slacktivist

L.B.: Nero's fiddle

Left Behind, pp. 71-73

Two things happen over these few page of the book. The surface-level thing is that Buck Williams talks to a customer service agent in the airline club and she helps him to charter a private flight to New York City.

Suddenly it was Buck's turn at the counter. He gathered up his extension cord and thanked the young woman for bearing with him. "Sorry about that," he said, pausing briefly for forgiveness that was not forthcoming. "It's just that today, of all days, well, you understand."

Apparently she did not understand. She'd had a rough day, too. She looked at him tolerantly and said, "What can I not do for you?"

"Oh, you mean because I did not do something you asked?"

"No," she said. "I'm saying that to everybody. It's my little joke because there's really nothing I can do for anybody. No flights are scheduled today. The airport is going to close any minute. ..."

Both Buck and the woman at the PanCon counter eventually recover their cheer and their charm and wind up having a fairly friendly conversation that results in the woman helping Buck find a charter pilot.

To appreciate the other dynamic at work in these pages, though, we need to step back and reconsider the backdrop for this flirty exchange of banter.

Taken in isolation, this is an unremarkable bit of conversation. The airport is completely shut down, so both Buck and the woman are a bit cross, a bit wearied by the inconvenience and the extra work that this shutdown entails for them. Yet despite this inconvenience, each is able to summon enough pluck to be civil and even cheerful. We've all faced unavoidable travel delays and we can all relate to how frustrating they can be.

The good cheer demonstrated by Buck and the PanCon woman might be seen as exemplary if the airport's paralysis were the result of a freak snowstorm, or a power outage, or a computer glitch. Their glib, these-things-happen, whatchagonnado? playfulness might constitute a healthy attitude in such a situation.

But that's not what's going on here. That's not why Buck and the PanCon woman are having a "rough day."

The airport is shutting down, to their inconvenience, because of a fatal plane crash. That alone makes their conversation seem inappropriate and self-centered. That alone should be enough to cause the next person in line to interrupt with something like, "Gee, I'm sorry you're having such a rough day and this is all so inconvenient for you, but think of that poor bastard who crashed his Piper Cub out there on the runway. Think of his family and how they must feel ..."

But the tragedy shutting down the airport doesn't involve just the death of one person in a small plane. It involves dozens of crashes on the runway. Dozens of crashes of giant passenger planes carrying hundreds of people. The death toll there at O'Hare could easily surpass 1,000. And, by the way, the same thing has happened at every airport, everywhere in the world. Tens of thousands are dead. Thousands more are injured, many of them still lying, untended, on the runways outside the windows of the PanCon Club where Buck and the woman are chatting.

Oh yes, and the children are gone. Everyone's children. All of them. Just ... gone. Without explanation.

That's the background here. That's the setting that LaHaye and Jenkins have created. It's one of the most awful and awesome panoramas of human suffering ever imagined in a work of fiction. But the audacity of the wholesale suffering that L&J imagine is dwarfed by the greater audacity of their wholly disregarding the very scenario they have presented. The authors and their protagonists seem wholly unperturbed by all of this death and destruction, save in how it presents a logistical inconvenience and cramps the travel plans of our heroes.

Given this context, Buck and the PanCon woman cannot be described as merely playfully glib. Their glibness -- their self-centered obsession with their own inconvenience -- is monstrous, psychopathic.

I wish I could read this as a sly, intentional message of the book. I wish L&J were here trying to convey that our left-behind, and therefore unredeemed, protagonists are unreliable narrators whose unregenerate, sinful natures make them wholly incapable of basic human empathy or sympathy and the instinctive desire to help in time of tragedy.

But there's no indication that this is what's going on. Just as we are intended to believe that, despite his profoundly dense incuriosity, Buck Williams is the Greatest Investigative Reporter of All Time --

"I wanted to get into journalism," the woman tells Buck. "I studied it in college."

"If you really want to be a journalist," he does not say in reply, "then why are you sitting here behind a desk that might as well be closed instead of getting your butt out there, on the other side of that window, where the biggest story in human history is unfolding even as we speak?" He does not say this because it never occurs to him.

-- Likewise, despite his utter lack of courage and his unwillingness to help others in crisis, we are intended to believe that Buck is a good guy and a genuinely noble protagonist.

Left Behind Fridays

So where were we? Page 71?

We've been at this for a year and half and we're only on page 71?

I'm going to try to keep our ongoing book review from devolving into another weekslong lapse by imposing a more orderly schedule.*

Ladies and Gentlemen, welcome to the first installment of Left Behind Fridays.

I take as my inspiration the selfless devotion TBogg and World O' Crap have demonstrated in their willingness, week after week, to subject themselves to the latest offerings from America's Worst Mother.™ Immersing myself in the Worst Books Ever Written may not be pleasant, but at least I won't have to come up with new names for the children each week.

In other Left Behind-related news, I'm now a bona fide member of the "Left Behind Prophecy Club," a particularly shameless, money-grubbing subscription service from Tim & Jerry. The club's message boards provide a gathering place for fans of the book series to meet and to reassure each other that, happily, the world is getting worse and worse, the gyre ever-widening towards the blessed hope of apocalypse.

Among the recent signs of The End recently cited on the message boards: a halter top in church.

It seems that in this last year I see so much moral decline ... The Terri Schiavo case ... The promotion of homosexual lifestyle all over TV. Especially HBO. No, I don't want to see makeovers by the Fab Five. And the clothing they are foisting on us ladies ... they want to dress us worse than prostitutes. The young lady in church with the halter top and satin mini just blew my mind. ... When I was young, ladies wore white gloves and hats to church. My mother was always fussing about my getting my gloves soiled on the way. Experimentation with human and animal combinations. Removing the Ten Commandments from public view, outlawing Nativity Scenes at Christmas, chocolate crosses for Easter, labeling Christians as 'nuts', outlawing expressions of Christianity in school and public, a movement to end church 'tax exempt' status and so on and on.

I'm not sure if her comment about "human and animal combinations" refers to some kind of genetic engineering or to something more Santorum-ish, but either way you have to love that this is included on a spectrum of depravity that includes ladies no longer wearing white gloves at church -- the abomination that causes desolation.

Anyway, welcome to Left Behind Fridays. It may not be the end of the world, but at least it's the end of the work week.

- - - - - - - - - - -

* I invite you to hold me to this schedule. I have a sad personal history of convulsive attempts to become more organized, occasionally resulting in mini-spending sprees at Staples. Weeks later the unused accordion files and color-coded labeling systems sit there, seeming to radiate an aura of disapproval, like so many New-Years-Resolution inspired treadmills gathering dust in the basements and garages of couch potatoes across America.

L.B.: Cursed are the peacemakers

Left Behind, pp. 68-71

Our first real glimpse of Nicolae Carpathia comes through the eyes of Chaim Rosenzweig, who is rather impressed with him:

"I found him most charming and humble. ... Impressive, that's all I can say. ... He knew my language as well as his own. And he speaks fluent English. Several others also, they tell me. Well educated but also widely self taught. And I just like him as a person. Very bright. Very honest. Very open. ... a man of high ideals."

All of this sounds laudable and is meant to be interpreted favorably. But Rosenzweig also says the Magic Words regarding Carpathia -- the words that indicate to every premillennial dispensationalist "prophecy" buff that this man is clearly the Antichrist:

"... a peacemaker and leading a movement toward disarmament. ... I believe his goal is global disarmament."

That word -- "peacemaker" -- practically screams Antichrist. For LaHaye and Jenkins' intended readers, it wouldn't be any clearer if Carpathia had the number "666" tattooed on his forehead and went by the nickname "Horny Beast."

For those not initiated into the cabalistic logic of PMD prophecy freaks, this seems counter-intuitive. Peace, after all, is generally regarded by Scripture as a Good Thing. Peace is one of the fruits of the Spirit (Gal. 5:22). The Messiah is described as the "Prince of Peace" (Isaiah 9:6-7). Peace is often spoken of by God's angels, including the heavenly host of the Christmas story in Luke 2 (cue Linus), who sing, "Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men."

Since we're on the subject, a few more examples:

Psalm 34:14: "Turn from evil and do good; seek peace and pursue it."

Isaiah 32:17: "The fruit of righteousness will be peace."

Matthew 5:9: "Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called the children of God."

Ephesians 2:17: "He came and preached peace to you who were far away and peace to those who were near."

James 3:18: "Peacemakers who sow in peace raise a harvest of righteousness."

We could go on, and on, and on. Peace is a pretty major theme in the Bible.

But none of this matters to the prophecy nuts who are convinced that the Antichrist will be a man of peace. And since they believe that the most important thing for Christians to do is to be on the lookout against the Antichrist, and vigilantly opposed to his evil ways, they believe that Christians must oppose anyone who speaks of, pursues, or tries to make, peace.

This is one of the most astonishing and dangerous aspects of the popularity of the End Times heresies promoted by people like LaHaye and Jenkins. It is one of this biggest reasons why this matters -- deeply, truly, seriously matters.

Tens of millions of copies of the Left Behind books have been sold. That doesn't just mean that tens of millions of our fellow citizens have horrible taste in literature. It also means they are being taught to oppose -- to condemn as immoral and ungodly -- any effort that goes under the name "peacemaking."

Since they believe the Antichrist will rule over a one world government, these readers are also being taught to fear, loathe and oppose the United Nations and anything that smacks of multilateral or international cooperation. (We'll see much more about the UN as we get further into L.B.)

Oddly, the PMD prophecy heretics often have a hard time explaining exactly why it is that they believe the Antichrist will be "a man of peace." They love to quote (and twist) the Bible, but if you press them on this point, they're far more likely to quote instead from the received wisdom of some other "prophecy scholar." LaHaye is just saying it because Hal Lindsay said it. And Lindsay was just repeating Scofield and Ironsides. And those guys were just repeating Darby, who concocted the whole convoluted scheme and is notoriously hard to follow.

Dig deep enough to find their alleged biblical basis for this belief that peace is Bad and you'll find them relying on one of two passages.

The first is from 1 Thessalonians 5:3, " While people are saying, 'Peace and safety,' destruction will come on them suddenly."

The second is even more obscure, Daniel 8:25 includes the phrase ""he will destroy many while they are at ease." In the King James Version, this reads, "and by peace shall destroy many." The subject of that passage is a Greek king (usually thought to be Antiochus Epiphanes who profaned the Temple in Jerusalem during his reign in 175-163 B.C.). But prophecy nuts don't worry much about the apparent subject of any given biblical passage. For them, the subject of every bit of Scripture about something bad is really, secretly, for readers who appreciate the arcane secrets of prophetic interpretation, the Antichrist.

And that is why many American Christians oppose any effort to bring peace to the Middle East. No, really, that's why. Because of Daniel 8:25.

L.B.: Unmotivated Close-up

Left Behind, pp. 68-71

Buck Williams' role as a journalist provides a useful device for long stretches of exposition without departing from the protagonist's point of view (one of many tropes borrowed from Sydney Watson's earlier rapture novels).

Jerry Jenkins' clumsy employment of this device often results in strange passages like this one, in which Buck reviews his notes from an interview with the Magical Jew, Chaim Rosenzweig, wherein the miracleworker discusses an obscure Romanian politician.

It's a bit odd for Buck to be reviewing this particular section of this particular interview just now. He just received an e-mail from his boss telling him he's in charge of investigating and reporting on the worldwide mass disappearances. You and I might consider that to be his most urgent priority. The disappearances, after all, are a top candidate for Biggest News Story of All Time.

But neither Buck nor his boss considers this the most important story. The editor is more worried about a pair of Jewish conferences gathering soon in New York City. (Jews in New York -- now that's news.) Steve Plank is convinced those wily Jews are Up To Something and no story is more vital than prying into the secrets of their international conspiracies.

(Inexplicably, the planning of these conferences isn't even slightly delayed by the mass disappearances and the resulting shutdown of air travel. Even as our hero goes to great lengths and great expense to charter a private plane to NYC, everyone else -- Jewish nationalists, Romanian diplomats, members of the Parliament of World Religions -- seems able to continue their travel plans to that city without interruption or delay.)

Buck's own obsession is with the Romanian, mentioned briefly at the end of his boss's long rant about the Jews. This was the literary equivalent of Roger Ebert's "Unmotivated Close-up" rule, so Buck astutely realizes that any person thus singled out must be more significant than he at first seems.

Add to this that the man's name is Nicolae Carpathia. It's almost impossible to read that without hearing a swell of ominous organ music on the soundtrack. (Frau ... Blucher!)

Nicolae Carpathia is, in fact, the Antichrist. This has been made explicitly obvious to the reader, but it's something that Buck could not yet have any way of knowing. Perhaps this shows his vaunted journalistic instincts at work. Others might see the vanishing of billions of people as the bigger story, but the rise of the Antichrist to worldwide dominion is just as newsworthy -- and Buck is onto that story long before anyone else.

By fortuitous coincidence, Buck had already learned a great deal about Carpathia. It turns out that in his interview with Rosenzweig, the doctor had gone off on a tangent about one of his hobbies. When he's not busy inventing miracle formulas that make the deserts bloom, Rosenzweig apparently likes to study "the lower house of Romanian government." Who doesn't?

"Don't feel bad that you don't know" such things, Rosenzweig tells Buck:

"... even though you are an international journalist. This is something only Romanians and amateur political scientists like me know. That is something I like to study."

We'll get back to Carpathia and what Rosenzweig had to say about him soon, but I need to post this now so I can get back to one of my favorite hobbies. I like to read up on Estonian appellate courts.

L.B.: Get in line

Left Behind, pg. 68

It was nearly Buck Williams's turn at the head of the line at the Pan-Con Club counter ...

Buck has clawed his way back to the terminal at O'Hare and worked his way into a line at the counter.

This doesn't really make sense -- the airport is clearly closed, it's runways cluttered with burning wrecks and a still-unknown quantity of its staff vanished or dead. All the airports are obviously closed. Faced with an unprecedented local disaster as well as a mysterious and unprecedented global disaster it hardly seems likely that a Pan-Continental Airlines customer service agent will be able to offer much assistance, so why wait in line to get to the counter?

Yet this irrational behavior on the part of Buck and the others in line is one of the first things in the book to ring somewhat true. This might actually happen. Faced with an overwhelming, incomprehensible situation and carnage on a massive scale he sees a line of people and a person in uniform with an official-looking badge of some sort at the head of the line. What are they in line for? Who knows? But surely all these people wouldn't be in line if it weren't for something important. And if he doesn't hurry up and grab a spot in line then others will just get there ahead of him.

Buck thinks of himself as a man of action, and confronted with the situation before him he acts. He gets in line. Others, frantic, may still be wandering in a panicky daze -- We have to do something! Buck is doing something. He's waiting in line.

It never occurs to the authors, or to Buck, that he might be in any way obliged, as an able-bodied young man, to participate in the desperate rescue efforts going on all around him. On the other hand, back on pages 10-14, Buck Williams personally witnessed an all-out nuclear assault in which the entire Russian arsenal was spent but no one was killed or even injured. After seeing something like that, he may no longer be able to appreciate the significance of a mere few dozen jumbo jetliner crashes.

During that nuclear assault, Buck had kept his wits about him enough to remember that he was a reporter. He observed and reported. But now his only journalistic instinct is to hurry back to the office, ignoring everything that's happening around him.

Our hero journalist does not behave like either a hero or a journalist. Instead, a bit absurdly, he sets out to charter a private plane by getting into the very long line at the counter of an airline that does not provide such a service.

The further I get in this book, the more Buck reminds me of Arthur Dent from Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker series. The main difference being that Arthur, at least, realized that he was a confused and selfish man overwhelmed by the absurd events unfolding around him. And Buck, unlike Arthur, really is a jerk, a total kneebiter.

L.B.: Nice people finish last

Left Behind, pp. 59-66

Over the next several pages we find something new in Left Behind -- sympathetic characters.

We meet three new people in these pages. None of them is particularly important and each serves mainly to move along the plot and to provide some helpful (and unsubtle) exposition. But LaHaye and Jenkins also want us to think of these minor characters as nice people.

The first is the suddenly, providentially appearing doctor who shows up to treat Buck Williams' bleeding scalp.

He doesn't come across as sympathetic to the readers, but that's only because the readers -- unlike the authors -- still remember that just outside the airport club where the doctor is lounging about is a scene of human disaster and suffering desperately in need of medical attention.

Bracket that, as the authors do, and the doctor is a nice enough guy. He's a little curt, perhaps, but in a world-weary way that's kind of likeable.

Next up is a character we meet via Buck's e-mail, "Steve Plank's secretary, the matronly Marge Potter." (So for those of you keeping score at home, that's four female characters we've met by name so far: 1 ingenue; 2 madonnas; 1 whore.) Via e-mail, at least, she seems like a nice woman. Her expository note also tips us off that "nice people" is meant to be something of a theme in this section:

I hoped and prayed you'd be all right. Have you noticed it seems to have struck the innocents? Everyone we know who's gone is either a child or a very nice person. On the other hand, some truly wonderful people are still here. I'm glad you're one of them ...

A couple pages later we're back with Rayford Steele, hitching his way the last few miles to his suburban home. He encounters another very nice person, a "woman of about 40" who gives rides to strangers.

Why this sudden rash of nice people doing nice things and talking about niceness?

L&J here are offering the first hints of something they will explore in more detail later, but their basic point is the Calvinist doctrine that salvation is a matter of grace, not of works. They take this to mean that there will be many nice people and even good people among the unsaved who are left behind.

Like many American evangelical Christians, L&J would defend this idea by citing Ephesians 2:8-9: "For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith -- and this not from yourselves, it is the gift of God -- not by works, so that no one can boast ..."

Like many American evangelical Christians, they will also steadfastly avoid citing -- or even reading -- the rest of that paragraph: "... For we are God's workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do."

The difficulty of reading verses 8 and 9 of Ephesians 2 without ever reading verse 10 is nowhere near as complicated as the gymnastics required for some of the selective omissions L&J have in store later in the series. Consider the complexity of reading Matthew 25:31-34 and also verse 46, without ever reading the 11 verses in between. Or reading Revelation 20:11-12a, 13a and 14-15 without ever reading the second half of those two verses.

Fear of a doctrine of "works righteousness" -- salvation through good works -- has led to a fear of good works themselves. This is not unique to L&J, although they do exhibit a particularly virulent strain of the disease. They believe the road to Hell is paved not with good intentions, but with good works.

Although this Protestant phobia of "works" derives from Calvin, the reformer himself wouldn't have recognized it. His doctrine that "salvation is grace; ethics is gratitude" has been Americanized into "It's not what you do; it's who you know."

As we will see in the chapters ahead -- with their pornographic depictions of religious conversion -- L&J's soteriology is even further removed from that of the Reformation. Ultimately for L&J, salvation is not a matter of who you know, but of what you know. Left Behind isn't Calvinist. It's gnostic.

We'll see much more in the coming pages about the divorce of faith and ethics. That separation is a major theme in this book.

L.B.: 21 days

Left Behind is rife with continuity errors of a sort.

Yet these inconsistencies are consistent in that most of them seem to involve the myopia of fundamentalist American Christianity -- an ignorance or amnesia to any suffering or need that exists outside of the tiny protective bubble that surrounds our main characters. Hence a bored, idle doctor treating our hero while ignoring the plane-crash victims directly outside.

Those curious about the editing process that allows such gaping holes in continuity might be interested in this article, from Today's Christian, in which we learn more about Jerry Jenkins' writing process:

Jenkins shared some insights into his writing regimen. "By the time I get here I have done my research and information gathering, so my goal is to produce 20 pages a day," he says. "Each morning I edit and rewrite what I wrote the day before, and in the afternoon I finish the next 20 pages. When the manuscript is complete, I do a thorough edit and rewrite again."

At that pace, Jenkins is able to crank out an entire novel in about 21 working days.

Jenkins himself does a "thorough edit" -- with the kind of thoroughness one might expect from a writer who cranks out a complete novel in 21 days.

You too can learn to be a prolific, best-selling Christian author. Just sign up for courses from the Christian Writers Guild, a "training institute" Jenkins purchased "with the goal of giving something back to the writing community":

CWG offers online writing courses, teaming students with experienced writing coaches. According to Jenkins, the guild has dozens of mentors serving more than 1,500 students, and is adding more than 100 new students a month.

Since Jenkins's acquisition of the guild, it has expanded its services to include college credit courses, agent and publisher referrals, and more. His vision for the guild is "to restock the pool of Christian writers and to hopefully upgrade the overall level of work."

The goal, apparently, is to produce even more efficient writers -- people who can crank out a novel in, say, 18 days.

As for Jenkins' partner in crime, Chris Jones e-mails this link to the blog-like "Kristof responds" column at the New York Times, where Tim LaHaye's recent letter to the editor (see "There goes the neighborhood") is posted in full.

Kristof had criticized the triumphant, cackling tone of L&J's 11th LB novel, The Glorious Appearing, in which the redeemed -- and Jesus himself -- seem to delight in the destruction of the lost and the unforgiven. LaHaye responds:

The eschatological problem Kristof mentioned of believers mourning the lost in the next life is a subject that bothered me for years until I found Revelation 21:4, which informs us that in his mercy God will wipe away all tears from their eyes; there shall be no more death, nor sorrow, nor crying. Somehow the memory of all who reject Christ will be mercifully eradicated from our memories.

Blessed are those who mourn, for their memories will be wiped clean of whatever it is that they were mourning about. The eternal sunshine of the evangelical mind.

L.B.: Dr. Dives is bored

Left Behind, pg. 59

Buck Williams and the authors have been so busy checking his e-mail that they seem to have forgotten he has a gory wound on the back of his head from his odd and violent pratfall on the tarmac.

He'd better see a doctor. Maybe we could just have one wander by:

Buck kept pressing a handkerchief soaked with cold water onto the back of his head. His wound had stopped bleeding, but it stung. ... when he was tapped on the shoulder.

"I'm a doctor. Let me dress your wound."

Whew. That was convenient. What're the odds?

"Just let me do this, pal," the doctor says. "I'm going crazy here with nothing to do, and I have my bag."

You can understand why the doctor is getting antsy.

Nothing to do in the airport except to sit around in the "exclusive Pan-Con Club" and stare out the window watching the rescue workers and EMTs below scurry from plane crash to plane crash. It's kind of amusing for a while, seeing them set up a desperate triage there among the smoke and the broken bodies, separating the gravely wounded from those in need only of First Aid and those merely suffering from shock after the loss of their loved ones. But it gets old eventually, just sitting there, so what the heck -- why not patch up that rich guy's bleeding scalp over there?

The doctor is exactly like Dives, the rich man in the parable, ignoring the pain and need of the beggar Lazarus on his very doorstep (see Luke 16:19-31). But at least Dives did not complain of his boredom while feasting in his first-class travelers' club.

The doctor's boredom is monstrous. It is sociopathic. It is a violation of medical ethics, of the Hippocratic oath, of common decency, of the Golden Rule.

Yet LaHaye and Jenkins do not seem to intend us to view the doctor as monstrous. His behavior, after all, parallels that of Rayford Steele and Buck Williams -- our sympathetic heroes.

The authors, like all of their characters, seem to have forgotten entirely about the scene of tragedy and suffering they have just left behind them. It's out of sight and out of mind. For L&J -- as for Rayford, Buck and the doctor -- those other people and their suffering and need simply do not exist. Lazarus is invisible. Lazarus does not exist.

That's the central characteristic of the morality L&J are portraying. That is the morality they are teaching.

And that is the morality that 40 million earnest Christians are learning from these books.

L.B.: The Final Frontier

Left Behind, pp. 57-58

I'm not sure, but Steve Plank -- the delusional and anti-Semitic executive editor of Global Weekly and Buck Williams' boss -- may get his name from Jesus' parable/proverb, translated this way in the NIV:

Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother's eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye? How can you say to your brother, 'Let me take the speck out of your eye,' when all the time there is a plank in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother's eye. (Matthew 7:3-5)

I may be reading too much into this, of course. Planks are long and hard, and the editor's name may simply be drawn from the same freudian well as the names of the other male characters in Left Behind ("Buck," "Steele"). And if his name is an allusion to the parable, I'm not sure what it's supposed to mean.

Jesus' plank-eyed hypocrite was blinded by his own hypocrisy, and Steve Plank does exhibit a lack of vision. He's one of the few people we've met so far in the story who doesn't seem to have read the book jacket and therefore doesn't see that he is a character in a premillennial dispensationalist "novel of the Earth's last days." Whether or not we're intended to read this as evidence of Steve's blindness I can't tell, but his different perspective does allow him to ask some legitimate questions.

At the end of his rambling, expository and conspiratorial e-mail to Buck, Plank mentions that "a niece and two nephews" of his are among the disappeared. "You think they'll be back?" he asks.

That's a legitimate question. The mass disappearances were so utterly inexplicable that a subsequent mass reappearance could hardly be more surprising. Plank further speculates about the disappearances:

If I had to guess, I'm anticipating some God-awful ransom demand. I mean, it's not like these people who disappeared are dead. ...

I thought the same thing about the ransom demand (see "The Lex Luthor Factor"). But Plank supposes only that such a demand would come from whoever was responsible for the disappearances. He doesn't envision the more likely scenario of opportunists who might issue such demands.

And I'm not sure what LaHaye and Jenkins intend us to make of Plank's insight that "it's not like these people ... are dead." From L&J's perspective, that's true. Kind of. Although they have a hard time explaining how that's true. They want us to believe that the "Rapture" means escaping death. As Rayford's dear departed (but undead) wife Irene put it, "Jesus coming back to get us before we die."

L&J are never clear on why we're supposed to believe there's any meaningful difference in the experience of sudden, unexpected "rapture" and that of sudden, unexpected death. It's not like these people are dead, is it? Yes. It's exactly like that.

Plank's e-mail ends by dismissing another speculative explanation:

I'm not ready to start believing the tabloids. You just know they're going to be saying the space aliens finally got us.

But, absent any special knowledge gleaned from the book jacket, what's wrong with the space alien theory? In the absence of any credible terrestrial explanation, why rush to rule out an extra-terrestrial one?

Despite the book's intended PMD premise, I still haven't ruled out the space alien theory. I'm not thinking of the almond-eyed grays of Close Encounters, but of the powerul creature in Star Trek V who masquerades as God.

Yeah, I know. The odd-numbered Trek movies mostly suck, and The Final Frontier is often unenduringly embarrassing ("I want my pain! I need my pain!").

But the premise is intriguing.

Such a malevolent alien creature, one vastly more powerful and intelligent than us, wouldn't have much trouble performing enough "miraculous" signs to convince us it was divine. Those who believe that omnipotence is God's only significant characteristic would be especially susceptible to such a ruse.

Imagine that such a creature has been listening in on the radio signals beaming out into space from our little planet. For decades, those signals have included the prophecy babble of PMD radio preachers like LaHaye and Harold Camping. The creature realizes it has been given a step-by-step blueprint for how to steal away all of Earth's children for use as slaves in some nefarious intergalactic plot ...

Or maybe not.

All I'm saying is Plank shouldn't be so quick to dismiss the space aliens theory.

L.B.: Keep an eye on the Jews

Left Behind, pp. 54-57

Here the story switches back to Buck Williams, who is proud to have been "the first passenger from his flight to reach the terminal at O'Hare."

The others apparently didn't realize it was a race. They were slowed by the steeplechase of human misery along the way, not realizing that the needy and the suffering were obstacles to be avoided instead of opportunities to help, they couldn't keep up with Buck. Suckers.

The Greatest Investigative Reporter of All Time knew better than to allow himself to get bogged down in the spontaneous outpouring of solidarity and mutual aid that often follows the shared experience of mass tragedy. He races back to the terminal and straight to "the exclusive Pan-Con Club," where he can check his e-mail without distraction from the moans of the hoi polloi.

What Buck finds is two messages from his boss at Global Weekly, Steve ("dumb as a") Plank -- the World's Worst Editor.

Buck first reads the message Plank sent to "all field personnel." This first message actually contains a bit of common sense. Plank tells his reporters not to try to get to the office in New York, but to report from wherever they are -- "on-the-scene stuff, as much as you can transmit."

Aside from the odd choice of verb ("transmit?"), this seems like a good move. The mass disappearances are a global event without an apparent epicenter. The story is everywhere and reporters can cover it from wherever they may be.

Plank also tells his staff to:

Begin thinking about the causes. Military? Cosmic? Scientific? Spiritual? But so far we're dealing mainly with what happened.

It's not until we read the next message, addressed specifically to Buck, that readers begin to realize that Plank is actually insane and a raving anti-Semite conspiracy theorist. It starts off reasonably enough:

Buck, ignore general staff memo. Get to New York as soon as you can at any expense. ... You're going to head up this effort to get at what's behind the phenomenon. ... Whether we'll come to any conclusions, I don't know, but at the very least we'll catalog the reasonable possibilities. ...

But then Plank takes a sharp turn through the looking glass:

I do have an ulterior motive. Sometimes I think because of the position I'm in, I'm the only one who knows these things; but ...

The remainder of the e-mail -- three pages long -- has nothing to do with the disappearance of more than a billion people, including every child and infant on the planet.

Instead, Plank speculates about what he sees as the really important stories -- stories about Jews, international bankers, the U.N. and international Jewish bankers at the U.N. Plank suspects that those Jewy Jews are up to something. He's not sure what it is, but his nose for news tells him that it's a bigger story than the anguish of every parent on earth. After all, these are Jews we're talking about, and if something Jewish is afoot, then he needs his best reporter on the job: