L.B.: A routine flight

Left Behind, pp. 233-234

It's Monday and Rayford Steele is back at work (pilots get weekends off?). He has a pretty busy day ahead: flying to Atlanta and back, converting his daughter and explaining to her about his years of toying with Hattie's emotions.

The flight to Atlanta was full and busy, and Rayford had to change altitudes continually to avoid choppy air. He got to see Chloe for only a few seconds while his first officer was in the cockpit and the plane was on autopilot. Rayford made a hurried walk-through but had no time to chat.

That's a bland, normal-seeming paragraph, unless you consider the context. In context, the bland normalcy here is stark raving mad.

It's like that time at Starbucks when you were getting the lid for your coffee and found yourself talking to a very polite, well-dressed, normal-seeming woman pouring cream, and she was so blandly polite, matter-of-fact and normal-seeming, her speech so closely imitating the rhythms and intonations of normal small talk, that it took you several seconds to realize that she wasn't just commenting on the weather, but was, rather, explaining that she was in a hurry to get home so she could cook more pancakes for the basement, and that it was her basement full of pancakes that had ordered her to kill the dog.

In context, this paragraph makes the Pancake Lady seem sane.

The last time Rayford flew a plane, about a week ago, he had to turn around because dozens of his passengers had disappeared without a trace. Dozens of other airliners crashed that day and he had been forced to land between piles of smoldering wreckage, only to learn that the disappearances were a global phenomenon, reducing the world's population by 2 billion. There are no more children. Anywhere.

"Rayford had to change altitudes continually to avoid choppy air," Jenkins writes, and yet no one panics. The passengers, like Rayford, apparently just think to themselves, "Hmm, that's a bit choppy. Hope the pilot changes altitude." No one looks around the cabin after every bump, wild-eyed with fear, to see if anyone else has disappeared. No one breathes a sigh of relief when Rayford walks through the cabin, reassured that the pilot hasn't vanished. No one recalls the dozens and dozens of plane wrecks they've seen on the news for the past week and thinks to themselves, "My God, this is insane! What was I thinking getting back on an airplane?"

Rayford himself has no qualms about leaving the plane in the hands of his new first officer, the guy who replaced Chris Smith. Chris couldn't be on this flight because he took his own life after learning his wife and kids had been killed in one of the uncountable crashes that accompanied the disappearances. The last time Rayford saw him, his last glimpse of the first officer the last time he flew a plane, all he saw was a bloodied wrist sticking out from under the coroner's sheet.

That was a week ago.

I realize this isn't the first time I've pointed out this weird disconnect, this absence of consequences, this apathy and incuriosity toward the victims of the story. By this point it's clear we should expect nothing else from Left Behind. But once more let me say again that there's more to this than just Bad Writing.

It also is Bad Writing, of course, a failure of imagination, craft and work ethic that destroys any sense of reality in the story. And part of the reason for that, as we've seen, is that the authors don't have time for such work. They don't have time to research the correct details (even to glance at a map) or to re-read what they've written to see if it makes sense, or if they're repeating phrases and descriptions from earlier chapters.

They don't have time because they have too much ground to cover. The Great Tribulation is unfolding, a seven-year period crammed full of bowls of wrath, seals, judgments and horrors. All of these events, they believe, must occur in their proper order to fulfill their detailed scheme of End Times prophecies. So they can't afford to linger on the effects of Event No. 1, the Rapture. Any physical or emotional consequences from that must be swept away as quickly as possible so they can move on to event No. 2: The Rise of the Antichrist. This is the only way they know to approach the story of the Great Tribulation.

This is also the only way they know to approach real life, now, in this time and place. Just as the Great Tribulation consists of a long checklist of prophecies, so too now there is a checklist of prophecies they believe must occur before the Rapture occurs and all the fun starts. That checklist is a bit more vague: wars, rumors of war, earthquakes, floods, famine, plague, Bad Stuff in general.

Preoccupation with this checklist in real life can lead to real people, people like LaHaye and Jenkins and some of their tens of millions of readers, behaving with the same blindness toward, and sociopathic disregard for, the suffering of others that Rayford displays in the novel. Dec. 26 tsunami? Check. Katrina? Check. Pandora's box opened in Iraq? Check, check, check!

When this is your primary response to such tragedies, there's a lot more wrong than just Bad Writing.

Comments

[Scott]

Off-topic, but I wonder what Scott would make of this:

I saw the part about it being a spoof, but thought Jeff's logic was interesting, and typical for a leftist. Basically, I was supposed to be in support of 'private' slavery because it was "for their own good", which is the leftist's justification for use of force against others. Progressives should favor slavery if it makes the slaves better off, regardless of what the slaves think. The slaves who object are just in the way of 'progress' being bestowed on us by our betters.

[the opoponax]

What are people supposed to do, except than trying to go back to normal as quickly as possible? If Rayford is anything like a prototype of how unbelievers feel and act according to LaHaye and J, they actually don't have lost enough to be paralyzed by grief. I didn't get the impression so far, that Rayford cared much about his family - and he still has Chloe for company, anyway. So why shouldn't he go back to work? Why should we assume that anyone else of the left-behind pagans would care any more for their families than Rayford did?

...

Which means they better get their buds into the office or into a plane to attend the next business meeting in Atlanta, least they loose their houses as well.

I see this has already been answered by people who weren't directly affected by 9/11, but i'm gonna up the ante here.

I worked in 7 World Trade as of 9/11/01. One of the smaller towers that wasn't directly hit, but did go down due to structural damage from debris & such later that day. I was in the subway station directly under the towers, heading into work, when the second plane hit (i thank God every day i was running a few minutes late, or i'd have been in the courtyard between towers 1 and 2 at that moment and would most certainly not be alive to tell this story). I literally heard the impact of the plane on the building above me.

nobody in new york, whether they were directly impacted or not, went to work for the rest of the week. and the following monday, when everybody did go back, things were WEIRD. anyone who worked in a tallish building which was near anything that could conceivably be a target was completely freaked out (including myself). there was at least a month of mass PTSD. even though, yeah, we did have to pay rent and put food on the table (and thus go back into tall buildings downtown). it was a spoken thing. everyone knew how weird things were and everyone talked about it all the time and assumed, for a few months at least, that either it would inevitably keep happening, or something else insane and unthinkable and destructive of our lives would begin to happen. we had no frame of reference for exactly what the future might hold, but we thought it may well be extremely dangerous. and this is not watching it vicariously on TV, but living it. for a few months i was pretty sure i wouldn't survive to see the end of 2002, if not 2001. it was the end of everything we knew, or at least it felt like it.

and, yes, it's true you can't live that way for very long. at a certain point you have to keep living your life, knowing that it may get you killed, knowing you can't take anything for granted. but it doesn't mean you're not affected by it, that you simply go back to the daily grind of your job. it took probably 6 months before i was back into the grind of work and school, bitching about my annoying boss and the rest of the stuff we do unthinkingly at work every day.

i STILL, more than 5 years later, get a shiver in my spine every time my train so much as stops at the subway station where i was that morning. i will do just about anything to avoid getting out at that stop. last year this time i was walking over there with my brother, who was staying in a hotel in the neighborhood. without thinking about it, we walked right by ground zero (it was night, and we were walking along, talking, in search of a place to eat dinner). i looked over and noticed a staircase sticking up out of the rubble. i had walked up that staircase multiple times a day when i worked there. i just about had a panic attack. it's memory that still chills me, the sight of that lone concrete staircase jutting up into nothing.

Also, 9/11 did an interesting thing. suddenly relationships that were falling apart or on the back burner seemed suddenly incredibly vital and life-or-death important. people you generally didn't give a shit about came into focus. it seemed so incredibly important to foster what we still had, to have emotional support, etc. on September 10 i was strongly considering breaking up with my shithead boyfriend (who i was living with at the time) and coming out of the closet and living the kind of life i truly wanted to live. then 9/11 happened, and it suddenly seemed so important that we had each other, could turn to each other. so many babies were conceived that year. i know at least 3 couples who had passing interests in each other but finally got together within a week of 9/11. and i never heard of anyone who lost a spouse or a child or any close family member in the towers and thought, "good riddance. our marriage was shot, and this'll save me the paperwork on a divorce!" or "whew, finally that obnoxious coke-addled son of mine is gone!" or whatever. even if they really didn't care or their relationships weren't strong before the tragedy. when you lose someone close to you, so suddenly and violently, the petty bullshit fades and you remember how much you really loved each other. unless you are a sociopath.

so basically what i'm saying with this freakin' novel i'm writing (which is probably moot as someone else probably explained it in much better terms) is that Fred's right -- L&J made a major, major misstep in the way every character (down to the 'extras' in the story) completely forgets such a monumental event and everything is routine and hunky dory within a week of the disappearances. and, yeah, this is 1994, a time that was so sheltered compared to our own, and they might not have had any frame of reference for the events they were describing. but could they not exercise a little imagination and put in a single sentence like, "it had only been a week since the disappearances, and the mood was tense on the plane. rayford looked over at the empty seat where Chris Smith had been sitting a week ago this time, and he realized for the first time how much he would miss his first officer. he hoped that Chris' replacement (replacement!) would be as smart and sensitive a pilot had Chris had been, though he knew they would never develop the rapport he had had with his previous first officer" or somesuch?

[Skyknight]

Scott: You're STILL not explaining how anarcho-capitalism is going to perfect the cosmos, let alone the world. Why do you think something as volatile and mutable as a market is going to embody something as diamond-like and immutable as perfection and righteousness? (And no, popular will ISN'T important here. Righteousness is too important to be tainted with human bias. Or god bias. Or ANY bias. Think of righteousness as a perfect machine, unchanging and unstopping.)

No, I don't trust human emotion. My fealty is to the totality of existence, not merely humanity which is just a tiny sliver of such. It is the definition of evil to favor the lesser over the greater. So what right do we have to look to the self before the other? Answer: none. Getting to the beam in our eye before the motes in the eyes of the others was an error of God, for which he must be corrected.

[Fred]

Ray, thank you for this: "I am so never ordering pizza from you guys."

Now I'm picturing a whole sketch based on Parousia Pizza's "imminent" delivery policy and the crisis of faith faced by those waiting for their pie. "Guy said our pizza was 'at hand' -- what does that even mean?" (Sadly, the audience niche for seminarian sketch comedy is prohibitively narrow.)

As for The End Times: I'm 38, so even though no one knows the day or the hour, I'm guessing The End can't be more than 50 years off, 60 tops. Then again, I drive I-95 every day, so it could be a lot sooner. Your mileage may vary.

[C. Diane]

Opopnax -
Imagination is against God and of Satan. Didn't you get the memo?

(Not to make light of the rest of your comment; it was informative and moving. Living in the southeast, I don't have any useful comments on it.)

[jw]

Disconnect
I don't see anything particularly sinister about the obvious disconnect between reality and what takes place in LB. This is a plot-driven book. And while the PMD viewpoint shapes that plot, the boyos get to fill in the plot details, like a guy called Carpathia. Surely most of us have read a book that was pretty much nothing but plot, and enjoyed it, caring only that the plot moved along.

9/11
I think it's likely that if J&LH had written this first book after 9/11, there would have been a better set of incidents and occurrences by copying reality. Their basic problem seems to be a lack of imagination. I happened to fly out of Logan airport (Boston), the first day it opened after 9/11, a Saturday I think. I felt safe once on board, and don't recall thinking about the possibility of our plane being hijacked. Getting to the plane was scary stuff, though, with the large presence of police, military, dogs and very lethal looking automatic weapons.

[Beth]

Being in the last days does not mean, as Mark said, the end is near.

So "last days" is something like "last throes". Is that it? (Sorry, Rev. I do understand the point you're making, but I couldn't resist.)

Your mileage may vary.

Especially if you're driving on I-95.

opoponax,
And on top of all that, remember that 9/11 was NOTHING compared to the Rapture Disaster. We lost, what, 2-3,000 people out of a city of 8 million? That's less than one tenth of one percent. What we're looking at here is hundreds of times worse. If non-essential businesses were open at all, they'd be operating at half strength, with many of their employees too devastated to return to work. Business trips would have been rescheduled or simply dropped by mutual consent -- when you've just lost your kids and the world is in chaos, that big presention you've been planning for months suddenly seems incredibly unimportant.

[the opoponax]

This is a plot-driven book... Surely most of us have read a book that was pretty much nothing but plot, and enjoyed it, caring only that the plot moved along.

i've heard this defense of LB several times. for whatever reason i couldn't think of an answer to it as i was reading the books, assuming that the problem was that i was too much of a literary elitist who'd spent way too much time in the ivory tower of college and post-modernism and all that to "get" this page-turner of a book.

as time has gone by, and i've finished school and moved to a job that takes way too much out of me, intellectually and energy-wise, to read Dostoevsky and Melville and "the classics" (whether that's the Canon or the more recent multiculti and post-linear classics like Morrison and Marukami and Achebe and such), i've really gone back to the "page turner" defense of LB.

there are WAY WAY WAY more exciting plot-driven novels out there than Left Behind, whether we're talking about Great Literature or mass market paperbacks. for one thing, there's more page-turning action in a chapter of anything by Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Capote, or Faulkner than there is in an entire Left Behind book. The above writers, with the exception of Faulkner, are not challenging or ponderous or even overly long. You can read "In Cold Blood" or "The Sun Also Rises" on a plane as easy as you can read anything by Steven King. There's also a whole universe of genre and pulp and mass market fiction, from Ian Fleming to Helen Fielding to your airport and subway standards that are probably a million times more interesting than LB. lately i've been getting by on short story collections and graphic novels. All much more action packed and entertaining than Left Behind. If you think you're reading Left Behind because you're looking for something simple and plot-driven and down to earth, you are either lying to yourself or you have a really crappy public library.

i also think people who offer up this defense of the books do it because they're sort of ashamed for having not questioned the same things the person criticizing the books is bringing up. like the critic is attacking your taste in literature or reading skills or whatever. "It's just a book, it's plot-driven, you have to ignore all that stuff" is a euphemism for "look, this book was good enough for me, so it's good enough for you to, you elitist blue stater!"

if you have to look past 80% of the details (or lack thereof) to get any enjoyment out of a book, you need to look for a different book. a book that does not suck. there's nothing wrong with reading a shitty book. it's sort of the equivalent of finding yourself watching the ENTIRE real world marathon on MTV, just because you were too lazy to change the channel or that girl has a nice rack or whatever. except that it's socially acceptable to admit that you kinda sorta secretly like Dancing With the Stars even though you know how lame it is. it's not socially acceptable to admit that you like reading enough to actually seek out books that are well-written (and even the pulpiest pulp is sometimes well written). so we lower the bar practically to the floor and explain that we don't read because we can't find anything good (and paint those who have sought out good books into an ivory corner). rather than picking up some Margaret Atwood or Terry Pratchett or whatever and scorning LB for the bird cage liner it truly is.

which proves my point, yet again, that the entire raison d'etre for Left Behind is to make people stupid and unquestioning and quasi-literate so that the right wing can establish a totalitarian state. people who don't ask how many calories are in the mush they're being fed will never get around to biting the hand that feeds it to them.

[New Duane]

Now I'm picturing a whole sketch based on Parousia Pizza's "imminent" delivery policy and the crisis of faith faced by those waiting for their pie. "Guy said our pizza was 'at hand' -- what does that even mean?" (Sadly, the audience niche for seminarian sketch comedy is prohibitively narrow.)

LOL!

[Angelika]

oppoponax: which proves my point, yet again, that the entire raison d'etre for Left Behind is to make people stupid and unquestioning and quasi-literate so that the right wing can establish a totalitarian state.

Somehow the authors' grasps on conspiracies or human psychology as it is exemplified in the LB-series makes it unlikely that they'd be able to come up with a scheme as devious as you suggest.

I guess they are simply relying on two convinient factors, which allow them to make a lot of money with a minimum effort. These factors being that there are (a) many people with little to no taste for literature who don't care for quality in their books as long they don't have to actually use their brains while reading - and (b) that many Christians don't dare to doubt anything with the lable 'Christian' on it and approved by their congregations no matter how stupid or absurd it actually is.

[Skyknight]

And (c) they're not so much relying on the factors as they are caught in them themselves. That is, LaHaye and Jenkins are likely anti-literature connoisseurs themselves (or whatever would be a better term). Not so much driven by avarice as by a fervor to get these prophecies known (unlike Scott, I don't think humans are inherently driven by self-interest first and foremost {and I'm still waiting for him to explain how, if that's the case, anarcho-captialism has driven his own self-interest away}. Save for sociopaths, whom I think are MUCH more infrequent than 25%, or even 10%). Remember what LaHaye labels this and the Babylon Rising series--"prophecy fiction". Good as other literature might be, since it doesn't have the same built-in divine purpose, how can it be more IMPORTANT?

[bulbul]

This is a plot-driven book...
I'm with the opoponax - that's nonsense. Tom Clancy is plot-driven, so is Michael Crichton. LB is a pure bullshit in absolute terms as well as relatively. There is a reason why I bring up Tom Clancy - when we get to vols. 3 and beyond, LB turns into a sort of tribulation techno-thriller: we'll be swarmed with endless descriptions of military tactics, vehicles, planes, radio equipment, uniforms and buildings. At times, I could have sworn L&J tried to imitate Clancy's style. And they failed miserably. Tom Clancy, for all his obsession with all things military, can indeed write. He not only manages to make a simple car ride into a thrilling experience and never to miss an important detail, he can also give you characters that feel real and act real. LaHaye and Jenkins just can't do any of that.

[Jeff]

Scott:
I saw the part about it being a spoof, but thought Jeff's logic was interesting, and typical for a leftist. Basically, I was supposed to be in support of 'private' slavery because it was "for their own good", which is the leftist's justification for use of force against others. Progressives should favor slavery if it makes the slaves better off, regardless of what the slaves think. The slaves who object are just in the way of 'progress' being bestowed on us by our betters.

Are you claiming it's a spoof, which would be hard, since it's on the WTO's own website. Or are you claiming that although free-marketers are actually stating that slavery is for their own good, it's a leftie thing to do?

If you really believed what you say you do, you would either prove the page a fraud, or defend the WTO, all without mentioning fictional lefties. I doubt you will, because all I've seen is no-nothing trolls.

[jw]

bulbul and opo -

My comment was not meant as a defense of the book. I was simply laying out the likelihood that J&LH just don't care about these reality things, not because of any sinister disconnections from reality, but simply because the plot is all that counts.

[the opoponax]

gah! Tom Clancy! i could not for the life of me remember his name (or anything he'd written so i could google him) during the entire above screed. thank you, bulbul.

i also kept getting As I Lay Dying and For Whom the Bell Tolls confused and ultimately changed it to "The Sun Also Rises" because i didn't want to make that gaffe, even though FWTBT is probably more plot-driven and page-turney. For Whom the Bell Tolls = Hemingway re WW1; As I Lay Dying = Faulkner, Addie Bundren, right?

[the opoponax]

and JW, if the plot was what really counted, why would they either omit key plot-driving scenes or relegate them to phone calls? also, something being plot-driven doesn't mean you can't, say, describe something or do research or remember key details about the universe you've created for your characters.

the checklist is all that counts.

[the opoponax]

and again, i am wrong. For Whom The Bell Tolls is about the Spanish Civil War, not WW1. but it IS page turney.

i was thinking about A Farewell to Arms.

[jw]

Well... I would equate the checklist with the plot.

[Beth]

Plot-driven? Excuse me? As far as I can remember, so far, the central plot has gone something like this. Pilot learns many of his passengers have disappeared in mid-flight. He turns the plane around, lands at the airport, makes a bunch of phone calls, fights off a clingy coworker, and arranges a flight back home. He misses his wife, talks to his daughter, goes to church, watches a video, and gets saved. Then he returns to work.

Meanwhile, a reporter who was on the flight spends a long time making phone calls and an even longer arranging transport to New York. Once there, he hears of a friend's suspicious suicide, flies to London, talks to a cop, nearly gets blown up, flies back to New York, and talks to a collegue, and decides to contact a foreign politician who has some connection to the Evil International Organization who he assumes were behind the fake suicide and bomb.

Ok, the "exciting stuff" is yet to come, but we're almost 250 pages into the book, and so far all we've seen is one car bombing and a couple of guys walking around doing pretty boring stuff. There's been hints of powerful bad guys, but that's not going to be enough to keep readers hanging around for over 200 pages, not if you've got nothing to offer them but plot.

[jw]

C'mon Beth. The plot's there. They need to stretch it out over, 9, 10 books. The readers have a 2,000 year old foreshadowing. People getting saved, that's hot action. My spine is tingling.

[Doctor Science]

Re: what counts as the "last days" --

The Christians who were putting together the New Testament had lived through their own 9/11, the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple -- the epistles of Paul are the only parts of the NT that were certainly written before 70 CE. For the post-Temple Christians, in retrospect Jesus and his contemporaries *had* been living in "the last days". The old way of life had been destroyed, they needed to find a new Temple, a new fulcrum for their faith. They, the post-Temple Christians, were already living in the post-Apocalyptic period, a period that contained the full menu of tribulation.

What always boggles me about treating Revelations as a strictly literal and future prophecy is that it makes the Bible look dumb. If Revelations is solely a prediction about what will happen in the 21st century, then what use was it to the billions of Christians who lived and died in previous centuries? Surely if something is in the Bible it should be perpetually useful and informative.

[bulbul]

the opoponax,
the checklist is all that counts
Plus the number of conversions. I just reread the part in volume 2 where Rabi Ben-Judah comes on TV publicly admits that based on "the three years [he has]invested in searching the sacred writings of Moses and the prophets" he now recognizes that Jesus is the Messiah. All I can say is - yuck. I can't wait for Fred to analyze that one.

[ninjanun]

I know it's probably already been stated in previous LB comments, but it's Revelation (singular), not Revelations (plural).

John was not writing a letter to those in Revelatia, like Paul was to those in Galatia or Corinth. ;)

Just one Revelation, people. One giant, multi-part, franchise-tastic Revelation, apparently.

Okay, you may carry on now.

[Reg]

Jeff, gatt.org is a lovely spoof, but it's a spoof nonetheless. Click around. "Meeting schedule" takes you to Haliburton's website? Really? If you check out the whois data on the site, you'll see the domian was registered by one of The Yes Men, one of my favourite subversive protest groups. (I have soft spot for Rev. Billy, the great anti-Disney street preacher, and the old-school Billionaires for Bush, but that's perhaps too much of a confession of my political history.). I think the DNFTT policy is in effect for Scott as well.

[the opoponax]

They need to stretch it out over, 9, 10 books.

this is another defense of the shittiness of Left Behind i've heard. they "need to stretch out the plot to fit 12 books" or however many there ultimately were, i forget. another defense that is completely silly when you take it apart.

firstly, if they really needed to "stretch" it, they could have, say, spent more time exploring the characters. or described something. they could have gone into more detail about the aftermath of the rapture. they could have showed us various expositionary details rather than just having the characters talk on the phone about them. they could have included excerpts of Buck's brilliant journalism rather than just telling us "Buck was the greatest writer of all time". they needn't have skipped the skeptic scene. Jenkins writes as if he's rushing us through because he has TONS of material to cover in only 10 short books. so to say that the opposite is true, there isn't enough material and they had to stretch it by throwing in all those phone conversations and travel details, is a tad weird.

secondly, if they felt there wasn't enough material in their story to fill 10-12 500 page books, they could always have said, "wait, hold on, maybe we should only do 5 books." or "wait, hold on, maybe the books should be shorter, like 250 pages instead of 500." the number of books in the series and their length isn't symbolic of anything or conceptually necessary for any reason i can think of. this isn't an english paper, where you are arbitrarily handed down a number of pages you must fill, lest you fail the assignment. writers can make their books however long they want, and authors of series can propose whatever number of books they want.

[AlexG]

Jeff, it's an activist spoof pretty obviously.
Here is the explanation:
http://theyesmen.org/hijinks/wto.shtml

[AlexG]

aaah, beaten!

[jw]

So opoponax, are you arguing with me, or just with the general concept of "this is another defense?"

[Brad]

Now I'm picturing a whole sketch based on Parousia Pizza's "imminent" delivery policy and the crisis of faith faced by those waiting for their pie. "Guy said our pizza was 'at hand' -- what does that even mean?" (Sadly, the audience niche for seminarian sketch comedy is prohibitively narrow.)

Not according to Aaron Sorkin.

"Why are we always fighting?"
"You hate us because you think we think you're stupid.
We hate you because you're stupid."

[the opoponax]

well when i wrote it i thought you were Jeff, the original person who said "c'mon, it's plot driven, it's ok". then i realized you were you, being sarcastic. but my point still stands. just not as a rebuttal so much. sorry.

Reg:

Jeff, gatt.org is a lovely spoof, but it's a spoof nonetheless.

I bet some First Church of Milton Friedman is going to see that site and think "What a great idea"! It certainly fits with Friedman's attitude that sweatshops were good for the workers (he stopped just shy of the Triangle Shirt Factory, but it's hard to see how he could condemn it after praising every other sweatshop).

But what is "the DNFTT policy"?

AlexG:

http://theyesmen.org/hijinks/wto.shtml

I appreciate the link. Thanks

[The Old Maid]

Maybe there's some unwitting symbolic reason why everybody spends so much time travelling, the way there is with the telephones?

Most of the paid (i.e., published) critics suggest that it's an unconscious reflexive expression of a dispensational attitude toward the world as a place from which to escape.

Since in the L&J scenario, the fundamental structures of the society are still in place (children under 12 seldom work as bankers, pilots or policemen) and it might be safely assumed that most of the higher ranking bank-agents are still on earth, unless they died in a plane crash, everyone can expect his/her rent/mortage payment due at the first of the month.

But the authors may not be aware just how many jobs depend upon the existence of children. Politics alone would be wrecked enough. What would happen in a country with a one-child policy, that now has no children at all? What would happen in a country that already is missing a generation between the gandparents and the littlest ones, because the middle generation has been decimated by AIDS? Even in a wealthy, Western country, try filling out your tax return without children. (No dependents, no child support checks, no child-oriented charities to support for the tax write-off.) When I was putting together a Spoilers page, one of the questions was that readers list at least ten types of workers who would lose their jobs, and at least ten businesses or institutions that would be closed for lack of customers. The fact that Hattie's sister and Loretta (a stay-at-home-mother? the text is unclear) are the only ones to lose their jobs does seem a bit of an oversight.

[Beth]

Forget pop, genre, or graphic novels; a scene this bad wouldn't even make it into a comic book.

Imagine the world has just been through a natural -- as opposed to a super-villian-produced -- disaster. Lois Lane is missing; Jimmy Olson's dead. Superman flies to his Fortress of Soliditude where he pours over ancient Kryptonian texts, hoping for some clue as to the source of the disater. He hits the jackpot. One ancient tome not only describes the recent cataclysm, but tells what will happen next, and best of all, contains a secret formula that can protect anyone from the worst of the coming tribulations. Then a call comes in for a routine rescue, a child is trapped on a crumbling ledge on one of the tallest buildings in Metropolis. Superman flies in and saves the kid, without giving a second thought to Lois or Jimmy or the people all around him who will suffer horribly unless they use the formula he's discovered.

The same disaster has also struck Gotham. The air is thick with smoke from car wrecks and plane crashes. Every single child in the city has mysteriously vanished. Batman and Robin return to the Bat Cave to search for an answer to the mystery and to mourn Aunt Harriet, who is among the disappeared. After a week in seclusion, they head downtown in the Batmobile, to talk to the mayor. Along the way they see that everything is just as it was before the disaster. All physical signs have been cleared away, and people are going about their daily lives as if nothing had happened. Neither of the Dynamic Duo sees anything remarkable in this.

I think even the average 12-year-old would throw those comic down in disgust. You don't have to care much about character and motivation to realize that someone who's just been through a traumatic event is going to think about it when he first goes back to where he was when it happened. You don't have to be a 9/11 scholar to realize that a week after an inexplicable global disaster takes countless lives, it will not be business as usual.

[Jesurgislac]

I think even the average 12-year-old would throw those comic down in disgust.

Would they? What you've described sounds to me pretty much like how any comic book series works, certainly before the idea of "story arcs" got going.

[bulbul]

What you've described sounds to me pretty much like how any comic book series works, certainly before the idea of "story arcs" got going.
'fraid not, Jesu. The best example Beth gave is the one with Batman and Robin. As Batman and Robin ride into town and notice that everything is back to normal, every kid would expect, nay, demand some a reference to some sort of sinister conspiracy or some mind-altering gas released by Joker/The Penguin/Mole people/Ra's al Ghul, because that's how comic books work. If they saw Batman and Robin acting like nothing had ever happened and then just proceed to their meeting, they would impatienly skim through to the last page (because that's what kids to) expecting, nay, demanding to see one of Batman's adversaries boasting about how well the serum administered to Batman worked / how noone noticed that they replace Batman with a clone while the real one is tied up and tortured somewhere in the dungeons - because that's how comics work. If the kids reading the comic book were disappointed again, they would think really hard about buying the next edition. But if they did and that edition failed to provide any explanation to the mysterious occurrences mentioned, they would proceed to throwing the comic down in disgust and vowing never to buy it again.

[Jesurgislac]

Bulbul: Clearly, we were reading different comic books. In the ones I remember when I was a kid, a giant catastrophe in Gotham City - or Metropolis - would be neatly wrapped up at the end of the comic book. Begin the next comic book, and everything's back to what passes for normal.

Comic books these days have story arcs (at least, the ones I read these days do) but the comic books I looked at when I was a kid didn't. Superman could rescue Lois Lane from the kind of horrible danger that ought to have landed Lois Lane in therapy and given her flashbacks for the rest of her life: but, next week, it's as if it never happened.

Jesu:

I think that what bulbul's referring to is that within any one issue, the effects of what happened would be obvious and commented on. Everything might be reset and not worth noticing by the next issue, but for that week (or two), Batman and Robin or Superman would have to contend with all the problems the villian of the week caused them.

[bulbul]

Thanks anonymous, that's exactly what I meant. It's like the disaster that struck Gotham appeared on page 1 of the issue #245, affected Gotham and the Dynamic Duo the way Beth described on pp. 3-41 and then was suddenly forgotten for the rest of the issue. The hypothetical kid who has just bought the comic book could only hope that this was the beginning of some longer story arc, but once the kid found out that it obviously wasn't...

[Cactus Wren]

When I was putting together a Spoilers page, one of the questions was that readers list at least ten types of workers who would lose their jobs, and at least ten businesses or institutions that would be closed for lack of customers. The fact that Hattie's sister and Loretta (a stay-at-home-mother? the text is unclear) are the only ones to lose their jobs does seem a bit of an oversight.

Heck, just walk into the nearest supermarket or shopping mall! The grocery nearest to my home is a Bashas' store, and near the entrance is the "Cub House", a play center where customers can drop off their small kids while they shop. Now imagine -- every parent of small kids who used to shop at this Bashas' is now going to drive the extra mile or two to Fry's or Albertson's or Safeway, just to avoid having to look at the place where their kids used to play.

Walk down the breakfast cereal aisle, and watch the Cocoa Puffs and Cap'n Crunch and Lucky Charms piling up on the shelves. Similarly the cookie aisle, the Lunchables, the ice cream -- how much of the store's merchandise is unsalable, or is going to sell at a tenth of its previous rate? There's an entire aisle devoted to babyfood and disposable diapers.

There's a big play-center in the mall where I used to work: how long is it going to sit there, casting a pall over the entire northern half of the mall? (But who will dare to suggest removing it?) Watch the cobwebs accumulate at the toy store -- watch Toys R Us go under entirely, watch Disney follow it. (Giggle uncontrollably as Veggie Tales is next to go.) No more Fisher-Price. Mattel is gone -- bye-bye Barbie. Nobody but Brendan Powell Smith will be buying Legos any more.

Blue Bird Corporation loses a lot of its business. Minivans and family-size SUVs will sit at the car dealerships -- and sit, and sit. A huge segment of the world's economy has just evaporated! But to L&J ... it's as if nothing happened.

[ako]

See, one of the first things I thought of was my brother and his family. A schoolteacher, a daycare worker turned stay-at-home mom, and a baby. Not hard to envision the impact of the Rapture there.

One of the interesting things would be the prolonged panic in businesses that cater to older kids and teens. Sure, their customer base wouldn't have disappeared, but they'd have to worry about it possibly being the last generation of high school freshmen in existence. There would be a panic of several months before the first verified conceptions (since they raptured every fertilized egg, and a lot of women would figure they were sterile and stop checking).

After the pregnancies were confirmed, all elementary schools would be shut down but maintained for the new kids, and a lot of teachers would be laid off for years. There'd be a lot of districts worrying about how to close down various grades as the kids aged out, and reopen them when the new generation got ready. Which would all be horribly ironic, unless there was still school after the Second Coming.

[1982_Cygni]

Jeff and Bulbul,

Hee hee, I was waiting to see if someone would catch onto the fact that www.whatthehelljusthappened.com is NOT A REAL WEBSITE. ;) Not yet, anyway.

A recurring problem with logic in the LB series that keeps coming up in the posts is that of reproduction after the Rapture. If all the fetuses were raptured, wouldn't women's unfertilized ovae be too, rendering everyone sterile? Plus, let's not forget that every frozen embryo in every reproductive services clinic in the world would be raptured too, thus effectively ending any debate about what to do with stem cells and the "snowflake babies." I believe that if LaHaye and Jenkins did give it a moments' thought, they promptly ignored it because (1) they wanted to bring to life what Jesus said about "Woe to those who are with child in those times" (or something like that--keep in mind I do not have the whole Bible memorized) and (2) they wanted to make Chloe as much of a suffering saint as humanly possible.

And no, I don't think the elementary schools, daycare centers, Toys R' Us, Walt Disney World, etc. will be reopening in the End Days, considering all the obstacles to business--people dying of plagues and water poisoning, economic changes due to the Mark of the Beast, really nasty UV exposure so kids can't play outside, and all that. If flaming balls of coal are falling from the sky so that families can't go out to drive or to the mall, it really can't be good for business. Alas, I think the Hot Topics would still be open to attend to the cynical, fashion conscious late-Gen X and Gen Y kids' every fashion need.

[dr ngo]

In the event that the anonymous query above was genuine (and we've all had to learn this stuff sometime):

DNFTT = Do Not Feed The Troll. I.e., do not attempt to engage in discourse with those posters whose only aim is to derail discourse.

[chris Borthwick]

I'm out of the country and can't, but is there any other slackie out there who'd be prepared to spring to get the big guy a copy of the video game?

[Hagsrus]

If all the fetuses were raptured, wouldn't women's unfertilized ovae be too, rendering everyone sterile?

Why would they? Life/soul is supposed to begin at conception, not before sperm meets ovum.

[Sue W]

Just listen to you people. You talk about the disappearance of millions of adults and every child in the world like it's a Big Deal or something. I mean, come on now, there are much more exciting things afoot in this story. How can you expect the characters to concern themselves with a little thing like mass disaster when Romania has a new president?! :-D

[Alexela]

There would be a panic of several months before the first verified conceptions (since they raptured every fertilized egg, and a lot of women would figure they were sterile and stop checking).

Are you kidding? It would be the other way around. They'd have noticed all the babies go, and would be frantically checking themselves to within an inch of their life to make sure this state of affairs wasn't permanent. It's, what, a few weeks till the first reliable pregnancy tests? I bet CNN would be running a steady ticker on it.

[Jesurgislac]

Bulbul: It's like the disaster that struck Gotham appeared on page 1 of the issue #245, affected Gotham and the Dynamic Duo the way Beth described on pp. 3-41 and then was suddenly forgotten for the rest of the issue.

Yeah - but Left Behind is not - precisely - like that. If we consider each chapter to be one issue of a comic book, then we are now (in comic book terms) several issues away from the Rapture. Of course it's not worth referring to....

(Fred, am I right? How many chapters are we into the book now?)

[Axiomatic]

Just listen to you people. You talk about the disappearance of millions of adults and every child in the world like it's a Big Deal or something. I mean, come on now, there are much more exciting things afoot in this story. How can you expect the characters to concern themselves with a little thing like mass disaster when Romania has a new president?! :-D

Also, plotting Jews! PLOTTING JEWS!!!
I cannot stress this enough. There are snakes, I mean jews!

[Axiomatic]

Also, I think the Rapture would still be refered to.

"This is just like the time the Divine Rapturer stole Mary Lou's baby right out of her womb!"

[As excitingly depicted in issue #234, dear reader!]

[bulbul]

If we consider each chapter to be one issue of a comic book, then we are now (in comic book terms) several issues away from the Rapture.
Are you sure? We're barely halfway through and what we've had so far were mainly phone-calls, which are quite easy to translate into comic :o)
AFAIK, it's chapter 13.