One of the great English writers of the last century, Dame Rebecca West (1892-1983) became fascinated with the psychology of treason as committed by some British turncoats who aided the Nazi cause in World War II. In 1947 she published a remarkable book entitled The Meaning of Treason. Particularly brilliant is her long section on William Joyce (better known perhaps as Lord Haw-Haw), a complicated Irish fascist who made English language propaganda broadcasts for the Germans through the course of the war. Some years later she returned to the theme—this time dealing with Communist spies—in The New Meaning of Treason. These are two important books of lasting merit, both as “true crime” and as penetrating psychological and historical studies. How much it is to be regretted that Dame Rebecca is no longer with us to write The Even Newer Meaning of Treason, or perhaps The Meaninglessness of Treason.
Such musings are inspired, of course, by the reported activities of the puerile Massachusetts Air National Guardsman Jack Texeira, who leaked all sorts of top secret military documents to a group of his adoring acolytes, one of whom then became a super-spreader and the instigator of a massive American embarrassment and an international incident with still unforeseeable implications for further death and destruction in the Russo-Ukrainian war and for the future effectiveness of American military intelligence. There is probably more disturbing news to come. The latest press reports are that Texeira actually began leaking secret information about the Russian invasion within days of its commencement. Nobody seemed to notice at the time, but people have noticed now. A PBS interview with a Ukrainian military leader I saw last week was disquieting. This official was of course being diplomatic and understated , but you could tell that he was inwardly fuming over the stupidity of the leaks. Altogether the episode is an American tragi-comedy that briefly turned my eccentric professorial mind to another great book actually entitled An American Tragedy (a novel by Theodore Dreiser, 1925).
Not enough people know this book today; so I’ll tell you a tiny bit about it. An American Tragedy is the highly fictionalized descendant of a famous murder case of 1906, the fictionalized anti-hero being one Clyde Griffiths, the child and impressed factotum of impecunious street evangelists in Kansas City. After his sister escapes her similar evangelical imprisonment by skipping town with a fancy man, Clyde finds work as a bellhop in an upscale hotel. Though a low level and servile occupation, his job gets him away from his Bible-thumping parents, puts a little a money in his pocket, and inserts him into a group of young colleagues who in their spare time like to think of themselves as badasses in their pursuit of wine, women, and even occasionally song. Clyde has a couple of particularly unsavory friends among this group, especially one Willard Sparser. Sparser, who likes to impress his fellow bellhops, is responsible for cleaning and maintaining the expensive new car of a wealthy resident. He “borrows” the car to take Clyde and some others on a day-off joyride into the countryside in search of booze and other assorted naughtiness. But Sparser pays too little attention to how time is passing and discovers in alarm that he must drive at reckless speed back to the city in order to return the car and keep its unauthorized use undetected by its owner. Alcohol impaired, he hits a young girl in the road. Then, fleeing in terror from that crime he totals the car altogether. Clyde tries to avoid association with these catastrophes by fleeing Kansas City, eventually arriving in Chicago, where after several hundred pages the actual main plot of the novel begins. This is, as the Friar says to the Wife of Bath, a long preamble to a tale, but a preamble nicely exemplifying the motives of Jack Texeira, airman first class and “cyber defense operations journeyman”. (The Air National Guard does not use the rank of Bellhop.) Those motives were not the gnaw of conscience, intellectual conviction of the desirability of Communism (Alger Hiss, Philby, Maclean, Burgess, Blunt); nor (self) righteous indignation at the criminal behavior of our government (Ellsberg, Assange, Snowden, Chelsea Manning); they had nothing to do with the frank venality of money (Aldrich Ames). Nor is motivation to be found in his political views, religious inclinations, or possible racial prejudices—topics that in the current climate have inevitably been suggested in several cultural commentaries. Unfortunately, there seems to have been no serious social motive, noble or base, plausible or crackpot, in play. No, Jack Texeira mainly wanted to impress a group of adolescent video game players, to show them that he was very, very cool. He had the keys to a metaphorical fancy new car—top secret documents! He would treat them all to a joy-ride! Whatever be the legal fate of Cyber Defense Operations Journeyman Teixera—and while honoring a quasi -mythical presumption of innocence, I suspect it will be unpleasant—I am already prepared to declare it at least a demonstrated linguistic crime that such a fellow could be said to work in the field of Military Intelligence. And as that is the same Military Intelligence whose digital wizards were in their search for the leaker scooped by two reporters for the New York Times, one does have to wonder if we have a more systemic problem.
Jack Texeira
Much has been made of Texeira’s youth (twenty-one), and some have suggested that no person so young should have access to state secrets. (Of course there is a difference between youthfulness and callowness. Stripling youths fought effectively at Bunker Hill, Shiloh, Belleau Wood, and Tarawa. Kim—Kipling’s young hero, I mean, not Kim Philby—was an ace espionage agent at the age of twelve.) Having been a college professor for forty years, I am aware that young people often do dumb things. As a matter of fact I myself was once young and did many very dumb things. Yet even mindlessness operates on a sliding scale, and this document dump is so deep in the red zone that lights are flashing. According to news reports Mr. Texeira’s desire to commit to a military career is consistent with a significant family tradition of patriotic service. But he devoted many hours to playing online video games, and in this avocation became a kind of leader of and guru to a group of “gamers,” including teen-agers and others of possibly arrested mental development, who were like-minded video game enthusiasts. Mr. Texeira apparently sought to impress these acolytes, as the fictional Willard Sparser had set out to impress Clyde Griffiths, of just how cool he was by the flagrant abuse of something potentially lethal that he was supposed to preserve and protect. Texeira had promised to do so in a formal signed document, his oath of office so to speak. Having now exposed my own deep and perhaps mindless prejudices about video games and those addicted to them, I must admit that I actually don’t know squat about such games, having never played one. I do vaguely recall reading a news squib once that claimed that Marine recruiters actually sought out video-gamers because so many had honed their digital reactions to warp speed. Theory holds that such dexterity ought to be transferable from a game board to an M27 automatic rifle. And I more distinctly recall reading in the press almost a decade ago of a disquieting international brouhaha involving criminal misogyny alleged to have been visited upon female game creators and players by young men who believed the gaming world should remain a male monopoly. I don’t know how this episode ended, but I do remember the catchy name it was given: Gamer Gate! Thanks to some bungling Republican burglars working on behalf of Richard Nixon in the early Seventies, many outrageous scandals are now Something Gates—the stuff of a future whimsical philological essay, perhaps. Just now I am too annoyed by the fact that this great moniker “Gamer Gate”, which seems so perfectly suited for the shenanigans of Jack Texeira and his elvish crew, is no longer available. I suspect that this same fate of unavailability, except on prison visiting days, awaits our airman first class as well. He is not a whistleblower, just a guy blowing his own horn; yet he is not entirely without his defenders. Representative Marjorie Taylor Green of Georgia, a believer in Pizza Gate, if you remember that one (pedophilia plus pomodoro sauce), has proclaimed his heroism. Don’t you find it funny that so many things that are not at all funny are so—funny?
