By Byron L. McAllister

Hey, did you leave something out?

Those who push hard with any position that may not be convincing to just anybody have a tendency to neglect points that a neutral bystander would think are relevant as all get-out. A lot of these are political, like, “Ronald Reagan brought the Soviet empire to its knees,” which neglects the fact that for decades before President Reagan took office the US pursued a policy called “containment,” which many insisted couldn't possibly work, but which may well have played the critical role in the eventual outcome. Did it? If the goal is to attribute almost magical powers to a single individual, it is necessary to toss this question aside. The details are missing.

Some are economic, like, “There will be a time when Social Security will be reduced to the relatively few supporting the relatively many, but putting the money into private investments will cure that.” Maybe so, but the presenters tend to bypass the question whether if the payouts are coming out of corporate earnings there will be enough workers contributing to the economy to support the elderly people who are no longer supported by the system in place today. It's possible that there's a magnification effect from funneling workers' efforts through corporate management, so that there's no problem, but dividends and interest don't just drop from the sky, and the people telling us about the problem seem to suppose that somehow that's what happens. The details are missing.

Some are geopolitical, like, “The way to peace is through accumulating a vast number of atomic weapons, so that neither side will be willing to attack the other.” That appears to have worked, back in cold war days, but back then neither side wanted to see itself destroyed. Does it have any bearing on a situation when one side is perfectly willing to let itself be destroyed in order to assure the destruction of the other? Probably not, but then, the spin-off positions involving vast outlays of money into destructive power are weakened, and the gaps in the logic are never quite filled in. The details are missing.

Some are sort of socioeconomic, like, “Money sent to the rich will help everybody to prosper.” This is often expressed in the metaphor, “A rising tide lifts all boats,” but the metaphor, like many of the boats, has enough holes in it to let the truth leak away. What can we really expect the “enriched rich” do with their money? Surely that's relevant, but, again, the details are missing.

Then there are assertions about how various forms of sin anger God and bring His wrath down upon the nation—but, despite a few relevant-sounding anecdotes, questions about whether there is any consistency about the asserted effects are always omitted. The details are missing.

And, on matters of immediate interest to mystery or other writers (readers who don't also write may want to take notice also, and draw your own conclusions as to whether and how this affects you), there's the assertion that, “Persistence is the basic key, requiring as its only supplement a proper attention to publishability and marketability.” Surely it's true that without persistence only astounding luck can bring a writer's work to the attention of the public, and also that one should pay due attention to both publishability and marketability. But is persistence really “the” “basic” “key”? Can one anticipate either publishability or marketability (overlapping ideas, but not identical) in a world where major publishing companies are all owned by a relatively small clique of financial houses, not actually interested in writing at all except as a means to enlarge their ability to own more and more of the world's capital? Is it possible that now all that matters is the casting couch? Or, is it possible that the details are missing?

(As for this column itself, perhaps the details are missing. In the words of some university textbooks, they are left as exercises for the reader.)