Yes. Where IS the Outrage?

Here are the first four of Mark Twain's nineteen rules governing literary art for romantic fiction, with references to Fenimore cooper omitted:

1. That a tale shall accomplish something and arrive somewhere.

2. They require that the episodes in a tale shall be necessary parts of the tale, and shall help to develop it

3. They require that the personages in a tale shall be alive, except in the case of corpses, and that always the reader shall be able to tell the corpses from the others.

4. They require that the personages in a tale, both dead and alive, shall exhibit a sufficient excuse for being there.

And here is an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal.

I confess to having not the slightest clue what Messrs. Rivkin and Casey, as the Journal calls them, are talking about. The problem with obfuscatory prose in narrative writing is--you may have guessed--that it obfuscates. Let me put it to you this way, homeys: That shit's not real clear. Fortunately I was once a teaching assistant in an undergraduate literature course, tasked with reading, commenting on, and grading sixty students' weekly reactions to many Divers and Poetical Readings. In other words, I am not unskilled in the Ouijan arts of discernment.

Here, then, is the Rivkin-Casey Thesis: A government spying program about which no one knows anything, rendering all critiques baseless, is entirely necessary to our national well-being, and changes to the program about which no one knows anything have weakened it from its former state, about which we know nothing. All good Americans should be outraged.

That Escherian argument is lost amidst a cast of characters as various and a prose as dense as the opening pages of Daniel Deronda. And yet I do find myself quivering with outrage that something entirely unknown to me has been altered in a manner which cannot actually be revealed to become something else entirely unknown to me. It is imperative that my government be able to assure me that its operations-in-secret are secretly operating. Since no terrorist has successfully attacked the United States in years, there are surely vast, impressive edifices to our secret successes at surveilling those Sunnis suborning seditions against these States. Remember: successive speculations about succeeding series of super-secret spy-service subversions of civil standards only support and substantiate those scare-stories still circling the seamless scandal scams of domestic sociliasts socialists.