saddam was trying
to get WMD, and it was so taken at the Agency by analysts who had hoped it
would show something else.
Valerie Plame drove in a convertible
through the front gates the Bureau of Public Roads Research, oops, CIA HQ at
Langley, every damned day. She must have been photographed by every
intelligence service (or their stringers) in the whole blinking world. I can
name you some free lance people who took her photo daily and sell their crop
to anyone who wants to buy. It's not a particularly lucrative industry.
I am more than weary of the whole silly
affair. A proper Empire would take better care of its minions.
==========
Subject: Madness?
Jerry
Madness
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?
xml=/news/2007/11/25/nbook125.xml
The scare over global warming, and our politicians'
response to it, is becoming ever more bizarre. On the one hand we have the
United Nation's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change coming up with yet
another of its notoriously politicized reports, hyping up the scare by
claiming that world surface temperatures have been higher in 11 of the past
12 years (1995-2006) than ever previously recorded.
This carefully ignores the latest US satellite figures
showing temperatures having fallen since 1998, declining in 2007 to a 1983
level - not to mention the newly revised figures for US surface temperatures
showing that the 1930s had four of the 10 warmest years of the past century,
with the hottest year of all being not 1998, as was previously claimed, but
1934.<snip>
This year will be remembered for two things.
First, it was the year when the scientific data showed
that the cosmic scare over global warming may well turn out to be just that
- yet another vastly inflated scare.
Second, it was the year when the hysteria generated by
all the bogus science behind this scare finally drove those who rule over
us, including Gordon "Plastic Bags" Brown, wholly out of their wits.
==========
More on the MFA
Dear Jerry:
I agree completely that no degree is needed to become
a writer. I also note that it seems to be a rare and unpredictable ability.
Most people think it is easy, simply because they've been trained to think
of work as something involving unpleasant effort, usually physical in nature
and fail to understand that true success is finding something you love to do
and getting paid for it. Some people will write dozens of books and others,
like Harper Lee, write one and are so successful that they never venture
another one. I think that writing is more a compulsion than an occupation. I
realized yesterday that the administrative bog, the travel and some health
problems have kept me out of the game for about the last year. I'm not
blocked; anything but. I just can't find the time and mental space to commit
to one of the various projects before me. I feel the itch and will bloody
well make the time.
You mentioned that it helps to have something to write
about, and in this context, the "Day Jobs" help a lot because they expose
you to situations and characters you probably would not meet otherwise.
Sometimes the lack of knowledge at a very deep level hinders the realization
of a complete narrative. The rule is "write about what you know", right? I
can think of a novel about the real estate business that was done by a
best-selling author and which, by her own account, was hard to finish.
Research will take you only so far. I read it and my own opinion is that she
failed to understand why people go into that business, which at its higher
levels can be very creative and satisfying. There is also the thrill of
finally, finally closing the sale and making a large chunk of money. She
missed that too. That lack of knowledge made her characters sad and joyless.
It's hard to write people you don't like. Think about it; even villains have
their attractive qualities or they wouldn't be so scary. Pure evil is
predictable and boring.
I believe in "Kaisan". This is a Japanese term from
Management Science meaning "Continuous Improvement". The current version of
"The Shenandoah Spy" is getting really good reviews, but there will be some
minor changes for the new print version, perhaps no more than 5,000 words,
which will make in even better for the reader. I've never stopped reading
and researching the background on this. Going once more to the source
material can give you a better physical description of a minor character and
inspire dialog that adds clarity to the theory of the novel. Since I started
in Drama, I always ask that actor's question. "What's my motivation?" or
"Why would (he, she, it) do that?" Even incredible situations have to have
their own internal logic or they fail to engage the reader. Cognitive
dissonance sets in; that nagging feeling that something is just a little
off. The late Johnny Carson said "If you buy the premise, you buy the bit".
Ursula K. LeGuin added that your P.S.G. (Pseudo-scientific Garbage) must
always be in order. She was writing about science fiction, but the principle
applies generally
That said, what is the role of MFA programs in
developing world class writers? Why bother?
Well, as previously said, you already have to write
very well just to get into one of these programs. That does not mean a
mastery of the mechanical aspects, despite what your high school English
teacher told you. I couldn't diagram a sentence to save my life. I employ my
own editor. No, it means that you know how to tell a story. How to create
interesting situations and characters and deploy language that will engage
the reader. You don't go to one of these program to learn how to write, but
to learn how to write better.
I've been at this for 42 years now and think I'm
finally getting the hang of it. One of the real advantages is that you never
have to "retire". You can just quit, the way Harper Lee did. But she's the
exception. Last summer after WesterCon, Leigh and I went up to Marin County
to see some people. One of them was Vance Bourjaily, my mentor at the Iowa
Writer's Workshop, who is now 84 and no longer teaching. As we walked into
his house we could hear a typewriter going full blast. He's working on a new
novel.
I don't think that writing fiction or drama can really
be taught. It can only be learned. There all sorts of venues for doing that
and all sorts of theories about how to do it. There is a story about the
famous author who was approached by a society matron at a party.
"Sir," she asked, "How many words are there in the
modern American novel"
"I don' t know. I've never thought of it in those
terms. I suppose eighty or a hundred thousand."
"Oh thank God! I'm done!"
Sincerely,
Francis Hamit
I first heard that story told by
Bennet Cerf: in those days a novel was about 60,000 words. I suspect it was
in Joe Miller's Joke Book.
I still say that one can learn how to
write fiction, but no one can teach it to you.
TOP
CURRENT
VIEW Tuesday |
