slacktivist

Inevitable

The American right wing's ability to make parody redundant has gone from being a bitter joke to being a bitter cliché. It's an observation so frequently made because it's so frequently true.

For an astonishingly explicit example of this, check out the Conservative Bible Project* at Conservapedia. Yes, that's right, they've decided the Bible will have to be rewritten due to its obvious liberal bias.

This requires a closer look precisely because of that old joke about the irrelevance of satire.

Consider what that joke means. Satire works by exaggeration, but it can't be arbitrary exaggeration. It's only effective (or funny) when it adheres to the trajectory of the idea it lampoons. The target of satire offers a series of points in succession and the satirist ridicules these ideas by continuing down that line, racing ahead to the next logical points in the established progression and demonstrating the inherent absurdity of those ideas by taking them to their logical -- and necessary -- extreme conclusions.

The satirist and the extremist are thus in a kind of footrace. And, as the Conservative Bible Project demonstrates, the extremists these days are winning. They're getting there first -- beating any would-be satirist to the finish line and the punch line.

Thus we have Poe's Law, which states, "Without a winking smiley or other blatant display of humor, it is impossible to create a parody of fundamentalism that someone won't mistake for the real thing." The Internet provides dozens of illustrations of this, Web sites that come to function, simultaneously, as parodies and as earnest expressions of the beliefs of extremists. The intent of those sites' creators may not even matter because, if the satirist is doing her job well, she will wind up at precisely the same point further along the trajectory at which the extremist will, sooner or later, arrive. Or vice versa. To paraphrase Flannery O'Connor, all that descends into absurdity must converge.

The CBP is a fine example of this. It reads like parody, even though it isn't. It presents an exaggerated, extreme view, but that extremism and exaggeration is not the product of a satirist's mockery. This makes it unintentionally funny but also, more importantly, it makes the CBP useful as a herald of what is to come. Soon. The CBP illustrates the inevitable destiny of the religious right. This is where things are headed, where things are going, possibly faster than you expect.

Observe Christianity Today, the moderate mainstream of evangelical America. Draw a point to represent that perspective. Now observe Dr. James Dobson, broadcasting his right-wing nuttiness on more than a thousand radio stations. Draw another point there. (Those two points aren't that close together, but we're not concerned here with distance as much as with direction.) Dobson's ultimatum led Sen. John McCain to select abdicated Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as his running mate. Palin quickly became a revered spokesperson for Christian conservatives. So draw a third point there for Sarah Palin.

Now we have three points, so now we can be sure. Get a ruler and connect the dots. Start with CT and keep going past Dobson, past Palin, and see where it takes you. This is the trajectory. This is the direction in which things are headed. Dobson looks like a parody of CT and Palin looks like a parody of Dobson, but these aren't parodies, simply slightly more extreme, exaggerated forms of the same ideas, further down the line.

And if one continues along that same line, then one eventually has to try to rewrite the Bible. It may be a bit surprising that the folks at Conservapedia are so enthusiastically transparent about the project -- that they have so few qualms about editing, redacting and altering their alleged scripture so that it no longer condemns their ideology and their idol. But it's not surprising that they've come to this point.

This point is on the line and following that line leads, inescapably, to this point. It was unavoidable.

So I want to take a closer look at this project. It's ridiculous and extreme and brazenly blasphemous and colossally illiterate, but this is the future of the religious right. This is what's next. Don't think of it as a point further out along an ideological spectrum, think of it as a point further along in the inevitable chronology of American evangelicalism.

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

* Thanks to Michael B., Adrian T., Andrew M., Chris H., Craig L. and Steve S. for linking to this via e-mail.

TF: Feast and Famine

Tribulation Force, pp. 94-104

Nicolae Carpathia, it turns out, is too busy to meet Buck for lunch at the Manhattan Yacht Club, so he's arranged to have Buck greeted there by their mutual friend, Chaim Rosenzweig.

It's not meant to, but this strikes me as suggesting that Nicolae is both responsible and considerate. Say what you will about the Antichrist's evil agenda, but you can't deny that he's putting in the time and working hard at it. Being so busy, he isn't able to turn his attention to his visiting friend, so he arranges to have Buck met by a Nobel laureate in his place. That's kind of classy.

Buck made his way through the crowd of tables to the booth by the window, where he was exuberantly greeted by his old friend Chaim Rosenzweig. The man knew enough to whisper in public, but his enthusiasm was boundless.

"Cameron!" the Israeli exulted in his thick accent. "How good to see you! Sit down, sit down! This is a lovely place, no? Only the best for friends of the secretary-general."

"Will he be joining us, sir?"

Rosenzweig looked surprised. "No, no! Much too busy. Hardly ever able to get away. Entertaining heads of state, ambassadors, everyone wants a piece of him. I hardly see him more than five minutes a day myself!"

This chapter is sprinkled with little asides like that "knew enough to whisper in public, but ..." to contrast Buck's sophistication with his friend's loud lack thereof. Broad ethnic stereotypes, apparently, make embarrassing dining companions, confusing the salad and dessert forks and committing a host of other embarrassing faux pas. But we should note that Chaim is the one who shows the good manners here of greeting his friend properly. Buck is the one who doesn't "know enough" to say hello, instead greeting Chaim with a chilly, dismissive, "Is it just you?"

Several pages are exhausted with yet another rehash of how Buck and Chaim first met and of the last time they saw one another -- which Buck remembers but Chaim doesn't because he was brainwashed to forget Buck's presence at that meeting. I get that Book 2 in a series requires the occasional review of events from the previous book, but it seems like two-thirds of Tribulation Force's 450 pages are devoted to such summaries while the remaining 150 pages of actual story line will itself be repeated and reviewed in Book 3.

So here we get the Rosenzweig variation of a conversation Buck has already had with Stanton Bailey and Steve Plank, with the brainwashing victim baffled by Buck's supposed absence from the meeting at the U.N.

"Where were you?" Dr. Rosenzweig asked.

"That's the question of the ages," Buck said. "Where are any of us?"

Rosenzweig's eyes twinkled, though Buck felt like a fool. He was talking gibberish, but he didn't know what else to say.

He really ought to have a cover story by now, a prepared answer for this question. Particularly since, after lunch, he's planning to see Hattie and Nicolae, both of whom, like Bailey, Steve and Chaim, are bound to ask, "Where were you?" Trying to evade the question might cut it with the others, but it seems urgently important that he be ready with an answer for Nicolae that won't lead the Antichrist to conclude that he Knows Too Much.

Having a cover story for the others is relatively easy. All they know, in their brainwashed state, is that Buck wasn't at the meeting, so any plausible-sounding excuse might work with them. But Nicolae will be asking this question fully knowing what really happened -- knowing that Buck was there and knowing what, if anything, Buck is supposed to believe instead.

Buck's answer to Nicolae will thus involve a bit of gambling and guesswork. Buck knows what false memories Nicolae brainwashed into the others' minds, but he has no way of know what false memories he himself was supposed to have been brainwashed into believing happened. Nicolae may have tried to brainwash Buck into believing something specific -- some particular explanation that would account for his supposed absence.

With the others, Buck could invent some story, telling Stanton, Steve and Chaim that, for example, he'd been mugged on his way to the meeting, held up at gunpoint and forced to miss being there. But that excuse wouldn't work with Nicolae himself. Nicolae knows where Buck really was, so he would know that the story was an invention -- a conscious lie. There's a one-in-a-million chance, I suppose, that Buck might guess the exact alternative scenario Nicolae had tried to brainwash him into believing, but trying to make that guess wouldn't seem wise. Guess wrong and Nicolae would know that his attempts to brainwash Buck had failed -- that Buck is probably a Real, True Christian, and therefore his enemy. And that this brainwash-proof enemy likely remembers seeing Nicolae fire the bullet that killed Stonagal and Todd-Cothran.

Buck's best chance, then, would be to apologize profusely while remaining as vague and confused-seeming as possible about where he thinks he really was. "I'm so sorry I wasn't there," he should say. "It was unforgivable, inexcusable. I ... I really don't know how I could have ... I must have fallen asleep, or ... I mean I don't know what I ... I looked up at the clock in my office and suddenly realized that I'd missed. Inexcusable. I can't ... Bailey was furious, you know. Exiled me out to Chicago. I can't blame him. I'd have done the same thing if someone I was counting on ... I just don't ... In any case, I'm so sorry. I really meant to be there, I wanted ... Please forgive me."

That sort of thing. And since that's going to have to be his official story with Nicolae, he needs to be saying the same thing here to Chaim.

Instead, though, Buck acts like it's a game -- like he's just playing coy by refusing to tell Chaim where he was instead of attending that meeting. As though pretending he has some great secret would reduce others' suspicion of him. The authors suggest that this works with Rosenzweig, but I can't imagine it working with Nicolae.

Rosenzweig was a bright, quick man with a love for intrigue. "So, you don't want to tell me. All right. Not being there was your loss. Of course, you were spared the horror it turned into, but what a historic meeting nonetheless. Get the salmon. You'll love it."

Buck had always, always made it a habit to ignore recommendations in restaurants. It probably was one of the reasons for his nickname. He realized how rattled he was when he ordered what Rosenzweig suggested. And he loved it.

The italics on that second "always" are in the original. I'm trying to imagine taking a friend or coworker to a restaurant and having them respond like that to a recommendation.

"So this is Dmitri's, you have to try the snap peas."

"No way. I always, always ignore recommendations in restaurants."

I can think of some nicknames that might result from that, but none of them are as polite as "Buck." This is another example of what we discussed last week of the way Jenkins makes a point of telling us something about his characters that he thinks is really cool, but which makes us find that character even weirder and less likable. Buck's affectation about ignoring his friends' suggestions just makes me think of Pee-Wee's Big Adventure -- "I'm a loner, Dottie. A rebel."

Anyway, what's most interesting in this whole luncheon conversation is something that Buck and Chaim never discuss -- something that never even occurs to Buck.

To fully appreciate the perversity of this conversation, just consider where Buck was at this same time the previous day.

Twenty-four hours ago, he was sitting in church, listening to a sermon on the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. That sermon was unlike anything any of us have ever heard on the topic because like the preacher, Bruce Barnes, Buck believes that the Four Horsemen are the first four seals of judgment that the book of Revelation prophesies will unfold during the Great Tribulation. And Buck believes that he is living in the Great Tribulation. So what Buck heard Bruce describing in that sermon had for him the immediacy of the five-day forecast on the Weather Channel. He was hearing what was about to happen.

Here is one passage from Revelation that was discussed in that sermon, John's description of the third horseman, traditionally referred to as Famine:

When the Lamb opened the third seal, I heard the third living creature say, "Come!" I looked, and there before me was a black horse! Its rider was holding a pair of scales in his hand. Then I heard what sounded like a voice among the four living creatures, saying, "A quart of wheat for a day's wages, and three quarts of barley for a day's wages, and do not damage the oil and the wine!"

Buck believes -- he knows -- that Famine is coming. Soon. Bruce guessed they might have a short window, perhaps 18 months of relative calm in which to prepare, but in at most a year and a half, Famine would ride forth over the entire world and a piece of bread will buy a bag of gold.

That was yesterday. Today, Buck is sitting in a swanky restaurant enjoying a nice piece of fish with his friend Chaim. That would be Dr. Chaim Rosenzweig, winner of a Nobel Prize for inventing an almost magical formula that turns arid deserts into the most abundantly fertile soil the planet has ever seen.

Famine, meet Dr. Cornucopia. More than any other human being who ever lived, Rosenzweig has the capacity to stop Famine. His formula is capable of slaying the rider on the black horse, or at least of sparing the lives of the millions who will die 18 months from now.

This would seem to be an example of the classic dilemma of an unstoppable force confronting an immovable object. Inevitable famine confronts unlimited fertility. Something's gotta give.

Yet it never occurs to Buck, or to the authors, to make anything of this astonishing juxtaposition of feast and Famine.

At an absolute minimum, we'd expect Buck to be concerned about stockpiling food against the coming of the rider on the black horse. Tim LaHaye's premillennial dispensationalist theories rely heavily on the book of Daniel -- a book that borrows and repeats motifs from the story of Joseph. So the authors ought to be familiar with the idea of planning ahead for the seven lean years. Like Joseph, Buck knows that the seven lean years are coming. He doesn't have the luxury of seven "fat" years to prepare, but with Rosenzweig's miracle formula, 18 months should be time enough.

But Buck doesn't think to enlist Rosenzweig's help with stockpiling food for the coming of Famine. He doesn't think about stockpiling food at all.

Throughout their conversation in this chapter, Buck and Chaim return to the subject of Rosenzweig's formula, but Buck never once connects this topic with the Famine he knows is soon to arrive.

They discuss Rosenzweig's arrangement with former U.N. Secretary-General Mwangati Ngumo, in which the Botswanan Motswana president (in the LB universe, heads of state, rather than diplomats, serve in the United Nations, retaining both posts at once) would be permitted to license the formula for his country in exchange for being replaced by Nicolae as secretary-general. Chaim is excited by the prospects of his formula helping to feed the hungry in Africa:

"It's too early to tell, of course, but if the formula works as well as it has in Israel, Botswana will immediately become one of the most fertile countries in all of Africa, if not the world."

Buck, however, is horrified by the prospect of feeding a hungry world. Feed the people of Botswana and the people of Africa and it won't stop there -- soon even the Russians will have access to food.

"Oh, Chaim! For what? Billions of dollars that Israel no longer needs? It makes no sense! Having the formula made you the richest nation on earth for its size and solved myriad problems, but it was the exclusivity that made it work! Why do you think the Russians attacked you? They don't need your land! There's no oil to be found! They wanted the formula! Imagine if all the vast reaches of that nation were fertile!"

This is at first baffling. Then, after you think about it for a moment, outrageous. Buck, the author's ideal of an RTC, stridently argues against sharing food with the hungry. Feeding the hungry in Africa or Russia is, to Buck, the nightmare scenario, an evil plot of the Antichrist.

The backwards and upside-down morality Buck displays here overshadows some of the other howling atrocities of that paragraph. Buck's confusion of price and value, for example -- his assumption that scarcity is the only measure of worth and that abundant food is worthless, because while it may feed the hungry, it can't be sold to enrich the sellers. Or the fact that a plot point in this book hinges on the problem of food scarcity in Botswana, even though the rapturing of that country's children and RTCs would leave it with less than half of its pre-Event population. Or that Russia was trying to use nuclear missiles to steal a secret formula.

But ultimately, in the Left Behind series, none of this matters. According to the official LeftBehind.com timeline -- a graphic showing the End Times check list as it relates to the books in the series -- Tribulation Force is supposed to recount the arrival of the second and third horsemen, the second and third seals of judgment, War and Famine.

As it turns out, there's plenty of War, but not much in the way of Famine. The rider on the black horse is pretty much a no-show.

It's fun to speculate on how the conflict of Feast and Famine might have played out here. Rosenzweig's formula might have fended off the third horseman, creating a prophetic paradox that alters the events of the check list. Or his formula might have been used for a Tribulation Victory Garden in the backyard of New Hope Village Church. Or maybe this formula -- which has only been in use for a few years, keep in mind -- spreads throughout the world and then backfires, poisoning the soil and causing the judgement of the third seal to come to pass. Or maybe ...

The possibilities seem endless, but in this book the possibilities never get started. If you're looking for that third horseman of the Apocalypse, you won't find him here.

That's a good thing for Buck, since he and his Tribulation Force friends never do get around to stockpiling food.

All Dance and Dancing

They're rating it a 10 before they drop and die

"Dance Across the Centuries," Johnny Clegg & Savuka
"Dance and Boogie," The Pipettes   
"Dance Dance Dance," Lykke Li
"Dance, Dance, Dance," Steve Miller Band
"Dance Stop," Daniel Amos
"Dancing at the Policeman's Ball," Mark Heard
"Dancing in the Dark," Bruce Springsteen
"Dancing in the Dark," Tegan & Sara
"Dancing in the Shadows," After the Fire
"Dancing Lessons," Sinead O'Connor
"Dancing on Light," Terry Taylor
"Dancing Queen," Abba
"Dancing With Joey Ramone," Amy Rigby
"Dancing With Myself," Billy Idol

"'Dance Stop' instructions: You may dance any dance that you desire, but in the course of the song when the word STOP! is shouted and the music stops you must FREEZE in whatever position you are in at that moment. In the song you will then hear the crowd voices escalating. Resume dancing again when you hear the word DANCE shouted and the music resumes."

In the belly of the fish

I request the consent of the chamber to revise and extend my previous post.

1. The whale was in Pinocchio

In discussing the book of Jonah, I try to avoid the notorious bit with the really big fish. That's what the story says -- "fish," not "whale."

If you're not familiar with that bit, here it is, briefly. Instead of heading east, like God told him to, Jonah sails west. So God sends a big storm that threatens to sink the boat. Jonah realizes what's going on, but instead of telling the sailors to turn around and take him back, he tells them to throw him overboard, because he'd rather die than help God save the people of Ninevah.

But God doesn't let Jonah drown. Instead, God sends a big fish that swallows Jonah and he spends three days in the belly of the beast. While there, he offers up one of those negotiated repentances (God, if you get me out of this, I'll ...). The fish spits him out back where he started and he finally heads for Ninevah.

My fundie Bible teachers considered this the main, or even the only, point of this story worth considering. Their task, as they saw it, was to defend the story as being "literally" true, and so they'd share legends (see Bartley, James) of sailors swallowed by whales and go to great lengths to argue that such a thing was possible. This led to some rather strange and uninspiring sermons, the main point of which seemed to be that God is capable of creating a fish that could swallow a man whole and keep that man alive for several days. The message of those sermons was, at best, difficult to apply in one's daily life during the following week.

The larger problem with such sermons, though, was that they were elaborate devices for pretending to engage the story of Jonah while actually avoiding its clear and vehement argument. I've come to believe that such evasion is the primary function for a "literalist" approach to the Bible. (See also Genesis 1-11.)

2. I didn't write the book of Jonah.

We have no way of knowing who wrote the book of Jonah, but I assure you it wasn't me.

But whoever wrote it really did so as an explicit challenge to and rejection of an exclusive, vengeful perspective found elsewhere in scripture. Don't take my word for that, read it yourself (it's short).

When I point this out, some folks get mad at me. That hardly seems fair. I didn't write it and I wasn't around when we were deciding what to include in the canon. So if the book of Jonah's refutation of the stories about the ethnic cleansing of Canaan causes you discomfort because it creates conflict within the canon, please don't take it out on me.

3. Jesus really liked this book.

In the Gospels, Jesus specifically cites the book of Jonah. Asked for a sign that he speaks for God, Jesus said he would give no sign except "the sign of Jonah."

Some say that's a cryptic foretelling of Jesus' eventual death and burial for three days in the tomb. Three days in a fish, three days in the tomb -- get it?

I'm not buying that. Neither Jesus nor his critics would have thought it made any sense for him, when his legitimacy was being questioned, to compare himself to Jonah. You can accuse someone of being like Jonah, but you can't try to vindicate yourself by claiming to be like him.

I think, rather, that the "sign of Jonah" means something like, "See for yourself, the Ninevites are being saved." Jesus was responding to his critics by telling them that they could either join the party of they could go off to the desert and sulk, like Jonah. When Ninevah is spared, Jonah rages against God for being "a gracious and compassionate God, slow to anger and abounding in love, a God who relents from sending calamity."

In Jonah's view, those are all bad things. (I can't help but think of the recent "empathy" debate.)

And because God is so infuriatingly gracious and abounding in love, Jonah declares that "it is better for me to die than to live ... I am angry enough to die." Jesus' critics felt the same way about his compassion and abounding love for tax collectors, prostitutes, lepers, Samaritans, gentiles, women and other unclean outcasts.

That reading of "the sign of Jonah" is supported by Jesus' other, more allusive, references to the story in his parables. The ending of the parable of the Prodigal Son seems lifted directly from the book of Jonah. "The older brother became angry and refused to go in." If his father's love was to encompass his undeserving younger brother, then he, like Jonah, wanted no part of it.

4. Reconciling canonical conflicts.

"It's simple," says the sculptor in the old joke. "I just take a block of granite and chisel away anything that doesn't look like a horse."

Just for the sake of argument, some of my fellow evangelicals say, let's pretend you're right and there actually are conflicting views present within the canon of scripture. How, then, are we to know which side to choose? How can we know which of these conflicting views we ought to be following?

A classmate of mine asked exactly that question years ago of one of my seminary professors. The professor said nothing at first, but just turned around and walked to the blackboard. Holding a short piece of chalk sideways he made two broad, sweeping strokes and turned back to the class, pointing behind him to the cross he had just drawn. "That," he said. "That is the standard by which I judge everything we read in the Bible."

Good answer. That same answer is why I side with the author of Jonah against the biblical views that the story of Jonah attacks.

But while I think that's a good answer it doesn't settle the ongoing debate. That same debate in which the book of Jonah is just one fierce volley -- the debate between exclusive and inclusive understandings of God's abounding love -- is nowhere near settled. And it can't be settled by appeals to the Bible, or to the meaning of the cross, because where one stands in that debate colors how one reads the Bible, or what one considers the cross to mean.

The sign of Jonah

Andrew C. writes with a good question:

How do you explain the seemingly barbaric actions of God in the Old Testament? God outright ordered genocides, wars and brutal punishments upon his own followers.

Not just a good question, but a canonical one. A question asked, in fact, by many people right there in the Hebrew scriptures.

The author of Jonah thought this question was so important that he (or she) sat down and wrote the book of Jonah. That book is a relentless attack on the idea that God really is the sort of God who would order genocides, wars and brutal punishments. The book is a brutal satire of such an opinion of the character of God. And it gives God the final word on the matter:

"Should I not be concerned about Ninevah, that great city, in which there are more than 120,000 persons who do not know their right hand from their left, and also many animals?"

As punchlines go, that one's a knockout. This is God Almighty expressing displeasure that anyone would consider God capable of desiring the destruction of a great city, of innocent people or innocent beasts.

And that's where the story ends. Jonah gives no answer because the author of Jonah doesn't think there is any answer to be given.

This isn't a subtle or sideways point the author is making here. It's a direct, explicit challenge -- a rebuttal -- to those other parts of scripture that portray exactly this sort of God, the very parts of scripture Andrew is objecting to as well. You know the sort of thing, where someone like Jonah says that God has declared some great city or another irredeemable and has commanded it to be destroyed utterly, every man, woman and child and every beast within its walls.

Nonsense, the author of Jonah says. God is not the sort of God who would ever command any such thing and anyone who says otherwise is a bitter, disobedient fool. And the author of Jonah then sketches for us a portrait of just such a bitter, disobedient fool.

It's a vicious, ugly picture. The author of Jonah isn't interested in fighting fair or in conveying any sympathy for the straw-man embodiment of the nonsense he's railing against. Jonah is, without fail, disobedient, stupid and wrong -- wrong at every turn. He is portrayed this way because the author of Jonah isn't just trying to raise some doubts about the view he's criticizing, he wants to demolish it, to render it unthinkable.

From start to finish, the author of Jonah is railing against Jonah-ism. There's nothing subtle about this. What we've got here is a good old-fashioned diatribe. And it's a canonical diatribe. This is holy scripture here. The word of God.

The difficulty, though, is that so are all those passages of scripture that the author of Jonah is mocking and ridiculing. The book of Jonah's anti-Jonah-ism is canonical, but so is the Jonah-ism the story condemns. Both are scripture.

This is what freaks out many of my fellow evangelical Christians. It seems to violate what they call the unity of the scriptures -- the idea that the Bible cannot and does not ever contradict itself.

That view is hard to square with the book of Jonah. It's hard to square with the fact of the book of Jonah, with its very existence. The book is a polemic, and we can't have a polemic without also having two poles -- two contrasting and opposing points of view. The author of Jonah takes sides. Whatever else that means, it demonstrates that there are sides to be taken. It means that there is more than one side, more than one identical view.

It shouldn't be surprising that the Bible contains more than one identical view. This is an anthology of 66 books by a host of different authors, written over a span of many centuries. That all of those authors and all of those books do not present lockstep unanimity doesn't mean we're being presented with contradictions so much as that we're given an ongoing conversation -- one that includes and encompasses many points of view, some of which disagree, sometimes vehemently.

This multiplicity of perspectives isn't only something that can be found between books written centuries apart as in the debate between the book of Jonah and the book of Joshua. It can be also found within a single book, a single chapter, a single verse. Even within a single word.

The 15th chapter of the book of Acts describes a gathering of the early Christians in Jerusalem, during which the Apostle James reads from the prophet Amos:

"I will rebuild the dwelling of David ... so that all other peoples may seek the Lord ..."

That's how Acts 15:16-17 quotes Amos. But keep your finger there and flip back to the book of Amos itself, to the same passage -- Amos 9:11-12. If you're using any of our English translations, you'll read something rather different there:

"I will raise up the booth of David ... in order that they may possess the remnant of Edom."

Here's the fun thing about biblical Hebrew: no vowels. Plug in one set of vowels and you get "Adam," which means "humankind," giving us a passage that supports James' claim that God's people are to include the "remnant of humankind" -- "all other peoples."

Plug in a different set of vowels and you get "Edom," which means Esau and his descendants, an ancient enemy born of the brother who was denied God's blessing. That gives us a passage saying that those people -- those Edomites and Ninevites -- deserve to be destroyed so that God's own righteous people, the exclusively blessed, can reap the spoils of "the remnant of Edom."

Those two readings are opposites -- parallel opposites of the polar opposites we find in the book of Jonah. Maybe James was reading from a different version of Amos than the one our Bibles have. Or maybe he was reading from a text without vowels and unknowingly supplied the "wrong" meaning. Or maybe he had the right meaning and our book of Amos has it wrong. Or maybe he was engaged in a deliberate act of revisionism. I don't know.

What matters here, with regard to Andrew's question, is that we have both meanings, both views, both perspectives, in the Bible we Christians read. Both are a part of our canon. And given these two opposing perspectives we must, like the author of the book of Jonah, choose one. We have to take sides.

We can choose the exclusive vision of Jonah-ism, the view that says we alone are blessed and the rest of the world can go to Hell. Or we can choose the expansive, inclusive vision of the book of Jonah, the view that sees God as madly in love with the great city of Ninevah and indignant at the suggestion that there could be any such city, any person or beast, beyond the scope of that love.

Lame excuses

So I thought I'd be able to prep for this exam tomorrow and still get today's LBFriday installment posted.

I was wrong about that.

So there may be an LBMonday.

Sorry about that.

TF: Unlikable

Tribulation Force, pp. 91-95

We should take a moment here at the beginning of Chapter 5 to note something else we're not seeing: chaos, anarchy, lawlessness and depravity.

The authors told us this was to be expected in the world of Tribulation Force -- a world without any Real, True Christians. Those RTCs were whisked away, taking with them every vestige of salt and light, taking with them the very presence of the Holy Spirit indwelling them. The world has become something even worse than Sodom without five righteous men, it has become a world without the Spirit of God. (It's a weirdly contra-biblical claim, but this seems to be LaHaye's idea -- that God is present in this world only to the extent that the Holy Spirit is present within RTCs. Take away those godly people and you take away every trace of God.)

The authors briefly hinted at what that ought to mean in the context of their story. In the early aftermath of the Event, they mentioned a crime wave. The Steele's home was burglarized by Jimmy Bats and the beleaguered police told Rayford they were overwhelmed as this newly godless nation ran amok.

But then all of that just kind of stopped. No more crime or looting or savage attacks from roving bands of violent hoodlums unchecked by conscience or divine grace. Everything went back to normal.

Better than normal, really, considering how much work and disciplined cooperation must have gone into repairing all the damage from the Event -- getting all of the infrastructure and machinery of daily life up and going again. It seems almost miraculous, really.

I'm fairly sure this wasn't intentional -- that the authors didn't mean to present the world of Tribulation Force as the secular, post-RTC utopia it seems to be. I think they're actually just lazy. Sustaining a premise takes thought, effort and attention, and those are all in short supply in this slap-dash first draft of a novel. Jerry Jenkins couldn't be bothered to think about what the radically altered landscape of his story would entail, so he very quickly drifted back to default descriptions of a familiar world in which no airport, restaurant, suburban street or even local church appears affected by the removal of all of the world's RTCs.

So I don't think the astonishingly rapid return to normalcy post-Event was really something they thought about or that they meant anything by it. I think it's just an accident of Very Bad Writing.

If we had the chance to sit down with the authors and ask them, I think they'd insist that a world without RTCs or the Holy Spirit would be utterly unlike the orderly, mundane place they've set forth in this book. I think they'd describe a depraved scene like something out of a Jack Chick tract, and I think they'd further explain that this is the sort of godless, lawless, bestial world they meant to convey in the pages of Tribulation Force.

Except they didn't do that in their book. Here they presented instead a post-Event world that is indistinguishable from their version of the pre-Event world. The unintentional implication -- found on every mundane page describing the characters' unperturbed daily routines -- is that the presence of a billion RTCs in this world really doesn't make any difference one way or another.

This is a very strange message for these authors to be communicating, but it comes through loud and clear. As I said, I don't think it's an intentional message, but there it is.

A second unintentional message recurs throughout these books, something which also presents itself as Very Bad Writing, but in this case I think that's the symptom, not the disease. I'm referring to the authors' habit of reversing the usual shorthand signals most writers employ to prompt readers to like or dislike particular characters. Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins frequently get these backwards without seeming to realize it.

In discussing some of the other flaws in these books we've noted instances where Bad Writing seems to emerge from the authors' Bad Theology, or sometimes just from the authors themselves being Bad People. But I'm not talking about theology or morality here, I'm talking about likability -- which is often related, but not the same thing.

What we have in these novels is a massive body of evidence that the authors simply don't understand what makes most people like or dislike another person. Again and again we see Buck and Rayford behave in ways that range from the merely unappealing to the outright appalling, and in nearly every such instance the authors seem to have intended this behavior to persuade readers to be fond of these two jackasses.

I tried for a while to account for this bizarre characterization as some kind of attempt to present them as anti-heroes, or flawed heroes, or even just as rough-edged but lovable cads (like, say, Jimmy McNulty on The Wire). But such readings weren't supportable or sustainable. That's not what we have here.

What we have here is a compendium of reasons large and small for readers to detest Buck and Rayford, all set before us by wide-eyed authors who point to this very behavior and, grinning, say, "Aren't they the coolest?"

No. No they're not.

This gap is one of the main reasons these books are unreadable -- the gap between how readers are forced to perceive the main characters and how the authors intended them to be perceived, or how the authors themselves perceive them. That chasm is so vast that one despairs of a common language.

We could go back to review prior examples of this -- Buck's juvenile misogyny toward Verna, Rayford's pride in his off-putting obnoxiousness, both characters' overweening sense of entitlement -- but there are more than enough examples ahead of us. Such as here in the section of the book we're considering today.

We left Buck in a limo headed toward cake or death, dimly fearing that the global despot and embodiment of evil he's about to meet with might be planning something unkind:

Buck began to feel more confident that he wasn't in mortal danger. Too many people had been involved in getting him from Chicago to New York and now to midtown. On the other hand, if Nicolae Carpathia could get away with murder in front of more than a dozen eyewitnesses, he could certainly eliminate one magazine writer.

Buck seems to have forgotten that Nicolae already has eliminated one magazine writer. Remember Eric Miller's ferry ride? Buck's worry that he might be in danger before his meeting with the Antichrist shows us that he doesn't really understand what that meeting is about. This is the Find Out If Buck Knows Too Much meeting. You're never in danger of being killed before such a meeting, but you won't get out of it alive unless you're able to convince the evil mastermind that you don't Know Too Much, even if you actually do.  That's why it's best to head into such a meeting with a plan that goes beyond simply recognizing, vaguely that one ought to have "some sort of plan ... that sort of thing."

The limo pulls up to "the exclusive Manhattan Yacht Club," reimagined for the purposes of our story here as an ultra-swanky enclave for the mega-rich -- a small piece of the Hamptons in downtown New York. The silent bodyguard from the limo leads Buck into the posh restaurant, "past a long line of patrons waiting for tables" directly to the maitre d'. More of the same business we saw at the airport, where Buck was allowed to board early and seated in Firster-than-First Class.

"Buck would have felt right at home in the Yacht Club," we're told, were it not for the presence of his hulking guide. Throughout this chapter, Jenkins takes pains to show us how relaxed and unperturbed by this setting Buck is. And we, the readers, are meant to be deeply impressed.

This is the sort of thing I was trying to describe above. Jenkins lays on the jet-set sophisticate details --

"How long will you be in town?" Buck asked, accepting a menu and allowing the waiter to drape a linen napkin on his lap.

What he's shooting for, I think, is the effect of "Buck Williams is an impressive guy." But he winds up, instead, with something more like "impressing others is important to Buck," or, even worse, "Buck is terribly impressed with himself." Throughout the restaurant interlude, Jenkins is desperately trying to get us to admire Buck, but it all produces the opposite reaction.

The effect is like being out to dinner with the sort of egomaniac who makes a big show of paying with his Black Platinum Elite card while complaining that the port is an inferior vintage (because, yeah, he ordered port), not as good as what he has at home and probably not even from the Douro Valley, where, by the way, he can recommend a splendid little restaurant. I have little personal experience with such appalling dinner companions, but I'm familiar with the scene from having watched it in dozens of movies and read about it in dozens of books. It's a stock scene, meant to convey -- often unsubtly -- that we're not supposed to like this show-off, that we should regard him as an unlikable jerk. While such stock scenes are a cliché, they work as a kind of short-hand vocabulary -- they communicate what they are intended to communicate. Jenkins seems wholly unfamiliar with this established vocabulary, applying its terms here to Buck -- portraying him as the ultimate Wrong Other Guy in a hackneyed rom-com -- while expecting us to find Buck more likable because of it.

If your setting is an "exclusive" yacht club, a playground for wealthy elites, and you want your readers to like your hero, then you need to show that he or she doesn't "feel right at home" in such a place. There are some exceptions, some few likable heroes who might feel right at home: Nick and Nora Charles, Tony Stark, James Bond, the gang from Leverage, I suppose (although their motive for being there -- casing the joint -- probably means they shouldn't count).

There are probably other examples, too, but the list is short. Far, far shorter than the list of heroes who would find the club's ostentatious indulgence and exclusiveness off-putting and unsettling. This is true for most heroes because it is true for most readers -- for most humans.

I've had the misfortune on occasion to stumble into such settings myself and was always keenly aware that I was anything but "right at home." Such places seem claustrophobic and a little mad, impossible quite to reconcile with everywhere else. You feel an urgent need for fresher air, for a lungful of perspective, maybe a whip of cords. You tug at your collar and finish your business so you can return to reality as quickly as possible.

This is almost always what a fictional protagonist is thinking too. When they seem too at ease in such settings they become suspect. When they boast of feeling right at home, they become odious. Despite their intentions, this is how the authors are instructing us here to respond to Buck.

What I'm trying to get at here isn't economic -- not class conflict, but rather the kind of moral intuition that precedes any such choosing of sides. One of my favorite essays, George Orwell's "Charles Dickens," describes this precisely in discussing Dickens' "quasi-instinctive siding with the oppressed against the oppressors. As a matter of course he is on the side of the underdog, always and everywhere."

More than any specific instance or even the accumulation of myriad such instances, it's this choosing of sides that Jenkins always gets wrong. He, and therefore his characters Buck and Rayford, instinctively side with the oppressors against the oppressed, with the powerful against the powerless, with the exclusive against the excluded. The heroes' religious conversions were just additional examples of this same choosing sides writ large.

That makes our heroes unlikable to begin with, but then Jenkins compounds the problem with the insulting assumption that readers must share this instinctive preference for the haves over the have-nots and for the most-exclusive, most-expensive privileges of the privileged. Here at the Manhattan Yacht Club, as in the previous chapter where Buck luxuriated in the jealous stares of the other airline passengers, it's clear that Buck always feels right at home on the side of the overlords and not the underdogs. And because the overlords are so much more impressive, Jenkins assumes that we will therefore be impressed with Buck.

But as desperate as they are to be impressive, it's just not possible for readers to be impressed with the toadying instincts of Buck and Rayford, Jenkins and LaHaye. The best one can do, instead, is to feel a measure of pity for four characters so earnestly desiring to be liked but so confused about what might make them likable -- so intent on being admired, but so utterly clueless as to what is admirable.

Our trespasses

Today's paper has a good piece from reporters Hiran Ratnayake and Ginger Gibson -- "Immigrants on fringes in debate's foreground" -- on the desperate situation faced by illegal immigrants in need of health care here in America.

The article starts with one story:

When Miriam was 15, her parents trespassed into the United States from Mexico.

Now in her mid 20s, the Wilmington resident still doesn't have citizenship but has become familiar with the health care system.

In the spring, she and her husband -- who both work as custodians -- were admitted to St. Francis Hospital in Wilmington for two days with pneumonia.

When they were released, they faced bills amounting to more than $4,000 and were put on a payment plan that eats up about one-fourth of their combined paychecks.

"I'd rarely go to a hospital because I can't afford to pay for it again," said Miriam, who is not being identified due to her immigration status, through an interpreter. "If I get sick again, I won't go to the hospital unless it's really serious."

What I want to draw your attention to here is the legally accurate verb in that first sentence: "trespassed."

That's not Lou Dobbs' preferred word for illegal immigration, since we don't tend to think of trespassing as a particularly menacing form of crime and people like Dobbs -- the CNN anchor fearfully obsessed with illegal immigration from Mexico -- want to portray these aliens as more of a threat than the word "trespasser" seems to convey.

But there's another reason you won't hear that word from Dobbs or from his role models on Fox News or the other members of the frantically xenophobic anti-immigrant mob, like the birthers, deathers and tea-baggers or the demagogues who stoke their cowardly anger, like drop-out Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin or South Carolina's Rep. Addison Graves Hansen Huntington Wegener Ricketts Parkinson "Joe" Wilson* -- the congressman who said he was overwhelmed by his emotions when he heard the president excluding illegal immigrants with what he regarded as insufficient viciousness. ("You lie!" Wilson shouted, after Obama said illegal immigrants would not receive federally funded health insurance under his health care reform plan. Obama's statement was true, but Wilson fears such immigrants might not also be aggressively prohibited from purchasing private health insurance, and the idea of them doing so keeps him tossing and turning all night.)

The main reason that none of these Very Angry, Very Scared people wants to use the word "trespass" is that it reminds them of church.

There's this prayer we Christians say in church, at every service, whenever we get together. We recite it in unison, usually, and we've all got it memorized. We call it "The Lord's Prayer," because Jesus himself taught it to us and told us to pray it. Sometimes we call it the "Our Father," since that's how it starts.

Most of this prayer is comforting and reassuring, like the 23rd Psalm. "Give us this day our daily bread," we pray. "And deliver us from evil." Daily bread and deliverance, that's nice.

But then there's this other phrase which, when we listen to ourselves saying it, is the scariest part of any given Sunday. "Forgive us our trespasses," we pray, "as we forgive those who trespass against us."**

That's disturbingly conditional. It's almost contractual. The conditions laid out there are crystal clear and explicit, but we tend to recoil from them. We pray this one prayer more than any other, but every other prayer omits this quid pro quo. "Forgive us according to thy infinite mercy," we pray, or "according to your boundless grace," or "for Jesus' sake," or "in Jesus' name." Straight-up, unconditional, one-way forgiveness is what we ask for in every other prayer. Apart from our recitation of that one prayer, you'll rarely ever hear us ask that this be conditional -- "Forgive us as we forgive others."

Rep. Wilson attends the First Presbyterian Church in Columbia, S.C., and every time he goes there with his family he has to recite those words: "Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us." How can he possibly reconcile that with his rabid anti-immigrant views? Having those views, how does he even manage to speak the very first word of this prayer?

Think of Wilson and the rest of the "take back America" crowd praying this prayer in tens of thousands of nominally Christian churches across the country. Think of them praying this prayer on behalf of "their" country: "Forgive America its trespasses as America forgives those who trespass against it."

If those are the conditions -- and they are -- then we're screwed. Our own words, our own prayers, condemn us.

Wilson and the tea-baggers have to realize this. They have to hear this every week, to listen to themselves saying it, listen to their own voices inviting and invoking their own damnation. Praying this prayer must be for them like those monks in Monty Python's Holy Grail who carry wooden planks and smack themselves in the face after every phrase of every chanted prayer.

Maybe that explains why these people are so miserably unhappy, why they're so disproportionately angry, so wrong-headedly certain that they deserve to be jealous of those luck-ducky illegal immigrants like Miriam in the story above. Those desperately poor immigrants may have no access to care they can hope to afford, but at least they can hope to be forgiven. Wilson and the tea-baggers know that they, due to their own prayers, never can be.

The heroes in all of this, to me, are those health care providers like the ones in the story above who insist on being exactly that -- providers of care, regardless of a patient's ability to pay or to produce identification papers for the ICE or the polizei:

If law enforcement is alerted by a health care worker that a patient is undocumented, more patients with the same status would shy away from seeking care when they need it, added Rosa Rivera, executive director of Henrietta Johnson Medical Center.

"All you're doing then is a disservice to the community," she said. "Our goal is to treat as many people who come here that need our services and take care of them and make them well. It's not to determine who is a citizen and who isn't."

That obligation to care for those in need, without regard for their trespasses, clearly applies to anyone with the temerity to pray the Lord's Prayer. But I don't think it's an exclusively sectarian obligation.

In a country like America, where the democratic conversation is often dominated by the voices of demagogues and the shrieking of Very Angry Cowards like Dobbs, Wilson, Palin and the tea-baggers, it's tempting to focus on the politically expedient -- tempting to agree even in the long-term to exclude those whom this vehement faction lives to exclude. But lead us not into temptation.

And deliver us from evil.

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

* Julia noted in comments to the previous post that Rep. Addison Graves Wilson "is named after three diseases." And that's just too good to leave it at that. This deserves to be a runner, much like the endlessly fun "Nicky Appalachians" game.

** There's a bit of awkwardness when ad hoc groups of Christians find themselves praying this prayer outside of their usual congregations -- do we say "trespasses" or do we say "forgive us our debts and we forgive our debtors"? On this contentious question, I tend to prefer the debtor side, for economic reasons. Jesus' disciples, like most Christians throughout the history of the church, were more likely to be wage-earning debtors than to be propertied creditors. And while I personally am in the process of converting debt into property, its a 30-year mortgage and at this point I'm still almost entirely on the "debtor" side. Either way, though, please note that neither trespasses nor debts is quite the same as sins.

21 Wilsons

I wouldn't have guessed it was possible for Gov. Mark Sanford, this quickly, to become only the second most-embarrassing politician in South Carolina.

There are more than 300 million people here in the United States of America, and out of all those people we only need to find 535 members of Congress.

More specifically, there are 668,668 people in South Carolina's 2nd Congressional District and they one needed to find one of them to serve in the House of Representatives.

And they picked this guy?

They'd have been better off picking a name at random out of the Columbia phone book.

I don't know a lot of people who live in the 2nd District of South Carolina, so instead just let me toss out a few other possibilities. Here are 21 people other named Wilson who would be better qualified to represent the people of the Palmetto State. Electing any of these would be far less embarrassing than repeating the mistake of sending Addison Graves Wilson back to Congress:

1. Ambassador Joe Wilson
2. Valerie Plame Wilson
3. James Q. Wilson
4. E.O. Wilson
5. William Julius Wilson
6. August Wilson
7. Cassandra Wilson
8. Rita Hanks Wilson
9. Brian Wilson
10. Mookie Wilson
11. Wilson, the neighbor from Home Improvement
12. Nancy and/or Ann Wilson
13. Luke and/or Owen Wilson
14. Dr. James Wilson
15. Gretchen Wilson
16. Dan Wilson
17. Rainn Wilson
18. Willie Wilson
19. Mr. Wilson, from Dennis the Menace
20. Carney Wilson
21. Wilson the Volleyball, from Castaway

Trust me, South Carolina, any of those would be an improvement.

TF: Mr. McGillicuddy

Tribulation Force, pp. 85-91

On Monday morning, before flying to New York, Buck Williams needs to meet with spiky Alice about the final details of his upcoming romantic farce:

Fortunately ... he didn't see Verna until after he had dropped off his key to Alice and was driving out of the lot. Verna was driving in, and she did not see him.

Phew. After the way he's treated her, Buck knows that Verna wouldn't just look the other way if she were to catch him in a major violation of Global Weekly's ethics policy. And that's exactly what he's up to here.*

The problem is not that Buck is going behind Verna's back, but that everything he does for the rest of the day is paid for by his interview subject. This may seem relatively minor compared to his earlier ethical transgressions with the same interview subject -- when he agreed to spike a story for Nicolae in exchange for a promise of personal safety. But the following pages offer a textbook case study in the sleazy quid pro quo of journalistic junketeering, with the perks of his jaunt to New York resembling a parody of a Jay-Z video. If Buck were a member of Congress accepting all of these undisclosed gifts he'd be looking at serious prison time.

Buck had no identification with the name McGillicuddy on it. At O'Hare he picked up an envelope under the phony name and realized that not even the young woman at the counter would have known a ticket was inside.

The young woman at the counter must be going mad with curiosity. A passenger walks up to an airline counter and requests the envelope left for them there -- whatever could possibly be inside? It's so mysteriously cloak-and-dagger.

Also, it's been a few years since the last time I was in O'Hare International Airport, but I seem to remember there being more than just the one counter. Anyway ...

At the gate he checked in about half an hour before boarding was to begin.

In the three weeks since the Rapture, Buck has been racking up frequent flyer miles. Each trip to the airport is a reminder of how much air travel has changed here in the real world since these books were written in the 1990s (particularly on today's anniversary). Buck's half-hour window doesn't allow enough time to get through security, one thinks, and then one remembers what it was like back then.

But then one also remembers everything that has happened in this story and how impossible it seems that a routine flight should be so very routine here at an airport where, three weeks ago, the runway was littered with the wreckage of dozens of planes. At the very least you'd expect that airlines would be making a show of the extra safety measures they've put in place to reassure passengers that the mass death of the simultaneous crashes less than a month ago would not be repeated. There ought to be redundant flight crews and automated emergency landing systems and that sort of thing just to convince travelers that it was again safe to fly. Most of all, there ought to be travelers who need such convincing. Yet no one seems the least bit jittery about getting back on a plane, even with the cracks and scorch marks still visible on the tarmac.

Buck, addressed as "Mr. McGillicuddy," is offered the "exclusive privilege" of boarding the plane before anyone else, the airline personnel treating him with the obsequious mixture of awe and fear reserved for VIPs and celebrities. They continue fawning on him after he boards, offering him breakfast and the customary early Monday morning bottle of champagne.

Buck had never been a drinker, so he declined the champagne, and he was too keyed up to eat. The flight attendant said, "Are you sure? An entire bottle has been set aside for you." She looked at her clipboard. "Compliments of N.C."

"Thanks anyway," Buck shook his head. Was there no end to what Carpathia could -- or would -- do?

"You don't want to take it with you?"

"No, ma'am. Thanks. Would you like it?"

The attendant gave him a stunned look. "Are you kidding? It's Dom Perignon!"

"Feel free."

This bit of regifting is probably the most generous tip Buck has ever given in his life. The flight attendant asks him to sign her clipboard so she doesn't get in trouble, and Buck Williams signs "Buck Williams."

"Um, sir?" the attendant said. "What is your name?"

"I'm sorry," Buck said. "I wasn't thinking." He took the clipboard, crossed out his name, and signed "B. McGillicuddy."

Suave. One gets the feeling that while traveling incognito, Buck makes air quotes with his fingers every time he says his fake name.

Normally coach passengers would steal glances at those in first class, but now even the other first-class passengers checked Buck out. He had tried not to be showy, but clearly he was getting preferential treatment.

This tells us either that Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins enjoy flying first class, imagining that the hoi polloi are straining their necks for a glimpse of their glittering selves, or else that L&J resent flying coach and spend flights bitterly trying to peek through the curtains at those enviable elites for whom several hundred dollars for a few hours in a wider seat with free drinks seems like a reasonable bargain. Either way, the authors seem to enjoy imagining themselves here as Buck imagining himself to be Richard Cory, fluttering the pulses of the people on the pavement.

He was waiting on board when they arrived, and during the flight the attendants hovered felicitously around him, topping off his drink and asking if he wanted anything else. Whom had Carpathia paid for this treatment, and how much?

Felicitous, solicitous ... whatever. Worrying about choosing the right adjective is for those suckers back in coach.

On the question of "whom had Carpathia paid" for this lavish special attention, I'll take a wild guess and say, "the airline." That's usually how that works. But there's nothing troubling about the airline's role here -- you pay them to schmooze and they'll schmooze. The problem here, rather, is that Nicolae is paying the airline a lot of money to schmooze Buck, and Buck is the willing recipient of all that largesse. Have a hand-rolled Cuban cigar, Nicolae offers, and Buck the objective journalist thanks him, lighting it with the flaming end of Global Weekly's ethics policy.

After landing at JFK:

... a uniformed driver strode directly to him as he appeared at the end of the jetway, reached for his carry-on, and asked if he had any checked bags.

"No."

"Very good, sir. Follow me to the car, please."

Buck was a world traveler and had been treated like both a king and a pauper over the years. Yet even he found this routine unsettling.

As a world traveler, Buck at least ought to know not to hand his luggage to somebody who never even asks for his name. The fake sky-cap scam may not be the most sophisticated or lucrative scam in the book, but it's beauty lies in its simplicity.

Buck follows the driver to a waiting limousine and gets inside.

As his eyes adjusted to the low light and the tinted windows, Buck noticed a man in a dark suit sitting with his back to the driver, staring at him. "You with the U.N.," Buck asked, "or do you work directly for Mr. Carpathia?"

The man did not respond. Nor did he move. Buck leaned forward. "Excuse me!" he said. "Do you --"

The man put a finger to his lips.

After the groveling, anything-we-can-do felicitude solicitude of the airline, this cryptic silence of driver and hired muscle is just weird. They were sent by Nicolae, of course, but they seem to be carrying on the whole "McGillicuddy" business, even though there's no reason for it at this point. (But then there was really no reason for it with the airline, either.)

Buck can't imagine that their showy silence and mysterious air is a good sign for him:

Buck wondered if this would be his last ride. ... For all he knew, he could be on his way to his own execution. The only record of his trip was a mistaken signature on the flight attendant's clipboard, and he had crossed that out.

It seems unlikely to me that an execution would involve a lavish round-trip first-class ticket, complimentary champagne and a stretch limo ride all the way to the swamps of Jersey, but then unlike Buck I'm not a sophisticated world traveler. Maybe this five-star treatment is how the jet-set has people whacked. (Note to self: If you're ever going to get whacked, try to get whacked by these guys.)

We cut back to Rayford who has, meanwhile, flown to Dallas-Fort Worth airport to practice takeoffs and landings in Pan Continental's spiffy new 757s, which Rayford describes as "the Jaguar of airplanes."

The authors spend more than a page on this training session. They return here to the subtext established in the opening pages of the first book in which Rayford's large, powerful jetliner represents his correspondingly large and powerful penis. That makes this section, once again, unintentionally funny and we could dwell here again on that, chuckling over the authors' obsession with "thrust," but instead I think I'll cut L&J a break here.

This brief passage seems mostly just included as Jenkins' way of reassuring LaHaye that his very manly Mary Sue isn't being neglected in favor of his own, but for all that it's still a page in which we see a character at work on his job, putting in the time to get better at it. Such scenes are all too rare (unless the character is a doctor or detective) for me to discourage them with another string of "cockpit" jokes.

We cut back to Buck who, just moments ago, was worried he was on his way to a one-way ferry ride:

Buck Williams' limo was soon stuck in traffic. Buck wished he'd brought something to read.

Always good advice. Never, ever leave the house without something to read, just in case. You might find yourself like Buck here, stuck in the back of a limo in a traffic jam with no way to pass the time until your impending execution.

Buck might have taken this opportunity to check the locks and plan his escape, but instead he muses about the seemingly pointless show being staged by his host and his authors:

Why did this have to be so mysterious? He didn't understand the point of his treatment on both ends of the plane ride.

Neither Carpathia nor the authors ever offers a good explanation.

The driver "swept past the appropriate exit" for Nicolae's office at the United Nations so now Buck has no idea where they might be headed.

He hoped they were headed somewhere nice for lunch. Besides the fact that he had skipped breakfast, he also liked the prospect of eating more than that of dying.

Can't argue with that. If the choice is between "somewhere nice for lunch" and a shallow grave, I'll take lunch every time.

Back at DFW, Rayford has finished with his training session. His examiner is about as loquacious as Buck's companions.

His examiner handed him a business-size envelope. "So did I pass?" Rayford said lightly.

"You won't know that for about a week," the man said.

Ooh, another envelope. Could it be more airline tickets for Mr. McGillicuddy?

What's this? Rayford wondered, entering the van and tearing open the envelope. Inside was a single sheet of United Nations stationery, already embossed with Hattie Durham, Personal Assistant to the Secretary-General. The hand-written message read simply:

Captain Steele,
I assume you know that the brand new Air Force One is a 757.
Your friend,
Hattie Durham

Hopefully, Hattie didn't get too much of that fancy stationery printed up, because in just a few months she's going to need new letterhead embossed with Hattie Durham, Whore of Babylon.

But her note is confusing. "Air Force One" is, of course, the plane that flies the president of the United States. But while Hattie seems to be hinting she can land Rayford a job as the president's pilot, she doesn't work for the president, or the Secret Service, or the U.S. Air Force. She works for Nicolae Carpathia.

One of her duties for Nicolae, in fact, was to be on hand during his top-secret unveiling of his New World Order, at which he divided the globe into 10 princedoms ruled by his hand-picked lieutenants. Hattie may have been brainwashed into forgetting who pulled the trigger at that meeting, or that Buck was also present, but she still ought to remember seeing Nicolae abolish the sovereignty of every non-Hebrew-speaking nation on the planet. His doing so meaning, among many other things, that there no longer ought to be a plane called Air Force One for the American president to fly in, since there no longer is an American president, or an Air Force, or an America.

In the chapters that follow we learn that Hattie has, in fact, set Rayford up to be the president's pilot (or, rather, the pilot for the man who thinks he's still the president). But then President Fitzhugh -- the ultimate (in every sense) lame duck -- later gives the plane to Nicolae so that Rayford winds up being the Antichrist's personal pilot.

But we're getting ahead of ourselves. This being Tribulation Force -- the book in which Very Little Happens Very Slowly -- Rayford can't take the job until he first spends several repetitive chapters laboriously insisting that he doesn't want it.

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

* From The New York Times' ethics policy, the section on "Paying Our Own Way":

30. When we as journalists entertain news sources (including government officials) or travel to cover them, our company pays the expenses. In some business situations and in some cultures, it may be unavoidable to accept a meal or a drink paid for by a news source (for example, at an official's residence or in a company's private dining room). Whenever practical, however, we should avoid those circumstances and suggest dining where we can pay our share (or, better, meeting in a setting that does not include a meal). Routine refreshments at an event like a news conference are acceptable, but a staff member should not attend recurring breakfast or lunch meetings unless our company pays for the journalist's meals. Whether the setting is an exclusive club or a service lodge's weekly luncheon, we should pay our way.

31. Staff members may not accept free or discounted transportation and lodging except where special circumstances give little or no choice. Such special cases include certain military or scientific expeditions and other trips for which alternative arrangements would be impractical — for example, an interview aboard a corporate jet where there is no benefit other than the interview. Journalists should consult responsible newsroom managers in advance when special circumstances arise.

And while we're on the subject, kudos to The Times for having it's ethics policy publicly available online. Here are links to many others, all of which contain similar language forbidding journalists from accepting free first-class airline tickets, bottles of Dom Perignon, limo rides or lunches at the Manhattan Yacht Club.