slacktivist

TF: That Guy

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

"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

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

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

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

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

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.)

Tehran

The above photo, from Getty Images, was taken Tuesday in Tehran, Iran, during the third day of massive street protests.

This despite warnings from political, religious and military leaders (the three tend to be intertwined in Iran) that such protests are forbidden. I know little about defeated reformist presidential candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi, but I find the courage and defiant determination of these people beautiful, humbling and inspiring.

By the third day of these demonstrations, Iran's establishment was struggling to regain control of the situation -- to put these people back under control. Foreign journalists were forbidden from recording, photographing or attending street demonstrations.

So the people in the photograph above were forbidden to demonstrate and the photographer was forbidden to take their picture. Yet there it is and there they are. Just look at them.

 

Tony Perkins' genital politics

So back on Wednesday the House of Representatives passed the Foreign Relations Authorization Act, approving funding for the State Department and the Peace Corps for another two years. The official summary for H.R. 2410 reads:

To authorize appropriations for the Department of State and the Peace Corps for fiscal years 2010 and 2011, to modernize the Foreign Service, to authorize democratic, economic, and social development assistance for Pakistan, to authorize security assistance for Pakistan, and for other purposes.

"Other purposes" you say? Ah, Tony Perkins smells a fundraising opportunity. Those "other purposes" may provide the fodder for something he can use to terrify the members of his Family Research Council, and if he can keep them scared, he can keep them writing checks. So Perkins sifted through the 342 pages of this appropriations bill and found there a couple of items that might loosen the sphincters and purse strings of his eager-to-be-frightened followers.

If you're familiar with Perkins' career, you won't be surprised to learn that these two things are the same two things he's always shrieking about: Abortion and homosexuality. When you've had as much practice as Perkins has, it's not hard to sniff out traces of these in every omnibus appropriations bill and then to elevate them to its primary themes so that you can pretend that a bill "to authorize appropriations for the Department of State and the Peace Corps for fiscal years 2010 and 2011, to modernize the Foreign Service, to authorize democratic, economic, and social development assistance for Pakistan, to authorize security assistance for Pakistan, and for other purposes" is nothing more than a Yes/No vote on abortion and gays.

This is, after all, how Perkins reads the Gospels. None of those books contains even a hint of anything that can be wrestled into a statement on abortion and gays, but he treats them all as treatises defending his peculiarly obsessive strain of genital politics.

Perkins' "Eeek! Gays!" response to H.R. 2410 is at least somewhat explainable. What has his panties in a twist is this section, 140 pages in:

Sec. 333. DISCRIMINATION RELATED TO SEXUAL ORIENTATION

(a) TRACKING VIOLENCE OR CRIMINALIZATION RELATED TO SEXUAL ORIENTATION. -- The Assistant Secretary for Democracy, Human Rights and Labor shall designate a Bureau-based officer or officers who shall be responsible for tracking violence, criminalization, and restrictions on the enjoyment of fundamental freedoms, consistent with United States law, in foreign countries based on actual or perceived sexual orientation and gender identity.

(b) INTERNATIONAL EFFORTS TO REVISE LAWS CRIMINALIZING HOMOSEXUALITY. -- In keeping with the Administration’s endorsement of efforts by the United Nations to decriminalize homosexuality in member states, the Secretary of State shall work though appropriate United States Government employees at United States diplomatic and consular missions to encourage the governments of other countries to reform or repeal laws of such countries criminalizing homosexuality or consensual homosexual conduct, or restricting the enjoyment of fundamental freedoms, consistent with United States law, by homosexual individuals or organizations.

Sec. 333 also contains a provision stating that reports tracking systematic and legal discrimination in other countries will now keep track of discrimination based on "actual or perceived sexual orientation and gender identity" as well as the religious and ethnic discrimination they previously tracked. Perkins is happy that these reports keep track of systematic and legal discrimination against Christians in countries in which they are a religious minority, but he's appalled at the notion that the State Department would also be concerned by the exact same kinds of bias and oppression when it is exercised against "actual or perceived" sex or gender minorities.

Rights for me but not for thee is the opposite of the rule of law. It's also the opposite of the Golden Rule. Opposing this section of this bill is impossible to reconcile with the Family Research Council's claim to "hate the sin but love the sinner." Perkins & Co. believe that homosexual sex is a sin, and that GLBT people need to pray away the gay -- to get saved and let Jesus straighten them out. I understand that view, but I don't follow the leap from such a belief to the idea that we must ignore and implicitly condone the imprisonment or disenfranchisement of GLBT in other nations.

Perkins says that Sec. 333 above constitutes a "radical agenda" that would mean "one of the State Department's biggest priorities would be pressuring other countries to overturn laws that restrict homosexual and transsexual behavior."

Perkins isn't just exaggerating by saying this would become "one of the State Department's biggest priorities," he's lying. It is not possible that he believes his own hyperbole here or his own deliberate distortion. The language of the bill is timid and requires no measurable outcomes. It says that the secretary of state "shall work ... to encourage" the "reform or repeal" of laws criminalizing homosexuality. Just imagine if the bill directed the secretary "to encourage the reform" of North Korea's nuclear weapons program, would Perkins then accept the claim that this was "one of the State Department's biggest priorities"? Of course not.

Note also the liar Tony Perkins' blanket approval of "laws that restrict homosexual and transsexual behavior." He thinks it is wrong to encourage the reform of laws "criminalizing homosexuality or consensual homosexual conduct." He approves of such laws. And more than that, he approves of laws "restricting the enjoyment of fundamental freedoms ... by homosexual individuals." He wants to outlaw gayness and gay sex and he favors laws denying GLBT people the rights of free speech, free assembly, free exercise of their religion, the right to bear arms, to own property, to vote, etc. He favors such laws abroad and he favors such laws here at home.

So for Tony Perkins, restricting fundamental human rights is OK provided it's only for an unpopular minority. That argument always works out so well. ...

It takes a bit more imagination for Perkins to characterize H.R. 2410 as an abortion bill, but the man has no shortage of imagination when it comes to injecting abortion politics anywhere and everywhere that he possibly can. Here is how Perkins introduces his diatribe against this bill for the funding of the State Department and the Peace Corps:

While the Obama Administration has made the claim that they want to reduce abortions in America, they've made no such claims abroad. On the contrary, the current administration is already planning the groundbreaking ceremony for an Office of Global Women's Issues, which is certain to become an international abortion headquarters. ...

I'm not quite sure what "an international abortion headquarters" is supposed to describe, but it's hard to see how the Office of Global Women's Issues, as described in the legislation, would be anything of the sort. See if you can figure out what Perkins is talking about from the text of the bill:

SEC. 334. OFFICE FOR GLOBAL WOMEN’S ISSUES.

(a) ESTABLISHMENT. — There is established an Office for Global Women’s Issues (in this section referred to as the ‘‘Office’’) in the Office of the Secretary of State in the Department of State. The Office shall be headed by the Ambassador-at-Large (in this section referred to as the ‘‘Ambassador’’), who shall be appointed by the President, by and with the advice and consent of the Senate. The Ambassador shall report directly to the Secretary of State.

(b) PURPOSE.—The Office shall coordinate efforts of the United States Government regarding gender integration and women’s empowerment in United States foreign policy.

(c) DUTIES.—

(1) IN GENERAL.—The Ambassador shall —

(A) coordinate and advise on activities, policies, programs, and funding relating to gender integration and women’s empowerment internationally for all bureaus and offices of the Department of State and in the international programs of other United States Government departments and agencies;

(B) design, support, and as appropriate, implement, limited projects regarding women’s empowerment internationally;

(C) actively promote and advance the full integration of gender analysis into the programs, structures, processes, and capacities of all bureaus and offices of the Department of State and in the international programs of other United States Government departments and agencies; and

(D) direct, as appropriate, United States Government resources to respond to needs for gender integration and women’s empowerment in United States Government foreign policies and international programs.

(2) COORDINATING ROLE.—The Ambassador shall coordinate with the United States Agency for International Development and the Millennium Challenge Corporation on all policies, programs, and funding of such agencies relating to gender integration and women’s empowerment.

(3) DIPLOMATIC REPRESENTATION.—Subject to the direction of the President and the Secretary of State, the Ambassador is authorized to represent the United States in matters relevant to the status of women internationally.

(d) REPORTING.—The heads of all bureaus and offices of the Department of State, as appropriate, shall evaluate and monitor all women’s empowerment programs administered by such bureaus and offices and annually submit to the Ambassador a report on such programs and on policies and practices to integrate gender.

Note that nothing in the above mentions abortion or reproductive health at all. Perkins is certain, though, that everything listed there as the agenda of the Office for Global Women’s Issues means one and only one thing: abortion. All that talk about integrating women and empowering them to become full and equal members of society is, to Perkins, nothing more than code words for abortion, abortion, abortion. And therefore, since Perkins is opposed to abortion, he concludes that he must oppose the empowerment of women and any effort to integrate them as full and equal members of male society.

That "therefore" in the preceding sentence is where so much of the anti-abortion movement either goes off the rails or shows itself to never have been on the rails in the first place. That "therefore" does not follow.

Tony Perkins is not a good person nor an honest broker, so let's set him aside for the moment to consider how a different person -- someone truthful and arguing in good faith -- might approach something like this Office for Global Women's Issues.

I used to work on anti-Apartheid stuff with a woman named Leah who was a devout Catholic who believed in the full humanity of the unborn from the moment of conception. Because of that premise, she argued that the unborn had a "right to life" which, in the case of abortion, she believed should outweigh the competing rights of the mother. She did not deny the existence or the validity or the importance of those competing rights, but simply argued that in this one circumstance, the unborn person's rights trumped them. Given her premise, that's a reasonable conclusion. It parallels the logic of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes' observation that your right to extend your arm ends where my nose begins.

But I'm afraid that people like Leah have not become the leading voices of the anti-abortion movement in this country. The leading voices belong to those who do not simply argue that one set of competing rights ought to outweigh the other, but who argue that only one set of competing rights is legitimate. Because my nose exists, they argue, you have no right, ever, to extend your arm. This is the sweeping non-sequitur we hear all the time from people like Perkins. He isn't satisfied to argue that a "right to life" for the unborn deserves to be weighed against the competing rights of the mother or of all women, but instead he races beyond anywhere his premise suggests or allows to insist that no such rights of the mother or of all women even exist.

We saw this absurdity on display here in Pennsylvania when it got our former junior senator, Rick Santorum, laughed out of office. Roe v. Wade was decided, in part, on the recognition of the fundamental right to privacy. Santorum's purported belief in the full humanity of the unborn ought therefore to have led him to argue that the right to privacy was, in the case of abortion, outweighed by the competing rights of the unborn, but Santorum wasn't satisfied to make that claim. Instead, he went mad. Santorum declared that the right to privacy does not exist, that any claim to such a right was a "myth," and that all that is not expressly permitted is forbidden. He thus became an advocate not merely of "big government," but of boundless government. He was thus invited, by a huge bipartisan majority, to return to the, um, private sector.

Tony Perkins and the Family Research Council are here following Santorum off the same cliff, repeating his lunacy as it applies to "gender integration and women’s empowerment." Perkins goes far, far beyond what logically flows from or is required by his premise of a commitment to a "right to life" for the unborn, choosing instead to deny, denounce and reject the very existence of any rights that might possibly compete with it.

As evidence that gender integration and the empowerment of women are simply code words for "unlimited abortion," (meaning only and exclusively that), Perkins quotes Secretary of State Hillary Clinton: "We are now an administration that will protect the rights of women, including their rights to reproductive health care." If reproductive health care might be construed to include legal abortion, then Perkins concludes that women must be denied reproductive health care. And if "protecting the rights of women" necessarily entails reproductive health care, then Perkins concludes that he must oppose rights for women -- all rights for women. Thus he arrives at this astonishing place of fierce opposition to the integration and empowerment of women anywhere on earth.

Again, Perkins' position does not logically flow from his alleged premise of rights for the unborn. That premise does not and cannot carry him to the place at which he has arrived. So how did he get there?

I think it's safe to assume that this is where he has arrived because this is where he always intended to go. Tony Perkins opposes gender integration and women's empowerment. He opposes protecting the rights of women and he opposes women having any right to reproductive health care. He claims that he opposes all of these things based on his opposition to abortion, but that train won't get him there. He got there all on his own. Concern for the rights of the unborn had nothing to do with it.

TF: Skip verse 10

Tribulation Force, pp. 53-55

Buck Williams spends a few more pages reviewing and admiring his miraculously complete Global Weekly cover story on the various theories circulating to explain the disappearance of every child on the planet, plus another few hundred million adults.

In that one sentence I've already described the Event in more detail than Buck seems to have done in his article. He's not alone in this -- in the world of Tribulation Force, no one stops to ask who is missing, or why them and not anyone else.

That no unbelievers would be curious about such questions is yet another impossibility. This is what we humans do when confronted with the inexplicable: We look for patterns. Buck and the other new believers don't have to look for patterns because they already know what the pattern is. They know that all of the missing adults were real, true, evangelical Christians who believed that Tim LaHaye was right about biblical prophecy. Yet Buck bewilderingly chooses not to mention this in his article on the disappearances. Like every other piece of evidence he has proving What Really Happened, he withholds this information from his readers.

As we've already discussed, Buck never had or committed time to write this article. Even if we go with the theory that Buck had the chance to type it up on the plane back from Germany, it seems unlikely that everyone he needed to interview for the piece was on that same flight. We're about to consider Buck's conversation with the Roman Catholic archbishop of Cincinnati, for example -- when was that conversation supposed to have taken place? Buck's painstakingly chronicled itinerary for the past 14 days did not include a visit to Cincinnati and we never read of him conducting any interviews by phone. (Our authors are not in the habit of skipping any detail of any phone conversation.)

But yet another reason Buck couldn't have written this article is that he just isn't up to speed on the subject. He has spent the past two weeks in a voluntary news vacuum. Bruce and Rayford have at least been watching CNN, but apart from their third-hand accounts of what they saw on TV, Buck has no idea what's going on in the world. He has picked up precisely one newspaper in the past two weeks, in which he read precisely one article -- his own obituary. He has no way of knowing what theories might be circulating in the current of current events because he hasn't so much as dipped a toe into the flow of news.

And there ought to be an unmanageably vast number of competing theories circulating, not just because we humans seek and require (and invent) patterns to explain the inexplicable, but also because circulating a vast number of competing theories is part of Nicolae Carpathia's job.

This is Disinformation 101: If you need to cover up a conspiracy, spread a thousand false conspiracy theories. Nicolae needs to keep people from learning the truth about What Really Happened. He may not know, specifically, about Bruce Barnes or New Hope Village Church or Pastor Billings' video, but he'd have to anticipate that there would be people like that out there and that steps would have to be taken to make sure that nobody would listen to them. This wouldn't require any recourse to his brainwashing mojo or his preternatural powers of persuasion -- all he'd need would be a sound studio to record hundreds of variations on Billings' "if you're watching this, it means I have disappeared" video. Most plausible explanations would fall under the broad categories of gods or aliens, but there are any almost infinite variety of such scenarios that might be retroactively "predicted" in these videos.

Another obvious step would be to commission dozens of "bible prophecy" experts to claim that the disappearances were the Rapture of the saints predicted in the Christian scriptures. These impostors would proclaim just enough detail from the premillennial dispensationalist truth, mixed in with just enough demonstrably false and easily disprovable nonsense, to discredit people like Bruce or Rayford once they started to speak out. "The Bible predicted all of this," Bruce would start to say, and everyone would think, "Ah yes, this bit. We've heard this and we know it's not true."

This would also of course be how Nicolae would deal with the "Two Witnesses" in Jerusalem. So Moses and Elijah are prophesying by the Western Wall? Very well  then, sprinkle a half-dozen more Moseses and Elijahs throughout the city. Have Abraham and Melchizedek prophesy by the Damascus Gate, warning people of the impending natural disasters that God is sending as a sign that they must obediently serve his chosen world leader. Send John the Baptist and John of Patmos to prophesy in the Kidron Valley and have Joseph and Daniel stake out a street corner on the Via Dolorosa. Dozens of pairs of "witnesses" would arise in every corner of the globe -- William Blake and Emanuel Swedenborg in London; Haile Selassie and Simon Kimbangu in Addis Ababa; Edgar Cayce and Madame Blavatsky in Machu Picchu; Nostradamus and Joan of Arc at the foot of the Eiffel Tower extolling the prophesied savior, the "golden-haired son of Cluj who shall appear to many as like unto Condor, only without the sideburns." Equip them all with enough plants and pyrotechnics to make the trip-and-die guys seem like small potatoes (I'm assuming that Nicolae is at least as capable at this sort of thing as Jannes and Jambres).

Mark Twain noted that "a lie can get halfway around the world before the truth can even get its boots on." Buck Williams has already given the lie a two-week head-start, so if Nicolae is anything like the Great Deceiver he's supposed to be -- or even if he were just a bush-league disinformationist along the lines of a Kim Jong Il -- the whole subject of "theories behind the disappearances" ought to be irreparably polluted by now by a flood of falsehoods and half-truths and the white noise of a thousand videos, prophets, witnesses and experts.

Nothing like any of that appears in Buck's article, which seems to restrict itself to Rayford's explanation of PMD mythology and a smattering of tabloid-style theories that Buck seems to have gleaned exclusively from the tabloids.

The good news is that by avoiding any real engagement with any actual competing theories, by refusing to debunk anything, by neglecting to even mention the official explanation, and by omitting all of the evidence he might have presented for the real explanation of WRH, Buck frees up a lot of room in his cover story. He uses this room to offer an extended rant against the Arminian heresies of the papist infidels.

That's right. Buck studiously avoids any discussion of Darby, Scofield or Hal Lindsay, but he goes out of his way to present a caricatured rehash of the Diet of Worms.

Most interesting to Buck was the interpretation of the event on the part of other churchmen. A lot of Catholics were confused, because while many remained, some had disappeared -- including the new pope, who had been installed just a few months before the vanishings. He had stirred up controversy in the church with a new doctrine that seemed to coincide more with the "heresy" of Martin Luther than with the historic orthodoxy they were used to. When the pope had disappeared, some Catholic scholars had concluded that this was indeed an act of God. "Those who opposed the orthodox teaching of the Mother Church were winnowed out from among us," Peter Cardinal Mathews of Cincinnati, a leading archbishop, had told Buck.

They probably first realized they were in trouble with their new pope when he chose the papal name of Calvin Zwingli I.

Buck decides to engage the archbishop in a theological debate. Because this Global Weekly article is obviously the appropriate place for that. And because Buck skimmed through the Gospels just the other night, so he's confident he knows the Bible better than this bishop possibly could.

Buck had been bold enough to ask the archbishop to comment on certain passages of Scripture, primarily Ephesians 2:8-9 ...

OK, stop. Two things.

First, there's no way that Buck knows anything about the book of Ephesians. He's never read it himself and, since it's not one of the "prophecy" books, Bruce never read it to him. It's absurd enough that Buck is going around citing chapter and verse, as though he'd grown up doing Sword Drills in Vacation Bible School, but it's even more ridiculous that he would be citing chapter and verse for a chapter and a verse that we know for a fact he's never read.

The explanation for this miraculous knowledge, of course, is that the authors know this passage, and they can quote it from memory, citing chapter and verse. And since Buck here is acting as the authors' mouthpiece, he magically knows everything they know.

This destroys any hope the reader has of a realistic story with realistic characters, but it can also be kind of fun. Just watch this:

READER: Hey, Rayford! Bev's birthday is in April, right?

RAYFORD STEELE: Yes, the 30th.

READER: What'd you get her this year?

RAYFORD: Oh, I found this lovely butterfly broach, an antique with ... wait, crap, I mean, um, ah ... who is this "Bev" that you speak of? I don't know anyone named Bev. Irene, that's my wife's name, Irene Steele, not this Beverly LaHaye or whatever it was you said. And anyway I'm not supposed to be talking to you like this.

He falls for that one every time. And you should see what Buck does when you tell him that Gil Thorpe was never funny.

But let me get to the second point, namely this: Anyone who makes a habit of reciting Ephesians 2:8-9 without going on to recite verse 10 as well is a jackass.

Seriously. A colossal jackass.

Here's the first two verses, which ventriloquist-dummy Buck recites:

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.

And here's the next verse, the next sentence, the second half of that thought:

For we are God's workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.

Now there's only one reason you'd ever quote those first two verses while omitting the third, and that's if you're doing what Buck is doing here -- tossing out what you believe to be the Lutheran trump-card in some pointless, abstract and distracting argument over "grace vs. works."

Buck at least has an excuse -- he's fictional, and thus on an even footing with the fictional strawman bishop he's debating here. But this same side of this same argument is presented  all the time in American evangelical churches, as though the fictional strawman Peter Cardinal Mathews were lurking in the lobby, just waiting to burst into the sanctuary to declare that we earn our way to heaven by doing good deeds, praying to Mary and buying indulgences.

Simply saying that evangelicals, like Buck, recite those first two verses without ever mentioning the third doesn't fully convey how emphatically they reject what Ephesians 2:10 has to say. They treat this verse like the 13th floor of a hotel. It's not part of their canon. I have sat through at least a half dozen sermons in evangelical churches during which the preacher read the first nine verses of this chapter and then launched into a condemnation of the evil works-righteousness of the evil good-works faction, concluding with, "So let's pick up reading at verse 11 ..."

What elevates this strange behavior to the status of jackassitude is that these folks have allowed their fiercely abstract debate over the mechanics of soteriology to tie them into knots to the extent that, for them, "good works" is an epithet, an obscenity. To do good, to be good, is treated as an affront to the sufficiency of grace.

Here in Tribulation Force, LaHaye and Jenkins are gleefully proud of the way their spokescharacter in this scene is able to cite scripture to prove the evils of good works. After Buck recites Ephesians 2:8-9, carefully stopping before verse 10 (jackass), the archbishop is reduced to stammering:

"Now you see," the archbishop said, "this is precisely my point. People have been taking verses like that out of context for centuries and trying to build doctrine on them."

"But there are other passages just like those," Buck said.

Oh, snap! Buck is thinking as the authors high-five one another for successfully out-debating their fictional bishop.

Of course Buck left his personal comments and opinions out of the article, but he was able to work in the Scripture and the archbishop's attempt to explain away the doctrine of grace.

And thus we come to the point. Martin Luther believed in the doctrine of grace. Buck, LaHaye and Jenkins believe in believing in the doctrine of grace. The archbishop of Cincinnati did not believe in that doctrine, and so he was left behind. Pope Calvin was raptured along with all the other RTCs because he had come to believe in the gospel of salvation by belief in the proper understanding of the mechanics of salvation. RTCs are not real, true Christians because of the grace of God -- they are real, true Christians because their sentiments are aligned with the correct side of the argument about the role of God's grace in salvation.

What L&J and Buck are arguing for here is self-refuting nonsense that swallows its own tail and it isn't easy to give a lucid description of such madness, but try thinking of it this way: They do not believe in Calvinism, but in Calvinism-ism. They believe that we achieve our own salvation by means of asserting that Luther, Calvin and Augustine were correct to say that we cannot achieve our own salvation. The logical implication of this would seem to be that Heaven will be populated with Calvin-ists and Luther-ans, but that Calvin and Luther themselves will be excluded. Those reformers mistakenly believed that God's grace would be sufficient to save them, not realizing -- as L&J do -- that God and grace are powerless apart from what really matters, which is our own assent to the proposition that grace is sufficient. To be saved, then, we need to say that God's grace alone is sufficient, but to mean by that that our belief in the power of our believing that we believe that is what is really sufficient to save us. Or something like that.

The point is that it is the authors and their mouthpiece who are here rejecting the doctrine of grace. The gist of that teaching is that God's grace is not dependent on our merit or worthiness -- that's what "grace" means, after all. But the authors believe God's grace is dependent -- that it is earned and not freely given. They believe grace is dependent on a correct understanding of grace, that it is contingent on whether or not its potential recipients can properly articulate how it works. They believe, in other words, in righteousness by works -- but mental, or sentimental, works, rather than tangible ones.

This whole lengthy aside is particularly troublesome in the context of this series, which elevates the apocalyptic passages of the Bible over the rest of it. Those passages are not very hospitable to Calvinism, let alone to the authors' Calvinism-ism. The authors' favorite book, Revelation, ends with a relentless and emphatic litany of judgment based solely on deeds: "The dead were judged according to what they had done ... Each person was judged according to what he had done." Or consider my favorite apocalyptic passage, Jesus' so-called "mini-apocalypse" at the end of Matthew's Gospel, the centerpiece of which is the parable of the sheep and the goats. That parable makes no mention of faith or grace or any other basis for judgment or salvation apart from how we treat "the least of these." Those who feed the hungry and befriend the criminals are saved. Those who don't, aren't. Period.*

Those passages can be reconciled with the idea of salvation by grace, but not in the way that Buck or the authors think of it. The idea -- which is embraced by Catholics and Protestants, Calvinists and Arminians alike -- is that grace is what enables the sheep to be sheep. God's grace is what affords us the possibility to be -- in the Pauline phrase that jackasses like Buck so studiously avoid -- created to do good works.

That idea leads to a workable doctrine of grace -- something more like the original Pauline and Augustinian notion that Luther and Calvin sought to recover. It says, "Grace. Therefore works." Buck and the braying crowd of Skip-Verse-10ers would argue the opposite of that, "Grace. Therefore not works." So I guess I shouldn't be calling them jackasses. "Goats" would be more accurate.

The poor archbishop was constructed and inserted here entirely for the purpose of this anti-works-righteousness rant in defense of thoughts-righteousness, so he's not meant to be anything more than a straw-man embodiment of the worst evangelical fantasies about what it is that deluded Catholics believe. The authors won't allow him to discern any pattern as to who was taken in the disappearances, and they insist that he must be -- like every character in Tribulation Force who isn't a member of the Tribulation Force -- wholly ignorant of any aspect of PMD rapture mythology, and those restrictions force him to seem a bit dim. But all of that together gives the bishop an incoherence which is just about the closest thing you'll find in this book to realistically conflicted human nature.

He comes across as someone who is struggling to make sense of the horrific tragedy of the Event, someone who is desperate to reconcile such horrors with the idea that a just and loving God is still in control. So he starts by trying to talk himself into the "winnowing" of evil theory:

"The Scripture says that in the last days it will be as in the days of Noah. And you'll recall that in the days of Noah, the good people remained and the evil ones were washed away."

He's got a point there, actually. The bishop is referring to Matthew 24, where Jesus says that the end of the age will be like "the days before the flood":

... until the flood came and took them all away. That is how it will be at the coming of the Son of Man. Two men will be in the field; one will be taken and the other left.

That last sentence is, of course, where the Left Behind series gets its name -- Matthew 24:40 via Larry Norman's "I Wish We'd All Been Ready." But neither L&J nor Larry seemed to notice that the flood reference clearly shows that getting "taken" is bad while being "left behind" is good.** That's part of why I think this passage makes far more sense if read as a memento mori.

When Buck pointed out to the bishop that the disappearances also involved children and babies:

The bishop had shifted uncomfortably. "That I leave to God," he said. "I have to believe that perhaps he was protecting the innocents."

"From what?"

"I'm not sure. I don't take the Apocrypha [sic] literally, but there are dire predictions of what might be yet to come."

"So you would not relegate the vanished young ones to the winnowing of the evil?"

"No. Many of the little ones who disappeared I baptized myself ..."

He's a straw man grasping at straws. He doesn't know how to make sense of what happened and he's willing to admit that, to confess, "I'm not sure." This makes me far more fond of him than I'm able to be of any of the cruelly certain characters the authors tell me I'm supposed to like.

Buck could have helped the archbishop. He could have opened his eyes to the pattern of the disappearances and explained the prophecies outlined on the back cover of the book, but he's no more interested in sharing that evidence with the bishop than he is in sharing it with his GW readers. So instead of telling the poor man what he believes happened -- what he knows happened -- he instead abruptly asks the guy "to comment on certain passages of Scripture."

"So you've lost many children from your parish, precious little ones you knew and loved yourself," Buck says. "Well then suck on this. Ephesians 2:8 and 9, bee-yatch! Aw yeahhh!" And then he spikes the Bible and starts doing his end-zone victory dance, leaving the poor man more bewildered than ever.

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

* This parable utterly contradicts Calvinism-ism's notion of salvation by assent to proper doctrine. The story suggests, instead, that salvation itself is unrelated to concern about salvation. The Son of Man tells the sheep that they are blessed and they reply, "I'm sorry, have we met? What's a 'Jesus' and what does that have to do with me?" They have no knowledge or understanding of the mechanics of salvation and it turns out they didn't need any. Soteriology is a red herring.

** The parallel passage in Luke's Gospel is more fun if you ever have to deal with a PMD in conversation. Be sure to use the King James Version when you bring up Luke 17:34 -- "In that night there shall be two men in one bed; the one shall be taken, and the other shall be left" -- and then argue that a literal interpretation suggests that precisely 50 percent of homosexuals will be raptured.

Wanderlust-Warning Sign

Tell me what you want, what you really, really want ...

"Wanderlust," Bjork
"Wanderlust," Delays
"Wanderlust," R.E.M.
"Wannabe," Spice Girls
"War," Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band
"War Pigs," Cake
"Warakurna," Midnight Oil
"The Warbler," The Choir
"Warning," Green Day
"Warning Sign," Talking Heads

Yes, the quote above is from the Spice Girls. But for a moment try to forget that's where that line is from and try not to think about that silly song. Is there a more important or more intimate question than this?

It's not even a question, actually, but a command: "Tell me." Connect. Tell me. Tell me what you want, what you really, really want.

In the context of the silly song, "really" seemed like one of those all-purpose empty intensifiers that tend to pepper our speech. "I really want," in that sense, meaning roughly the same thing as "I very much want" or "I bleeping want" -- conveying intensity and urgency, but nothing more. But the word offers more than that. "Really" can also mean truly, genuinely, sincerely. Strip away pretension, propriety, insecurity, fear and the bills you have to pay. Strip away concern for what others might say or think or expect. Strip away every mask, veil, closet, beard, disguise or cultivated persona. Disregard all of that and tell me what you want, what you really, really want. Describe for me your pearl of great price, your treasure hidden in a field.

Back in 1996, the Spice Girls' "Wannabe" was unavoidable. It seemed like there was nowhere one could go without hearing those lyrics. In our daily lives, though, the occasion to say such a thing -- the opportunity to invite such a vulnerable confession, to really, really connect -- is a rare and precious thing, a kind of miracle. If anything is sacred, it is a moment such as this: "Tell me what you want, what you really, really want." "I'll tell you what I want, what I really, really want, I want ..."

For all that, though, "Wannabe" is still a screechingly awful, if catchy, bit of disposable pop. The difficulty or seeming impossibility, of ever telling what we want, what we really, really want, or even of fully knowing what that is ourselves, is reflected in those three songs above  that share the title "Wanderlust." Each of those songs, one way or another, aspires to get at the unsettling refusal to settle for anything less. Some people sleep, some people yearn.

Etymology

Warren Clements of The Globe and Mail is the latest language columnist to discover the words slacktivist and slacktivism.

The Globe and Mail is based in Toronto, so it's a bit of a shame that Clements misses the local angle: that word slacktivism was coined by a native son -- by Dwight Ozard of London, Ontario, in fact.

If you're searching for the origin of this word, Google tends to direct you to Paul McFedries delightful Word Spy site, and to the 2002 entry on the word slacktivism. This is where Clements winds up, relaying McFedries' earliest citation of a Feb. 27, 2001, Newsweek article and his note that:

This shortened form of the phrase slacker activism had a brief appearance in a Usenet posting in 1995, and then didn't appear again until 2000 in a discussion concerning people whose idea of activism is clicking the "Forward" button in their e-mail software. ...

That's certainly the dominant prevailing meaning of the word, but Clements also digs up another early use that suggests something rather different. A 2000 article in U-Wire, he notes, refers to "television host, filmmaker, author and self-confessed slacker-activist (slacktivist, if you will) Michael Moore." Whether or not you're a fan of Michael Moore's, he's clearly someone whose idea of activism goes far beyond forwarding e-mails.

 That description of Moore gets closer to the original use of the word. I can't say "original" with 100-percent certainty, mind you, since McFedries doesn't tell us the context of that 1995 Usenet citation, but as you can see from the scans here, "slacktivism" was the title of a seminar series that Dwight and I gave at the Cornerstone Festival in 1995.

Cornerstone is the annual music festival and refugee camp organized by the Jesus People USA every summer on farmland in western Illinois. The word "organized" there probably isn't quite right, actually, it's four days of tents, mud and rock & roll held together by providence and hippy optimism. It's probably the closest thing this side of the pond to Greenbelt, if that helps to give you an idea.

The festival is always on the weekend nearest July 4, but the C-Stone people needed our seminar title and summary/sales-pitch much earlier for their publicity materials. Those included print ads and articles in their own magazine and others as well as those broadsheet newsprint mailers that they send out to a few hundred thousand people starting around March. So thanks to Cornerstone's publicity apparatus, such as it is, Dwight's word "slacktivism" got splashed about fairly widely in early 1995, and was then given another boost at the festival itself, which was attended by 60,000 or so people as well (most of whom, of course, did not attend our seminars). It thus seems likely that Dwight's coinage preceded -- and may have been the source -- of the word's first appearance on Usenet.

Our "slacktivism" seminars were not about finding minimal effort ways to feel self-righteously smug, as per the online-petition, e-mail-forwarding dominant sense of the word after it re-emerged. We chose the theme of "slacker activism" (which Dwight shortened, despite my objection that it sounded gimmicky) as a way of confronting the use of "slacker" as an epithet by Baby Boomers who had heard of, but not seen, Richard Linklater's 1991 movie and had taken its existence as confirmation of their suspicion that you kids these days are lazy and nowhere near as concerned and committed as they were back in the '60s. We countered that with dozens of stories of then-young people doing difficult, necessary and beautiful work all over the country, work that by its nature had to be done on a small, personal scale. The direction we were suggesting was bottom-up rather than top-down; less marching in the streets and more The Man Who Planted Trees.

At some point I should probably dig through my old notes from those seminars and retell some of those stories here. My point today though is just this: Until someone comes up with evidence of a pre-1995 use of the term "slacktivism," I'm going to consider it Dwight's word and to continue using it the way he did.