My wife says I'm not giving enough explanation

She also says "it's very long." (Weekly sidebar, this time about writing)

Leonid Pasternak, The Passion of creation.

I’m doing two things here on Substack. First, I’m doing this weekly sidebar on Wednesday, which is roughly the length of a typical blog post. Second, on Sundays I’m sending out my book in installments, one chapter at a time, hoping readers will engage and comment. So far the only person offering criticism is my wife Gigi. I’ve had people say privately to me that my scholarship is super interesting and keep it coming, but I have noticed (via the handy Substack dashboard app) that readership went down on that last post. The thing is, only the people who really love you will tell you what you’re doing wrong in your writing, just like they’re the ones who tell you that you have something stuck in your teeth. Most people who have a problem with your writing just don’t read it.

As to Gigi’s criticism, here’s the dilemma: She consistently says the Sunday posts are “very long” or “too long,” to which I respond, “Too long for what?” Gigi lives in a world of NY Times op-eds and press releases and Congressional testimony. They don’t use words like “teleological.” I, by contrast, am currently engrossed by a 1200-page tome by Hew Strachan entitled The First World War, Vol. I: To Arms (Oxford University Press, 2001). So, in my mind, if my end product is coming in at fewer than 1200 pages, then it’s not “too long.”

But then she also says, “You’re not giving enough explanation as to how this relates to your larger project.” To that I say, (a) last week she said I was giving too much explanation; and (b) I fundamentally don’t understand how to address the problem of a piece being “too long” by adding content to it.

Part of what’s going on here, I think, is that I’m writing a book (okay, I concede it’s a book at this point and not just a very long article) of which, presumably, people are going to read more than one chapter at a time; but I’m releasing the draft in weekly installments. That worked for Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities, although I think he did the reverse: he envisioned it first as a weekly serial and then turned it into a book. The more apt, 21st century comparison may be a streaming TV series: If you sit down and read a book, that’s like binge-watching the whole series; you’ll typically click “skip recap” as you start each new episode. But if you’re watching one episode a week, or if it’s a new season, you might just need that recap. So, sometimes my wife needs the recap and sometimes she doesn’t. Maybe I have utterly failed to articulate how the Spanish-American War of 1898 relates to everything else, or maybe I did and she’s just forgotten.

On the premise that it’s the former, let me explain how the last installment of the book, “The Spanish-American War of 1898: Origins and Consequences,” relates to everything else. This book is weaving together the history of American imperialism with the history of American surveillance. My argument is that one led to the other, as evidenced by the fact that the Insular Cases, a set of early 20th-century Supreme Court decisions aimed at resolving the colonial dilemma that arose from the Spanish-American War, were then used as support for United States v. Verdugo-Urquidez (1990), which held that the 4th Amendment does not apply to non-U.S. persons overseas. In Part One of the book, I went through all the other 16th, 17th, 18th and 19th century building blocks for the Verdugo-Urquidez decision: how did we come up with the idea that the U.S. Constitution, or any law, for that matter, “applies” spatially to a linearly bounded territory but doesn’t “apply” even one inch over that line? (the Westphalian nation-state system). How did we decide that the U.S. Constitution stops at the U.S. border, but somehow also attaches like a barnacle to U.S. persons traveling overseas? (extraterritorial jurisdiction that evolved out of the 15th century Ottoman capitulations).

Part One (“Season One,” in Netflix parlance) doesn’t get into the 4th Amendment, and that’s because, prior to the 20th century, there is virtually no U.S. Supreme Court jurisprudence on the 4th Amendment. And why is that? Because, prior to the 20th century—prior to the Spanish-American War, as a matter of fact—there was so little intelligence and law enforcement capacity that the U.S. federal government wasn’t doing much of anything on which the Supreme Court might have wished to impose 4th Amendment limitations. Just not a whole lot of searching and seizing going on, whether “reasonable” or not. Why did this change after the Spanish-American War? Because, after the Spanish-American War, the United States was finally saddled with ruling people whom white Americans couldn’t enslave but did not want to enfranchise, who didn’t particularly want to be ruled by white Americans, and who were too populous and too resilient to white people’s germs to simply be pushed out of the way and onto reservations. These were the people then inhabiting the Philippines.

The Philippines were where the U.S. waged its first counterinsurgency campaign, which turned out to be as brutal and as politically unpopular in the United States as anything the Spanish had ever done. Subjugating the Philippines without all the torture and concentration camps eventually required more subtle methods of control, a modern progression in human discipline that is exhaustively discussed in Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, a seminal work for privacy and surveillance scholars. Specifically, the U.S. authorities who began to take over operations from infantry soldiers around 1901 started doing a whole lot of searching and seizing, not to mention collecting, monitoring and indexing. This then raised novel questions—often raised by Filipinos, but sometimes by U.S. soldiers and veterans who settled in the Philippines—about how the U.S. Government could be asserting power over the Philippines, presumably power that originated out of the Constitution, but without all the protections contained in the U.S. Bill of Rights that we all thought was part of the overall Constitutional package. The way the U.S. Supreme Court resolved this conundrum about the assertion of U.S. power without U.S. Constitutional limitations was through the Insular Cases.

It’s actually my post for this coming Sunday that is going to explain all this. But I wasn’t sure it was a good idea to just launch into the Insular Cases without first answering the obvious question of: Wait, why the heck did we acquire the Philippines, anyway? If the average American knows anything at all about the Spanish-American War of 1898, they know it had something-or-other to do with Cuba and the Hearst newspapers and then the U.S.S. Maine blew up. If I’m about to tell you—and I am—that the U.S. acquisition of the Philippines fundamentally changed us as a nation, I can’t imagine that you wouldn’t be curious how we came to that decision, and if this represented a sudden break with our national character or else a subtle manipulation of what our national character had been all along.

I would also think you’d want to know something about the Cuba angle, since Cuba is likely going to come up again in conversation when we talk about the post-World War II U.S. intelligence apparatus—there was a missile crisis—and Guantanamo Bay will almost certainly come up, since Boumediene v. Bush, 553 U.S. 723 (2008) is the other major U.S. Supreme Court case that wrestles with the Insular Cases in the context of national security. If at any point in the past decade you’ve wondered, “How is it that the U.S. controls Guantanamo Bay, yet it’s part of Cuba, and they let us stay there even though our bilateral relations are terrible, and because it’s not ‘in the United States’ the U.S. Government can do things to detainees at Gitmo Bay that it can’t do at home?” (maybe you were channel-surfing, and BBC America was broadcasting “A Few Good Men” for the upteenth time?), you probably want to know how all that got started. So I put that in there, along with a cool public domain photo I found on Wikimedia Commons of the U.S. Marines raising the U.S. flag over Gitmo Bay for the first time, in 1898.

I’m also—don’t know if you’ve noticed this—trying to help the reader navigate by place-names and familiar, recurring characters. People, places, and races, which through a happy coincidence, is the name of my draft book. I always mention the name of a U.S. president when it comes up, assuming that if you know the name William Howard Taft, you’ll go, “Oh yeah, that guy.” Same for the Philippines. Gigi asked me last week why I had included a quote about the Spanish suppressing labor and shipping 1400 convicts off to the Philippines. I did it because the quote had the word “Philippines” in it. What I’m hoping is that the reader, at a subconscious level, is already thinking, “Wow, a whole lot of stuff seems to be going in and out of the Philippines. Silver from Mexico. Opium from China that the British smuggled into China from India. Spaniards and sailors, looking for prostitutes and concubines,” etc. It’s a trick I read that J.R.R. Tolkien used to help keep his readers from getting lost in The Two Towers: He invented the entire constellation of stars over Middle Earth (because he’s Tolkien), and at various points characters are looking up at the same constellation, and that’s how the reader is subconsciously aware that these two events are happening at the same time in different parts of Middle Earth.

The problem is, I’m no Dickens and I’m certainly no Tolkien. And this isn’t a work of fiction. Am I aiming for a good story well told, a work of scholarship so that I’m taken seriously as a scholar (using words like “teleological”), or something that has a policy impact and can even help solve some immediate problems at work? Unfortunately, the answer is “yes.”