L.B.: The Trepid Reporter

Left Behind, pp. 256-258

The rest of this chapter, as far as Buck Williams goes, involves him getting ready for his big interview with Nicolae Carpathia. Chaim Rosenzweig (who in addition to being a botanist and an electromagetismologist moonlights as a booking agent) has scheduled the interview for sometime after midnight:

"He has several interviews, mostly with television people, and then he will be live on ABC's Nightline with Wallace Theodore. Following that, he will return to his hotel and will be happy to give you an uninterrupted half hour."

So Buck's "exclusive" follows "several interviews" and requires him to show up at Nicolae's hotel room late at night. This is the sort of thing that gets Hattie in trouble later on. I also can't help but wonder if Ted Koppel's absence on Nightline is meant to suggest that he was among the disappeared. (And what's with his replacement's name? Is his co-host "June Ward"?)

He heads home to change out of his "George Oreskovich" costume (i.e., his baseball cap) and to shave and shower for the first time since his return to America. Steve Plank tags along to help him get ready, which makes him seem less like Buck's editor and boss and more like Duckie in Pretty in Pink.

They don't discuss Carpathia's "electromagnetism" theory of the disappearances -- even though just a few days ago Steve gave Buck the assignment of writing a feature-length cover story exploring just that topic. Nor do they discuss how it is that either of them still has a job when they haven't produced an issue of Global Weekly in more than a week.

Instead, they talk about the international banking conspiracy led by Jonathan Stonagal and about Carpathia's possible role in it. To be fair, it's been less than 48 hours since Buck narrowly escaped a car bombing due to his investigation of this conspiracy, so it seems reasonable to me that this topic would be something Buck would want to discuss. (Laura Bush would disagree with me on that point -- she would likely view this as another example of journalists' biased preoccupation with "the one bombing a day that discourages everybody.")

Buck's investigation of this conspiracy is the one storyline so far in Left Behind that doesn't directly involve events from the Bible Prophecy Checklist. The idea of powerful international bankers secretly plotting behind closed doors goes along with the fears of a coming one world government and the Mark of the Beast, so this subplot isn't much of a departure. But unlike Carpathia, these nefarious bankers don't correspond to supposedly biblical characters from the premillennial dispensationalist timeline. Since that timeline drives the plot of this book, it's hard to know what to make of it when we're told that, after his press conference, Carpathia "was seen in the company of Jonathan Stonagal."

Stonagal isn't the Beast, or the False Prophet, or the Whore of Babylon, so what's he doing here in the pages of Left Behind?

Mainly this subplot seems to exist so that we can see Buck playing the part of the Intrepid Reporter.

It's the idea of the reporter as action hero -- half detective, half super-spy. (Think Joel McCrea in Foreign Correspondent.) So we get many of the stock scenes from Intrepid Reporter movies. Buck receives a cryptic answering machine message and jets off to London to meet Dirk, his secretive inside source, only to find that Dirk is dead. It's an apparent suicide, but the Intrepid Reporter suspects foul play -- that Dirk was killed because he Knew Too Much. This is confirmed by the policeman who warns Buck to just drop it if he knows what's good for him. The policeman tells our Intrepid Reporter that Dirk was killed by Joshua Todd-Cothran, the outwardly respectable head of the London Stock Exchange (think Herbert Marshall in Foreign Correspondent) who secretly controls Scotland Yard while plotting "some clandestine thing" with international banker Jonathan Stonagal. And then the policeman is killed, the victim of a car bomb intended for the Intrepid Reporter himself because he's Getting Too Close.

Steve Plank and Buck Williams spend the next three pages discussing this conspiracy:

"But, Steve, you have to agree it's likely that Dirk Burton was murdered because he got too close to Todd-Cothran's secret connections with Stonagal's international group. If they wipe out people they see as their enemies -- even friends of their enemies like Alan Tompkins and I were -- where will they stop?"

And here, abruptly, Buck ceases to play the part of the Intrepid Reporter. In the standard version, this would be where the IR and his editor discuss whether they have enough evidence to go public with the story (which, usually, they don't, necessitating the elaborate set piece of the movie's final act). But neither Buck nor Steve seems to remember that they're in the journalism business. Neither of them recalls that the best weapon against shadowy conspiracies is the bright light of public exposure. It never occurs to either of these Woodward and Bernstein wannabes that the head of the London Stock Exchange killing a policeman might constitute news. When it comes to actually reporting on what he has learned, our Intrepid Reporter turns out to be extremely, well, trepid.

The bigger problem with all of this is that we never get even a hint of what "clandestine thing" it is that Stonagal and Mr. T-C are up to. We're told there's a conspiracy, but never what it is that they're conspiring to do. There's no maguffin.

Dirk suggested that the Stonagal group has been advocating the shift to a single global currency, but that hasn't been a secretive effort -- it's not even the sort of thing that could be done in secret. It's kind of a dumb idea, but there's nothing illegal about it. The only hint of illegal activity is when we're told that Stonagal owns different banks in different countries. Arranging that seems like it would involve a bit of graft and corruption to get around foreign ownership regulations. Of course, this also seems like a reason for Stonagal to oppose any plan to consolidate currencies -- the trading of which must be making him a fortune.

We learn later that Stonagal is pulling levers to orchestrate Carpathia's election to the post of U.N. secretary-general, and it's hinted darkly that this would make him the power behind the global throne. But we're never told what he intended to do with this supposed influence.

What could one do? What would it mean if you did have a corrupt secretary-general in your pocket? I suppose you'd have the inside track to no-bid contracts for refugee resettlement. Maybe a slice of the lucrative Darfur-observer money machine. And you could guarantee that officials would look the other way as your criminal empire smuggled goods from northern Cyprus to southern Cyprus.

This plot only makes sense in the context of the authors' peculiar understanding of the United Nations (see earlier, "Going to the UN"). According to this view, the U.N. secretary-general outranks the president of the United States. The president, after all, only rules over one country, while the secretary-general rules over the entire world. To LaHaye and Jenkins, Ban Ki-moon is not merely an international diplomat. He is the king of kings.

Comments

[Nell]

Fred, you've probably known of this forever, but I was amused to find the Slacktivist L.B. series linked in the Wikipedia entry for Left Behind: "Lengthy, ongoing critical review of the series from a Christian viewpoint".

What sent me to the entry was the question of when LB was written, in light of the UN criminal enterprise question. 1995. Before oil-for-food, before the Balkans rackets... There's been plenty of garden-variety corruption, of a bureaucratic/skimming kind, for decades, but I wonder if there was any real-world allusion at all.

[sdf (Stu)]

I think our host has spoken before about this cult of "sincerity" in evangelical art, where only the "message" is seen to be important. Actual artistic quality is a distant second -- or maybe even mistrusted as vaguely decadent.

Not coincidentally, this is also a pretty good description of Socialist Realism.

[Hibryd]

The only way this could be a more stereotypical LB chapter is if the conversation happened over the telephone.

You know, if Overlord Carpathia wants to shatter Steele, Buck, and the rest of the Tribulation Force, all he would have to do would be to cut gloabl communication lines for a week or so.

[nick]

Can these names that appear in the sequels sound any more ethnic? David Hassid, Ming Toy, Hannah Palemoon, Chang Wong, Tsion (pronounced 'Zion') Ben-Judah?

Chang Wong??? What, was "Ima Chinaman" taken?

[Ken]

The kid who wrote Eragon had an unusual advantage: his parents were publishers (small-press probably; they had published 3 books prior to Eragon) and willing to have him take a pretty extensive book tour (maybe because he's homeschooled? It certainly would allow a flexible schedule). If Wikipedia's to be believed, his book then caught the eye of Carl Hiassen (or his stepson, who told him about it) who in turn told Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. that it might be worth pubhlishing. -- Brandi

There's a website and LiveJournal called "Anti-Shurtugal" that's doing to Eragon what Slack's doing to LB. (A lot of the comments about "Pao Pao" -- CELEBRITY Author of Eragon -- pretty much trash homeschoolers using him as the type specimen.) I've posted anonymously on the LJ calling LB the Eragon of Christian Apocalyptic Fiction and pointing them back to here.

When I read this, I thought you meant that the writing was about on the order of The Eye of Argon. -- Francis

No, it's Eragon-level. For the "Eye of Argon" of Christian Apocalyptic Fiction, check out 666 by Salem Kirban (still in print and selling after over 30 years).

Stonagal's "International Group" represents, I assume, the infamous "Tri-Lateral Commission", since Stone-A-Gal is a lame play on Rock-A-Feller, and everyone knows that the Rockefellers run the world through the Tri-Lateral Commission. There must be some reason why the authors need to drag the poor Rockefellers into their skit. -- Mr Linzy

Because The Rockefellers (TM) and the TriLateral Commission (TM) have been staples of Conspiracy Theory since I was a kid, that's why.

And after a while, all these Conspiracy Theories (Air Force/UFOs, Communists under every bed along with Rockefellers/Bilderbergs/Rothschilds/Jooooooz, Jesuits/Mystery Babylon/Satan, BushHitler/9/11/WTC) all sound alike. Nothing original, just repeating the same over and over with different names. When are we going to see an ORIGINAL Conspiracy Theory -- like on the level of THE COMMUNIST GANGSTER COMPUTER GOD ON THE DARK SIDE OF THE MOON PARROTING PUPPET GANGSTER ASSASSINS THROUGH FRANKENSTEIN EARPHONE RADIO CONTROLS!!!!!!!!" or something?

"Good grief, I never realized that! This truly is cheesy fan-fiction: puns are an integral part of it. -- Anon

That's not a pun, that's a "See How Clever I Am/Nudge Nudge Wink Wink Know What I Mean Know What I Mean" GROANER.

Not coincidentally, this is also a pretty good description of Socialist Realism.

Or Socialist Realism's yin-yang reflection, "National Socialist Realism".

[Ken]

Anyway, on a much smaller scale, in my household it came down to an argument I once had with my father about imagination....he believed it was sinful. No really, he said that. It was sinful to imagine. Because, I guess, imagined thoughts hadn't been put through the church-o-filter and given the stamp of approval. All unapproved thoughts might come from the Devil, and so should be cast out. And we, as individuals, were not to trust ourselves regarding which thoughts were ok...we were to defer to the Authority. Which was called "God" but was of course "the church."

I hadn't yet read Orwell at that age, or I might have recognized the "whatever was not forbidden was mandatory" tone of all this. -- emjaybee

Which is why I refer to it as "Christ as The Party Line" theology.

[Zorya]

For the "Eye of Argon" of Christian Apocalyptic Fiction, check out 666 by Salem Kirban (still in print and selling after over 30 years).

For Real? It's still in print? Why? It makes LB look like high art. BTW, when we were helping my mother move into assisted living from her house 2 years ago I found my copy of "666" that I bought back in the 70's. I thought it was drek when I read it back then, too.

[Dr.Steve]

I just had to tell you.

Remeber those Amish schoolhouse shootings that happened about 6 months back? Well, they just finished building the new schoolhouse. What do you think they named it? "New Hope"

Of course in light of recent events that name seemed (wait for it.........wait for it.....) more appropriate than ever!

[cjmr's husband]

I didn't realize so many Amish were Star Wars fans.

[Ken]

For Real? It's still in print? Why? It makes LB look like high art. -- Zorya

Preacher friend and writing partner of mine said Kirban's publisher is a vanity-press operation. And that Kirban later went into fad diets, and that someone he knew got caught up in that.

Said Kirban fad diet consisted of nothing but bread, bread, bread, bread, and bread and also required you to measure and weigh every "steaming pile of what used to be bread" that came out the other end. And that Kirban's plug for this "Godly Diet" claimed it made your eyes glow with the presence of God or something like that.

I am not making this up.

[Ken]

Chang Wong??? What, was "Ima Chinaman" taken? -- Nick (presumably not a Romanian Robert Redford)

And what about "Longh Wangh", "Hung Lo", "Pun Tang", and "Phuc Yu"?

[cjmr]

Wouldn't that last one be Vietnamese, not Chinese? (Or is it Thai? I'm not an Asian language expert.)

[Professor P]

Ken, those names appear to be spurious.

[Mau]

I think our host has spoken before about this cult of "sincerity" in evangelical art, where only the "message" is seen to be important. Actual artistic quality is a distant second -- or maybe even mistrusted as vaguely decadent.

A former boss of mine used to manage one of those typical Christian Book Stores.... He told me that he had this beautiful landscape painting for sale, for a really reasonable price. It hung on the display wall, unsold, for weeks and weeks and weeks.... Then my boss got some Bible verse engraved in a little brass tag, attached it to the landscape painting's frame, doubled the price, and it sold that week.

Chang Wong??? What, was "Ima Chinaman" taken?

Well, it's not like "Ming Toy" is any better... and
"Ming Toy" is a girl, too.

[Nicole J. LeBoeuf-Little]

Gah! I haven't caught up reading this thread but I *must* report something!

So, I'm in the Cheektowaga Public Library right now (you would not believe the Amtrak layover changing trains on the way from Toronto to Chicago), and I was spinning through the YA Paperback racks, and I found something that made me grin like a loon.

Right next to all the Left Behind: The Kids books was a copy of Circle of Three #15: Initiation. This is a running YA series featuring... Wiccan teenagers. Yay!

Oh, they're as bad as you'd expect. The first six pages of #15 was full of "as you know, Moonbeam" moments, and I flipped ahead going, "Where's the plot? Where's the plot?" The first scene involved one of the main characters power-devouring her way through a sack of Oreos because she was depressed and frustrated that her friends got to be initiated into the coven while she didn't. Very, very "dumbed down for teens" is what I'm thinking.

But. That this series exists and is shelved right next to The Worst YA Series Of All Time makes me irrationally amused.

(Sadly, that there's only one on the rack while there's some 6 or 7 of the LB:tK on the same rack suggests to me that some local "do-gooders" are performing that old borrow-'em-and-lose-'em trick in order to Protect The Children. *sigh*)

[David Mathew]

There are people who borrow books from the library and then lose them on purpose in order to keep people from reading them? And they put them in book stores where someone can still find them, instead of just destroying them... not only is it senseless, it's inefficient as well. Way to go, dorks.

[hapax]

Yes, there are people like that. Lots of them. What is really sad is that when a book isn't returned to a public library, the librarian generally takes that as proof positive that it is a Really Popular Title and spend tax money on replacing it (with additional copies), all of which is money going to Evil Satanist Authors, encouraging them to write even more of those books. Meanwhile, these same numbskulls donate dozens of copies of every LB, Gilbert Morris, etc. title, convincing the librarian not to bother to spend tax money on books nobody wants to keep, and that will probably be donated sooner or later anyhow.

But I can speak with utter certainty that the reason there is only 1 CIRCLE OF THREE left on the rack is that they are very, very popular with real live teens (even here, in the buckle of the Bible Belt), and LB:The Kids are not. They are sheer fluff, it is true, but fluff that was written by someone who actually bothered to find out what kind of things teens WANT to read, rather than what a pair of old fundamentalist farts thinks they OUGHT to read.

[Constantine]

the Greatest Investigative Reporter of All Time, is fluent in English and no other language.

Similarly, Dr. Robert Langdon, protagonist of The Da Vinci Code, brilliant Harvard Professor of "Symbology", and religious art expert doesn't know how to speak any French.

[Ken]

Ken, those names appear to be spurious.

Actually, they were pseudo-Vietnamese place names from a "news report" in the Seventies movie Groove Tube. But tell me, after all the examples we've had of the LaHaye & Jenkins School of Ethnic Character Names, can you honestly say those are any worse?

[the opoponax]

@ Constantine --

even though you pretty much can't get a graduate degree in the humanities, liberal arts, or social sciences without a decent knowledge of French.

[Bugmaster]

Hahaha can you imagine what would happen to a Real True Christian (tm) teen -- assuming they actually exist -- if he picked up a Circle of Three book instead of LB, by mistake ? "Let's see what Jesus wants to teach me today... hmmm... summoning the powers of East and West ? Channeling the Mother Goddess through my being ? Wait... this is... aiieeeeeee *head explodes*". That'd be so cool.

[cjmr's husband]

What would be cool would be the slowly dawning realization of "waitaminute, the main character MIGHT NOT CONVERT!"

[Skyknight]

If I'm going to do Antichrist Figure names, I think I'll stick with references, rather than out-and-out puns. For one (specializing in things related to pride), I've come up with the given name Eliezer--a reference to Eliezer ben Hyrcanus (go find "Why the Jews Rejected Jesus" to see what I'm up to). Meanwhile, another antichrist (this one specializing in things related to sloth) bears the family name Laplace (q.v. Laplace's Demon; the idea here is fatalism).

And of course, the last part of the chimera, "Kingdom Come", is out (subtitle: The Final Victory). Copley Library just got five copies. I'm guessing LaHaye was trying to coordinate this with the beginning of the Holy Week?

[Jeff Weskamp]

"Hahaha, can you imagine what would happen to a Real True Christian (tm) teen -- assuming they actually exist -- if he picked up a Circle of Three book instead of LB, by mistake ?"

He or she would probably assume that the simple act of looking inside such a book had opened him/herself up to demonic infestation of some kind. Frank Peretti's books heavily feature this concept. And they describe "warfare prayers", i.e. exorcisms, to banish such demonic influences.

[Nicole J. LeBoeuf-Little]

Yes, there are people like that. Lots of them. What is really sad is that when a book isn't returned to a public library, the librarian generally takes that as proof positive that it is a Really Popular Title and spend tax money on replacing it (with additional copies), all of which is money going to Evil Satanist Authors, encouraging them to write even more of those books. Meanwhile, these same numbskulls donate dozens of copies of every LB, Gilbert Morris, etc. title, convincing the librarian not to bother to spend tax money on books nobody wants to keep, and that will probably be donated sooner or later anyhow.

hapax, that totally makes my day. I hadn't thought through the implications of the despicable practice (that of stealing library books as a form of censorship). The only problem is, if it results in the librarians buying more of the "objectionable" book, how is it I manage to always be visiting the library between the stealing and the restocking?

But I can speak with utter certainty that the reason there is only 1 CIRCLE OF THREE left on the rack is that they are very, very popular with real live teens (even here, in the buckle of the Bible Belt), and LB:The Kids are not. They are sheer fluff, it is true, but fluff that was written by someone who actually bothered to find out what kind of things teens WANT to read, rather than what a pair of old fundamentalist farts thinks they OUGHT to read.

Fluff or not, what little I read certainly seemed truer to teen behavior than the stiff and stilted Chick Tract crap in LB. The Oreo scene had me exasperated with its triviality, but the conversation around it had the right rhythms at least.

With stuff like Circle of Three on the shelves, why do the RTCs bother protesting Harry Potter? If they want to be outraged at something that's both aimed at youngsters and specifically teaches Wicca, why'd they skip over the stuff that actually says "Wicca" in it and go straight to the broomsticks and wands?

Maybe the RTCs, too, wish that magic really worked as it does at Hogwarts. It would make a more glamorous demon to do battle with than, say, me and my husband and our best friend sitting around a coffee shop table discussing plans for the upcoming Samhain ritual and party.

(Of course, Circle of Three glamorizes things a bit too, given the "As you know Bob" summary of previous plots that the Oreo-eating youngster rattled off, but it does seem to use real-life Wicca as a stepping-off point. The plots seem to hover closer to the real-life magic-user's perceived boundary of possible/impossible: making contact with ghosts to solve their murders and such like that. Or maybe I'm just talking out of my butt and need to actually read one of these before I go farther discussing it. I'd like to start with book 1 though.)

[X]

One of my distant cousins studies puritanism. Her observations seem germaine here, cos these fundies seem to work in the same way.

The stereotype, she said, was that a puritan is someone who lives in fear that someone, somewhere, might be having fun. The way it really works, though, I'm told, is more one of those "we're all in it together things." If someone starts giving in to temtpation and masturbating, say, they're not just imperalling themself, but they're letting the devil into the community - giving him a foothold of leverage as it were. As such, you're not just having a minor moment of personal weakness, you're letting the team down. Hence all the histrionic concern for what everyone else is doing.

It sounds like the RTC fundies have the hysteria down, but is it also a contamination type model like the puritans worked on?

[Bugmaster]

...why'd they skip over the stuff that actually says "Wicca" in it and go straight to the broomsticks and wands?

Because Harry Potter is actually popular. I haven't heard of Circle of Three until today, and I doubt I'm special in this regard.

[Ken]

With stuff like Circle of Three on the shelves, why do the RTCs bother protesting Harry Potter? If they want to be outraged at something that's both aimed at youngsters and specifically teaches Wicca, why'd they skip over the stuff that actually says "Wicca" in it and go straight to the broomsticks and wands?

I said the same thing when Philip Pullman's "Anti-Narnia" trilogy (Golden Compass, et al) surfaced a few years ago during the height of the Christians Against Harry Potter hysteria.

While all the escorts are off hysterically depth-charging a false lead, the real torpedoes bore into the opposite side of the convoy...