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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 12, 2022

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Clark in particular had a fair amount of that. Without Remorse, his origin story, has him completely outside the law, but it also has Jack Ryan's dad as the detective attempting to catch him, and a lot of the point of the novel is about how what he's doing really isn't okay. Particularly on the military side of things, there's a great deal of grousing about what we might term REMFs; Clear and Present Danger and The Sum of All Fears both hinge on jackass politicians fucking things up for the honest servicemen under them, and there's more of that in the other books as well. Still, especially at the level of the Feds and the Military, there's a whole lot of emphasis on following procedure and getting authorization, not engaging in cowboy shenanigans. The big exception is Clear and Present Danger, which now that I think of it has a whole bunch of faintly horrifying breaches of protocol, multiple incidents of threating criminals with murder if they don't spill, and a bunch of cops arranging to scuttle the case against a pair of murderers, provided they kill two other murderers, who are going to walk because the Coasties who caught them held a faked execution to coerce confessions. Every part of that sequence is portrayed as morally acceptable, if perhaps not terribly advisable, which in itself should probably give the reader pause... but absolutely did not when I was reading it as a youngster. None of that ever involves the Bureau, though.

The FBI is represented mainly by Special Agent Dan Murray, Jack Ryan's best friend, who's basically a carbon copy of Jack Ryan, only not the main character. Clear And Present Danger initiates its main plot when the incorruptible, courageous, and universally-lauded Director of the FBI is assassinated by Columbian drug cartels, and things follow that general take for the preceding and following books. FBI agents are significant characters in pretty much every book, and they are never portrayed with anything but a halo. I think I recall J. Edgar Hoover being mentioned as being the distant past, and the Bureau Doesn't Work That Way Any More, but beyond that the books get to engaging with real-world discontents with the FBI is in one of the later books, when some white supremacists try to build a huge truck bomb to blow up the white house.