Deniable Plausibility
Well, it’s seven months on, and before my wife and I set off on our trip to Athens Greece and thereabouts I find myself with time to contemplate the world we now live in. Though stopping over at JFK on the way, we’ll be missing our only chance to see the lighted WTC Memorial as it will have been turned off a couple of days before our journey. But no standing memorial will fully symbolize this world’s loss than ... well, what’s missing from the New York skyline. And from our lives.
We’re going on with what’s left of them, all of us. For me, I suppose, it’s been a return to writing and smofdom, highlighted by this trip overseas, at a time when many don’t think that it’s very wise. Greece is no sandbox. The seat of Western civilization is only a stone’s throw from the biggest hotspots in the modern world. Why are we even thinking about going?
A few months ago, xxx fretted about the far-reaching effects about September 11th - specifically for us writers of SF - saying sooner or later they’ll be stringing up Tom Clancy for ‘giving people ideas’. Who but the most imaginative of the human species could conceive of such treacherous, deplorable, and ‘unthinkable’ acts, but those who imagine for a living? After all, it can’t happen without some mastermind behind it, right? An evil genius?
Perfect SF fodder, that, but more tellingly, it is a very close approximation of the average Science Fiction writer/author.
Look at Ian Fleming, famously average author of James Bond fare. To tell the story, one must think like, invent, and convincingly characterize a sufficiently bad ‘bad guy’. Fleming created a pantheon of villains, who each did the increasingly unthinkable, in a neverending quest to escape the unoriginal and cliché. Never mind that in doing so he created a whole new level of cliché!
It’s fiction. It’s what we do.
So we write. The unthinkable thoughts get thought. Books get printed, movies filmed. Some people eventually get it into their heads that this fiction equates reasonably enough with their own twisted reality, and – boom. Atrocity City. What can never happen does, and we writers are left with a measure of unjustified, knee-jerk blame, to share with unjustly prejudged gas station attendants and student visa-holders worldwide. We writers may not have plotted the crimes, but we ‘gave them ideas’. And we’re not in hiding. Out come the warrants.
It was so much easier for us, of course, when the masterminds of these inordinately complicated plots had both supporting administrations and a concept of national security to hide behind. Plotters used to sit comfortably threaded into some machine (perhaps) overseas, shrouded tightly in the ‘plausible deniability’ inadvertently provided by those administrations. Politicians are intimately aware of the term; in essence, if you don’t know it exists, how can you be held responsible for the consequences of its existence? Thus empowered, heads of state can deny whatever they want, because to the deepest of their convictions, they are right. It doesn’t exist, regardless of the reality. Ignorance becomes a defense. There is no Area 51. Seems to work for Uncle Sam.
I’m going to coin a phrase, to complement the phenomenon. I will call it deniable plausibility.
Therewith, any sensible human being who conceives of an act as imaginable, doable, and capable of being turned toward evil means - like putting a box cutter in the hands of a brainwashed maniac - can’t just sit at home forever with his or her own fate shackled to mere statistics.
Unthinkability no longer enters into it. In this world, we can’t hide behind the odds. I have an imagination; I can just imagine what can happen to us up there, and just doing that can potentially reduce me to a quivering, ineffectual putty of paranoid paralysis. No box cutter necessary.
Deniable plausibility is the key - an enabling indemnity for anything, when this big, chaotic world brings about another such event. In the set of all things that can happen aboard a jet in flight, what occurred on September 11th was possible, doable and really didn’t take a lot of smarts to accomplish. Will it happen again? Given the number of flights worldwide versus the number of people who will someday find themselves with both a psychotic grudge and airline tickets in hand, the answer is positively yes. Plausibility assured.
But I will deny it, knowingly and deliberately, to continue my life. I will fly to Greece on that Boeing 767. I will enjoy a vacation to the seat of Western civilization, because a life lived in fear ... you know.
What happened has happened. What will happen will, but we only have control over what’s in between. To hell with the odds.
Books by Me
We’re going on with what’s left of them, all of us. For me, I suppose, it’s been a return to writing and smofdom, highlighted by this trip overseas, at a time when many don’t think that it’s very wise. Greece is no sandbox. The seat of Western civilization is only a stone’s throw from the biggest hotspots in the modern world. Why are we even thinking about going?
A few months ago, xxx fretted about the far-reaching effects about September 11th - specifically for us writers of SF - saying sooner or later they’ll be stringing up Tom Clancy for ‘giving people ideas’. Who but the most imaginative of the human species could conceive of such treacherous, deplorable, and ‘unthinkable’ acts, but those who imagine for a living? After all, it can’t happen without some mastermind behind it, right? An evil genius?
Perfect SF fodder, that, but more tellingly, it is a very close approximation of the average Science Fiction writer/author.
Look at Ian Fleming, famously average author of James Bond fare. To tell the story, one must think like, invent, and convincingly characterize a sufficiently bad ‘bad guy’. Fleming created a pantheon of villains, who each did the increasingly unthinkable, in a neverending quest to escape the unoriginal and cliché. Never mind that in doing so he created a whole new level of cliché!
It’s fiction. It’s what we do.
So we write. The unthinkable thoughts get thought. Books get printed, movies filmed. Some people eventually get it into their heads that this fiction equates reasonably enough with their own twisted reality, and – boom. Atrocity City. What can never happen does, and we writers are left with a measure of unjustified, knee-jerk blame, to share with unjustly prejudged gas station attendants and student visa-holders worldwide. We writers may not have plotted the crimes, but we ‘gave them ideas’. And we’re not in hiding. Out come the warrants.
It was so much easier for us, of course, when the masterminds of these inordinately complicated plots had both supporting administrations and a concept of national security to hide behind. Plotters used to sit comfortably threaded into some machine (perhaps) overseas, shrouded tightly in the ‘plausible deniability’ inadvertently provided by those administrations. Politicians are intimately aware of the term; in essence, if you don’t know it exists, how can you be held responsible for the consequences of its existence? Thus empowered, heads of state can deny whatever they want, because to the deepest of their convictions, they are right. It doesn’t exist, regardless of the reality. Ignorance becomes a defense. There is no Area 51. Seems to work for Uncle Sam.
I’m going to coin a phrase, to complement the phenomenon. I will call it deniable plausibility.
Therewith, any sensible human being who conceives of an act as imaginable, doable, and capable of being turned toward evil means - like putting a box cutter in the hands of a brainwashed maniac - can’t just sit at home forever with his or her own fate shackled to mere statistics.
Unthinkability no longer enters into it. In this world, we can’t hide behind the odds. I have an imagination; I can just imagine what can happen to us up there, and just doing that can potentially reduce me to a quivering, ineffectual putty of paranoid paralysis. No box cutter necessary.
Deniable plausibility is the key - an enabling indemnity for anything, when this big, chaotic world brings about another such event. In the set of all things that can happen aboard a jet in flight, what occurred on September 11th was possible, doable and really didn’t take a lot of smarts to accomplish. Will it happen again? Given the number of flights worldwide versus the number of people who will someday find themselves with both a psychotic grudge and airline tickets in hand, the answer is positively yes. Plausibility assured.
But I will deny it, knowingly and deliberately, to continue my life. I will fly to Greece on that Boeing 767. I will enjoy a vacation to the seat of Western civilization, because a life lived in fear ... you know.
What happened has happened. What will happen will, but we only have control over what’s in between. To hell with the odds.
Books by Me
