Stromata Blog

My Hugo Ballot: On to the Novelettes

This installment is late enough that I can’t even fantasize that it might influence anybody. Nonetheless, I’ll rank the novelette nominees for the sake of clarifying my own thoughts.

1. “The Calorie Man” by Paolo Bacigalupi shares one characteristic with “The People of Sand and Slag”, his 2005 Hugo nominee: Both are set in bizarre ecologies that must be accepted as premises through vigorous, though not impossible, suspension of disbelief. Last year’s was a poisoned world where life could survive only by means of extreme bioengineering. Biological tinkering underlies “The Calorie Man”, too, though the world portrayed here is far less grim, and the story ends optimistically.

Very briefly, this not-too-distant future has almost no fossil fuels, and all of its edible plants have been wiped out by a mysterious plague. Energy comes from human and animal labor, nourishment from the genetically modified, patented crops of a few mammoth corporations, which paranoically guard their intellectual property.

Quite a few themes are present that could lead to an abundance of sermonizing. Happily, preaching is firmly subordinated to a well-wrought picture of the technology and social relationships that such an environment might foster. It’s remarkable how much one can do with muscle power, treadmills and springs. The scientist whose rescue is the centerpiece of the plot pedals his laptop computer.

After I decided to give the nod to this candidate (by a thin margin over the runner-up), my copy of Gardner Dozois’ Year’s Best anthology for 2005 arrived. “The Calorie Man” is the only Best Novelette nominee that Mr. Dozois selected. Evidence that the fellow has good judgment, I’d say.

2. “Two Hearts” by Peter S. Beagle is a sequel (or, more exactly, a coda) to The Last Unicorn (1968), a classic of modern fantasy whose succès d’estime didn’t encourage the author to stick with an ill-paying genre. Only in recent years has he returned. “Two Hearts” isn’t up to the standard of its predecessor (what is?): less inventive and more predictable in its use of fantasy archetypes. When Schmendrick and Molly Grue see Lir – no longer a young hero but an aged king – for the first time in decades, the reader will instantly think of Théoden of Rohan. Still, “less inventive” doesn’t mean stereotyped. Lir’s decrepitude has its own cause and cure, which are linked to the problem, a griffin ravaging a remote village, that sets the plot into motion.

A good deal of the story’s charm is imparted by the risky device of employing a nine-year-old girl (“Almost ten!”) as the narrator. She could be cute and cloying, but isn’t. It may be, of course, that I liked her because she resembles my slightly younger great-niece Sophia, who possesses a similarly imperious determination and fearlessness of adults.

A blurb accompanying the story in F&SF indicates that it is the transition to a novel, and the last couple of pages make it clear that we will see more of the heroine, whom Schmendrick and Molly have instructed to wait till her seventeenth birthday, then whistle a particular tune. We aren’t told what the notes will summon. On the strength of this prelude, I’m eager to find out.

3. “I, Robot” by Cory Doctorow, like “The Calorie Man”, touches on issues of great importance. The two stories would, in fact, be siblings if Mr. Bacigalupi had given in to the urge to preach.

In an afterword, the author declares that this is the first of a series of stories that will borrow titles of famous SF works and “expose their totalitarian premises”. The “totalitarian premise” of Isaac Asimov’s robot yarns is, one infers, the Three Laws of Robotics (presumably a stand-in, in the author’s mind, for all restrictions on cutting edge scientific research). A society that enforces the Three Laws will, we are told (in a very loud voice), be ruthless, backward and oppressive. Contrariwise, one that frees itself from such constraints will blossom into a wealthy, high-tech, humanitarian paradise.

The plot relentlessly pushes the reader to recognize this truth. Unfortunately for its coherence, events contradict the party line. We discover that the despicable Three-Laws enforcers in fact carry out unfettered research in secret – and all that it does is give them more effective weaponry. I sympathize a great deal with Mr. Doctorow’s libertarian impulses, but he forgets that tools don’t make the man; it’s the other way round.

If only the homily could be cut out, what remains would be a gritty, rather sobering picture of a society that has sharply demoted privacy and devalued human skills. It’s a pity that there’s so much scribbling all over the canvas.

4. “The King of Where-I-Go” by Howard Waldrop is a time travel vignette so loaded with nostalgia and local color that it never comes to a point. Events occur, quite peculiar events. They happen to an interestingly quirky protagonist. But I am at a loss to figure out how they connect with one another. Unless I missed a huge clue (not at all impossible), this is the first story ever in which going into the past and not changing a thing alters the future. Well, that could be a profound statement about the nature of causation and time, but I don’t get it.

5. “TelePresence” by Michael Burstein takes the faults of “I, Robot” and squares them. Maybe virtual reality technology will be the savior of the nation’s educational system, but isn’t an advertising campaign in its behalf, complete with “VR changed my life” endorsements, premature?

Interspersed with the commercials is a promising but imperfectly executed mystery story. Two students in a VR high school drop dead during their lessons. Good puzzles could spring therefrom. Did the simulations kill them? If so, how? But those questions are answered instantly, ignoring all explanations except murder. (Has Mr. Burstein never heard of cocaine overdoses?) All that is left is tracking down the murderer. His motive proves to be uninteresting (the other kids made fun of him), and the chase is indistinguishable from magic. Clarke’s Law is not, alas, an ideal guideline for writers.

Sorry to sound grumpy, but the SF novelette has enjoyed better years.

P.S.: The House of Representatives passed a major pension bill last night, so this blog will have to be neglected until I finish my share of the Deloitte & Touche booklet on its provisions. My picks for the rest of the Hugo categories may or may not appear before the voting deadline (which is, BTW, midnight Pacific time on Monday, July 31st).

Quote of the Day

Kenneth Brower of Spectrum Associates, in a letter to the editor of Defense News (sorry that I don’t have a link):

The reality is that over the last eight days, Israel has employed less than 3 percent (and probably less than 2 percent) of its mobilizable military potential to combat these threats, and is generally doing this under still-restrictive, low-intensity conflict rules of engagement. Is this gloves-off war?

On July 20, one TV reporter announced that the Israelis had flown 16 combat jet sorties through midday. It could have flown about 1,500. Another reporter interviewed an M109A6 battery commander who stated his guns had fired 30 rounds per tube over the last 24 hours. No wonder his soldiers looked so rested.

An army that can mobilize 17 divisions and 14,000 armored fighting vehicles (AFVs) in 48 hours probes 500 meters into Lebanon with a few tank platoons while nearby villages still take fire.

What, one wonders, would the Israeli response to Hezbollah terrorism look like if it really were “disproportionate”?

Continuing My Hugo Ballot: Best Novella

The novella is traditionally one of the stronger Hugo Award categories, probably because bloated stories are defined out of it. This year, I wouldn’t mind seeing a victory by any of the contenders and couldn’t easily decide exactly how to rank them. Indeed, I may change my mind again before the ballot actually has to be submitted.

Not only are the nominees all worthy reads, but they are a remarkably variegated group: a far future tale of splintered humanity, a ghost story, a near future cyber-fiction, a surrealistic fantasy and a detective story. Which a voter prefers may depend on his subgeneric preferences as much as any other factor.

1. Burn by James Patrick Kelly has the rare merit of extrapolating contemporary issues, including terrorism, ecological fanaticism and the ethics of interfering with other cultures, into the far future, without simply mapping them onto a familiar political template. The reader can’t identify any of the characters or factions with the present day Right and Left, and anyone determined to take sides will not be able to rely on the criteria that he uses to choose between George W. Bush and al-Qa’eda. Transcending current preoccupations in this way is a greater imaginative feat than devising a dozen extraterrestrial species.

The story’s setting, the ostentatiously retrograde, anti-technological planet of “Walden”, is neither a paradise nor a dystopia. Its own citizens tend to uncritical faith in its superiority to the rest of the human-inhabited galaxy. In turn, it is regarded with contempt by most of mankind. The protagonist falls uneasily in between. He has glimpsed both the wider galactic society and the deep alienation felt by some of his fellow Waldenites, but those aperçus on his homeland’s faults don’t persuade him that it deserves the destruction at the hands of the “pukpuk matyrs” who aim to burn down its vast, artificially stimulated woodlands. His inner conflict is palliated at the end, but not resolved. A moral of the story is that, for some conflicts, no resolution is possible.

There is one other aspect that I liked: Prefacing each chapter is a quotation from Henry David Thoreau, whose muzzy philosophy is, of course, the inspiration for “Walden”. While it may not have been the author’s intention, these excerpts make plain what a foolish, self-centered man – I would call him “evil”, but he wasn’t self-aware enough for that – the supposed sage actually was. Any work that does that is worthy of at least a Hugo Award.

2. Inside Job by Connie Willis also features quotes from a famous sage, namely H. L. Mencken, whose reputation has always been more controversial than Thoreau’s. Here we are shown one facet of the strangely flawed gem of his intellect: his hard-headed skepticism about his era’s counterpart to modern “New Age” buncombe. I doubt that Mrs. Willis or her characters would be quite so admiring of many of Mencken’s other opinions; he is, after all, the presiding genius of that fine right-wing periodical The American Spectator.

Be that as it may, there are no politics in Inside Job. In spirit, it is a 1930’s comedy, complete with lovestruck hero, seemingly unobtainable heroine and cantankerous ghost. The first of these, editor of an underfunded psychic-rejected magazine, faces a series of quandaries: Is the ghost really what it seems to be or a devilishly clever trap? Is his beautiful assistant too good to be true? And, if the ghost really is Mencken’s, how is it possible to use a spirit from another world to discredit spiritualism?

The quandaries get worse, naturally, before they get better, but all it deftly tied up at the end. Boy gets girl. Ghost gets psychic (different sense of “get”). And all is right with the world.

My only reservation about this tale – and the primary reason why I rank it only second on this year’s ballot – is that the author does, in a couple of places, slip into overly earnest lecturing about the absurdity of mind readers, channelers, mediums, telekineticists and other such frauds. I’d like to think that we don’t need to be told that. But maybe Connie Willis knows better than I.

3. “The Little Goddess” by Ian McDonald shares the setting of his River of Gods, a Hugo nominee last year, though it has no connection to that book’s plot. The time is a few decades from now, when India, the world’s most diverse country, has fragmented into successor states, several of them centers of the highly controversial and not wholly legal artificial intelligence industry. In this future, AI and other scientific breakthroughs have transformed Indian society into a weird amalgam of the traditional and the radically innovative (sometimes at the same time, as with the longevity-enhanced “Brahmins”).

This particular story begins in a rare spot on the subcontinent that modernity has barely touched, either today or in the imagined future: the Kingdom of Nepal, where the Kumari Devi is still incarnated in a pre-pubescent girl identified by 32 special signs and ability to pass a test of her divine attributes. (In light of current events in Nepal, one must, alas, be pessimistic about whether this tradition will survive three decades from now.) The narrator tells how she became a living goddess, rebelled ever so slightly against her status, returned to mortality prematurely through an unlucky accident, struggled to survive in an unaccommodating society, and finally discovered her true powers. The portrait of a very strange, yet also strangely plausible, society is compelling, much better than most attempts to foresee the consequences of cybernetics. My only reason for ranking this story third is that two others are even better. It is, as I intimated, a strong year.

4. “Magic for Beginners” is Kelly Link’s second Hugo nominee in a row. She won Best Novelette last year for “The Faery Handbag”, which, I must confess, struck me as only fifth best, albeit fifth in an extraordinarily competitive category. The author’s brand of pseudo-juvenile whimsy, reminiscent of the great Daniel Pinkwater, must have quite a few fans. They will like “Magic for Beginners”. I, too, am impressed. One can quibble about the fact that the story is a series of incidents that don’t quite connect to form a plot, but what incidents!

The central conceit is a renegade television show that takes over its fans’ sets at unpredictable times. The show itself is suitably oddball, set in a world-sized library and featuring a main character, “Fox”, of changeable appearance (always female, though, even when played by male actors). Hmm, that is too simplistic a description, for, recursively, the teenagers who watch the program are also part of it, and, when one of them inherits a telephone booth in Las Vegas from a deceased great-aunt, show and meta-show start to interact. And that is too simplistic, too. I’m afraid that I can’t explain and know that I ought not to try. If what I’ve said so far sounds utterly ridiculous, you have no interest in reading this story. If it sounds like fun, you may very well put it in first place.

5. It’s a sign of how strong a year this is that “Identity Theft” by Robert Sawyer, a top-notch whodunit set on a believable Mars, brings up the rear. Sawyer revisits the theme of transferring minds between bodies (with the artificial limitation that putting the same mind into two bodies simultaneously is taboo), this time looking at the possibility of identity theft in a literal sense. To this device he welds the conventions of hard-boiled detective fiction, which he handles well, for all that they are on the road to becoming a clichéd subgenre of SF. The question facing our P.I. hero is not just who identity stealer but whose identity he (or she or it) stole. The answer is, as in all well-crafted mysteries, obvious – but only after it has been revealed.

Don’t forget that voting (open only to members of L.A.Con IV) closes at midnight, Pacific time, on July 31st.

Moral Non-Equivalence, Illustrated

A friend – he works for the State Department but does not, I fear, represent mainstream opinion there – sent me this cartoon, which encapsulates the moral distance between the two sides in the Middle East and, indeed, in the general war between Western Civilization and the mufsidun:

The Missile Doves

Tomorrow’s Wall Street Journal reminds us of what Joe Biden, often labeled the top foreign policy expert among elected Democrats, said back in the days when nobody took North Korea or Iran seriously:

When President Bush announced the U.S. withdrawal from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty five years ago, Democrats howled. Pulling out of the treaty to roll out missile defense would, they predicted, lead to a new arms race, undermine American security and in any case was unnecessary. “This premise, that one day Kim Jong Il or someone will wake up one morning and say ‘Aha, San Francisco!’ is specious,” Senator Joe Biden told AP in May 2001.

That remarkably inept prophecy strikes me as more embarrassing to the Senator’s Presidential ambitions than anything he could say about convenience store customers with Indian accents.

Other Democrats’ yeoman labors to slow down or stave off the development of missile defenses ought to be an embarrassment, too:

Democrats . . . made a fetish out of the ABM Treaty, even after the end of the Cold War. Al Gore campaigned to keep it in 2000, promising only to build defenses that would abide by its tight limitations. Senator Biden predicted that dropping out of the treaty to build missile defenses would turn the U.S. into “a kind of bully nation.” And Senator John Kerry cautioned that “we must not set aside the logic of deterrence that has kept us safe for 40 years.” Neither logic nor deterrence are the first words that come to mind when we think of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Nor have recent events led to new thinking:

In the House, John Tierney of Massachusetts this year proposed cutting the Pentagon's missile-defense budget by more than half. His amendment was defeated on the House floor, but it won the support of more than half of his Democratic colleagues, including would-be Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

Meanwhile in the Senate, Carl Levin (D., Mich.) offered [an amendment] in June to cut off funds for the ground-based interceptor program that Mr. Bush recently activated in Alaska in anticipation of the North Korean launch. Mr. Levin wants to stop new interceptors from being built, but Senate Republicans wouldn't bring his proposal up for a vote. . . .

You may rest assured, though, that if one day – horribile dictu – a Taepodong-2 takes out San Francisco or Seattle, Democrats and liberals will with one voice blame George W. Bush.

The First Veto

Yes, I too would be happier if it were the hundred and first, but a President’s got to start somewhere, and the veto of the bill to expand federal funding of embryonic stem cell research is a spectacular, or at least attention getting, debut. Al-Reuters “reported” the President’s intentions in this impartial fashion:

President George W. Bush will cast the first veto of his presidency on Wednesday to stop legislation championed by top scientists and desired by most Americans to expand embryonic stem cell research, the White House said.

No doubt that’s a direct quote from Tony Snow’s press briefing.

Senator Tom Harkin (D–Iowa) calmly and soberly observed, “Mr. President, you are not our moral ayatollah, maybe the president – nothing more.” It’s a safe bet that we’ll hear a lot along those lines between now and early November.

The outrage is, however, either demented or artificial. No advocate of killing human embryos in the course of medical research can rationally regard the failure to enact this piece of legislation as much of a setback. That kind of experimentation is entirely legal in the United States and has no trouble attracting funds, including lavish expenditures of tax dollars. California is providing $3 billion over ten years through a bond issue approved in 2004, and other states have been rushing to follow suit. Naturally, if the results are as wonderful as proponents promise – remember John Edwards’ “We will stop juvenile diabetes, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s and other debilitating diseases. . . . People like Chris Reeve will get out of their wheelchairs and walk again with stem cell research”? – getting private funding will be a breeze. A cure for Alzheimer’s would be better than the proverbial license to print money.

Whether Congress expands the scope of research that can be carried out with federal grants is of trivial significance. In fact, I can’t think of any strong reason why the feds should spend anything on popular avenues of research that have no trouble lining up cash. Wouldn’t it make more sense for the government to devote its resources to diseases and approaches that the private sector overlooks?

The strangest aspect of this imbroglio is its casting by the media as “science vs. moralism”. The noisiest supporters of the embryonic stem cell bill weren’t people who ordinarily display unbridled enthusiasm for scientific inquiry. I’m confident that you’ll find a remarkable overlap between supporters of experimenting on human embryos and opponents of experimenting on mice and dogs. It’s interesting that over half of the House members who voted “aye” on the vetoed bill were against legislation to increase funding for adult stem cell research, deploying exactly the kind of obscurantist rhetoric that they attribute to pro-lifers.

Is there any more rationale to “Bush as ayatollah” posturing than a combination of Bush Derangement Syndrome and fanatical hatred of the Right to Life movement? If so, it is hard to discern. When people wax hysterical over minor, meaningless defeats, the suspicion is unavoidable that they are better subjects for psychological study more than logical refutation.

Addendum: Today’s OpinionJournal Political Diary offers a pertinent quote from Michael Tanner of the Cato Institute, scarcely a haven for “moral ayatollahs”:

By its very nature, government politicizes everything it touches. Science is no exception. Stem cell research needs neither government money nor politics. It is better to get the government out and let the private sector continue its good work. Those people calling for increased funding could take out their checkbooks and support it. Those who oppose embryonic stem cell research would not be forced to pay for it.

Further reading: Michael Fumento, “Science’s Stem-Cell Scam”
Kathyrn Jean Lopez, “Ethical Alternatives: An Interview with Dr. David Prentice”

Ordinary BDS

I don’t watch The McLaughlin Group. Maybe nobody does any more. That would explain why the following incident, recounted by OpinionJournal Political Diary (invaluable, but subscribers pay only $3.95 a month), doesn’t seem to have attracted much attention:

In discussing the G-8 summit meeting in Russia, Newsweek’s Eleanor Clift charged that Vladimir Putin was the only one of the leaders at the conference “who goes in there with a commanding popularity among his own people, because he is perceived to be an effective dictator. What we have in this country is a dictator who is ineffective.”

That brought a rise from Chrystia Freeland, a Canadian who is the U.S. managing editor of London’s Financial Times. “But he’s not a dictator,” broke in Ms. Freeland. “We can’t use these terms so loosely.” Ms. Clift backed down only an inch, asserting that “we have an authoritarian president who is ineffective.”

It tells us something when our homegrown leftists have to be reminded by foreigners that the United States is a democracy, notwithstanding the paranoia of the moonbats.

Hope in the Middle East

Instapundit went off to Knoxville’s Downtown Grill & Brewery yesterday, saying “Jeez, the Middle East post is too depressing to finish the night with.” The post to which he referred definitely wasn’t a beacon of cock-eyed optimism, and the mainstream media have been relentlessly reinforcing the impression that, as the on-line Wall Street Journal’s current blurb puts it, “ISRAEL’S CONFRONTATION with Hezbollah ratcheted closer to a regional war as the guerrilla group launched rockets into Israeli cities and Israel prepared for a major offensive to try to eliminate rocket positions in southern Lebanon.”

The stock market, too, seems pessimistic. At least, that’s a plausible explanation for three straight days of triple-digit declines in the Dow.

So, are we on the Eve of Destruction? Will a new war undo all the progress made in the Middle East over the past three years, as liberal pundits not-too-disguisedly hope? At the risk of being proven Pollyannish, I don’t think so. Indeed, I go so far as to see distinct prospects for a decisive shift of the region’s balance of forces against Islamofascism and in favor of civilized society.

The expectations underlying Hezbollah’s raid into Israel and kidnaping of two Israeli soldiers aren’t hard to figure out: Either the new Israeli government, led by an untested Prime Minister with a “soft” reputation, would respond feebly, eventually making concessions to the attackers, or the incident would touch off a new war between Israel and its neighbors. Given the outcome of every previous Arab-Israeli War, the latter might sound like an event to be avoided, but Israel’s inveterate enemies are ever hopeful. They know that they just have to win one war. Anyway, if a war between nation states did break out, Syria and Egypt – not Hezbollah – would wind up doing the fighting and dying.

Of those two alternative strategies, each has failed spectacularly. Israel’s retaliatory strikes have been fiercer than anyone would have predicted, and no government in the region has displayed any interest in intervening in Hezbollah’s behalf. Iran and its quasi-puppet Syria may wish to, but neither has the means. A Syrian attack would inevitably lead to the occupation of Damascus and destruction of the Ba’athist regime, while Iran doesn’t yet possess the nuclear weapons that would make it a threat.

Hezbollah can lob unguided missiles in Israel’s direction, randomly killing or wounding handfuls of civilians. So far, a thousand rockets have produced fewer than a hundred injuries and a total of about ten deaths. For a nation inured to the horrible toll of suicide bombings, those don’t reach even the pinprick level. With no means of harming its enemy and no meaningful military force, Hezbollah’s only hope is to go to ground and wait for the Israeli storm to pass over. Its weakness has been starkly exposed.

Israel has the capability, and apparently the will, to deal blows to Hezbollah’s leadership, infrastructure and prestige that will render it essentially harmless. All that will remain will be for the Lebanese government to screw up the small amount of courage needed to outlaw and suppress this domestic enemy. Meanwhile, the loss of face by the Mullarchy and its Ba’athist toadies could be the final push needed to topple one of both of those internally unpopular regimes. If not, they certainly will not emerge stronger from their humiliation.

The Middle East being what it is, everything could go wrong. Maybe the European Union and the State Department will rescue Hassan Nasrallah and restore his thugs to their former eminence. A large part of the Western Left, fearful above all that a defeat for Hezbollah will be a victory for George W. Bush, undoubtedly hopes so. But their prayers this time are likely to go unanswered.

For Bastille Day

The following arrived as an e-mail attachment, so it’s probably about as fresh as a “new idea” from Nancy Pelosi. Nonetheless, it seems fitting and proper on the Inglorious Fourteenth of July:

TED NUGENT ON DEER HUNTING

Ted was being interviewed by a British journalist, who was obviously an anti-hunting advocate.

The journalist asked, “What do you think the last thought is in the head of a deer before you shoot it? Is it, ‘Are you my friend?’ or is it, ‘Are you the one who killed my brother?’”

Nugent replied, “They aren’t capable of that kind of thinking. All they care about is, “‘What am I going to eat next, who am I going to screw next, and can I run fast enough to get away?” In fact, deer are very much like the French.”

The Great Kerfuffle Goes to Court

Without ever having been tragedy, the Valerie Plame kerfuffle is repeating as farce. In the fantasy world of Joe Wilson and Daily Kos, suing Dick Cheney and Karl Rove may be a brilliant legal maneuver. Outside the surreality-based community, it will be a continuing source of amusement (to friends of the Bush Administration) and embarrassment (to its non-moonbatty critics).

According to press reports – I haven’t bothered to pore over the complaint itself – the gravamen of Wilson & Plame v. Cheney, Rove et al. is that the Vice President and his dark minions invaded Valerie Plame-Wilson’s privacy and endangered the lives of herself and her children by disclosing the deep, dark secret that she was employed by the Central Intelligence Agency. If Mr. Cheney’s lawyers have a sense of humor, they can make great fun out of the accusation of endangerment.

Why would anyone wish to harm Mrs. Plame-Wilson? The theory, presumably, is that the revelation of her position made her a target of terrorists wishing ill toward the United States. Now, what could a terrorist have inferred from the leak that appeared in Bob Novak’s column? Only that she was married to a former member of the diplomatic service and played a role at the CIA that enabled her to influence the selection of her husband to investigate rumors about Niger. Maybe al-Qa’eda’s dot-connecting ability verges on the psychic, but that information wouldn’t lead me to think that Valerie Plame was anyone of special significance. No doubt Osama bin-Laden would be delighted to kill everybody in Langley (he has, after all, shown limited acuity in distinguishing friend from foe), but nothing that Mr. Novak wrote would single out this particular cog in the American intelligence apparatus as an especially hateful infidel.

On the other hand, a mufsidun who read the Western press diligently would have found, on October 5, 2003, a Reuters story, published in the Washington Post and elsewhere (but the links have proven ephemeral; you may have to look it up in Lexis or hard copy), a story by Sue Pleming, in which Mr. Wilson was quoted as asserting that “a leading former CIA official had said his wife ‘was probably the single highest target of any possible terrorist organization or hostile intelligence service that might want to do damage’.”

Well, there is a clue and a half for murderous Islamofascists.

Q. Ambassador Wilson, why do you believe that your wife’s life was in danger?

A. Because she was a key CIA operative, maybe the most important they had.

Q. How would a terrorist have known that?

A. It was in the press. Reuters published it.

Q. Would that be here, in Exhibit P-9876, an article by Sue Pleming, where it says that your wife “was probably the single highest target of any possible terrorist organization or hostile intelligence service that might want to do damage”?

A. Yep. That’s right.

Q. Did Ms. Pleming cite her source for that disclosure?

A. Er, yes.

Q. Would you care to read to the jury the last paragraph of the story, where the source is named?

A. Sorry. I can’t find my glasses.

In actuality, no doubt, the proceedings will be mundane. Likewise, no doubt, the further they progress, the more obvious it will become that Mr. Wilson is a mentally unbalanced prevaricator, who can’t bear the thought that Fizzlemas ended his quarter hour of celebrity. Let the games begin!

Where Are the Libertarians?

Once during a House of Commons vote on a bill to liberalize abortion laws, Margaret Thatcher, a Methodist standing with the “nays”, looked around and asked, “Where are the Papists?”

Similarly, as the debate on immigration policy grows in volume and venom, I wonder, Where are the libertarians? Ordinarily, they’re a noisy bunch – and not at all hesitant about exposing their disagreements with others on the political Right. Abortion, same-sex marriage, the “war on drugs”: You needn’t listen hard to hear their cries in behalf of an expansive view of individual liberty.

Yet, when the argument turns to the freedom to travel across international borders for peaceful purposes and to offer one’s services to a willing buyer without interference from the State, voices that loudly advocate laissez faire in sex, drugs and music rarely speak up for freedom in the market for labor. I haven’t tried to track down the exceptions (I know of a few, such as David Zincavage at Never Yet Melted), but hunting for them shouldn’t be necessary. You can find more pro-abortion libertarians in half a minute than pro-immigration ones in half a week. (It’s interesting to observe what a small proportion of the signers of today’s anti-restrictionist op-ed in the Wall Street Journal are identifiable libertarians; most are traditional right-wingers or neocons.)

Having no special animus against libertarianism, little though I agree with much in its contemporary incarnation (scroll down to 12/19/01), I’ll refrain from devising snarky explanations for this strange silence. I do feel qualified, however, to declare that it is foolish as a matter of both principle and tactics.

Tactically, the absence of libertarian pressure makes it easier for the Congressional Republican leadership to plow forward toward defeat in November. With much assistance from the Right side of the commentariat and blogosphere, it has proclaimed an immigration “crisis” – about which it proposes to talk without acting. Instead of legislation, we have road shows designed to whip the party’s base into a state of alarm, and to innoculate it against all rational compromise. This strategy, if one may dignify it with that word, guarantees one of two disastrous outcomes: No action and the appearance of ineffectual dithering, or passage of a bill that yields ground to immigration proponents and sparks desertion by the “betrayed” conservative base.

On other contentious issues, Republicans have demonstrated the ability to uphold their principles without abandoning a sense of the possible. Hence, we offer incremental restrictions on abortion rather than an all-or-nothing Human Life Amendment, and direct our fire at judicial imposition of same-sex marriage without trying to revive anti-sodomy laws. Recognition of libertarian interests plays a large role in those astutely fashioned positions. But libertarians seemingly don’t care about immigration, leaving the field to those who do care, that is, to the Tancredos and Krikorians and other Kos-like restrictionist hotheads.

The intellectual consequences will take longer to bear fruit but are equally poisonous. If we come to care only about liberty for Americans, how long will we continue to care about even that? If it is no infringement of libertarian principles to close our borders to low-paid, culturally different Mexicans, shouldn’t it likewise be acceptable libertarian policy for California to keep out low paid, culturally different Alabamians, or San Francisco to erect barriers against those odd people from Fresno?

The concept of universal liberty grew historically out of the peculiar liberties of particular places, ranks and individuals. Shouldn’t libertarians worry about running that progression in reverse, so that Liberty shrinks back into the womb of privilege? For others on the Right, whose ideas are less grounded in the Enlightenment, that development might not be a major problem, but I don’t see how any libertarian can welcome, much less tacitly encourage, it.

There are ample opportunities to fashion sensible immigration rules that will reduce the risk of terrorist infiltration (the restrictionists’ one legitimate worry) while allowing labor markets to operate with as much freedom as possible. Rep. Mike Pence has put forward proposals to that end (which bear some resemblance to my own, I modestly note), only to become a target of restrictionist invective. It would be nice if, in turn, his efforts on behalf of liberty received the backing of those who worship most ostentatiously at its shrine.

Quote of the Day

Not being a great fan of metric football (for reasons that I once explained [second item]), I was much taken by this one-liner from Andrew McCarthy: “Moving on from the World Cup to other interminable international proceedings during which nothing much happens, yet another war crimes trial got underway today at the Hague.”

His substantive point is worth pondering, too:

Hamdan was charged with conspiracy – specifically, membership in the al Qaeda conspiracy to mass-murder civilians in violation of the laws of war. The Hamdan plurality, however, claimed this violated international law because, according to Justices Stevens, Souter, Ginsburg and Breyer, the crime of conspiracy is not recognized as an offense under the law of war.

Well what do you know: In the war crimes trial begun today, the Times explains that to convict the six defendants, “prosecutors must demonstrate … that Belgrade had a ‘criminal plan’ to permanently expel a large portion of the Kosovo Albanians[.] …[L]awyers familiar with the tribunal proceedings said that prosecutors must prove there was a Serb plan to expel them.” (Emphasis [and ellipses] added [by Mr. McCarthy].)

A conspiracy, of course, is nothing more than a plan to which people agree.

Maybe if the Defense Department had just charged Hamdan with involvement in a plan to mass-murder civilians, instead of a conspiracy to mass-murder civilians, the make-it-up-as-you-go-along standards of international law would have been satisfied.

Filling Out My Hugo Ballot: Best Novel

It’s that season when every true fan’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of Hugo Awards. So I’m going to post now and then about my progress in filling out this year’s ballot (due by the end of July). I’ll begin with what George R. R. Martin has memorably labeled “The Big One”.

Let me confess that I did not read two of the nominated novels to the end, though my failure to finish them doesn’t necessarily reflect badly on their merits.

A Feast for Crows by George R. R. Martin is the fourth volume of his A Song of Fire and Ice mega-novel. When volume one, A Game of Thrones, appeared a decade ago, I bought it but resolved not to begin reading until the tetralogy (as it was then supposed to be) was finished. That way I wouldn’t have to face the annoyance of between-books forgetfulness of major characters and key events. I had no doubt that GRRM would produce a work that would reward my patience.

When this year’s list of nominees came out, I tried an experiment: I would plunge into the latest installment, without having read any of its predecessors, and see whether I could enjoy it, or, for that matter, figure out what was going on.

The answer was, sort of. The individual incidents are clear enough, and most of the characters are comprehensible without knowledge of the back story (albeit there’s a risk that what one thinks is comprehension may be riddled with misconceptions). What is not discernible is how the incidents and characters fit together. To the neophyte reader, the effect is like opening a detailed history of Medieval Italy without any prior knowledge of the Guelphs and the Ghibellines. Who are these strange people, I wondered, and why are they all trying to kill each other, and why should I care? The answers, I’m sure, are in the three previous volumes. So – back to my original plan and no expression of opinion on whether the crows should feast on a Hugo.

Accelerando by Charles Stross cobbles together stories that have appeared separately over the past couple of years. I’ve read most of them, thought that several were very good and didn’t actively dislike any. Nonetheless, the whole lacks the virtues of the parts. I couldn’t bring myself to go on after the first two or three episodes.

I have an explanation for this phenomenon. The stories rush along, hurling ideas right and left (er, left and lefter – nothing “right” about the anarcho-socialist Mr. Stross), leaving barely a moment for reflection. For a single sitting, this madcap narrative is highly readable. After a time, however, a flaw appears: The author is a screwball comedian without a sense of humor. Every wild-eyed concept, farcical disagreement among the bizarro characters and ludicrous concatenation of cyber-nonpossibilities is set down with utter, unsmiling seriousness. It’s as if Abbott and Costello delivered “Who’s on First?” in the tone of a metaphysics lecture.

Someday Mr. Stross may find the right pace and voice for a readable novel. So far, he is a great singles hitter who ought to know better than to swing for the fences.

Now for the three nominees that I have the right to judge:

1. Learning the World: A Scientific Romance by Ken MacLeod is a First Contact novel in which the apparently backward aliens turn out to be superior to the technologically advanced humans who discover them. That isn’t a new idea. In fact, it equally well describes a Hugo winner of just a few years ago, Vernor Vinge’s A Deepness in the Sky, as well as many other notable SF tales. The theme of encountering alien intelligence holds out perennial possibilities, and a twist that puts the “primitive” culture on top has a perpetual ironic appeal.

Like A Deepness in the Sky, Learning the World tells two stories, one from the point of view of the humans who have come to colonize what they assume is a sapient-free solar system (just like all the others found to date), the other set on the system’s second planet, “Ground”, where a myotidoid (I think that means “bat-like”) species is in the throes of scientific and industrial revolutions. The latter is the better crafted and more interesting part of the book. The colonizing vessel, a gigantic, slower-than-light, sort of multi-generation starship, is a wonderful concept, mostly well carried out (as in the portrayal of a chasm-like generation gap) but is marred by unconvincing add-ons. In particular, the author, like many foggy-minded leftists, thinks of financial markets as a form of magical manipulation. Every time a character “launches a futures market” in this or that implausible commodity, I’m reminded of a nine-year-old writing about sex. It doesn’t help that the teenage protagonists remind me of Podkayne of Mars.

Yet even these irritating youngsters can be amusing, as in this imitation of Socratic dialogue:

“Consider this one. If humanity is to fill the galaxy, the human population at that time in the future will be many orders of magnitude greater than the present human population. Agreed?”

“OK.”

“Therefore the probability of being alive in a future galactic human community is billions or trillions to one greater than being born now, when humanity fills only a tiny fraction of the galaxy. But we are alive now, which is very unlikely unless there is no greater future human population. Therefore humanity will soon become extinct.”

I pounced on a too obvious flaw. “It might just stop expanding.”

Grant shook his head. “You still get far more future humans than present humans, even if you stay with the same population for say the ten million years it would take to fill the galaxy. And thus, the same desperate improbability of our existence among the first, unless we’re also among the last.” He looked around, his shoulders hunched. “Doom lurks unseen.”

Al Gore would doubtless agree.

If humanity expands to fill the galaxy, or merely endures for a great many tomorrows, the probability is high that there will be lots of SF novels better than this one – but not a large number in this year or decade.

2. Old Man’s War by John Scalzi likewise calls to mind award winners of the past, in this case Robert A. Heinlein’s Starship Troopers and Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War. Like them, it is a grunt-level perspective on high-tech, interstellar warfare. The key difference is that Mr. Scalzi’s hero doesn’t begin as a raw kid and mature in the stress of battle. As the book’s title says, this is an “old man’s” – and woman’s – war. Mankind’s distant colonies, beset by an array of fierce and fantastical enemies, recruit septuagenarians to do their fighting, equipping them with bio-engineered, green-skinned, super-human bodies that give them most of the capabilities of Heinleinian Mobile Infantry without the bulky suits. (Also included in the package is a raging sex drive; the author evidently believes General Patton’s dictum, “A man who can’t [you-know-what deleted – this is a PG-rated blog], can’t fight”. Alternatively, given how much trouble that kind of thing leads to in this story, he may be making a subliminal point against co-ed armed forces.)

After the hero, a mild mannered pacifist in his former life, joins up, he proceeds through an increasingly imaginative series of challenges, leading to unexpected discoveries and a strange reunion with his dead wife. It is all quite a satisfying read, but –

Why does the Colonial Defense Force sign up 75-year-olds? Ostensibly because it wants soldiers with judgment and maturity rather than the young hellions and “scum of the earth” who traditionally have filled the military’s ranks. That’s a fascinating idea, and I’d like to see how it works out. Old Man’s War doesn’t say. John Perry is bright and develops into an outstanding soldier, but, so far as I can discern, the only carryover from his civilian experience is uneasiness about militarism – probably not what the CDF was hoping to obtain. By the end of the book, when we learn about the origins of the Force’s secret elite, the entire rationale for the plot seems to have been forgotten. When I looked up from the excitement of battle, I was disappointed.

3. Spin by Robert Charles Wilson isn’t reminiscent of anyone but Robert Charles Wilson. Like Darwinia, The Chronoliths and Blind Lake, it features a mind boggling scientific anomaly with staggering global effects: Earth is cut off from the rest of the universe. The stars disappear, and, scientists eventually discover, time itself slows down. Outside the barrier, known for obscure reasons as “the Spin”, a hundred million years zip by for every one of ours.

There comes, alas, a point at which suspending disbelief gives you a broken neck. Spin gallops past that point as rapidly as its un-Spun Martian colony outpaces the static Earth. Making these impossible things harder to believe, before or after breakfast, is the author’s tendency to look to chicklit as his model for his characters’ personal relationships. The best that can be said is that he avoids the excesses of Blind Lake, which was a life-after-divorce novel with an alien invasion on the side. Still, there is much phony angst, and the hints of a Big Secret involving the hero’s and heroine’s mothers turn out to foreshadow nothing of any consequence.

Spin is not a bad book. It certainly tickles one’s Sense of Wonder, and its implicit solution to Fermi’s Paradox is clever, if not convincing. But it’s not a second Darwinia, much less a progression from Wilson’s earlier work.

If Vegas or Ladbroke’s made book on the Hugos, I would bet on Old Man’s War, which has plenty of favorable buzz. If it doesn’t win, Learning the World very likely will. Accelerando might also be a good bet, despite my misgivings. It may not win, but it’s bound to cover the spread. I doubt that either A Feast for Crows or Spin has a real chance, but the Hugo electorate has surprised me before. In fact, that seems to be its favorite occupation.

Quote of the Day

Cliff May:

I was at Disney World last week. Why am I sharing this with you? Because to get into the park I had not only to use an identification card – I also was required to insert two fingers into a little machine. The machine read my finger prints — instantly confirming that I was who I claimed to be, ensuring that I wasn’t using grandma’s card.

Interesting, is it not, that we have such biometric indicators at Disney World but not yet at airports?

It’s even more interesting that we don’t use devices like these to protect against vote fraud. Or is it worse to cheat the Disney conglomerate out of a few dollars than legitimate voters out of the candidate they elected?

Westercon, For Good and Ill

Westercon is one of the oldest regional science fiction conventions, in continuous existence since 1948, and one of only two in the U.S. that imitates the Worldcon by traveling from place to place. (DeepSouthCon is the other.) Last year’s site was Calgary. This year the con moved to the opposite end of its range, San Diego (under the name “Conzilla”, perhaps inspired by the Artist Guest of Honor, Bob Eggleton). Next year will be in San Mateo (“Gnomeward Bound” – I haven’t a clue), marking the first return to the Bay Area since 1987. Shortly after that, Washington, Oregon and Canadian fen discovered that they could dominate the northern zone in perpetuity, always outvoting Northern California. Last year the zones were changed to break this stranglehold. Ironically, the 2007 site was chosen under the old system.

A consequence of moving about is that Westercons vary wildly in size. Many are like this year’s: smallish (about 600 warm bodies) but with a high density of familiar faces (familiar to me, at any rate). I recognized at least half the names and half the faces – not necessarily the same people.

Except for the much smaller Midwestcon and SMOFCon, there is probably no other con whose membership is so thick with Worldcon voters, so it was no surprise that all three of this year’s bidders were present with tables and parties. The real bidding excitement, though, was in the 2008 Westercon race, pitting Las Vegas against Phoenix. Vegas has obvious drawbacks for a gathering whose members tend not to enjoy spending, most less losing, money. On the other hand, Westercon has never been there, while Phoenix is familiar terrain. The lure of novelty led to a narrow Las Vegas victory: 113 to 90, with 16 ballots cast for write-ins or “No Award”. The Phoenix committee promptly announced a bid for 2009, which is at the moment unopposed.

As already noted, the Chicago, Columbus and Denver bids for the 2008 Worldcon all showed up to tout themselves at the last major convention before the decisive vote. There have been no startling scandals to change the complexion of the race. Chicago and Denver remain heavy favorites. Opinions differ as to which is ahead.

In a burst of energy, the Montreal in 2009 bid, generally rated as hopeless an underdog as Columbus in ’08, threw parties at both Midwestcon and Westercon, one-upping favored Kansas City (absent from San Diego).

The convention program struck me as exceptionally good, and I meant to see more of it (excuse for absence infra). My personal highlight was Bob Eggleton’s slide show, during which he revealed that among the most important influences on his own work was John Constable and that he greatly enjoys painting landscapes and clouds. So pay attention to the scenery behind those Godzillas.

Less of a high point, but worth mentioning for its curiosity value, was the panel on “Secret Histories”, which included Tim Powers, one of the great purveyors of mysterious explanations of the workings of the world. (His latest, after too long an hiatus since the marvelous Declare), is Three Days to Never, due out next month.) I was looking forward to hearing about how authors construct fictional conspiracies out of the rags and bones of fact. Unfortunately, one of the panelists insisted on regaling us with the Truth about contemporary American politics, which is that the Bush Family, allied, naturally, with Christian fundamentalists, has secretly taken control of the country for the purpose of hastening the Second Coming, to be accomplished by provoking wars in the Middle East. She has traced this plot back to 1980 (when, one presumes, George H. W. Bush cleverly schemed to lose the Republican Presidential nomination to Ronald Reagan in order to set the Grand Design in motion.) Mercifully, she was cut off (Tim Powers: “It must be a pretty crappy conspiracy if you know all about it”) before she reached the ritual denunciation of Zionist neocons à la Cindy Sheehan.

A more light-hearted sign of the existence of the Moonbat Fringe of fandom was a t-shirt in the dealers’ room bearing the slogans “One Nation Under Surveillance” and “George Bush is Listening – Use Big Words”. I was almost indignant, but, when one thinks about it, it’s amusing to have this evidence that left-wingers really do think that the President is the idiot savant of diabolical conspiracies. Besides, what harm is there if folks who wear that kind of t-shirt develop a phobia about talking on the telephone and sending e-mail? Hey, lefties! It’s All True. The NSA knows every word that you say or write. May as well give yourselves up now and save the Right-Wing Secret Police the bother of tracking you down.

And it was no doubt in punishment for such uncharitable thoughts that I suffered the loss of my faithful laptop, “786,432 Beneficent Pixels”. She had been acting a bit weirdly of late, e. g., losing Opera when I upgraded to version 9, and died on exactly the third anniversary of the day on which I ordered her, meaning that she was about 99 in computer years. There was a Best Buy a mile from the convention hotel, whose “Geek Squad” (awful name, but they were pleasant and efficient) confirmed the diagnosis of hard drive controller failure. This being the day and age that it is, I purchased a successor on the spot. You already know that I spent the same amount of money as in 2003 for twice the processor speed, RAM, hard drive capacity, etc. Ho, hum.

Also disconcerting – and less easily corrigible – was the loss, at least temporarily, of my Tucker Hotel bathrobe, which I’d bought from Scott and Jane Dennis only the week before at Midwestcon. It is heavy white terrycloth, which a maid seems to have mistaken for towels and taken to the hotel laundry. With luck I’ll get it back, but one hates to depend on the efficiency of hoteliers. [Update: In this instance, they were efficient. I got a call Friday afternoon, telling me that the robe had been found, as well as a stuffed dolphin from Sea World that must have been left behind by a previous occupant of my room. The robe is being shipped to me; I declined to take custody of the dolphin.]

While I was out of town and not particularly in touch, an asteroid missed the Earth by less than 300,000 miles, a space shuttle went up on the Fourth of July, the North Korean loonocracy launched a couple of ICBM’s as wayward as itself, and the Mexican election, after a hopeful beginning, went into overtime. It’s amazing how much happens when I turn my back for a few days.

Addendum: While talking about the (lack of) latest Worldcon bidding news, I should have noted that the Chicago in 2008 committee has published a bidzine, the first to appear in this race.

Al-Qa’eda’s Volunteer Fifth Column

Yesterday the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page meted out what may be the severest adverse judgment ever pronounced by one major newspaper against another. It didn’t utter the words “espionage” and “treason”, but those are the stark meanings beneath its denunciation of the recent conduct of the New York Times:

Mr. Keller’s argument that the terrorists surely knew about the Swift monitoring [the Terrorist Financing Tracking Program] is his own leap of faith. The terror financiers might have known the U.S. could track money from the U.S., but they might not have known the U.S. could follow the money from, say, Saudi Arabia. The first thing an al Qaeda financier would have done when the story broke is check if his bank was part of Swift.

Just as dubious is the defense in a Times editorial this week that “The Swift story bears no resemblance to security breaches, like disclosure of troop locations, that would clearly compromise the immediate safety of specific individuals.” In this asymmetric war against terrorists, intelligence and financial tracking are the equivalent of troop movements. They are America’s main weapons.

The Times itself said as much in a typically hectoring September 24, 2001, editorial “Finances of Terror”: “Much more is needed, including stricter regulations, the recruitment of specialized investigators and greater cooperation with foreign banking authorities.” Isn’t the latter precisely what the Swift operation is? . . .

The obligation of the press is to take the government seriously when it makes a request not to publish. Is the motive mainly political? How important are the national security concerns? And how do those concerns balance against the public’s right to know?

The problem with the Times is that millions of Americans no longer believe that its editors would make those calculations in anything close to good faith. We certainly don’t. On issue after issue, it has become clear that the Times believes the U.S. is not really at war, and in any case the Bush Administration lacks the legitimacy to wage it.

So, for example, it promulgates a double standard on “leaks,” deploring them in the case of Valerie Plame and demanding a special counsel when the leaker was presumably someone in the White House and the journalist a conservative columnist. But then it hails as heroic and public-spirited the leak to the Times itself that revealed the National Security Agency’s al Qaeda wiretaps.

Mr. Keller’s open letter explaining his decision to expose the Treasury program all but admits that he did so because he doesn’t agree with, or believe, the Bush Administration. . . .

Perhaps Mr. Keller has been listening to his boss, Times Publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr., who in a recent commencement address apologized to the graduates because his generation “had seen the horrors and futility of war and smelled the stench of corruption in government.

“Our children, we vowed, would never know that. So, well, sorry. It wasn’t supposed to be this way," the publisher continued. "You weren’t supposed to be graduating into an America fighting a misbegotten war in a foreign land. You weren’t supposed to be graduating into a world where we are still fighting for fundamental human rights,” and so on. Forgive us if we conclude that a newspaper led by someone who speaks this way to college seniors has as a major goal not winning the war on terror but obstructing it.

Serious though these charges are, the editorial shies away from demanding prosecution, on the prudential ground that, once the government begins questioning and indicting reporters, it may not know where to stop. One day, we’ll be sending them to jail for revealing the tactics used to stop terrorist funding; the next, for not telling who leaked the identity of a middle ranking CIA officer. Oh – you say that we’ve already gotten to the bottom of the slippery slope without having started at the top? And that the Times thought the CIA leak consequential enough to warrant a special prosecutor leading a full-court-press investigation? What a curious world we live in.

I agree with the Journal that a de facto Official Secrets Act would be undesirable, but I also note that the United States shows no observable tendency in that direction. If there were, plenty of indictments would have been handed down before now. The real danger is not that the government will suddenly become zealous in silencing critics but that its revulsion against censorship will lead it to grant effective immunity to a Fifth Column of journalists who carry out acts of war in behalf of our enemies.

The Times case presents, I think, as bright a line as one ever gets in this messy world. The paper’s actions directly and materially hindered important anti-terrorist operations in time of war. This was not a matter of exposing embarrassing secrets or opening an aperçu on the sausage factory in which policy is made.

A comparison to the Plame-Wilson affair is instructive. There a soi disant whistle blower alleged that the President knowingly made a false statement about Ba’athist Iraq’s efforts to acquire yellowcake uranium. On the most invidious reading of the facts, an Administration insider responded by giving a friendly columnist classified information that undercut the truthfulness of the charge and perhaps damaged the CIA career of the accuser’s wife. Assuming arguendo that this leak was illegal, its useful to our country’s enemies was nil. To conjure up a scintilla of damage to any national interest requires a highly active imagination. In those circumstances, I don’t think that the special prosecutor’s decision to demand information from reporters about their sources was prudent, though it was unquestionably legal. Far less would it have been justifiable to indict Bob Novak for publishing national secrets.

James Risen and Eric Lichtblau of the Times did something entirely different. They actively sought information about how the government interferes with financing of terrorism, discovered a program that had resulted in the disruption of terror networks and the capture of their leaders, and told the world, including the terrorists, how it operated. If they had told only Osama bin-Laden, the meanest intellect would call them “spies”. Does the wider audience change the quality of their activities? If Klaus Fuchs had written up nuclear secrets for the Guardian instead of the NKGB, would he have been less of a traitor?

In reality, of course, the supposedly proto-fascist Bush Administration will do nothing, down to and including the minor sanction of revoking press credentials, to punish the Times. Large segments of the public may be indignant, but nothing that most of us can do will injure, or so much as inconvenience, Bill Keller. Those who could do so – his paper’s readers and advertisers – won’t. The former largely share his views; the latter are just interested in selling goods and services and will spend their money where the customers are. The Fifth Column is, for the foreseeable future, free to continue supporting the Hirabah, though we know whom they’ll blame the next time terrorists take American lives. Our leaders will have to live with that unpleasant truth and plan around it. Messrs. Keller, Risen and Lichtblau will receive their just condemnation from God and the history books.