It is, in theory, very easy to be a terrorist in America. I wrote that line sometime between 1997 and 1999, in response to the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, the opening event of It Isn’t Murder If They’re Yankees. While discussing it at their local bar, Sam Lee remarks that we can’t ban explosives because “we’ve got powerful explosives available everywhere. We drive them every day.”
One man’s essential tool is another man’s terrorist weapon. I considered changing that line after the events of September 11, either getting rid of it or adding “and fly in them” to make it even more prophetic, but ultimately decided against it. Sam earlier said that identifying root causes of terrorist acts is not the same as giving in to terrorists. That is a serious part of what Yankees is about, so the line stayed.
The tools for terrorism will always be available, no matter how many freedoms we take away from Americans. No matter how much we crack down on people who don’t look like us. If we truly wish to stop terrorist acts, we need to stop making people want to be terrorists, we need to stop funding criminals and terrorists with the same stupid laws that funded the mafia in the twenties, and we need to stop telling victims that their best response to crime and terrorism is to acquiesce until the criminal goes away. That, and the limits on it, is what It Isn’t Murder If They’re Yankees is all about.
Sorry for giving the ending away. You can read more about my views on this in Always Trust a Criminal.
If you haven’t read the intro yet, you should go to the It Isn’t Murder If They’re Yankees home page.
The cover art and internal art was designed by myself, Casey Wasser, and Triska Wasser. Triska did the final drawings. You can see my version of the bridge image at the top of this page for comparison. Triska’s work is amazing, and you can see more of it at her web page.
In the course of writing this book, I read a lot of interesting books about national events in 1993, “the war,” and the South in general. You may find some of these interesting. I certainly did.
I also found the music of Michelle Shocked, Tracy Chapman, Southern Culture on the Skids, and the Indigo Girls inspirational, especially the following albums from the story’s time period:
Whle the main theme of Yankees appears to be rarely touched upon in literature and art (Spider-Man, both the book and the movie, touched on it and then ignored it), there are a lot of wonderful books, albums, and movies touching on various minor themes within the story.
Self-publishing is becoming easier and easier nearly every day. Successful self-publishing remains just as difficult, if it isn’t getting even more difficult because of all of the new self-published books on the market. The combination of print-on-demand and on-line bookstores has revolutionized self-publishing in the same way that the world-wide web has revolutionized having an opinion.
In the old days, anybody could have an opinion, and most did, but only a select few could get their opinions to the masses. Today, anybody can make their opinion available to the entire on-line world, and many do. Of course, this also means that many people publish opinions that nobody else wants to read, either because they are trivial, boring, or disturbing. We have a plurality of opinions that we never saw before the Internet, and of course that means that sifting through those opinions is harder and harder. But they are all, even the trivial, boring, and disturbing ones, good to have available. They give us a deeper insight into the minds of people we might not normally see.
We are, of course, still free to ignore those opinions, and out of necessity we still do. We all make our choices about what to listen to--but we no longer have that choice made for us by someone else who happens to own a newspaper or television station.
In the old days, anybody could write a book, and quite a few did, but only a select few could publish their books to the masses. Today, just about anyone with a hundred dollars (or sometimes even less) can make their book available on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Books-a-Million for the world to purchase. The fact that many do makes it that much more difficult to be heard through the din, but that, also, reflects a wonderful new plurality of voices.
We can look at some of the tales of authors almost not getting published, or getting published solely through the dogged determination of their heirs, and realize that some wonderful books have been lost forever. No future generation will ever find them, because they were thrown out when the author died (or killed themself) along with the rest of the author’s effects. To the extent that self-publishing changes that, it is a good thing.
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“Every society has the criminals it deserves.” --Albert Camus (Resistance, Rebellion, and Death) |