It was maybe thirty years ago, when I was a young reporter, that I said to a friend. “If you aren’t a cynic when you die, you haven’t lived long enough.”
I thought of my observation all those years ago when I read an announcement from one of my favorite bookstores, The Mysterious Press in New York City. It said that James Comey’s latest novel, FDR Drive, will be officially released tomorrow (Tuesday).
I’ve never read one of his mysteries. And, honestly, I never gave him much thought during his long and sometimes storied career with the FBI. But I definitely had to roll my eyes at the announcement. The heart of a cynical reporter still beats strongly in me.
Last week, Comey shared a photo on Instagram of seashells on a beach arranged in the numbers 8647. The caption read: “Cool shell formation on my beach walk.”
The posting created a firestorm.
Rachel Treisman of NPR’s Fresh Air reported the following:
“Eighty-six” is a slang term that means “get rid of,” and Trump is the 47th (and 45th) president of the United States. According to Merriam-Webster, the most common meaning of 86—which has its roots in the service industry–is to throw out or refuse service to a customer. The dictionary notes that the term has also come to mean ‘to kill.’ But the dictionary says it does not include this meaning in the official entry ‘due to its relative recency and sparseness of use.’
“The post sparked uproar among some Republicans, who suggested Comey was threatening the president . . . But Comey, who deleted the photo within hours, said he assumed the shells were a ‘political message,’ not a violent one. It’s unclear who created the shell formation.
“Comey has been an outspoken critic of Trump since he led the FBI during the president’s first term. Trump fired Comey in 2017, four years into his ten-year term, as he was overseeing an investigation into alleged Russian meddling in the 2016 election.
“‘I didn’t realize some folks associate those numbers with violence,” Comey wrote in Instagram. “It never occurred to me but I oppose violence of any kind so I took the post down.’”
Even James Patterson couldn’t have created the kind of marketing furor that accompanied that post. And Patterson definitely knows how to sell a book. My social media blew up with shells on beach photos, most of which mocked the former FBI director. Some might say that wasn’t good. But when it comes to selling books in today’s market, is there such a thing as bad publicity?
The Mysterious Press included some laudatory reviews for the book in its email, saying it was “exceedingly well written and perfectly paced. Comey’s strongest outing yet.”
It noted that Comey would be in New York tonight at 7 p.m. at the Upper West Side Barnes & Noble celebrating the book’s release in an interview with fellow author Richard Esposito. Or could be heard talking about this latest effort on various interviews with CNN and MSNBC. Enough publicity to set some Republican’s hair on fire is what I thought when I saw the upcoming schedule.
Apparently, he’s also been doing interviews with the FBI about his Instagram post. I’m guessing those won’t be available for public viewing.
Whether or not the Instagram comment was harmless or a viable threat depends on what side of the political aisle you sit, I guess. It felt an awful lot like shameless huckstering to me.