President Jack Ryan and the TV News Anchor (Part 1 of 2)

Coming into the last month of 2007, we were back in interesting times and every blogger had a field day flaunting his or her biases. On the days immediately after the Manila Pen incident, I engaged in punditry at Philstar.com, this time zealously defending my comments by contesting every deletion (futile it may seem, but paraphrasing did get me somewhere) and arguing against other posters foolish enough to piss me off.¹ When the comments started waning and the debate was more subdued, I shifted my attention to friends' blogs. Thankfully, what I encountered was either an absence of a discussion or entries similar to my opinion.²

As for this blog? Well, my way of thinking is not so much like that of journalists and columnists but more like those of historians, futurists and fictionists; thus, I shall not inflict further upon you, gentle reader, high-blood-pressure-inducing appeals to emotions most blogs and columns alike enjoy dishing out at this moment since I might do it poorly (and really induce hypertension). Rather, I shall be sharing a subplot from a novel I just finished recently. A spoiler alert is in order.

Tom Clancy's Executive Orders is the culmination of the career of Tom Clancy's fictional hero Jack Ryan who was introduced to public consciousness in a novel chronicling his exploits as an obscure history lecturer and stock broker thrust into history by saving a family of the British Royalty from the IRA (Patriot Games). Due to subsequent terrorist attacks on his own family, he becomes a CIA analyst, and rises though the ranks to become Deputy Director, Central Intelligence. The novels show him pulling the plug on an illegal operation in Colombia (Clear and Present Danger), facilitating three Russian defections (Red Rabbit, The Hunt for Red October and The Cardinal of the Kremlin) and stopping a nuclear war (The Sum of All Fears), wherein the last one made him quit the CIA.³ Big stuff indeed, all of which could make him a well-loved All-American Hero, which, in turn, he could easily translate into a seat in the government but they were well-kept secrets in the CIA. Besides, he may respect the institutions, but he abhors the politics involved in running them.

Now it so happened that after Ryan's CIA stint, the novel Debt of Honor shows how he got sucked back into the government as the National Security Advisor mainly because he was not someone who runs away from a challenge as well as the opportunity to serve his country. (Aww, ain't that cute? It's even cuter because he doesn't say it like a politician would--out loud for the world to hear.) Like any good fictional coincidence, Ryan's appointment came at a time when America finds itself at war with an international alliance of emerging powers. It was a 21st century war waged with stealth, minimal force, espionage, sabotage and deceit (the last of which involved--gasp!--the US media). And oh, USA won that conflict.

A subplot in that novel was a sexual harassment scandal involving the Vice-President Ed Kealty. In order avoid impeachment and further shame the entire administration, which was busy fighting a war, it was agreed that he would tender his resignation. Jack Ryan's impressive contributions in winning the war made him a shoo-in for the vice-presidency, it did help that he was supposed to merely fill in the vacancy for the next six months before the elections.

There was no stopping Jack's ultimate rendezvous with destiny, however. In a "shocker" of a "heart-stopping climax" as the reviewers had put it,⁴ an unexpected attack killed off the country's leadership--the Congress, the Supreme Court, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Cabinet and even the President himself--with only Jack Ryan surviving and immediately sworn in as the new president, setting the stage for Executive Orders.

(To be continued.)

-oOo-

Footnotes

1. My opinion was in the majority, but as the mutineers have shown, stupidity existed and their mutiny had agitated me enough to be in the fighting mood: one rabidly biased idiot got his ass handed back to him with at least one fan cheering me on to boot. Too bad the entire "debate" was deleted; the world was deprived of laughing at his stupidity.

2. If ever there's a different opinion, I don't think they'll be as ridiculous as what I occasionally see in Philstar.com and what I usually see in some blogs out there--one tip, it's so easy too see your bias in this incident if you focus on the mistakes of one side only when it is clear that all sides were incompetent fools playing heroes, villains and broadcasters of a painful comedy.

3. The movie version made major revisions and consequently resulted in a Ben Affleck flop way too inferior to the novel, worse than the usual case with novels turned to movies. How dare they mess up one of my favorite Clancy novels! My other favorite is Debt of Honor. Let's see if they would ever dare make a movie out of that one!

4. It would still be about a decade later that all would be shocked--for real. Though the counterpart events in the real world were under different circumstances, the eerie similarity with 9/11, the anthrax scare and war in the Middle East (in similar chronological order to boot!) would make one think that Tom Clancy had a political crystal ball up his sleeve.