In Memoriam: Andrew Vachss, 1942-2021

Obituaries have been few and far between for one of my favorite mystery writers - no, one of my favorite writers, period - since his passing a few days ago, but he considered his career as a novelist more of a side-job in comparison to his work as a legal advocate for abused and exploited children. To Vachss, this wasn't merely a career - it was a personal, lifelong call to arms. And he kept up at it until the time of his death.

A bibliography of his published fiction can be found here, but the article on him at Encyclopedia.com is the one that does him proper justice. The only thing I corrected was his year of death, which hadn't been updated. His CV shown below shows how much drive and energy he had, but more importantly, it shows exactly who he was in life.

VACHSS, Andrew (Henry) 1942-2021 (Andrew H. Vachss)

PERSONAL: Surname is pronounced "Vax"; born October 19, 1942, in New York, NY; son of Bernard and Geraldine (Mattus) Vachss; married; wife's name, Alice (an attorney and writer). Education: Case Western Reserve University, B.A., 1965; New England School of Law, J.D. (magna cum laude), 1975.

CAREER: U.S. Public Health Service in Ohio, field interviewer and investigator for Task Force on Eradication of Syphilis, 1965-66; Department of Social Services, New York, NY, began as caseworker, became unit supervisor of multi-problem ghetto casework team, 1966-69; Community Development Foundation, Norwalk, CT, field coordinator in Biafra, 1969, urban coordinator, 1970; Calumet Community Congress, Lake County, IN, organizer and coordinator, 1970-71; Uptown Community Organization, Chicago, IL, director, 1971; Libra, Inc., Cambridge, MA, director, 1971; Medfield-Norfolk Prison Project, Medfield, MA, deputy director, 1971-72; Department of Youth Services, Boston, MA, project director and director of Intensive Treatment Unit (ANDROS II), both 1972-73; Crime Control Coordinator's Office, Yonkers, NY, planner and analyst, 1974-75; attorney in private practice, 1976—. Director of Advocacy Associates in New York and New Jersey, 1973-75; director of New York City Juvenile Justice Planning Project, 1975—. Adjunct professor at College of New Resources, 1980-81; lecturer at Child Welfare League of America, Columbia University School of Social Work, Eastern Regional Conference on Abuse and Multiple Personality, Dominion Hospital, Kirby Forensic Psychiatric Center, Law Guardian Training Program—New York State Ninth Judicial District, Mississippi Committee for the Prevention of Child Abuse, National Association of Counsel for Children, National Children's Advocacy Center, New Hampshire Department of Corrections, Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, St. Luke's Hospital Child Protection Center, U.S. Campaign to End Child Prostitution in Asian Tourism (ECPAT), and others.

MEMBER: PEN American Center, Writers Guild of America, ChildTrauma Academy, Protect PAC.

AWARDS, HONORS: Fellow of John Hay Whitney Foundation, 1976-77; Grand Prix de Litterature Policiere, and Falcon Award, Maltese Falcon Society (Japan), both 1988, both for Strega; Deutschen Krimi Preis, 1989, for Flood; Raymond Chandler Award, Giurìa a Noir in Festival (Courmayeur, Italy), 2000, for body of work; Harvey J. Houck, Jr., Award from Justice for Children, for national child advocacy.

Twenty years ago

The first inkling that something was wrong that morning was a call I received from my friend Paul Carter where all he said was something like "Hey Chris, turn on the TV - you're not going to believe what's happening".

Then all hell broke loose.

And its effects have lasted for two decades afterwards, either directly or indirectly.

At the time, I was in the throes of an extended period of underemployment after I had been cut loose from my previous full-time job in late September of 1998, so I wasn't one of the thousands of people who evacuated downtown office buildings in Chicago after the planes hit in New York, Arlington and crashed after a passenger rebellion over Pennsylvania. I've worked in the Chicago loop for a total of nearly nine years, and I can only imagine how it was that day for people getting out.

A mutual friend of mine and Paul's was downtown that day, though, and what made it worse for Jeffrey Oelkers was that he had been in New York a few weeks before this happened. He had seen the twin towers of the World Trade Center firsthand just like anyone else in the area could. And he saw the terrifying footage of them getting destroyed weeks later after he stopped off at a place that had a TV on after being evacuated from work.

Like the worldwide pandemic that we've been living through since early 2020, 9/11 was an event that brought out the best in people - and the worst. A gas station attendant was shot to death in suburban Phoenix by a moronic self-described "patriot" just because he was wearing a turban. Unsurprisingly, the "patriot" didn't know the difference between a Sikh and a Muslim and even if he did, it probably wouldn't have stopped him from doing it. Conversely, there are stories of women going grocery shopping with Muslim friends of theirs because the Muslim women were afraid of reprisals. Events like 9/11 serve as a psychological mirror since they strip away the detachment that goes with the ability to think at a remove from trauma, and this is ultimately how you find out what you are, unwillingly. The long-term psychological trauma of that otherwise sunny Thursday morning is another element of this tragedy that will continue to be studied for decades afterwards.

Two decades have passed since that morning, and although people eventually went back to a semblance of their normal lives many people were permanently changed by what happened: the surviving close friends, relatives and loved ones of the people who died in the attacks, either as victims of the hijackings or on the ground. The first responders who risked their lives and either died in the collapse of the twin towers or suffered long-term health effects as a result of exposure to the now-poisonous air at the site. The countless scores of active-duty troops, reservists and eventual enlistees who fought in Afghanistan in the wake of the attacks. And countless others who saw it unfold in real time.

But the saddest truth is that after all of this, none of what happened then or since will give those 2,977 people their lives back.

Nothing will.

And that might be the hardest fact to swallow of all.

Afghanistan Agonistes

The impending collapse of Afghanistan shouldn't come as a surprise. And everyone's to blame. Everybody.

Why? Well, here's a thought - the US has been in Afghanistan for 19-plus years; the Soviets were there for roughly a decade. They - and the British Empire before that - thought that they could somehow take an intensely tribal, regionalized, backward society into the current century of their choice and make it behave as if any of the previous military interventions had actually worked.

They hadn't. And contemporary Afganistan is your proof.

From our point of view, no less than four American Presidents thought they could do what no one since Alexander the Great had done, which is change that region into something that it's not, or at least bring the Taliban to heel by military intervention (George W. Bush, Barack Obama until 2014) or by delusional "deals" he supposedly made with the Taliban (Trump). By withdrawing US forces, Biden is facing reality. The fact that that reality was hideously mangled by over forty years of civil wars, military intervention, constant butchery of civilians by warlords and different political and ethnic factions isn't strictly his fault. Instead, it's everybody's, going all the way back to 1978.

Granted, leaving what passes for Afghanistan's political "leadership" out of the blame game is equally daft. According to Transparency International, Afghanistan ranks 165th out of 180 countries in terms of political corruption. Add to this the fact that local military commanders decided to run for their lives or switch sides as soon as the Taliban rolled into town, and what you get is a collapse that was every bit as predictable as it was inevitable. What happens next is up to the Taliban and whoever chooses to fight them in the future, but what will probably happen is that the regime that holds onto Kabul will constitute the "government" and any number of guerilla bands and local warlords will constitute the real political power in the areas they actually control. And if the Taliban decides to shelter another group of Islamist lunatics who killed a shitload of foreign nationals elsewhere as they did with Al-Qaeda, the county will get bombed and invaded all over again. And the common people get to suffer the worst, just like they did in 1979 or 2001.

If Afghanistan ever manages to change - good luck with that idea ever being made a reality - it will be in spite of intervention by world or regional powers, not because of them. Pakistan, Iran and the like have reasons to keep Afghanistan in the current shape it's in, and Pakistan's military establishment in particular has no problems with the Taliban being in charge just as they were up until September 2001. The reality, however, is that the onus is on the Afghani people to fix things themselves. And when you've bottomed out as much as they have, the only direction out is to start to climb back up. Whether they can or not is anyone's guess.

35 reasons to stay angry

I haven't gotten around to posting about this yet because my initial take involved repeatedly copying and pasting the word "motherf***er" 35 times, but this is just another indication (out of an innumerable amount of previous examples) that the only thing Mitch McConnell is interested in is dying an incredibly rich bastard after being as much of an obstructionist tool in the Senate as possible before he goes.

House representative Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-Illinois) has stated that the 35 traffic cones in the Senate who voted against a commission effectively gave the Trumpers all the ability to cover up who was behind January 6th, but - even worse - also gave them all the excuses they needed to possibly try that shit all over again. If they do, and succeed, I'm done. It's either leave the country or go underground after that. And I'm not engaging in hyperbole about that fact.

A certain class of democratically elected politician - initially, at least - has always acted like they have a God-given right to stay in office permanently afterward, and that losing that office was the worst thing possibly imaginable, which is precisely the reasoning behind people like Putin, Erdogan, Duterte and (though he wasn't as successful as the other three) Trump. All of them share the belief (whether stated or not) that their particular form of autocracy and corruption was the best thing for all involved. Which is bullshit, of course, but it doesn't stop them from promulgating the idea to people dumb enough to be their followers. My response is simple, especially concerning Trump: think losing your office is bad? Try losing your entire fucking country instead.

SF conventions: coming back in a post-pandemic world

 It's now been approximately 19 months since the Covid-19 pandemic first manifested in the Wuhan region of China and 15 months after it made its way to the United States. As As you might've guessed, the North American science fiction community took an especially hard hit, since conventions were one of the things most adversely affected by lockdowns in terms of force majeur shutdowns of events held in hotels and convention centers; this didn't kill off conventions in their entirety, but it forced them to either go online or suspend operations in their entirety, which means that not-for-profit (or even small for-profit) cons operating on a shoestring budget will be hard-pressed to return despite expenses such as booking hotel and convention space not being an issue due to the shutdowns. 

So how to do it? The solution that many conrunners will adopt will be a hybrid model in which lower numbers of on-site attendees will be buttressed by online attendees. There's every possibility that on-site attendance may increase to pre-pandemic levels by 2022 if completely ideal post-pandemic conditions are in play by that time. However, there's no guarantee that that would be the case; new strains of the novel coronavirus may crop up that are resistant to vaccines, and if not the possibility of large amounts of people becoming apathetic or outright blase about Covid-19 as a continuing threat to public health can't be ruled out. We've already seen what remaining ignorant about this disease can do; the antimask and antivaccine movements in the US have made opening large-scale events problematic, and unfortunately they'll probably continue to do so. Holding something as large as San Diego Comic Con would be anything from difficult to downright nightmarish under such circumstances, but a hybrid model - though less financially lucrative - would be far safer, at least for 2021. 

A hybrid model for SF conventions still raises the question of how to accomplish an on-site presence that can be considered safe for in-person attendees. What concoms would need to do is closely coordinate with hotel management in terms of rules concerning reduced function space occupancy, cleaning and disinfecting of frequently used areas, proper social distancing for waiting in line for events, etc. Concoms may need to either increase the size of their Ops or security divisions to assist the hotel with their more stringent safety rules - or, in fact, take responsibility for them in public con space themselves. This isn't merely a question of making sure attendees don't become infected and sick - a hotel that refuses to host a convention because of staff negilence means that that convention will have to go looking for a new venue. Worse, it could mean that they're getting sued by an affected attendee as well. Cons may have no choice but to create entirely new concom divisions intended to deal with such post-pandemic issues and nothing else until the pandemic is finally over with.

All that being said, conventions are still such a central element of fandom that they'll never go away entirely. They may need to be retooled in order to keep functioning in a post-pandemic atmosphere, but there's no reason not to make the effort. Fandom has survived several wars and tons of worldwide political upheaval since Nycon I in 1939. There's no reason it can't survive this as well.

Ten theses on being offended, speech and communication

I wrote the following essay because the subject of what constitutes tolerable speech even in private circles is becoming a major issue of controversy. It was written as a way to possibly dial down the temperature of the room by providing a few insights of how speech should work, as opposed to being a set of inflexible rules on the subject.

1) You have the right to be offended by speech, a work of art or any other expression of opinion;

2) You also have the right to not be offended by that same speech, work of art or opinion;

3) However, you do not have a right to consider your standards for what is offensive so universal as to preclude anyone else expressing themselves merely because that form of expression is personally offensive to you.

4) Utilizing the government - whether it's a local library board, a village board or a state or Federal legislature - to ban forms of speech you find offensive is not only unconstitutional, but is ethically vacuous and ultimately a waste of time for all concerned;

5) However, certain forms of speech that are not protected by constitutional law, such as serious threats of assault and murder, pedophilic imagery, unsolicited sexting and others are unlawful for a reason. Defending them as forms of speech protected by the First Amendment is not only factually incorrect but is complete asinine.

6) Private concerns such as online messaging boards, social media and publishing companies are under no obligation to disseminate communications or publications that violate their Terms of Service or their own editorial policies. Users or readers displeased by this fact should look elsewhere for their online socializing or reading material.

7) That being said, those terms and policies should be made clear up front so as to not catch users or readers in a trap of wasting time or paying money up front for content that falls well short of what was promised or implied. Likewise, bodies such as ISPs or social media outlets should have clearly established policies concerning rules of unacceptable behavior that will result in a suspension or revocation of service, with amendments to those rules being made clear to all in order to avoid arbitrary "community standards" ultimately unknown to no one except the owner of the outlet (i.e., the "Facebook algorithm effect").

8) No one is perfect. Anyone making a statement or a joke that comes off as obnoxious should not be presupposed to have done it out of maliciousness, especially if they genuinely apologised for the unintended insult.

9) However, when someone insists on being repeatedly obnoxious to a targeted individual or group in order to garner an angry reaction, they're being anything from childish to openly displaying their bigotry. Actions ranging from calling them out to shunning them outright are justified, and anyone who insists on feeling wronged for provoking such retaliation is free to get over themselves.

10) Anyone incapable of civil discourse towards someone who has made a good-faith effort at it themselves ultimately deserve to be ignored, called out for such behavior or shunned until they can improve on their social skills. However, in any group setting on social media, an owner of an individual wall or account or a moderator of a group has every right to step in when an argument spins out of control. No one likes to see something they enjoy detoriate to the point of not being enjoyable. Likewise, participants in a heated online argument not capable of understanding this fact should've never been allowed to post to that wall or forum in the first place if their only purpose was to ruin it for everybody else.

Schadenfreude: Rush Limbaugh

 You're not liable to find a better example of a complete asshole in life, but the following link from Snopes shows just how devoid of any common decency he was:

Iowa’s Cedar Gazette reported in 1990 that Limbaugh’s “AIDS Update,” a recurring segment in which he made jokes about a disease that had killed more than 100,000 people in the United States the previous decade, started by playing songs such as “Back in the Saddle Again,” “Kiss Him Goodbye,” “I Know I’ll Never Love This Way Again,” and “Looking for Love in All the Wrong Places.”

Granted, he expresses regret about that bit, but as the article makes clear it didn't stop him from being a raging homophobe elsewhere. And he also bitched about "harassment", which is a self-serving way of characterizing the criticism he so richly deserved.

I'm sure someone will miss him outside of his immediate family. I'm just not sure why.

Goodbye, and good riddance

 Understand this: I'm not a petty person, nor am I particularly vindictive. It takes a lot to earn my hatred, and even more to earn my contempt.

Ultimately, Donald J. Trump got both.

When I say "hatred" or "contempt" I mean exactly that; there are any number of people I've met in my personal life who've earned one or the other due to their behavior towards me or friends and loved ones of mine, and most of them will only be able to get off of my shitlist for the things they've done by fixing the damage they've caused.

Politicians, at least in the United States, are different - they can always be voted out of office if you're in the right jurisdiction, and if you're not they can always be made targets of the derision they deserve in other, perfectly legal ways. It's a normal thing in a democracy to dislike people holding public office that you didn't vote for or ones that ended up a disappointment that you did, and there's no reason to feel guilt at that fact unless that dislike is based on irrational, ridiculous reasons.

The reasons that I hate Trump are hardly irrational or ridiculous. If anything, they're anything but that (see this link in RationalWiki that details a good number of them), and the idea that only one human being sitting in the White House for four years could do so much damage to the country he falsely claims to love so much is horrifying.

Unfortunately, that damage is real. And extensive.

I could go on and on about how his administration's feeble, incompetent actions during the Covid-19 pandemic have resulted in a death total of over 400,000 (nearly twice the second worst national total, Brazil's), or the fact that his cult-like standing among his followers led a number of them to join with white supremacists and other armed wackjobs in attacking the assembled Senate and House of Representatives on January 6th in order to violently overturn the counting of electoral college votes. Those are only two of the most recent things he's managed to do to us in four years, and if I listed all the others it'd take hours to read in summary form and days to finish if I went into full detail. So I'll have to be brief and say that he was nothing but trouble since his inauguration and the closest thing to a walking plague in expensive shoes at his worst.

And in roughly an hour, he'll finally, mercifully, be out of office.

As expected, his farewell speech was full of the usual triumphalist, egotistic garbage and was singularly lacking in self-awareness or even a connection to outward reality, and I'll only listen to it if I have to remind myself of why I despise him.

Joe Biden may be able to undo a good deal of the damage Trump caused to the Federal government's ability to function, but it's questionable if he can undo the damage to our already fractious political culture. That latter issue may take years - if not decades - to address, and we can't keep going this way as a nation and survive. And in a way, this may be one of the greatest crimes Trump has committed. National politics in the United States since the 1980s have been increasingly zero-sum and unpleasant, and Trump and his enablers have succeeded in making it exceedingly ugly and even barbaric at times. Just one look at what happened on January 6th will convince you of that fact.

After all that, the nicest thing I can say about Trump being gone is this: "goodbye, and good riddance". He came close to ruining us. Here's hoping he never finds a way to finish what he started.

The aftermath

 I've already made the comment elsewhere that I really need to keep my mouth shut when talking about possible future events; the disaster that was the invasion of the Capitol building by a pro-Trump mob bent on overthrowing the result of the electoral college vote was actually far worse than I could've possibly imagined, and the very real possibility that it could happen again on Inauguration Day fills me with a dread that I shouldn't be feeling in a country that's never previously gone through such a naked coup attempt. I'm under the impression that security will be incredibly tight on January 20th. Indeed, it'd be utterly ridiculous to not have airtight security after what happened on the 6th. But what if the neo-fascists (and make no mistake - that's precisely what they are) try it again?

One of the more reassuring sets of facts about what happened on the 6th is that a good deal of the energy that Trump created by stoking anger in his followers in Washington has been dissipated; their figurehead has been permanently stripped of his public megaphone on Twitter and is rightly facing the possiblity of removal under the 25th Amendment or a second impeachment. In addition, a number of the new-generation Blackshirts responsible for the Capitol building riot have been arrested and will eventually be facing a number of felony charges. Even so, the possibility that any number of co-conspirators are still at large and active is not a happy one. Especially considering that the current sitting President is a completely treacherous bastard: witness how he allegedly wanted to use the National Guard.

All of this is a highly mixed bag, and it's exceedingly grim in parts. But this country has survived far worse, and someone who was responsible for making that survival possible during another crisis needs to be quoted here to reassure anyone that we can, and most probably will, come out of the other end of this intact:

So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is...fear itself — nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance. In every dark hour of our national life a leadership of frankness and of vigor has met with that understanding and support of the people themselves which is essential to victory. And I am convinced that you will again give that support to leadership in these critical days.

-Franklin Delano Roosevelt, March 1933

A constitutional game of chicken

Understand this before you read any further: I am not in any way advocating a civil war. Not even close to that. Civil wars are invariably bloody, visceral descents into hell for any country that fights them, and this was true for us in 1861 just as much as it was in other eras for England, Ireland, Russia, Lebanon or the Balkans. You don't want to go there. Ever.

That being said...

The degree of unconstitutional fuckery currently being advocated by certain halfwits in Congress such as Louie Gohmert, Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz in order to support the mindless power fantasies of their thoroughly delusional caudillo seem guaranteed to push us in that direction, even if the electoral college vote is upheld tomorrow. Because there will be any number of Trump cultists (and forget about denying that it's a cult, since there's plenty of evidence affirming that fact) willing to do any number of stupid things if our Orange Caligula is turned out of office on January 20th.

In my opinion, this is the closest we've come to Fort Sumter in 1861 since Fort Sumter itself.

And if that's the case, you'd better hope that things proceed as normal on January 6th.

Because if they don't, we're all in deep trouble.