L.B.: New Babylon

Left Behind, pp. 346-353

Buck Williams and Hattie Durham are in a cab on their way to meet Rayford and Chloe Steele at the airport, when Buck decides to swing by his office to pick up his cell phone and laptop.

Hattie waited in the cab, but she told him she was not going to be happy if she missed her appointment. Buck stood by the window of the cab. "I'll just be a minute," he said.

When Buck gets inside, however, he finds that Steve Plank and Stanton Bailey, Global Weekly's publisher, are waiting to talk to him. Their conversation takes place over the next nine pages, during which neither Buck nor the authors seems to remember that Hattie is stuck in a cab outside with the meter running.

In Bailey's office the boss got right to the point. "I'm gonna ask you two some pointed questions, and I want some quick and straight answers. A whole bunch of stuff is coming down right now, and we're gonna be on top of every bit of it."

This is how Bailey talks, a rat-a-tat stream of cliches:

"You brats think that because I'm two or three years from the pasture, I don't still have contacts, don't have my ear to the ground. Well, let me tell you, my phone's been ringing off the hook since you left here this morning, and I've got a gut feeling something big is coming down."

These stock phrases are Bailey's native language because, after all, he's a stock character, a type. He wasn't created by LaHaye and Jenkins, he was taken off the shelf ready-made and inserted into their story.

In most books, the arrival of such stock characters is a low point -- a lazy lapse by the author. Here in the World's Worst Books, however, these walking cliches actually stand out as more vivid than the characters around them. Readers already know Stanton Bailey. He is The Executive -- the no-nonsense, graying-at-the-temples white male authority figure we've met dozens of times before in other hastily written novels, movies and TV shows. A character actor with limited skills but the right "look" can make a long and lucrative career out of playing this type over and over, never having to change anything about his performance except his tie and the nameplate on his Big Desk. (Oddly, some of our elite political pundits seem to think that such a career as a paycheck actor is all the experience you need to become president.)

The Executive is hackneyed, trite and two-dimensional, but our longstanding familiarity with the type almost makes Bailey seem more real and more human than Buck, Rayford, Steve or any of the other original creations who surround him.

L&J have summoned this literary day laborer here for a bit of expository catch-up. They've got a lot to tell us about Carpathia's rise to power so they've brought in Bailey to summarize. Bailey has the inside scoop because he's a journalist. Our hero is also a journalist, of course, a choice of vocation that I think initially was intended to allow Buck to keep us up to date on these kinds of plot developments. But since Buck has been distracted lately other journalist-expositors like Bailey and Dan Bennett are having to pick up the slack.

Bailey has figured out some pieces of the puzzle and he wants Steve and Buck to fill him in on the rest. "I'm telling you that nothing you say here is gonna go past these walls, so I don't want you holdin' out on me," he tells them. That's a fine summary of Global Weekly's journalistic approach: Pursue the truth relentlessly, then make sure it never leaves the building.

Anyway, Bailey has figured out that Carpathia is angling for the position of U.N. secretary-general:

"Rumors are flying that Mwangati Ngumo is calling a press conference for late this afternoon ..."

How is this a "rumor"? Is Ngumo calling a press conference without actually telling the press? How would that work, exactly?

"... and everybody thinks he's stepping down as secretary-general."

"Really?" Plank said.

"Don't play dumb with me," Bailey growled. "It doesn't take a genius to figure what's happening here. If he's stepping down, your guy knows about it. You forget I was in charge of the African bureau when Botswana became an associate member of the European Common Market. Jonathan Stonagal had his fingers all over that, and everybody knows he's one of this Carpathia guy's angels. What's the connection?"

The entire scene plays out like this, Bailey "growls" a couple of lines of hard-boiled boilerplate boss-speak (Jenkins' grasp of the type is a bit unsteady, at times The Executive sounds more like The Police Sergeant) and then a couple of lines of PMD-world nonsense. Or he growls at Steve until he babbles something insane from off of the End-Times Checklist. The contrast between The Executive's no-nonsense persona and the raving nonsense he's actually saying is unintentionally delightful.

"I get a call from a guy who knows the vice president of Romania. Word over there is the guy has been asked to be prepared to run the day-to-day stuff indefinitely. He's not going to become the new president because they just got one, but that tells me Carpathia expects to be here a while."

Hmmm. Put that together with the fact that the guy sitting next to him just took a job as Carpathia's New York-based, English-speaking press secretary and I think he might be on to something. Bailey spends a couple of pages summarizing things we already knew before finally moving things forward a bit. The publisher of Seaboard Monthly had called, he said:

"... about how you, Cameron, and his guy that drowned last night were working the same angle on Carpathia, and whether I think you're going to mysteriously get dead, too. ... He said his guy had intended to take a slightly different approach -- you know, zig when everybody else is zagging. Miller was doing a story on the meaning behind the disappearances, which I know you were planning for an issue or two from now. ...

"An issue or two from now." So your kids -- everyone's kids -- vanish into thin air and Global Weekly decides to wait three weeks or a month to do a story on it. Talk about trying to "zig when everybody else is zagging."

To his credit, Bailey does say, later in this section, that the story on the disappearances is:

"... the one that interests me most. ... Sometimes I think we get too snooty as a newsmagazine and we forget that everyday people out there are scared to death, wanting to make some sense of all this."

I don't think "snooty" would be my first choice for a word to describe someone who doesn't regard the disappearance of every child on the planet as newsworthy. I'd lean more toward "sociopathic." But at least Bailey aims to correct for this snootiness. Eventually. In a month or so.

"... an issue or two from now. How that ties in with Carpathia, and why it might paint him in a dark light, I don't know. Do you?"

Buck shook his head. "I see them as two totally different pieces. ... I sure wouldn't have thought to somehow link Carpathia with the disappearances."

From Buck's point of view, the only thing the two stories have in common is that neither one is likely to ever be written.

Bailey turns back to Steve, demanding he tell them all about Carpathia's agenda for the United Nations. Normally, telling the publisher and editor of a major news magazine all about your boss' secret agenda is something you should try to avoid as a press secretary. But Steve knows these two. Buck is already elbow deep in covering Carpathia's (and Stonagal's) tracks, and Bailey is far more interested in collecting and guarding secrets than in publishing them. "I won't tell anyone," the publisher insists. (That could be etched over the front door of the building as the Weekly's motto: "We won't tell anyone.") So Steve knows he's safe here, safe among friends just like when Tim Russert has one of his friendly off-the-record chats with Karl Rove.

"He wants a new Security Council setup, which will include some of his own ideas for ambassadors."

"Like Todd-Cothran from England?" Buck said.

"Probably temporarily. He's not entirely pleased with that relationship, as you may know."

Buck suddenly realized that Steve knew everything.

Well, everything except how little the secretary-general has to do with the appointment of ambassadors to the U.N. Maybe the "new setup" Steve refers to means that all the ambassadors to the U.N. will be replaced by ambassadors from the U.N. Or maybe the authors don't understand that there's a difference.

"And?" Bailey pressed.

"He wants Ngumo personally to insist on him as his replacement, a large majority vote of the representatives, and two other things that, frankly, I don't think he'll get. ...

OK, brace yourself. Put one hand on either side of the frame of the looking glass. Take a deep breath. Ready? Now ... jump!

"... Militarily, he wants a commitment to disarmament from member nations, the destruction of 90 percent of their weapons, and the donations of the other 10 percent to the U.N."

"For peacekeeping purposes," Bailey said. "Naive, but logical sounding. You're right, he probably won't get that. What else?"

This is insurmountably ridiculous. Voluntary universal disarmament. Try to imagine a world in which such a thing is even remotely plausible, let alone "logical sounding." Such a world would be radically, irreconcilably different from this world in ways too numerous to count.

The story has just moved beyond unrealistic, beyond implausible, into the realm of hopelessly impossible.

And keep in mind that, for the authors and most of their millions of readers, this isn't merely a story. This is a fictional account of what they think of as actual events that will soon occur. Their unreal and impossible fiction is a reflection of their unreal and impossible beliefs about the actual world.

The authors produced this passage and they thought it sounded good. They thought they were offering a plausibly accurate description of the world and how it works. It needs to be said: Dr. Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins are profoundly stupid men.

But let's continue with Steve's summary of Carpathia's agenda:

"He wants to move the U.N."

"Move it?"

Steve nodded. ... "He wants to move it to Babylon."

"You're not serious."

"He is."

"I hear they've been renovating that city for years. Millions of dollars invested in making it, what, New Babylon?"

"Billions."

That's the first thing in this book that really does seem, as they say, "ripped from the headlines." American taxpayers, after all, have been "renovating that city for years" at a cost of billions of dollars. And the centerpiece of New Babylon is a secretive, palace-like compound "six times larger than the United Nations compound in New York." If I were the Antichrist, bent on world-domination, this is exactly the sort of place I would want for my headquarters. Here in the real world, of course, the United Nations refuses to have anything to do with the place.

"Think anyone will agree to that?"

"Depends how bad they want him," Steve chuckled. "He's on The Tonight Show tonight."

"He'll be more popular than ever!"

So the authors seem to think that Jay Leno will be among those left behind. The authors also seem to think that The Tonight Show is closely watched all over the world by the key decision-makers in every member nation of the U.N. Or I guess they think that everyone TiVo's Leno since, as has already been established a couple of chapters earlier, the whole world (except for Marge's husband) watches Nightline.

Steve says that right now Carpathia is "meeting with the heads of all those international groups that are in town for unity meetings." Kind of an awkward moment for Buck. He was supposed to be attending those meetings himself to report on them, so right now he is so busted.

Steve explains, matter-of-factly, a bit more of Nicolae's agenda:

"He's asking for resolutions supporting some of the things he wants to do. The seven-year peace treaty with Israel, in exchange for his ability to broker the desert-fertilizer formula. ..."

We were already told, way back on page 8, that Israel was at peace with all her neighbors. The only nations Israel wasn't at peace with were Russia and Ethiopia, whose militaries Israel destroyed without even lifting a finger. So it hardly seems they would be feeling an urgent need to trade their most precious asset in exchange for a peace treaty. Carpathia's universal disarmament scheme would also seem to make the need for any such treaty even less urgent. But so what if it doesn't make sense? It's in the Checklist, so it has to happen.

The chronology here also seems a bit dodgy. Nicolae will acquire the formula in order to become secretary-general, after which he will sign a peace treaty with Israel. In exchange for the peace treaty, Israel will give him the formula that will allow him to become secretary-general. Huh?

"... The establishment of one religion for the world, probably headquartered in Italy."

"He's not going to get far with the Jews on that one."

"They're an exception. He's going to help them rebuild their temple during the years of the peace treaty. He believes they deserve special treatment."

"And they do," Bailey said. "The man is brilliant. Not only have I never seen someone with such revolutionary ideas, but I've also never seen anyone who moves so quickly."

This is, again, insurmountably ridiculous. With the exception of "the Jews," who will be bought off with a new temple (that worked so well for Herod), none of the world's religious believers will have any objections to Nicolae's plans for a merger with a new "headquarters" (because all religions have "headquarters") in a non-neutral site.

L&J believe this sounds not just plausible but "brilliant" because in their minds, these religious believers are all the same. They are aware, dimly, that some of these believers call themselves "Hindus," while others call themselves "Muslims," "Buddhists," "Wiccans" or "Roman Catholics," but to L&J no such distinctions are really meaningful. All that matters is that these people are not RTCs. There are only two categories that do matter: the saved and the damned.

This goes back to what Rayford said a few pages back (see, "Mystery Dance"). "To people who didn't want to admit that God had been behind the disappearances," Rayford said to himself, "any other explanation would salve their consciences." From the authors' perspective, everyone knows that the Real True Christians have the Real True Truth. Those who reject becoming RTCs just "didn't want to admit" what they knew to be true, so they latched onto these other religions -- which they knew to be false -- to "salve their consciences." All that supposedly sectarian conflict occurring right now in New Babylon? That's just play-acting.

L&J seem to believe not just that all other religions are false, but that all other religions are insincere.

Comments

[Josh D]

Yayyy! Left Behind Friday is finally here!

[twig]

He is The Executive -- the no-nonsense, graying-at-the-temples white male authority figure we've met dozens of times before

"Meat! Some nice Christmas meat! No job!"

Yay, LB Friday! <3

[Richard Hershberger]

Botswana a member of the European Common Market???

[rampancy]

"Botswana a member of the European Common Market???"

Makes just about as much sense as tying South Africa together with "the Iraq" and "US Americans". Just ask Miss Teen South Carolina...

[SueW]

"...and I've got a gut feeling something big is coming down."

Something big, right. Not like that minor business with millions of people disappearing. *banging head on keyboard*

[Technomad]

This editor strikes me as being like Spider-Man's regular PITA/employer, J. Jonah Jameson---but without Jameson's deep human side.

Come to it---I wonder if super-heroes would be raptured? Would J'onn J'onnzz, the Martian Manhunter, be saved if he said the Magic Prayer Spell? And what if you had super-villains who were RTCs---maybe they did all those awful things because they couldn't stand being surrounded by sinners?

[ako]

Voluntary universal disarmament. Try to imagine a world in which such a thing is even remotely plausible, let alone "logical sounding."

I think the most convincing presentation of this was in a sci-fi novel suggesting that a future society could progressively, over the course of several decades, using considerable political finesse, build a system that would ultimately and eventually result in voluntary universal disarmament (with the caveat that 'voluntary' sometimes meant 'under substantial political pressure'). And that left me wondering about the credibility.

This plan is so stupid I'm tempted to accept it as an example of the Antichrist mind-whammy. But that still doesn't explain why the career journalists are saying, "Naive," instead of, "No, really. What's his actual plan?"

[Pseudowolf]

I know it shouldn't shock me by now, but I still can't get over how jaw-droppingly ignorant LH&J are about how the U.N. and the secretary-general actually work(s). They seem to think that the secretary-general appoints the ambassadors who represent the member countries instead of the other way around. He controls all the world's militaries, so he can decide that they all disarm. And he can make laws that all the countries have to follow which is how he can declare one official religion for the whole planet.

It goes beyond simple misunderstanding to, as I said, ignorance. Worse, it's *willful* ignorance given how easy it is to get information on the U.N. and how it operates.

It'd be hilarious if it weren't for the fact that they obviously believe their version to be true and they convince others of this in their writings.

[Pseudowolf]

I know it shouldn't shock me by now, but I still can't get over how jaw-droppingly ignorant LH&J are about how the U.N. and the secretary-general actually work(s). They seem to think that the secretary-general appoints the ambassadors who represent the member countries instead of the other way around. He controls all the world's militaries, so he can decide that they all disarm. And he can make laws that all the countries have to follow which is how he can declare one official religion for the whole planet.

It goes beyond simple misunderstanding to, as I said, ignorance. Worse, it's *willful* ignorance given how easy it is to get information on the U.N. and how it operates.

It'd be hilarious if it weren't for the fact that they obviously believe their version to be true and they convince others of this in their writings.

[Mike]

I used to spend a lot of time arguing over this stuff with my LB-style Christian friends. A lot of the discussions tended to end with me utterly speachless and dumbfounded, so they'd assume they had refuted me into silence. I just couldn't get them to see how ridiculous ideas like a one world government or religion are; the insanity runs deep.

[LMM]

L&J seem to believe not just that all other religions are false, but that all other religions are insincere.

And now, suddenly, I see how, precisely, fundamentalist pre-millenialists are anti-Semitic.

That's been bugging me for awhile. As an atheist, I'm damned. Screwed. Driven into hell, and nobody seems to care for a minute. Whereas, when a fraction of all Jews convert and the rest of them get sent into hell, we label L&J anti-Semitic.

But it's not that. It's that Judaism is, for whatever reason, fundamentally different from all other religions on the planet.

Everyone else is interchangible. We're all damned. But Jews? For whatever reason, they're damned in a *special* way.

[Joolya]

When I was in fifth grade I wrote a story about a CIA agent following international terrorist criminal something-or-others. What the terrorists had done or were planning to do was unclear, but this was around or just after the Iran-Contra hearings, so I had some vague awareness of corruption and terrorism connected to the Middle East. The CIA agent had a red and black sports car, which was lovingly illustrated by my classmate Justin, who used to hang upside-down on the monkey bars with me at recess. In the opening paragraphs, she is whipping down the highway to the airport to go undercover to catch the criminals and uncover the dirty dealings. I think there was a crooked CIA agent involved who turned out to be the main character's best friend or boss or something, but I never got that far into the story. Chapter One (which was as much as I ever wrote) was composed on a Tandy1000 and printed on that paper with the tear-off holes that you could fold up into dangly springs. It was called "The $25,000 Expedition." That seemed like a lot of money when I was ten.

Anyway, in this story, the agent got on a plane in New York which flew to Tehran with a stop-over in Baghdad. As in, "Flight 752 via Baghdad to Tehran is now boarding at gate 17."

See, I was astute enough as a ten-year-old to understand that some bad shit was going down in Iran, but not cognizant enough of world events or the logistics of air travel to know that no flight plan would ever, ever, ever go from JFK to Baghdad to Tehran - in 1988 or probably ever.

Every time there is an exposition of world events in LB, I reminded of "The 25,000 Expedition". Except that my story was more plausible and better written.

PS: I heart Fred and LB Fridays!

[mmack]

Their conversation takes place over the next nine pages, during which neither Buck nor the authors seems to remember that Hattie is stuck in a cab outside with the meter running.

The very first thought that came into my head after reading this:

"The white zone is for immediate loading and unloading of passengers only. There is no stopping in a red zone."

I wonder if the cab driver was Ted Striker?

[RickRS]

"OK, brace yourself. Put one hand on either side of the frame of the looking glass. Take a deep breath. Ready? Now ... jump!"

OK...
??????

Holy cr@p!!! I can't believe this!!!

"It needs to be said: Dr. Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins are profoundly stupid men."

Well, duh! After that idea, I felt like their collective IQ was dangerously close to single digits.

[mndean]

Unfortunately late, but I finally found a copy of the book which fills my requirements (that it cost me nothing, that nobody I knew would see me with it, that it can be used as toilet paper when I'm done), and now I can follow along!

[Robb]

I've got a gut feeling something big is coming down.

Or in Lucaspeak, all together now:

"I've got a bad feeling about this."
_____________

And what if you had super-villains who were RTCs---maybe they did all those awful things because they couldn't stand being surrounded by sinners?

That would be awesome: "Oh Lord, please bless my death ray, enlarge the the territory of my minions, and may my hands be your fist as I smash the unbelievers."

"Sir, you're needed in the Control Room"

"Not now, you fool, can't you see I'm praying!"

[Keith]

Seaboard Monthly sounds like a longshoreman's trade journal. Of course, that doesn't mean they couldn't scoop Global Weekly.

Aren't they moving rather fast with the PMD time line? They've still got 11 books to go and Nicky Mountaintop is already yodeling for a one-world religion, universal disarmament and relocating the great and Powerful UN to New Babylon? as if no one would notice that he seems to have cribbed his master plan for world domination from the back of the book they are all living in. My head, the spinning...

[Hibryd]

This book is not just stupid. It oozes stupid out between every single line. There is so, so much wrong with everything they're talking about.

No one in this room misses their kids or knows anyone who does, but they're all convinced a foriegn politician could become a simultaneous celebrity and a UN Secretary General capable of 1) Moving UN HQ, 2) Showing special favor to Israel (which is already sitting pretty on a mountain of cash with no enemies left), 3) getting everyone everywhere to throw away their weapons, and 4) establishing a new "World Religion" in Italy.

I would actually enjoy a good book about a evil mastermind who was able to do all of this, because it would have to involve a lot of brilliant planning, leveraging, blackmail, PR and propaganda, and take hundreds of pages to put one piece after another together. But we're not gonna get that, are we? (I suddenly got a mental image of Nicky dressed up as Genie. Crosses arms, blinks - POOF!)

[Cowboy Diva]

L&J seem to believe not just that all other religions are false, but that all other religions are insincere.

Thus spake Cinderella's Prince, to the Baker's wife as he leaves her behind in the woods, "I was raised to be charming, not sincere."

Anyway.

At some level, a lot of people think this way, about many aspects of the culture of others versus their own. Saying it out loud is often considered gauche, but there are still phrases like "No Irish Need Apply" and "Yankee, Go Home" that are pretty prevalent. Is this Christianity we're talking about, or xenophobia masked as Christianity, worsened by horribly terrible writing?

[Geds]

From Buck's point of view, the only thing the two stories have in common is that neither one is likely to ever be written.

Hee hee...

[JadarX]

This is insurmountably ridiculous. Voluntary universal disarmament. Try to imagine a world in which such a thing is even remotely plausible, let alone "logical sounding."

Hey, it worked in Superman 4!

[Magpie]

Come to it---I wonder if super-heroes would be raptured? Would J'onn J'onnzz, the Martian Manhunter, be saved if he said the Magic Prayer Spell? And what if you had super-villains who were RTCs---maybe they did all those awful things because they couldn't stand being surrounded by sinners?

Reading this made me realize how much God's Divine Plan seems like something a super-villain would do--zapping up all the children and everyone else until they truly worshipped him. What's that line from Superman II?

Official: Oh, God
Zod: (thin smile) Zod.

"We Won't Tell Anyone" is still cracking me up.

[Richard Hershberger]

"I used to spend a lot of time arguing over this stuff with my LB-style Christian friends. A lot of the discussions tended to end with me utterly speachless and dumbfounded, so they'd assume they had refuted me into silence. I just couldn't get them to see how ridiculous ideas like a one world government or religion are; the insanity runs deep."

In a similar vein, I know a guy who is worried about an Islamic invasion and overthrow of the U.S. I don't mean terror attacks, or even waves of immigration swamping the gene pool. He worries about every Muslim nation in the world uniting into a new Caliphate, building a fleet of warships, and transporting an army that will conquer the U.S. through military force. He believes that the war in Iraq and all that goes with it is both justified and necessary in order to prevent this.

He and I had argued in the past about Iraq and I never could quite figure him out. He's not stupid, nor is he irrational on many subjects, such as brewing good beer. But there is this peculiar paranoid aspect to his brain. And the thing is, if one accepts the Islamic Navy transporting the Caliphate's mighty army as a given, his logic kind of makes sense.

How to counter this argument? I can't even imagine. His view of reality is so different than mine that, for purposes of this topic at least, one (or both) of us is functionally insane. Reasoned discussion simply isn't in the picture.

[Rozzen]

That's been bugging me for awhile. As an atheist, I'm damned. Screwed. Driven into hell, and nobody seems to care for a minute. Whereas, when a fraction of all Jews convert and the rest of them get sent into hell, we label L&J anti-Semitic.

But it's not that. It's that Judaism is, for whatever reason, fundamentally different from all other religions on the planet.

Everyone else is interchangible. We're all damned. But Jews? For whatever reason, they're damned in a *special* way.

There was a radio program about Evangelical Fundies and their relationship to Israel where someone put it this way : EFs claim not to be antisemitic because they like Jews, they're for Israel and stuff. But the thing is they don't see Jews as people, or Israel as a nation ; they see them as a mythical entity. Just like antisemites do, except to EFs the mythical entity will bring on the End Times, while to antisemites it killed Jesus, or controls the world economy, or something equally nefarious.
Either way the Jews are dehumanized.

[LL]

I think I actually feel myself getting dumber every time I read LaJenkins' prose. It would explain a lot. Much as I think people who get all of their news from TV are actually less informed than people who don't watch any news at all on TV, LaJenkins make the people who read their books less intelligent by having read them.

Apropos of nothing (maybe), what's with Joel Osteen all over the TV lately? He was on one of the morning shows today (I was channel surfing), I think it was GMA. Is he replacing Falwell and Dobson as the go-to fundie for the media whenever they need someone to represent the Christians? Just curious.

[cjmr]

Osteen's got a new book out, so he's doing the touring the late shows thing.

[Geds]

Is he replacing Falwell and Dobson as the go-to fundie for the media whenever they need someone to represent the Christians? Just curious.

Can't shed any light on that, but he is pretty popular. Oh, and I think a new Osteen book is coming out/just came out.

As much as I despise Osteen, I think I'd prefer it if he did become the go-to. His message is pointless and fuzzy, which would be a nice change of pace from the hate speech...

[aunursa]

But so what if it doesn't make sense? It's in the Checklist, so it has to happen.

That is the entire LB series in a nutshell.

[Jim]

European Common Market

Arghhh, Maastricht was signed in 1992, a full three years before the book was published, and "European Union" had been in wide use since then. One would think that prophecy nuts might be interested enough in world events to pick up a newspaper from time to time. Apparently not.

[cjmr]

Nope. Newspapers are hot-beds of liberalism, don'tcha know?

[Richard Hershberger]

"...what's with Joel Osteen all over the TV lately? ... Is he replacing Falwell and Dobson as the go-to fundie for the media whenever they need someone to represent the Christians?"

I don't know about the recent spurt, but my understanding is that Osteen isn't really "fundie" so much as the logical conclusion of megachurches-as-feel-good-entertainment. I gather that he is effectively a motivational speaker overlaid with a veneer of Christianity. I can see how he would mesh well with the mainstream media.

[Nope]

Bailey turns back to Steve, demanding he tell them all about Carpathia's agenda for the United Nations. Normally, telling the publisher and editor of a major news magazine all about your boss' secret agenda is something you should try to avoid as a press secretary. But Steve knows these two.

<3

[aunursa]

Their conversation takes place over the next nine pages, during which neither Buck nor the authors seems to remember that Hattie is stuck in a cab outside with the meter running.

(Oddly, some of our elite political pundits seem to think that such a career as a paycheck actor is all the experience you need to become president.)

"Rumors are flying that Mwangati Ngumo is calling a press conference for late this afternoon ..." How is this a "rumor"? Is Ngumo calling a press conference without actually telling the press? How would that work, exactly?

So your kids -- everyone's kids -- vanish into thin air and Global Weekly decides to wait three weeks or a month to do a story on it. Talk about trying to "zig when everybody else is zagging."

L&J seem to believe not just that all other religions are false, but that all other religions are insincere.

All great points.

[Jim]

The very first thought that came into my head after reading this:

"The white zone is for immediate loading and unloading of passengers only. There is no stopping in a red zone."

The first thought that came into my head (and which I couldn't shake) when reading the Stanton Bailey dialogue, was "Lloyd Bridges in Airplane!" As in, "Picked the wrong week to sell out to the Antichrist."

[CapnAndy]

In a similar vein, I know a guy who is worried about an Islamic invasion and overthrow of the U.S. I don't mean terror attacks, or even waves of immigration swamping the gene pool. He worries about every Muslim nation in the world uniting into a new Caliphate, building a fleet of warships, and transporting an army that will conquer the U.S. through military force.

Ah, I see I've found a fellow Dan Simmons fan.

(For those who don't know: Dan Simmons is an unarguably brilliant science fiction writer who turns out amazing, inventive, original, and epic masterpieces. And in each one, there's a section that comes square out of the blue wherein Muslims are presented as foaming-at-the-mouth terrorist caricatures whose dual goals are to 1)form a global Caliphate and conquer the world and then 2)destroy the world. Because... Muslims blow up shit, right?)

[Rozzen]

For those who don't know: Dan Simmons is an unarguably brilliant science fiction writer who turns out amazing, inventive, original, and epic masterpieces. And in each one, there's a section that comes square out of the blue wherein Muslims are presented as foaming-at-the-mouth terrorist caricatures whose dual goals are to 1)form a global Caliphate and conquer the world and then 2)destroy the world. Because... Muslims blow up shit, right?

I guess I should be glad I haven't read beyond the two first Hyperion books... I certainly didn't notice Muslims in those, am I wrong ?

[Bruce in South Florida]

L&J seem to believe not just that all other religions are false, but that all other religions are insincere.

Your use of the word "insincere" here has me thinking about Linus, making his pumpkin patch the most "sincere" in the world so that The Great Pumpkin will visit him personally this Halloween.

If someone can explain to me how this is any different from ANY fundamentalism, other than fundamentalism's tendency to resort to violence, I'm all ears...

[cjmr's husband]

Threadjack:

MAN'S VOICE
Listen Betty, don't start up with your white zone shit again! There's just no stopping in a white zone.

LADY'S VOICE
Oh really, Vernon, why pretend, we both know perfectly well what it is you're talking about. You want me to have an abortion.

MAN'S VOICE
Its really the only sensible thing to do. If its done properly, therapeutically, there's no danger involved.

[Boze]

I had an opportunity over the weekend to buy the first eleven books in the series for eleven dollars. But I'd already read the first eleven and I thought that they were asking way too much.

The odd thing is that the "Left Behind" novels have been a victim of their own success, and in that way they've contributed to weakening their own theory. Now, if the Rapture actually happened, everyone in the world would have to admit, "This sounds unusually like what happened in the 'Left Behind' novels. Maybe we should think about this." And then there would be a potential for massive conversions, or at least massive questioning about the reasons behind the disappearances, neither of which actually occur in the novels. The great flaw in the whole "Left Behind" construction is that the "Left Behind" novels postulate a world in which "Left Behind" was never written.

If Jerry Jenkins had been a much better writer (which perhaps he is, in an alternate world), he could have thrown in a nice Philip K. Dickian-style subplot involving a group of people who figure out what's going on by reading a bad series of endtimes novels written before the disappearances occurred.

[CapnAndy]

I guess I should be glad I haven't read beyond the two first Hyperion books... I certainly didn't notice Muslims in those, am I wrong ?

Yes. There's the New Prophet and his slavering kill-the-infidels followers on New Riyadh who Kassad dispatches, and at the end of Fall of Hyperion there's a quick mention of how a radical sheik comes out of the desert on the same planet, takes over the government, and turns back the clock three thousand years. The population responds by "rioting in joy".

The absolute worst offense is in Olympos, where he completely derails the plot so a character can tour an ancient Global Caliphate Forces nuclear submarine and discover that it was loaded down with missiles with a payload of several thousand black holes. Oh, those kooky Muslims, always trying to destroy the entire planet even after they've conquered it!

[Lax Tool]

"Well, let me tell you, my phone's been ringing off the hook since you left here this morning, and I've got a gut feeling something big is coming down."

Aside from providing several tokens to the harboiled lingo bingo, isn't this a bit confusing. It seems like there should be some relationship between those phone calls and Bailey's "gut feeling," but that's never really established.

"Rumors are flying that Mwangati Ngumo is calling a press conference for late this afternoon ..."

How is this a "rumor"? Is Ngumo calling a press conference without actually telling the press? How would that work, exactly?

Maybe it's a secret press conference? Maybe it's some sort of advanced Rovian technique for handling the press. This way later on when the media start asking questions about why it would make sense for Israel to sign over the grow formula in exchange for something they already have, he'll just let out an exasperated sigh and condescendingly say, "I already outlined my plan in detail at last week's press conference, which you would know if you had bothered to show up." Then the reporters will be cowed into silence. Although considering the news media's current tactic for handling those in position of power, this might actually work.

[Kevin]

Umm, why does Israel need a peace treaty? Israel just smacked the combined might of Russia and Ethiopia (once, when Michael Jordan was still Michael Jordan, he scored 50 in a game. In the post game press conference, one of his teammates said something long the lines of "Yep, Me and Mike went for 51 tonight -- hard for anyone to beat us when we do that!") out of the sky without suffering so much as a wounded soldier. Right now, half the world is begging for peace form the Israelis, not the other way around.

And why, for that matter, is the world not consumed with not only the disappearance but the new wars in Russia and Africa? If something like that had ever happened, a Chechnyan army would be marching towards Moscow, the Chinese would be biting off chunks of Siberia, the Ukraine, the Baltic states and Japan would be settling old territoarial disputes by the simple expediency of marching into the disputed territory, and the UN, EU and NATO would be consumed with making sure that the chaos did not spill over into a general european war (Ethiopia would be being craved up by Somalia, Etereria, and the Sudan, but the powers that be in the real world cares all that much Africa, so LeHay and Jenkins can hardly be counte don to do otherwise)

Have LeHay and Jenkins ever actually met another human being?

"or those who don't know: Dan Simmons is an unarguably brilliant science fiction writer who turns out amazing, inventive, original, and epic masterpieces. And in each one, there's a section that comes square out of the blue wherein Muslims are presented as foaming-at-the-mouth terrorist caricatures whose dual goals are to 1)form a global Caliphate and conquer the world and then 2)destroy the world. Because... Muslims blow up shit, right?"

CapAndy -- I don't think thats fair to Simmons. Unless his later work has changed, I don't think thats a fair assessment of something like Hollow Man or the early Shrike work (anti-Catholcism, in the latter through, is pretty prevelant) I think that is idiocy on the matter of Islamic terrorism is a new phenomenon.

[Lax Tool]

If Jerry Jenkins had been a much better writer (which perhaps he is, in an alternate world), he could have thrown in a nice Philip K. Dickian-style subplot involving a group of people who figure out what's going on by reading a bad series of endtimes novels written before the disappearances occurred.

An end times storyline in which the rapture comes shortly after publication of an end times novel by Jenny Jerikins and LaLa Timaye. In one of the later installments, it is revealed that Jerikins and Timaye are AI programs, one programmed as a telephone switchboard operator, the other designed to set up travel arrangements ala Expedia.

[MikeJ]

Joolya, regarding your work, "The $25,000 Expedition", Zondervan books is on line 2.

As for the post, I understood what LaJenkins were saying here. As soon as the RTCs are out of the way, all of this will happen, logical or not. This is what the slavering hordes of secularists are baying for, and the only thing holding them back is people armed with the Truth voting for Bob Dole, or George Bush, or Fred Thompson.

I would already be running my bible to toilet paper recycling facility if those pesky RTCs weren't standing in my way!

[Jon]

And what if you had super-villains who were RTCs---maybe they did all those awful things because they couldn't stand being surrounded by sinners?

I know there have been a few like that, but the only one that springs immediately to mind is "The Crusader," a minor Thor villain.
Going outside of comics and into SF, I'm reminded of the character "Nirriti the Black," in Roger Zelazny's "Lord of Light." The story takes place far in the future on a distant colony world. Nirriti is a Crhistian, but the rest of his fellow colonists have used technology to turn themselves into self-styled gods from the Hindu pantheon, which definitely offends his sensibilites, and drives him to commit horrible acts of terrorism.

[mmack]

This is how Bailey talks, a rat-a-tat stream of cliches:

Now imagine reading this while doing a bad Jimmy Cagney impersonation:

"You dirty rats think that because I'm two or three years from the pasture, I don't still have contacts, don't have my ear to the ground. Well, let me tell you, see, my phone's been ringing off the hook since you left here this morning, and I've got a gut feeling something big is coming down. Nyah!"

It could work.

[Keith T.]

From Buck's point of view, the only thing the two stories have in common is that neither one is likely to ever be written.

L&J are showing their contempt for the lib-rull media. Of course the media would not think that a major Christian prophecy would be newsworthy, because the lib-rull media is too busy attacking God-fearing Americans and promoting free pornography and heroin for rapists. Or something.

As for the UN stuff... same thing. L&J know, because they have been taught it, that the UN is a grab for power by evil nations to control the good, Godly nations. They launch wars and decide world leaders. Ignore that it's a democratic body. Ignore that the ambassadors are solely appointed by their nations. Ignore that the UN does not actually have its own troops or weapons. L&J have, and they are doing just fine. And as most people don't know these things either, the poor suckers who read these books are completely hooked.

[mmack]

American taxpayers, after all, have been "renovating that city for years" at a cost of billions of dollars. And the centerpiece of New Babylon is a secretive, palace-like compound "six times larger than the United Nations compound in New York." If I were the Antichrist, bent on world-domination, this is exactly the sort of place I would want for my headquarters.

Yes, but Fred, give the AntiChrist some credit: He could probably stop people from mortaring and car-bombing the Green Zone. You know, that AntiChrist mind control ju-ju and all.

[Josh D]

Robb wrote
"And what if you had super-villains who were RTCs---maybe they did all those awful things because they couldn't stand being surrounded by sinners?

That would be awesome: "Oh Lord, please bless my death ray, enlarge the the territory of my minions, and may my hands be your fist as I smash the unbelievers."

"Sir, you're needed in the Control Room"

"Not now, you fool, can't you see I'm praying!"

Ha ha! I love reading everyone's comments on this stuff.

Oh, and I'm envisioning covers of Global Weekly
Newsweek font on the cover, but instead of the date right underneath:
"We won't tell anyone"
or at least "We won't tell anyone until no one would care anyway".
I mean, a month after the Event?

[mmack]

I think you're going to mysteriously get dead, too

Placing the snark aside for one second, right here for me is a shining example of how hideously bad L & J's writing is. NOBODY who has mastered English as their primary language would say "mysteriously get dead".

Kevin, to answer your question, if they actually have met a real person, he or she was a hack scriptwriter who mysteriously never got any of their scripts published.