I’ve been reading Tom Clancy again. Partly because I just wanted some brain-candy, or possibly brain-pizza *G*, and partly because I was trying very hard not to be too miserable over the fact that I am looking for work at the moment rather than actually working. It’s amazing the weight of depression that settles on one’s shoulders in these situations, the physical sensation of feeling guilty about ‘not being at work’ and the fear of trying to work out how to advertise oneself effectively to an employer.

I am intrigued by his John Ryan series, which ends up with the character, however improbably, becoming the US President. In one book a nuclear bomb is exploded on the US mainland, interrupting the religious expression of the Superbowl (Americans and Australians alike having a devout fervour for a particular team dedicated to the kicking of an oval pigskin through a pair of sticks).
If it were not for the fact that something very similar happened last year, and almost three thousand people lost their lives in a place and at a time should have been otherwise “safe”, it would be much easier to accept the novels as “just a story”.

It’s a bit like the idea of me being able to write every day, or at least most days, so that I can have an “active blog”. Most of the blogs I have read seem to be updated every day, yet here I am, nearly a week into being the proud producer of blog content, and I have been totally unable to think of a think to write about! Not because I haven’t had any interesting thoughts, but because every time I have sat down to transcribe/capture/write them down, they disappear. Or worse, I start writing them down and they convert into the biggest conglomeration of gobbledegook one would be embarrassed to review in later life, never mind moments after getting them onto paper!

So I hide in a page-turner, an author and plot line that feeds into the paranoia of the time, and then try to gather my thoughts and virtually pin them to the electronic paper in order to produce content for someone else to read. And all I can think about is that Clancy has a somewhat idealized view of the “American Dream”. But then don’t we all? The ability and the wherewithal to live life as we wish we could without having to acknowledge that we have little or no control over the big things that happen in the world. Although Ryan is often caught up in the situations that are dangerous and politically complicated he is still in far more control of what and how he lives than the rest of us do. He sometimes is even able to do things to make a difference to those ‘big things’ too. And through it all there is the thread of his belief in the religion in which he was raised.

I think it is the belief in what he was raised in and the way it informs many of Ryan’s choices that I appreciate. It is on the surface a very simple belief and yet it drives him to really put it on the line and stand up for those beliefs in situations where many others might otherwise have acquiesced to a more powerful individual. That Ryan is wealthy enough to tell even the President of the USA to ‘stuff it’ is I think part of the American Dream that Clancy idealizes. But the strength to defy a senior officer, because Ryan is still very much a marine officer at the base of his personality, when that officer makes a seriously bad decision, is the idealization of Ryan’s simple belief and is something that I think most of us would like to be able to do ourselves.
We just pray that we are never in the sort of situation that Ryan is in when he makes that decision, and in another way we pray that those who are in that situation are able to have the strength of character of a John Patrick Ryan to make those sorts of moral decisions.

I think I have burbled enough on something that I still haven’t really worked out. Perhaps tomorrow will be different. I am going to finish making the macaroni cheese for tea …