An Outstanding but Relatively Unknown Writer, Charles McCarry

Charles McCarry has largely dropped from sight, but a mere 15 to 20 years ago he was widely recognized as the pre-eminent American author of spy and intrigue novels.  He worked at the CIA as a deep cover operative, so he was quite familiar with his subject.  I always think it a shame that books get pigeonholed as mysteries or spy works, as that tends to leave them on a less-elevated plane than the great classic novels.  These works, however, are often astoundingly revelatory of the human character, in all its guises, and of human behavior.  So it is with McCarry’s books.  I cannot recommend them highly enough to you, particularly the Paul Christopher series.  Those books include, not in chronological order, but in my order for insights delivered, the Last Supper,  Shelly’s Heart, Second Sight, Better Angels, The Secret Lovers, Old Boys, Christophers Ghosts and so on.

McCarry was rather far-seeing, imagining in one plot that Kennedy was killed in revenge for the assassination of then South Vietnam President Diem.  In another, he postulated terrorists hijacking planes and flying them into buildings.  Reviewers at the time pooh-poohed the plot as too far-fetched.  We know how that worked out.  In one book, a CIA operative uses a super-computer to fix the presidential election.  Also not so far-fetched.  But what I want to focus more on is his descriptions of the prevailing attitude among the radical elite.  Tom Wolfe, as I detailed in a post earlier this year, pegged this group perfectly as Rococo Marxists.  McCarry in a different, more serious manner, nails them equally well, wryly pointing out the hypocrisy and the shallowness of their “ideas”.

In the book Second Sight, for example, McCarry describes, writing almost 50 years ago, how the media had come to function like a secret police, using informers, investigations, accusations by anonymous sources, including those inside government, and then conducting public “show” trials in which the victim had no opportunity to defend him or herself.  These were ideologically based, directed against the “bad” people who did not hold the generally radical views of media members.  A character says to a prominent media member “I think that you and your fellow true believers are in the grip of a collective dementia that makes it impossible for you to perceive reality.”  That is true of the entire pro(re)gressive movement.

And in the Better Angels, in the context of those who refused to go to Vietnam because the Viet Cong were admirable revolutionaries and the US was just a capitalist, imperialist country, but their refusal usual meant that some poor minority went instead, a character says “that is the beauty of idealism–it always finds a way to make others pay for its pleasures.”  And so it is today, as the whackos are making us all pay economically and socially for their literally insane beliefs.

I mentioned above the book in which the election is stolen.  It is followed by a book in which the plot is revealed.  In these books, it is the progressives who justify undermining democracy because their beliefs are more important than respecting the electorate’s choices.  It is the progressives who will use any arm of the government to punish their opponents, an opponent being anyone who dares to suggest they might be wrong.  Here are some enlightening excerpts:

“These characters despise the people; every time they’re rejected at the polls they think the voters have been duped.  If there was no vote, truth–as they call their gibberish–would prvail and they’d damn well see that human nature was replaced by a code devised by themselves.”  A character asks “you think the left lies?”.  The answer from another character:  “Yes, about everything.  They systematically falsify reality as a matter of keeping faith with their political delusions.  … Like all liars, they live in a panic because they know they may be discovered at any moment.”

As I said, these words were written long ago, and unfortuately, things have only gotten progressively (pun intended) worse.  And the why is obvious.  Think of blood cancers.  Most blood cells are produced in bone marrow, including the cancerous ones.  Academia is the bone marrow of American society, and it has been producing cancer cells across every profession for decades.  And now our very society is cancerous, a diseased hulk in its terminal stages.  The only hope is a bone marrow transplant.  The current version of academia needs to be completely destroyed, every rotten left wing professor or staff-member fired, and the universities rebuilt with a true belief in learning and teaching independent, critical thought.