Introduction

In Jonathan Haidt's, "The Righteous Mind", he suggests that the Republican brand values "Loyalty" as one of its moral foundations. The introduction of Katie Pavlich's book begins with what seems like a lack of loyalty. The introduction, as commonly happens, is written by someone other than the author herself. It is, I feel safe in assuming, selected by her with a point and a purpose. In this case, the author of the introduction is Jay Dobyns.


Jay Dobyns, like Katie Pavlich, is an author. He is also a Special Agent with the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms. Jay Dobyns seems to be a Special Agent with a hearty dose of courage on bravado. He was notably involved in "Operation Black Biscuit," which involved the infiltration of the Hell's Angels. His work in this operation resulted in death threats against Jay and his family. Dobyns had a falling out with his bosses for which he blames the withdrawal of the "backstopping" (cover stories, fake ids and other things) which had been his only remaining cover. His bosses contented that the cover was no longer necessary. However, in 2008, his family home was targeted by an arson attack. His wife and children escaped with only smoke inhalation injuries. The Office of the Inspector General concluded, "ATF needlessly and inappropriately delayed its response to, and investigation of, threats against its own agent." These findings were reported to Eric Holder and the White House, but no further action to protect his family was ordered.

Jay seems to be a brave man who has served his country well; a man who's country has not served him equally well. He may also be a bit of an adrenaline junky and someone who doesn't toe the line to anyone. Taken hostage at gunpoint and ordered to drive the car away, he removed the keys from the ignition and dropped them to the floor. He was rewarded with a bullet through his chest. He nearly died. Brave or pathologically obstinate? I couldn't tell you. I can tell you that I feel with great confidence that our country needs people like Jay in law enforcement. I would also suppose that people like Jay have a hard time playing nicely with others or following the orders of superiors who haven't served on the "street."

Jay Dobyns, for this is who writes the introduction, begins by criticizing his agency and I can easily see where he would have gotten such negative ideas. Jay is not an intellectual. The job he does requires a certain boldness. While very helpful in the job we need people like him to do, it would be expected to create problems. Jay can't be cowed by a handgun pointed at him during a hostage situation. He isn't going to back down to his bosses. I would imagine him to be especially less inclined to recognize the authority of his superiors if they are people of different types. Jay, a man of action, his managers men of thought and education. Friction and frustration could easily develop. Even when Jay needed the protection of Backstopping cover stories for himself and his family, he did not back down. I would not have expected him to do so. I suppose his bosses thought they could force him to back down, but they were wrong.

This is the man asked to write the introduction by Katie Pavlich or her editors. Now, I do not suppose this was a gratis gig. The man was being paid for it and, in being paid, he has motivations to provide a letter that suits the interest of his employer. He also has a beef with the agency that seems reasonably well founded; if perhaps myopically not seeing his own behaviors are possibly creating friction with his bosses. This sets the stage for understanding his Introduction.

In the introduction, he portrays an "old guard" of the agency in glowing terms. "Hard" men and woman who worked in the field and had put the cuffs on bad guys. He complains about a change in the department, which reeks of nostalgia's charms wherein everything that was is better than anything that is. The good things are all exaggerated and the bad things forgotten. Such is the fog of recollection.

Jay portrays the new guard as intellectuals, weak and without knowledge of the "streets." He carefully proposes that inadequate or incompetent field agents went into management. In doing so, he easily calls to mind the experiences the men and women of blue collar America who might resent their more highly educated management and their more highly compensated positions. Aesop's fable of the fox and the sour grapes come to mind. It is easy, if one is not in management, to think and say bad things about management.


I believe there are ineffective managers who's book learning doesn't equate to an understanding of how to do the job. I believe there things field agents know and experiences you can trust. However, I also believe that dismissing everyone with more education with contempt is also a wrong approach. Hammers are good for driving in nails; they suck at screws. Every person is a tool the agency can use and it would be wise to use the right tool for the job. Obviously, someone with field experience will be great in some areas; but field experience does not make one qualified or competent to deal with governmental bureaucracy. This explains why the old guard with cowboy boots left the management; the skills needed to work in the field and the ones needed to work in a bureaucracy are not the same.

In such a situation, you have field agents doing the dangerous and dirty work for superiors who work in offices and look at computers. It would be easy for the field agents to disrespect their bosses. Then, too, in seeing their bosses better compensated, they may grow jealous or resentful. The bosses, contrariwise, would feel they have earned their position by virtue of their intellect and education. The attitude from their field agents might seem rude or disrespectful. In a consequence they might try to put the field agents in their place or somehow force or coerce them into showing submission. The superiors, not being the bold personality of a field agent who cannot be easily made to back down from a threat, fail to understand this will not work. In fact, I believe it generates additional ill will on both sides. Everybody  needs to see a counselor.

Back to Katie's reason for this story.

If the person buying your book is a blue collar man who hates government involvement in gun control and has a not to subtle racist streak, this is a story that will resonate quite well. Any black man who rises above you in your field based on superior intellect or education can be degenerated in exactly the way done in the Introduction. Using Jay's voice, she draws on experiences her readers might have had to help indoctrinate them into a mental state of being receptive to her message.

She seems to be showing an anti-intellectualism and disdain for people higher on the pay scale. Running by the numbers and considering the number of high-paid office execs wanting to read your book and the low-paid grunts with guns freaking out over Obama already... well, this seems like a very good way to frame your narrative.

But remember, if you were a  high paid exec and felt you deserved your position in life.. (hrm, you might be Republican) ...you should realize that Jay would have been a difficult employee to have working for you. Jay has and is entitled to his perspective, but  you should recall that Jay is unlikely to be making a steadfast effort to fully educate you on the matter. Like most people I've met in my life, Jay will be vulnerable to confirmation bias. As a person who doesn't back down and has great confidence in himself; he will similarly be hard to back away from a dearly held point of view. Once he started disliking the agency, he would have seen only superiors whom he despised. In order to maintain his simple view of  the agency as corrupt, he would have overlooked or ignored the positive contributions made by intellectuals and egg-heads.

Passions do not guarantee one is wrong; but strength of emotion does not guarantee one is right either. Powerful emotions do, however, further blind one to the possibility that they may be in error. Think of this like momentum; once you get going it is hard to change course. Anger, fear, frustration, bitterness... once these emotions start building inside you it can be very hard to take personal responsibility for what is happening in your life.

I would have to read more of Jay's writing to understand him better; but based on the evidence thus far I have made the best conclusion possible for me at this time.

Acknowledgement

Acknowledgement reads: "To those who have the courage to stand for truth. To my parents for teaching me how to take on a challenge."

Truth is a great and wonderful thing. The search for truth can be a slow and gradual process, but the seeds sown in the search for truth produce a great harvest for all mankind. Science is, fundamentally, a search for truth. There are means and methods for a scientific pursuit of truth. People of a religious perspective can often disregard or dismiss the findings of science, but they do so in error.

Galileo pursued the truth and the Church of the day didn't much care for that. The resisted; I suppose that's a kind way of putting it. Reading up on the clash between the two forces: Science and Religion is an exercise left for the reader. In the end, the Church may be "Infallible" when it comes to spiritual instruction; but they are not so flawless when it comes to understanding Science. 

The pursuit of scientific truth, truth about things which can be studied, requires a certain vigorous respect for the process. Impartiality must be maintained. Evidence must be gathered. Hypothesis made as the best possible educated guess from the available evidence are then tested. All in all, the researcher attempts to avoid bias, which is the nemesis of science. And I call it such for a reason.

In Sir James Frazer's, "The Golden Bough," he touches upon the evolution of magic, religion, and science. He begins by suggesting magic was poor reasoning wherein man felt he could magically control elements beyond his ability. Religion, Frazer suggests, then steps in. Magic ritual obviously fails and... eventually, the ineffectiveness of magic left man searching for another option. He fills the world with spirit which must be placated by prayer and supplication in order to achieve the desired ends. This provides an excuse for the failure of the magical seeming rituals. In time, however, man recognizes that religion fails to improve his understanding of the world and proceeds to science. Science, it can be seen, makes slow steady process.

Religion has advantages over Magic, but Religion still fell into some of the same traps. In particular, the problem with Galileo. Much like how fables and fairy tales try to answer age old questions such as why is the sea salty or what causes the tides, religion had been called onto provide answers. They came up with answers, but at no point tried to test their hypothesis. Thus we are told that a magic grinding mill is constantly churning out salt at the bottom of the sea and that the tides were caused by Thor getting into a drinking contest with a giant.

Religious answers are not testable and, therefore, are strongly influenced by confirmation bias and.. especially, the passions with which people invest in their religion. These strong emotions prevent people from seeing or entertaining other notions. Along with creating witch trials and being responsible for the burning of heretics; Religion has shown itself truly horrible in generating peace and good will between different faiths.

For these reasons, the Founding Fathers of the United State of America put a separation of Church and State into the Bill of Rights. In order to get people to get along, we needed them to keep their religion out of the rule making.

The consequence of which, many years later, are people who's affiliation to a political party is no less biased and unbending than Theology. Essentially, there are people who make a Religion out of their Politics. Given the title of this work, I believe the author guilty of this sin.

In order to search for truth, you have to step outside your pride and systematically gather evidence. Once you have gathered the evidence, then you can see how things fit and make theories. But people with a strong political perspective have a goal in mind before they ever start gathering evidence. This lack of impartiality obscures the truth. Bias blinds the researcher. Their holy and precious "truth" is an idol of their own vanity concocted in their brain to which every evidence gathered must pay homage or be sacrificed. Evidence supporting the bias is praised; contrary data ignored, distorted, or demonized.

Such is not someone who has courage to stand for the truth. You can only stand for the truth if you value diligently seeking it first. To seek the truth, you do not start with "how can I prove I am right?" You ask the harder question, "Am I actually right?"

....

So, I ask myself. Am I a seeker of truth? Will I consider evidence? Will I stand for the truth revealed by that evidence? I endeavor to do so.

Title

The title of Katie Pavlich's book, "Fast and Furious: Barack Obama's Bloodiest Scandal and its Shameless Cover-Up." Sets the tone for reading the work.

Ordinarily, the title itself is so obviously biased that I would put little to no trust in the reporting of the author. Books read to gain knowledge need to be handled with a certain diligence. Emotion and critical thinking skills do not often go hand-in-hand as an excess of emotion clouds perception excepting in the direction of your preexisting expectations.

A book with such a title would appeal to a certain demographic. People who hate Obama and are looking for a reason to hate him. These are people suffering from the ills of confirmation bias, the tendency to only look for sources of information that confirm your existing belief. With an inflammatory title, the author hopes to sell a book telling the buyer exactly what he wants to hear.

The book is, essentially, preaching to the Choir.

Meanwhile, anyone who is undecided or liberal will logically veer away from the book as biased reporting is often very poor quality reporting. Garbage in / Garbage out is a saying I've heard in reference to computer programing. It also works with the brain. If you consistently read works by authors who are biased and possess poor reasoning skills, you will become as they are. Thus, people of discretion avoid sources of information likely to be error-filled.

But, you may ask, what about Confirmation Bias. Is the moderate or  liberal reader also carefully filtering only for information that supports their existing bias? I don't think so. A book with a more balanced title might be of value to a moderate or liberal reader as a source of perspective for, at least, understanding the conservative mind on this matter.

I was asked to read this book by my Uncle. I am going to try and do so. For your information, I am someone who strives to be moderate in my politics, but I do lean towards the Democratic side because the Republican side tends to get more Pants-on-Fire fact check results. Understandably, I mistrust liars. I also detest people who intentionally spread falsehoods to further their own agenda. By this, I mean when someone says something so obviously and blatantly in contrast to the facts... but says it anyway.

Anyway, so much for the title....

This book was published on April 17, 2012 according to Amazon.com.