(a) By the way, no kidding about the formula’s name. Were the Technical Branch statisticians aware that they were giving the algorithm such a heavy, almost thanatoid-sounding acronym? It’s actually doubtful. As all too many Americans now know, computerized programs are totally, maddeningly literal and nonconnotative; and so were the people in Technical Branch.
4 (excepting the ‘All rights reserved’ part, of course)
5 This latter is a good example of the sort of thing that threw the publisher’s legal people into a swivet of anality and caution. People often don’t understand how seriously large US corporations take even a threat of litigation. As I eventually realized, it’s not even so much a question of whether or not the publisher would lose a lawsuit; what really concerns them is the cost of defending against it, and the effect of those costs on the company’s liability insurance premiums, which are already a major operating expense. Legal trouble is, in other words, a bottom-line issue; and the editor or in-house counsel who exposes a publishing company to possible legal liability had better be able to demonstrate to his CFO that every last reasonable bit of caution and due diligence was exercised on the manuscript, lest he wear what we in Exams used to call ‘the brown helmet.’ At the same time, it isn’t fair to attribute every last tactical change and deviation here to the publisher. I (meaning, again, the actual human David Wallace) also fear litigation. Like many Americans, I’ve been sued — twice, in fact, though both suits were meritless, and one was dismissed as frivolous before I was even deposed — and I know what so many of us know: Litigation is no fun, and it’s worth one’s time and trouble to try to head it off in advance whenever possible. Plus, of course, looming over the whole vetting-and-due-diligence process on The Pale King was the shadow of the Service, which no one in his right mind would ever even dream of wanting to piss off unnecessarily, or actually even to come to the full institutional attention of, since the Service, like civil litigation, can make your life miserable without ever getting one extra dime from you.
6 E.g., one is now an Assistant Regional Commissioner for Taxpayer Assistance in the Western Regional Commissioner’s Office at Oxnard CA.
7 A signed, notarized 2002 FOIA request for copies of these videotapes is on file at the Internal Revenue Service’s Office of Public Information, 666 Independence Avenue, Washington DC…. And yes: The Service’s national HQ’s street number really is ‘666.’ So far as I know, it’s nothing more than an unfortunate accident in the Treasury Department’s assignment of office space after the Sixteenth Amendment was ratified in 1913. On the Regional levels, Service personnel tend to refer to the national office as ‘Triple-Six’—the meaning of the term is obvious, though no one I was able to talk to seemed to know just when it came into use.
8 This loose term is meant to connote the dramatized reconstruction of an empirically real occurrence. It is a common and wholly respectable modern device used in both film (q.v. The Thin Blue Line, Forrest Gump, JFK) and literature (q.v. Capote’s In Cold Blood, Wouk’s The Caine Mutiny, Oates’s Zombie, Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage, Wolfe’s The Right Stuff, & c., & c.).
9 The main way you can tell that the contracts are different is from our reactions to their breach. The feeling of betrayal or infidelity that the reader suffers if it turns out that a piece of ostensible nonfiction has made-up stuff in it (as has been revealed in some recent literary scandals, e.g. Kosinski’s Painted Bird or that infamous Carcaterra book) is because the terms of the nonfiction contract have been violated. There are, of course, ways to quote-unquote cheat the reader in fiction, too, but these tend to be more technical, meaning internal to the story’s own formal rules (see, e.g., the mystery novel’s first-person narrator who doesn’t reveal that he’s actually the murderer until the last page, even though he obviously knew it all along and suppressed it just to jerk us around), and the reader tends to feel more aesthetically disappointed than personally dicked over.