L.B.: The Holy Hand

Left Behind, pp. 393-395

Here, just after he finished typing Chapter 21 and just before he began churning out the first and only draft of Chapter 22, here is where I think Jerry Jenkins paused briefly to skim over the previous 392 pages.

In doing so it seems he noticed a few -- but only a few -- mistakes. He seems to have reconsidered the impact of the whole Babel Fish incident -- the explicitly divine harmless destruction of thousands of incoming nuclear warheads high above Israel. And he seems to have realized, after repeated proselytization scenes and one full-blown conversion, that he hasn't provided even a hint of what his evangelists and evangelizees were discussing (we'll get to that next week).

Most writers, realizing such problems in their initial draft, would have gone back to those earlier pages and rewritten those scenes. That is, actually, what "writer" means. But Jenkins doesn't work like that. He doesn't do rewrites. Instead, he just begins typing Chapter 22, proceeding with the next scene -- Buck's Brief Dark Night of the Soul -- while trying to squeeze in as many retroactive corrections as he can manage. This works about as well as when someone who only partially recalls the joke they are trying to tell keeps doubling back to correct the set-up or to insert something they'd left out.

The chapter begins with Buck in his apartment, unable to sleep. What the writers tell us, actually, is that he "did not sleep well." They also tell us that he is pacing in his living room. I, for one, have usually found it difficult to sleep well while pacing in my living room.

Partly he was excited about his morning surprise. He could only hope Chloe would be happy about it. The larger part of his mind reeled with wonder. If this was true, all that Rayford Steele had postulated -- and Buck knew instinctively that if any of it was true, all of it was true -- why had it taken Buck a lifetime to come to it? Could he have been searching for this all the time, hardly knowing he was looking?

I don't follow the logic, or even the "instinct," of the idea that "if any of it was true, all of it was true." It seems perfectly reasonable to say, for example, that Jesus' prediction in his mini-apocalypse of "wars and rumors of wars" and of "famines and earthquakes in many places" has proven quite accurate without having to therefore embrace all the nuttery in Tim LaHaye's or Hal Lindsay's prophecy cult.

"If any of it was true, all of it was true" seems to be simply another version of the fundamentalist insistence that if any of it is not true, then none of it is true. This is the house-of-cards implication fundies draw from their notion of biblical "inerrancy" which, again, has very little to do with the supposed inerrancy of what the Bible actually says and everything to do with their own alleged inerrancy as its interpreters. This is what makes fundies so vehement over things that have no biblical basis -- from the chronologies of LaHaye and Bishop Usher, to the insistence that David never danced, Jesus never drank or that the Book of Isaiah had a single author. Question any of that and they will respond as though you were denying the divinity of Christ or the very existence of God. All of that makes fundamentalism a very fragile construct, which is why it has to be guarded so fiercely. "If any .. then all" may just be the flip-side of that construct.

Alternatively, it could just be an expression of LaHaye's conspiratorial side. He was once a lecturer for the John Birch Society and still advocates many of their convoluted notions about how the world "really" works. "If any of it is true, all of it is true," sounds like the sort of thing someone would say to you just before they tell you about Groom Lake or Rose Cheramie or the Trilateral Commission.

The rest of this, Buck's literal restlessness and his lifelong search, seems to be shooting for something like St. Augustine's "our hearts are restless until they rest in God." That gets a bit confused here -- and even more so in the pages to come -- due to Buck having been simultaneously touched by the Holy Spirit and stricken with Cupid's arrow. Yet for all of his initial infatuation with Chloe, she's not the Steele he can't stop raving about:

Yet even Captain Steele -- an organized, analytical airline pilot -- had missed it ...

Oh Captain! my Captain! I have all due respect for airline pilots. They have a difficult job with little margin for error. But this recurring motif -- that airline pilots should be regarded with reverence and awe -- is just getting silly. I can't figure out why pilots should be considered particularly "analytical." Nor do I understand why being organized and analytical would qualify one as a spiritual guru. (Tell me, O Certified Public Accountant, what is the summum bonum?)

Abruptly, Buck begins a two-page meditative flashback on his experience at ground zero during the divinely thwarted Russo-Ethiopian attack on Israel. (Buck was there to interview Chaim Rosenzweig, who had won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry despite not being an airline pilot.)

The Holy Land attack had been a watershed even in his life. He had stared his own mortality in the face ...

This is, again, why Buck's epiphanies ring so hollow. He crosses the watershed and the water is still flowing in the same direction. His life didn't change. The experience was not a watershed; it wasn't even a water closet. Back in the original description of Buck's experience we read that:

Buck admitted, if only to himself, that he became a believer in God that day. ... Christian friends wanted Buck to take the next step and believe in Christ, now that he was so clearly spiritually attuned. He wasn't prepared to go that far, but he was certainly a different person and a different journalist from then on. To him, nothing was beyond belief.

Aside from these two assertions, 379 pages apart, Buck never seems particularly "spiritually attuned." And in the more recent instance of his "staring his own mortality in the face," his response was less spiritual and more pragmatic -- he cut a deal with Carpathia to bury a story in exchange for his own life. (Also, what "Christian friends"? Lucinda and who else?)

Back to the current, revised and updated flashback:

He had stared his own mortality in the face and had to acknowledge that something otherworldly -- yes, supernatural, something directly from God almighty -- had been thrust upon those dusty hills in the form of a fire in the sky. And he had known beyond a doubt for the first time in his life that unexplainable things out there could not be dissected and evaluated scientifically from a detached Ivy League perspective.

Wait, which was it? Upon those dusty hills? Or in the sky? Never mind. What's more confusing here is the same-page flip-flop from that little anti-intellectual shot to this, just one paragraph later:

Everyone in the world, at least those intellectually honest with themselves, had to admit there was a* God after that night.

So being all Ivy-League intellectual is Bad, but being intellectually honest is Good. And if you don't believe in this particular concept of God, then you're not intellectually honest and therefore an intellectual. Or something.

We get several more paragraphs here about how incredibly amazingly incredible and amazing this explicit miracle was and about how it left observers with no choice but to accept it as proof of the existence of God. Nice of you to catch up with your readers, Mr. Jenkins, we've pretty much realized that since back on page 12. We figured it out when, the night after personally swatting aside all of those missiles and planes, God appeared on a special two-hour Larry King Live to talk about it.

Mixed in with all of this miracle flashback is Buck's rumination on something else he finds awe-inspiring -- his own talent as the Greatest Investigative Reporter of All Time:

Buck had always prided himself on standing apart from the pack, for including the human, the everyday, the everyman element in his stories when others resisted such vulnerability. This skill allowed readers to identify with him, to taste and feel and smell those things most important to them. But he had still been able, even after his closest brush with death, to let the reader live it without revealing Buck's own deep angst about the very existence of God.

So he "became a believer in God that day," yet he has some "deep angst" about it. And after that event "everyone in the world ... had to admit that there was a God," but Buck left that out of his story. Like Marty DiBergi, Buck was more interested in making sure that readers could "smell those things most important to them." We're told that Buck captured those smells so vividly that he was awarded the Hemingway Prize for his report of the Holy Hand over the Holy Land, yet we readers are only allowed a single glimpse at the words Buck set down with such apart-from-the-pack skill:

To say the Israelis were caught off guard, Cameron Williams had written, was like saying the Great Wall of China was long.

This gives us a glimpse into Buck's apparently collaborative process as a writer:

BUCK: The Israeli's were sooo caught off guard.

STEVE: ...

BUCK: I said, the Israeli's were soooo caught off guard ...

STEVE: Oh, sorry. Right. How caught off guard were they?

After witnessing Explicit Divine Intervention No. 1 in Israel, Buck then -- along with the rest of the world -- witnessed EDI No. 2, the Event itself:

Not that many months later came the great disappearance of millions around the world. Dozens had vanished from the plane in which he was a passenger. What more did he need? It already seemed as if he were living in a science fiction thriller.** Without question he had lived through the most cataclysmic event in history.

Odd that Buck seems to think that living through "the most cataclysmic event in history" somehow separates him from everyone else -- the other 4+ billion people who lived through it too. Yet despite all the ret-conned "deep angst" in this section, neither of the global-scale EDI's really seemed to impress him terribly deeply or to force him to change his agenda. ("The most cataclysmic event in history? Yeah, I'll look into it, but first I gotta go check on my friend Dirk ...") Neither of those was really, for Buck, a "watershed event in his life."

But Rayford's description of the Two Witnesses and the Trip 'n' Die Guys -- that rendered him sweaty and speechless.

Buck realized he'd not had a second to think in the last two weeks. ...

Amidst all the retroactive revisionism of this section I've decided to read this as Jenkins' own apology, or at least his excuse, for not integrating any of this into the preceding 390 pages.

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

* Why just one? The freaky hail-and-meteor storm and the mystic, protective fire across the sky was clearly the work of a god (or perhaps of Dr. Stephen Strange -- it was certainly more his style), but how could you be sure which one? Yes, the protection of Israel in particular would seem to point toward their God (or to a certain Miss Rosenberg), but it could also have been the handiwork of some angry Chechnyan and Somali deities who just really hated the Russians and their Ethiopian allies. Or maybe it wasn't supernatural at all, merely a gesture of gratitude by some technologically advanced alien race who had used Dr. R's miracle formula to revitalize their once-dying planet.

** I've been trying to classify that according to the TV Tropes categories. Buck seems to think he's being genre savvy, which he's not, but he's not quite genre blind either, having read the back of the book along with everyone else. I want to describe this as something like "misplaced genre savvy," maybe The Man Who Knew Too Little?

Comments

[Elmo]

This flashback is exactly what I would expect from someone who has been churning out daily comic strips and suddenly discovers that he needs to explain something that happened 2 weeks ago and is already in print.

[Spherical Time]

The problem is that this is "The Man Who Knew Too Little" without the revelation at the end in which the character realizes that he's been wrong all along.

[Comrade Rutherford]

Off topic, slightly.

Just go read this:
A Heathen's Guide to the Rapture
http://www.alternet.org/module/printversion/73108

[Mouse]

The Turkey City Lexicon has some entries dealing with the "feels like a sci-fi novel" kind of revelations. http://www.sfwa.org/writing/turkeycity.html

[mmack]

God appeared on a special two-hour Larry King Live to talk about it.

"My guest tonight is a towering figure in scripture, theology, music, books, and movies. He is referred to as Jehovah, Yahweh, Allah, the Almighty, and among friends, The G-man. My special guest tonight, promoting his new book I Am He Who Is: God."

"Thank you Larry, it's a pleasure to be here."

[Geds]

Dammit, Fred. Why'd you have to go link to TV Tropes. Now my whole afternoon is shot...

Also, as someone who has a book sitting around that took the better part of four years to write and still isn't right, I can totally agree on that whole re-write thing. It's just not ready. I'm not looking to make it perfect, I'm just looking to make it right.

[twig]

BUCK: I said, the Israeli's were soooo caught off guard ...

<3 LB Fridays.

[Richard Hershberger]

"This is the house-of-cards implication fundies draw from their notion of biblical "inerrancy" which, again, has very little to do with the supposed inerrancy of what the Bible actually says and everything to do with their own alleged inerrancy as its interpreters."

It's worse than that. The assertion is not that their interpretation of scripture is better than others', but that they aren't interpreting scripture. Rather, they are reading the plain meaning. Since this meaning is plain, anyone who disagrees (by "interpreting") is either a scoundrel or a fool.

Of course they are interpreting, but there is a peculiar fetish in much of modern American Protestantism where it is absolutely anathema to admit this. I once attended a service where the sermon was about a chapter from Romans. The preacher told us that when Paul wrote about the Greeks and the Jews, we should understand "Greeks" to mean anyone not a Jew. That is, Paul wasn't merely discussing the inhabitants of Palestine and the inhabitants of the lower end of the Balkan peninsula. I absolutely agree with this interpretation. But I was startled later in the service to be informed that in this church they did not indulge in any "interpretation" of scripture. Uh... They just did. That's when I realized that "interpret" had lost any meaning beyond "disagree with me".

[Jos]

Well, TV Tropes may Ruin Your Life, but at least you'll be entertained while it's getting ruined.

[mmack]

Most writers, realizing such problems in their initial draft, would have gone back to those earlier pages and rewritten those scenes. That is, actually, what "writer" means. But Jenkins doesn't work like that. He doesn't do rewrites. Instead, he just begins typing Chapter 22, proceeding with the next scene

Sounds like Jenkins writes novels like the Big Three used to build cars in the bad old days: Just slap 'er together and send 'er down the line, and don't stop the line, folks!

I wonder if Left Behind is a Monday or a Friday novel?

[Sarah Dylan Breuer]

The most disturbing thing about the LB books, from my view, is how little the writers show any care or compassion for people -- especially in comparison to how much they care about being RIGHT. And mostly what they think they're right about seems to be that Jesus cared more about being right than about people. The core confession of Christian faith, it seems to me, is that God's character and will for humanity is revealed in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. Core to that confession -- especially from St. Paul's view, if 1 Cor. 15 is any indication -- is that the risen Jesus and judge of the nations is the very same person as the one who went about teaching, healing, and confronting powers that oppress people, who died on a Roman cross rather than exercise violent resistance, and who spoke words of forgiveness even from the cross.

Furthermore, Christians believe that the risen Jesus is present wherever two or three gather in his name, so we're not anticipating a "Second Coming" of Jesus -- that's what we call "Easter." We're not even anticipating a "Third Coming" of Jesus -- we believe Jesus is present wherever two or three are gathered in his name. So we're waiting for the parousia, roughly the Twenty Billionth Coming (just a guess) of Jesus -- risen Christ who has authority over the nations, and the same guy who taught and healed in Galilee.

So why on earth, given our experience of Jesus' character and behavior over the last nineteen billion (or thereabouts) times Jesus has shown up among us, do LaHaye and Jenkins think that Jesus is going to have some kind of sudden personality transplant and show up as the Christinator to make millions of people suffer horribly before dying slowly?

It's a psychological puzzle.

[practicallyevil]

(Also, what "friends"? Lucinda and who else?)

Fixed this for you Fred.

[Ken]

Oh Captain! my Captain! -- Slack

First thing that came to mind:

"Captain Tightpants
Will save the day;
He'll protect you
If you're not Gay..."
-- "Reavers' Song" on YouTube

Second thing (besides the groaning about the truly bad writing):

You know what this is, everybody? It's the first part of the Big Conversion Scene after the Altar Call Ending; if it follows the Conventional Christian Fiction formula, we can expect our Self-Insertion GIRAT to Say the Magic Words/Get SAVED! (TM) in next Friday's installment. (This is CBA-sanctioned; It Is THAT predictable.)

Never mind that (as was pointed out two weeks ago), Buck Jenkins screwed up the Altar Call Ending completely with only a third-person summarization of Rayford's Christless/Gospelless End Time Prophecy "sermon". (Not even mentioning if our Dashing Heroic Airline Captain's PMD/End Time Prophecy lecture -- listened to by all parties with (literally) worshipful attention -- non-sequitered into an Altar Call; I've seen that happen IRL.)

Conventional Christian Fiction Trope: The Altar Call Ending; end the book by directly preaching a "Sinner's Prayer" salvation sermon to the reader, either by breaking the fourth wall directly or by idiot conversation/infodump proxy using the main/viewpoint character as a reader stand-in.

Conventional Christian APOCALYPTIC Fiction Trope: The Talking-head Summary Ending of each major scene, where the characters (who spend most of their time passively observing the predestined Apocalyptic Events) turn to the reader and explain at length how What We Just Saw Fulfills Such-and-such End Time Prophecy. Done in the same manner as the Altar Call ending, either by breaking the fourth wall to directly lecture the reader or by idiot conversation infodump.

[Caravelle]

(Buck was there to interview Chaim Rosenzweig, who had won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry despite not being an airline pilot.)

That made me giggle. Thanks for the laughs, Fred !

[jamoche]

Christian friends wanted Buck to take the next step and believe in Christ, now that he was so clearly spiritually attuned

Yeah, because that's my first reaction to seeing someone who is "clearly spiritually attuned".

This makes no sense - normal human behaviour is not like this; but wouldn't normal RTCs assume that if you were "clearly spiritually attuned" you'd found the only God there was to find? Oh, but he didn't say the magic words - now I've got it.

fire in the sky

Because I'm in the choir, and because I'm very good at remembering music, my mind is now running lyrics that have the refrain "Lord, to whom shall we go? You alone have the words that will live beyond our grave." Never having been one of the proof-texting verse-memorising types of Christians, I have no idea if the authors meant that to happen, but it does rather fit the "if any, then all" theme.

[Jeff]

This skill allowed readers to identify with him, to taste and feel and smell those things most important to them.

And where, pray, is the evidence for this? We have no sample of his reportage (said with the french accent, of course), nor even "reaction shot" of someone reading one of his stories. He'd have to file a story for them to read it, but in the Dali-esque land-and-timescape of LB, that's a mere quibble. All we know of him, from his converstions, indicates that this is a lie.

Since it's not true, does that mean that none of LB is true?

[hapax]

jamoche, it will reveal the depths of my bad musical taste to note that the words "fire in the sky" will indelibly imprint a John Denver soundtrack in my head for the rest of the afternoon...

[damnedyankee]

I dunno, something as blatant as the missiles going "poof" seems more like something Zatanna might do ("Raeppasid selssim!") rather than Dr. Strange. She likes the over-the-top special effects.

BUCK: The Israeli's were sooo caught off guard. STEVE: ...

BUCK: I said, the Israeli's were soooo caught off guard ...

STEVE: Oh, sorry. Right. How caught off guard were they?

And now I'm picturing Buck hosting the Match Game with Bret Summers and Charles Nelson Reilly exchanging barbs in the background...

[mmack]

and show up as the Christinator

Sarah, I read that and got this mental picture of Jesus with an Ahhhhnold accent.

Christinator: "I'm a friend of Chloe Steele. I was told she was here. Could I see her please?"

Cop: "No, you can't see her she's making a statement."

Christinator: "Where is she?"

Cop: "It may take a while. Want to wait? There's a bench over there."

Christinator: "I'll be back!" (ascends into heaven)

[Kevin]

It's worse than that. The assertion is not that their interpretation of scripture is better than others', but that they aren't interpreting scripture. Rather, they are reading the plain meaning. Since this meaning is plain, anyone who disagrees (by "interpreting") is either a scoundrel or a fool

And It's even worse than that. They tell their believers that they are simply repeating the plain and clear meaning of the words in the Bible. So when people go read the Bible and find that the words do not explicitly say what the preacher said they did, or that the preacher had to bend and twist them out of all recognition to get them to mean what the preacher wanted them to mean, it is an instant crisis of faith. The Word is true and plain and clear to all good and Goldy men, right? So why can't I see what the minister sees?

And so the parishioner is left with trusting him or herself or the combined weight of everything they have ever been taught is good and righteous and wholesome and the knowledge that all of their friends and families can see the plain meaning the minister sees. It's a horrible thing to do to a person.

Furthermore, Christians believe that the risen Jesus is present wherever two or three gather in his name, so we're not anticipating a "Second Coming" of Jesus -- that's what we call "Easter." We're not even anticipating a "Third Coming" of Jesus -- we believe Jesus is present wherever two or three are gathered in his name. So we're waiting for the parousia, roughly the Twenty Billionth Coming (just a guess) of Jesus -- risen Christ who has authority over the nations, and the same guy who taught and healed in Galilee.

So why on earth, given our experience of Jesus' character and behavior over the last nineteen billion (or thereabouts) times Jesus has shown up among us, do LaHaye and Jenkins think that Jesus is going to have some kind of sudden personality transplant and show up as the Christinator to make millions of people suffer horribly before dying slowly?

Partly becasue I am Catholic, I think, I have always thought you could read the story of the Apocalypse as the story of Christ failing His temptation for at least a time. Since Christ is as much Man as God, He would be subject to the same kinds of pain, temptation, and human emotional failings as the rest of us. The bloody apocalypse could be seen as the tail of what happens when Jesus gives into His righteous anger and acts on the very human temptation of inflicting revenge in the name of justice and punishment in the name of teaching.

[Ken]

If any of it was true, all of it was true" seems to be simply another version of the fundamentalist insistence that if any of it is not true, then none of it is true. This is the house-of-cards implication fundies draw from their notion of biblical "inerrancy" which, again, has very little to do with the supposed inerrancy of what the Bible actually says and everything to do with their own alleged inerrancy as its interpreters. -- Slack

Internet Monk's been doing a series of posts this week (mid-January 2008) about the subject of Inerrancy (and is getting a lot of flesh-to-pile-of-rocks hassle over it, to the point he had to shut down comments on a couple threads). Links:
* My Theology Can Beat Up Your Theology, 14 Jan 2008.
* Links to Inerrancy posts/essays, 15 Jan 2008.
* What I Did With the Bible I Don't Believe, 16 Jan 2008.
* IMonk Radio Podcast #85, 18 Jan 2008.

[damnedyankee]

Christinator: "I'll be back!" (ascends into heaven)

Win.

[hapax]

damnedyankee, Match Game would require at least one obligatory sniggering reference to "making whoopie" in every chapter. Try Hollywood Squares instead, with a cell phone in the center square instead of Paul Lynde.

[mmack]

BUCK: The Israeli's were sooo caught off guard.

STEVE: ...

BUCK: I said, the Israeli's were soooo caught off guard ...

STEVE: Oh, sorry. Right. How caught off guard were they?

And now I'm picturing Buck hosting the Match Game with Bret Summers and Charles Nelson Reilly exchanging barbs in the background...

I see Buck standing in front of a brick wall on a stage with a microphone in front of him a la Jerry Seinfeld.

"What is the deal with Nicholae Carpathia? Have you seen this guy? . . . "

[Robb]

"If any of it was true, all of it was true" seems to be simply another version of the fundamentalist insistence that if any of it is not true, then none of it is true.

I wish I could remember when it was that my epistemology broke from this, not that it was any single event, but I wish it was. I'd point to that time/event as my arrival into (relative) maturity. It probably was around the first time I read Scandal of the Evangelical Mind (which, not coincidentally, is displaying on the syllabus to the side as I type this), though the theology classes (& my professors) I was taking at the time probably helped a fair bit as well.

It's funny to look back on this mindset, though, because I don't understand it anymore. It's like those Magic Eye puzzles, where you can see it for a while, then focus your eyes on something else, and when you turn back to the puzzle, it's gone, and you can't get it back. In the case of my fundie meta-narrative mindset, I don't want it back, but I do sometimes wish I could remember the intellectual justifications I used on myself.

*****

Oh Captain! my Captain! I have all due respect for airline pilots.

...and then it hit me: an idea for a Right Behind story so awesome, it could only have - well, I guess there's not any hyperbole that could be attached to it yet. But it's there in my head. Could one of the RB admins send an email to robb[dawt]blazey[at]gmail[dawt]kham to get me on there?

[aunursa]

If this was true, all that Rayford Steele had postulated -- and Buck knew instinctively that if any of it was true, all of it was true

It reminds me of Christian evangelists who tell Jews that Christianity is nothing more than Judaism plus Jesus. Supposedly if I were to come to believe that Jesus was the Jewish Messiah, then it would logically follow that the entire New Testament is the divine word of God, and the Evangelical position on the nature of God (i.e. a Trinity), the nature of humanity (i.e. sinful), the nature of angels (i.e. having free will), and every other theological disagreement was not only correct, but so obviously true that by accepting Jesus, I could not even envision any other possibility.

You see this more in the sequels -- when the Trib Force spiritual leader, Tsion ben Judah takes an active role and pronounces PMD doctrine as if it were actually derived from the NT.

[damnedyankee]

hapax: "Making whoopee" was The Newlywed Game.

[greygelgoog]

"Why just one? The freaky hail-and-meteor storm and the mystic, protective fire across the sky was clearly the work of a god (or perhaps of Dr. Stephen Strange -- it was certainly more his style), but how could you be sure which one?"

Considering the depiction of God in these books, I'm willing to accept that this was the work of Azathoth the Blind Demon-Sultan who sits enthroned at the center of Ultimate Chaos.

[Praline]

why had it taken Buck a lifetime to come to it? Could he have been searching for this all the time, hardly knowing he was looking?

Or could it be because he's a contrived fictional character being forced to accept a whole load of nonsense because of one badly-written scene?

These being books designed to appeal to people who already believe, that has a dog-whistle air. It's a reassuring concept to people who've been PMDs all their lives that, fundamentally, everybody has been a PMD all their lives, but some of them just haven't realised it yet. It removes the possibility of all that frightening disagreement.

Buck had always prided himself on standing apart from the pack, for including the human, the everyday, the everyman element in his stories when others resisted such vulnerability.

And what? I'm sorry, what? Including the human and the everyday is standing apart from the pack? What does this pack consist of, playing cards?

This is the kind of appalling contradiction you get into when you try to be a Great Humanitarian and a snob in the same sentence.

Also, I'm sure Chloe has been frowned upon for trying to be 'intellectually honest' herself, earlier, when she was expressing doubts about the whole prophecy thang. I guess 'intellectual honesty' joins all those other phrases on the list of things that are only acceptable when they're doing what L&J want. Number, oh, five hundred and twenty-seven on the list, it looks like!

[damnedyankee]

Yes, I watch the Game Show Network far too much for my own mental stability. My dreams are a fevered miasma of polyester suits and orange shag carpeting...

[Jon]

"Lord, to whom shall we go? You alone have the words that will live beyond our grave."

In my church it was "Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life." When I saw your comment the sound of my former pastor's voice singing that line popped up in my head after close to twenty years.

[mmack]

I think damnedyankee and hapax are on to something re: Buck as a gameshow host. Maybe Fred could imagine Paul Lynde's voice everytime he reads Rayford Steele's dialogue in Left Behind. Could help him survive the book.

[Vermic]

(Buck was there to interview Chaim Rosenzweig, who had won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry despite not being an airline pilot.)

Heh.

I think LB's pilot-worship must be a Tim LaHaye contribution. Wasn't there a time, some 40 years ago, when the job of airline pilot carried a prestige akin to rock stars and astronauts? (That's at least the impression I get from films like "Catch Me If You Can" and "View from the Top".) It makes sense that LaHaye would push to give his alter ego as cool an occupation as his stuck-in-the-early-'60s mind could imagine.

I don't mean, of course, to disrespect actual airline pilots or the job they perform. But -- due I'm sure to the more everyday nature of air travel nowadays -- the days of pilots as demigods are long over, gone the way of the "coffee, tea or me" stewardess (as well as the term "stewardess").

[aunursa]

Praline: Also, I'm sure Chloe has been frowned upon for trying to be 'intellectually honest' herself

Alas, in the next few pages, dear Chloe will abandon her intellectual honesty for the rest of the series. If it can happen to a Stanford student, it can happen to anyone... Or maybe the quality of a Stanford education isn't what it used to be.

But what do I know. I went to Cal.

[Keith]

I'm hip deep in the second draft of a novel that's already taken a year to write and my first draft was ten times more coherent than LB. Note to Lehay and Jenkins: continuity is your friend!

When they make movies, there's someone on set whose sole job is to make sure the actors hold the gun int he same hand or are wearing the same outfit form the previous scene. That's why writers make notes!

[NewsCat]

I never got the whole worship of airline pilots until I saw "Catch Me If You Can" and realized that back in the '60s being an airline pilot was supposed to be cool. Like being a...I guess Top Gun pilot or something. My guess is that Tim LaHaye was in his 20s when airline pilots were cool and just never got over that initial image of them.

Does anyone else think that airline pilots are just kind of glorified bus drivers these days? And badly paid ones at that.

[NewsCat]

Vermic...I guess we think alike...:-)

[Keith]

So why on earth [...] do LaHaye and Jenkins think that Jesus is going to have some kind of sudden personality transplant and show up as the Christinator to make millions of people suffer horribly before dying slowly?

Because that's what L&J hope and wish Jesus would do. or more precisely, because it's what they would do, if they were Jesus.

[Richard Hershberger]

"Wasn't there a time, some 40 years ago, when the job of airline pilot carried a prestige akin to rock stars and astronauts?"

That's probably overstating it. Airline pilots were solidly upper middle class, but with more pizazz than doctors and lawyers. Having an airline pilot in your social circle might be like socializing with the local TV weather guy: noteable, but not utterly amazing.

[mmack]

Airline Pilots and Left Behind

IF wikipedia can be believed, (and Tim LaHaye's page has links as citations):

LaHaye indicates that the idea for the series came to him one day about 1994 while he was sitting on an airplane and observed a married pilot flirting with a flight attendant. He wondered what would befall the pilot if the Rapture happened at that moment. The first book in the series opens with a similar scene.

Thank God he didn't take the bus that day. Ralph Kramden might have to save the world. "One of these days, Irene . . . "

[aunursa]

mmack: It's not just that. I read an interview where one of them stated that LaHaye has had a dream of becoming a pilot and Jenkins identifies with the Buck Williams character. I'll try to find the link.

[mmack]

I read an interview where one of them stated that LaHaye has had a dream of becoming a pilot

Obviously he wants to be instrument rated if The Rapture happens in rain, snow, or at night.

[zzyzx]

"If any of it is true, all of it is true"

That does work well with conspiracy theories. Start out with very slight discrepancies in public stories ("The government says that Bush was on a plane at 9:15 but this photo of him in the airport has a clock in the background that says 9:16!") and use that to build up a whole theory. Then argue back and forth over what time Bush boarded the plane as though that would be enough to prove that he singlehandedly blew up the WTC while cackling evilly.

[Vermic]

Tim LaHaye seems like the sort of person who spends a lot of time watching people enjoy themselves, and then imagining what would befall them if the Rapture happened RIGHT NOW.

That's probably overstating it. Airline pilots were solidly upper middle class, but with more pizazz than doctors and lawyers. Having an airline pilot in your social circle might be like socializing with the local TV weather guy: noteable, but not utterly amazing.

Thanks for this, Richard H. I was born in 1971, so everything I know about the '60s comes from secondhand sources such as Gwyneth Paltrow films. :-)

[Lax Tool]

It's scary how many sentences in a typical passage of LB are headache-inducing.

Buck had always prided himself on standing apart from the pack, for including the human, the everyday, the everyman element in his stories when others resisted such vulnerability.

Judging from Buck's awful analogy, I think this sentence should read:

Buck had always prided himself on standing apart from the pack, for including the banal, the mediocre, the humdrum element in his stories when others resisted such vulnerability.

And really, does this make any sense?

But he had still been able, even after his closest brush with death, to let the reader live it without revealing Buck's own deep angst about the very existence of God.

Is he a columnist or an investigative reporter? Are we expecting an opening sentence like "Financial markets in London and the United States were rocked by the sudden death of Joshua Todd-Cothran much like my soul is rocked by the question of the existence of a loving and omnipotent God."?

[Lax Tool]

Oops, sorry.

[mmack]

Italics Begone!

[aunursa]

Haven't found the interview. But according to Wikipedia, "LaHaye enlisted in the Air Force in 1944 at the age of 17, after finishing night school. He and served in Europe as a machine gunner aboard a bomber."

[damnedyankee]

LaHaye indicates that the idea for the series came to him one day about 1994 while he was sitting on an airplane and observed a married pilot flirting with a flight attendant.

Given what he and Jenkins seem to know about romance and interpersonal relations, I can only imagine what he might consider flirting.

Attendant: Want me to grab you a coffee, Bob?

Pilot: Thanks, Linda. Two sugars, please.

Attendant: Sure thing!

LaHaye (overhearing from his seat): Those damned, dirty sinners. When the Rapture comes...

[Dan]

Just wanted to say that I'm amazed you could focus enough to come up with any clarity in this one. This passage is so bad (how bad is it?),filled with so many possible cues for criticism, that mere mortals would be overwhelmed by the simple feat of choosing one, and would simper off into a corner instead.

Strangely, I was just having this same inerrancy discussion with a group of pastors yesterday. This is why the John MacArthurs of the world get all bent out of shape by the emergent Folks - because they deny that the Bible is True (i.e. inerrant according to their definition). And if you deny inerrancy, next thing you'll be ordaining women and gays and loving on Muslims like a liberal.