That's about enough silence

The period of silence that has reigned over this blog for the last three months and change coincided with the end of my former career. In early March, I quit my job as a Korean translator and intelligence analyst at the National Security Agency. 

I didn't always love the job, but I felt some level of satisfaction in the belief I was good at it. The skill of understanding spoken and written texts and explaining their meaning, which I developed as a literature student and which has powered this blog, also made me uniquely built for the position. I was a decent translator, but moreover, I was adept at reporting what had been translated, and by being able to do both, it felt like it was somehow more than the sum of its parts. 

Since resigning, my family and I sold our house in Maryland, moved to Ohio where we are from, and I am currently looking for a new job. Although the deferred resignation program allowed me to continue receiving my salary until the end of September, that would have required me to be on administrative leave. It would have meant technically still being a part of the Department of Defense under Trump and Hegseth (NSA is part of the DoD). When I realized in early March that the deferred resignation program would allow people to move the date of their resignation up to any time they wanted, I sent HR notice that I wanted to resign that day. Then I took care of final administrative things and left. 

From the moment Trump was elected in November, I had a growing feeling of a moral obligation to leave my job. That grew as crazy talk from his camp increased leading up to his inauguration, and then it went into overdrive in the early days of him taking office. If it hadn't been for the deferred resignation, I'd have had to leave with no incentives, so in a way, it rescued me. Because of it, I was able to take early retirement. I don't want to act like I'm so noble I just walked away with nothing. I walked away with less than I could have, but not with nothing. I like to think I'd have resigned anyway, but I didn't have to test it. I now at least have a small pension to help out while I'm waiting to find a new job. It's not a ton, but here in Ohio, it'll go further than it would have in Maryland. I'll take a pension, because I'm not ashamed of the work I've done up to now, but I didn't want to keep getting paid my salary until the end of September, because I'd have been ashamed to continue to be a part of the DoD. 

The new job hunt isn't exactly going great; nobody in Ohio cares that I know a lot about North Korea. It would be better if I knew how a drop forge works. I can't even get interviews for a lot of entry-level positions. It was probably foolish to turn down all that free money, but it seemed right to me. By late February, some of the things that made me realize I needed to leave immediately were:

• Trump's executive order on transgender troops. Look, I've written on here before that I'm a liberal skeptic of some of what trans advocates are telling me. I'm not alone in this. There's a reason Trump spent so much money in October focusing on Harris's support for trans issues: because on some issues, like trans women in women's sports, there is a majority that opposes it. I honestly think that Democrats' refusal to move slower on trans issues is the reason Trump is president again. That being said, Trump went way beyond what was necessary in creating the order. He could have just said that gender dysmorphia was like other conditions that affect readiness, so the military can't allow it. Instead, he attacked the honesty and integrity of trans people who had volunteered for the military. It's the definition of dogma: treating your opinion like obvious fact, the way my sister-in-law talks about abortion. If trans identities are obviously made up, the order reasons, then anyone insisting on having one is obviously a liar. It's making trans people out to be morally corrupt and evil, instead of just too difficult for the military to treat. It was a dangerous demonization of a population.  
• The ambush of Ukrainian President Zelensky in the White House, keeping in mind this is the guy running a country that was invaded.
• Just general talk of using the country's military to strongarm Greenland, Panama, or Canada made me not want to be anywhere near the DoD. That talk apparently isn't going away. 

I'm not judging anyone who stayed, nor am I judging anyone who took the admin leave as part of severance. I'm not speaking for anyone myself, or claiming I have special knowledge informing my decision because of my former job. My beliefs are based on nothing more than reading the same news anyone else could read. 

Many friends argued I should stay, based on the "one of the good guys" idea, that good people needed to remain in order to have at least some level of influence. Some people in government reason that we all serve the people, not the administration, and so doing whatever the administration asks is fine, unless it very clearly crosses legal boundaries. These arguments have their points, but I think something as outrageous as Trump II demands a tougher line, one less fraught with the possibility of putting me in a morally compromising position. Trump has made it clear he intends to push the boundaries of what is legal as far as he can get away with them, leaving civil servants to have to carry out a number of policies that are right on the border of what they should be doing. I didn't want to potentially be in such a position. And while every civil servant will have to work at some time during their career for policies they think are mistaken, there is a point at which those policies become so mistaken that I don't know how you can achieve the necessary separation from them to be part of carrying them out. I know that nobody will care that I left, and it won't be any skin off anyone's nose, nor will it change any discourse, but that isn't the point. I made a decision I could live with for my small life. 

A friend asked what made this administration so bad I had to leave, without even taking the severance pay. Surely I had tolerated questionable moral judgement from previous administrations, including the growth of drone attacks, which had no due process and which could sometimes hit innocent bystanders. Also, I stayed through Trump's first administration. 

As a matter of fact, during Trump's first administration, I was often the liberal in the room trying to get other liberals not to overreact. The first time, he spent most of his administration surrounded by grownups and trying to act like a semi-normal president. There is some merit to his criticisms of the neo-liberal world order, even if he's a terrible communicator of those criticisms and he has even worse proposals to offer as replacements. I actually liked his attempt to reach out to Kim Jong Un. I thought that whatever its faults, at least it was an attempt to do something different, and since nothing the U.S. had ever done with North Korea really worked, different was good. Until the final days of his term, I thought concerns about him wanting to be a king were overblown, and even after he did lose his marbles completely, he did, eventually, leave on his own. 

The reasons I left are also the reasons behind my shell-shocked "time for silence" post in March. This version of Trump is so obviously off the rails, so openly corrupt, I can't understand the lack of opposition from his own supporters. The only time he starts to face a real backlash is when tariffs look like enough of a reality the stock market crashes or people start to face the possibility of paying more for things they want. But if he gets Qatar to invest billions in his cryptocurrency and his business, that's too abstract for anyone to care about. It's so bad, I feel like I don't even understand the world, and my thoughts on it can't possibly have value. I couldn't have functioned professionally in that world, and I have a hard time even writing personally, when it seems like I've misread reality so completely.  

My plans for the future

Like I said, the job hunt isn't going great. An M.A. in English isn't a draw to employers. I don't have a teaching certificate, so I can't use my education for that. Even if I could, I have had an issue with my voice for a few years now that I can't seem to fix. My ENT said it was reflux-induced, but I've been taking antacids faithfully for years, and doing all the voice rehab exercises they prescribed, and I still often struggle to get my voice out. I had mentioned earlier that I might want to try blue collar work, but I have chronic foot pain that comes and goes, and recently I've had issues with my elbow, as well. I think both the foot and voice issues stem from the Marine Corps, but I never applied for disability, and now that it's been twenty-eight years since I was discharged, I will likely not be able to prove any service connection. Especially since the diagnoses I've gotten for both issues seem to suck and not help. I've had two job offers, both of which would be a challenge to my medical issues. We'll see how it all works out, but money's definitely going to be a concern again in a way it hasn't been for a long time. 

Now would be a great time, of course, for my writing career to suddenly take off. Sadly, it seems like I just keep missing the cut. I recently got another encouraging rejection from The New Yorker. This one said they weren't taking my story although "we continue to admire your writing." There's a lot to unpack in those six words. We? More than one person? Continue? So more than one person at TNY remembers who I am from one submission to the next and tracks it with some level of enthusiasm? It's certainly possible to make too much of a polite rejection, even though it's clearly more than a form rejection, but this does seem promising. However, I've gotten so many of these promising-seeming rejections from so many good outlets, it seems like that is now my level. I'm a not-quite-there writer. 

It's frustrating to me that I never made it, partly for reasons that every wanna-be writer would find true, but also because I feel like I have a novel draft that would be successful. I wrote a novel about NSA. Not a potboiler, and not even really a tell-all. It's more of a speculative, satirical novel. Like what Vonnegut would have written if he'd had my job. My writing resume isn't the best, but it includes wins in a few contests and about twenty short stories published in total. I can't believe that I can't send out a bunch of cover letters that say this is my writing resume, I worked at NSA, and I have a novel draft about NSA that's already been through pre-publication, and based on that find an agent willing to work with me. As it is, all I've gotten is the same we-like-it-but-it's-still-not-for-us line that seems to follow me everywhere. 

I'm confounded by it all, as I am by so many things these days. A decent book sale number is 3,000 copies. I feel like an NSA book would have that many more or less baked in. A lot of employees or former employees would buy it, as would people curious about it. Only one other NSA novel by a former employee has come out, as far as I know, and that one was kind of a rah-rah NSA book that wasn't very good. 

I tried to tell a different kind of truth in my novel. Maybe it's all a little too high-concept to pitch well, but my basic approach was this: I took the fictional country of Zendia, which NSA has used to teach basic analysis concepts for years, and I pretended that Zendia was actually a real country whose very existence is so secret that the government had to hide it. They chose to hide it in plain sight by pretending it was a made-up country and using it as an example for training. My main character is one of the few people read in to the very secret "Roman A Clef" project who knows that Zendia is real. He's a Zendian linguist, one of the few who still exist. By using a made-up country, I was free to talk about surveillance in ways I wouldn't have been able to if I'd used a real country. (I guess. This guy seemed to be able to talk about a whole lot I wouldn't think you'd be allowed to say.) 

My point wasn't really to do a tell-all about NSA. I was intentionally silly, because specific facts about NSA aren't really what matters to me. I wanted to take a deeper, more philosophical look at the notion of surveillance itself. Because I was once religious and will never really be free of magical thinking, I often let myself believe that writing this book was the whole reason I was put on the Earth. So when I think that this book will never happen, it's easy to start asking myself what, exactly, I'm doing here.

There are also concerns about what would happen if I ever did get the book published and it did succeed. NSA has a pre-publication requirement, and while the official policy makes it seem like it's not all that strict in terms of what you'd have to get pre-publication review for (not for something like this blog post, for example, because general thoughts about my life and NSA don't qualify as "official NSA  information"), I certainly have heard versions of my obligations while at NSA that would suggest I'd never be able to do an interview about the book without first getting all the questions and answers approved. It would make publicity kind of hard. 

Also, I'm kind of done with NSA. I'm ready to do something else. I don't really want to spend the rest of my life being "the NSA writer." If I could do the novel and move on, that would be great, but I have a feeling the novel would come out and that's who I'd be forever. I guess that's what happens if that really is my purpose for being here, but I'd also be happy if from this moment forward I never thought about NSA again.  

The future of the blog

As far as the future of this blog, I do really enjoy taking stories apart and showing how they work for readers who don't necessarily have the literary background to do it but who would still like to enter into a deeper relationship with texts. It's also nice to try my hand at reading something challenging and discuss that reading with other literary people. A few times in the last month, I've had the crazy idea to try to make this blog my job. I'd certainly have to switch platforms, I think. I might even have to turn it into a podcast, but if I did that, I think it would be a lot harder for people to find what they're looking for. The audience I have in mind has a job in something very non-literary, but they've picked up Best American Short Stories or something like it, and they're giving it a go. They get stuck and Google to see what they can find, and they spend five to twenty minutes on my blog, hopefully getting unstuck. A podcast is way harder to do that with. It's harder to skim and harder to tell ahead of time if it's what you want. 

Also, when you run a podcast or a blog you make a living off of, there's kind of a heavy sales element to your life. I haven't been assiduously avoiding sales work in my job hunt just to fall into it on my own. Having a podcast is like having a Mary Kay business: you don't have friends, only potential customers you socialize with. 

There are also some possible futures in front of me that would make continuing the blog difficult. I will probably need to go back to school if I don't want to work low-paying jobs the rest of my life. Law school is a possibility, but if I did that, law school would become my life, and I can't see finding the time to keep this blog up. I've been volunteering lately for the Immigrant Worker Project, tutoring in English. When I went in there to meet them, I spoke with the head of the IWP, who is a lawyer with the stereotypical piles of cases on his desk, working overtime lately to just try to get the government to follow basic due process with his clients. If my purpose in life isn't to write the great philosophical-satirical spy novel, helping people to keep working and keep living their lives isn't a bad alternative. I've been working at improving my Spanish (and quickly forgetting my Korean, which, sadly, I think has no future in my life) in order to be of more use to them. 

If not law school, I probably need to learn something else. There's a small chance, I guess, that I could try to finish my Ph.D. in English at Kent State and use that knowledge here on the blog, but that chance seems remote. Much like that chance that I'll ever find I have some actual special purpose in life. 

I recently heard Michael Lewis on a podcast talking about his book Who is Government? He had so much belief in the power of stories to change the world. He said it doesn't seem like there is change for the longest time, and then suddenly there is a whole lot of change at once. I don't know if I believe that, or if that's just something that people who traffic in stories tell themselves to feel better. It's certainly hard to explain the direction the world seems to be headed when there are all these great stories. If the problem isn't the stories, but the readings that given interpretive communities give to those stories, then I've been happy to try to improve the interpretive communities I am a part of. My optimism about the world varies wildly from day to day and month to month, which is why my willingness to throw myself into the blog and writing also varies along with it. Right now, it seems like maybe it's time to close the literary chapter while I'm closing other ones and worry about taking care of my family and tending my own garden. We'll see how I feel in the fall when BASS comes out again, this time under a new editor. 

For today, though, I didn't want the silence of bewilderment to be the last word on this blog. Consider this my contribution, pointless as it is, on this day when so many are pushing back against the possibility of kings here in America.