John Ramsey Miller

With a few notable exceptions, we all love to hate politicians. They are a sociopathic bunch who seem interested only in power, and most seem to sell their votes to the highest bidder all the while swearing they can’t be bought by the people who make their living bribing votes. They will swear that on the eyes of their children until the day they walk into the nearest Federal prison. They talk out of both sides of their mouths and straight out of their asses at the same time. They almost never do what they say they will do to get into office and will stay on decades after they’ve worn out their welcome. Even senility cannot pry them from the marble halls. If you need a villain every reader will hate, make them a Congressman, Senator or an assistant of some sort to the sitting President. Hell, even a President will do.

A villain will do anything to keep their jobs, including killing innocent people, or people close to a protagonist to get the protagonist worked into a lather. Almost never will a protagonist be a politician, because it’s playing against type. The good guy(s) are always fighting a corrupt official or an agency dedicated to protecting the Status Quo, which is usually the career of a powerful politician. A good villain can corrupt the Military, IRS, NSA, CIA, DEA, even the FBI and its believable because they have actually done so, and will again I am certain.

Writing thrillers is easier if you are paranoid. The longer I live, the more I understand the sanity of being among that number. Villains need to be powerful, and that is all they have to have on the line for them to do anything it takes to remain there. In the book I am writing at present the protagonist remarks how anything that rich people acquire and value so highly eventually end up in the possession of someone else. It’s a thought I have anytime I go into an antique shop, or a consignment shop. What the bad guys we write about rob and kill for is never worth what they do to get or keep it. Power is extremely intoxicating. Power is even more transitory than objects. I love writing about power and more about perceived power and the fear of losing it will cause a villain to do anything to your protagonist. Corruption and power go hand-in-hand in novels and in real life as well.

I was watching the news the other night and saw that 85 year-old President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe was throwing himself a quarter million dollar birthday party in (what was) the most financially troubled economy on earth, where disease, corruption, starvation and murder are as commonplace as chiggers in an Alabama weed field. THE MAN IS 85, for Christ’s sake. And the very next news story I watched was about bank officials here doing the exact same thing as Wild Bob Zimbob. Big party and big bucks involved. And then I watched a politician (Okay, Barney Frank) complaining that those bank executives were wasting “our” tax dollars. Amazing. How can ANY politician accuse anybody else of wasting tax dollars and keep from laughing out loud at the audacity of that accusation? Just staggering. Goes to show you that arrogance has no physical boundaries.

Next time you are looking for a villain just watch the first ten minutes of the national news, and take your pick from the lineup.