A previous post (‘Novel Words – fictional pronouns for the actual future.’ *) explored the concept of a non-gendered singular pronoun, ‘e’, to supplement our familiar ‘he’ and ‘she.’ Fortuitously, a recent article on the perils of AI suggested another way to frame the case.
With ‘he’ and ‘she’ as our English language’s only widely-accepted singular pronouns (‘they’ carrying the stain of wokeness upon its back in addition to its confusion with the plural and ‘it’ being generally received as an insult whether or not intended as such), alongside the predominant conversational practice of using gender terms (‘man’ and ‘woman’) as if they were synonymous with the bio-sexual (‘male‘ and ‘female’), any inquisitive consideration of gender is pre-emptively shipwrecked on the issue of whether each particular individual carries around a penis or a vagina.
Thus, perhaps the simplest and most cogent reason to encourage the use of a gender free singular pronoun such as ‘e’: it enables us to discuss gender issues without the need to pin-down (ouch!) anyone’s genitalia.
P. S.: E Unum Pluribus is a new speculative fiction with its own take on where the current culture wars may be leading our nation, and how even tragic events can spawn new possibilities for the future. The novel is currently being serialized on this site and you can be among the first to read its opening pages in the post titled ‘E Unum Pluribus.’
Admirably demonstrating the value of professional journalism, The Mission is factual, detailed, incisive and – despite being a nearly 400-page history of a government agency – thrilling. With more than one hundred participants interviewed, many verifiable sources and its most critical opinions credited to persons who clearly have both the knowledge and the background to deserve being heard, this is an authoritative accounting of a very complex subject.
Having previously written Legacy of Ashes to chronicle the first 53 years of ‘The Agency,’ as the CIA is colloquially known, Weiner begins the new millennium on a downbeat, depicting an Agency whose capabilities were sadly ignored and unmaintained once the Soviet Union collapsed. Deprived of the purpose and challenges which had pushed it to excellence (and sometimes overreach…) ever since it sprung from the seeds of WWII espionage to meet the needs of the old War, the CIA in 2000 was not held in great respect either inside the government or among the public. So little respected, we learn, that the shiny new Bush2 administration refused to listen when Director George Tenant presented substantial indications that Al Qaeda had something big planned, soon, and pleaded for authority to eliminate him before it could happen. To his great frustration, and the even greater losses of others, that plea was ignored – in early 2001!
Like a speed bump beneath all the smoke, dust and debris of the 9/11 attacks, political leadership quickly passed over their own failure to comprehend, instantly deciding The Agency was a great tool for what they conceived as their own brainstorm – the War on Terror. That effort, which had already been one of the Agency’s areas of focus for decades, would become the public reason for much of its activity over the next 25 years.
Using sourced quotations for section titles such as “We were all making it up as we went along,” “The U.S. didn’t want peace. We wanted the war on terror,” and “We have to say Iraq has WMD,” Weiner quickly arrives at one of this central themes: a continual conflict between The Agency’s focus on providing the most useful and reliable information it can glean out of hostile environments versus politicians’ desire for sound bites to serve their pre-determined policies (at best) and (not infrequently) their emotional needs. Unsurprisingly, CIA staffers from that era are harshly critical of the Bush2 administration and Weiner is cogent in describing how intelligence was ignored or actively misused in order to justify a doomed Iraq invasion to which the President and his team appear to have been fully committed from at least November 2001, if not earlier.
Even as The Agency is bent to serve debatable ends, Weiner gives us many tales of dedicated agents serving honorably; one standout being that of Tom Sylvester, who led a ten-person team into northern Iraq to prepare the ground for the Bush/Cheney invasion. An Arabic-speaking ex-Naval special forces operator, he took great personal risks to forge links with Kurdish forces, Sufi mystics and others, produced intelligence direct from Saddam’s highest ranks and closest advisors to guide invasion planning. Sylvester would go on to lead the Agency’s clandestine services two decades later, under very different challenges.
Another eye-opening episode is related in Chapter Ten, ‘A Beautiful Operation.’ Having heard over many years that Pakistani scientist A. Q. Khan was known to have shopped nuclear weapons secrets around the world, I’d always been curious how he got away with it. Answer: he didn’t; at least not for long. Weiner describes how, learning from a 1920’s sting played by the Soviet ‘Cheka’ spy agency against Russians who had fled the USSR, the CIA created their own front companies to do fake business with Khan, eventually penetrating his facilities and dealings sufficiently to have him arrested, tried and convicted. Moreover, where a quick drone strike could have eliminated Khan sooner but allowed his proliferation efforts to continue, their smart and patient approach allowed them to also roll up associates and customers, completely destroying his operation and drastically diminishing the danger of nuclear weapons getting into the hands of people like Muamar Gaddafi, and Osama Bin Laden. A service to humanity that required the Agency’s characteristic willingness to use dishonest means in order to further admirable ends which, Weiner notes, is a fundamental and unavoidable characteristic of all espionage.
The successful pursuit and eventual killing of Bin Laden is treated in detail of course, as are the waterboarding scandal and other episodes not so laudable. As we approach 2016 though, the tone of this history changes considerably, from one of challenges and ambitions to one of dread and despair. In both his narration and in the quotes he includes from various agency sources, Weiner makes clear just how little Mr. Trump understands or values the proper purposes of The Agency, and how far he and his allies have by now penetrated our nation’s intelligence agencies (and the FBI, as well). Acting more like double agents than principled overseers, they are now focusing those resources to protect not the nation but their own political and financial interests. With extensive attrition of experienced and qualified personnel and heavy thumbs laid on those who remain, every page increases the premonition that we are in for some oncoming catastrophe on the scale of 9/11 – or even greater.
The CIA has never been entirely a hero, nor an utter villain, but an institution of fallible human beings who are willing to serve as tool for those who make policy and direct its execution – the President, the Cabinet and, ultimately, the votes who put those officials in office. Its many characters have included some cads but are mostly honorable patriots, willing to compromise their own safety, morality and maybe even a part of their souls in service of a greater public good – protecting us all from the worst of the world.
At times a tale of ignorance and human weaknesses, at others a triumph of courage and will, The Mission is important information for every American. Please read it and share it with others! (If you can’t buy the book, check a copy out from your local library; if you can’t read it all, just start at Chapter Twenty-One, which carries the catchy title ‘Face-eating baboons.’) Democracy depends on informed voters!
P. S.: E Unum Pluribus is a new novel with its own take on where the pursuit of power for power’s sake may be leading our nation, and how even tragic events can spawn new possibilities for the future. It is currently being serialized digitally at no charge and you can be among the first to read its opening pages via this link:
If you prefer not to open links from unknown sources, just navigate to this site’s home page and scroll down to the post titled ‘E Unum Pluribus’ or select the item of that same name in the top menu. Any way you get there, it’s totally free!
As the years 2016 to 2020 unfolded, I found myself preoccupied with a particular aspect of human history: that even the greatest empires, dynasties, governments and nations have each eventually ended and been replaced by…something else. The ongoing self-segregation of Americans along various lines – urban/rural, elites/masses, investors/workers, digital/analog, etc – suggested our own nation’s end might come sooner than later, and not through some external conquest, virulent plague or invasion of space aliens, but our simple failure to appreciate the myriad benefits of remaining ‘United.’
Starting in 2021, those thoughts began to coalesce into a speculative fiction, structured as a tale of murder and conspiracy happening a decade or so in our future in one of many new sovereignties sprung up among the remains of the U. S. of A. The novel toys with other themes as well – of language and gender, identity, guilt and even the origins of faith and belief – but speaks loudest in its depiction of just how much we all stand to lose if we remain divided into factions which each act only for their own needs and interests.
Writing the book took many months and once it seemed ready, the publishing industry proved impenetrable, even as the politics of disorder and division grew stronger. By the end of 2025 it had become clear I must find another pathway to the public and so I offered the first installment in a post which can be reached via the following link:
That and all subsequent installments may also be accessed via the ‘E Unum Pluribus’ buttons in the top menu or the right-side Categories list of this website’s home page.
Maybe the novel will find an audience this way, maybe not, but regardless, if you believe in the message that we Americans must overcome our divisions and preserve the USA as a government of all the people, by all the people and for all the people – or if you simply support authors being heard without reliance upon the gatekeepers of corporate commercial publishing – please share this post and the above link as widely as possible.
Sincerely hoping the world of E Unum Pluribus turns out to have been a naïve exaggeration, and wishing this great nation the good fortune of avoiding it, I thank you,
E Unum Pluribus – a tale of The Big Diss, imagines the United States of America dissolving into chaos because its elected representatives ceased to work together for the common good. While the novel is fiction, its premise is plausible, which begs the question – what can an individual do to avoid such a tragic outcome?
Plenty of folks more knowledgeable than I have commented that we’ve all gotten so isolated into our own bubbles – republicans/democrats, conservatives/liberals, red states/blue states, urban/rural, blue collar/elitist; however one summarizes it – that it’s easy to dismiss everyone on ‘the other side’ as unreasonable, unapproachable, unsalvageable or worse.
If (like me) you fear there is some truth to that description, and if (like me) you think forever encouraging division is a dead end – if you’ve ever felt the impulse to disagree when you’ve heard someone say the ‘X’ party is corrupt and they’re all a bunch of ‘z#fqt*^k!s,’ – how about switching your voter registration: to the X Party!
WTF?
First off, once you switch, you will know for certain that there is at least one reasonable person in the X Party – one grain of sand to begin a beachfront of unification.
Second, you may (depending on your state) gain the opportunity to vote in the X party’s primary and improve the chances of their most reasonable candidate. If enough of us do that, we could all have a better set of candidates to choose between in the actual election, instead of one we cannot stomach and one we can support if we have to, but only by holding our collective noses.
Third, although there is no need for any else to know about your switch, should you ever hear someone thoughtlessly badmouthing either party, you might choose to respond by pointing out your agreement or disagreement “even though I’m a registered X!” A single brick pulled out of a wall can improve communication between the two sides.
For whatever it’s worth: I switched to ‘the other party’ over a decade ago. Since that time, I have found myself much more open to hearing ‘other party’ statements and proposals. I certainly do not dismiss all members of my new party out of hand – I am one of them, after all! And I still do not always agree with their (our?) positions, but I feel obliged to at least listen, and much less resistance to acknowledging when a representative of my new party has proposed something worthwhile or productive.
Changing your party doesn’t mean voting for candidates you don’t support. It does mean choosing a future where each side is not so committed to smashing and trashing the other side that it’s virtually impossible to accomplish anything constructive.
Government of the people, by the people and for the people should not be a cage-fight; it should be – and it can be – a mission in which we all share, together.
Posing as satire of the Western world’s self-help book genre, this clever volume starts out strong (“Look, unless you’re writing one, a self-help book is an oxymoron. You read a self-help book so someone who isn’t yourself can help you, that someone being the author.”) and finishes even stronger. There is a stretch about three quarters through its slender 220 pages that treads close to familiar crime and corruption thriller terrain, but happily that is only a dalliance, employed by Hamid to bring his protagonist down to earth and set up the final chapters wherein we realize what sort of wealth is really being promoted here, and in what way this book truly proposes to help its readers help themselves.
Along the way, we get a glimpse of what life is like for many hundreds of millions across the globe. A lesson given greater impact by being written in the second person, casting the reader as protagonist (“The whites of your eyes are yellow, a consequence of spiking bilirubin levels in your blood.”) This choice is particularly effective at impressing readers from prosperous northwestern-quadrisphere cultures (such as myself) with the realities of life for those who indirectly support our affluence (“The virus affecting you is called hepatitis E. Its typical mode of transmission is fecal-oral. Yum.”) Later, when a different range of emotions arise among characters in circumstances superficially different from our (my) own, this second-person setting makes plain the conclusion that we are all the same underneath, no matter how different our economics make us seem at first glance.
Lest this sound like a civics lesson, I want to emphasize that the writing throughout is full of wry insight and humor. To that, the final chapters add great warmth and sympathy for the human condition and an understanding of love, aging and the grace with which those can be faced – when complex and imperfect beings rise to their best potential. An unexpected and very welcome reward at the end of a brisk and entertaining trip.
Ultra-impressive work by Hamid, who is fast becoming a favorite author. Originally from Pakistan, he has dual English citizenship, degrees from Princeton and Harvard Law and experiences in the worlds of corporate law and McKinsey consulting to complement his South Asian frame of reference. Author of five novels so far and at least one work of non-fiction (Discontent and its Civilizations: Despatches from Lahore, New York and London, 2014), his is a voice which deserves to be heard, and widely.
RobinAndrew 