After letting shoot-em-up video games keep his brand of political action alive for the better part of a decade, Tom Clancy has returned with Dead or Alive, a door-stopping behemoth of a book which sees the return of many familiar characters united in a struggle to stop a hideous terrorist villain The Emir, a thinly veiled stand-in for Osama bin Laden.
Clancy’s politics have always been so right as to be nearly fascist, but Dead or Alive takes his work to new levels of racist Islamophobia, sexism, and ra-ra Americana. If you like the idea of a world where “heroes” go around blowing the heads-off Arabs (sorry “bad guys”), treating women like objects (when they notice them at all that is), and fantasizing about their next Big Mac – then by all means this book is for you. All 950 pages of it (I only got to about page 300 – so please if there is a sudden reversal in the following 650 please correct me – but I thought the sample size was large enough)
It may seem redundant to look critically at a Tom Clancy novel for its characterization of Islam and women, but the fact that it’s sitting prominently in the bestseller section of bookstores deserves some sort of comment. This essary will look at how the book characterizes its heroes, it’s villains, and women characters. These characterization result in the creation of a circular relationship where the Islamophobic and sexist attitudes of the male heroes are confirmed and reflected through the way the book’ characterization of Arabs and women. Essentially Tom Clancy creates a world where Islamophobia and sexism are justified by the action of its characters.
Almost to a T, these characters represent a nearly identical world-view which is that they are just regular working class folks whose job happens to be killing “bad guys”, which in the case of Dead or Alive means Islamic terrorists. Brian Caruso, an FBI agent and member of an elite intelligence agency known as the Campus, expresses the view that what they do is about “doing the job you trained your ass off to be good at, taking care of the guys on your right and left, and coming out on the other side with all your fingers and toes.” At the same time, Clancy does his best to balance the unapologetic violence his male characters embody by having them express an appreciation for cultured items such as good wine and fine dining. Sitting in an Italian restaurant and expostulating on wine and where the best restaurants in Italy, Brian’s Marine cousin Dominic comments “I’m not your typical jarhead, you know.” Rather, Clancy’s ‘not typical’ jarheads are realists who do what is necessary to keep the world. The logic of their ‘realism’ also extends to meat consumption, driving large gas-guzzling vehicles (Jack Jr drives a Hummer which even but is quick to assert he’s no “tree-hugger”), and general support for anything American. John Clark, the elite leader of Clancy’s Rainbow 6, gives a particularly cringe-inducing expression of this general attitude when he inwardly wonders why airlines don’t serve “decent food” by “stocking up on Big Macs and fries”.
In contrast to the heroic men, there are generally two types of female characters, the near sexless support characters and the ruthlessly promiscuous women who use sex as their main tool to achieve their ends. Secret Service Agent Andrea Price-Day is a perfect example of the former. She exists in the background of former President Jack Ryan’s environment and only explodes into action when a threat emerges. Her relative unimportance as a character is emphasized by her second appearance in the novel where she is again introduced as if it were the first time, with her full name and position. The gendred and possessive way she is defined as “his [Jack Ryan’s] principal agent” reinforces the subtle sexism which pervades the novel’s characterization of women who are with the ‘good guys’. In contrast to Price-Day, most of the women characters we are introduced to are either sex workers or promiscuous drug users. A good example is the woman hired by the Emir to seduce a nuclear engineer with the Department of Energy. She uses her “training” to strike up a relationship with the unsuspecting man and then extract vital information from him. The common trait for these female characters other than their use of sex to obtain their means of survival, they are also generally used by the text as well, appearing and disappearing to serve the whim of Clancy’s plot. By denying his female characters any influence as characters beyond plot devices, the sexism which places them in secondary and supporting roles to the male heroes is reflected in the structure of the novel itself. The one female character who has a semi-influential role in the novel is Mary Pat Foley, part of Tom Clancy’s equivalent to Homeland Security. The character of her thoughts, though, is essentially a carbon-copy of her male counterparts, suggesting that in Clancy’s world the best way for a female to become important is to be more like a male.
Maleness is a key component for the villains of the novel, the Emir and his organization known as the URC. The core members are uniformly men, although unlike the professionalism and able men of the Americans, the Emir’s URC soldiers are generally lazy and incompetent. While conducting a raid on a cave in Afghanistan, the American soldier Driscoll encounters enemies who are either relaxing their guard, sleeping, or just plain inexperienced. Consequently they are easily dispatched by Driscoll and his team, a scenario which is repeated numerous times, a constant proof of the superiority of American troops. In addition to being funadamentally less competent, Clancy’s terrorist “bad guys” generally represent all sorts of moral corruption. Despite their claim to follow a strict religious code of conduct, Clancy produces plenty of moments where the Emir’s men engage in petty egoism, lusting after women and even imbibing in alcohol. The Emir himself is a ruthless killer, dispatching those who have been hired to help him after they have served their purpose (itself a clear contrast to the loyalty and comradeship of the Americans). The ultimate depravity of the Emir’s character is produced in the scene where he has one of his underlings hire a prostitute off the street for him and then has her killed for asking “too many questions”. Having made his “terrorist” characters morally corrupt and unable to live up to their own Islamic makes them the merciless thugs deserving of the no-holds-barred onslaught against them by Clancy’s American heroes. In Clancy’s world, the answer of why America is under attack is that there are unredeemable men in the world who need to be killed.
The end result is a long self-reinforcing chain circular reasoning where the sexist and Islamophobic attitudes of the heroes become justified through the book characterization of women and Arabs. The main argument of the heroes is that if they don’t hunt down and kill the “bad guys” (i.e. Islamic terrorists), they will kill untold numbers of people. By portraying the villains as ruthless killers driven by religious (Islamic) fundamentalism, the fictional universe set up by Clancy serves to affirm the attitudes of his heroes. None of the characters are able to articulate a critique that raises issues about the violence perpetuated all over the globe through American imperialism, simply because they are religious zealots blindly following an undefined notion of Allah’s will and their leader, the Emir. Similarly, the sexist views held by Clancy’s American heroes are also confirmed when the women characters exhibit morally corrupt behavior. All this leads to a masculine fantasy world where the good guys can go around shooting the bad guys without remorse, where America is the shining model of what every society should be, and women should be virtuous and supporting of their male heroes (with the knowledge that it’s ok to be a little slutty in the bedroom).
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