Tom Clancy—a novelist for transsexuals

Dusk falls on the business park—through the smoked windows you watch the purple light bounce off the handful of cars in the parking lot. You settle down into your swivel chair. You left a message on the ansafone for your wife, you told her you had to work late on a project—a white lie. You almost scrunch yourself up in excitement as you bend down to the lowest drawer in your desk. You remove the baseball cap. It reads “USS Guppyfish CA-684” (behind, over the little oval where the plastic size adjuster sits, it reads, in little gold letters, “Commander”). You glance at the picture of your family—the one that went out with the round robin last Christmas—the brood clusters about the family Labrador, the two children hugging him, your wife, “the boss”, behind. You glance back to the command line, you run the program: MICROROSE presents…TOM CLANCY’S SUBMARINE COMMANDER. It begins.

Tom Clancy is a franchise, not a man—hence, though the actual Clancy died in 2013, his work lives on in perpetuity in a manner familiar to other American institutions such as the Hardy Boys (The Hardy Boys and the Submarine Caper being almost a Clancy title); or, indeed, Nancy Drew (Clancy Drew—we will return to this). The torch has been passed to a new generation of anonymous ghostwriters condemned (it’s a tough market) to eke out a living with titles such as Tom Clancy’s Ghost Operation: A Jack Ryan™ adventure. There are video games and films too—and Clancy provides what might be called “classic Boxing Day entertainment”, the post-prandial submarine film, with Sean Connery, accompanied by a Turkey sandwich from the leftovers.

Clancy writes passages along these lines: “Lieutenant Commander Charles ‘Chuck’ McGruder hauled himself into the con and poured himself a cup of black coffee—it was navy coffee, made with a pinch of salt. ‘What’s the sitrep?’ ‘We’ve had a Soviet Boomer-class on scope for the past ten hours, Skip.’ The bosun, a vast avuncular Boston Irishman, John ‘the Bear’ Bearson, rarely called the Commander ‘Skip’ it was just he’d been up all night on watch and the exhaustion had finally got to him.

The Commander put an arm round the young sailor, ‘I’ll let this pass just this once, Bear,’ he said, gently expressing his paternal authority over the crew, ‘now what’s Ivan up to?’. ‘He’s lying there, stone dead. Reactors on idle. Minimum cavitation.’ The Russian Boomer, as big as the Queen Elizabeth II, carried 34 Murzurka IRBMs but right now she was dead in the water like the carcass of a bloated whale. ‘So Ivan’s just lying around like a walrus in a muumuu,’ said McGruder, then he added, almost under his breath, ‘just like my ex wife.’ Susan took the kids and Chip the spaniel last year, and it still stung, but for a career sailor like McGruder it went with the territory.

‘Okay, let’s get a helo up,’ said McGruder. He turned to the SS-1345-56 Cavitation Analysis Machine, a new gizmo from Palo Alto, spiced up with a British sonar sniffer and finished in a titanium shell by the Germans. ‘The Krauts sure know how build ’em,’ McGruder said. ‘That’s affirmative, Skip,’ said Bearson. McGruder’s father had worked Atlantic convoys during the last war and he still retained a professional respect for the sailors of the Reich—God, McGruder thought, war is hell; if it weren’t for the politicians and bureaucrats all us servicemen would just get to together in a bar, a sweaty bar, one with carousels where you have to squeeze in like a well-lubricated piston, and talk about all the good boys we lost, and just sort it out like men, like men, like men…’ ‘Skip? Skip?’ ‘Er, yes. Very good. Launch helo, Bear.’ The A-400F Sea Whippet sprung from her tungsten stanchions and set her sonar to active ping, at the controls Major Charles ‘Chad’ Donaldson III etc & etc…”

Clancy has two strengths as a writer: he provides great pace—hence why so many of his novels became films—and he satisfies the male need for autistic details. Men generally dislike fiction, but they like Clancy because he fills paragraphs with information about the A-400F Sea Whippet, with its mirror-like titanium alloy that makes it invisible to Soviet radar, at a brisk clip—in fact, the Sea Whippet (its land variant being, of course, the Greyhound A-400D) does not exist, but if this was Clancy it definitely would and the technical details would definitely be correct (per Jane’s All the World’s Fighting Aircraft).

So Clancy produces fast-paced autism—hence he exemplifies the “techno-thriller”; and, really, what Clancy does is take a report from a think-tank with a name like the Institute for Strategic Evaluation (ISE) and dramatises its scenarios for a mid-scale war between the USA and Russia—along the way he adds plenty of technical verisimilitude that speaks to the train spotter in us all (plane spotter in my case). Really, Clancy is Bridget Jones for men—whereas girls want light fiction that describes several “ideal men” in contest over a reader surrogate, men want fast-paced fiction about manly men in a life-or-death struggle, with lots of accurate technical detail interspersed with action; and, in fact, the whole story should preferably be a dramatised account of a real strategic document.

Hence characterisation in Clancy is minimal; and, in fact, his principal creation, Jack Ryan, is a cypher. Despite endless movies and books about him, Ryan is insubstantial. James Bond: women want him, men want to be him. Jack Ryan…. What can you say about him? The man is a blank. In fact, the whole character is summed up by the Ryan line, “I’m just an analyst, I shouldn’t even be here.” This gets to the nub with Clancy, because although he writes stories for “real men” Clancy’s characters are, in fact, women—Tom Clancy is a novelist for transsexuals.

“Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Four”

This struck me when I read Clancy’s Red Storm Rising (1986): Clancy has a character, an intelligence analyst, who goes on and on in an interior monologue about whether he can risk another slice of spice cake—whether he can work it off on an exercise bike. Hmmm, I thought, this guy sounds kinda like…a girl. He’s watching his weight, perhaps he’ll join WeightWatchers. The same character has a prissy little fit where he wants to examine another man’s badge for “clearance” before he shares his super-secret “ladies only”—sorry, “eyes only”— information with him. This character is not bad, he’s meant to be admirable. Yet his general demeanour is like a big girl’s blouse—with his little Mean Girls clique, “I’m cleared for Level Alpha-2345435, you’re only cleared for Level Alpha-2353534, so I can’t possibly share it with you,” (snaps manila folder shut and sashays from the office).

Could it be that the CIA is the original girls’ club where all the officers wear lacy panties snagged from Susan’s drawer, Christ I hope this doesn’t come up in the custody hearings? Stop, you’re being perverse—Clancy world is men’s world, the navy is a job for a man’s man. Well, only in the sense that Jeremy Clarkson is a man’s man—except the famous British automotive journalist isn’t masculine at all. What is Clarkson at bottom? A consumer affairs correspondent (sub-type: cars).

Put that way, he doesn’t sound like the “typical bloke” he’s meant to be at all. He’s a guy who reviews cars to help you do your shopping; he gets neat “toys” or treats from companies and then does stunts with them—in a way, he’s like a child among his Christmas presents, all these free goodies and yet he’s still dissatisfied so he makes a “hilarious” sarcastic review on occasion. Yet the truth is Clarkson is not a masculine archetype, he is a man who advises you about your shopping sprees—and shopping is the woman’s domain.

Clancy’s autism is not just confined to submarines and missiles—his novels are replete with anachronistic boasts, often going on for paragraphs, about the relative merits found in VHS and Betamax; and, indeed, in a Clancy novel Russians and Americans, after the Russians have defected, will bond over popcorn and a video of ET. In other places, a Marine and a naval officer have what can only be described as a “girls’ night in” complete with pirated satellite TV and a bucket of popcorn.

They proceed to make nerd-clever Reddit-type commentary about Russian films from the 1930s, including expressing concern that the Russians seem a bit “racist”—this kind of progressive nerdery “like Ivan the Terrible would totally sink in all that armour on a frozen river, totes unrealistic”, so prevalent today, dates back to the 1980s at least. This oddly juvenile or tween behaviour is interspersed with jokes about the Chief Petty Officer rewinding a particularly good pair of boobs on Baywatch again and again to delight the boys in the Mess. In a way, “Chief Petty Officer” would be the ideal rank for Clancy.

This combination of childish films, consumerism, and pornography constitutes the unsavoury aspect to Clancy—that is to say his entirety. There is a scene, a scene Clancy thinks is “naughty”, in Red Storm Rising in which a submarine surfaces near a yacht—in a barely credible but somewhat plausible move, the yacht’s owner is having sex with his girlfriend (Clancy could never write that, he has this odd smutty-awkward way of writing things, unfortunately genuinely present in the military, where he would say “he was perpendicular and she was horizontal”). The submarine commander records it on his ultra high-tech equipment and replays it for the crew’s gratification for weeks on end. The story is meant to be erotic and goes on for several paragraphs. Aside from its irrealism, it shows us what Clancy is at heart: a pervert, a panty-sniffer—a peruser of keyholes.

Clancy is the type to drill a hole in the girls’ bathroom at a co-ed college and insert a pinhole camera to record all the action. “Look, I even got this girl on the toilet, wanna see?”….Clancy, draws breath in, could we have a word…? Basically, Clancy is a perv. His entire genre is a perv-out for “just analysts”, just sitting in a business park playing with my submarine game, who want to be with the real men but never can be.

Ryan is an author surrogate, Clancy being Irish Catholic, and he is empty. He is empty because Clancy is empty: all Clancy knows is shopping and boasting about the latest VHS he bought (with a German titanium head so you can see the scene where the guy takes a scheiße on the girl’s face perfectly…Clancy…draws breath in). Indeed, Ryan is billed as superior to military officers, being seconded to the CIA from his job as historian, because he earns more money than even senior officers; and this supposedly makes him more objective—in reality, money is fragile and people value status over it (handsome > rich); yet for years Clancy was an accountant at a firm founded by his father-in-law, hence the man-child values…

So Clancy is a woman. He loves shopping, he thinks money makes you superior to other people—above all he worships technology; and he is obsessed with coffee, he writes about it all the time—he definitely needs a Starbucks vanilla grande to get through the day (just like Carrie in Sex and the City). He has a weird love-hate thing with the British where he wants to replay the WWII alliance all the time (they’re not as rich as us, so not such good people) and although Ryan hangs out with characters called things like Viscount Little Goring Gore, Clancy is always keen to note they have their titles through “merit” not blood. Above all, Clancy is godless and you can tell this is so from the passage below. In this passage, Clancy describes the vesica piscis, the third eye, and even has it registered by an officer called “the TAO”. Yet what he has done is inverted the Tao, lowered the spiritual reality into material physics. Clancy is a pervert.

It goes deeper, since Clancy not only hates aristocracy but also has this weird sub-dom dynamic with black people—most apparent in the Red October film. Indeed, Clancy himself eventually replaced his wife with a half-caste related to Colin Powell—very apposite. Hence Clancy likes scenes where black people laud it over white people in a paternal way—Clancy is always keen to mention the senior black officer got there “entirely on merit”, while in reality it was undoubtedly due to affirmative action. This desire to flip roles, like a decadent Roman aristocrat who pinches himself just to feel something, again represents Clancy’s perversity. He wants to be a woman, he wants a big black…draws breath in.

Naturally, Clancy is a feminist as well. In his Red Storm Rising, Clancy has a bona fide “kick ass” girl fighter pilot to test the latest gee-whizz techno tricks. She’s a Japanese-American, with the typically awkward nickname “Buns”. Again, it’s pervy nerdy pinhole territory: Clancy produced many books in collaboration with military board game players (you get the picture)—here we see the “yellow fever” nerd extol his ideal Japawhore. “Acsually, it’s realistic because Japanese-Americans have very high IQ and so would make excellent fighter pilots—the first female fighter pilot would be Japanese-American.” No, it’s because you have a fetish for Asian women because you hate your mom and secretly want have sex with children but don’t have the courage to abduct them off the street and so you have to live out your fantasies with Asian women instead. Everyone knows, bro.

Even when I read this inspirational feminist tale at sixteen I remember thinking, “This doesn’t seem real.” What is called “political correctness” and “wokeness” is nothing new—it is just the typical American belief system. There have been “kick ass” girls in American fiction forever—if not back to Nancy Drew. Naturally, the little Jap shows that she can “do it like a dude”, much to the consternation of the fighter jocks. Snaps smart salute, “God bless you, Major Nakamura, you’re everything the red white and blue stands for.” (If you are like Clancy fan Ronald Reagan, a deluded narcissistic sentimentalist whose father was an Irish drunk, you are meant to cum at this point—this is what it’s all about, we did it for the kiddies; especially my daughter, so she could live her dreams).

Clancy is partly this way because his Irish Catholic identity is important to him—indeed, he even complained at one point that while the blacks, gays, and so on are protected it’s still open season on American Catholics. However, while Clancy might value his Irish Catholic victimhood—per Biden—he in no way believes in God. Indeed, he has his characters refuse to invoke God for strength to kill their enemies (sounds legit, maybe), but then he also has them refuse to invoke God in a prayer for their shipmates to recover—in other words, God is out altogether for Clancy (though in the guise of religious sensitivity).

Indeed, while Clancy has grudging respect for the Soviets, the people he really detests, the real “baddies”, are Islamic terrorists—you can feel the hate in Clancy’s prose when he touches on them (as his characters say, the Soviets had girl pilots in WWII—more progressive than us). Clancy opposes aristocracy, advocates racial and sexual equality, and worships material goods and technology—he’s practically a communist, albeit he values consumer greed not socialist equality. And, indeed, he was tutored by the Jesuits—and what they say about the Jesuits is true, they’re godless.

It is now clear why Clancy novels are for trannies. Clancy is a keyhole perv who doesn’t think God exists and gets off on “the oppressed”—women and blacks—ruling over “the massahs”. Being feminised and loving technology, the next logical step is to use technology to become a woman—to become one of the exalted “oppressed”. After all, being an analyst, being a CIA spy, isn’t a job for a man—just a watcher, just someone who talks about it (masturbates over it) yet never does it. Clancy worships the CIA, esteems its motto “the truth shall set you free” and speaks about finding “grace” within it—yet the CIA is devoted to betrayal, the opposite of grace, since the lowest circle of Hell is reserved for traitors.

You can see Clancyites on the loose today if you hover over the OSINT (Open-Source INTelligence, they even gave themselves a Clancyish acronym) community. Within you will find endless esteem for technology, incongruent remarks about “burned orcs” (dead Russians), and awkward jokes about anal sex. This is pure Clancy, per the photo below, where Clancy looks like some guy snapped as he furtively exits The Adult Shop with a little brown paper bag stuffed with Cum Vixens and German Scheiße Aktion XII.

The “OSINT community”, as with the transgender community, engages in vicarious pleasure over effortless Western technological superiority—feigned responses from soulless adult nerds, who derive their ethics from The Goonies. Indeed, the Clancyite is pure “Boomer”—pure smug spoiled progressive, permanently twelve. They make awkward jokes about Putin being “buggered” because they are feminised men and the “Clarkson-type” jokes are explorations and preparation to one day embrace their “true identity” and have their penises surgically removed so they may live “as Susan”.

Then they will sit before their screens in their lace panties, rubbing one off to some porno on RedTube, flicking back to Twitter to celebrate a video that shows some Russian conscript eviscerated by a StrikeEagle 34F-A drone. “Burn orc,” they post—complete with their little Clarkson “oh no” gif and then they fire up the popcorn and settle down to watch Star Wars LX: Revenge of the Hutt because, in the end, boys wills be girls (not men).