slacktivist

Easy Living to Edit

I don't remember last night but they took my picture

"Easy Living," Billie Holiday
"Easy to Ignore," Sixpence None the Richer
"Easy to Remember," Billie Holiday
"Eat for Two," 10,000 Maniacs
"Echo Wars," Peter Case
"Eclipse," Steve Hindalong
"Ed Again," Swirling Eddies
"Ed Takes a Vacation," Swirling Eddies
"Eddie's Ragga," Spoon
"Edge of the World," Josh Ritter
"Edge of the World," Sam Phillips
"The Edge of the World," Sonia Dada
"Edit," Regina Spektor

Sinister suffrage

The Associated Press reports:

SAN FRANCISCO — Stunned and angry, national left-handed leaders Wednesday blamed scare-mongering ads — and President Barack Obama's lack of engagement — for a bitter election setback in Maine that could alter the dynamics for both sides in the southpaw-franchise debate.

Conservatives, in contrast, celebrated Maine voters' rejection of a law that would have allowed left-handed people to vote, depicting it as a warning shot that should deter politicians in other states from pushing for sinister suffrage.

"Every time the citizens have voted on the rights of minorities, they have always sided with the majority," said Mathew Staver, founder of Liberty Counsel, a Florida-based Christian legal group. "Maine dramatically illustrates the will of the people, and politicians should wake up and listen."

Left-handed activists were frustrated that Obama, who insists he staunchly supports their overall civil rights agenda, didn't speak out forcefully in defense of Maine's voting law before Tuesday's referendum. The law was repealed in a vote of 53 percent to 47 percent.

"President Obama missed an opportunity to state his position against these discriminatory attacks with the clarity and moral imperative that would have helped in this close fight," said Evan Wolfson of the national advocacy group Freedom to Vote. "The anti-lefty forces are throwing millions of dollars into various unsubtle ads aimed at scaring people, so subtle statements from the White House are not enough."

The White House, asked about the criticism, had no immediate comment.

The left-handed voting debate is simmering in at least a half-dozen states where a bill is pending or where a court ruling or existing law is being eyed by conservatives for possible challenge.

Had Maine's law been upheld by voters, it would have become the sixth state to legalize voting rights for the left-handed — and the first to affirm it by popular vote. In Massachusetts, Vermont, Connecticut, New Hampshire and Iowa, southpaw suffrage resulted from court decisions or legislation.

California is sure to be a major battleground over the next several years. Last year, conservatives succeeded in winning public approval of Proposition 8, which overturned a state court ruling allowing lefties to vote. Left-handed rights groups want to take the issue back to the voters but are divided on a timetable.

In the aftermath of the Maine vote, some California activists appealed to their supporters for money to help them put a measure on the 2010 ballot. Other activist leaders want to wait until 2012.

"It's never too early to go back to right a fundamental wrong," said Chaz Lowe of Yes! on Equality, who favors shooting for 2010. "A lot of people are angry, a lot of people are upset. It at least has the potential to be a mobilization for the grass roots."

Some California activists said the outcome in Maine strengthened their belief that it will fall to the U.S. Supreme Court — not to right-handed voters — to make the left-handed franchise legal. A federal lawsuit challenging Prop. 8 is scheduled to go to trial in January, the first step in a legal journey that is expected to reach the high court in a few years.

"The results in Maine underscore exactly why we are challenging California's left-handed voting ban," said Chad Griffin, president of the American Foundation for Equal Rights, the Los Angeles group spearheading the lawsuit. "The U.S. Constitution guarantees equal rights to every American, and when those rights are violated, it is the role of our courts to protect us, regardless of what the polls say."

Meanwhile, Maine voters will return to the polls next month to consider another series of referenda regarding the privilege of rights for minority groups. Proposition 13 considers whether redheads might be allowed to own property, Prop. 42 would permit Mormons to obtain a driver's license. and Prop. 57 would overturn a court ruling allowing Libertarians to dine in public restaurants.

Innocence and experience

I made this recently, but I'm still not quite sure what to make of it.

Playing off of Jesus' charge to his disciples to "be wise as serpents and innocent as doves" we can construct the following grid of wisdom and innocence, charting four possible outcomes when you encounter someone purporting to be in need of your help:

As you can see, one of these outcomes is a Very Good Thing, one is a Very Bad Thing, and the other two are more or less indifferent. That lower right square is, of course, the inbreaking of the kingdom of God. The lower left square, on the other hand, is a little slice of Hell on earth.

So our little model here would seem to suggest that it might be wisest to avoid the wisdom of serpents altogether and stick to a dovish innocence. Assume that everyone you encounter is genuinely in need and you'll never find yourself participating in the hellish neglect of that lower left square. The worst that could happen would be that you'd get taken advantage of, which is sub-optimal but, morally speaking, no big whoop. Such deliberate naivete would also seem in line with some of the other things Jesus told his disciples, such as telling them to give freely to anyone who asks and to lend without the expectation of repayment.

But there are at least three problems with the holy foolishness of that approach.

The first problem, obviously, is that it contradicts the original statement. Jesus didn't say, "Forget about being wise as serpents, just get out there and be as innocent as doves." He seemed to think there was some merit or necessity to serpentine wisdom, so it's probably worth exploring what that might be.

The second problem is that a strict adherence to an unqualified dovish innocence offers no way of knowing or ensuring that our actions are effective -- that we're making the best use of our finite time and resources. When the question is "Should I help this person?" then an undiluted innocence may provide an answer. But when the question is more complicated -- "Should I help this person or that person?" -- it seems a measure of wisdom is called for.

The third problem with the dovishness suggested by the grid above is that this abstract model doesn't account very well for the actual facts of the actual people we're likely to meet here in the actual world.

Take for example the routine ethical dilemma posed by panhandlers. "Ignore him -- he just wants money for drugs," is one form of the usual dismissal given to any obligation we have when confronted by this purported need. That dismissal is sometimes despicably self-serving, but it's also usually accurate. The vast majority of people in need do not panhandle, and the vast majority of panhandlers are not in need -- or, rather, they have real and desperate needs, but not of the sort that a fleeting exchange or a few small bills can hope to address. Nine times out of 10, giving money to a panhandler is enabling, not empowering.

Given this data set, then, in which most panhandlers are addicts or scammers or both, we might conclude the opposite of what the model above suggests -- that we should completely avoid dovish innocence and treat all panhandlers with a suspicious, reptilian wisdom.

That approach seems troubling, in that it leaves open the likelihood of the hellish scenario in the lower left square while shutting off the possibility for the kind of blessed community described in the lower right square. Plus, again, it contradicts what Jesus actually said. His charge to his disciples indicates that he also saw something worthy and necessary in maintaining the innocence of doves. He wanted his followers to have both wisdom and innocence, so that they wouldn't lose their shirts or their souls.

Anyway, that chart above was originally part of a weird attempt to spoof the use of PowerPoint in church services, which I eventually abandoned because it seemed too much work for something silly. The chart itself is also silly, but I thought it was silly in a somewhat interesting way -- a silly way of approaching some interesting and maybe important things.

But I'm still not entirely sure what to make of it. Hence this rather feeble conclusion.

TF: Saving Hattie Durham

Tribulation Force, pp. 108-109

Buck Williams is sitting just outside of the Antichrist's office.

He imagines he can feel the supernatural evil emanating from the next room. He desperately prays for divine protection, for deliverance, because he knows he's in extreme danger. Nicolae Carpathia has power over the minds of men and unless Buck is somehow able to convince him that he, too, is under his spell, that office may be the last room that Buck ever sees.

Buck has taken a terrible chance coming here, accepting this invitation to New York for a rendezvous with pure evil. But he had to come. For Hattie.

She had come to him for help and in return he had, unwittingly, put her immortal soul in danger. Buck had introduced her to Nicolae Carpathia, the Antichrist himself. He may as well have sold her into slavery.

Buck feels responsible for Hattie. He is responsible for the perilous new life she has begun. He talked about this endlessly with Rayford Steele and with Bruce Barnes, agonizing over how "every day" it gnaws at him that he put Hattie into harm's way and then just left her behind. In several long and repetitive conversations, both Bruce and Rayford warned him of the dangers of coming here, but he knew this was his only chance -- the only way he might perhaps reach Hattie, find some way to take her to somewhere it was safe to talk so that he could tell her about the truth he had found and that truth could set her free.

That was the reason he was here, the only reason. He was here in New York, in the dragon's lair, to rescue the damsel in distress. He was here to save Hattie Durham.

Hattie Durham approached Buck and Chaim Rosenzweig, and they both stood. "Mr. Williams!" she said, embracing him. "I haven't seen you since I took this job."

Yes you have, Buck thought, you just don't remember.

"The secretary-general and Mr. Plank will see you now," she told Buck.

And that's it.

That is the entire extent of Buck's conversation with Hattie Durham during this trip to New York. She greets him warmly and he responds, as he did when greeted by Rosenzweig, without saying anything, absorbed in thoughts of how cool it is that they've been deceived and he hasn't. (He does the same thing yet again when Steve greets him on the next page.)

Hattie leads Buck down a long hall, but he doesn't say a word to her, taking the opportunity instead to check out her outfit:

... he realized he had never seen her out of uniform. Today she wore a tailored suit that made her look like a classy, wealthy, sophisticated woman. The look only enhanced her stunning beauty. Even her speech seemed more cultured than he remembered. Her exposure to Nicolae Carpathia seemed to have improved her presence.

Buck spends the rest of the afternoon there in the same set of offices as Hattie, but he never speaks to her again before flying back to Chicago. He never even tries to speak to her.

Take a moment to savor this marvelously weird fumble here by Jerry Jenkins. He spent several chapters setting this up, with three separate conversations in which Buck agonized over whether or not to make this trip, weighing the immense danger against his overriding sense of obligation to undo the damage he had done to Hattie.

And then, abruptly, Buck and Jenkins both just forget all about it. Once Mr. McGillicuddy gets on the plane for New York, he abandons every thought of trying to save Hattie Durham.

Hattie does have one long conversation during Buck's visit to her new workplace, but that conversation is on the phone, with Rayford. And Rayford -- who also has spent pages and pages agonizing over his regrets and responsibilities regarding Hattie -- doesn't try to rescue her either. Instead, he lets her recruit him to come work for the Antichrist too.

Chapters 4, 5 and 6 of this book recount Buck's brave, heroic trip to New York to rescue Hattie who has been lured into working for the Antichrist. He doesn't do that, or even try to do that, but by the end of these chapters both Buck and Rayford will also wind up as part of the Antichrist's entourage.

If you're keeping score at home, that would be: Antichrist 2, Tribulation Force 0.

This doesn't happen due to Nicolae's Redfordian charisma or to his mind-control mojo. It's not his doing at all. This is Jerry Jenkins' doing.

Back in Book 1, Jenkins decided that he was going to be telling this story exclusively through the eyes of his two main characters. The inevitable result of that decision is that Buck and Rayford are doomed to find themselves in Nicolae's posse. That's where the action's at, so that's where our bystander-narrators need to be.

This really isn't the best narrative approach to a story attempting to present a comprehensive look at the End of the World. It means, among other things, that nothing significant can happen anywhere unless either Buck Williams or Rayford Steele is there to see it. If an apocalyptic prophecy falls in the forest and neither of our heroes is there to hear it, the prophecy can't be fulfilled.

The result of that choice in Tribulation Force is vast chunks of the book in which nothing much happens other than Jenkins' implausible maneuvering to get his bystanders into position. Most of this book doesn't have anything to do with Tim LaHaye's End Times check list at all, but only with the elaborate machinations involved in getting Buck and Rayford into front-row seats for the Nicolae Carpathia Show.

Apart from the generally dull pointlessness of these chapters, there's a larger problem with Jenkins' devotion to the idea that one or the other of our heroes must always be standing by when Nicolae does something Antichrist-ish. This problem is that it means our heroes will always and only be doing just exactly that -- standing by. The Tribulation Force can never become any legitimate kind of resistance or underground because that might interfere with their ordained narrative function of being bystanders. And that means, in turn, that our heroes can never be heroes. There's no such thing as a heroic bystander.

This poor structural choice by Jenkins winds up influencing the plot of these books and the character of its characters. In the Big Finale of the last book, Nicolae points a gun at Stonagal and we read:

Buck considered a suicidal dive across the table for the gun ...

But he didn't make that dive. Jenkins couldn't risk it. If something had happened to Buck, then who would be left to tell us this story?

This becomes a pattern in these books. Buck and Rayford are consistently portrayed as the kinds of heroes who never, ever make a dive for the gun. Jenkins places them right at the center of the action -- or, rather, right next to the center of action. But he never dares to put them in the action. They can't act and narrate at the same time. Ultimately, whether this is due to Jenkins' timidity or to that of his characters really doesn't matter -- either way Buck and Rayford come across as inert, self-absorbed cowards, as timid bystanders who think of themselves as the most important person in everyone else's story.

The publisher's blurb on the back cover of Tribulation Force promised something different:

Rayford Steele, Buck Williams, Bruce Barnes and Chloe Steele band together to form the Tribulation Force. Their task is clear, and their goal is nothing less than to stand and fight the enemies of God during the seven most chaotic years the planet will ever see.

But not really, no. That's not this book. The Tribulation Force can't "stand and fight," they can only stand by, doing nothing as the world crumbles around them.

But of course even if this book had tried to live up to the publisher's blurb it would still have been immensely difficult to reconcile that idea -- "stand and fight the enemies of God" -- with, you know, the whole gospel of Christ crucified. thing. The distinction between God's friends and God's "enemies" isn't compatible with that gospel. We're not talking about some esoteric aspect of theology here, but about something as elementary as John 3:16. Even if it were possible, or permissible, to identify some separate class of people who constitute "the enemies of God," I have to wonder what the point would be. Why waste time making lists of friends and enemies when you're told to respond to both the same way?

This whole Onward Christian Soldiers kick is probably an unfortunate side effect of St. Paul's use of some martial metaphors to illustrate what he called the "ministry of reconciliation." Twisting those metaphors into some kind of "literal" call to "stand and fight the enemies of God" makes about as much sense as interpreting Gandhi's idea of "satyagraha" as advocating violence since he said it describes "the Force which is born of Truth."

I'm repeating myself here, but that publisher's blurb is another reminder of how the Left Behind series warps that great old gospel song:

He could have called ten thousand angels
To destroy the world and set him free
He could have called ten thousand angels
But he died alone, for you and me

The way LaHaye and Jenkins sing that song it goes something more like this:

He should have called ten thousand angels
To destroy the world and set him free
He's coming back with ten thousand angels
To destroy the world, except for me

I like the original better, and not just because it's more orthodox.

Oops

And then, suddenly, Fred remembered he had a blog. ...

TF: Tim LaHaye's Cherokee grandmother

Tribulation Force, pp. 105-108

Before we proceed to our first glimpse of the appalling Tsion Ben-Judah, let me first take a moment to commend Jerry Jenkins for what is, for him, a minor achievement here:

At a few minutes after two in New York, Buck waited with Chaim Rosenzweig in the opulent waiting room outside the office of the secretary-general of the United Nations.

Here we are at the U.N. without having to trace every step of the journey from the table at the Manhattan Yacht Club to this room. See how much easier that can be for reader and writer alike? This is an utterly standard device in almost any other work of fiction, but in these books it's a pleasant surprise on these rare occasions to be spared the logistical details of any journey Buck makes from Point A to Point B.

This new setting hasn't changed the dynamic we saw between Buck and Chaim during lunch. Chaim remains full of enthusiastic affection for his friend and Buck is still seething with scarcely contained scorn.

Chaim was merrily going on about something, and Buck pretended to pay attention. He was praying silently, not knowing if his foreboding sense of evil was psychological because he knew Nicolae Carpathia was nearby, or if the man truly emitted some sort of demonic aura detectable to followers of Christ.

Buck is praying with a zeal that he hopes makes up for his utter lack of forethought or preparation for his impending encounter with Nicolae. I recognize this behavior. I grew up attending a fundamentalist Christian school, so I know all about last-second desperate prayer as a substitute for having done one's homework.

Then again I also recognize this behavior from having played a lot of AD&D growing up. Buck is in the antechamber to the lair of the evil boss. He casts Detect Evil. He casts Protection from Evil. ...

Buck was warmed by the knowledge that Bruce was praying for him right then.

Good move. Get the cleric to cast Bless before heading in to the lair. Buck is so preoccupied in trying to decide whether to use his Potion of Haste now or to save it for a lower level of the U.N. that he still isn't listening to Chaim:

"Anyway, I was saying. My dear friend Rabbi Tsion Ben-Judah has finished his three-year study, and it wouldn't surprise me if he wins a Nobel Prize for it."

"His three-year study?"

"You weren't listening at all, were you, my friend?"

"I'm sorry."

Another pleasant surprise: an actual apology from Buck. He and Rayford don't usually apologize for anything. They seem to view it as a sign of weakness.

"It's all right. But listen, Rabbi Ben-Judah was commissioned by the Hebrew Institute of Biblical Research to do a three-year study."

"A study of what?"

"Something about the prophecies relating to the Messiah so we Jews will recognize him when he comes."

For this, Chaim expects his friend the rabbi to receive a Nobel Prize. This isn't as strange as it sounds. If Chaim can win one for botany, there's no reason Ben-Judah shouldn't get one for Tanakh studies.

Buck was stunned. The Messiah had come, and the Jews left behind had missed him. When he had come the first time most did not recognize him. What should Buck say to his friend? If he declared himself a "Tribulation saint," as Bruce liked to refer to new believers since the Rapture, what might he be doing to himself? Rosenzweig was a confidant of Carpathia's. Buck wanted to say that a legitimate study of messianic prophecies could lead only to Jesus. But he said only, "What are the prophecies pointing to the Messiah?"

The stunning thing here is that Buck assumes his friend has never encountered the Christian idea that Jesus is the Messiah. He thus wrestles with whether or not he should risk exposing himself as a Christian in order to let Chaim in on this big secret.

I'm not being facetious here. This is really what Buck -- and, by extension, the authors -- seems to think. He believes that Jews like Rosenzweig are simply unaware that Christians believe Jesus was the Christ. As though our use of that name wasn't a pretty big hint.

Buck (like the authors) further believes that if he were to explain this to his friend -- "Well, Chaim, we Christians believe that Jesus was the Messiah" -- then his friend would have no choice but to kick himself for not having realized that sooner while kneeling to convert.

Seriously, read that paragraph again and note the two key words: "Legitimate" and "only."

A legitimate study of messianic prophecies could lead only to Jesus.

"Messianic prophecies" is, for LaHaye and Jenkins, a synonym for the entirety of the Hebrew scriptures, or what we Christians call the Old Testament. It's not quite true that LaHaye thinks these scriptures are exclusively composed of prophecies about the Messiah. There are also lots of prophecies about the Antichrist, of course. But the whole thing, in LaHaye's mind, is mainly a list of prophecies. Just like the New Testament.

Chaim -- who is portrayed in this book as relentlessly dim -- doesn't guess at what the reader sees coming a mile away. TBJ's three-year study will of course conclude that the "messianic prophecies" of the Hebrew scriptures can "lead only to Jesus." TBJ's study will thus reach the same conclusion Buck has reached after his extensive two weeks of second-hand research and the same conclusion that the authors started out with.

Note what it means here that TBJ is credited with "legitimate" study of the Hebrew scriptures. That means -- explicitly in this book -- that every other Jew who has ever studied the Tanakh without thereafter converting to Christianity was engaged in illegitimate study.

We'll have plenty of opportunity in the chapters ahead, after TBJ arrives in person in our story, to explore the theological assumptions at work here. But for now I want to touch on how this tale of the scholar-convert compares to Penthouse Forum.

The introduction of Tsion Ben-Judah in this story might as well have started: "Dear Jews for Jesus, I never believed these stories were true until one day ..."

What I mean is that we're dealing here with the authors' fantasy, with a pipe dream of their idea of the Ideal Jew. It's a fantasy that, like those infamous Penthouse letters, purports to express the writers' affection for its object but which actually, by treating them as objects for their own gratification, displays instead their contempt.

TBJ is what the authors imagine to be an Honest Jew. Any Honest Jew, in their view, is one who rejects Judaism. The implication, of course, is that any Jewish person who fails to do this is a Dishonest Jew.

Now, sure, that sounds awfully anti-Semitic. But in partial defense of L&J, we should note that this attitude of theirs toward Jews isn't wholly different from their attitude toward everyone else in this regard. In their view, anyone who fails to embrace what they see as the obviously self-evident truth of their brand of rapture-obsessed Real, True Christianity can only be acting out of a deliberate perversity. You and me and every other atheist, agnostic, pagan, Hindu, Muslim, Sikh, Roman Catholic, Quaker, Anglican and amillennialist can't have given any legitimate consideration of their views. If we had, then we'd have been forced to concede that they were right and we were wrong. So either our studies have been illegitimate, or else we're just pretending we're not convinced or, perhaps, we've deliberately chosen falsehood over truth because we're all evil like that.

So, yes, L&J believe that all devout Jews are disingenuous and perverse deniers of the truth, but they believe the same thing about most Christians, too.

Tsion Ben-Judah is a remarkable character because he embodies in these books that weird admixture of Judeo-philia and anti-Semitism that baffles and infuriates just about every observer of the prophecy-maniac fringe of American Christianity. We don't need to exhaust that topic here before TBJ even arrives in person in our story, but let me make one more comparison: Tsion Ben-Judah is Tim LaHaye's Cherokee great-grandmother.

"I thought all white people had a Cherokee great-grandmother," the old AIM guy told me, sublimely deadpan. The barb in that joke is a deadly serious complaint having to do with wannabes and the misappropriation of culture.

Tim LaHaye loves Israel the way wealthy hippies love turquoise jewelry and dream catchers. He loves Jews the way James Arthur Ray loves Native American spirituality. Which is to say he appropriates Judaism for his own ends, disrespecting it by usurping for himself the respect it is due, twisting it into what he wants it to be rather than what it is.

But we're getting ahead of ourselves. Chaim's second-hand introduction doesn't really do justice to the full effect of TBJ in person and that will have to wait.

Chaim sidesteps Buck's catechistic question ("What are the major prophecies pointing to the Messiah?")

"I was not a religious Jew until God destroyed the Russian air force, and I can't say I'm devout now. I always took the messianic prophecies the way I took the rest of the Torah. Symbolic. The rabbi at the temple I attended occasionally in Tel Aviv said himself that it was not important whether we believed that God was a literal being or just a concept. That fit with my humanist view of the world."

L&J really have no idea how anyone who isn't an RTC actually talks.

"Dr. Ben-Judah was a student of mine 25 years ago. He was always an unabashed religious Jew, Orthodox but short of a fundamentalist. Of course he became a rabbi, but certainly not because of anything I taught him."

L&J also don't seem to have any idea how scholarship works. It's as though they think all pointy-headed intellectual types work together in one big laboratory. Secular botanists teach at the Yeshiva. Rabbinical students attend Tel Aviv A&M. And they're all eligible for Nobel Prizes in Smartness.

Defying gravity

I need help from people who know more than I do about science -- in particular about gravity and what we do or don't know about how it works.

What I'm trying to do is to find another angle for breaking through the protective shell that makes communication with "creationists" almost impossible. Some of my best friends, as the saying goes, are creationists, and it isn't good for them. It warps their faith and it puts them on the wrong side of a dangerous anti-science trend that affects a wide range of very important things, from climate change to vaccination* to the insane notion that the middle of a global recession is a smart time to start aggressively worrying about budget deficits.

When people stop finding science persuasive, when they distrust it precisely because it is science, then they become vulnerable to all sorts of Really Bad Ideas.

But anyway, I'm pretty well-equipped to engage my creationist friends and relatives on some of the other layers of their anti-science belief system. I can articulate a capable critique of their illiteralist hermeneutic and the way it vivisects the opening chapters of Genesis and transforms them into something unintended and antibiblical. And I'm pretty good at addressing their notion that Christian faith rests entirely on the basis of a modernistic "literal" interpretation of every verse of scripture, meaning that their world will crumble if Noah's Ark can't be found on Ararat because that would mean that Jesus doesn't really love us.

On the biblical and theological side, in other words, I can speak their language. I'm fluent in the idioms, allusions, connotations and quirks of evangelicalese.

But when I'm addressing the "science" aspects of "scientific creationism" I find I'm unable to communicate with them -- not just because I'm less fluent in the language of science, but because when they start talking about science then words no longer seem to mean what they mean for the rest of us. They use familiar-sounding words, but you quickly realize that they're using these familiar words in unfamiliar ways, using them to communicate vastly, irreconcilably different things.

The most common and frustrating example of this is probably the way creationists talk about a "scientific theory." This seems to mean, for creationists, something like, "a wild, uneducated guess unsupported by evidence that can be dismissed and ignored without consequence," with additional overtones of "a conspiracy to deceive and corrupt the youth of America."

I heard these words used this way a few nights ago in a BBC radio story following a group of fundamentalist Christian middle school students as they toured a museum of natural history, itching for a fight with the evolutionist scientists running the place. "Why won't you admit that evolution is just a theory?" their teacher said to the scientist leading the tour.

And then, to hammer the point home, he added, "It's not like gravity."

Aha. So here we come to where I need some help from actual science types. Because it strikes me that the teacher is sort of right about that, but just not in the way he thinks. Gravity is also "just" a theory -- but if I understand these things properly, it's a theory with some serious problems. Like that it doesn't work at the atomic level and that it gets a bit wibbly wobbly when trying to explain the behavior of astronomically large things as well.

The comparison with gravity, it seems to me, underscores the comparative strength of evolution. I think it might be helpful to point that out when our creationist friends, inevitably, start going on about the alleged shortcomings and flaws of the justatheory of evolution.

So what I'd like to be able to say to them would be something like this:

Well, OK then, but gravity is justatheory too, the way you're using that word. And gravity, as justatheory, has much bigger unresolved problems than the justatheory of evolution does. If we took your standards for evaluating the justatheory of evolution and applied those standards to gravity, then we'd have to conclude that the justatheory of gravity is even more wrong.

So, a little help from you science types, please. Does that work? Is it a fair/accurate line of argument? Does it need to be qualified? Amended? Embellished? Abandoned? Please let me know.

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

* Yeah, I'm talking about you, Bill Maher (via). The Real Time comic has become a self-appointed advocate for the spread of H1N1 and of seasonal flu.

Here I would remind us, again, of Wendell Berry's distinction between religion and superstition. Religion, Berry said, is belief in something which cannot be disproved. Superstition, on the other hand, is belief in something that has been disproved. The former can be reasonable, the latter cannot. For all of Bill Maher's railing against religion as "mere superstition," it seems he doesn't understand either of those ideas. His latest anti-vaccine, anti-medicine, anti-science crusade is superstitious nonsense. It's religulous.

Kindness and necessity

An article in the paper this weekend quoted a religious leader from New Jersey describing the basic message of his faith. "People should have high morals and be kind to each other," he said.

That seems hard to argue with.

So let's argue with it. Because actually this religious leader's formulation bothers me. What troubles me is the way he presents what seem to be two separate, distinct ideas: "high morals" and "kindness."

This doesn't seem to be a matter of repetition for emphasis. The religious leader isn't saying, "People should have high morals by being kind to each other," or "People should have high morals by which we mean be kind to each other." He is suggesting, instead, that there is something called "high morals" that exists and matters beyond the separate something of being kind to each other.

I'll somewhat grudgingly concede that this might be true in some technical sense, but I still don't like the distinction.

Before we get into that, I should note that kindness is a bit of an awkward term here. It tends to convey more an idea of niceness than of goodness -- and as Little Red Riding Hood sings in Into the Woods, "nice is different than good."

Kindness seems less robust than, say, a word like justice. But while it may seem to mean less, it can also mean more. It's possible to treat someone justly without also treating them kindly, but if one is to be kind, one must also be just. There's no such thing, after all, as a kindly injustice. Nor is it possible to accept or allow injustice while still being, in any meaningful way, kind. (Stonewall Jackson, the eighth-grader's history book says, was "kind" to his slaves. No. No he wasn't. If he had been kind to them, then they would not have remained his slaves.)

So while kindness may be less comprehensive than love, which is the word I would have preferred to use here, it still seems adequate for the question I'm trying to get at, which is whether it is helpful to speak of a duty to "have high morals" as something that is or can be distinct from the duty to be kind to each other.

To justify the religious leader's formula above, all we really have to do is to find some examples of morality that aren't directly related to the obligation to "be kind to each other."

The most obvious examples of that sort of thing are the sorts of religious duties that I tend to think of as matters of piety rather than of morality (which is not to say that such matters are necessarily lesser just that they are something else). Sabbath-keeping, for example, is regarded as a moral matter for Jews and Christians, but it doesn't seem to be obviously related to or derived from the obligation to be kind to one another.

We can also find plenty of non-sectarian examples of what seem to be moral obligations that have little to do with being kind. Imagine, for example, a lone individual stranded on the proverbial jungle island, living on a diet of fruit, nuts and vegetables and thus, seemingly, freed from any relationship that might require this island dweller to exercise kindness. It still seems possible for such an isolated individual to behave morally or immorally. This hypothetical island-dweller will need to do work -- to build a shelter, for example -- and that work can be done with care or it can be done carelessly. That care or lack thereof involves a moral component. Care and craft would seem to be another realm of morality that can be considered distinct from being kind to each other.

So technically at least, it would seem that the religious leader's formula is valid. And yet I'm still not happy with it.

Here's why: It is true, as this formula suggests, that "be kind to each other" is not wholly sufficient as an expression of all that morality entails. But while kindness may not be sufficient, it is necessary. If kindness is not quite the whole of "high morals," such high morals cannot exist without it. Kindness -- well, here let's use that better word -- love may not quite be the only moral duty, but it trumps all others.

Talk of "high morals" as distinct from "be kind to each other" may be technically true, but it opens the door to the danger of allowing those other matters to override that essential duty of kindness.

And we do this all the time. We latch onto the pietistic duties of religion or the secular pieties of craft as thought they somehow exempted us from the obligation of kindness. We use them as excuses for our failure to be kind to each other. Given the choice, or when the need to choose inevitably arises, we opt for "high morals" rather than kindness. That's backwards.

"The sabbath was made for humankind and not humankind for the sabbath." Apart from "be kind to each other," high morals really aren't.

TF: My Lunch With Chaim

Tribulation Force, pp. 97-104

Yes, as those page numbers indicate, we're flipping back a bit this week to review a bit more of Buck and Chaim Rosenzweig's conversation over lunch at the Manhattan Yacht Club. There are a few things we missed the first time through, including a bit of that discussion that lays the foundation for their next conversation in the pages we'll turn to next week.

Much of this lunchtime conversation is taken up with Chaim Rosenzweig's breathless praise of his new boss and patron, Nicolae Carpathia. Including a notable discussion of Nicolae's humility.

Here the authors approach the edge of something sensible, but can't quite manage to step across into it. Nicolae's humility is the one quality of his that the authors seem to appreciate is bogus. Their Antichrist, they realize, must pretend to be humble, but cannot be portrayed as genuinely humble.

Thus we get three pages of Chaim lavishly extolling Carpathia's vast humility while Buck -- unbelievably unnoticed -- rolls his eyes and sighs and thinks to himself things like "I'll bet."

The authors at least appreciate that Nicolae might be a lethally ambitious man who pretends to be humble. Yet they can't imagine such duplicity when it comes to his other seeming virtues. They can't imagine that his dedication to world peace or to feeding the hungry might also be disingenuous. Those aspects of Nicolae's character, they assume, are the genuine article and therefore these other virtues, in the authors' eyes, must be perceived as vices.

This is, again, the sheep-in-wolf's-clothing problem. The authors are convinced that the Antichrist will be so disguised, so every sheep is suspect and anyone who speaks of feeding the hungry or of working for peace (or who, say, is given a Peace Prize) is regarded by them as nothing more than a candidate for Antichrist.

It's interesting that the one exception to this is Nicolae's humility. In Rosenzweig's description, the Antichrist is:

"Probably as humble as any leader I have ever met, Cameron. Of course, I know many public servants and private people who are humble and have a right to be! But most politicians, heads of state, world leaders, they are full of themselves. Many of them have much to be proud of and in many ways it is their egos that allow them to accomplish what they accomplish. But never have I seen a man like this. ...

"Think about it Cameron, he has not sought these positions. He rose from a low position in the Romanian government to become president of the nation when an election was not even scheduled. He resisted it! ...

"And when he was invited to speak at the United Nations not a month ago, he was so intimidated and felt so unworthy, he almost declined. ..."

What I find most interesting here is the way Nicolae's ersatz humility is almost presented as a subversion of the myth of Cincinnatus, because that myth -- not the story or the man himself, but the aura of meaning it conveys -- is immensely important among the evangelical American readers who make up these books' intended audience.

Cincinnatus was a Roman general who retired to work and live on his farm. When invaders threatened Rome, he was summoned to serve as dictator, a post he accepted reluctantly. He conquered Rome's enemies, resigned from the role of dictator and returned to his farm.

This is, for many American social conservatives, a portrait of the ideal leader. Cincinnatus' humility was proof of his virtue, and the people have nothing to fear from a virtuous dictator.*

By portraying Nicolae's humility and reluctance to accept power as a sham -- a pose to deceive the masses -- the authors tip-toe right up to the line of recognizing that they, too, might be so deceived by such a ruler, and that the idea of trusting a ruler checked only by his own virtue is itself not to be trusted. But they can't quite bring themselves to grasp this. Buck's smug superiority (a surrogate for the authors' own) reasserts itself in the scene and Chaim is ultimately portrayed as a fool not for naively supposing that a humble dictator can be trusted, but only for failing to realize that this particular virtuous dictator isn't truly virtuous. Buck listens to Chaim's ode to Nicolae the Humble and rolls his eyes because he knows better. He agrees with Chaim's premise that a virtuous dictator is a Good Thing, but he realizes that Nicolae is only pretending to be virtuous.

Rosenzweig segues from his praise of Nicolae's humility into praise of the Antichrist's other virtues -- virtues the authors don't portray as mere pretense:

"Cameron, he has ideas upon ideas! He is the consummate diplomat. He speaks so many languages that he hardly ever needs an interpreter, even for the chiefs of some of the remote tribes in South America and Africa! The other day he shared a few phrases understood only by an Australian Aborigine!"

This is all intended to be perceived by readers as evidence of Carpathia's true nature as the epitome of evil. Diplomats are presumed guilty. Polyglots doubly so. A knowledge of other languages and cultures, after all, is something that would only be sought by some fuzzy-headed relativist unconvinced by the self-evident cultural superiority of English-speaking Christendom. And learning to communicate with others is just too suspiciously irenic -- why learn their languages when you might, instead, "invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity." Plus, learning languages is too intellectual. Intellectual is bad.

It might be that we're meant to understand Nicolae's preternatural knack for languages as a super-natural gift -- a kind of infernal miracle. It makes sense in a way that such a skill would go along with his brainwashing and mindreading powers. To read someone's thoughts, you'd need to understand the language of those thoughts. To implant thoughts in another's mind, you'd need that person to be able to understand those thoughts in their own language.

If that's what's supposed to be going on here with Nicolae then it's an odd super-power for an Antichrist. I'd expect the Antichrist to be something like an End Times Jannes or Jambres -- able to imitate or counterfeit the miracles associated with Christ. But this bit with languages instead seems to mimic the miracle of Pentecost -- more the sort of thing one might associate with an Antichurch than an Antichrist.**

This is yet another reminder of the road not traveled in these books, the missed opportunity to explore the character of Christ through the character of the Antichrist. By portraying Nicolae Carpathia as an explicit opposite of Jesus Christ, the authors might have used him as a kind of mirror reflection, allowing us to picture Jesus more clearly.

For example, Nicolae has been granted a Satanic rule over all the kingdoms of the earth. It would have been a simple matter to portray his use of Rosenzweig's miracle formula as a version of turning stones into bread and then to show him demonstrating his miraculous specialness by some equivalent of leaping, unharmed, from the highest point of the Temple. Those were the temptations Jesus faced, and rejected, during his 40 days in the wilderness. Seeing Nicolae grapple with those same temptations, succumbing to each in turn, would have been a potentially fruitful way of exploring their meaning from a different angle.

Denys Arcand's wonderful film Jesus de Montreal offers such a reimagining of that account of Jesus' temptation. Arcand's movie explores the role of the artist through the story of Jesus (and vice versa). His Christ-figure confronts each of Jesus' temptations in turn, with an oily show-biz lawyer standing in for Satan.

But Left Behind isn't interested in exploring the character of Jesus. The authors are not at all concerned with how their portrayal of Jesus' opposite might be a means to explore the meaning of Jesus' own character, actions, words, ministry or mission. They're not terribly concerned with Jesus at all.

And in any case, LaHaye & Jenkins' Antichrist isn't really presented as the opposite of Christ. They think of him more as a cheap, pirated copy. That is seen most clearly when Christ himself arrives in their books several volumes from now. That LB-Jesus doesn't act like Nicolae's opposite, but rather like a better, stronger, faster version of the same character -- a superior, more powerful Antichrist.

And the authors' account of Christ's return offers what they neglect here in their introduction of Nicolae Carpathia -- an explicit, if unintended, retelling of the Gospel story of Jesus' temptation in the wilderness. LB-Jesus flings himself from the sky and lands miraculously unharmed. He forces all the nations of the world to bow down before him and immediately sets about turning stones into steaming piles of produce. The authors' Jesus, in other words, corrects what they perceive as the errors of the Jesus of the Gospels. Jesus 1.0 rejected the temptation of power. Jesus 2.0, they say, will return to seize power with relish. He will arrive as a conqueror bent on conquest -- but with an even bigger bow and more impressive white horse than the one Nicolae rides.

Rosenzweig's paean to Nicolae moves on to touch on the Antichrist's admirable pacifism. Admirable to Rosenzweig, that is, but the authors and Buck know better. Nicolae's pacifism, unlike his humility, is the real deal. There's no point for him to pretend he's a pacifist since all pacifism is itself, in the authors' view, nothing more than a form of pretense. Thus Rosenzweig explains that Nicolae's pacifist disarmament scheme will be enforced with the threat of nuclear annihilation:

"Knowing full well that some nations may hoard or hide weapons or produce new ones, the full agreement between the sovereign state of Israel and Security Council of the United Nations -- with the personal signature of Nicolae Carpathia -- makes a solemn promise. Any nation that threatens Israel will suffer immediate extinction, using the full complement of weaponry available to the U.N. With every country donating 10 percent, you can imagine the firepower."

"What I cannot imagine, Chaim, is an avowed pacifist, a rabid global-disarmament proponent for his entire political career, threatening to blow countries off the face of the earth."

"It's only semantics, Cameron," Rosenzweig said.

Not to get bogged down in semantics, but I'm trying to understand how Rosenzweig's use of that term here makes any sense at all.

Buck sees the hypocrisy here of a pacifist issuing nuclear ultimatums, but the authors ultimately conclude that such hypocrisy is intrinsic to pacifism and shared by all supposed pacifists. This is what they think all pacifists are really like, deep-down. Here again Tim LaHaye's John Birch Society roots are showing. To LaHaye, "pacifist" always means "crypto-Stalinist." (Even the Amish? I'm not sure, but clearly they're Up To Something.)

Nicolae's nuclear ultimatum is somehow tied up with his soon-to-be-signed seven-year peace treaty with Israel, the prospect of which is really what has Rosenzweig so bewitched.

Buck asks his friend why Israel would want to sign such a treaty, what's in it for them?

"What has Israel prayed for since the beginning of her existence, Cameron? And I am not talking about her rebirth in 1948. From the beginning of time as the chosen people of God, what have we prayed for?"

Buck's blood ran cold, and he could only sit there and nod resignedly. Rosenzweig answered his own question. "Shalom. Peace. 'Pray for the peace of Israel.'"

The authors seem to forget here that they've already told us that Israel has peace, stability and security. Here's a bit from page 8 of the previous book:

The prosperity brought about by the miracle formula changed the course of history for Israel. Flush with cash and resources, Israel made peace with her neighbors.

And by "her neighbors" there, the authors mean Iran and Turkey, since the Israel of the Left Behind novels is a vastly larger nation than the one that exists today, peacefully swallowing up the territory of what is now Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and much of Iraq to encompass everything "from the Nile to the Euphrates."

Plus that book described an attack on Israel -- a full-scale nuclear assault -- that was swatted away by the hand of the Almighty. You'd think that experience would have helped the nation feel a bit more secure. But Rosenzweig says no:

"We know God Almighty supernaturally protected us from the onslaught of the Russians. Do you know that there was so much death among their troops that the bodies had to be buried in a common grave, a crater gouged from our precious soil by one of their bombs, which God rendered harmless? We had to burn some of their bodies and bones. And the debris from their weapons of destruction was so massive that we have used it as a raw resource and are refabricating it into marketable goods. Cameron," he added ominously, "so many of their planes crashed -- well, all of them, of course. They still had burnable fuel, enough that we estimate we will be able to use if for five to eight more years. Can you see why peace is so attractive to us?"

This awkwardly catalogued array of weird detail is meant to parallel the specifics of the biblical "prophecy" that this whole Russo-Ethiopian invasion was concocted to "fulfill." It's LaHaye's imagined explanation of the "Gog and Magog" passages in Ezekiel 38 and 39. Those chapters say things like:

I will turn thee back, and leave but the sixth part of thee, and will cause thee to come up from the north parts, and will bring thee upon the mountains of Israel: And I will smite thy bow out of thy left hand, and will cause thine arrows to fall out of thy right hand. Thou shalt fall upon the mountains of Israel, thou, and all thy bands, and the people that is with thee ... And they that dwell in the cities of Israel shall go forth, and shall set on fire and burn the weapons, both the shields and the bucklers, the bows and the arrows, and the handstaves, and the spears, and they shall burn them with fire seven years: So that they shall take no wood out of the field, neither cut down any out of the forests; for they shall burn the weapons with fire: and they shall spoil those that spoiled them, and rob those that robbed them ...

So all of Rosenzweig's rambling here is LaHaye's attempt to reimagine a "literal" fulfillment of Ezekiel's hyperbolic description of that supposed future conflict. (If by "literal" you mean that these two chapters of Ezekiel are meant to be literally divorced from the context of the rest of that book and literally spliced somewhere into the beginning of John's apocalypse, wherein "shields and bucklers" might be regarded as an acceptably "literal" representation of jet fuel.)

But anyway that brings us, finally, to the main reason we needed to flip back to this conversation. In the following pages, Rosenzweig will introduce us to the character of Tsion Ben-Judah, who will quickly come to supplant Bruce Barnes in the role of Mr. Exposition while leading a worldwide network of Jews Against Judaism. And to really appreciate that character when we meet him, we first need to read Chaim Rosenzweig's description of the meaning of Jewishness:

"Cameron, Cameron," Rosenzweig said wearily, "history has shown our God to be capricious when it comes to our welfare. From the children of Israel wandering 40 years in the desert to the Six-Day War to the Russian invasion to now, we do not understand him. He lends us his favor when it suits his eternal plan, which we cannot comprehend. We pray, we seek him, we try to curry his favor. But in the meantime we believe that God helps those who help themselves."

This isn't just Rosenzweig's description, of course, it's also the authors' idea of Judaism. The bottom line being that Jews simply "do not understand" God. Tim LaHaye, on the other hand, understands God perfectly. Alas, if only the Jews would recognize his superior knowledge and his superior superiority, he would be happy to respond by condescending to explain it all to them.

Playing out that fantasy is, more or less, the role of Tsion Ben-Judah in the remainder of this volume.

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

* This is another division distinguishing the social-conservative wing of the Republican Party from it's libertarian, free-market faction. The myth of Cincinnatus illustrates social conservatives' comfort with unchecked power and unlimited authority. That contradicts the Madisonian concern for limited government that's central to conservatives of a more libertarian bent.

It also helps to explain why the partisan hypocrisy often demonstrated by this kind of social conservative isn't only partisan hypocrisy. President George W. Bush was, in their view, a virtuous man with Jesus in his heart. That virtue, they believed, was sufficient as a check and balance against any potential misuse of power. President Barack Obama, they believe, is an evil man and therefore must not be trusted with even the constitutionally constrained, limited, checked-and-balanced power of his office. This is why former Vice President Dick Cheney belongs with the social conservatives even though he was, at best, unenthusiastic about their dual obsessions of criminalizing abortion and homosexuality. Cheney believes that virtue and virtue alone is a sufficient constraint on the use of power, and that power ought to be wielded unfettered by any other limit in pursuit of that virtue.

** In Luke's account, the Apostle Peter stands to preach the gospel at Pentecost and those from every tribe and nation hear him speak in their own languages (while others think he sounds like a babbling drunk). That story presents the young church as a redemptive community -- an expanding, inclusive body through which the divisions of Babel and the curses of our fallen world are being restored. That entails a very different ecclesiology and eschatology that what they authors present in the Left Behind books -- a different vision of the nature and purpose of the church and its role in the destiny of human history. Given their vastly different take on those ideas, the authors don't do themselves any favors by alluding, even slightly, to Pentecost.

Oh, and Tony Perkins? He lies. A lot. For money.

David Waters has a good rundown and smackdown of religious right opposition to the expansion of hate-crime law to include violence intended to intimidate lesbians, gays, bisexuals and transgendered people.

The bottom line is that these supposed people of faith are arguing in bad faith. They know this legislation won't affect their religious freedom in any way, but its enactment will force them to find a new lucrative bogeyman for future fundraising letters.

That was fairly straightforward, but let me put it more bluntly: The leaders of the religious right opposed to this bill are liars. They are liars motivated by greed.

Please don't clutch your pearls and get the vapors that such an impolite thing is stated so honestly. That Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council lies a lot in order to scare people into sending him money is not surprising, or new, or unusual or controversial. Tony Perkins lies for money. Giraffes have long necks. Water is wet.

The problem is that these charlatans and fearmongers have muddied the conversation to the extent that others -- people who, unlike the Liar Tony Perkins, are trying to argue in good faith -- are confused about the what and how and why of hate-crimes legislation. So let's quickly review and clarify a few points.

1. This is not about "thought crime"

The Liar Tony Perkins et. al. have exploited potential confusion arising from the name "hate crime" and stirred it into actual confusion about this. But no, these laws do not actually prohibit hatred. Hate crimes do not threaten the livelihood of those who, like the Liar Tony Perkins, feed and feed on hatred of The Other. Nor does it threaten the existence of bigotry that stops short of expressing itself through actual, tangible violence. Bigotry in all forms -- racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, anti-Semitism -- is still perfectly legal. So too are all the things that cause this bigotry -- inarticulate fear, the insecurity that arises from deep-seated feelings of inadequacy, the recognition that unmerited privilege at others' expense is ultimately unsustainable, etc.

Hate-crimes legislation is actually bigotry-neutral. If you're a bigot, you have nothing to fear from such laws. (Of course, if you're a bigot, then you're probably not too concerned with whether or not your fears are ever founded or rational.)

The only extent to which hate-crime protections pertain to "thought" is in the way that all criminal law does, which is to say that motive matters. If you truly believe that the law should make no distinction between accidental manslaughter and premeditated first-degree homicide, because you truly believe that any such distinction constitutes the establishment of "thought crime," then I will accept that you are making this "thought-crime" objection to hate-crime legislation in good faith. (I'll think you're kind of an idiot, but at least a sincere idiot.) But you can't accept that distinction and still argue in good faith that hate crimes are "thought crimes."

2. This is not about limiting free speech in any way

Hate-crimes involve explicit and actual violence. It's not enough that someone makes a fist or shakes a fist -- they have to hit somebody with it. Unless someone gets hit or shot or stabbed or set on fire or has their property destroyed, then there can be no hate crime. No harm, no foul, as we say on the playground.

And the First Amendment right to free speech -- like the First Amendment right to free exercise -- has never been interpreted to allow any of us the freedom to hit, shoot, stab or torch anybody else.

Free speech is not inhibited by hate-crime legislation. Hate speech isn't even inhibited by hate-crime legislation. Consider again the living, breathing embodiment of the proof of that: the Rev. Fred Phelps.

The only place hate-crime laws touch on speech is when that speech explicitly incites violence. That means speech directly linked to a discreet act of violence actually carried out. Speech like, for example, "Pull the trigger! Shoot him!" or the sort of "Go kill them all now" message broadcast by Hutu Radio. The sort of hate speech regularly practiced by the Rev. Fred Phelps does not rise/sink to the level of such incitement.

The Liar Tony Perkins and his buddies on the religious right have spent years telling evangelical ministers that they will be prosecuted for hate-crimes for sermons that mention homosexuality. The Liar Tony Perkins is lying about this. Those sermons could be as spitefully vitriolic and nasty as the stuff Fred Phelps says without any need to worry about prosecution. Evangelical pastors telling their congregation that it is their sacred duty to go forth and beat to death any homosexuals they encounter would be in legal jeopardy, so if that's you, be warned.

Short of that, though, you're safe, even if you sound exactly like Perkins or Phelps. (Legally safe, that is. If you sound like Perkins or Phelps then, well, your soul is in mortal peril. You can't hate your brother and not become the enemy of God. The Bible tells me so.)

3. This is about terrorism

A hate crime is simply an act of terrorism. Nothing more, nothing less.

(Does this mean that the Liar Tony Perkins and his fellow opponents of hate-crime legislation are defenders of terrorism? Yes, actually, it does. But to be fair, the Liar Tony Perkins doesn't defend terrorism out of any particular love for terrorism -- he's just doing it for the money.)

Terrorism is violence with an agenda and an audience. Terrorism is violence that intends to send a message.

The content of that message doesn't matter. As we discussed above, laws against terrorism are not "thought-crime" statutes. It doesn't matter if the terrorists' message is "Death to America" or if it's "This is what we'll do to you, too, if you whistle at a white girl in this town." The content of the message isn't what makes it terrorism, the problem is the medium of the message -- violence and intimidation.

If Bob assaults Jim, that's a crime. Bob is the perpetrator and Jim is the victim. Simple.

But if Bob assaults Jim in order to send a message to everybody like Jim that the same thing will happen to them if they don't do whatever it is Bob says, then that's also a hate crime, which is to say it's terrorism. Bob is the perpetrator and Jim is a victim, but Jim isn't the only victim. All those other people who are like Jim are victims of this crime as well.

That's what makes terrorism -- hate crimes -- worse than just the acts of violence at their center. The seriousness of the crime being perpetrated against those additional victims should not be dismissed or belittled. Their trauma is real and it counts. Just think of all those people in every red state who can tell you exactly where they were on Sept. 11, 2001.

4. Tony Perkins lies a lot for money.

It's who he is. It's what he does.

TF: An approved wanton

Tribulation Force, pp. 104-105

We've read the set-up for this.

Buck Williams has headed off to New York without telling Chloe because he didn't want her to talk him out of his meeting with Nicolae. Meanwhile he's given spiky Alice the key to his apartment so that she can drop off the things arriving from his old office before she heads to the airport herself to pick up her fiancé. So the stage is set and here we come to the scene.

It unfolds, of course, on the telephone. Rayford dials his daughter, who is screening her calls with the answering machine:

Chloe grabbed the phone. She sounded awful. "Hi, Dad," she mumbled.

"You under the weather?"

"No. Just upset. Dad, did you know that Buck Williams is living with someone?"

"What!?"

"It's true. And they're engaged! I saw her. She was carrying boxes into his condo. A skinny little spiky-haired girl in a short skirt."

You can't miss with the classics. Unless you're Jerry Jenkins. Because here, in Tribulation Force, even this standard, tried-and-true plot device is mishandled.

It should be automatic. The instructions from the Acme Romantic Comedy factory are clearly written and all Jenkins needed to do was remove the prefabricated plot device from its packaging and insert it into his novel.

The Not What It Looks Like confusion of innocent behavior as infidelity may not be the most sophisticated plot device in the catalog, but if installed properly it works. Sure, it's a gimmick, but it's a reliable gimmick. It turned Julia Roberts into a movie star in Mystic Pizza. It generates conflict through innocent confusion, allowing audiences to sympathize with both parties without finding fault in either. And the conflict is easily resolved, lasting only as long as it is needed to introduce just enough tension or to bring to the surface the characters' unspoken or unrecognized affection.

Shakespeare employed several variations of this device. Don John, the poor man's Iago, sets the plot of Much Ado About Nothing* in motion by deliberately creating just such a case of Not What It Looks Like (or, actually, Not Who It Looks Like, since Borachio and Margaret really are doing what it looks like they're doing). That play illustrates both the sturdy reliability of this plot gimmick and its limitations. The manufactured conflict between Claudio and Hero works, but it's never as interesting as the character-driven conflict between Benedick and Beatrice.

Here in Tribulation Force Jenkins -- being Jenkins -- makes a hash of this classic can't-miss plot twist. First he botches the set-up, then he puts the thing in backwards, and then he compounds the problem by dragging the whole thing out far longer than it could ever reasonably be sustained, and then longer still, and then even longer still, and then a bit more until finally the reader winds up wishing Iago himself would show up and hand someone a pillow.

Before we get to those problems in more detail, here's a bit more of Jenkins' description of how this played out. After seeing Alice carrying boxes into Buck's condo, Chloe says:

"I was so mad I just drove around a while, then sat in a parking lot and cried. Then around noon I went to see him at the Global Weekly office, and there she was, getting out of her car. I said, 'Do you work here?' and she said, 'Yes, may I help you?' and I said, 'I think I saw you earlier today,' and she said, 'You might have. I was with my fiancé. Is there someone here you need to see?' I just turned and left, Dad."

"You didn't talk to Buck then?"

"Are you kidding? I may never talk to him again."

The first problem with all of this is that Chloe isn't really wrong. We've seen Buck and "Anything for you" Alice in action and theirs does not seem to be a wholly innocent professional relationship. Alice seems, in fact, like she really is a rival for Buck's affection, one who appears so far to be winning. All that giggling and wide-eyed leaning forward and jumping at the chance to drive all over lugging boxes for Buck shows us that Alice is clearly smitten. And Buck finds nothing quite so attractive as a woman with the good judgment to be smitten with him.

The guiltily belated reference to the existence of Alice's fiancé didn't do anything to dispel the sense that those two need to get a room. The mention of this fiancé  didn't communicate to readers that Alice is engaged and therefore not interested in Buck, but rather that this poor schmo of a fiancé just doesn't realize he is losing his girl to a superior man.

I think Jenkins wanted the fiancé to signal that Alice was spoken for and therefore not a rival of Chloe's, but he just couldn't resist his compulsion to demonstrate that Buck is the Alpha Male and that Alice's fiancé can have her affection only if Buck allows it. Buck/Rayford has to be given first dibs on any woman in the story, otherwise the authors fear that we might suspect that woman impossibly might actually prefer some other man over our heroes/authors.

That's all part of the insufferable perfection the authors intend for us to see in their heroes. Such perfect men, of course, can never be wrong -- not even innocently mistaken. And that's why Jenkins decided to stick this plot device in backwards. Instead of having his protagonist confused by an innocent mistake, he forces this confusion onto poor Chloe -- the object of the protagonist's affection.

That's not how the gimmick works and it creates several problems here.

Chloe isn't a point-of-view character in this book, so we're only able to see her confusion and her sense of betrayal second-hand via Rayford. This makes her seem less sympathetic -- more petulant and vindictive than she might have seemed if we had been given her reaction first-hand. We aren't invited to consider the conflict as it appears to Chloe, but rather as it appears to Buck. This makes our hero Hero -- virtuous and wrongfully accused (reinforcing the persecution complex at the heart of these books). Chloe comes across less like the innocently deceived Claudio than she does like Don John -- a cruel, spiteful accuser. At best, in the authors' view, she is meant to seem foolish, since only a fool could ever suspect Buck Williams of wrongdoing or, for that matter, of having any flaw whatsoever.

It doesn't help Chloe any that we readers know all along that she is mistaken. We know better, so we never participate with her in her confusion. We may try to understand it, but we don't share it. It's her mistake, not  ours.**

The implicit message thus is not "We humans sometimes jump to the wrong conclusions based on incomplete information and a fear of losing what we cannot live without," but rather, "Chloe is a girl and girls are silly."

And that's really the fundamental problem here. The rest of this might be surmountable -- even the authors' suffocating self-love for Buck as Mr. Perfect -- were it not for the way this subplot reinforces these books' relentless misogyny.

Chloe isn't portrayed throughout this episode as a victim of circumstance making an innocent mistake. She's just a woman, and in LaHaye and Jenkins' universe, women are inherently foolish, rash and unreliable. They are drama queens in need of firm guidance from men, who are far more reasonable and wise and fully human.***

This Not What It Looks Like subplot, dragged on ad nauseum over the next several chapters, offers the authors' neatly circular defense of this misogyny. Chloe is portrayed as foolish because she is a woman. And it's not unfair to portray women this way, because just look at what Chloe is doing.

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* In Elizabethan slang, "something" and "nothing" were sometimes used to refer, respectively, to male and female genitalia. The title of Much Ado About Nothing is thus not simply a reference to the illusory conflict at the heart of the plot, but also a nifty dirty pun.

** This is something Mystic Pizza actually does better than Much Ado, in which the audience knows all along that Claudio is deceived and never shares in that same deception. This can make Claudio unsympathetic -- a potential disaster, since Hero's restoration and happiness involves her receiving Claudio as her reward, and if the audience doesn't like him, then it seems like she's getting doubly cheated. This is why I think the actor playing Claudio has to have a beautiful singing voice. If he sings like an angel in Act V, the audience will usually forgive him for acting like a prick in Act IV.

*** This is just a theory, but this pervasive disdain for women -- the sense that their opinions do not really matter -- may be one factor (if not the only one) in these books' hilariously omnipresent homoerotic subtext.

Buck and Steele are presented as paragons of manliness who, by definition, deserve the adoration of every woman. And yet, also by definition, no woman can be presented as genuinely deserving them. This creates a problem. Illustrating their virile manliness requires that readers be shown others as perceiving them and responding to them as irresistibly sexually desirable. Yet for that desire to be credible and respectable it cannot come only from mere women. Women's opinions don't really count. Thus it falls to the other men in the story to express that sexual desire in a way that is, for the authors, credible and convincing.

Oscar Wilde, I think, made playfully deliberate use of something like this in The Importance of Being Earnest, employing his male protagonists' chauvinism as a kind of mask for their clear preference for flirting with one another, a la Beatrice and Benedick.

A darker example might be Frank T.J. Mackey, Tom Cruise's predatory sex guru in Paul Thomas Anderson's Magnolia. Mackey seems like the inverse of what we have here in Tribulation Force. His repressed homosexuality is channeled into a vicious misogyny. The authors here fully embrace Mackey's credo: "Respect the cock! Tame the [nothing]!" but for them the dynamic works the other way -- with their vicious misogyny getting channeled into an inadvertent homoeroticism.

But like I said, it's just a theory.

Apocalypseses

Author Tom Sine tells a story about his first encounter with Ron Sider's book, Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger. It made him mad.

Sider's book suggested that money was a major theme of the Bible. Tom knew better. He had read the Bible. He read it every day. Like any good evangelical, he had committed big chunks of it to memory. It might mention money a handful of times, but mainly it was about other things, stuff like sin and lust and idols and praying and what not.

So Tom went back to his Bible, angrily, setting out to disprove Sider's claims. And suddenly he noticed something he had never noticed before. Money is a major theme of the Bible. It's everywhere in that book. And the Bible, it turns out, has far more things to say far more often about the poor than it does about, say for instance, sex.

This was a revelation. One biblical word for such a revelation, such a pulling back of the veil, is "apocalypse." That which had been hidden is revealed and the whole world is changed, remade, replaced, reborn.

Tom Sine had the grace to welcome this apocalypse, to embrace it. But not every reader is receptive to such revelations.

I suspect that a similar apocalypse lies behind the creation of the Conservative Bible Project. Someone caught a fleeting glimpse of what that book has to say when read without the filtering lens of what it is expected to say. It may even have been, as in Tom Sine's story, an angry attempt to disprove what some radical prophet was claiming it said. However it happened, for a moment the veil was lifted and there it was -- the law and the prophets, the sheep and the goats, the stark binary clarity of 1 John and that pervasive, terrifying, overwhelming insistence that nothing else matters to God if we fail to respond to neighbors in need with a tangible expression of love.

This revelation was unwelcome.

The folks at Conservapedia wanted no part in the new world promised by this apocalypse. Their response to it, instead, was something like a scene from Douglas Adams:

They flew out of the cloud.

They saw the staggering jewels of the night in their infinite dust and their minds sang with fear.

For a while they flew on, motionless against the starry sweep of the Galaxy, itself motionless against the infinite sweep of the Universe. And then they turned round.

"It'll have to go."

The folks at the Conservative Bible Project caught a glimpse of something too big to accommodate in their tiny little comfortable framework and so, unable to accept it or even to allow or recognize it, they've set about turning it into something else.

It's an audacious project for a group of people who self-identify not just as Christians, but as "Bible-believing" Christians (that is, Real, True Christians) -- people who proudly differentiate themselves by declaring their "high view of scripture." The only way to reconcile that sense of identity with the project of rewriting the Bible is to pretend that their problem is not with the Bible itself, but with the supposed distortion of it perpetrated by evil, feminist, intellectual, tree-hugging, gay-loving, baby-killing, liberal translators.

Correct that distortion and the problem will go away and that scary glimpse of whatever it was they thought they saw there for a moment when the veil was lifted will cease to haunt their sleep. A bit of "retranslation" and they can be rid of that liberal notion that loving one's neighbor encapsulates the whole of the law and the prophets.

Among the many humorous aspects of this undertaking is the CBP organizers' confidence that this project will be easy. They hope to harness the power of wiki to quickly produce a new translation. An army of homeschoolers, they are convinced, should be able to accomplish this in a matter of months.

Some of those footsoldiers may well work as quickly as they imagine. The gruntwork of the Berlitz barbarism they have in mind as "translation" doesn't require much thought or care. And this project is easier than most translation, because the translators already know ahead of time what it is they're going to make the text say.

But I also think that army of homeschoolers is going to have more than a few deserters. I suspect this project will, for many, become a matter of a little learning being a dangerous thing. Alps on alps arise, and apocalypse upon apocalypse. The text will speak for itself. It's not going to lose this fight. The Conservative Bible Project, I suspect, will come to work as a subversive virus, creating far more converts from than to its cause.

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As for the redundancy of satire in this case, which we discussed in the previous post, I'm not yet willing to surrender. The ridiculous must be ridiculed. That is part of our sacred duty to the truth, and not to do so is to sin by omission.

When something like the CBP comes along and we realize the impossibility of outracing it, of getting ahead of its own headlong pursuit of absurd conclusions, then we are obliged to ridicule it by creating a parallel track, starting a new line of thought alongside it.

The most fitting response to the Conservative Bible Project thus might be something like the Conservative Shakespeare Project. The words of the Bard, after all, have also been tainted by the hands of devious liberal translators (and actors) and thus will also need to be remade, re-edited and rewritten to ensure that they are fully compatible with the pro-market, anti-government perspective of the Conservapedia.

We clearly need a new folio in which, for example, the quality of mercy is strained.