Devastated by your optimism: thoughts on reading Thae Yong Ho's memoir about the North Korean slave state

Like a lot of the world, I've had some more time at home lately than I'm used to. I've made every effort to use the time well, rather than get lost in a haze of worry and sloth. I wrote a novel, then some short stories. I read the book of a writer I've gotten to know and reviewed it. In the last six weeks, though, I did work closer to my professional life as a Korean translator than my private passion as a writer. I read Thae Yong Ho's memoir, The Three-Story Secretariat's Password. Thae, if you're not familiar because your life doesn't revolve around things Korea-related, was one of the most high-profile North Korean defectors of the last twenty years. He was the deputy ambassador in London when he and his family defected in 2016. He'd spent a long career in North Korea's Ministry of Foreign Affairs, so he knows a lot about North Korean decision-making of the last three decades at a reasonably high level. He didn't have first-hand access to the Kim family, but he did have insider access that gave him pretty good second-hand insight. There's no English version of his book, meaning I had to grind through the Korean, which took me about six weeks. The style is straightforward enough; it's just a long book, and I was stopping to take notes through a lot of it.

A word on the reliability 

Thae comes off as generally quite credible. He is careful to separate what he knows first-hand from what he doesn't know for sure, or what he merely heard as rumor or his own conjecture. When he can, he tells exactly who was involved and when, although on occasion, he has to obscure names, because he doesn't want his former colleagues and friends who are still stuck inside North Korea to suffer from what he writes.

There are maybe a few reasons to be a little bit suspect of Thae. The general drift of his messaging on North Korea pretty neatly matches what any North Korea hawk would say: North Korea has never negotiated in good faith on nuclear weapons, and only ever used negotiations as a stall tactic to buy time to keep developing its nuclear program. Any American skeptic of North Korean genuineness, like John Bolton, would agree. Thae is currently a member of South Korea's parliament for the conservative South Korean party, so his account is likely to support a tough-on-North-Korea narrative, one that differs from the ruling party led by President Moon Jae-in. So he has a political interest in pushing the narrative he's pushing.

But I don't think that automatically rules out the possibility he's being largely honest. That would be a chicken-and-egg type of fallacy, assuming his views on North Korea are a result of his politics, not that his politics are a result of his hard-won views on North Korea. He has joined with the right because he thinks their views are more likely to bring about the change in North Korea he wants to see based on a lifetime in North Korea. Nobody is immune from bias, but his memoir came off to me more as his honest account of why he thinks the way he does than an attempt to get others to think as he does by any means necessary.

One could also say that the book maybe suffers in parts from a little bit of indulgence in self-praise. But I look at this the same way I read St. Paul when he addressed a Jewish audience: "I was circumcised when I was eight days old. I am a pure-blooded citizen of Israel and a member of the tribe of Benjamin--a real Hebrew if there ever was one!" Thae knows his audience may include North Koreans who are either reading bootleg copies of the book or perhaps assigned to read it by the Ministry of State Security in North Korea. He wants to let them know that he wasn't just some slouch in the North Korean system who left because he couldn't hack it. He was a good North Korean, with a proud family history, and he left because he was disgusted by how the Kim family betrayed socialism's ideals. The indulgences are there to convince North Koreans, not audiences outside the country. They don't greatly hurt the book's reliability.

A word on the title

Thae's English Wikipedia page translates the title (Korean: 3층 시기실의 암호) as "Cryptography From the Third-Floor Secretariat." That's a very literal translation, one that doesn't take into account how Thae himself explains the "three-story secretariat." If I just looked at the title by itself in Korean, I'd also guess it referred to the third floor of a building, but Thae very specifically explains that it's not the third floor, but that the building is referred to as the "three-story secretariat office." It's the building that the ruling North Korean party, the Korean Workers' Party, uses as its headquarters, a building Thae says even North Koreans didn't know about until a North-South summit hosted Moon Jae-in there.

"Cryptography" (암호), meanwhile, can also mean a secret code or just a password. The title refers to a password that Thae was sent in order to open an email from the party with instructions to buy tickets to an Eric Clapton concert in London. Kim Jong Un's older brother Kim Jong Chol was to attend. (The media eventually got wind of it and it became a huge story.) After Thae escorted Kim Jong Chol all over London for three days, his children asked him how Kim could spend thousands of dollars on a concert and hotel and restaurants when millions in North Korea were struggling. It was a moment of shame for Thae, and it was a pivotal moment in his change of heart that led to his defection.

Whenever I felt like giving up on reading this whole book, I would look at Thae's stern face, which felt like an accusation that I was not working hard enough. 

Back story on a number of the big North Korea stories for the last 30 years

In addition to the Kim Jong Chol/Eric Clapton story, Thae also had a driver's-seat view of a number of stories that got North Korea notoriety. One was the threat to a salon owner in London when the owner used Kim Jong Un's likeness for an advertisement. Thae was one of the two men from the North Korean embassy who went to the salon. Thae also had to try to keep the film maker who made Big Bang in Pyongyang, about Dennis Rodman's disastrous trip to bring basketball diplomacy to North Korea, from sending the version of the movie he made to film festivals. The regime didn't like that it mentioned Kim Jong Un's brutal killing of his uncle Jang Song Thaek, and they told Thae to threaten to sue. The filmmaker pointed out that there was no contract, so North Korea was welcome to sue. Thae wasn't responsible for the failure to sign a contract, but he was still reprimanded for not stopping the movie.

These stories, the ones with the highest degree of validity because of Thae's direct involvement, do a lot on their own to show how capricious the Kim family is, but also how methodical it can be in its cruelty. Even though Thae did not have direct involvement in things like the killing of Jang Song Thaek or nuclear arms talks, it isn't hard to see how he goes from the things he did experience directly to make deductions about other things he wasn't in the room for.

North Korea as a slave state

The most emotional parts of the book came when Thae spoke from the heart about the existential horror of being a North Korean. He frequently calls North Korea a slave state, its citizens slaves, and calls his own leaving an escape from slavery. He compares the struggle to topple the Kim family and reunite the two Koreas under one, democratic government to the U.S.'s own struggle to rid itself of slavery.

I often am trying to correct people who go around thinking that all North Koreans are just sad, terrified, and brainwashed all the time. I point out that North Koreans experience happiness, love their children, and value their lives. I explain that the partially marketized economy--not so much a result of reforms as bending to the inevitable--means that sometimes, North Koreans can move ahead within fixed bounds. They aren't just automatons. They're real people who don't respond that differently to their situation from how we would.

That's all true, but reading Thae's book, I started thinking about slavery scholarship in our country. When I was in college, I started seeing scholarship emerging on the diversity of the slave experience, how it meant a lot more than the field and the lash for everyone. Some slaves were allowed to hire themselves out after their regular work was done, and keep part of the wages of their labor. Some slave owners treated their slaves somewhat leniently, both out of a sense of decency and also just out of the economic reasoning that it made more sense to keep their property in good working order. Some masters allowed their slaves to buy their way to freedom, or to learn to read or a trade.

That's all true, and as far as it's always a good thing to bring precision to any field of study, I'm all for the more detailed scholarship. But some people have capitalized on the precision of this study to suggest that slavery "wasn't really that bad" for most slaves. It's linked to the same school of thought that wants black people in America to "get over" slavery because it was 160 years ago. No amount of precision in scholarship should ever overrule the primary fact that it's still slavery.

After reading Thae's book, I feel like my own desire to see North Koreans as real people has at times just been pedantry masking itself as erudition. Yes, the reality of life for North Koreans is a lot more complicated than the popular picture of brainwashed, goose-stepping soldiers who worship their leader like a god. But slavery is still slavery. Yes, it's important to try to understand the specifics of that slavery, but nothing should distract anyone from the central fact that North Korea's people are not meaningfully free.

If that's true, what responsibility do I have? What responsibility do we all have? There were four million slaves in the U.S. at the outbreak of the Civil War. There are twenty six million people in North Korea today.

Thae doesn't believe it will require war to unite the peninsula and free North Korea's slaves. He thinks that keeping sanctions on North Korea will eventually put enough strain on the regime that it will fall on its own. He believes that already, there are seeds of the regime's downfall planted. Young people don't think of Kim Jong Un as a god, or even particularly like him. And when officials try to interfere in the markets run throughout the country, people actually fight back.

I wish I could share his optimism that freeing North Korea's slaves could come without bloodshed, but I don't. While conventional wisdom is that if a regime is too repressive, the people eventually have nothing to lose and will rebel, this isn't true in a perfectly repressive country. Thae spells out how North Korea managed to not fade away like the Soviet Union did because, in the minds of its rulers, it kept its ideological purity while the Soviet Union did not. The playbook of strategic patience and economic pressure might work on an amateur repressive country, but North Korea is the uncontested champion.

Economic pressure might work if the world really made up its mind it wanted to do this, and if we approached it with the kind of energy we once approached things like ending apartheid in South Africa. But as Thae himself admits, even in South Korea, younger people don't have much interest in reunification. (I wrote about this before when talking about a South Korean soap opera.) If even South Korea can't get excited to free the slaves they share a history and language with, I don't know how the rest of the world will.

All of which is very depressing to consider. Thae's genuineness, optimism, and determination to live to try to bring about the abolition of slavery in North Korea ended up making me feel more dispirited than uplifted. But if Thae can rally himself to keep fighting for it, so can I. Unlike many of the other things wrong with the world, I actually know enough about this to contribute to it in some way, if nothing else, than by helping to increase knowledge about North Korea. Thae claimed Kim fears nothing as much as the truth, but the truth works two ways: both the truth about the outside world making it into North Korea and the truth about North Korea making it to the outside world.

More daydream than lucid dream

One figure of speech about writing fiction that's held up for me is that it's like dreaming, or dreaming while awake, or lucid dreaming. But I'd add that the most apt simile is that it's like daydreaming. I think a lot of writing advice gives the impression that the best way to write is to keep a dream journal, wake up in the middle of the night, and write furiously while your dream is still fresh and your conscious, linguistic, rational mind hasn't completely taken back over yet. This is, in fact, almost exactly the advice Olen Butler gives in his fiction how-to book, From Where You Dream.

While this image of a good story as something like a dream converted into words has held up for me, I'd like to add the caveat that it's more like a daydream for me than lucid dreaming. In both a day dream and the dreaming we do during our deep sleep, our brains tend to churn over whatever has been occupying their neurons in the last few hours before the dream begins. With a daydream, the link is somewhat direct: someone says something about getting takeout, and you start thinking about how good takeout was in Korea, and then you wonder what it would be like to deliver food in Korea on a moped, and then you've imagined this moped delivery guy's life, and you realize you've been dreaming a story. Everything is a bit linear in your thinking process. If you can remember enough, you'll recall how you got from point A to B to Z. In a dream during sleep, this linear process doesn't seem to hold.

The majority of stories I've written have started as daydreams. I'll use "Sunflower," which recently got published, as an example. I think part of how I ended up dreaming this story came from reading another short story, "The Stamp Collector" by Dave King, which I wrote about here. It's about an alcoholic in search of his rock bottom. I was sort of following some thought having to do with that story, and I was also hating myself for having just eaten too much again.

I was thinking about how eating too much isn't just bad for my vanity or my health, but it's actually a sin of sorts, because it means I'm using more of the Earth's limited resources than I should be. Overeating is like leaving the lights on. I was thinking about what would happen if everyone who over-consumed got what they deserved, and somehow, my brain put together King's story with overeating and the karma thereof, and I landed on the idea of a karmic rock bottom.

That's just where I started from, of course. As I wrote the story, I had to poke and prod, and I used the naturally occurring elements to build further than what my initial burst of imagination had been able to accomplish. Calling the woman Sunflower and then using the image of a sunflower as a central symbol came later. The dream gave me the scaffolding, but from there, I had to use my normal brain to finish the work. That's why I feel like writing a story is more akin to daydreaming than deep-sleep dreaming, because it's a negotiation between normal cognitive functioning and the breaking loose from reality that comes with a dream. It's a middle state between the logic of your brain after it's had its morning coffee and it's focused on work and your brain when it's whacked out on vodka and Gatorade and you pass out on the couch.

Veteran as victim: how the military got on the good side of the counter establishment

In the Vietnam era, protest songs were all about the war and the military. In the imagination of the left, the symbol of all that was wrong with America was the military. Although hippies also weren't fans of "pigs," the protest songs of the era were far more focused on the military as the symbol of fascism than on the police. Maybe because the most iconic unrest from the Vietnam Era ended in violence at the hands of the National Guard and not the police, the anti-establishment gaze remained mostly fixed on the military.

To use one list of protest songs from the Vietnam Era as an example, there are no mentions of the police in any of the lyrics. Some of the songs don't have a villain, like John Lennon's "All We Are Saying." They're about peace in general. But in those that do have a villain, it's the military, usually personified by the generals who lead it and the politicians who put it to work. One song, Black Sabbath's "War Pigs" from 1970 (which didn't appear on the list I linked), likens generals to servants of Satan:

In the years since, the military has slowly taken a back seat to the police as the symbol of the oppressor. We've gone from reviling war pigs to just pigs. Partly, this has been the result of a change in who gets to have a voice in pop culture like music. In the 60s and 70s, most pop stars were white. A look back at the list of protest songs I linked above will show some melanin among the singers, but not a lot. One could argue that to a privileged, white, young audience in 1968, the threat of being sent over to a war that presented physical danger represented the most oppressive use of state power. But to those in black neighborhoods, which were still kept in a state of legal segregation by redlining policies at the time, the war was just one of a number of threats to physical safety, and not necessarily the most pressing one. As early as the 80s, when rap music became mainstream, white children like me started hearing about black rage toward the police. We were scandalized by it, helped along by the adults we knew who told us what to think of these lyrics, but we heard it.

But there's been something else, too. In Barry McGuire's "Eve of Destruction," there was an appeal directly to what seems like an enlisted solider: "You don't believe in war, but what's that gun you're totin'." Even though generals and politicians were the main target, there were times when the common solider was fair game, too. Returning Vietnam veterans found themselves jeered and spit upon.

That all changed when America got involved in its first war I was old enough to remember. During Operation Desert Storm, the whole country seemed like it wanted to return to the good, old days when America still won wars. That meant "not having another Vietnam." We meant that in a lot of ways, not the least of which was supporting the troops. When I was a senior in high school, we wrote letters to the troops, held fund-raisers for their families, and the Pledge of Allegiance reappeared for the first time since I was in kindergarten. (I stood for it, but didn't recite it, which is a story for another time.)

We continued this tendency to support the troops during the Second Gulf War, what my friend who is a veteran of the first one calls "the one we started." Even though Gulf War II was fought on questionable grounds from the start, and even though it included terrible errors, both unintentional (drones hitting civilian targets) and intentional (sexual violence against prisoners for the sake of humiliating them), even the left that was against the war wanted to support the troops. We distinguished between the majority of good troops and the few rotten apples who did things like take involuntary dick pics of prisoners.

In fact, far from criticizing the troops, the left tried to capitalize on the sacredness of military members in the public imagination in two ways. One was calling out failures on behalf of the VA to take care of those who had served. The second was to make use of a refrain war opponents have been using for centuries: rich man's war, poor man's fight:

(For a much better review of protest music from the 00's, see Lindsay Ellis' excellent video on the subject.)

One thing about rich man's war/poor man's fight is that it turns soldiers from willing pawns of an evil overlord into victims of that overlord. They're as much the victims of war-hunger as the ostensible enemies of the rich who run their wars.

Iowa Review runs a contest, and I'm invited!

At the end of May, I stumbled across word that The Iowa Review, one of the top 20 literary journals in the country, was running a special contest for veteran writers. Although they said you could enter as long as you were a veteran and you could write about any subject matter you wanted, the examples they gave all wrote about something military-related. The only story I've written about my experience in the military, "Brokedick," has already been published, so I needed another one. I decided to sprint and write one quickly before the contest's due date at the end of May, because I figured that even a hurried story would have a better chance of getting me into The Iowa Review than I'd have under normal circumstances. It's incredibly competitive, and I hoped that maybe with the limiting factor of only veterans being able to enter, my odds would only be a hundred to one instead of five hundred to one, like they would be during a normal open period.

It occurred to me that "veteran" is the only special category I, as a white, cis-male, will ever be able to claim. Journals often run special periods for historically marginalized voices, or at least they specifically call out that they are looking for these voices. The voices they are looking for are BIPOC or LGBTQIA+, for the most part. I'm not here to complain about journals making extra room for those voices. This isn't a white man complaining about affirmative action in literature. For the most part, this focus on new voices is a good thing, and it's brought needed shifts of focus in our culture. There are still plenty of places I can publish my work. I'm only interested here in the fact that at least in some way, "veteran" is a category considered disadvantaged enough to at least occasionally sneak into the list of people who deserve special amplification of their voices. It puts veterans alongside historically marginalized groups. Why?

One of the reasons for this is the new focus on PTSD. Virtually any depiction of a veteran in the last ten to fifteen years has focused on the difficulties of readjustment. Even when we talk of the occasional wrongs that military members carried out while deployed, we tend not to focus on blaming them. Instead, we talk of "moral injury" they have endured by being ordered to do what their moral senses told them was wrong, or by making mistakes of judgment under the fog of war.

Trying to have it both ways

Anti-establishment critics want to both rage at a machine that is oppressing us but also avoid being too harsh toward the popular emblems of that machine. You can see this in the System of a Down video above. On the one hand, the song is saying that the poor are victims of the establishment, driven by economic necessity to play a hand in the military. But at the same time, the video shows a mindless army of automatons marching to uphold the will of the establishment. Presumably, these are the poor people whom the song seems to take the side of, but visually, the poor seem to share in the blame for their lack of critical thinking (which the band members, like Neo in the Matrix, have red-pilled their way out of). We could maybe think that the ones marching in the video are contractors for Halliburton, but the reality is that the video is trying to play it both ways, both excusing the human tools of the state and also blaming them.

Currently, a lot of anti-establishment voices are doing the same thing. The police are extremely unpopular, while the military is still trusted. Partly, this is because the military has been smart enough to keep itself out of the current anti-police uprising. Some military officials have pointed out the constitutional issues with using the military to stop citizens from protesting, which, in one sense, is just the military clinging to rules and regulations to stay out of trouble, something it's good at, but has the effect of making it look like the military is opposing a Trump-led would-be dictatorship.

I've also read a lot of veterans writing that the problem with the police is that they aren't held accountable the way the military is. In the military, they write, even an accidental discharge of a weapon gets investigated, meaning the military is very cautious about using force. And when a military member does wrong, he or she is punished.

This dual track is disingenuous. There is no place on Earth that can waste money like the Department of Defense. And that money is hard for watch groups to track. It's easier for the DoD to hide what it does wrong than it is for the police, which is part of the reason why we still trust it a little bit. Most of the worst part of America's occupation of Iraq took place before smart phones were ubiquitous, but we still got plenty of examples of wrongdoing that made it through. What would a U.S.-led occupation look like now, if we could see all of it?

If you're going to be in the ACAB camp (All Cops Are Bastards), but you're not willing to say the same about the military, then you're using a double standard the facts don't call for. Police and the military are made up of the same demographics. A lot of police are themselves veterans. Nobody has statistics on how many, but when I was in the Marine Corps, a lot of the people I knew said the reason they'd joined was to get experience so they could become cops (or fire department) after the service. Veterans get hiring preferences for a lot of police jobs. Of the five police I know personally, four are veterans. Psychologically, the same kinds of people who join the military are the people who are likely to become police. And contrary to the "military are trained not to do bad things" narrative, at least one study shows that police with military experience are more likely to fire their weapons than those who never served in the military

Both the military and the police are products of a society that wants order and wants to be strong, but doesn't want to be terribly inconvenienced to obtain those things. Both are asked to provide difficult products in order to satisfy voters while not costing enough to greatly aggravate those same voters. Both are asked to clean up the messes created by our society not thinking deeply about how to fix problems.

And here's what you may not want to hear: Trump isn't lying about being somewhat popular in both groups. It's different, of course, among educated military members than uneducated ones, just as it's true in general in America that educated voters--even white male ones--are less likely to vote for Trump if they have a college education, a fact people seem to keep glossing over when talking about the racial politics of the Trump era. My friend, a Marine Corps officer who went to Harvard and doesn't like Trump, was recently reassigned to work with an infantry unit. He told me that when Trump's ad came on during the Super Bowl, nearly the entire two thousand or so people in the mess hall in 29 Palms broke out in a roar. Just because some officers are saying things that show their break with Trump doesn't mean it's unanimous in the military. Yes, about half the military now has an unfavorable view of Trump, but the numbers are different among the parts of the military likely to end up as police.

The moment you try to do anything good, you become a victim

I hated the Marine Corps. I know that's a strange thing to hear come out of a Marine's mouth, but I did. I hated it because it espoused high-minded ideals, while undermining those ideals in a practical way every day. I hated it because I do not think medieval ideas like a caste system between officers and enlisted have any problem in a modern democracy. I hated it because I do not see how one can defend all the freedoms we care about by joining an organization where you are stripped of many of those same freedoms. Old school military believe this is the only way to maintain good order and discipline, but as the military's greatest legal mind has shown, "good order and discipline" is just a phrase justifying a lazy avoidance of answering questions about why some old regulations still exist.


I'm not a victim, though. Maybe I'd think I was if I hadn't been in during the 90s, when there were no wars to fight. But I didn't go into the Marine Corps because I was poor. My parents weren't rich, but they were far from poor, and I could have avoided the military and still gone to college. I joined because I had romantic ideals about doing my part. I thought it was wrong of me to let others do the hard work and enjoy the fruits of their labor. What I discovered while enlisted was that the real work of America is being done mostly by people who don't have a clue. There are perennial problems that never get fixed, because everyone is just trying to survive and move on, and nobody really knows how to fix the problems, anyhow.

I learned that America's most important institutions are held together by duct tape, wishful thinking, and abuse of the good will of young people. That doesn't make me a victim, it just makes me wiser. I wanted to be part of making America stronger, and I learned the truth of what that means. The police are in the same boat. A lot of anti-police sentiment acts like the police have some master plan they're carrying out on behalf of a carefully constructed plot to maintain the status quo and keep historically disadvantaged people in their place, not realizing America is the last country on Earth capable of organizing something so concerted. America is what happens when chaos is barely held in check by the best of us. It is not a place where masterminds control puppets behind the scenes. When police act like they don't know what they're doing, it's not because someone really knows what they're doing and are disguising it. What you see is a reflection of reality. We have massive problems caused by our own laziness, bad policy, and unwillingness to do the hard work to fix anything difficult, and we throw those problems on people like Marines, police, social workers, and teachers. We ask them to fix it, cheap, and if they can't, we'll hold them accountable.

Any of these front-line civil servants, the ones most in the vicinity of the worst problems we face, are there for a variety of reasons. Maybe they care about the world. Maybe they need to pay the bills. Most likely, it's a mix of those things. All are trying their best to operate in a world that's not just imperfect, it's barely functioning. Part of that dysfunction is the outrageous behavior of some co-workers, behavior that is hard to know how to respond to when it seems like the whole world is against your group and the only people you can trust are within it.

I was lucky when I joined the Marine Corps. I passed tests that allowed me to go to school to learn Korean, rather than go carry heavy artillery pieces until my back broke. It was just dumb luck I ended up where I did, and maybe a little bit of privilege that my background got me ready for something other than the infantry. But I might very well have ended up a grunt (infantry) or a police officer. If I had, I can guarantee that me at twenty-three had no idea how to deal with the things police deal with. The world sees me as a veteran, and therefore someone to admire or possibly pity, but if I'd followed the Marine Corps with a second act as a police officer, I'd have lost all that respect.

We've accepted the military because we've learned to see them as us. They're not bad people who went off to kill Vietnamese peasants, they're ordinary people who joined because they needed the money for college and got in over their heads. I don't know why we don't afford the same suspension of doubt for police, other than the military does its things it's not proud of overseas, where we don't have to see them.

Not back on it, John, still on it

HBomberGuy, a YouTuber my son watches and therefore--because my son likes to watch on the good TV in the living room--I watch, too, often cracks jokes about how every video he does ends up descending at some point into a critique of capitalism. Maybe anyone who posts content regularly will inevitably end up circling back to the same points over and over again. That's my explanation, anyway, for why I'm about to lodge another lament about how I don't feel at home intellectually or emotionally with either of the two main political camps in my country at the moment. Even though I disagree with one side more than I do the other, even the one I tentatively cling to tends to arrive at its positions and push its agenda in ways I don't recognize as legitimate.

Here's a meme from the past two weeks that I've seen several people on Twitter post:

Contrast the language in that meme and the certainty with which it presents its conclusions with two other documents I read this last week. One was the statistical analysis on racial differences in police force from a few years ago by Roland Fryer, the one that made headlines when the media reported that it showed police did not show bias when it came to shooting suspects. The other was a piece by Vox critical of Fryer's paper.

I'm not a frequent viewer of The Daily Show, but when I watch it, I think Trevor Noah's usually sharp, funny, and insightful, and the Daily Show has always been good at demonstrating the weaknesses of media in getting stories right. But this idea, that the police are looting black bodies, contrasts in tone with the papers I read by Fryer and Dara Lind on Vox. Here's about as strong as Fryer gets in presenting his thesis: 

Interestingly, as the intensity of force increases (e.g. handcuffing civilians without arrest, drawing or pointing a weapon, or using pepper spray or a baton), the probability that any civilian is subjected to such treatment is small, but the racial difference remains surprisingly constant. For instance, 0.26 percent of interactions between police and civilians involve an officer drawing a weapon; 0.02 percent involve using a baton. These are rare events. Yet, the results indicate that they are significantly more rare for whites than blacks. 

(Lost in the hub-bub over the paper suggesting there isn't much bias in police shootings was the other conclusion, which is that there was evidence of bias in every kind of force except for shootings.)

Lind, attacking Fryer's work, is somewhat more blunt, but not much. She is critical of how Fryer claimed to be doing pioneering work in a field that actually already had a lot of statistical work done, but she doesn't blast the work indiscriminately. She characterizes it as "definitely useful in some regards," and separates what Fryer's work might tell us from what it leaves out.

Ultimately, I find myself agreeing with Lind somewhat. Reading Fryer's work, it's clear he's uncomfortable with a bigger question of why police have MORE interactions with blacks and Latinos than whites to begin with. Even in his edited version of his paper, the one that he published after first dealing with criticism for his original "working paper" (the one the media reported on back in 2016), Fryer is not sure how to handle this question, referring vaguely to "race-specific crime participation rates," and describing an ideal experiment that would be impossible to carry out.

But what really struck me reading both Fryer's work and Lind's reply was how different academic discourse is from political discourse. Academic discourse is careful. It avoids being provocative or overstating its findings. It attempts to be precise about what the possible implications of a conclusion are and are not.

While I've been plenty frustrated over the years with how some academic discourse seems indifferent to its relevance to the world and the people who live in it (namely, the literary theory I was subject to as an English student), I'm at least as frustrated by political discourse that seems only concerned with getting the effect it is looking for, and not tying that push for an effect to some intellectual basis. Anytime there is a move from proposition to policy, there is a loss of precision. That's inevitable, perhaps, but not an excuse to abandon a commitment to intellectual rigorousness altogether.

I used to believe that the political left had a greater commitment to intellectual rigor than the right did. We used to console ourselves after our frequent political setbacks by telling ourselves how hard it was to convince people we were right when our arguments required a great deal more nuance than was practicable for moving the masses. It now feels like we've decided to alleviate those concerns by just ditching our inconvenient attachment to high-minded ideals like truth. It's like how Ohio State used to whine that it couldn't compete with the SEC in football because of its tougher academic standards and fussiness over rules, so it decided to just become as corrupt as the other schools, thereby eliminating the problem it had competing.

The left might still have some greater degree of intellectual gravitas as a legacy, but it's quickly eroding. This was brought home to me recently by another meme I saw circulating, one that was re-posted by some writers I admire:

Since when did a preference for facts over feelings become "white noise"? When did "facts don't care about your feelings" become as illegitimate a trope as "just obey and you won't get hurt"? I realize any rhetorical tactic can be used for evil, including one that calls for a rigorous approach over an emotional one, but are we really ready to just hand this argument over to people we disagree with concerning police violence?

There is, of course, more than one kind of truth. There is emotional truth and there is statistical truth. There are numbers on police violence and there are actual stories about real suffering of real people, many of which have been captured on video. There's a reason politicians like to give vignettes during speeches, and why every news story ever on a big topic starts off with the individual story of a single person. We react differently to stories and their emotional tug than we do to facts.

That's fine. There's a place for both. But I feel more and more like the left is only a place for emotional truth. We're so obsessed with winning, we continually rely on the political tactic of overstatement to the intellectual discipline of precise statement. We only focus on emotional truths at the expense of logical ones.

There's a place for the emotional logic of narrative in the national dialogue over how to reform the police. But narrative logic, like academic discourse, can be either shrill or measured, can be either precise or wildly imprecise.  I've been very disappointed sometimes to see that fiction writers I admire aren't terribly impressive when it comes to precision with their online activism. One writer in particular whose stories I love often responds to Trump Tweets with nothing more creative than "fuck you."

There's a time for fuck-you, just as there is a time to indulge in emotional logic at the expense of precision. If we all went to see comedians perform expecting precision, we wouldn't have much fun. It's fine to bend the truth for a specific reason, but only if we all keep in mind that the truth is being bent, and our indulgence of this is temporary. It sometimes seems to me, though, that we've been indulging a type of imprecision in the name of activism for so long, we've forgotten that's not actually the right way to think all the time.

There are some good ideas out there. One of the things I realized this week when trying to educate myself about statistics on police violence was how hard it is to get good data. One of the calls right now is for a national database to help fix this problem. It would be a great start, because it would improve the logic we use to try to figure out what problems we even need to solve in the first place. But there are much deeper problems to solve than we will be able to deal with during a season of protest.

The reason Fryer was reluctant to dive into the question of why the police are more likely to come into contact with black and Latino people in the first place is the same reason we're all reluctant to deal with it. If we just blame the police for being assholes and focus on the dramatic confrontations we see on video, we don't have to confront a much more difficult truth. Blacks and Latinos are more likely to commit crimes that bring them into contact with police, and that's a result of years of bad policy.

That policy was something everyone contributed to. We all tolerated bad policy. We now all tolerate unequal opportunity that leads to greater criminality in some communities. When Mrs. Heretic's students tried to get jobs in Baltimore, they found there were few to get, and any there were took hours by bus to get to. With adult responsibilities thrust upon them at a young age, many decided to get into selling drugs, at which point a long string of police interactions became a certainty. To increase opportunity would take an enormous investment on our part. Instead, we tend to just throw the problem in the laps of moderately paid teachers and police. When they aren't up to the impossible job, we decide the solution is for politicians to "hold them accountable." It's an insane approach to deep social problems, and it's no wonder it never works. It's no wonder we keep ending up at the same place.

We do have to fix the police, but that won't solve the problems that made us want the police to fix in the first place. Defunding the police only works with massive funding in other areas. When we reallocate that funding, we need it to be based on cold, rigorous findings that tell us what will work. I'm increasingly skeptical, though, that we even have the ability as a people anymore to do that kind of thinking.

A new unity is possible in America, but only if we realize how difficult unity is

Mrs. Heretic posted a link to an article on her Facebook timeline yesterday about a speech George W. Bush recently gave. Her posting of this article seemed to approve of what Bush said. Later in the day, she said something to me about being nostalgic for Bush. If I had been able in 2004 to look ahead into the future long enough to hear her say that, I'd have probably refused to live in that timeline, because I'd have assumed someone had hijacked her brain.

In 2004, we moved from Chicago, where we had just finished grad school, to the D.C. area, where I had just landed a new job. I showed up in March, but Mrs. Heretic, who still needed to stay in Chicago until the end of the spring semester to finish up her MA in women's studies, didn't come until the end of April. When she showed up, she came with about ten of her classmates from the women's studies program, who joined her at the March for Women's Lives. They made t-shirts that they all wore, which said, if I recall correctly, something like "Boobs Against Bush."

A sign from the 2004 March for Women's Lives

I wasn't a fan of Bush, either, especially his decision to get America involved in military adventurism in Iraq to achieve nebulous political goals, but to Mrs. Heretic and many other liberals, he was the devil. Or at least, he was a sheep surrounded by devils. The rhetoric from the left about Bush painted him as the dumbest and worst president in history, and often cast him as extremist.

Now that we really do have the dumbest and worst president in American history--one who, if not an extremist himself, certainly plays with the fire of extremism, and only escapes being an extremist because that would involve the commitment to a single idea of which he is incapable--Bush no longer seems like such an enemy to liberals. When we listen to him now, we remember a time when the Republican Party at least pretended to try to represent all Americans, when they really thought they had a chance to win over Latinos, so there was a large faction of them fighting for reasonable immigration reform. We remember the term "compassionate conservatism," and recall a time when presidents at least could somewhat lull us to sleep on their policies we didn't like by drowning out the bad parts with tons of rhetoric everyone agreed with.

I mentioned earlier the idea of going forward in time from 2004 to 2020, but what if we could go back in time from 2020 to 2004? What would our rallies back then look like? Would we still burn Bush in effigy at every rally? Or would we try to build a consensus where we could in order to accomplish some worthy goals, while expressing our firm opposition to the policies we disagreed with, but without demonizing him or his supporters personally?

The problem with civil politics is that the politics of confrontation has seemed to work so well for so long. Politicians have used it as a strategy because their strategy experts told them to. But confrontation isn't really a strategy; it's a tactic, one that should only be used for a limited time for limited purposes with very specific aims. Continuing to use it long-term might win you some battles, but you'll lose the war, not because your enemy vanquished you, but because the whole battlefield will turn to poison that kills you along with your enemy. That's where we are now.

There's a paradox in politics that the larger your coalition, the stronger you are relative to those outside your coalition, but the more internal stresses you face. The more groups you bring in, the more you can defend yourselves from outside forces, but every new person brings new opinions and wishes, and balancing those becomes more difficult with every new member of your coalition. This explains some of the perennial disorganization within the Democratic Party, which is more heterogeneous than the Republican Party.

The best way to manage the competing interests is to reduce the number of things everyone has to agree on in order to maintain the union. You don't have to actually believe other races are equal; you just have to believe they're equal before the law. You don't have to believe homosexuality is moral; you just have to believe it deserves protection under the law.

Hillary Clinton used the slogan "stronger together" in her 2016 run. I don't disagree with the principle, only the smugness and certainty with which it was used. Being together might make us stronger, but only if we realize how much work it is to keep everyone together. We're not going to sprinkle slogans over differences and wake up to unity. Unity involves minimizing the space we need to agree on to keep the union working, which means not fighting over things that don't matter. It involves realizing how deeply other people hold some beliefs and how hard it will be be to get them to bend. It involves realizing how fragile a democracy is. It means cooperating with some people who hold beliefs you personally find abominable, because there is no other choice. And maybe it involves realizing that the compromise with others is only a temporary one, meant to achieve nothing more than comfort and peace in this life. You might even use the word "secular" to describe it. We can be in the world and work with others but not be of the world by agreeing with them.

James Mattis, in his critique of Trump this week, went beyond just criticizing the President to a hope for union. He called what demonstrators are seeking a "wholesome and unifying demand." Nearly everyone in the union can understand the core desire of the demonstrators: to not feel fear of the police. Sticking to that desire as the central aim will likely continue to garner sympathy. Attacking police as thugs or state-sponsored terrorists will not. I'm not speaking about emotional truths here, but practical ones. That kind of talk won't keep the union together, which means a failure to achieve goals.

Moreover, in attacking anyone who doesn't immediately fall into ideological lockstep with whatever saucy Tweet someone just blasted out means you're going to be attacking people you might later find could have been someone you could have worked with. For how long did we call Bush, McCain, and Romney racists? Do we regret now any of the things we said about them? Do we see now how demonizing someone slightly to our right can end up bringing us someone far to our right? (Or whatever political space Trump is occupying on a particular day, depending on what news he watched that morning.)

Mattis also hoped the people could find unity in spite of Trump:

Donald Trump is the first president in my lifetime who does not try to unite the American people—does not even pretend to try. Instead he tries to divide us. We are witnessing the consequences of three years of this deliberate effort. We are witnessing the consequences of three years without mature leadership. We can unite without him, drawing on the strengths inherent in our civil society. This will not be easy, as the past few days have shown, but we owe it to our fellow citizens; to past generations that bled to defend our promise; and to our children.

Wouldn't it be something if the most polarizing president in history ended up making us somehow more united, if he helped us to turn back some of the increasing polarization that has built up since the first troops from World War II started arriving back home? To do that, the first step is to realize it won't be easy. It means people who deeply disagree about issues on which they will never change each others' minds will have to get along. It means people who fundamentally dislike each other will have to get along. It means realizing unity isn't a fuzzy liberal's dream, it's a necessity we can't live without. 

The tricky "what good will this do" question

The most surprising thing to me every time there's a crisis isn't the panoply of opinions I see expressed, it's the certainty with which people hold those opinions. I don't claim to be the smartest or the most informed about any issue out there, but I've certainly put in more work than a lot of the people I see posting opinions that start with "What you need to understand..." or words to that effect. Everyone's a guru.

I suppose I can understand the impulse toward certainty; nobody wants to be caught idling during an important moment, and uncertainty is the enemy of action. Nobody can ever be fully certain of anything, but there are times when the need is so urgent, we simply must act based on the best information available.

Fair enough, although I believe "action" for many people begins and ends with social media slacktivism. Those who are doing more, who are out there on the front lines, are welcome to accuse me of dithering. It's in my nature to be too willing to keep thinking after the time for action is at hand. For both good and evil, I'm indecisive by nature. I will accept the criticism that comes with that.

But it's also true that even in a war, there is a time after the first bullets start flying to take a step back and evaluate how the attack is going. Based on watching the media for the last week, both news and social, I think one can broadly categorize the reactions to the anti-police-brutality demonstrations (APBD) and the looting that has followed in its wake as follows:

1. This is good and long overdue, without qualifications. We don't need no water, let the motherfucker burn.
2. There are valid concerns here that have gone unaddressed for too long. Destroying property of innocent people, especially in the communities of those most affected by police brutality, is of course a bad thing, but just like police supporters feel a few bad cops shouldn't tar all police, APBD supporters say we should listen to the valid concerns and not be distracted by the few vandals.
3. Often quoting Dr. King, some point out that even the vandalism is the "cry of the unheard," and therefore should be understood, if not condoned. 

Conservative responses are somewhat mirrors of the first three

1A. Black lives have been improving, if you get past the media always whipping everyone up into a froth over isolated incidents. Life for black Americans is not as bad as the media wants us to believe. (And here there is a possible branch of this argument saying that the people taking advantage of this are operatives or outsiders with their own political objectives.)
2A. Just like there are some bad apples among the demonstrators, there are some bad apples among cops. Being a cop is hard, and there will always be some people who don't do it well.
3A. Perceived injustices should be taken care of within the system. Whatever your complaint, you cannot seek redress from a system you are actively undoing through contempt for basic property rights. And more importantly, this won't solve anything, it will only make things worse.


(And then there's a stand-alone reaction, one that worries about the possible effect of these demonstrations on the spread of coronavirus.)

I wonder if anyone has ever coined the malaphor "Fiddler on the Roof is on Fire," because that would be Donald Trump to a tee right now. 

Saying "they all have a point" isn't the same as saying they're all equally valid

I'm already indecisive, so when I say things like, "Well, there's some truth in all of these things," I fear I'm opening myself up to the double-whammy of being both indecisive and conciliatory. But saying there is some truth in them all doesn't mean there's equal truth. Generally, the APBD supporters are in the right. But conservatives, as they are wont to do, do come equipped with some annoying truths. The reconciliation of these disparate viewpoints seems to me to run something like the following.

Of course, policing is unfairly carried out on communities of color, and this unfair policing is taking place within the context of a thousand other injustices, all of which were viscerally on display when an officer kept his knee on the neck of a man who didn't seem to be resisting. These unfairnesses are the direct result of history and policy. As Ta-Nehisi Coates keeps pointing out, if aliens came to Earth, and they studied American history and then looked at the current situation of black Americans, they would not be confused about why black Americans are in the situation they are in. Given this historical injustice and its link to the present, a present which just got a very palpable illustration, the peaceful demonstrations are completely valid, and even some of the violence is understandable.

But I'd like to look at the end of argument 3A: "it won't do any good." Supporters of APBD will say that's not the point, that this is the natural expression of trauma, and the point isn't to "do good," but to express what cannot be bottled up any longer. Okay, I can understand that. But how long does the exemption from results last?

The fact is that violence can be an extremely useful political tool, although it's a difficult one to wield. As Coates has pointed out, those who laud the approach of a Dr. King over Malcolm X forget that King's camp was happy to use Malcolm X to get concessions out of LBJ. King would ask for something, and if he didn't get it, he would say, "Well, you can always try to deal with Malcolm X," at which point LBJ would give in. We can praise King's non-violence, and we should, but his non-violence was partly effective because it was better than the other option for a government that had a war in Vietnam to worry about.

Of course the vandalism--some of which is probably coming from outsiders with their own agendas-- can be understood to a large degree as the spontaneous outcry of anguish, but what if the violence stopped being random targets that happened to be in the way, and took on a more strategic flavor? What if it changed from mob violence to political violence?

Why is spontaneous violence tolerated more than planned violence? 

This whole "you have to understand this violence as the inescapable outcry of the injured" response, when continued in perpetuity, is in danger of becoming irresponsible. We've been having these kinds of demonstrations for a long time now, every time some emblem of what people of color feel to be their every day reality is goes viral. Why has there not been a more effective planned and political response, one that persists over time? Could it be that the very effort on behalf of some well-meaning people to just understand the anger and not pass judgment upon some manifestations of it is part of the problem? I'm seeing a lot of white people anxious to signal their own sympathies with the protesters talk coddlingly of the traumatized, as though they were children unable to control their own rage. It's a non-threatening kind of sympathy, because spontaneous violence doesn't lead to change. It doesn't "do any good," as the conservatives would say, but for a particular breed of social media liberal who only wants to demonstrate that their feelings are on the right side, that's just fine. "Doing good" isn't the point. We're here to pat people of color on the head and tell them we understand their feelings.

But what if spontaneous violence became planned violence? At present, one of the weaknesses of APBD is that there is no central leadership. This is also true of Black Lives Matter. There are many local chapters, but no centralized hierarchy. This means the protesters have no list of demands to be met. There's no agenda for the government to respond to. Much like the government now has a power vacuum because the president is largely absent or ineffective during the protests, the protesters themselves present no figure with whom the government could negotiate even if they wanted to. Those attending the protests have no unified platform. There is no organized political movement taking place, at least not one of any consequence.

Say that changed, and a central organization with a centralized leadership formed, and that leadership decided to hit certain, strategic targets, minimizing loss of human life but maximizing economic and political impact? Say this group kept this up for a while, then pulled back and offered talks. Even if the government refused, because it doesn't negotiate with terrorists, it would still offer a lot of strength to other groups outside of the one committing the violence. If a credible threat presented itself, it could change the complexion of politics, and it could actually "do good" to the group with the grievance.

Naturally, the local nature of police force is one of the reasons it's hard to create a national movement. There are a lot of issues no president could solve, because they involve working with governors or mayors or city councils. But an organized national movement could effectively mobilize to make change in one location at a time, as happened during the Civil Rights Movement. The Democratic Party could be part of this, but its leaders seem happy to just say the right sentiments during times of crisis. When we say that questions of utility miss the point, we absolve political forces on the left from the responsibility to organize effectively. Our attitudes about violence are a symbol of this absolution.

For some reason, we seem as a society far more tolerant of ineffective and temporary shows of violence than considered and long-term ones. We call the former "the cry of the unheard" and the latter terrorism. It's an extension of the criminal distinction between crimes of passion and pre-meditated murder, as though it's less awful to murder someone when you've found out they're leaving you than it is to murder them for the insurance money.

I'm too indecisive to actually be recommending violence. I'm asking a question

I'm not talking about the utility of violence to recommend violence, I'm talking about it because there is so little talk generally about what kinds of actions might be useful, which says a lot about why we continue this cycle of incidents and disorganized responses. The outright assumptions we make about violence without even discussing those assumptions reveals a lack of seriousness about attaining the desired ends.

Why are so many liberals at the moment willing to brush aside the question of whether the violence will "do any good"? Whence this liberal pessimism about our ability to change the political course of the country? And what does our over-confident assurance that the question isn't what's important say about the lack of actual political goals on the left? Why are we willing to tolerate sporadic acts of violence with no end in mind but we completely shut off the idea of violence as a potential tool in organized political activity? Is it because we are so shocked by intentionally using violence to achieve an end, or because disorganized violence mirrors our own disorganized political approach?

Myself, I'm not going to pretend I'm excited to go storming buildings to see change. Generally, I think the change that needs to happen will take time and concerted, slow effort. It will take people being useful day-to-day. My political action isn't radical or violent; it's to try to do little things. We vote for change. We support black businesses. Mrs. Heretic has taught for a decade in some of the populations that are affected by injustice. We try to help those kids when we can. One of the ways we help them is with the money I make in my day job, a job that is, without a doubt, the opposite of anything radical. I've adapted to the world as it is in order to try to make living in the world as it is a little easier for a few people.

That leaves me stumped about how to respond to a crisis like this. Do more little things? I'd like there to be an identifiable political or activist movement with goals I mostly agreed with to join, but there isn't. There have been multiple instances of anger boiling up into spontaneous action in the last decade, but no lasting political movements with an agenda to capitalize on that anger.

For those still willing to dream big, I don't know why we think asking about the effectiveness of the tactics being used to bring about the world of tomorrow isn't a valid question. What does that say about us if we brush aside questions of utility because we don't even think the oppressed are capable of effectively organizing a political resistance to the oppression?

Violence is an incredibly difficult tool to wield well. No matter how focused you try to make the violence, there will be collateral damage, as the government finds out every time it tries to surgically strike terrorist leaders. I'd be happy if nobody needed to go down that path, if we were able to find a peaceful way to greater equality. 

But absent that, we should stop insisting the efficacy of the protests is a moot question. If we shouldn't be asking "what good will it do?" of random acts of violence, then we certainly have a responsibility to be asking, "What will do good?" I'd like an efficient political left. I've been making do with a disorganized, chaotic Democratic Party since I changed sides in my twenties. I'd love something with more focus, something I could even see myself being an active part of instead of just a default voter for.

All of this concern for sadness among liberal well-wishers, both our own and the sadness of the oppressed as we imagine it, seems to me misplaced. It's an abstract "won't someone please think of the children" kind of concern. The question isn't about caring enough or feeling the right thing. It's about what we want to accomplish and how to do it. Taking the protests and the issues that are behind them seriously seems to me to include questions of efficacy, namely why the left seems to find it so hard to muster any.