Great Expectations

Really, David. I expected better from Bracken, and I certainly expected better from you.

Commentator Joel expresses disappointment with racial theme elements in the "Foreign Enemies" online sample.

Author Matthew Bracken responds:

I’m not sure what politically correct planet Joel hails from, or if he has some other axe to grind, but I’m confused by his comments. He begins by referring to “all those EEEVIL dirty brown people” in Domestic Enemies. Was he referring to the heroine, the Arab-American Ranya Bardiwell? Or perhaps to the hero, Alexandro Garabanda, a Cuban-American? Domestic Enemies is set in the future in New Mexico, during a period when the Southwest is fracturing away from the United States. Yes, plenty of bad guys in the novel are Hispanic. Plenty of the good guys are as well. Perhaps if I had set the novel in North Dakota, and invented an immigration invasion by Canadians leading to…never mind. You get my point. If I’m going to write reality-based fiction about the breakup of the USA, set in the Southwest, it’s going to be pretty hard to avoid some Hispanic bad guys. Sorry Joel, if that offends your PC sensibilities. (And don’t hold your breath waiting for my novel about North Dakota.)

As far as cannibalism occurring three weeks after the complete cutoff of Memphis from the outside world, following a Richter level eight earthquake—yes Joel, that would happen. Spend a little time researching such disasters. People don’t quietly starve, while calmly sitting at home. The young and the strong quickly revert to cannibalism in the face of the total cutoff of other sources of food. History shows this, over and over. In the posted excerpt, there is one case of cannibalism described, in a city of over a million inhabitants.

Considering that you found the internet posted sections of Domestic Enemies to be full of “all those EEEVIL dirty brown people,” (despite the ethnicity of the heroes and its Southwestern setting), I’m not surprised that you would compare the posted excerpt from Foreign Enemies to the infamous white racist screed, “The Turner Diaries.” Perhaps you stopped reading these excerpts, before you got to the story of Web Hardesty? He is a white racist villain of the first order, using the breakdown of law and order following the earthquake to engage in a vendetta against African-Americans and Hispanics in Western Tennessee. I’ll say it in your terms: Web Hardesty is an “EEEVIL dirty white person.”

In Foreign Enemies, a rough sort of race war is introduced as one of several background plot elements. Blacks and whites are portrayed in both heroic and evil roles. Perhaps you are simply offended that I would dare to suggest that a complete breakdown in the social order would lead to racial atrocities being committed on all sides? If so, I would suggest that you are a Pollyanna, inhabiting the lofty airs of politically correct thought, viewing the world through rose-colored glasses.

Forgive me if I don’t think that folks will be holding hands and singing Kumbaya, three weeks after an earthquake wrecks most of the bridges between Little Rock, Saint Louis and Nashville. In Memphis, after three weeks with no food, drinking water, electricity or gas, I believe that we would see many of the worst traits that humanity has demonstrated under similar circumstances down through the ages.

I don’t expect that Joel will be reading Foreign Enemies, after he saw “all those EEEVIL dirty brown people” in Domestic Enemies, (in spite of the fact that the heroes are themselves “brown people.”) But for anyone else who read and enjoyed my first two novels, I make this promise: Foreign Enemies ends with a positive resolution of most of the various crises described. This includes a racial reconciliation by several of the characters, who had come to distrust members of differing ethnicities.

And please don’t get the idea that Foreign Enemies is primarily about racial conflict. That is merely one of the plot elements, in a novel that is mainly about the total usurpation of the Constitution by a rogue President and Congress.

Matt Bracken

Florida