Et In Arcadia Ego

Posted on June 17, 2025 by James McCrone

(“Even in Arcadia, there am I”)

There was a place, at NE 40th Street and University Way in Seattle’s University District, where even recently, some 40 years on, I could locate and remember a former, younger self, one now slowly fading. That intersection was quite literally a crossroad for me–between the Last Exit on Brooklyn, the College Inn Pub and Arnold’s. And the University of Washington.

The news that The College Inn Pub will close after 50 years has hit me hard. I have read that you die by degrees; that is, you’re not really gone until the last person who remembers your face dies. But I think parts of us disappear even while we’re living.

The “I” in the translation above is meant to be death itself, present everywhere, even in the happiest places. Which that corner certainly was. It also leapt out at me because Arnold’s Video Arcade, scene and locus of much misspent youth, was diagonally across the street.

This post isn’t meant to be a cranky whinge about how great things used to be and how soulless and rotten they are now. Change is a constant, you can’t put lightning in a bottle, and lots of other cliches that for all their threadbare, hackneyed-ness nevertheless articulate a truth. It’s that when things that are (or were) a part of you disappear, it feels like losing yourself, or like reaching out in the dark to touch a wall you know should be there. But it’s not. People, places and things locate you, give you context, guidance, maybe even comfort.

The Pub anchored the northeast corner of NE 40th Street and University Way in Seattle’s University District, an area just west of the University of Washington campus that was a focal point for the lives of me and my friends from 1979 until about 1994, by which time I had moved to another part of the city, first Belltown, then Beacon Hill and then the Rainier Valley.

Diagonally across the intersection from the Pub stood Arnold’s, a video arcade. Just around the corner, on Brooklyn Ave., was The Last Exit on Brooklyn, Seattle’s second oldest coffee house, and one of the oldest in the country. It stood right next door to the Ethnic Cultural Theatre. Arnold’s is long gone, The Exit moved to a new a location and then closed 20+ years ago, and now the College Inn Pub is up for sale and will probably be closed.

I started working at The Exit as a dishwasher when I was 15 years old in 1979. Later, when my high-school friends and I would stop in at Arnold’s to play Asteroids, or Defender or Ms. Pac-Man, we’d often steal through the alley into the back of The Exit, where we would hang out. And if it was a weekend night, we’d look for someone to buy us beer. I would also take dates there. Not only was it an interesting, funky place, but it was cheap, and I was known.

I think I was the youngest employee Irv Ciskey, the owner, had ever hired. I had gone to his other restaurant, Lake Union Pizza, to apply for a job when we moved to Seattle, and he had sent me to The Exit. Unbeknownst to me at the time, Irv had called the manager there and told him to hire me. It did seem like an easy interview even at the time.

Even before I was old enough to go inside, the College Inn Pub loomed large in my thoughts. My freshman year at the University, I was in the Terry-Lander dormitory, and even though it was generally simpler to take the Campus Parkway exit from the building to get to my classes, I would often leave via the back exit, and NE 40th–terra firma. I’d head to The Exit for a quick espresso, then mount the stairs to leave via the back way out, into the alley that also ran behind Arnold’s and onto the street.

Later, I would work at the Pub as a “beertender”–my work life as a grad student split between it and the University Bar & Grill about six blocks up the street.

Even after we had moved east, returning on visits to that corner, I could see myself there. It was unique in that it represented not just a snapshot of my life, but a series of lives–adolescence, undergraduate, graduate, young father–were enacted there. Not like flipping through an album of static pictures or one brief moment, but like viewing a film covering the ages of 15 to 36, how I changed (if, indeed, I’ve every really grown up!), how my friends grew, how the city changed, even as the corner remained largely unchanged whenever I returned. Fortunately, I’m still close with those friends, even if we don’t see one another regularly.

I lived in the midwest (Wisconsin and Iowa) for about 12 years, in Seattle for 21; and I have now lived away from Seattle for longer than I was there (25 years). My wife says I’m a midwesterner at heart, but a good deal of my life and heart is at 40th and University.

I’m not sure when I’ll be back in Seattle next, though I hope it will be soon. If you see some sad and bitter old man standing in the intersection staring disconsolately, or pointing out what used to be, he’s not lamenting a Seattle that is no more, but mourning the loss of a bit of the sense of himself.

Maybe I should be grateful that I have such a place–a “better to have loved and lost…” kind of thing. Maybe I will be grateful one day.

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James McCrone is the author of the Imogen Trager political suspense-thrillers Faithless Elector, Dark Network , and Emergency Powers–noir tales about a stolen presidency, a conspiracy, and a nation on edge. Bastard Verdict, his fourth novel, is about a conspiracy surrounding a second Scottish Independence referendum. His novel-in-progress is called Witness Tree, a (pinot) noir tale of murder and corruption set in Oregon’s wine country.

All books are available on BookShop.org, IndyBound.org, Barnes & Noble, your local bookshop, and Amazon. eBooks are available in multiple formats including Apple, Kobo, Nook and Kindle.

James is a member of Mystery Writers of America, Int’l Assoc. of Crime Writers, and he’s the current president of the Delaware Valley chapter of Sisters in Crime. He lives in Philadelphia. James has an MFA from the University of Washington in Seattle.

For a full list of appearances and readings, make sure to check out his Events/About page. And follow this blog!

You can also keep up with James and his work on social media:

Mastodon: @JMcCrone
Bluesky: @jmccrone.bsky.social
Facebook: James McCrone author (@FaithlessElector)
and Instagram/Threads “@james.mccrone”

Shining light on conscious stupidity

Posted on November 11, 2024 by James McCrone

A meme has been making the rounds, credited (as I saw it) to a Nelson Guedes, regarding “premeditated ignorance.” It is the quality or condition of deliberate unawareness, and I am grateful to Nelson Guedes for putting it about.

Sadly, it sounds all-too similar to the Ingsoc principle (from George Orwell’s 1984) called “crimestop.” Crimestop describes the mental gymnastics–the insanity–required for self-preservation in an authoritarian regime. It means “the faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought. It includes the power of not grasping analogies, failing to perceive logical errors, of misundertanding the simplest arguments if the are inimical to Ingsoc, and being bored or repelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction.”

As I read the passage above (from the “Goldstein Book” section of 1984), I can’t keep Tucker Carlson’s quisling Labrador face out of my mind. But, loathsome as he is, he’s hardly original, and we’ve seen it before, with the know-nothings of the 1850’s, a lurid brand of Nativists, the McCarthy era, etc. It is conscious, premeditated stupidity. Or as I would term it – willful ignorance. And it is most dangerous when weaponized, together with Aggressive Stupidity.

Ignorance and knowledge exist on a spectrum, bearing the physical-religious qualities of light (and also darkness). I used to joke about it, but events of the last decade have strangled the funny.

At one end of the spectrum lies ignorance. No judgment (necessarily), it merely describes the absence of information.

Ignorance –> Stupidity –> Willful Ignorance –> Aggressive Stupidity

Red – Orange – Yellow – Green – Blue – Indigo – Violet

Beginning with “simple ignorance” (i.e. lack of information), ignorance is judgment-neutral and merely describes a state of (un)knowledge, a kind of dark matter state, glimpsed only indirectly, defined only by what it is NOT.

Further study may reveal that simple ignorance is not dark, but like faint light from a distant galaxy or indeed quantum particles, it may be that we sense something is there; but it could be almost anything, and we can’t describe it or discuss its qualities.

Proceeding along the spectrum, we come to “stupid,” which also describes an (un)knowledgeable state of being. But in this case that state has been changed by exposure to information/knowledge NOT absorbed or acted upon–a lost or discarded (albeit exposed) photo plate, let’s say. This state would include forgetting something previously known or failure to reason inductively based on past information or experience. A kind of petulant entropy.

The third state of ignorance is “willful ignorance.” In this state, painful/inconvenient facts are actively resisted. This is where bullshit comes in, too, giving space to misunderstand–or to claim that everyone else misunderstands. In the bullshit realm, it seems, up is down, and like a black hole, its gravity is so massive and powerful that it sucks in light, even as it continues to emit vast amounts of energy.

The fourth state of ignorance is “aggressive stupidity.” It is by far the most volatile and unstable state, an epistemological supernova. In this white hot state, it’s not enough that painful or inconvenient facts and information be ignored or resisted, but that the regard must be turned outward: facts must be obliterated and shouted down in all caps. Blame must be assigned. The threat of violence is ever-present.

We have seen that the MAGA-hat-faithful will contort themselves with willful ignorance and aggressive stupidity, but we’ve recently found that our billionaires are all-too willing to be Toads for Trump. We might also revisit Graham Greene’s very fine (and very dark) Doctor Fischer of Geneva for a look at the lengths to which the wealthy will go to keep or increase their wealth–and the debasement they are prepared to suffer for it.

The key to sanity in the coming years will be to call out what we see, and not to slip into comfortable, willful ignorance. Because if we begin to go along to get along, to stop questioning, to stop seeing things as they are and stating them plainly, we may quickly find ourselves defending the indefensible.

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All books are available on BookShop.org, IndyBound.org, Barnes & Noble, your local bookshop, and Amazon. eBooks are available in multiple formats including Apple, Kobo, Nook and Kindle.

For a full list of appearances and readings, make sure to check out his Events/About page. And follow this blog!

You can also keep up with James and his work on social media:
Mastodon: @JMcCrone
Bluesky: @jmccrone.bsky.social
Facebook: James McCrone author (@FaithlessElector)
and Instagram/Threads “@james.mccrone”

Strategic Mischief in the Electoral College

Posted on October 29, 2024 by James McCrone

Despite our familiarity with the Electoral College, it bears repeating that the citizens of the United States do not vote for the president but rather for Electors, chosen by the various political parties state-by-state, who promise, that is “pledge,” to vote for their candidate. “There are so many curving byways and nooks and crannies in the Electoral College that there are opportunities for a lot of strategic mischief,” Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) noted in a 2022 interview.

If you follow this blog, you know that my first novel was a thriller called Faithless Elector, in which a shadowy group seeks to steal the presidency by manipulating the Electoral College. My novel is a work a fiction, and I didn’t get everything right. But it’s dismaying to watch so much of its plot play out in the real world.

Faithless Elector debuted in March of 2016, well before the party conventions had selected their respective candidates, so it’s not about Clinton and Trump, but is animated by the question, “What if?” What if a shadow group wanted to steal the presidency by manipulating the Electoral College? The book’s staying power lies in the fact that it’s about a real, latent weakness in the process, prone, as Rep. Raskin points out, to “a lot of strategic mischief.”

And it’s about writers’ questions: Who are the bad guys? What do they want? What are the stakes? How would they go about it? Because first and foremost, for a good story, the protagonist(s) need a strong antagonist. If your “bad guys” are dummies, or the stakes don’t seem compelling, it doesn’t make for much of a story. As a reader, you want to feel the importance of the stakes and the very real possibility that the protagonist might not succeed.

The story is driven by move and counter-move. Verisimilitude (“like truth”) has been my guide, and I had to construct a plausible, mischievous threat. So, to begin with, I looked at the story not as the hero’s journey, but as the conspirators’ plot. I looked at how they might plausibly pervert rules and institutions, what groundwork they would have to create. I zeroed in on the weakest link, the actual Electors, and I made the conspirators resilient, having built into their model an ability to take advantage of serendipitous (for them) unforeseen events.

In the novel, the assumed EC vote tally is separated by only four votes. If three Electors could be persuaded to switch their votes, then the presumed loser would win. When I wrote the book, only a few states had anti-Faithless Elector laws on the books, and no one knew whether those statutes would stand if brought before the Supreme Court (there is much scholarship suggesting that Electors were intended to be decision makers, and despite their pledge were free to vote as they saw fit; but of course, no switched vote had ever changed the assumed outcome). Since the ’16 election a number of states and the District of Columbia (38 in total now) have instituted some sort of anti-Faithless Elector law, leaving twelve states without any such laws, and of the 38, fully half have no enforcement mechanism for their laws.

In the novel, an idealistic young graduate student, Matthew Yamashita, happens to be polling Electors for his dissertation research when he finds a suspicious number of deaths among them–all of them occurring between the general election and the real presidential election, when the Electors meet in their respective state capitols. This year it will be December 17, 2024. Matthew must get the information out to someone who will believe him–and who can do something to stop it. Later, Matthew and his allies realize that though they’ve got most of the facts right, they’ve missed a key point, which has cost them time.

In the novel, the conspirators need to give the Faithless Electors cover for switching their pledged vote, so they set about creating what looks like voter fraud in Illinois. It is the key to their strategy because it sows doubt and causes confusion. Meanwhile, in the real world, the Trump campaign covers all bets–it sows doubt about the validity of voting, and their operatives work to disenfranchise as many voters as possible. We have even seen ballot collection boxes set on fire in and around the Portland, OR, area, putting hundreds of ballots in jeopardy.

Not only is the Electoral College an archaic remnant that has never operated as designed, but since the first fully contested election (after Washington declined to run a third term), the rise of political parties has caused it to grow worse and more convoluted. Worst, far from giving a voice to small state voters, it disenfranchises rural and city dwellers alike. Adding the malapportioned Senate numbers (two per state regardless of population), further distorts the will of the people. The candidates, as has been true for some time now, focus on “swing states,” like my home state of Pennsylvania.

Meanwhile, there have now been five (5) presidential elections where the loser of the popular vote nevertheless became president – 1824, 1876, 1888, 2000 and 2016. Will it happen again in ’24? Will it be worse?

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All books are available on BookShop.org, IndyBound.org, Barnes & Noble, your local bookshop, and Amazon. eBooks are available in multiple formats including Apple, Kobo, Nook and Kindle.

For a full list of appearances and readings, make sure to check out his Events/About page. And follow this blog!

“Truth Value” and B.S.

Posted on October 28, 2024 by James McCrone

I was delighted today when an account I follow, Jonny Thomson’s Mini Philosophy, discussed Harry Frankfurt’s “Reflections on B.S,” an essay I used to teach when I was a community college instructor in the 1990’s, and one that I wrote about back in February of 2018. That post (link below), along with Corinne Purtill’s “The difference between a snafu….etc” remain among the most popular posts on this blog. I’m pleased that Frankfurt is still read and discussed.

As we stare down the barrel of another potential Trump presidency, I thought it might be helpful to revisit the Orewellian blare of that time, and the weaponized obfuscation that lies at the heart of an inability to distinguish lying and bullshit.

Oldthinkers Unbellyfeel Ingsoc

Link to original post

That difference, as Frankfurt notes, concerns truth value: one must believe that one knows the truth, in order to conceal it, to lie; whereas, the bullshitter has no necessary relation to truth.

The title of my original piece comes from 1984, and the appendix, Principles of Newspeak. It’s an imagined article in some future Newspeak-only newspaper, designed to show how Newspeak is designed and used to limit thought and action – ‘Oldthinkers unbellyfeel Ingsoc,’ would replace something we might understand today, as, “Those whose ideas were formed before the revolution cannot have a full emotional understanding of the principles of English Socialism.” The Newspeak version is brief but freighted.

It calls to mind Trump’s rambling word salads–it’s a stretch to call them speeches–impossible to pin down, and they’re formulated (if we can call it that) in such a way as to drop heavily weighted nouns that have specific meanings for his supporters. He sometimes, as in the example I used in the original post, contradicts himself within the same rambling, but the key nouns continue to resonate because the audience is not really listening. They hear the sound-cues they need and move on.

In a second Trump presidency, Project 2025 will be the scaffold for an ugly revolution, and the authors, who consulted with Trump in its creation, have made the grave mistake of being quite clear about what they will do.

Which may be why Trump is so keen to soft-peddle the Project. We need to listen, and we need to vote before it’s too late.

Here’s the Facebook post (reel) from Jonny Thomsom – https://www.facebook.com/reel/343009432203796

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All books are available on BookShop.org, IndyBound.org, Barnes & Noble, your local bookshop, and Amazon. eBooks are available in multiple formats including Apple, Kobo, Nook and Kindle.

For a full list of appearances and readings, make sure to check out his Events/About page. And follow this blog!