slacktivist

Compare and contrast

• Barack Obama on Religion

• John McCain talks to Beliefnet.com

If these were presentations by seminary students in the Faith and Politics class I used to T.A., then one of these would get an A and the other a charitable C-.

Obama offers a concise, clear and confident description of why the separation of church and state is necessary to protect both the church and the state. He has clearly thought this through. He knows what he thinks and believes and he presents a compelling, persuasive case for why others ought to agree with him.

McCain is anything but concise, clear or confident. He does not seem to know what he thinks or believes, or at best he is unable to articulate whatever that might be. He does not seem to have thought this through.

I appreciate McCain's attempt to speak with candor here -- it's immensely preferable to, say, George W. Bush's recitation of poll-tested, rehearsed platitudes crafted for maximum appeal to "values voters." But it is impossible to speak with candor if you don't already know what it is you believe. McCain appears in this interview to be nervously hoping that he'll stumble across what he actually thinks and believes if he just keeps talking, but he never quite gets there.

My point here is not that I agree with Sen. Obama and disagree with Sen. McCain. I do agree with Obama, but McCain never quite manages to say anything coherent enough for us to agree or disagree with him. Nor is it clear, watching that interview, that he even agrees with everything he's hearing himself say.

Much will be made in this election of the question of "experience." Obama has yet to serve one full term in the Senate, while McCain is serving his fifth term in that body. Yet somehow in all those years in office, McCain hasn't found the time to think through something as fundamental as what he believes about the separation of church and state -- Item No. 1 in the Bill of Rights. So who's really more "experienced"?

Contact

You may have already seen this story from the BBC, "Isolated tribe spotted in Brazil":

One of South America's few remaining uncontacted indigenous tribes has been spotted and photographed on the border between Brazil and Peru.

The Brazilian government says it took the images to prove the tribe exists and help protect its land.

The pictures, taken from an airplane, show red-painted tribe members brandishing bows and arrows.

More than half the world's 100 uncontacted tribes live in Brazil or Peru, Survival International says.

Stephen Corry, the director of the group -- which supports tribal people around the world -- said such tribes would "soon be made extinct" if their land was not protected.

The BBC also has more photos in this fascinating slideshow.

Anthropologists and advocates will debate the best way to protect these Brazilians who have never heard of Brazil. Some will want to ensure that they remain independent and unmolested by the wider world. Others will want to make contact to study them (if they can find a way of doing so without exposing them to epidemic disease). The Bush administration is probably already drawing up plans for a military invasion to liberate these people.

But for a look at the deeper meaning of this story, there's only one place to turn: Rapture Ready -- "your prophecy resource for the End Times." The confirmed existence of this tribe -- and of the 100 or so other uncontacted peoples like them -- is Big News for the pseudo-scholars of the "Bible prophecy" racket.

The relevant "prophetic" text comes from Jesus' mini-apocalypse in Matthew 24, verse 14:

And this gospel of the kingdom will be preached in the whole world as a testimony to all nations, and then the end will come.

For premillennial dispensationalist prophecy types like Tim LaHaye and John Hagee, the meaning of that passage is very clear. They believe that "the end" cannot come until after every nation and tribe on the planet has heard the gospel. And they really, really want "the end" to come. They can't wait for this world to be over with already.

This leads to the odd situation of PMDs supporting the preaching of the gospel to every tribe and every nation in order to speed the day in which every tribe and every nation is swept away in the apocalypse. That's an oddly contradictory sort of motivation, but anyone who's looked at PMDs' ardent "support for Israel" will already be familiar with this dynamic. They are fiercely "pro-Israel," because that's where Megiddo is, and therefore where Armageddon will happen, and they can't wait to see Armageddon when all the Jews get wiped out.

Both LaHaye and Hagee are fond of saying that "the end" could come before they reach the end of their sentence/interview/sermon. It could come, they say, at any second now. That claim would seem insupportable given that: A) they believe that "the end" cannot come until every tribe has heard the gospel preached; and B) many tribes, such as the people pictured above, have not yet heard any such preaching.

But don't worry, LaHaye and Hagee believe they have this covered. They believe that after all the real, true Christians are snatched off the earth -- which could happen at any moment -- the RTC gospel will then be preached to every tribe and nation by an army of singing Jewish virgins.

No, really. This is what Tim LaHaye thinks when he looks at a picture like the one above: "Oops, looks like our missionaries missed a spot. Oh well, the 144,000 singing virgins will have to get to them after we're outta here."

I may have mentioned this before, but PMDs are nuts.

Anyway, reality is far more interesting than PMD delusion, and for a fascinating reality-based exploration of the meaning of the story and the photo above, check out this installment of "Talk of the Nation" from National Public Radio in which they discuss all this with National Geographic's Scott Wallace. That interview also introduced me to the astonishing career of Sydney Possuelo, Brazil's champion of its isolated indigenous peoples.

Un-natural

On Monday in London, appearing at a press conference with President George W. Bush, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown endorsed Bush's strategy for the ongoing occupation of Iraq. And Brown did so using one of Bush's signature absurdities.

Here is Brown from the official transcript:

Can I just say that in Iraq there is a job to be done and we will continue to do the job, and there's going to be no artificial timetable.

"Artificial timetable" is one of Bush's favorite phrases when discussing the occupation. It appears more than 800 different times in the speeches, press releases and official statements posted on WhiteHouse.gov. Yet for all of that, I still have a hard time accepting that the president really means what he's saying here, because what he's saying here is insane.

To say that America's strategy in Iraq must not be based on an "artificial timetable" means that America must not have a strategy in Iraq. It is to say that we're just sitting back and watching events there unfold according to some natural timetable, some organic timetable unshaped by art or artifice. America is not acting according to a plan or a strategy but is, rather, a spectator to this serendipitous, windblown timetable. Que sera sera.

Military intervention is, by definition, artificial. It means you are relying on military force to force events to occur that would not simply occur naturally without such an emphatic application of artifice. If you're not willing to force a particular outcome, then you shouldn't be sending in forces. If you're not willing to set "artificial timetables," then you have no business sending in the Army.

To say, as Bush has repeatedly and Brown has now parroted, that "We will continue to do the job, and there's going to be no artificial timetable" is the same as saying that there is no military solution -- that the military is powerless to affect or effect the hoped for outcome. If the military is not capable of producing that outcome, then why keep them there? What "job" is there for them to continue to do?

How many years must the soldiers stay there? The answer, my friend, is blowin' in the wind.

L.B.: Doin' the deal

Left Behind, pp. 443-448

In the final pages of the penultimate chapter of Left Behind, Jerry Jenkins tries to ratchet up the suspense before Buck Williams' encounter with the Antichrist.

The supposedly suspenseful questions -- Will Buck get saved? Is Nicolae the Antichrist? Or is it really Stonagal? -- aren't all that suspenseful. The answers are thuddingly obvious (yes, yes and no, duh, respectively). Yet despite that, the conclusion of this book does involve a bit of suspense. After 400+ pages of non-sequitur plot developments, inconsistent characterization and glaring continuity errors, the reader approaches the end of this book with the realization that anything, absolutely anything, might happen. Since the normal rules of plot, character, motive, logic, physics, human nature, and cause and effect do not apply then anything goes.

Bruce Barnes warned that the Antichrist is planning some "show of strength," something big. In a normal book, that would seem ominous, but we have no idea what to make of such a suggestion here in the world of L.B. In this world, no one seems particularly impressed by a nuclear holocaust or the disappearance of every child from earth, yet the sight of two guys tripping and dying held the entire planet spellbound. In such a deliriously strange world, readers have no way of knowing what a "show of strength" might mean. That provides suspense, of a sort, just not the kind the authors seem to intend.

Buck's credentials were waiting for him at an information desk in the U.N. lobby. He was directed up to a private conference room off the suite of offices into which Nicolae Carpathia had already moved. Buck was at least 20 minutes early, but as he emerged from the elevator he felt alone in a crowd. He saw no one he recognized as he began the long walk down a corridor of glass and steel leading to the room where he was to join Steve, the 10 designated ambassadors representing the permanent members of the new Security Council, several aides and advisers to the new secretary-general (including Rosenzweig, Stonagal, and various other members of his international brotherhood of financial wizards), and of course, Carpathia himself.

So Buck is headed for a room full of people, at least 20, most of whom he has never seen before. And here he is walking down the hallway to that room and the hallway is full of people he has never seen before. Yet somehow Buck knows that these unrecognizable strangers are a different set of unrecognizable strangers. So who are all these people in the hall and what are they doing there? Don't worry about that. They're just Other People, and if there's one thing we've learned from Left Behind, it's that Other People don't matter.

We're about to get another four pages of Buck in anxious, fretting, full-of-dread mode. Since Buck is also Jenkins' Mary Sue surrogate, this description needs yet again to be prefaced with a disclaimer reminding readers that Buck is a manly man's man and that all of this fear and worry should in no way be interpreted as suggesting that he is anything other than a hard-charging, vigorous alpha male.

Buck had always been energetic and confident. Others had noticed his purposeful stride on assignment. ...

Keep in mind this is Buck's perspective here. We never read of those others actually noticing his purposeful stride, energy and confidence. All we read is his assumption that his must be something others must have noticed about him.

This is all you really need to know about Buck (or about Rayford Steele, for that matter). Will Ferrell has made a career out of playing this exact character -- the self-centered incompetent with epically disproportionate self-confidence. Buck is just like any of those interchangeable Ferrell characters -- Ricky Bobby, Ron Burgundy, George W. Bush. (Tell me you can't hear Bush's voice saying this: "Others have noticed mah ... purp-oseful strad.")

Others had noticed his purposeful stride on assignment. Now his gait was slow and unsure, and with every step his dread increased. The lights seemed to grow dimmer, the walls close in. His pulse increased and he had a sense of foreboding.

There are several more paragraphs of this --

What he feared, he knew, was not mortal danger. At least not now, not here. The closer he got to the conference room, the more he was repelled by a sense of evil, as if personified in that place. ... He was nearly paralyzed by the atmosphere of blackness. He wanted to be anywhere but there. ... he felt the darkest anguish of his soul ...

We get two full pages of this overheated, Lovecraftian dread between the elevator and the door to the conference room. Somewhere in the midst of all that: "Buck found himself silently praying, God, be with me. Protect me." And then, on the following page:

He tried to force himself toward the door, his thoughts deafening. Again he cried out to God, and he felt a coward -- just like everyone else, praying in the foxhole. ...

Yet he did not belong to God. Not yet.

Buck is still standing in the hallway when Steve Plank finally spots him.

"Buck! We're almost ready to begin. Come on in."

But Buck felt terrible, panicky. "Steve, I need to run to the washroom. Do I have a minute?"

Steve glanced at his watch. "You've got five," he said.

The last time these two spoke, Steve was darkly hinting that Buck shouldn't ask too many questions about the group assembled for this meeting or both of their lives might be in danger. Steve was so spooked in that conversation that he wouldn't even mention Carpathia or Stonagal by name. "Staten Island," he had warned Buck. "Staten Island!"

Here, however, Steve seems chipper and carefree. He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named and He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named-Either are just a few yards away, but this no longer seems to trouble him.

Lots of thrillers feature just this sort of unsettling shift from whispering coded warnings to cheery bonhomie. The mysterious stranger full of ominous threats in the previous scene is now smiling broadly, but the smile seems a bit forced and he seems to be stealing furtive glances over his shoulder. Or there's the Stepford/Body Snatchers variation, in which the now cheerful character seems genuinely puzzled by any reference to their earlier warnings. Such devices are so familiar that at first one suspects something like that was intended here.

But it's not. This is just more Bad Writing.

You'll recall that ever since Buck got off the phone with Steve he's been trying to figure out what exactly his old boss had meant by "he moves mountains." Was that a reference to Carpathia or to Stonagal? Here's his chance to ask Steve which he meant, and to ask him some of the other questions Buck urgently needs answered before he goes into that meeting. Yet he doesn't ask any of those questions. He doesn't mention their previous conversation at all. Like Steve -- and the authors -- Buck seems to have forgotten that conversation even took place.

A bit of accidental realism follows here, as Steve does what someone always seems to do if you've only got five minutes before a big meeting and you're trying to run to the washroom -- he keeps Buck standing there, talking:

"When you get back, you'll be right over there."

Steve pointed to a chair at one corner of a square block of tables. The journalist in Buck liked it. The perfect vantage point. His eyes darted to the nameplates in front of each spot. He would face the main table, where Carpathia had placed himself directly next to Stonagal ... or had Stonagal been in charge of the seating?

One of these two men was responsible for the murders of Dirk Burton, Alan Tompkins and Eric Miller. One of them -- probably the same one -- was also the Beast, the Antichrist, the embodiment of evil. But which one? Obviously, it was whoever had been in charge of the seating arrangements.

Next to Carpathia on the other side was a hastily hand-lettered nameplate with "Personal Assistant" written on it. "Is that you?" Buck said.

"Nope," Steve pointed at the corner opposite Buck's chair.

How can they see opposite corners of this block of tables from out here in the hallway?

"Is Todd-Cothran here?" Buck said.

"Of course. Right there in the light gray."

The Brit looked insignificant enough. But just beyond him were both Stonagal -- in charcoal -- and Carpathia, looking perfect in a black suit, white shirt, electric-blue tie, and a gold stickpin. Buck shuddered at the sight of him, but Carpathia flashed a smile and waved him over. Buck signaled that he would be a minute. "Now you've got only four minutes," Steve said. "Get going."

I'm not sure if the sartorial shades of gray here are meant to be symbolic. (Evil. Evil-er. Evil-est!) If we're dressing the bad guys in black, then Todd-Cothran would seem to deserve a darker shade. He is, after all, a cop-killer and proud of it. He was also, very nearly, a GIRAT-killer. Buck magnanimously seems willing to let that pass. He decides T-C is "insignificant enough" (enough for what?).

Buck put his bag in a corner next to a heavyset, white-haired security guard, waved at his old friend Chaim Rosenzweig, and jogged to the washroom. He placed a janitor's bucket outside and locked the door.

Did he just barricade the outside of the door? That seems like a neat trick. And what is it with this guy and bathrooms?

Buck backed up against the door, thrust his hands deep into his pockets, and dropped his chin to his chest, remembering Bruce's advice that he could talk to God the same way he talked to a friend. "God," he said, "I need you, and not just for this meeting."

And as he prayed he believed. This was no experiment, no halfhearted attempt. He wasn't just hoping or trying something out. Buck knew he was talking to God himself. He admitted he needed God, that he knew he was as lost and as sinful as anyone. He didn't specifically pray the prayer he had heard others talk about, but when he finished he had covered the same territory and the deal was done.

I've written several times in this series about the pornographic nature of the conversion scenes in a lot of Christian-branded fiction. Spiritual intimacy, like sexual intimacy, does not lend itself comfortably to observation and description. Such scenes, if rendered too explicitly, seem like a violation of privacy and like a reduction of something transcendant.

Buck's Big Conversion Scene here is, thankfully, underplayed without too much graphic detail. Yet despite that, it still seems coarsely reductive. "The deal was done." (Just try to imagine someone using that phrase in their testimony during an evangelistic revival.)

The authors here seem to have anticipated our "magic words" critique of this book's notion of personal(ized) salvation, clearly stating here that one can still "do the deal" even if one doesn't use the exact syntax of the official prayer. You can paraphrase a little, they suggest, and the magic spell will still work. It's still a magic spell, though.

It's also interesting that for all the talk in this book about "praying The Prayer" (or a close paraphrase of The Prayer for nonconformist rebels like Buck), the authors never really tell us what, exactly, The Prayer is. They've got a "Seeking God" section on Leftbehind.com, and they offer a 24-hour toll-free number (1-866-321-SEEK) where you can "Talk to someone about your eternity," but the book itself never spells out the spell. That seems, from their perspective, like a pretty big oversight.

The passage above does give us a few hints about "the territory" that The Prayer needs to cover in order to get the deal done, the core of which seems to be this: "He admitted he needed God, that he knew he was as lost and as sinful as anyone." That's almost a confession -- although of what, exactly, it's hard to say.

We should also note that, as with Rayford's Big Conversion Scene earlier, love never enters the picture. Not God's love for Buck. Not Buck's love for God. Buck admits to his share of some vague, generic "sinfulness," but that doesn't seem to have anything to do with love, or the lack thereof, either. I could go on here about how appallingly screwed up that is, but this confusion is, alas, not confined to LaHaye and Jenkins in particular, or even to premillennial dispensationalists.

The newly converted Buck returns to the conference room:

When he walked in, everyone was in place -- Carpathia, Stonagal, Todd-Cothran, Rosenzweig, Steve, and the financial powers and ambassadors. And one person Buck never expected -- Hattie Durham. He stared, dumbfounded, as she took her place as Nicolae Carpathia's personal assistant. She winked at him, but he did not acknowledge her.

Buck's only been a Christian for about four minutes, but already he's demonstrating everything Rayford taught him about the Christian male's duty of treating Hattie like dirt. This is also further proof that Nicolae is evil. Not only does he acknowledge Hattie, he's helping her with her career. Pure evil, that, luring a young woman into the wanton life of a career outside the home. From LaHaye's point of view, career-woman and working-girl are pretty much the same thing.

Meanwhile, Buck's spirit-sense is tingling:

While no special feeling had come with Buck's decision, he had a heightened sensitivity that something was happening here. There wasn't a doubt in his mind that the Antichrist of the Bible was in this room. And despite all he knew about Stonagal and what the man had engineered in England ... Buck sensed the truest, deepest, darkest spirit of evil as he watched Carpathia take his place. Nicolae waited till everyone was seated, then rose with pseudodignity.

The others may be fooled, but Buck, with his Jesus-powered "heightened sensitivity," is now able to tell the difference between dignity and "pseudodignity." As his new faith takes hold and his powers of discernment grow, Buck may soon also realize that "a black suit, white shirt, electric-blue tie, and a gold stickpin" is only pseudostylish.

"Gentlemen ... and lady," he began. ...

Yeah, that's right. Hattie is the only woman in the room. They expand the Security Council to 10 seats and it's still an all-boys club. (This is a bit surprising, actually, since you'd expect Tim LaHaye's notion of an evil cabal to include at least a token feminist. His wife Beverly, after all, heads up Concerned Women for America -- an antifeminist group dedicated to the proposition that no woman should head up anything.)

So as we head into the final chapter all of the supposedly suspenseful questions seem to have been dealt with. Buck's soul is saved and he's now mojo-proof. We've confirmed that Carpathia is, indeed, the black-suited Antichrist while Stonagal is merely a charcoal-suited wannabe. And we've all-but confirmed that Hattie is making the beast with two backs with the Beast with Ten Horns. All that's left for the last 20 pages is Nicolae's big "show of strength."

Hungover-Hymns

And still you seem to believe somehow love will conquer evil ...

"Hungover Together," Supersuckers
"Hungry Ghost," Rick Unruh
"Hungry Heart," Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band
"Hunt the Self," Howard Jones
"Hurry Down Doomsday," Elvis Costello
"Hurt," Johnny Cash
"Hurt You," Green
"The Hush," Texas
"Hyena," R.E.M.
"Hymn," Randy Stonehill
"Hymn to Her," The Pretenders
"Hymns to the Silence," Van Morrison

The video linked above to "Hungry Heart" says its from a concert in Paris in 1985. The audience still does a fine job singing the first verse. In English. Here's the same thing in Milan.

Product vs. ads

So I watched the first episode of In Plain Sight on Hulu.

USA is carving out a decent niche with its entertaining hour-long crime shows. This one is a bit like a female version of Burn Notice -- emotionally damaged, cynic-with-heart-of-gold protagonist offering wry voice-over narration with the case of the week serving more as background for longer character arcs, etc. Add those two shows to the quirky whodunits Monk and Psych and they've got a respectable lineup that, thanks to the more modest ratings expectations of basic cable, isn't going to leave viewers hanging due to abrupt cancellation.

Anyway, I wanted to see at least the first episode of this show to find out which of the USA Network's contradictory ad campaigns for it was more accurate. I've been seeing the network's nonstop promos for In Plain Sight for months (my fiancee* is a Criminal Intent addict). A few weeks back, those promos abruptly changed. They switched from portraying Mary McCormack's character as a sassy action girl (the great-at-her-job, bad-at-her-life bit) to portraying her as a nurturing surrogate mother to the people in her charge as a U.S. marshal in the witness protection program.

The new spots seemed like they were promoting an entirely different, and incompatible, show. In the new promos, In Plain Sight looked like Touched by a Marshal. Or like Judging Amy, if Tyne Daly had been packing heat. My guess is the more sentimental promos were some kind of attempt to make the show more appealing to some sought-after female demographic. (But that's just a guess -- I don't pretend to understand the thoughts or motives of TV executives and programming directors.)

Now that I've seen the show, it seems to me that the reinvented, mother-Mary promos were pure spin. The show was very much like what the original promos portrayed and not at all like the sentimental fare being marketed in recent weeks. This seems to me to be a Good Thing, since the latter imaginary show really didn't seem all that appealing, whereas the actual show is quite fun (see this review from Alan Sepinwall).

The odd thing about all this was the attempt to retool the marketing for the show without retooling the actual show. I mean, I'm glad they didn't retool the show, but it seems strange to think you could advertise something different while offering the same product. The hypothetical viewers that USA hoped to reach with its re-edited, nurturing promos presumably weren't responding positively to the original, more accurate promos, so USA changed the ads in the hopes of persuading them to watch the show. But it's still the same show.

If these viewers didn't like the original promos, then the odds are they won't like the show itself either. I guess the idea is to trick them into watching the show in the hopes that once they tune in, they'll like it despite themselves. But I'm not sure that this bait-and-switch tactic is the best way to go about trying to expand your audience.

And but so anyway, my point here isn't really about In Plain Sight, but rather about presidential candidates.

Selling a candidate is, in some ways, a lot easier than selling a new TV show. The USA Network has to do more than trick viewers into pulling a lever or checking a box. They can saturate their airwaves (cable-wires?) with ads that spin their show any way they like, but that's not going to keep viewers tuning in to a show that turns out to be nothing like the one they're selling. Those viewers will sit through half the show, realize it doesn't resemble the advertised product, and -- click -- they'll go back to watching The Ghost Whisperer instead.

Political campaigns don't have to worry about that. They don't have to worry about whether their actual candidates correspond in any way to the re-edited, re-imagined candidates their ads are selling. Voters, unlike viewers, don't need to be tricked every week, they only need to be tricked once every four years. Political campaigns can advertise anything at all -- "compassionate conservative," "fiscal responsibility," "national security," "we do not torture" -- and they only have to worry about maintaining the ruse up through election day. Once voters leave the booth they've bought the product and they're stuck with it for the next four years.

One more reason that selling a candidate is easier than selling a TV show: No reviews. Here's metacritic's page for In Plain Sight. You could watch a year's worth of the Sunday morning political talk shows and everything that cable news has to offer by way of campaign coverage and you'd rarely encounter the degree of thoughtful, skeptical scrutiny that even a summer-fill-in show on basic cable faces from TV critics.

- - - - - - - - - - - -

* Yep. Unless, of course, she gets a better offer from Vince D'Onofrio.

Get this

Stirring my brandy with a nail ...

"Get Behind the Mule," Tom Waits
"Get Off This," Cracker
"Get On Their Way," R.E.M.
"Get Out of Town," Ella Fitzgerald
"Get Outta London," Aztec Camera
"Get Rhythm," Johnny Cash
"Get Right With God," Lucinda Williams
"Get Up Get Out," The Rosebuds
"Gett Off," Prince
"Gettin' Jiggy With It," Will Smith
"Getting Mighty Crowded," Elvis Costello & The Attractions
"(Getting Some) Fun Out of Life," Madeleine Peyroux

L.B.: Back to school

Left Behind, pp. 442-443

Chloe Steele told her father of her plans to finally look into local college classes that Monday.

That makes sense, right? Chloe was just beginning the winter quarter of her freshman year at Stanford when her studies were interrupted by a loss in her family. She returned home to be with her father but now, after two weeks of sitting around at home, she's looking into resuming her studies closer to home. Makes perfect sense.

Or, rather, it would make perfect sense in a completely different novel -- one where the Steeles' family trauma was an isolated event and not part of a global apocalypse, a world-altering trauma heralding the end of the world. Here in Left Behind, the idea that Chloe would begin resuming classes -- or that there would even be classes for her to resume -- doesn't make any sense at all.

Part of the reason that she can't just pick up where she left off after her mother's funeral is that there was no funeral. Not for Irene, not for Rayford Jr., not for any of the 2 billion or so people all over the world who are now gone.

LaHaye and Jenkins could not allow funerals in this book. For them, everything depends on their ability to maintain an artificial distinction between "raptured" and "dead." This isn't just the alleged premise for this book, it's the linchpin for their entire End Times check list and the thing that reshapes every aspect of their theology -- not just eschatology but soteriology, ecclesiology, theodicy, the whole shebang. If they'd allowed funerals in Left Behind, then this artificial distinction would've been impossible to sustain and the wheels would have flown off their entire belief system.

In the early pages of the book, Rayford recalls his wife's cheerful description of this indistinct distinction:

"Can you imagine, Rafe," she exulted, "Jesus coming back to get us before we die?"

Her tone would have been a bit less exultant if she had avoided the euphemistic dodge of the "rapture": "Can you imagine, Rafe, Jesus coming back to grant us an instantaneous and painless death?"

But the latter is just as accurate as the former. Irene and every other real, true Christian and Raymie and every other innocent child on the planet have passed on. They are no more. They have ceased to be, gone to meet their maker. They've shuffled off their mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the bleedin' choir invisible. The plumage don't enter into it.

This transition from earth to heaven, from life to afterlife, is in every way indistinguishable from the inevitable form that this transition usually takes. We have a word for that experience. It's called "dying." Irene Steele went to bed, fell asleep and died. Saying that she was raptured does not, in any meaningful way, change the experience for her. Her experience of this event would've been no different had there been a carbon monoxide leak, or a gas leak and explosion, or a Donnie Darko-style jet engine through the roof. And the experience for those she left behind -- for her surviving husband and daughter -- isn't different in any meaningful way either.

The majority of the 2 billion or so "raptured" at the start of this book are children, those L&J believe are below some blurry "age of accountability" and who therefore would be regarded as innocents. (In interviews outside of the book L&J seem to underestimate the proportion of the earth's populace that falls into this age range. They seem to have assumed that developing countries would have the same basic ratio of old and young as we have here in the U.S.) These innocent children are included in the rapture, L&J say, because God is merciful, sparing them the suffering of the coming Great Tribulation.*

Viewing the rapture of these children as an act of divine mercy is entirely dependent on the dubious distinction between raptured and dead. As long as we think of it as a worldwide "snatching away," and not as a worldwide slaughter, then we can pretend that what has happened to all those children is somehow merciful. But that requires us to avoid anything that would allow or cause us to think more deeply about whether these things really are any different. Such deeper thoughts cast a disturbing light on Irene's exultant longing for the coming rapture -- and on the longing of her real-world counterparts (look again at that John Hagee sermon we looked at last week).

"To live is Christ, to die is gain," St. Paul wrote, but this longing for and celebration of a global rapture seems to have less to do with that than with something more like Jonestown, or Heaven's Gate, or the Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments.

Hence no funerals in Left Behind. Better to describe an impossible world in which humans do not act like humans -- in which the universal human need to grieve and to ritualize mourning does not exist -- than to allow readers to reflect on the similarities between the indistinguishable statements "Irene was raptured" and "Irene was dead." Elephants mourn their dead. The alleged humans in Left Behind do not.

But even in the impossible, inhuman, no-funerals-allowed world of this book it seems unlikely that local colleges would or could so soon be resuming their normal routine.

A mere two weeks after The Event, these schools would still be struggling to figure out which of their students and faculty members were among the disappeared. I realize that L&J view intellectual, academic types as inherently ungodly, but surely some of them would have been taken, and surely some would have been killed in the hundreds of plane crashes and thousands of highway disasters that occurred the night of The Event. And even if those who remained/survived aren't allowed to conduct funerals or memorial services, they would all, like Chloe, have been touched in some way by the disappearances and the concurrent carnage.

Consider also how The Event would forever alter most of the various academic disciplines. Physics and chemistry professors couldn't very well continue teaching their students about the Conservation of Matter, what with 50 million or so tons of the stuff having just vanished from the universe. Professors teaching early childhood education or obstetrics probably wouldn't see much sense in continuing with business as usual either. Those professors of religion and philosophy who remained would, of course, all be busy berating themselves because they were wrong, wrong, wrong not to have listened to Tim LaHaye.

It's hard to imagine a course of study that wouldn't have been shattered and turned upside down by The Event. But even if we assume that Chloe is studying subjects that might seem unaffected -- say, I don't know, Renaissance poetry -- it seems impossible that classes could just go on as before without the professor breaking down, sobbing, mid-lecture. "Today we're going to turn again to Petrarch's sonnets, and ... and ... and ..." (curls into fetal ball behind the podium) "My daughter. My beautiful daughter is gone and no one can tell me what has happened to her ... et le piaghe che 'nfin al cor mi vanno ..."

Then there's the question of where Chloe might be studying, of which local college she would be enrolling in.

This is trickier than it might seem. She's a convert now, a member of New Hope Village Church's prophecy-addled variant of the evangelical subculture. As such, somewhere like Northwestern or the University of Chicago just won't do. But if such hotbeds of secular humanism would no longer be an option for Chloe neither would she have any remaining religious options of the sort viewed as acceptable by her newly adopted subculture. Pre-Event she'd have had multiple options within commuting distance -- Wheaton College, Trinity Christian College, Judson University, even Christian Life College right there in town. But post-Event those campuses would be all-but deserted.** If the Christian alternatives are now closed and the secular schools are now unacceptable to her -- devoid even of the shelter of a Campus Crusade chapter, like Sodom without even 10 righteous to be found -- then where exactly is Chloe supposed to go?

Then again, the above difficulties all seem secondary to the larger question of why Chloe would even bother with college. The world is going to end in six years and 352 days. Spending three and a half of those years working toward her B.A. might not seem like a big priority at this point -- even if she thinks that she'd be able to finish in that amount of time without things like Wormwood poisoning the seas or an army of monstrous dragon-locusts interrupting her studies. (On the other hand, it would be pretty sweet to take out all those college loans knowing that you'd never have to pay them back.)

Alas, all of this discussion about Chloe's college plans turns out to be, well, academic. She soon ends up married to Buck and thus, in the authors' view, no longer needs to worry her pretty little head about getting an education.

"And I was thinking," she said, "about trying to get together with Hattie for lunch."

"I thought you didn't care for her," Rayford said.

"I don't, but that's no excuse. She doesn't even know what's happened to me. She's not answering her phone. Any idea what her schedule is?"

I appreciate the distinction Chloe makes there -- the obligation to care about people even if you don't care for them. That's a rare thing here in Left Behind. Note the contrast here between Chloe's willingness to go out of her way to meet with someone she doesn't really like and Buck's unwillingness, a few pages ago, to answer the direct questions of a friendly stranger. Even post-conversion Stepford Chloe seems like she could do better than Buck.

Her dad calls the airline to find out Hattie's schedule:

Rayford was told that not only was Hattie not scheduled that day but also that she had requested a 30-day leave of absence. "That's odd," he told Chloe. "Maybe she's got family troubles out West."

Not that he's going to bother checking in with her to find out if everything's OK. Rayford doesn't care for or about Hattie. He assuaged his guilt over their pseudo-affair by forcing her to sit silently through his gospel lecture, so as far as he's concerned, he doesn't need to give her another thought. And anyway, he's busy:

"I promised Bruce I'd come over and watch that Carpathia press conference later this morning."

It might seem easy to mock Rayford and Bruce's idea of a good time here, but I'd be eager to see that press conference too. There's a chance, after all, that Nicolae could announce what the new One World Language was going to be, and if that didn't turn out to be English I might need to re-enroll in college myself.

- - - - - - - - - - - -

* This Great Tribulation, according to LaHaye and his prophecy-studies compatriots, is a calamitous time shaped by war, famine, disease and, stalking in the rear, gigantic, inevitable death within seven years. It's worth noting that this is, right now, an apt description of what life is actually like for millions of children here in the real world. I would ask why God isn't doing something to change that for these innocents but, as the saying goes, I'd be afraid that God would just ask me the same question.

** I'm picturing poor Mark Noll, shell-shocked and wandering through the empty halls of Wheaton's campus, muttering to himself and ripping the pages one by one from Michael Williams' This World Is Not My Home like Ophelia with her wildflowers.

L.B.: Heebie-jeebies

Left Behind, pp. 440-442

Buck felt more alone than ever on the flight home. He was in coach on a full plane, but he knew no one. He read several sections from the Bible Bruce had given him and had marked for him, prompting the woman next to him to ask questions. He answered in such a way that she could tell he was not in the mood for conversation.* He didn't want to be rude, but neither did he want to mislead anyone with his limited knowledge.

Why the brush-off? His dodging of this woman's questions would seem to be, from the authors' own perspective, a shirking of responsibility. I realize that Buck is not yet a fully certified convert, but he has already decided that the stuff he's reading there is the Most Important Thing. When someone asks you a direct question about the Most Important Thing, it seems cruel not to tell them what you know, even if your answers are only partial or limited (as opposed to having un-limited knowledge, which the authors seem to suggest is a possibility).

So here is this poor woman. She witnessed the Israel miracle and then The Event, and she's started putting two and two together. Now she's desperate for answers and she turns to Buck Williams. He's got Bruce's annotated Bible right there in his hands. He's just finished what amounts to a three-day seminar, complete with Bruce's "crash-course in prophecy" and one, maybe two viewings of the ICR video. He is, in other words, the perfect person to begin to answer her questions. Yet he doesn't.

The morning before he was "moved to tears" by Chloe's story, in which she said that she believed his presence in the airplane seat next to hers was a sign from God. If he believes that to be true, then surely it was also God's divine plan that he is again, just a few days later, in an airplane seat next to a woman full of questions about God. But if Buck's presence in the next seat was a sign of God's love for Chloe, his presence next to this woman would seem to be a sign that God, like Buck, doesn't care what happens to her. (What if this woman gets off the airplane, walks out of the airport and gets hit by the hypothetical bus?)

I'm also not sure what to make of the apparent warning there against evangelism by those with only "limited knowledge." Throughout the rest of the book, this is presented as a universal, unavoidable duty for every believer. But here they seem to be saying it's better left to the experts. Odd.

The frustrating thing here is that this woman's questions would likely have been very similar to the questions Buck is asking himself. She would have provided a convenient means to present Buck's inner monologue as an actual dialogue, a conversation. But instead he blows her off and goes back to sulkily asking himself rhetorical questions in what seems like the voice-over narration of a bad movie. (I really believe that Jerry Jenkins has a Post-it note stuck to the monitor of his computer reading, "Tell, don't show.")

Sleep was no easier for him that night, though he refused to allow himself to pace. ...

This is, like, totally different from the bit in the last chapter where Buck was up all night, unable to sleep as he grappled with these same questions. In that scene, Buck was pacing. Here, he's not. See? Totally different.

He was going into a meeting in the morning that he had been warned to stay away from. Bruce Barnes had sounded convinced that if Nicolae Carpathia were the Antichrist, Buck ran the danger of being mentally overcome, brainwashed, hypnotized or worse.

There is that, of course. But keep in mind that Buck is also headed to a meeting where he will be sitting alongside Jonathan Stonagal and Todd-Cothran for the first time since he'd been forced to fake his own death and travel incognito because they planted a bomb in his car. This is the same Todd-Cothran, you'll remember, who telephoned Scotland Yard to inform them that he'd be murdering one of their policemen and there was nothing they could do about it. Yet Buck doesn't seem to be the slightest bit anxious about seeing these men face to face. He had promised -- cross-my-heart, pinky-swear -- never to write anything bad about them and in exchange they had agreed not to murder him in cold blood. Buck sees no reason not to take them at their word, so he's not nervous to be meeting them face to face.

As he wearily showered and dressed in the morning, Buck concluded that he had come a long way from thinking that the religious angle was on the fringe. He had gone from bemused puzzlement at people thinking their loved ones had flown to heaven to believing that much of what was happening had been foretold in the Bible. He was no longer wondering or doubting, he told himself. There was no other explanation for the two witnesses in Jerusalem. Nor for the disappearances. ...

So he now believes the "religious angle" should be central to his article on the disappearances. He believes, in fact, that there could be "no other explanation." Yet he doesn't end up writing any of that in his article. He treats his readers just like he treated that poor woman on the plane. He has the answers, but he's not in a mood to share them.

But hold that thought, I'm getting ahead of myself.

We get another half-hearted attempt at the Stonagal-as-Antichrist red herring. This, again, seems utterly lame at this point in the book, since everyone with even half a brain already knows without a doubt that Nicolae Carpathia is the Antichrist. What kind of moron could possibly think otherwise?

Buck still leaned toward Stonagal. ...

OK, then. So our half-witted hero heads out the door:

He slung his bag over his shoulder, tempted to take the gun from his bedside table but knowing he would never get it through the metal detectors. Anyway, he sensed, that was not the kind of protection he needed. What he needed was safekeeping for his mind and for his spirit.

The "safekeeping" he refers to there is the divine protection that Bruce told him would come with his conversion. If I were him, though, I'd also be loading up like the Winchester brothers, taking salt, garlic, holy water and maybe even some chalk for pentagram-drawing, just in case.

But now we turn to something interesting. Or, rather, we turn to something that might have been interesting:

All the way to the United Nations he agonized. Do I pray? he asked himself. Do I "pray the prayer" as so many of those people said yesterday morning? Would I be doing it just to protect myself from the voodoo or the heebie-jeebies? He decided that becoming a believer could not be for the purpose of having a good luck charm. That would cheapen it. Surely God didn't work that way. ...

At first glance, this seems almost like a direct response to our criticism here of the mechanistic magic implied in the authors' idea of what constitutes salvation. Throughout the book the authors repeatedly and consistently portray "praying the prayer" as a transaction, almost like an incantation that binds God to the spellcaster's will like a djinni. Pray the prayer, get the salvation. This passage might be LaHaye & Jenkins' way of saying that they don't really mean that.** But then we read the rest of the paragraph:

... Surely God didn't work that way. And if Bruce Barnes could be believed, there was no more protection for believers now, during this period, than there was for anyone else. Huge numbers of people were going to die in the next seven years, Christian or not. The question was, then where would they be?

So the authors are saying, explicitly, that we must not say the magic words as a temporal "good luck charm." God doesn't work that way. The magic words are meant to be an eternal good luck charm, protecting our souls from the voodoo and the heebie-jeebies of the afterlife.

The authors here are treading carefully to avoid the more interesting question here, one that is suggested more strongly in the following paragraph:

There was only one reason to make the transaction, he decided -- if he truly believed he could be forgiven and become one of God's people.

What really matters to L&J is whether or not Buck "truly believes" -- whether or not he is, like Rayford, passionately sincere and sincerely passionate. My Calvinist brother calls this "Great Pumpkin" spirituality -- the idea that our sincerity, rather than God's grace, is the decisive factor. I'm very much not a Calvinist, but I agree that such Great Pumpkin spirituality makes no sense. Jesus' parables are filled with characters begging for forgiveness for the most selfish and venal reasons imaginable, yet that never matters in those stories.***

But even though Buck uses the word "forgiven" here, it hardly seems like he really thinks forgiveness is something he needs. We don't even get the half-baked sort of thing we got with Rayford, where he seemed to be repenting of his own awesomeness. Buck seems to think that God's grace works like a personal line of credit -- that it's only offered to those who can demonstrate they don't really need it. In Buck's scenario, God is willing to save those who ask unless they really need saving, because "that would cheapen it." Or something.

One can imagine a more interesting version of this story in which Buck, desperate to save his own sorry hide, was perfectly willing to beg for help in the cheapest, crassest way imaginable, and primarily for the most selfish of motives. What would come next? Would the receipt of such unmerited grace force him to change and grow? Or would he be able to maintain a selfish ingratitude ("Thanks for the eternal salvation -- sucker!")? That would of course be a very different story requiring very different authors than the ones who gave us this book.

God had become more than a force of nature or even a miracle worker to Buck, as God had been in the skies of Israel that night. It only made sense that if God made people, he would want to communicate with them, to connect with them.

Unless, of course, those people are seated next to Buck on an airplane, in which case they're S.O.L.

Buck entered the U.N. through hordes of reporters already setting up for the press conference. Limousines disgorged VIPs and crowds waited behind police barriers.

Police barriers. A red-carpet entry for a press conference by the new secretary-general. That might have worked as a satiric device meant to describe Nicolae's movie-star-like popularity, but I don't think that is what was intended. The authors seem to imagine that this is what life is like all the time for politicians and diplomats.

Buck saw Stanton Bailey in a crowd near the door. "What are you doing here?" Buck said.

"Getting autographs," Bailey says. "Omigod, did you see Richard Holbrooke? He's so dreamy!"

OK, not quite that, what the authors actually have Bailey say is this:

"Just taking advantage of my position so I can be at the press conference. Proud you're going to be in the preliminary meeting. Be sure to remember everything. Thanks for transmitting your first draft of the theory piece. I know you've got a lot to do yet, but it's a terrific start. Gonna be a winner."

This is impossible. Buck hasn't written even a rough outline of this article yet, let alone a first draft. We readers know this. We've been with him through every step of every day since the article was assigned and he hasn't written a thing. He hasn't had time.

Based on Bailey's reaction, the Rapture theory doesn't seem to be a dominant theme in Buck's first draft. This is also impossible. Apart from his coworkers, the only person Buck has interviewed so far for this article is Rayford Steele. He hasn't talked to any scientists about the possibility of an "electromagnetonuclear" incident, or to any UFO theorists or anyone else about any other possible explanations for the disappearances. So how can he have written a first draft that gives those other theories greater weight than the only theory he has researched? And if he really believes in that theory, if he really believes "there was no other explanation," then why doesn't he make that case in his article?

Like Bruce and Rayford, Buck seems far more interested in being initiated into the secret prophecy knowledge of the Tribulation Force than he is in sharing that truth with anyone else, whether it's the woman next to him on the plane, or Hattie, or the readers of Global Weekly, or even his boss and his coworkers. After all, if he shared this secret knowledge with everybody, then there'd be no one left for him to say "I told you so" to.

"Thanks," Buck said, and Bailey gave him a thumbs-up. Buck realized that if that had happened a month before, he would have had to stifle a laugh at the corny old guy and would have told his colleagues what an idiot he worked for.

We might have mentioned this before, but Buck Williams really is a douchebag.

- - - - - - - - - - - -

* This scene's inversion of the usual nightmare-seatmate dynamic also seems like the premise for a comedy sketch (NOTE: Fixed scrambled names, but it's still not really that funny):

PASSENGER 2: Say what's that you're reading? Is that the Bible?

PASSENGER 1: What? Oh. Oh, yes. It's the Bible. ... I'm sorry, I've got a lot of reading to finish here and I just wanted to ...

PASSENGER 2: Oh sure, sure. No problem. Sorry.

P1: ...

P2: Sorry, I know you're trying to read, but I couldn't help but notice your lapel pin. That little fish, that's like a Christian thing, right? Like a "born-again" thing?

P1: Yes. The fish is a Christian symbol. Yes. Now, I'm sorry, but do you mind? (gestures back at the book)

P2: Oh right, sure. Sorry.

P1: ...

P2: So how's that work, anyway? Getting "born again"?

P1: Look, really, I don't mean to be rude, but I'd really just like to sit here quietly and read until we get to ...

P2: Hey, that's cool! I didn't notice that before.

P1: Excuse me?

P2: Your T-shirt! It looks just like a Budweiser T-shirt, but I just realized it actually says, "Be Wiser" -- oh, and instead of "King of Beers" it says "King of Kings!" Cool. I guess that means Jesus, right? And that I'd be wiser if I ... Hey, wow! Are those gospel tracts in your bag? Can I have one of those?

P1: Oh for God's sake! Why do I always end up next to you people?

** LaHaye and Jenkins seem dimly aware that critics of their books exist, and they seem to have a vague sense that it would be good to respond to those critics. But they never quite do. The closest they come is passages like this one, or the earlier scene where Chloe objected that this apocalypse seemed hard to reconcile with "a God of love and order." No one responded to Chloe's objection, she just seemed eventually to drop it for no apparent reason.

*** The difficulty in those parables for my Calvinist friends arises from what happens next. The selfish servant, motivated only by a desire to save his own behind from prison, throws himself on the mercy of the king, but the king forgives him anyway. A nice Calvinist parable if it stopped there. But the story doesn't stop there. "Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors," we Christians pray, and we read "with the measure you use, it will be measured to you." And sometimes I wonder if the whole Calvinist/Arminian reframing of the question isn't just a means of avoiding what that seems to entail.

Inexcusable, really

Left Behind Friday seems to have turned into house-hunting and dinner-with-family Friday. I apologize.

I don't suppose the promise of another Left Behind Saturday Monday (@%#$!) is much help if you're sitting in a cubicle and trying to run out the clock on a Friday afternoon, but perhaps it'll provide a welcome distraction come Monday morning.

As a kind of amuse bouche for tomorrow's belated installment, here's a link to John McCain's buddy, John Hagee, getting worked up preaching on his favorite topic: The Rapture of the Church.

Two things worth noting in that video: 1) Hagee is barking mad, and 2) His sermon gives more thought to what such an event might look like and how people might respond than LaHaye and Jenkins do in Left Behind.