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

[Ken]

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.

No, Slack, Bailey's not an "Executive Stock Character".

He's the Walking Infodump.
Idiot Conversationalist, at your service.

But then, why do it in person instead of By Phone?

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

Let's hear it for the Original Name!

"Billions."

Does that include the cost of bulldozing seven artificial hills atop the archaeological site in order to fulfill End Time Prophecy? (Never mind the fact that this "secretive, palace-like compound" had to be under construction for several years without anyone ever knowing about it...) Break out that slinky red dress, Hattie the Hottie, and get your forehead tatted for your new home.

[ChristianPinko]

"you're going to mysteriously get dead, too"

Not only is this phrase made of lose, it is made of badly written lose.

[Rob]

"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."

For some reason, I always took this issue with Star Trek. They had access to other bits of 20th century entertainment – they even traveled here a few times. So how come, each time they come up with some ridiculous contrivance to solve the interchangeable plot complication of the week, Geordi doesn't turn to Data and say, "Hey! This is just like that one episode of Star Trek!"

I don't have that reaction to other future science fiction worlds. Just Star Trek. What's up with that?

[Steve]

"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."

That's because he's got one more dimension to him than the main characters.

[That fat guy, he's from China or something?]

“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”

Now, if I was discussing with someone a politician who had once appeared in a few cowboy films and I decided to make him sound like some ignorant old fool, I might decide not to mention anything about his political career, and concentrate on those movies. Heck, they weren't very good movies. Maybe a man who can't make a great movie won't make a very good President. There's no a lot of logic in that, but I could do it. Once upon a time a man had a proper career, he was apprenticed as a shoemaker aged 14, spent his whole life as a shoemaker, and died a shoemaker. That's how things ought to work in Fred Clark's world, and this, after all, is Fred Clark's blog.

Fred Thompson, of course, is a career TV actor. After studying politics at university he passed the bar, and got himself to Washington in time to make his name during Watergate. After his stints in the Senate, Fred Thompson decided to run for President of the USA. This is the sort of thing practically all TV actors do, and the most important thing to focus on, if you live in Fred Clark's world, is that despite this obvious lifelong focus on acting, Fred Thompson was never even in front of a camera until he was 43. So he's a failure as well as being unqualified for high office.

Next week, Fred Clark's description of Jesus "just some guy, not so great at woodwork, I wouldn't hire him" and of Confucius, "I've known people who were better at herding animals".

[rampancy]

@ Rob: I think the closest ST ever got was the part in First Contact when Cochrane says to Picard and his party: "So...that means you're all astronauts...on some kind of Star Trek?"

[Rozzen]

I don't have that reaction to other future science fiction worlds. Just Star Trek. What's up with that?

It makes sense to me, Star Trek is one of the few future science fiction worlds that really permeated our culture.
Even then, would they know about it a few centuries in the future ? It isn't clear... though Data should know all about it.

The thing with future science-fiction worlds, unless you assume that precognition is possible in your world then you're necessarily positing that your future's past doesn't include the story you're writing... otherwise what would be the odds ?
Left Behind however doesn't have this issue, the whole point of PMD is that precognition is possible. (with divine intervention only, but still possible).

Reminds me of the DS9 bits where they had a writer in the 60s United States writing DS9... that's majorly twisted, you're assuming that your story did exist in your future's past, but that it was written in totally different circumstances. By a character in your story. Hum.
Hey, that actually works out fine. I say Gene Roddenberry is actually a rogue timetraveller who worked on Kirk's Enterprise and decided to have fun with our century. All subsequent writers for Star Trek were hired because they were also timetravellers.
Hey, I can totally imagine the whole crew of the Enterprises coming here to play their own roles during their shore leave for a laugh! Or maybe they've been tricked by an alien into thinking they're in a holodeck !

OK, OK, I'm going to sleep now...

[aunursa]

So how come, each time they come up with some ridiculous contrivance to solve the interchangeable plot complication of the week, Geordi doesn't turn to Data and say, "Hey! This is just like that one episode of Star Trek!"

I don't recall Star Trek breaking the fourth wall. The closest they came was in the two-part TNG finale "All Good Things...", when Q threatened, "It's time to put an end to your trek through the stars" and in the movie "First Contact" when Zefram Cochran asked, "[Y]ou're all astronauts, on some kind of star trek?"

[aunursa]

Beat me by ONE MINUTE!

[G-Do]

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

If we hit that bull's eye, the rest of these dominoes will fall like a house of cards! Checkmate.

[Bugmaster]

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."

You should read Lord of Light. Make sure you read it all the way thgrough. Heh heh heh heh. [spoiler redacted]

[Simon St.Laurent]

Um, so are the dispensationalists worried about the US government building its own "New Babylon" in Baghdad, with the Green Zone and the hugely expensive (and huge) embassy?

I have to think they missed something in their script, and maybe they'll notice this in their next end times update.

[Elizabeth the Second? Couldn't fix my truck]

Simon, that's exactly what they're doing, but I think

(a) you forgot to follow the links - this is the web after all
(b) remember if you're one of the RTC you actually want God to destroy the world and torture people, it's a good thing to bring all this about

[Michele]

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

*splutter* That so totally works!! LOL!

[Hames]

I think that the key to this passage is one missing line, which unfortunately was missed off when the book was printed but now, thanks to careful investigation, I have discovered-
"As soon as Buck arrived he, Steve and Stanton began drinking heavily. They continued throughout the conversation."
It all fits with the scheme of what they say, as this is exactly the sort of thing you could hear in a student union bar at 2am.
"He's going to appoint new UN ambassadors."
"Good for him."
"He's going to move the UN headquarters to a completely different country."
"Sounds logical."
"In accordance with biblical prophecies."
"Of course."
"And he's going to merge all religions into one."
"The man's a genius!"
"Except the Jews."
"Well, obviously. Brilliant!"

[1982_Cygni]

Last night I was talking with a friend in Chicago about how Ann Coulter said on CNBC (I think, or maybe it was MSNBC) that Jews need to be "perfected." And not be the old atrocities like plastic surgery to look Anglo, but by accepting Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior.

In response, I composed this song, roughly to the tune of "If You Were Gay" from Avenue Q:

If there were no Jews
I'd have the blues
There'd be no Jon Stewart
To make me laugh at night...

If there were no Jews
I'd have the blues
We wouldn't have had that Einstein genius guy
Or Jeff Goldblum in "The Fly"...

Terrible, I know, but hey, if we were all goyim, wouldn't that just be boring? Frankly, I'm a Christian, but I think all the other major religions are perfectly valid (or invalid, if you're an atheist) expressions of rejoicing in and communicating with the divine, all perfectly valid (or invalid) expressions of human experience on this little, pale blue dot in the Cosmos.

[LMM]

Either way the Jews are dehumanized.

Perhaps, but so is everybody else on the freaking planet. We're *all* pawns.

So how come, each time they come up with some ridiculous contrivance to solve the interchangeable plot complication of the week, Geordi doesn't turn to Data and say, "Hey! This is just like that one episode of Star Trek!"

That, my friend, is what Galaxy Quest is about.

Hm. Thinking of fundies as hard-core Trekkies -- the kind who think the Enterprise will land tomorrow and prove that *they*, not the people who scorn them, are really right all along -- suddenly explains a lot.

[Rozzen]

"Either way the Jews are dehumanized."

Perhaps, but so is everybody else on the freaking planet. We're *all* pawns.

Yeah, but nobody else gets a whole testament to themselves after all... (well the Christians do but they're the protagonists of their own story so that doesn't count.)

[MikhailBorg]

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

Oops, I, er... already was.

So how come, Geordi doesn't turn to Data and say, "Hey! This is just like that one episode of Star Trek!"

Geek role-playing game moment:

Character in an Illuminated near-future game of secret societies insisted he was a time-traveler from the future. With the gamemaster's connivance, every so often he could predict the near future, but there was always an alternate explanation for his knowledge. No one really believed his claims, until one day, he and the other characters were sitting around, and an episode of a future series of Star Trek came on. One of the show's major characters, interestingly, looked exactly like him. For some reason, he went pale, and refused to mention the "future" ever again... despite the other characters' sudden great interest in his predictions.

[aunursa]

Brandon: I just wanted to tell you that I thought a lot about what you said.
Jason: It's okay, now listen --
Brandon: But I want you to know that I'm not a complete brain case, okay? I understand completely that it's just a TV show. I know there's no beryllium sphere...
Jason: Hold it.
Brandon: ...no digital conveyor, no ship...
Jason: Stop for a second, stop. It's all real.
Brandon: Oh my God, I knew it. I knew it! I knew it!

[Mau de Katt]

Stock Executive: "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.

ah-HAH! THIS is the explanation for why Buck is such a Dog-awful Investigative Reporter, and why Global Weekly never manages to put out an issue of anything at all, much less real news. It's The Librul Meedjah! ALL the media now is Librul Meedjah, because the Real True Media was run by Real True Christians, and they're all gone now. Who cares about all the children in the world gone missing? Evil Librul Secular Humanists HATE kids, they just want to abort them anyway (remember Hattie begging money to Save The Abortion Clinic, until there are more "unborn babies" to abort?") So why bother covering such a trivial occurence in your news magazine anyway? Obviously nobody in the world cares about it anymore, there are (two) people tripping and falling dead of heart attacks in Israel to focus on! Priorities, people, prioroties!

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.

EX-actly.

[Noah Brand]

Okay, I hate that I know this, but there used to be an official fanon explanation for why there's no Star Trek in the Star Trek universe.

In "City On The Edge Of Forever", McCoy or whoever it was loses his phaser, and an old bum accidentally vaporizes himself with it. That is the moment at which our timeline diverges from the Star Trek universe. In our universe, Star Trek became a cultural phenomenon, so when we developed warp drive and met the aliens and everything, we designed things differently so it wouldn't be just like old TV show. Consequently, the exact circumstances leading to the bum's vaporization never happened.

In the Trek universe, however, because of the bum's vaporization, his son grew up fatherless and angry, and became a hardened criminal. This criminal went on to kill a young motorcycle cop named Gene Roddenberry, before Gene was able to break into TV writing.

This theory was carefully developed, elaborated on, and taken seriously during the serious Cult Age of Trek fandom.

[Tara, Antisocial SocialWorker]

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

Sort of like the "People in [wherever we're at war] don't love their children the same way we do" rationalization.

Oh, and "snooty" was obviously a reference to how the media is run by "liberal elites." Doesn't Buck seem "elite" to you?

[Tara, Antisocial SocialWorker]

Dangit, Mau de Katt beat me by seconds!

[Liz]

What? No, really, what?

Every few weeks or so, Fred gets to yet another passage that simply blows my mind. The off-handed exchange of "Oh, and he's going to insist on one religion!" "Oh, that's brilliant!" without even a trace of sarcasm or doubt ... what?

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

Amen, amen, a thousand times amen.

[LMM]

Brandon: Oh my God, I knew it. I knew it! I knew it!

Except, of course, Trekkies still have a point of reference to reality. When you draw your conclusions about the future from a series of ancient writings of relatively questionable origin, translated from a language that no one you trust knows how to speak, there's no one -- and nothing -- on the planet that can prove to you that you're wrong.

And, alas, that's quite possibly the point.

[Vashti]

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.

Even in 1991, "Common Market" was an antique phrase. The name "European Union" replaced the intermediate term "European Community", which you still hear from time to time. You never even *heard* "Common Market" in the late 80s/early 90s - at least not on UK news.

[cminus]

"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.

There have been a few, but when I scan my memories it's a lot easier to come up with evil pagans than evil Christians in the comic books. It's almost harder even to come up with Christian villains than it is to come up with people who became villains when they lost their religious faith.

Still, I can add:

1. Rev. William Stryker, the genocidally-minded televangelist from the X-Men graphic novel "God Loves, Man Kills."

2. Silver Dagger, a vigilante Catholic priest bent on eliminating sorcery who has clashed with Dr. Strange.

3. The first Foolkiller, an evangelical Protestant vigilante whose hatreds included secular society. (The second and third Foolkillers left out the religious motivation and just killed criminals, although they were the kind of guys who would kill people for, say, drug possession.)

[YetAnotherKevin]

G-Do, you beat me to it.
But there's no point closing the barn door after the cat's spilled milk under the bridge.

[Karen]

Jim noted this above, but "Common Market" hasn't been in general use since before I was in high school, and I graduated in 1981. The actual name at the time of the Treaty of Rome was European Economic Community shorted to EEC. In the 80's, I recall "European Community" being used frequently. "Common Market" was shorthand, and "European Community Market" nonexistent. For one thing, no one but L & J and their geography-illiterate readers would need to be reminded that all Common Market countries were in Europe.

[Karen]

Damn, Vashti beat me to it. Cool screen name, by the way.

[Jon]

Regarding the whole Star Trek not exsiting as fiction in the Star Trek universe, I actually think about that sort of thing in other areas besides Star Trek. It isn't something that actually "bothers" me. It's just something to kind of pass the time thinking about when I'm bored.
I find it kind of interesting to think about how different things would be from our world in one where, for example, Superman actually exists, so there never was a fictional Superman character in the comics. The idea becomes progressively stranger as, according to the dictates of comic book time, Superman's arrival on earth moves further and further away from his arrival in fiction.
Where it really gets strange is when you have inter-company crossovers, with something like Batman vs. Predator, or Superman vs. Aliens, where you have to further posit that the Aliens and Predator franchises also don't exist those universes.
(The same is also true, of course, true within the Aliens and Predator comics and movies themselves.)
Then there were those godawful X-Men/Trek crossovers. Just a bad idea right from the start, but made even more bizarre by the notion of Trek not existing as fiction in the Marvel Universe. Not one X-Man says, "Hey! It's Captain Kirk!"
And of course, the X-Men didn't exist as fiction in the Trek universe either.
But, again, that's hardly the worst thing that can be said about those particular comics.
In any case, the whole thing is a narrative conceit that I don't think really gets explored enough in fiction, though I suppose it would be very easy to get so bogged down in speculating about alternate histories and popular cultures and meta-fiction that you fail to actually tell an interesting story.

[McJulie]

"... 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."

This particular LB entry reaches a new low in stupidity throughout, but I just can't get over this one religion thing. Universal disarmament seems more plausible -- it's at least the kind of thing where you can see how somebody somewhere might think it's a good idea.

But establishing one religion for the entire world? And nobody in the conversation even seems to think that's weird? How does that even work?

"Oh, Bob, I know you used to be a Catholic, but now you're a Carpathian Universalist by decree of the UN."

What happens if you don't want to join? Are all non-Carpathian churches now illegal? Is atheism illegal? Who's going to enforce this?

I mean, these people are very casually talking about an act of supreme repression on par with the ex Soviet Union at its worst, and they're talking about doing it to the entire world, and they don't even react.

[MikeJ]

Too many people get hung up on the time travel aspect of trek existing or not in the fiction of the fictional world. How about something closer to home? Jerry Seinfeld was a comedian, and he got a sitcom, but it was a flop that nobody watched (or something like that. I wasn't watching Seinfeld prime by that point.)

[ako]

This particular LB entry reaches a new low in stupidity throughout, but I just can't get over this one religion thing. Universal disarmament seems more plausible -- it's at least the kind of thing where you can see how somebody somewhere might think it's a good idea.

And someone would want it, other than the power-hungry. I mean, even if you wanted to become a Carpathian Universalist, why would you want to make everyone else do it, except as a way to control them? Forcing people to be part of a religion they don't believe in to end religious conflict doesn't even have the naive logic of "If we take away all the weapons, NO MORE WAR!"

And not that many people are going to be the Dalai Pope of Carpathianism, so they don't get anything except a new religion crammed down their throat. Why would they think this was a good thing?

[Skyknight]

You'd think a better idea would be to efface all weapons, period. Let's see deadly war break out without a single fighter jet, artifice-bacterium vial, machine gun, revolver, or even DAGGER on the face of the planet.

{sigh} Except, there's this little problem displayed by a few lines in Shakespeare's History of King Henry VI, Part I's Act III, Scene I. Keep in mind that the servingmen of the Bishop of Winchester and the Duke of Gloucester have been forbidden to carry arms because of their tendency to attack each other on sight, no matter how many innocent Londoners are around. So now what do they do? Fill their pockets with stones and barrage each other with THOSE...

Henry VI: We charge you, on allegiance to ourself,
To hold your slaughtering hands and keep the peace.
Pray, uncle Gloucester, mitigate this strife.
First Servingman of Gloucester: Nay, if we be forbidden stones, we'll fall to it with our teeth.

Good luck ridding them of teeth or nails. {sigh} You'd think there'd be SOME way to kick evil back out of the cosmos without tainting ourselves or forcing God to do it for us. Where is it?!

[MikeJ]

Skynight, your argument sounds a lot like when the fundegelicals say, "the poor will always be with us, so fuck 'em."

[Andy]

In a later volume, one of the main characters specifically states that since members of non-Christian religions didn't really believe in their faiths anyway, joining the one-world religion was no big deal for them. Besides being quite insulting to Muslims, Buddhists, and Hindus (among others), it still doesn't explain why they would so eagerly join Carpathia's cult. At worst, it seems that they would be content to remain nominal Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, or whatever. I heartily second McJulie's characterization of this as "weird".

(I think the best explanation is the one already given, namely that a one-world religion is on the prophecy checklist and so must happen, however improbably.)

[Boze]

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

I feel like this could be an excellent summation of the whole corpus of Fred's "Left Behind" Collection.

[Skyknight]

I'm more frustrated than resigned. That wasn't a rhetorical question at the end...Unlike certain other people (read: cynics), I'm not going to taint myself with sloth by giving up. I just wish I knew how to go about the quest. Suggestions? (And no, "minding one's own business" and its ilk don't count. That's sloth incarnate...)

[Comrade Rutherford]

"a one-world religion is on the prophecy checklist and so must happen, however improbably."

And since it's a given that it must happen, why bother explaining how or why? The characters have better things to do, like make some more phone calls.

There have been decades of peace activists working through dozens of NGOs on weapons disarmament (mostly nuclear weapons - and there's a bitter divide between the arms control faction and the total abolition faction). I haven't heard of even a single NGO demanding the adoption of a single global New Age religion (other than US's support of the Moonies).

The UN is dominated by the US and our veto powers. The US controls about 85% of the decisions made by the UN. But that's all changing now that the Bush Admin has attained it's goal of reducing American influence across the globe.

And poor Hattie, still sitting in that cab with the meter running for hours now...

[G-Do]

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?

In the "1602" alternative storyline, major characters from the Marvel Universe are reincarnated in the year 1602 CE and get involved in political intrigue, old-Europe-style. I mention it because in the story, Magneto is a Grand Inquisitor, which is pretty badass. Not quite the Protestant fundamentalist you're shooting for, but I guess it's as close as we're gonna get.

[mcc]

"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.

So... wait. Is that part realistic or unrealistic?

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

"... 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."

There's... there's just so much that's weird here, I don't even know what's strangest.

That upon announcing that all world religions would be eliminated, the only reaction the other reporter has is to abruptly wonder how "the Jews" will react? Is that how they view the Jewish community? As something that just randomly crops up every so often to object to otherwise-sound plans?

That they think it's a "brilliant... revolutionary idea" to end all religions on earth except one? Oh, yes, nobody's ever had that idea before.

That both Carpathia, and the reporters, seem to view the one-world-religion thing as just a toss-off at the end of Carpathia's other plans? End all armies, arbitrarily recenter the U.N.'s 60-year operation... oh, and just for the heck of it, we'll abolish all world religion. Not only is this less relevant to the U.N.'s mission or capabilities than the disarmament thing, it's probably even less plausible than the armies thing. The one-world-religion thing is the biggest project on his list, not just dessert. I think the middle east lately has shown us it's much easier to buy off governments than it is a random bunch of ragtag religious extremists (though for that matter, in general, it's also been shown that disarming the world's governments wouldn't do all that much for world peace, because the arms we're mostly worried about these days are the ones in the hands of non-state actors).

There's perhaps the weirdest thing about this: L&J do, I suppose in one way of looking at it, show some small measure of consideration to the Jewish community, by briefly acknowledging that maybe they wouldn't tend to immediately acquiesce to the merging of their religion with everyone else's. But do L&J even think to comment, here or elsewhere, on the quiet and complete disappearance of Islam from the face of the planet that their antichrist's little plan features as one of its details?

I mean, it's odd how L&J think about Israel so obsessively and yet seem to be so oblivious to any of the details of the situation there.

I mean, brushing off the disappearance or subsumation of, I don't know, Buddhism can maybe be excused: it might not be something on the mind of the New York newspaper reporters in this scene, and the series might not even need to explicitly address it-- we might reasonably assume without being told that some degree of conflict or upheaval occurs in East Asia in response to Carpathia's plans, but it occurs offscreen. Just because an event in a novel is world-changing doesn't mean the author has to iterate the responses of the entire world.

But a significant portion of the action in this novel series takes place in or in the immediate vicinity of Israel! Wouldn't it be relevant that that general area does contain, you know, more than one religion? Yes, L&J are writing "pre-9/11", so perhaps it's not reasonable for them to immediately think of Islam as a first-order geopolitical force. But surely these guys would have received, in the period 1950-1995, some indications that Islamic identity does sort of have an occasional impact on politics in the middle east? Thus far in this series Islam doesn't even seem to exist. In a previous section of the book the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (which has both religious and nationalist components to it just for starters), was ended just by Israel literally buying off the statehood of its neighbors with its miracle-gro formula; now that same formula is going to be used, again, to buy off its neighbors' very religion. (Although it's unclear, what does Israel get out of this transaction? That their religion will be allowed to exist after all the others are eliminated? Oh, right...)

I do wonder how they might have done some of that differently given a chance to rewrite it today. Given time passed since the writing of the Left Behind books, it does seem that they eventually realized the middle east is not just important as a receptacle for the location of Israel (itself only important as a receptacle for the location of various events on the end-times checklist); as I infer from a banner of theirs I saw a few years back: "IRAQ WAR: GOD'S PLAN? JOIN THE LAHAYE BIBLE PROPHESY CLUB"...

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?

Hm. So although I was just complaining about this myself, there does seem to be one logical way to clear up the entire chain of events here, assuming we can discard Steve's babbling as simply confused. All the events do seem to follow, as long as we take it as a given from step one that Carpathia has control of the formula. This isn't hard to take as a given, since Carpathia has Chaim Rosenzweig, the brilliant botanist inventor of the formula, unusually enough working as his personal secretary. The way I would explain this, were there some need for me to do so, is that Carpathia brings Rosenzweig under his sway, and the rest of events fall like dominoes: He uses the formula to get into the U.N. top position and from there broker control of the world's armies and religions, and the state of Israel cooperates with what Carpathia wants because he-- since he already holds their miracle-gro formula-- holds the upper hand, and they're trying to negotiate the least painful loss of it possible.

What might Carpathia have done to have exerted such influence on Rosenzweig, that Rosenzweig would sell out his own nation and give his life's work over solely to the personal benefit of Carpathia? Well, I think some of our local fanfic authors might have a clue...

[Comrade Rutherford]

""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."

This sounds just like the 'liberal' US media:

And in other news today, President-For-Life Bush ordered the FBI to detain Congress inside the Capitol Building until they concede all Legislative power to the Vice-President.... BREAKING NEWS- This just in, Britany Spear's shaven vulva has made another appearance! We go now, LIVE, to Beaverly Hills where top Investigative Journalist Buck Williams has been standing by all day!

[Patrick Phelan]

I presume that all fiction based on Real Earth is set in an alternate reality with only one difference, and that difference is that the fiction doesn't exist in it.

Unless there's more than one difference, for example, vampires are real, sunlight can be weaponised, people think like LaHaye and Jenkins characters...

I only really have three things to say.

1 - About Superman not existing as Superman in Superman comics... no, wait, Superman not existing as Superman comics in Superman comics... YOU KNOW WHAT I MEAN... I liked what Watchmen did there. There were some superhero comics. Then there were actual superheroes. Then, because there really were superheroes, no one wanted to read escapism about superheroes, because you could just read the newspaper. So, instead, everyone read comics about pirates.

And that is awesome.

2 -
NICOLAE: Look! I've set up a new one-world religion! I call it (Patrick forgets what he actually calls it) Unigod!
WORSHIPPER: ...does Unigod actually provide for my faith-related needs?
NICOLAE: No, but it's so convenient!
WORSHIPPER: Sign me up, you old Antichrist!
UNIGOD: (devours Earth, turns Megagod into Galvagod)

Nicolae, I want to like you. A good villain goes a long way towards redeeming a story. If Dick Cheney was fictional, for example, I wouldn't miss a single episode of And Then The Republicans Took Over The World And Everybody Died. But, seriously, if instead of performing careful midra... exegesis (those special, special Jews are going elsewhere), guided by your own agenda, to consult with all major religious leaders, to slowly persuade people of your new world order - you're just going to dump Unigod on the world with a very bad marketing campaign...

...well, I'm sorry. I won't be making an AMV of you any time soon.

(Could you pass this note to Mewtwo?)

3 - I'D say "mysteriously get dead", dammit! "Mysteriously get dead" is a GREAT thing to say!

[Comrade Rutherford]

"Thus far in this series Islam doesn't even seem to exist"

Since the Bible was written before the invention of Islam, therefore it does NOT exist in the future when the Rapture®™ takes place...

[SueW]

"... 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."

He's not going to get ANYWHERE with ANYONE on that one. Don't these morons even stop and ask what the hell would be the point of One World Religion? No one bats an eye, no one asks "Which religion?", they just casually mention this hare-brained idea like it's the sort of scheme that secretary-generals of the U.N. dream up all the time.

Don't you love this line:

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."

"No, I would never ever dream that there is any connection, I don't know nuthin about what the Antichrist, I mean, Carpathia has to do with the Rapture, I mean, disappearances. I didn't read the book jacket or anything." He already knows where this is going (being the author's Mary Sue), but has to keep covering it up. :-D

[Technomad]

Let me see...if you had RTC super-villains, wouldn't the heroes have to be atheists?

"Look! Up in the sky! It's Madalyn Murray O'Hair!"

"NO!"

"It's Christopher Hitchens!"

"NO! It's Atheism-Man! Faster than a morning-after conversion, more fervent than a television network run by evangelicals, it's Atheism-Man! Fighting for truth, justice, and free abortions on demand! He's off to challenge his worst enemy, Bible-Thumper!"

Hmmm...this has possibilities, doesn't it, now?

[MikhailBorg]

UNIGOD: (devours Earth, turns Megagod into Galvagod)

Oh, now there's a thing of beauty. Especially if Galvagod's voiced by Leonard Nimoy in the movie.

[Fraser]

The indie comic "Elementals" had an evangelical super-team, the Rapture--heroic in intent, but villainous in practice (if I remember rightly, hunting down the heroes as Agents of Evil Magic).
2)DC Comics do exist in the DC universe: In the 40s we saw Wildcat get inspired by Green Lantern's comic-book origin, and several stories (at least in the Silver Age) have established that the main super-heroes have their own books (and in some cases TV shows). However, it's true they were not the same books that we read--they never showed the super-heroes' identities, obviously, and (according to at least one Batman story) were closer to true-crime comics. Likewise, the Batman TV show in the DC Universe was a true-crime series about his greatest cases, not the campy show we got.
Marvel, of course, established early on that Marvel Comics in the Marvel Universe does authorized, licensed versions of the Fantastic Four and other super-heroes. But it's true that since Reed took the FF into space 10-12 years ago (as someone once put it "10 years before now, whenever now is") Marvel-in-the-Marvel-Universe either never amounted to much or Lee and Kirby made their rep chronicling the First Line (the super-team retconned to fill the gap between the early fifties and the dawn of the FF).
3)We know the Trek universe diverged from ours or Khan would already have made his bid to conquer the world.
My big problem with Trek and 20th-century culture, however, is exactly the opposite: Apparently nobody in the next few hundred years will come up with anything knew because they don't know anything later than 20th-century culture in Trek. Ryker loves classic jazz, Picard enjoys Chandleresque hardboiled detectives, Data loves Sherlock Holmes, Paris like 30s SF serials, etc. So if this was the Trek universe I should probably give up on writing now.