slacktivist

TF: Let us sing

2009-07-10T19:01:02-04:00

Tribulation Force, pg. 61

This Sunday morning gathering at New Hope Village Church is a very strange worship service, mostly because the authors don't see anything strange about it. It's a church service and we all know what church services are like, so why should this one be any different just because the entire world is different?

Thus our service begins with some praise choruses, just like any typical evangelical church service would:

The music had begun. Buck stood to sing with everyone else. Many seemed to know the songs and the words. He had to follow as the words were projected on the wall and try to pick up the melodies. The choruses were simple and catchy, but they were new to him. Many of these people, he decided, had had plenty of exposure to church -- more than he had. How had they missed the truth?

If you're at all familiar with the sorts of "simple and catchy" choruses that tend to get "projected on the wall," then you'll realize that it only takes about five minutes to learn "the songs and the words." Mindless repetition tends to be easy to pick up.

I'm having a hard time, however, imagining how any of the usual PowerPoint choruses would seem remotely appropriate or relevant for this particular group of people on this particular Sunday, just weeks after the instantaneous disintegration of every last one of their children. "Shout to the Lord" wouldn't seem to be the sort of thing one would sing to begin a funeral and it would seem equally out of place here.

Jenkins mentions this singing of praise choruses to give a sense of familiarity for his evangelical readers -- to make them feel at home there at NHVC, reassuring them that it is their kind of church (the right kind, the good kind). That comforting sense of recognition is also intended, I think, to carry a warning to those same evangelical readers -- a reminder that "many of these people" had attended just such evangelical churches and yet had still been left behind. Don't think you're saved just because you go to the right kind of church, Jenkins is reminding them, you must also say the Magic Words and correctly acknowledge the correctness of correct prophecy doctrines.

It's unforgivably lazy, though, for Jenkins to leave out the telling detail of what songs, specifically, the congregation is singing. This is an aspect of storytelling he rarely seems to bother with -- the selection of just right details. Here was an opportunity to reinforce his themes and characters with a precisely chosen line or two of quoted lyrics. This would have, at the very least, made more tangible the effect he's going for of reassuring his fanbase that this is a familiar setting. More than that, though, it was a chance to season his prose with an allusive, evocative snippet of poetry, and how could any novelist ignore such an opportunity?

But this brings us again to the difficulty of choosing precise and apt details for this particular story. The story itself is so implausible that plausible details seem impossible to find. What on earth could such a congregation in such a setting possibly find to sing?

Choruses and hymns that mention children would be grossly insensitive. Most praise choruses would sound inappropriately pre-Event ("Our God Reigns," for example, comes from the wrong part of Isaiah), as would most southern gospel standards like "I'll Fly Away" or "When the Roll Is Called Up Yonder." Classics like "Amazing Grace" clash with the authors' theology and contradict the sermon Bruce is about to preach.

My choice would be a hymn that wasn't written for PowerPoint slides or Yamaha keyboards. I'd have started out with "It Is Well With My Soul." That's a song that arises from and begins with grieving over lost children, earning its way toward a conclusion in which "the trump shall resound / and the Lord shall descend."

That would seem to be an apt hymn for this group of "grieving ... terror-stricken" people gathered at New Hope Village Church, but I'm pretty sure I'm not looking at this the same way the authors are. Plus, when I hear this song in my head, the voice singing it is Mahalia Jackson's and her blues-on-the-verses, gospel-on-the-chorus rendition gives it a this-worldly grounding -- more Exodus than Revelation -- that I don't think the authors would like.

The sad truth is that there just aren't that many memorable songs espousing or even compatible with the prophecy mania of premillennial dispensationalism. And almost none of those few songs would still work after the Rapture has already occurred.

The only song I can imagine meeting that criteria would seem almost cliche here: Larry Norman's 1969 Jesus Freak anthem, "I Wish We'd All Been Ready."

Life was filled with guns and war,
And everyone got trampled on the floor,
I wish we'd all been ready
Children died, the days grew cold,
A piece of bread could buy a bag of gold,
I wish we'd all been ready,
There's no time to change your mind,
The Son has come and you've been left behind.

The influence of that song among PMD types can't be overstated. For all the millions of books sold by Tim LaHaye or Hal Lindsay, it is this version, this telling of the story, that most PMD evangelicals have in mind when they speak of the Rapture and the Tribulation. It's influence on the Left Behind series is as obvious as that title, but it's also worth noting the differences between Norman's vision -- in this song and many others -- and that of LaHaye and Jenkins.

The biggest difference isn't in the lyrics above, but in the minor key and the mournful tone of Norman's song. He isn't happy about the scenario he describes. He isn't triumphalist. And unlike L&J he doesn't find the idea of a Tribulation filled with guns and war and dead children to be feverishly exciting. His song expresses an unrestrained millennialism, but it's inclusive -- "I wish we'd all been ready." Because of that, the suffering he believes is prophesied is something dire and tragic and not the basis for gleeful, self-congratulatory distinctions between ourselves and those deserving of punishment (hence the inclusion of children in his scene).

For Norman, the "birth pangs" of apocalypse are a lamentable aspect of the coming rebirth, but the rebirth is what is most important -- the day when, as he sings in another song, everything can happen like it first was planned and we're all invited to play in the band. That's from "The Sun Began to Rain," which featured Dudley Moore on piano and lyrics like:

Water swelled from fountains and then turned to wine
Rocks fell from the mountains in a chorus line
He came in tails and top hat and he looked so fine
Yes, the son began to reign

That's a Busby Berkeley apocalypse, one that takes no joy in the birth pangs, but is positively jubilant over the prospect of rebirth. The despicable thing about the Left Behind books is the way they turn that emphasis upside-down. These books are fascinated by and preoccupied with all the doom and suffering and wrath they foresee in store for fools and sinners -- that's what gets the authors' pulses racing. In Hal Lindsay's terms, L&J don't get excited about "There's a New World Coming," but they can't get enough of all the lurid details in store for the "Late Great Planet Earth."

As a young hippie, Norman's millennialism tended toward the otherworldly, the idea that we're "only visiting this planet." That's a strain of religion easily exploited by those with an interest in the status quo and it tends to be mostly harmless. Yet even that long-hair, drop-out variety of millennial fervor carries the implicit danger of the more militant varieties. Millennialism proposes an ultimate ending and thus an ultimate ends that can come to be seen as justifying any ultimate means. A final solution, as it were. That is the inherent danger of millennialism -- that it propels itself toward a situation in which it will be used to justify atrocities.

What sets LaHaye & Jenkins apart is that they don't even bother using millennialism to justify atrocities -- they just assert the atrocities without seeing any need for their justification. For them, the atrocities are the main attraction.

I don't know what sort of songs such people would sing, but I'm fairly sure I don't want to hear them.

Remember when we used to have newspapers?

2009-07-10T17:02:03-04:00

What's the absolute minimum number of people required to copy edit a daily newspaper?

One way to find out, it seems, is to conduct an experiment. Take a functional copy desk and subtract 20 percent of its staff. Look at that -- they still managed to somehow get everything read and onto the page. With headlines even.

OK, then, try again. Let's eliminate another 20 percent and toss in some rolling furloughs so that the full complement of remaining personnel is never all there at once. Wow -- they still managed to do the job, more or less. Sure there's a noticeable decline in the quality and attention given to the product, but the quality isn't yet declining in a one-to-one ratio with the reduction in staff. And no marked increase in the cost of litigation for libel. Not quite yet, anyway.

So this week the nation's largest newspaper chain pushed its experiment even further. We lost another 25 percent of the remaining skeleton crew on our copy desk yesterday. Good people who were good at their jobs who are now looking for new careers.

This morning our readers received several pages of newsprint covered with words and pictures. It's possible that many of those words were accurate, but I really can't say for sure. ([Woody] I took a speed reading course and read War and Peace in 20 minutes. I think it involves Russia. [/Woody])

The experiment, it seems to me, has reached its conclusion. We now can say, with some confidence, how many copy editors is not enough.

One unintended, but predictable, outcome of this experiment will likely be that some of our remaining readers won't be delighted to learn that they are the first human being -- ever -- to read some of the sentences put before them and they may, in turn, decide to join the ever-growing fellowship of former newspaper readers. The ensuing decline in readership will, again in turn, suggest to some that there ought to be an additional corresponding reduction in the number of copy editors. Repeat as necessary until finished -- it shouldn't be too long.

So it's a frenetic end to a stressful week and what with the extra hours and the survivor's guilt and the frustrated rage that arises from watching good crafts~~men~~people and good craft ~~smanship~~ suffer and from seeing the public trust run aground due to the reckless quarterly myopia of irresponsible bean-counters -- what with all that, I'm afraid I haven't time today to give Bruce Barnes' sermon the full attention its peculiar awfulness merits. So this week's LBFriday installment will be somewhat abbreviated, but it should be posted shortly.

Sub-subminimal

2009-07-09T05:03:20-04:00

Every job comes with a set of minimum standards. An entry-level volunteer firefighter, for example, must meet a basic standard of physical fitness as well as be able to demonstrate a basic capacity for learning the craft of firefighting and a basic commitment to keeping the community safe.

Every once in a while, though, someone slips through the screening process and reminds us that every job also comes with a set of sub-minimal requirements. A volunteer firefighter, for example, shouldn't also be an arsonist on the side.

We tend to think of such subminimal requirements as things that go without saying, and thus we rarely state them explicitly. The recruiting materials for volunteer fire companies will mention the minimal requirements of time and physical capability, but they won't usually spell out the subminimal requirements. They won't say, in large block letters at the top of the page: "Firebugs need not apply."

Perhaps they should. Because again every once in a while some person comes along who meets the minimum requirements but turns out not to meet the subminimal ones and we are forced to rethink what we have previously allowed to go without saying. We start to think that maybe we should have stated explicitly that candidates shouldn't expect to spend all day in their cubicles surfing cyberporn, or that they will be expected to refrain from embezzling, or not to fabricate articles or plagiarize.

Or not to set fire to the fire station itself.

But of course we could never keep up. Subminimal requirements, it turns out, not only go unspoken but unimagined. It simply wouldn't be possible to list all of them, or even for most of us to conceive of what they might be until we actually witness some sub-subminimal employee who demonstrates for us some new and startling way to delve beneath simple incompetence into the astonishing realm of the sub-subminimal.

The firebug firefighter may be one exception -- an example of a subminimal standard that does need to be stated explicitly. Arsonists -- the sort who set fires for thrills, not for insurance fraud -- tend to seek work with fire departments and volunteer companies. Most squads, therefore, have learned to carefully screen against this, incorporating this one particular subminimal standard into their hiring process.

The closest parallel to the fire departments' problem is an equally common affliction bedeviling school boards and state boards of education. As with fire companies, the vast majority of candidates for these positions are responsible people committed to public service, the common good and quality education. But just like the fire departments, school boards seem to attract a significant unhinged minority of firebugs -- people who just want to destroy public education and laugh while it burns.

The latest of these is Cynthia Dunbar of Texas, whom I learned about thanks to an e-mail from Matt D.

Gov. Rick Perry is reportedly considering appointing the chair of that state's school board. Dunbar wants to destroy public schools, which she regards as "tyrannical" and a "tool of perversion."

Let me repeat that: Gov. Rick Perry of Texas wants to put in charge of his state's public schools a woman who wants to destroy those schools.

Perry doesn't just want to hire the giggling firebug, he wants to make her the fire chief. This makes Gov. Perry the second craziest person in this story.

The craziest, of course, is Cynthia Dunbar who is -- even by Texas Republican standards -- barking mad.

In a book published last year, Dunbar argued the country’s founding fathers created “an emphatically Christian government” and that government should be guided by a “biblical litmus test.” She endorses a belief system that requires “any person desiring to govern have a sincere knowledge and appreciation for the Word of God in order to rightly govern.”

Dunbar -- who is, astonishingly, an attorney -- takes as her first principle of government an illegal and flagrantly unconstitutional religious test. "Unconstitutional" isn't strong enough a description of Dunbar's views on this point, actually, she's anti-constitutional. Her idea of "an emphatically Christian government" ruled by a "biblical litmus test" douses the Constitution in kerosene and sets it ablaze, then pisses on its ashes.

If Dunbar is really an attorney, then the views in her book make a good case for her being disbarred. Maybe even deported.

It doesn't help that Dunbar is also a staggeringly unoriginal whackjob. Her book is titled, One Nation Under God.

That's the same title as dozens of previously published theocratic "next to of course god america i love you land of the pilgrims' and so forth" books. This hackneyed title comes, of course, from the Pledge of Allegiance -- an incantation from which Gov. Rick Perry of Texas has been working hard of late to remove the word "indivisible."

Also in the book, she calls public education a “subtly deceptive tool of perversion.”

The establishment of public schools is unconstitutional and even “tyrannical,” she wrote, because it threatens the authority of families, granted by God through Scripture, to direct the instruction of their children.

Dunbar home-schooled her own children.

The Houston Chronicle's Lisa Falkenberg provides some additional background on Cynthia Dunbar:

If the chatter from some board members proves correct, and Gov. Rick Perry is indeed considering appointing member Cynthia Dunbar as the board’s new leader, we may find ourselves reminiscing fondly about the good ol’ days when Chairman McLeroy simply disregarded experts, sidelined teachers and insisted on inserting his religious beliefs into public policy-making.

Dunbar’s shortcomings go far beyond ideology and poor leadership skills to beliefs promoting paranoia and bigotry.

This is the same Richmond Republican who penned an online essay shortly before the presidential election warning Barack Obama was plotting with terrorists to attack Americans. She refused to retract her claim, even under pressure from Republicans.

There are 4.7 million children in Texas' public schools. There are children in those buildings that Gov. Perry is willing to watch Cynthia Dunbar set on fire. Somewhere there's a line between simple incompetence and outright, deliberate, predatory evil. Dunbar and Perry have crossed it.

Some subminimal standards are worth stating explicitly. Fire companies mustn't hire firebugs. School boards mustn't hire insane home-schooling zealots who want to destroy public schools. Cynthia Dunbar is sub-subminimal.

Nice news

2009-07-06T01:50:53-04:00

I started working at the paper in Delaware in 2001 and every year since then they've introduced legislation to include sexual orientation in the First State's antidiscrimination laws.

Those bills never passed. "Discrimination against gays still legal in Del.," read the headline on the paper's Web site, year after year after year.

That headline was celebrated, each time, by Christian conservative groups who were always ferociously opposed to the idea that gays, lesbians, bisexuals and transgendered persons should enjoy the same legal protections as everyone else in the state. Those groups liked to quote Leviticus to support the idea that homosexuality was an "abomination" to God. The idea, I guess, was that homosexuals were sinners and thus real, true Christians were therefore obliged to ensure that it remained perfectly legal to deny them access to housing or employment.

It's tempting to respond in kind, to say, I'll see your Leviticus and raise you a Deuteronomy:

Do not have two differing weights in your bag -- one heavy, one light. Do not have two differing measures in your house -- one large, one small. You must have accurate and honest weights and measures ... For the Lord your God detests anyone who does these things, anyone who deals dishonestly.

In other words, no fair not being fair. You can't have one price for one group of people and a different price for a different group. You can't have one housing market or one job market for one group of people and exclude other people from that market -- that's differing weights and measures, something the Lord your God detests. Inequality, discrimination, disenfranchisement and the dishonesty of double-dealing and double-standards turn out also to be abominations before the Lord.

And there's nothing in Deuteronomy to suggest a loophole that says it's OK to have differing weights in your bag so long as the short-changing one is for homosexuals. The Bible says, unambiguously, that these Delaware Christians' crusade in defense of legal discrimination is abominable and detestable.

So what we have here is a theological dispute -- a disagreement over the interpretation and meaning of the scripture. I'm confident I can win this argument, but before we get bogged down in the theological details of such a dispute, allow me to point out the most important thing to remember about all such arguments: They don't matter. Not even a little bit. Because none of what any of us thinks about the interpretation and meaning of the scripture is in any way relevant to the question before the legislature, a wholly secular body charged only with the wholly secular matters of law and justice.

This is true even when the Legislature itself seems to forget this and starts to act like an amateur version of the college of cardinals, as the paper reported:

Supporters and opponents of the bill disagreed on what it means to be "Christian." They argued about what constitutes "discrimination" and "sin." They tussled over whether homosexuality is a "lifestyle" or whether lesbians can be "made" by other lesbians.

Happily, the Legislature refrained from ruling on most of those questions and we were spared from the flagrantly unconstitutional and laughably incompetent spectacle of lawmakers dictating the official meaning of "Christian" or "sin." They eventually remembered who they were and what their job is and returned to matters on which they actually have some jurisdiction and responsibility, such as whether or not it should be legal to exclude one particular minority group from legal protections enjoyed by everyone else in the state of Delaware.

And even more happily, the majority of these lawmakers came to the conclusion that legal discrimination is an oxymoron -- that differing weights and measures, differing laws and statutes, were not legally or constitutionally defensible. They decided that legal protection from discrimination was a right enjoyed by all Delawareans and not just a privilege enjoyed by the heterosexual majority.

And so, finally, after eight years, I got to write a new headline. Discrimination against this particular minority is no longer legal in Delaware.

This step toward a more just standard of justice and a fairer sense of fairness is being lamented by many of those same Leviticus-loving groups, including "the Sussex County Community Organized Regiment, a new group of conservative residents concerned about what they consider the nation's increasingly liberal bent."

One leader of the group, Eric Bodenweiser, says he regrets that their defense of legal discrimination has led others to view them as not nice:

Bodenweiser said he regrets the growing chasm between people on either side of the debate over homosexuality.

At one point Wednesday, Bodenweiser struck up a conversation with two women in the Legislative Hall cafeteria. He expressed his views on homosexuality without realizing they were a lesbian couple.

"One of them said, 'I can't believe that you think God hates me,'" Bodenweiser said. "Those girls were telling me I was a hater and a bigot, but I'm not. I'm a nice guy."

So OK, let's set aside the theological arguments and the debates over scriptural interpretation and just focus on this matter of niceness.

How, exactly, is the defense of legal discrimination compatible with being "a nice guy"? How is it nice to insist that landlords be legally entitled to refuse to rent to one particular minority? How is it nice to fight for employers right to fire members of that minority for no reason other than that they are members of that minority?

This word nice seems to have come to mean something strange and hard to pin down. If we simply consider the definitions of the words, then it would seem possible to treat someone fairly without being as nice to them as one might be. But the opposite would seem impossible -- we cannot treat someone unfairly and still be nice to them. Yet as the example of our "nice guy" above shows, the word is constantly being used in this second, impossible sense by people staunchly defending injustice while just as staunchly insisting that this doesn't mean they're not "nice" people.

So let me say something here that ought to be blindingly obvious, but which apparently still needs to be pointed out: Injustice isn't nice.

That's not the biggest problem with injustice, of course, which is why, for example, Moses didn't go to Pharaoh and tell him to be nicer. ("You have enslaved my people. That's rude. It's impolite, unkind and tacky. ...") No, he went to Pharaoh and demanded justice. Pharaoh's response, of course, was to crack down even harder, demanding that the slaves make bricks without straw. But at least Pharaoh had the decency not to pretend that he could redouble his injustice while still being "a nice guy."

Anyway, good news from Delaware. A minority previously excluded has now been included in the legal protections enjoyed by the majority. That's nice. But more importantly, that's just.

The short straw

2009-07-04T04:18:11-04:00

SCENE: A secure, undisclosed location somewhere deep beneath Washington, D.C. Representatives from every conservative PR tank and farm team have gathered for an emergency meeting.

Tony Perkins looks nervous, unsure if he should be glad he gets to go first. He reaches out and makes his choice. Grinning broadly, he holds up the long straw for the others to see and, chuckling to himself, makes his way to the back of the room.

“It’s not fair,” says George Weigel of the Ethics & Public Policy Center. “We had to take Santorum. We should get a pass this time.”

“Just pick, George,” says the intern from Heritage. They sent an intern just to show up the others. Heritage is cocky like that.

Weigel picks a long straw and almost begins to sob with relief.

Gingrich picks next, another long straw. Then the lady from AEI and then a guy from the Petroleum Institute. They both get long straws too, but the oil lobbyist tries to act like he hadn't been worried. “It might have been OK for us,” he says. “You know, ‘Drill, Baby, Drill’ and all that.” Nobody’s buying it.

It’s the Club for Growth’s turn next, and Stephen Moore looks like he just drank curdled milk.

“Do we really have to do this?” he whines. “Why not talk radio? Or Fox?”

“Have you seen her in interviews?” Gingrich says. “We stick with the plan – cushy think-tank post, ghost-write some books and buy ‘em back. Instant best-selling author and elder stateswoman. You know the drill. Now pick.”

Moore gets lucky, another long straw. And a string of long straws follows – for Dick Armey and Michelle Bernard and Mark Tooley from the Institute on Religion & Democracy, looking even twitchier than usual.

Brent Bozell is up next. The odds are getting worse and he hesitates.

“Look,” he says, “let's work something out here. What if we just agree to take Sanford instead? …”

TF: That Guy

2009-07-03T19:44:27-04:00

Tribulation Force, pp. 59-60

It's the third Sunday after the End of the World and everyone's going to church:

Rayford was glad he and Chloe had decided to go early to church. The place was jammed every week. ...

"Every week" here meaning that New Hope Village Church had been "jammed" the previous two Sundays. This is, again, kind of hard to explain. The Event whisked away every member of NHVC except for Bruce Barnes and Loretta. Now, despite the fact that Bruce has spent most of the ensuing weeks shuttered in his study, the place is overflowing.

We've already speculated that meta-Loretta must have been very busy indeed during this time. Somebody hired a church secretary, and a music director, and somebody to vacuum the sanctuary and take the trash out. Somebody also will have had to replace Bruce himself in his former role of "visitation pastor" -- since that kind of one-on-one counseling would be more important than ever these days. Bruce didn't do any of this himself. He, and the authors, seems to think his showing up in the pulpit at 11 a.m. on Sundays is all that it takes to keep the church filled, relevant and meaningful to these newcomers.

The authors do -- finally, 60 pages into the second book -- acknowledge that most people would be traumatized after the Event, and they speculate that such traumatized people might be looking for comfort or answers:

People were grieving. They were terror-stricken. They were looking for hope, for answers, for God. They were finding him here, and the word was spreading.

When we get to Bruce's sermon in the next section, we'll see again just what kind of God these newcomers were finding at NHVC. I rather doubt it's the kind of God that grieving, terror-stricken and hope-starved people would be looking for, since it's not really the sort of God one looks for as much as the sort of God one hides from. (That's true even for Bruce, hence his plan to Dig a Really Big Hole.) Once these seekers find this God, and learn that he is the source of their grief and their terror, you'd think they might start looking somewhere else for a source of hope.

"The word was spreading" won't explain why the church would be packed each week. People who are eager enough for hope and answers to find the place all on their own, without any help from Bruce, wouldn't be satisfied with being given such hope and answers for a lousy two hours per week on Sunday mornings. A church that's "jammed" on Sunday mornings, will also be pretty crowded on weekday evenings and Saturday afternoons. It's abundantly clear that Bruce hasn't been available to the new congregation any time except for Sunday mornings, so who is it who's handling all of the ministry and study and outreach and disciple-making the rest of the week?

LaHaye and Jenkins love taking pot-shots at liberal denominations and hidebound traditionalists who don't accept the gospel of premillennial dispensationalist prophecy, so we should note that they missed a golden opportunity here to incorporate more of that sort of thing into this story. The new church staff at NHVC could have consisted of several lapsed or liberal clergy from other churches in the area. Their testimonies of repenting from their apostasies of mainline Protestantism or Catholicism would have given L&J a chance to weave in more triumphalist business about the supremacy and unique legitimacy of PMD theology while also providing an explanation for who's actually running things while Bruce is locked away with his exclusive inner-inner-inner-circle leadership elite. It would also help to explain why these newcomers are deciding to show up here, at NHVC, on Sunday mornings instead of at the local Episcopalian or Methodist or Catholic churches.

Rayford smiled at his daughter. Chloe looked the best he had seen her since coming home from college. He wanted to tease her, to ask her if she was dressing for Buck Williams or for God, but he let it go.

I must admit that I just don't get this "dressing for God" concept.

I suppose the core idea might be something laudable having to do with the desire to look our best when visiting the House of the Lord, but we Christians don't believe we're ever not in God's presence, and obviously we don't wear our Sunday best every day, otherwise we couldn't call it that.

So right there I've got qualms about the way we take the idea of the Lord's Day and twist it into something that suggests the other six days are something less. Plus this idea of "dressing for God" raises some warning flags having to do with class and vocation. Why is it that a farmer or factory worker has to dress like a banker when he goes to church, but the banker gets to attend dressed like himself? (Unless the banker is a she, in which case she's expected to dress like she's on a fancy dinner date -- so let's add some warning flags, also, having to do with gender roles and sexism.)

If we're really "dressing for God," then shouldn't we be listening to what God had to say about clothes?

And why do you worry about clothes? See how the lilies of the field grow. They do not labor or spin. Yet I tell you that not even Solomon in all his splendor was dressed like one of these. If that is how God clothes the grass of the field, which is here today and tomorrow is thrown into the fire, will God not much more clothe you, O you of little faith?

Or this:

The man with two tunics should share with him who has none.

Or this:

I needed clothes and you clothed me. ... I tell you the truth, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me.

In poorer, working communities, getting decked out in your Sunday best for Sunday worship can be a form of celebration, like a bottle of perfume spilled at Jesus' feet. But for most suburban American congregations, "dressing for God" is just a disingenuous spiritual varnish on dressing competitively to impress or outdo one another. All of which provides me an excuse to retell one of my favorite stories from Mother Teresa (from her book, No Greater Love):

Not so long ago a very wealthy Hindu lady came to see me. She sat down and told me, "I would like to share in your work" ... The poor woman had a weakness that she confessed to me. "I love elegant saris," she said. Indeed, she had on a very expensive sari that probably cost around 800 rupees. Mine cost only eight rupees ...

It occurred to me to say to her, "I would start with the saris. The next time you go to buy one, instead of paying 800 rupees, buy one that costs 500. Then with the extra 300 rupees, buy saris for the poor."

The good woman now wears 100-rupee saris, and that is because I have asked her not to buy cheaper ones.

I'm ambivalent about the idea of school uniforms. I either like them or dislike them depending on which set of rigid, merciless fascists is most in charge of the school in question. If the school is one where students lives are ruled by teachers and administrators who believe in keeping the children in line by any means necessary, then school uniforms will be just one more means of control and discipline and I'm against them. But if the school is the sort of place where students lives are ruled by other students -- by the in crowd, the Queen Bees and the caste system of popularity that scorns and shuns and disenfranchises anyone who fails to conform by wearing the "right" clothes, then I rather like the idea of school uniforms. At a school like that, a uniform can be a kind of liberation from a cruelly and capriciously enforced fashion code. The sort of local churches where people talk piously of "dressing for God" seem to me to have more in common with this latter type of school, and I'm inclined to think that something like church uniforms might be, for them, equally liberating.

Anyway, we come next to a delightfully inadvertent and devastating piece of characterization -- a sentence that tells us far, far more about Rayford Steele and about the authors themselves than they realize:

[Rayford] took one of the last spots in the parking lot and saw cars lined up around the block, looking for places on the street to park.

Yes, Rayford Steel is That Guy.

You know That Guy. He takes two parking spaces to protect his paint job. He races past the pregnant lady to grab the last seat on the train. He sends back his steak and undertips. He drives on the shoulder all the way to the front of the traffic jam, then bullies his way back into line. He sees all of this as evidence that he's cleverer than the rest of us suckers. That That Guy.

That's Rayford Steele.

My first boss in my first job after college was That Guy. This made our business trips a nightmare. He didn't believe in checking bags -- that just slows you down. So instead he packed everything for a weeklong trip into a gargantuan bag three times larger than the size limit for carry-on luggage. (This was before 9/11 -- back when you could still bully airline personnel into letting you break the rules.)

My boss's giant "carry-on" bag was so large that he had to wheel it around on this folding metal contraption. Getting both his massive bag and the not-small folding metal thing into the overhead bin on the plane took a bit more bullying. He'd board early. When some ticket checker had the temerity to point out that his row hadn't yet been called, he'd just act entitled and put-upon, sighing acidly, rolling his eyes and calling them by the name on their name tag in a condescending tone until they'd surrender and let him by.

The other passengers were never happy to arrive at their seats only to find that one of the overhead bins in their section was already full and that half of the other one was taken up with some weird folding metal thing. They were even less happy after the plane landed and, while it was still taxiing to the gate and the seat-belt sign was still lit, my boss would jump up out of his seat and lay claim to the aisle for the reassembly of the wheeled metal thing. This reassembly, getting the giant bag down from the overhead bin and strapping it back onto the metal thing took 10 to 15 minutes, during which everyone who'd been seated behind my boss on the plane had to wait, standing in the aisle, unable to exit the plane.

That Guy.

The authors don't seem to intend to portray Rayford this way. They don't see anything strange or embarrassing in his swooping in to grab the last spot while others are forced to circle the block. Like Rayford himself, they seem oblivious to his behavior. That Guy never realizes he's That Guy.

Poor Chloe knows better, though, and even though the authors and her father ignore her presence here, the rest of us can appreciate her wincing horror at having to ride along with That Guy. There she sits in the passenger seat, grimacing with embarrassment and mouthing "I'm sorry" out the window at the old lady with the walker on the sidewalk as her father diagonally straddles the line between the last two parking spaces close to the church door.

We can see in this moment the long, heartbreaking history of Chloe's childhood and teen years -- all those times she's had to furtively apologize to those her father has cut in front of in line; the times she's had to surreptitiously supplement the 10-percent and not a penny more tip he's left at some restaurant after consulting the "Tip Calculator" card he's carried in his wallet since 1972; the times she's stared at her shoes in the car, wishing she were invisible, as her father cruised past a line of cars, driving on the shoulder in what he doesn't realize the rest of us refer to as the "Dickhead Lane."

Now think how even more excruciating things were for Chloe back when both her parents were present -- when Rayford's extravagantly inadequate tips were left alongside Irene's evangelistic tracts, or when he cut someone off in traffic in Irene's car with its Jesus Fish magnet on the back.

"And what does the Lord require of you?" the prophet Micah asks. "To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God."

Shorter Micah: Don't be That Guy.

"'Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.' This is the first and greatest commandment," Jesus said. "And the second is like it: 'Love your neighbor as yourself.'"

Shorter Jesus: Don't be That Guy.

You don't need to find the words of Jesus or the prophets authoritative to appreciate this point -- it transcends every religious tradition or moral system. The point is simply this: Follow the Golden Rule.

Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Not because this will get you into Heaven or keep you out of Hell; not due to your gratitude for the undeserved grace of God; not because you love Jesus, who asks this of you or because you're trying to follow his model of the best of humanity; not because of the law and the prophets or because of some Kantian or Rawlsian imperative or some utilitarian calculus. Simply follow the Golden Rule because it will protect you from becoming a gaping asshole.

One last note. Of course Rayford Steele would race to take the last spot in the parking lot while others have to park blocks away. That fits -- unintentionally but perfectly -- with everything we have read up until now about Rayford's character.

But now try to imagine Nicolae Carpathia doing this. He just wouldn't, would he?

What a strange moral universe we have here in these books -- a world in which the embodiment of evil comes across as more considerate than our role model of virtue.

Falling flat

2009-07-02T16:43:01-04:00

"North and South?" the people of Lineland said to our hero. "That's nonsense. There's no such thing as North and South, only East and West."

Our hero is the main character in Edwin A. Abbot's Flatland. He is a square -- a literal square, a four-sided, geometric figure in the two-dimensional world of Abbot's transcendently weird mathematical parable. And there I was, telling this story again because an honest question deserves the most honest answer we can give, particularly when the people asking it are in pain.

The girls spent last Tuesday getting the house ready for PopPop, who was coming home for hospice care. We talked about what that meant and I relayed, as gently and frankly as possible, what the doctors had told us. A few days. Maybe more, maybe less. But we would make them good days.

And so we cleaned and rearranged furniture and got things ready. We set up Pop's bed in the family room, where he'd be able to look out the sliding doors to see the back yard and where there would be room enough for all the visitors we expected to come that night and the next few days. The girls arranged pictures around the room and flowers from the garden. They did a great job. It was lovely.

But Pop didn't make it home. At some point during the ambulance ride home he fell asleep and then he died.

So the past week has been full of questions. PopPop was with Grandma now, the girls were told, and they're both looking down, free of pain and disability and dialysis, watching your swimming and softball, happier than ever in heavenly bliss.

Really? The girls, to their credit, are skeptical. What do these people mean when they say Pop is with Grandma? And do I really think he somehow saw the bed and the pictures and flowers, that he somehow knows how lovely the room was? Where is he now? What happened to him? In that sleep, what dreams may come?

These are questions I can't answer. None of us can. And so I tell what truth I have.

"I don't know."

Not good enough, of course, for them or for me. And so the children demand to know what I think -- what I believe or guess or hope. And not just the children.

Here I can do only slightly better. "Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard," St. Paul wrote in response to just these questions, and God help me the best story I know about such unseeable and unhearable things is Flatland.

So one day our hero, the square, comes across the kingdom of Lineland, which is just what it sounds like -- a straight line where all the people are just dots, little points on an East-West axis. To them the square looks like another dot, because that's all they can see of where he intersects their world.

The square tries to explain to them that he's more than that, that he's a two-dimensional shape consisting of lines that go North and South as well as East and West, but this just blows their little Linelander minds.

"North and South?" the people of Lineland said to our hero. "That's nonsense. There's no such thing as North and South, only East and West."

Try as he might, he couldn't get them to understand.

A few days later, the square meets another Flatlander, a circle who can do an amazing trick -- growing bigger and shrinking smaller. The circle explains to our hero that he isn't actually changing size, but that he's really a sphere -- a three-dimensional globe who only appears to change size to the square because he is rising Up and Down above and below Flatland itself.

"Up and Down?" says our hero. "That's nonsense. There's no such thing as Up and Down, only North, South, East and West."

His little Flatlander brain can't conceive of a sphere or comprehend what this sphere is trying to tell him. And so the sphere does something extraordinary -- it lifts our hero Up, taking him above and out of Flatland to behold the incomprehensible. The square is caught up to the third heaven, into the unknown and unknowable realm of Up and Down from which he can see all of Flatland laid out below. There he can see inside the houses, see through and into the Flatlanders themselves. This epiphany overwhelms him.

"I understand," he cries. "Three dimensions! Now let's keep going -- further up and further in! Let's go beyond your world too, to see the fourth and fifth and sixth dimensions!"

"Four dimensions?" the sphere says. "That's nonsense. There's no such thing, only Up, Down, North, South, East and West."

And he dumps the poor square back in Flatland, convinced the fellow has gone mad.

And but so anyway, I told them, that is what I think happened to Pop. That is what I think will happen to us all. One day you and I will be out of time and we cannot conceive or comprehend what that means any more than the poor Linelanders can understand North and South or the poor Flatlanders can understand Up and Down.

And so there I was, awkwardly trying to convey why I find this reassuring, why I find "We can't know" so much more pregnant with hope than "We don't know," when I suddenly realized that I hadn't yet named the reason or the source for that hopefulness, and that trying to do so might sound like nothing more than one more hollow, funeral-week platitude.

Flatland is a fine little parable as far as it goes, an invaluable illustration of geometry and physics and of finite creatures' inability to grasp the infinities that surround them, but it has little to say about love. And while there is much that we do not and cannot know, if you want to know what I think or guess or believe or hope, it is this: The universe is governed by love.

"Love?" the tesseract says. "That's nonsense. There's no such thing as love, only ..."

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

P.S. Thank you, everyone, for your kind words and condolences. After a long week, I'm looking forward to getting back to regular, irregular posting here.

Sad news

2009-06-26T18:26:15-04:00

McLAUGHLIN, PAUL J. on June 23, 2009 formerly of Broomall, PA. Beloved husband of the late Sarah M. (nee Curran); loving father of Vincent J. McLaughlin (Christine) of West Chester and Sally M. DeFelice-Clark (Fred Clark) of Exton, PA.; loving PopPop of Courtney, Kimberly, Alyson, Paul and Kevin; brother of Bonnie Morrison. Relatives and friends are invited to his Memorial Gathering Sunday, June 28th, 5-7 P.M. at the Donohue Funeral Home, 3300 West Chester Pike, Newtown Square, Pa., 610-353-6300 and to his Funeral Mass Monday 11 A.M. at St. Pius X Church, 220 Lawrence Rd., Broomall, Pa. Interment Private. In lieu of flowers, contributions in his memory to The Wheelchair Basketball Assoc. of America, 6165 Lehman Dr., Suite 101, Colorado Springs, CO. 80918 or The Special Olympics, 307 Lenox Rd. Havertown PA 19083.

Just say no

2009-06-22T15:00:00-04:00

He took offense.

It started out in college. You know, just experimenting with it. But he liked it. He liked how it made him feel.

For a while it was just recreational -- weekends and parties and rallies and that kind of thing. But soon he was hanging out with some pretty hard-core users, with the kind of people who took offense all the time. They didn't need a reason or an excuse, it was just what they did. It was who they were. Soon he found he couldn't get through the day without it.

Over the years he even learned to grow his own, to take the tiniest seeds of umbrage and nurture them into full-grown pretexts for outrage. The good stuff.

Some of his old friends tried to stage an intervention -- to convince him that he had a problem, that his whole life had become consumed by his addiction.

He didn't respond well. He just took more offense -- right there in front of them.

Addicts, he told them, are always chasing diminishing returns. They're always needing more and stronger drugs to provide an ever-smaller high. But the stuff he was taking didn't work like that. His highs just kept getting stronger and stronger no matter how flimsy or insignificant the reason.

You're not trying to help me, he screamed at them. You're just jealous. And he yelled at them some more, trying to get them to take offense too.

They wouldn't touch it, of course, and just left quietly, looking sad. He took a hit of offense at that and sat back on the couch. They think I've got a problem, he thought, but they're the ones with a problem. Ohh. He inhaled deeply. Yes, yes that's it. His eyelids fluttered. It's because I'm better than them, better than all of them ...

Four days later his landlord called the police, saying there was an offensive smell drifting into the hallway. They found him there on the couch.

The official report from the medical examiner said it was an overdose.

Something in my eye

2009-06-22T10:40:47-04:00

We watched the last of these last week, leading to a discussion of, among other things, scenes or lines or moments that "get you every time."

Not a bad topic for a Monday morning, so here are 10 of mine. Feel free to agree or scoff or offer your own in comments below.

1. "Son, if I'd only gotten to be a doctor for five minutes, now that would have been a tragedy."

From a movie that's basically Terms of Endearment for guys. Which brings us to the movie that's basically Steel Magnolias for guys:

2. "You're an All-American and our Captain, act like it!" "I believe I am."

3. "And we'll fight like 20 armies and we won't ... give ... ..."

4. "The tag at the end was bigger than the entire parade. I thought to myseIf: Thank God I got to see this in my lifetime."

5. "Waitin' for that shout from the crowd"

"(Turn it up)"

The sound of 3,000 ghosts crashing a block party.

6. "But I don't understand. ... I don't understand how this all happens. How we go through this. I mean, I knew her, and then she's -- There's just a body, and I don't understand why she just can't get back in it and not be dead anymore. It's stupid. It's mortal and stupid. And and Xander's crying and not talking, and and I was having fruit punch, and I thought, well, Joyce will never have any more fruit punch ever, and she'll never have eggs, or yawn or brush her hair, not ever, and no one will explain to me why."

(See also: Magic Snow)

7. "Your daddy's poor today / And he will be poor forever ..."

8. "Zebleckas. Pilashusky. Shucavage. Andrukitis. Karalunas. Bergalis."

9. "I will take it. I will take it. I will take the Ring ..."

Roger Ebert: "Deep movie emotions for me usually come not when the characters are sad, but when they are good."

10. "This is gold. Two more people. He would've given me two for it. At least one. He would've give me one. One more. One more person. ..."

TF: The second-biggest story

2009-06-19T19:07:37-04:00

Tribulation Force, pp. 56-59

I confess that I still can't make any sense out of what Nicolae Carpathia is supposed to be trying to do in his dealings with Buck Williams. It doesn't help that I also can't figure out what Buck is trying to do in his dealings with Nicolae.

The trouble comes from the fact that Buck isn't very, very dead at this point. Or at the very least in some secret dungeon at the United Nations* being tortured for an explanation as to how he managed to resist the AC-mojo brainwashing.

Let's review this relationship. Initially, it seemed the Antichrist was grooming the GIRAT to be his go-to friendly reporter. The arrangement would work the way these things always do, as an exchange of access for cooperatively fawning coverage. Neither Buck nor the authors would admit it, but he was quite useful in that role throughout the first book, providing invaluable assistance in helping Carpathia to suppress stories about Stonagal and Cothran and their role in the deaths of two of Buck's friends and of one of his rivals.

Buck was then hand-picked to be the sole witness to the birth of the New World Order -- the only journalist present at the meeting in which the form and the leaders of the One World Government were established, with 10 princes or lieutenants or whatever they're to be called put in charge of 10 vaguely defined regional divisions of the globe. This is where Nicolae's plans for Buck seem to have gone awry. Buck proved immensely helpful when it came to burying stories, but of little actual use when it comes to reporting them.

In all of the confusion surrounding the double homicide and the subsequent brainwashing in that U.N. conference room, it's possible at first to overlook the other, vastly more significant news to come out of that blood-shortened meeting. The bigger story went wholly unreported -- by Buck or by anyone else -- and still seems, days later, to be wholly unacknowledged and unnoticed. Buck sat there with a front-row seat as Nicolae Carpathia rebuilt, restructured and restaffed the government of the entire world. As that happened right there in front of him, as Nicolae worked his way around the table, elaborately swearing in each of his new potentates, assigning to each a tenth of the globe, Buck failed even to take notes on what he was witnessing. How hard would it have been to jot down, at the very least, the names and titles and jurisdictions of each of these new world leaders? That's Journalism 101 -- the sort of thing any intern sent to cover a school board meeting would have done as a matter of course. But not our Buck.

This was, please note, a huge story. Every political boundary and border on earth has been redrawn. Every constitution nullified. Every economy fundamentally altered. No matter who you are or where you live, the leader of your country is no longer the leader of your country. Your country is no longer your country. (Except, of course, for Israel, which is allowed to remain autonomous so that it can enter into a 7-year peace treaty with everyone else and then get destroyed after 3 1/2 years.)

Yet several days after this happened, no one in our story even seems aware that it did. Bruce and Rayford haven't gleaned a hint of it despite all of their CNN-watching. Even poor President Fitzhugh is apparently still sitting there in the Oval Office, not realizing that the USA is merely one regional district in the Global Province of Canamico and that he now is merely a ceremonial figure with less clout than, say, Prince Charles.

Buck Williams, the only reporter present at this epochal event, has yet to mention this reinvention of all nations to anyone, let alone to file a story on it. The equally incompetent Steve Plank and Nicolae Carpathia apparently forgot to mention it at their post-meeting press conference, and the 10 new world leaders themselves have evidently remained silent and anonymous. Even the authors themselves seem to have forgotten this occurred, spending the early chapters of this book, instead, on Buck's office politics, his fumbled flirtation with Chloe and Bruce's sense of being burdened with burdensome burdens.

This tectonic remaking of the world would seem to be the second biggest story of all time. Just quickly consider some of the lesser implications. Taiwan is politically unified with mainland China. India, Pakistan and Bangladesh are joined together as one. There are no longer two Koreas, Germany has once again absorbed the Sudetenland and Poland, and the Balkans are united as part of a single political entity. The world has been redrawn, with the outlines of something like the Ottoman and Holy Roman Empires reappearing on the map. And those vast, astonishing changes are, again, some of the lesser implications of what Nicolae has just done.

And yet, due to the distraction from the death of a couple of bankers, nobody noticed. What if we threw a New World Order and nobody came? If a OWG falls in the forest ...?

This launchpad collapse of the NWO suggests that none of the actors involved is capable of doing their job. Buck, Steve, Nicolae, the 10 princes and the authors themselves should all be fired for incompetence over this.**

Confronted with yet another bizarre impossibility, we readers are once more forced to concoct elaborate and implausible theories in an effort to account for the things the book has told us which cannot be so.

So here's mine. I'm going to account for this unnoticed remaking of the globe by accounting for another lesser, but still impossible, impossibility: The fact that Buck Williams is still alive.

Buck was the lone journalist at the table for the 10-princes meeting because Nicolae needed him to perform a job. He failed at that job and thus became unuseful and potentially dangerous. Several days later, Buck has vastly exceeded the life expectancy of people whom the Antichrist finds unuseful and dangerous.

The idea was to lure Buck to the meeting with the promise of exclusive access to the second biggest story in history. His presence there would mean that Nicolae would have a credible, disinterested and skeptical-but-convinced witness to brainwash into supporting the official double-suicide explanation of Stonagal and Cothran's deaths. It seems inexplicable, but in LB-world, Buck does have a reputation for being an independent and truth-telling journalist, so he'd be a useful guy to have on hand, allowing Nicolae to say, "Even if you do not believe my word or the testimony of those who work for me, listen to Mr. Williams and he will verify our account of what happened."

Carpathia double-checked everyone in the room to make sure the mojo had taken effect. God intervened directly to keep Buck from saying anything stupid just then, and Nicolae was, for the moment, fooled into believing Buck was brainwashed along with everyone else.

But then Buck blew it. He hadn't yet been made as a spy, but he abruptly stopped playing along and bolted, rushing off to his office to type up an account of what he had really seen. Once he revealed himself, ditching the police and the post-meeting press conference, Nicolae had to realize he had a rogue witness and a loose end.

This loose end called for a simple two-step solution. Step One: Apply a bit more brainwashing mojo so that no one remembers seeing Buck at the meeting, thus neutralizing any contradictory testimony he might offer as the rambling of a liar or madman rather than an eyewitness account. Step Two: Buck takes a one-way ride on the Staten Island Ferry or, better yet, his body is found the next morning in his apartment, the apparent victim of an autoerotic asphyxiation mishap.

Step Two is non-negotiable, I'm afraid. Sure, Nicolae may suspect that Buck, being Buck, won't bother to do anything or to tell anyone about what he has learned, but he can't afford to take the chance. When Buck ran out of that meeting, demonstrating his mojo-resistance, he signed his own death warrant.

Yet here he is still alive after several days -- carefree days during which he hasn't taken the slightest precautions to protect himself from the supreme global ruler, a man he knows will not hesitate to kill those who have knowledge against him.

My theory doesn't account for Buck's behavior. From the moment he fled that meeting, he must have realized he had only two options*** for staying alive. He could fake his own death and go into hiding, or he could arrange a meeting with Nicolae and beg for his life, offering to report or not report whatever he was told in exchange for being allowed to live. In the last book, you'll recall, when it was merely Cothran who wanted Buck dead, he chose both of those options in turn, so we know that Buck knows how this works and what's at stake.

Instead of either of those things, Buck flew to Chicago under his own name, leased a condominium, bought and registered a car -- all while maintaining his usual heavy schedule of regular phone calls to his known associates. He is restless and obsessively second-guessing himself, but only over whether or not he should call Chloe again so soon when she's still dealing with the ~~death~~ loss of her mother and brother and is probably, like him, wondering if the Apocalypse is the most opportune time to start a relationship.

So instead of potentially suspenseful passages involving half-glimpsed figures lurking in the shadows outside of Buck's condo and the palpable sense of impending doom that comes from his knowing that the attack could come at any moment, instead of that, we get a lot more of this:

Buck had half expected to hear from Chloe. He thought he had left it with Rayford that she would call at her convenience. Maybe she was the type who didn't call men, even when she had missed their call. On the other hand, she was not quite 21 yet, and he admitted he had no idea about the customs and mores of her generation. Maybe she saw him as a big brother or even a father figure and was repulsed by the idea that he might be interested in her. That didn't jibe with her look and her body language from the night before, but he hadn't been encouraging then, either. ...

But maybe she had phoned when he was with Bruce that morning. ...

Several more pages of that, actually. And it's hard to read those pages without resenting Nicolae for killing Buck like he ought to have done several days and chapters ago.

Buck is distracted from this mooning reverie by a voicemail message from Steve Plank, of which I'll offer only an abbreviated sample because, despite the fact that we know Steve has e-mail, he's still the kind of guy who thinks it's appropriate to play phone-tag while leaving book-length voicemail messages:

Did you get my message that Carpathia wants to talk to you? People don't make a habit of making him wait, my friend. ... I honestly don't know what he wants except that he's still high on you. He's not holding a grudge over your standing him up on his invitation to that meeting, if you're worried about that.

Tell you the truth, Buck, the newsman in you would have wanted to be there and should have been there. ...

Bailey tells me you're putting the finishing touches on the theory article. If you can get with Carpathia soon enough, you can include his ideas. He's made no secret of them, but an exclusive quote or two wouldn't hurt either, right? ...

The only reassuring thing about that message is that Steve doesn't seem aware that his boss is using him to lure Buck to his death, yet Buck doesn't seem terribly worried. He spends the next two pages weighing the pros and cons of Nicolae's invitation. On the one hand, it's quite an opportunity "to interview the leading personality in the world on the eve of the delivery of your most important cover story." On the other hand, you know, Antichrist.

He didn't know much about the Antichrist. Was the man omniscient like God? Could he read Buck's mind? ... He wished there was something in the Bible that specifically outlined the powers of the Antichrist. Then he would know what he was dealing with.

This is why Bible-professor Bruce couldn't fulfill his duties as Mr. Exposition and explain to Buck "what he was dealing with." There's a kind of weird integrity at work here. L&J concede that there's nothing in the Bible "that specifically outlined the powers of the Antichrist." They seem to share Buck's disappointment over this omission, but they are unwilling to go beyond what they believe the Bible teaches about the Antichrist prophecies. Those prophecies are, themselves, a fevered collage of inventions, fantasies, misquotations and virulent eisegesis, but the authors have mostly convinced themselves that those prophecies are really present in a simple and straightforward reading of the text and they won't go beyond that self-deluding imagined reading to offer a list of Antichrist superpowers that isn't there. LaHaye would say, I'm guessing, that the Bible tells us about the outcomes of the Antichrist's actions, but not about the powers he uses to produce those outcomes. (The exception would be Nicolae's brainwashing mojo, which seems to come from LaHaye's "literal" interpretation of passages saying that "many will be deceived" by false messiahs.)

At the very least, Carpathia had to be curious about Buck. He must have wondered, when Buck slipped away from the conference room where the murders had been committed, whether there had been some glitch in his own mind-control powers. Otherwise, why erase from everyone else's mind not only the murders, replacing them with a picture of a bizarre suicide, but also the memory that Buck had been there at all?

Clearly, Nicolae had tried to cover himself by making everyone else forget Buck was there. If such a move was supposed to make Buck doubt his own sanity, it hadn't worked. God had been with Buck that day.

Again, the idea couldn't have been "to make Buck doubt his own sanity," but to make him appear insane to everyone else and thus not a credible accuser when he described the murders he witnessed.

It's also strange that Buck understands the meaning of the "glitch" in Nicolae's mind-control, but that he assumes Nicolae himself would not understand what this signifies -- that "God had been with Buck that day." Buck doesn't seem to appreciate that Nicolae must suspect that he has become a Christian or, as Nicolae would call him, a martyr-in-waiting.

Buck at least gets this much right:

One thing was sure, he would not tell Carpathia what he knew. If Carpathia was certain Buck had not been tricked, he would have not recourse but to have him eliminated.

This strikes me as an overestimation of his own importance and uniqueness. Buck assumes that Carpathia may suspect him, but doesn't know for sure that "Buck had not been tricked." He apparently thinks he's special enough that Carpathia is willing to put off having him killed until he confirms which is which. But he isn't that special -- he works for the Chicago bureau now -- and that isn't how evil tyrants usually operate. They tend to err on the side of lethal prudence and the mere suspicion of disloyalty is enough to get you killed. It's not like they'll lose sleep if they find out later you weren't actually disloyal -- they're evil tyrants, that sort of thing doesn't actually bother them much.

And but so, here's my theory.

Nicolae sat in his office at the Plaza, kicking himself over his botched roll-out of the New World Order. In retrospect, he realized, it probably wasn't a good idea to try to pull off such a major announcement at the same time he was using his mojo to make everyone forget what they had just seen. The whole thing was exasperating -- three days later and people in Antwerp still thought of themselves and Belgian, rather than as citizens of the Great States of Britain. It didn't help, of course, that the newly appointed prince of the GSB had actually gotten himself arrested while trying to move into his offices on Downing Street, hauled off by a bunch of goons from MI5 who mistakenly still thought there was something called the British government (and who also didn't seem to have gotten the memo about global disarmament).

He realized he was going to have to re-do the whole thing.

Well, almost the whole thing. Not the killing of Jonathan and Joshua, of course -- that part had gone off well enough. But the rest of it, all of it, was going to have to be done all over again. He would re-do it a thousand times if that is what it took, dammit, and nobody was going to go anywhere until they were all quite done dividing the world into 10 kingdoms and making sure everyone everywhere knew that it has been divided into 10 kingdoms. And if doing all that meant keeping Buck Williams alive for another week so that they could get him back here to report on this, then so be it.

OK, so it's not the best theory, but really, I don't know how else to explain the fact that Buck Williams, foe of the all-powerful Antichrist, is still breathing.

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

* In the world of LaHaye and Jenkins, you just know the U.N. has secret dungeons, right there in Manhattan. And, probably, a network of tunnels connecting it to the subterranean bathhouse that's home to the headquarters of the dreaded IHA (International Homosexual Agenda).

** The authors here seem to be following the Rumsfeldian approach of ignoring difficulties in the hope that they will thereby not matter, all the while steadfastly ignoring that they are dis-proving everything they had set out to prove.

These novels were written to illustrate the near-future scenario that Tim LaHaye insists will happen. By vividly portraying what this scenario will look and feel like when it actually unfolds, he and Jenkins hope to convince readers of its reality -- to make us say, "My gosh, yes, this is so plausible and it all seems so real! This is obviously exactly where the world is headed. This is what the future has in store!"

Yet by setting down an endless string of ridiculous, inconsistent, contradictory and impossible events, they instead convince readers that LaHaye's prophesied future could never occur the way he promises that it must. Left Behind and all of its sequels disprove every tenet of premillennial dispensationalist mythology. They refute what they were meant to reaffirm.

This is one of the places where this self-refuting dynamic becomes so obvious that even the authors seem to have noticed it. Tim LaHaye teaches that, very soon, the whole world will be divided into 10 political kingdoms. He says the Bible teaches this, so it must be so, citing a "literal" reading of Revelation 13:1-2:

And I saw a beast coming out of the sea. He had ten horns and seven heads, with ten crowns on his horns, and on each head a blasphemous name. The beast I saw resembled a leopard, but had feet like those of a bear and a mouth like that of a lion. The dragon gave the beast his power and his throne and great authority.

There is only one possible meaning to that passage, LaHaye insists. If you take the Bible seriously, he says, you must conclude that it foretells an Antichrist very much like Nicolae Carpathia appointing 10 princes to lead the 10 divisions of the OWG. He believes that this will and must occur rapidly, without resistance, and due to nothing more than the fact that the Antichrist will be an immensely charming fellow.

It quickly became obvious to the authors, however, that writing a fictional account of such a scene would be impossible. A realistic portrayal of such a thing is, like the thing itself, unimaginable. Close your eyes and throw a dart at a map of the world and it won't land more than a few inches from somewhere that such a rapid and voluntary obliteration of borders and national identities is simply inconceivable. Ireland, Tibet, Iraq, Kosovo, Sudan, Quebec, Kashmir, Vietnam, Korea, Texas -- from Afghanistan to Zaire, an atlas offers an alphabetical refutation of LaHaye's ridiculous prophecy. Such a thing cannot happen. Such a thing will never happen. And any attempt to describe it happening will only serve to reinforce that irrefutable fact and to expose Tim LaHaye for what he is: a false prophet and a buffoon.

Faced with the impossibility of providing even the sketchiest fictional account of the division of the world into this non-literal 10-headed creature, the authors balk: "And then the Antichrist Nicolae Carpathia divided the world into 10 kingdoms and ... OMG, look at Verna's shoes! What a castrating shrew, huh?" It seems unlikely they're even fooling themselves with such a transparent dodge.

*** He would have had a third if he'd bothered to do his job and had taken notes at that meeting. The names and shapes of the 10 kingdoms and the names of their leaders still haven't become public knowledge. By showing that he knew those things, Buck could prove that he had been at the meeting and could thereby present a compelling case that Nicolae was both a murderer and a brainwasher. He'd probably still have to fake his own death, dye his hair, grow a beard and move to Paraguay, but at least he'd have been able to get a parting shot off first.

Percolating

2009-06-18T17:07:02-04:00

Been trying (and thus far failing) to tie together a few threads on hospitality, sheep and goats, grace and works, gays and abortion, and the "boundaries of moral obligation."

That last phrase comes from my friend Dave Gushee's book on The Righteous Gentiles of the Holocaust. The term "righteous gentiles" refers to those who helped rescue Jews. The most important fact regarding the righteous gentiles is probably this: There were shamefully few of them.

Anyway, re-reading in that book led me to this passage, which is probably better than what I was trying to write anyway, so I'll leave you with this until that other post comes together:

Rescuer research demonstrates that no single moral paradigm accurately captures the conduct or motivations of all Righteous Gentiles. ... One implication of these findings is the need for tolerance in Christian ethics and the church of the different languages and paradigms used to describe the motives or characteristics of Christian action on behalf of others. A kaleidoscope of terms and paradigms is available to describe loving and just treatment of the neighbor. Different paths toward such a just love, and different terminology to describe each path, are appropriate for different historical and corporate contexts. Given the desperate importance of neighbor-love in a world full of suffering and needy neighbors, all paths that genuinely lead Christians in love's direction should be accorded legitimacy and warmly welcomed. Likewise, all paths that lead Christians to hatred, indifference, injustice and exclusion should be rejected. The shadow of death that [the 20th century] casts over our planet's future makes arguments over the superiority or profundity of any particular moral paradigm, term or model seem like a waste of ink and time.

(Abominable apostrophe removed.)