I still can’t get past that initial phone call.  Your pastor has a coma, and you’re just “a little worried?”  Seriously?

“Hello?”

“Hello,…Buck?”  The voice sounded familiar–one of the ladies in the New Hope congregation.  But why–Buck tried to swallow down his apprehension.

“Speaking.”  The woman’s tone had bothered him, but Buck tried not to let it show as he gave the conventional response, almost reflexively.

“I’ve got bad news about Pastor Barnes.”  Bruce.  He must have gotten Nicolai’s attention.  The Antichrist had silenced Buck’s spiritual guide.  Would he be after Buck next?

You see, L&J?  See how just changing a few words at the beginning of the phone call can make all the difference?

No, of course not. -_-;

“A coma!”“Like I say, we’re a little worried about him.”

*headdesk*
*headdesk*
*headdesk*

“A little worried” about him being in a coma. Right.

And the Hindenburg encountered a minor setback.

Wow, the attack happens completely offscreen while the protagonists were in a car thinking about how great each other are. Didn’t see that one coming.

I like the second interpretation of the phone call better.  Besides, being the end of the world and all with record breaking crime waves, how much follow up are the police going to do with the nice church ladies?  (I hope the muse strikes some of our writers here!)

Also, in the hands of a better writer, the omnipresent telephone could really be a powerful symbol.  Alas, the writer of this story is somewhat unskilled.

Hey! Early TF post.

What’s interesting is what L&J decide to focus on: the very narrow circle of family that Rayford and Buck have. What I’m not sure about is whether these passages are designed to be coded shout-outs to the “family values” crowd, or whether they’re designed to conjure up the feelings of closeness and insularity that characterizes smaller-town Christian sects where everybody knows everybody else and this family-like atmosphere is being idealized by L&J.

Either way, it’s another way of saying to the target audience, “It’s OK to close in the ranks, and not worry about those Heathen Other People.”

I think it’s also interesting to explore Bruce Barnes’s demise from a couple of angles:

1. It’s almost like LaHaye wasn’t happy with a relatively unimportant Author Avatar (Bruce Barnes is, after all, just one of many, many church pastors in the USA) and wanted him bundled off quietly and quickly to make way for the snazzier Author Avatar of Tsion Ben-Judah.

2. Jenkins clearly doesn’t have a feel for what a major event being in a coma would be. For him, it’s like describing Barnes just coming down with the common cold. This suggests that Jenkins, like probably many people, hasn’t had to deal with someone he knows falling into a coma, but also hasn’t tried to put himself in the shoes of someone who has just found out someone he knows well is in such a condition.

I wonder if (2) has to do with (1), by creating psychological distance from the major event a coma would be, in order to more easily wish Bruce Barnes a quiet last gasp before he vanishes forever from the series.

Hmm.

What ‘police’? All the governments of the world are gone, right? Unless Hattie Durham, Chaim Rosenzweig, or Steve Plank have time to look into this personally, this is going unsolved.

‘“What’s this?” he heard Rayford say. “And we’ve been making such good time.’

I think this, and the ensuing conversation with the cop, sums up the entire series.  There have been two nuclear attacks on American cities, urban warfare within the city you’re currently in, and yet everyone’s sole thought is with how it affects the commute.  Remember: other people aren’t humans deserving of concern, they’re obstacles.

“The attack on Washington?” Rayford said. “Washington, D.C.?”“Keep moving,” the officer said. “If you need to get back this way you can get off at Route 53 and try the side streets.”Because that’s what’s really important.

Despite their concern for Bruce, Rayford felt a little more whole. He
had a four-person family again, albeit a new wife and a new son.

This? This is awful and squickworthy and horrible on so many levels that I’m not sure I can begin to enumerate them.

- Family members are not made out of legos; you can not simply purchase another when you wear out your first set.

- Given the slashtastic nature of the meta-Rayford/Buck, the last bit makes my skin crawl.

- The implication that Rayford gained a son and failed to lose a daughter is also just weird and wrong.

- Also, apparently being a whole person requires two kids. Who knew?

In summary: ick!

She’s certainly keeping a stiff upper lip, isn’t she?

You can just imagine the “Keep calm and carry on” poster by her side. Maybe the One True Church has gotten a few Brits in the last few years?

What’s so frustrating is that the ‘off-stage’ technique is as old as the drama, and SHOULD make for a much more powerful scene.  Two examples immediately popped into my head, from the TV series ‘Rome’–when someone comes into a tavern to report having heard Mark Antony give some kind of great speech over Caesar’s body, and when Mark Antony sits glumly in the prow of a boat after, presumably, all the hoohah at Actium has come to a conclusion.

I wish I had something really incisive to say about the insularity of our protagonists and the whole “a little worried” thing, but instead, I’m hung up on my initial misreading of “an old Nike site to store,” as “an old Nike store.”

Now there’s a mental image — rednecks with guns hiding behind racks of athletic footwear.

“Militia had taken over an old Nike base to store contraband weapons. After the attack on Washington, our boys wiped them out.”

I realize that this book was written pre-9/11, but the timeline for this comment is way off.

I presume that the nuclear destruction of Washington, D.C., is so recent that it isn’t THE topic of conversation for everybody everywhere. Yet apparently “our boys” have had the time to identify the culprits, locate the “Nike base” that the militia was using, and coordinate a military—whoops, paramilitary—operation to destroy them. Were “our boys” not concerned that the militia that has just demonstrated nuclear capability may have been sitting on more nuclear weapons at their “Nike base”?

(In L&J’s world, it’s not unusual for shoe manufacturers to have military installations? Did Nike get a good deal on the facility after the unilateral disarmament of the U.S.? Maybe not, since they’ve abandoned it already…)

Given that the world has apparently shrugged off the disappearance of millions of adults and every child under the age of 13, I suppose the nuking of Washington would be small potatoes in comparison…

Ha! I definitely got a British vibe from the exchange, but less “keep calm…” and more Monty Python. Perhaps Bruce is just pinin’ for the fjords.

The Frantically-Checking-His-Watch Bruce
Barnes’ Death Countdown: 8 pages

I was surprised to see Jenkins refer to an old Nike base — I can remember seeing Nike missiles when I was about 8 years old but as I recall they were to defend against manned bombers and became obsolete in the 60′s. (I was even more surprised to find that so many readers appear to be young enough to not remember Nike as anything but a shoe company.)  Jenkins has done some homework — enough to know that there was a base in Arlington Heights which isn’t far from Mount Prospect.  But I doubt that they would have taken the Tollway — those troll biscuits are expensive anymore although maybe it became a freeway after the great disappearing.  I’d have gotten off the Kennedy before River Road and cut up to Des Plaines to catch Northwest Highway and make a stop at the McDonalds store #1 to pick up some burgers and fries.

This is a small thing in the overall pile-up of terrible, but since when does Bruce go to Indonesia? Was it a mission trip of some sort? Why would Bruce “dig a big hole in the ground and crawl in with your 4 best buddies” Barnes be on a mission trip? 

Also, a note to Buck Buck:

 Somehow, someday, he would convince them they were not the Christians they thought they were.  

If your family was Left Behind in the Rapture then I’m guessing that by now they’ve figured out that they weren’t the Christians they had previously thought they were. If you’d used your beloved phone to call them even once you’d know that. They could maybe use a little of the info your buddy Bruce was feeding you before the church secretary got fed up and slipped rat poison into his coffee. You might want to try passing that info along to the folks, seeing as to how you’re not making any use of it in your job. 

I think Nike and other shoe manufacturers and their retailers started cracking down on shoplifters in 1994. Some might say a nuclear warhead is a disproportionate response to some kid lifting a pair of Sketchers, but if you think about the costs are passed on to the consumer, so….

[Somehow, someday, he would convince them they were not the Christians they thought they were.]

Buck knows what his own family needs to hear to be saved from the Antichrist and the Devil, and somehow, someday, he’s going to tell them about it. He’s been meaning to, really he has. Just because he hasn’t managed to find time for a visit or a phone call in the first year and a half of the Great Tribulation doesn’t mean he doesn’t care about them.

I think Fred is being too charitable.  Buck isn’t thinking about how he’ll save his family from eternal damnation and Hellfire here.  He’s thinking about how he’ll be able to say, “I’m right and you’re wrong.  Wrong, wrong, wrong.  Wrong.  Wrong.”

Convincing them to accept salvation isn’t what he’s planning on doing somehow, someday, convincing them that they suck is.

Ok, I think someone needs to clarify what a “Nike base” is, because I’m getting the impression it has nothing to do with athletic footwear…

Marge didn’t want to call him, but Loretta insisted. Wasn’t Buck a member of Bruce’s inner circle? Shouldn’t he know about this? Marge wanted to mention exactly how much Buck had cared about New Hope and their suffering pastor in the past months- i.e., none at all, but she knew Loretta had bigger things to deal with than her objections. So she swallowed her pride and made the call.

He finally picked up on the third ring. Marge tried to keep the acidity out of her voice as she addressed the man once presented to her as one of New Hope’s new leaders. “We’re a little worried about Pastor Barnes,” she said. It was unChristian, she knew, but if the man couldn’t be bothered to come to services for months, she wasn’t going to bother treating him like Bruce’s friend.

“Ma’am?” You idiot. ”He was gonna surprise y’all by coming down there for lunch.” And he’d so been looking forward to it, too.
“We thought he might.” How nice. So much for the ‘surprise’ part. His callousness made her feel a  bit better about saying the next part.“But he picked up some kinda bug in Indonesia and we had to get him to the emergency room. He didn’t want us to tell anyone, because he was sure it was something they could fix real quick and he could still get down there. But he’s slipped into a coma.”“A coma!” No, you idiot, the common cold.“Like I say, we’re a little worried about him.” She couldn’t quite manage to keep the sarcasm out of her voice this time.

Nike was an old anti-aircraft/missile system.  Any such base would be very, very old (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Nike).

“Militia had taken over an old Nike base to store contraband weapons. After the attack on Washington, our boys wiped them out.”

This could actually make sense – the authorities knew of the militia group, and decided that this was the good time to take them out (think of what the FBI would have to a group which they were monitoring pre-9/11, once 9/11 happened).

“The state police here relate to the OWG in kind of the same way that
Herod’s client state related to the Roman Empire. They’re independent
and in charge of their jurisdiction, except when they’re not, which is
whenever the OWG says.”

Yeah, that’s the way I can envision this thing being even Remotely possible.  “Your very lives will be given in tribute to Me.  In return, you will enjoy the generous protection of General Zodd.  In other words, you will be allowed to live.”

No Chloe story this week.  Got too busy. 

It’s a missile girl, well Nike is her name, you remember it, so pretty, so cold – The Misfits, Nike A-Go-Go

The Nike series – Nike Ajax, Nike Hercules, Nike Zeus – were of limited utility thanks to the proliferation of ICBMs, as the Nike was originally designed as a line-of-sight anti-aircraft missile.
Per Wikipedia, almost all Nike sites were deactivated by 1974.

I could accept the “we’re a little worried about him” if Jenkins had included “…she said, with a breezy, even detached tone” or some other descriptor that made it clear that she was responding on autopilot, or wasn’t all there, was more than just a bit out-of-character. Talk about how slowly she speaks, pausing as though she’s forgotten what words she wanted to use, or as though she’s reading from a script. Seriously, how do you say “he’s in a coma” without having ANY emotional response? Unless you don’t care about him, and because Jenkins doesn’t, neither does any of his characters.

I keep reading these posts and keep thinking I’ll become immune to the inhumane writing of these books but every so often something comes by to wallop me in the face again.

I swear I must be in Twilight mode because I can’t help imagine all of these lines being delivered by Edward Cullen.  The trouble is that it’s just Edward talking to Edward talking to Edward.  Bella might be rude and callous and condescending herself, but she at least occasionally calls out other’s for their actions.

At one point she did it so very well that I thought Ana had mistaken included her own response to Edward in one one of Bella’s quotations.

This story could use some more Bella.

-“A coma!”Edward chuckled, “Like I say, we’re a little worried about him.”I focused my attention on my lemonade and said, “A little worried?  You mean like how you’d be if your makeup started to run on a day that was turning out to be mostly cloudy instead of completely overcast, or more like you feel if someone asked my dad to to investigate the decline in the deer population and his response was, ‘Maybe later,’ instead of flat out, ‘No’?  Or is this more like an, ‘I wonder if someone will notice that we’re skipping school 1% more often than normal since this abnormally clear weather set in?’ level of worry?”I glanced up to see Edward’s obvious amusement.  I couldn’t look for long because whenever I did I lost the ability to form polysyllabic sentences.  I looked back at my lemonade and continued, ”He’s in a coma for fuck’s sake.  He might die.  If even if he lives he might never wake up.  Even if he wakes up he might never be the same.  This is a big, potentially life altering problem the likes of which you and yours will never have to personally face again, and all you can muster is a little worry?”Edward said, “I don’t see why it matters.  Alice said that most everyone in Chicago was going to die soon anyway.”-Of course, in the above I’ve combined Buck and the person he’s talking on the phone with into Edward, which is sort of my point.  Left Behind: Everyone is Edward Cullen.

Apparently “taking out” the old Nike base didn’t involve any reasonable-sized fires or explosions. 

Or maybe they just didn’t see the plume of smoke due to the mountainous terrain, heavy forestation, and twisty roads.

An alternative theory is that while Bruce was traveling, “one of the
women who helped out in the office at New Hope” found out about the
secret personal shelter Bruce has been building with the congregation’s
offering money. In this conversation, she’s just giving Buck the same
cover-story she gave to the EMT — “some kinda bug in Indonesia.”

Buck knows what his own family needs to hear to be saved from the
Antichrist and the Devil, and somehow, someday, he’s going to tell them
about it. He’s been meaning to, really he has. Just because he hasn’t
managed to find time for a visit or a phone call in the first year and a
half of the Great Tribulation doesn’t mean he doesn’t care about them.
There’s still plenty of time before the end. After all, we haven’t even
seen the second seal opened with the second horseman of the … hey … what’s with this traffic jam?

Just beautiful.

I also like Rayford’s happiness at his new four-person family, albeit with new wife and son. As with Job it’s really a numbers game isn’t it ?

The worst of it is, I think Jenkins is trying to go for dry wit there. He’s tried it before. It could almost be funny, except that… no. There are people who use dry wit, and circumstances they use dry wit in. Calling a stranger to tell them a mutual friend is in a coma isn’t one of them.

“Pastor in a coma?!”
“I know.  I know, it’s serious.”
“Do you really think he’ll pull through?”

The reason Jenkins doesn’t invest this scene with any emotional weight is because he doesn’t bother to — he knows Bruce will be killed off altogether 8 pages from now.  What’s a li’l coma compared to that?  Jenkins, as usual, forgets that neither his characters nor his readers share the same omniscience the author does.  As a result, he writes Nameless Church Lady as though she’s already read the rest of the chapter and knows how relatively minor this plot development is.

But, you guys?  This is so exciting — we’re back in the suburbs where I grew up!  I had some tests at Northwest Community a few years ago.  My piano teacher used to live around there.  And do you think they had to shut down Arlington Park Racetrack on account of World War III?  I hope they got the horses out in time!

Family members are not made out of legos; you can not simply purchase another when you wear out your first set.

Tell that to Job.

Another thing I find incredibly creepy is how happy Ray and Buck are with their ‘replacement families.’ There’s no indication Buck had a bad childhood or other tension with his family, right? Why are they so unimportant to him? I mean, I have theories, but none of them are exactly flattering to the World’s Greatest Investigative Reporter.

(I should note I have no problems with them finding family and community after a loss, etc, it’s the weird heartlessness that bothers me.)

Oh sweet hairy bob…

All this time I was hearing about Bruce dying, I sort of figured/hoped/expected that this would finally be a chance for Nick Teapot Dome to do something vaguely evilish.  Like have Bruce assassinated or made an example of in the aftermath of the attacks.

But noooooo.

He gets a disease.

I mean in the right kind of book, that sort of subverted expectation could be a strong point – showing that just because the world is ending, more mundane concerns like illness don’t just vanish…  but this is not that kind of book, because it’s not even interesting enough for us to care about what’s really going on, let alone about mundane things in this world.

Blerrrgh.

You’ve just described our local Bass Pro SHop.

In a better series, “picked up some kinda bug in Indonesia” would be foreshadowing for “is Patient Zero for the imminent zombie apocalypse.”  Think about it, LaHaye & Jenkins!  It’s never too late for a genre switch!

 I also like Rayford’s happiness at his new four-person family, albeit with new wife and son. As with Job it’s really a numbers game isn’t it ?  

This is one of the reasons I’ve always hated the story of Job. Family members aren’t supposed to be fungible. People who treat them that way are sociopaths. That goes double for a God who treats them that way—”Sorry your kids got in the middle of my dick measuring contest with Satan and ended up dead. Here are some new ones to make it up to you. You have the same number that you started with so it’s all good.” 

I was on a Caribbean cruise last week.  While waiting for the onboard specialty restaurant to open, an elderly widow from Houston, Texas struck up a conversation with me.  When she found out that I lived in the Bay Area, she mentioned that she had property in Oakland that her husband had owned.  The property used used for the offices of a radio station … actually a radio network for a Christian broadcaster.  She couldn’t remember his name.  I helped, “Harold Camping?”  “Yes, that’s the one.”  We had an interesting discussion.

I am starting to believe that these books are just TOO bad.  Like Jerry Jenkins is pulling the worlds longest and most subversive practical joke on Tim LaHaye.

Tim:  “And then they go to Chicago, where the second seal is opened and Washington DC is destroyed by nuclear fire (in accordance with prophecy).  I’m leaving the logistics of that up to you, since you’re the writer-guy.”

Jerry: “I don’t know Tim, maybe they should DO something?  Aren’t they supposed to be the heroes of this story?”

Tim: “Jesus is the hero.”

Jerry: “Yeah, well, he’s not in the story yet, maybe we should have our heroes rescue somebody or something.”

Tim: “But… Jesus is the hero.  And there will soon be war and famine and pestilence (in accordance with prophecy.)  They need to be in Chicago for the prophesied take over of this abandoned anti-aircraft facility.”

Jerry:” Traffic jam?  How about somebody telephones?”

Tim:”That’s a good idea.  Let’s do that.”

Jerry:”God you’re a jackass.”

I am actually having trouble believing that Jerry Jenkins is this much of an incompetent boob – I’m (hoping) that the situation is actually more like that episode of Family Guy where Brian writes the intentionally stupid self help book. (“Want it! Think it! Do it!”)

I have been told that one of my personal failings is that I fail to ascribe bad motives to people, even when it’s clear and am always seeing their actions in the best possible light.

Buck and Rayford are both risking their lives working for the devil only so they can be close to the action and know what’s going on before everyone else, and then the biggest event that has happened in hundreds of pages they have to find out about by rolling down the window and asking a traffic cop.  Priceless!

Hrmm…  I don’t want to be a pest or anything, but our names are reallllllly close together other than that one space and your avatar.  I just worry about confusion >< don't want to be annoying just… worrisome.

It’s also striking, but not surprising, that Buck doesn’t seem to want to *save* his family, and certainly has not forgiven them for being narrow-minded (which, what dies that mean in this context?) with charity and lovingkindness in his heart. No, he hopes someday to rub their faces in how wrong they were and how right he now is.
Stay classy, Buck!

I caught a whiff of Job when Rayford thinks about having the new wife and the new son – isn’t that what happened to Job (well, not the wife), he just got a whole new family after his tribulations?  

—”Sorry your kids got in the middle of my dick measuring contest with Satan and ended up dead. Here are some new ones to make it up to you. You have the same number that you started with so it’s all good.”

That’s pretty much the whole series…

The Trib Force loses Bruce Barnes at the end of Book #2, replaced by Tsion ben Judah in Book #3.
They lose doctor Floyd Charles in Book #6, replaced by nurses Leah Rose (in Book #6) and Hannah Palemoon (Book #7).
They lose pilot Ken Ritz in Book #5, but other pilots take his place.
David Hassid grooms his replacement Chang Wong so that Hassid can be killed off in Book #9.

Um, yeah. What Chris said.

I notice, and cringe, that the New Hope church lady’s lines are written in … dialect. So perhaps LJ were going for a kind of down-home country deadpan ironic understatement? As in “Yah, we’z been a little worried ’bout Ole Bruce drinkin’ too much since we found him at the bottom a that there w’isky barl.”
Needless to say, if this was an attempt at humor, it sank like a lead balloon.

He used to have a comic strip, which was only slightly better than this. (It was about sports). And he’s written other books, too, and they’re all pretty much exactly like this.  (The only reason these books are more famous than the rest of his work is because of the association with Tim LaHaye). If he’s been pranking him this entire time, it’s got to be pretty dedicated because he’s devoted his entire literature career to it.

Why does a guy named “Camping” need a house?

I think he ends up dying as a result of a bombing.

You know, the bombing that Buck knew about in advance and did nothing about.

I am actually very curious now as to what Bucky (and the authors) mean about Buck’s family if origin being “small-minded” Christians. Because the dude seems really, really bitter.
Now, I know what range of meanings I – and presumably this community – would imagine for “small-minded” in reference a Christian birth family that one is no longer on speaking terms with (apparently; except in their 4 a.m. revenge fantasies). But what I would take this to mean is a family like, well Rayford or Jenkins or LaHaye. A family who would discourage me from moving to Gomorrah to pursue my worldy career interests, who wouldn’t accept my life choices that did not include early marriage.

If Buck’s family were militant atheist hippies, who frowned on his yearning for a spiritual life and looked on joining the ranks if the mainstream media as selling out, or supercilious neo-pagans who regarded Christianity as corrupt and New York as a wart on the face of the earth, or something, then I could see where LJ might be going with this. But no, they are apparently Christians who think they are the right kind of Christians. (Are they Catholic?)

The best I can come up with is that his family are, like, high church bourgeois snobs who look down on New Hopers as hicks and writers as crassly bohemian … Except that, again, this just sounds like the authors again.

Thoughts??

The best I can cone

Actually the property is commercial — it’s the office building for Family Radio.

How much better would this bit have been, had we simply not had the earlier scene between Buck and Fitz?  World War III starts on an ordinary day, in the middle of a more or less routine car trip.  It just happens out of the blue and nobody is prepared for it – not our protagonists, not the rest of the world, not the readers.  It starts with an annoying, but otherwise innocuous traffic jam, then there’s the growing horror as the global scope of the situation is realized.

In itself this a perfectly good and well-used storytelling ploy — Stephen King does it all the time to fantastic effect.  Ellenjay, on the other hand, botch it entirely by telegraphing the whole thing pages earlier.  Perhaps they feel introducing surprise of any kind into their story would harm their readers’ delicate constitutions, sending them right to the fainting couch.  Or they just can’t stand something important going on without one of their author avatars being privy to it.  Whatever the explanation, it’s yet another reason why the Buck and Fitz scene needed an editor to walk by and put a big red “X” over the whole thing.

Another thing: So you’re killing off one of the major characters on the same day as nuclear war breaks out.  So to kill him, you… give him a disease?  From an international trip we didn’t even know he had taken?  I thought he was staying with his congregation because he felt so burdened by his duty to help them, but he left them alone for almost certainly more than a week?  But back to my point: Wouldn’t have been much more elegant to have killed him IN THE BLAST?  I thought for sure that that was what was going to happen- it seemed so obvious.  You don’t need a deus ex machina to kill off the character you’re bored of, if the deus is currently blowing up two cities.  Just say he was visiting one of those cities- it’s not that hard, and it would add some needed drama and emotional investment to the prophetic checklist.

Thinking about it, though, I can see one explanation both for why Bruce’s death was handled so clumsily and for why no one seemed to care that much.  Bruce has (theoretically) become a sympathetic character that we might care about.  If he’s killed in one of the prophecies, it becomes harder to enjoy the destruction.  You start to wonder why God’s judgment is killing a good person.  You then start to think about the millions of other people dying, and wonder if some of them might be good people.  Then you start to ask whether this whole set of judgments on those Left Behind is really just, or whether the God of L&J is punishing people who don’t deserve it.  And suddenly the whole prophecy scheme falls apart.  Better to skim over Bruce’s death as quickly as possible, and leave the mass suffering to the nameless, Godless extras who really deserve it.

I am also thinking it’s a huge letdown that Bruce’s death seems utterly random. Am fairly sure this is NOT and existential statement.

Yeah, and Buck giving someone crap about being narrow-minded seems totally ridiculous. He’s not exactly the poster child for loving and affirming. 

Beyond that, what does he mean when he says that about his family in these books? The things people normally mean when they complain about the narrow-mindedness of those who are ostensibly Christian are obviously not what these books means and yet Jenkins doesn’t bother to define his terms. And thus, “narrow-minded” joins the list of words that Jekins uses as code for “bad”, with no regard to actual meaning. 

(former J Johnson.2) My bad. I assumed it would show my email, and it… didn’t. Finally managed to get into my Disqus, though, so it should all be good.

Especially nice considering he was just as wrong as they were, as evidenced by his being left behind.  You’d think he’d feel empathy for those who were making the same mistake he had, and show them how he’d escaped the trap.  I guess it’s part of being Born Again- you’re a new person, and everything from before no longer matters, including people.

No no no they’re the type of “small minded” Christians who think gays should have rights and women should have things like names.Those poor bastards probably feed the poor and house the homeless,the small minded idiots.

Malkovich Malkovich!

The whole “Bruce Barnes dying of a random illness instead of the APOCOLYPSE” thing might have actualy been good had the idea been given to…I don’t know,a five year old maybe?

Think about it.You have this entire world ending nightmare about to start but instead of going out crushed by buildings or flaiming hail stones or whatever,he’s killed off by some bug he caught at random.I don’t know,I just think if handled properly it could bring to mind the whole “you never know when you’re gonna die” theme along with a humbling idea that some people don’t go out in a glorious apocolyptic fashion.Some people just die from the flu.We are just human after all.

heh heh humbling…in a Left Behing book.lolz.

Agreed- the idea is never as important as the execution.

The part that makes my skin crawl is that Rayford in ANY way perceives getting a new son-in-law (a mature adult, btw, not some 19-year-old) as being almost-equivalent to being the father of a 10-year-old (or so – how old was the kid, exactly?). 

I just don’t get the idea how having a new poker/conspiracy/drinking buddy even inhabits the same area of your brain as teaching your son to drive (and then fly), watching his first crush, helping him with his geography or physics homework…  Teaching his son to be a man – that’s the part of life that Ray lost when his wife and son disappeared.  How does getting a 40-year-old-virgin for a son-in-law trigger a “we’re a whole family again” response? 

Seriously – does Ray define “whole family” as meaning “fill each of the 4 seats in a 4-door sedan with the armrests down”?

The best I can come up with is that his family are, like, high church bourgeois snobs who look down on New Hopers as hicks and writers as crassly bohemian … Except that, again, this just sounds like the authors again.

From Prequel #2…

Cameron laughed. He’d wondered, as had many others, when Jeff married a thoroughgoing church woman. Jeff and Cameron had been church and Sunday school kids all their young lives but quit going as soon as they had a choice. On that they were agreed. It just didn’t seem to make sense. They saw no connection between what was being taught and how the family conducted itself at home. Their parents were honest and pleasant enough, but whatever they got out of church seemed for Sundays only. It wasn’t even discussed during the week.

Cameron’s parents were still faithful attendees, but they resented that their church was apparently not good enough for their daughter-in-law. Sharon continued to go to the church of her youth, and she took the kids. Rayford Jeff went on special occasions, and it was plain to all that Irene Sharon, wonderful as she was, considered him lost.

The Regime, p 114

Buck’s family of origin being “small-minded” Christians.

Apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, does it?

For that matter, if our non-intrepid (non-trepid) heroes were 25 miles/40 minutes away … How did they fail to notice the nuclear explosion?  The people screaming and pointing?  The people stopping on the freeway (*maybe* pulling over to the side) to gawk at (and then live-stream video footage of) the mushroom cloud?

Have they been enjoying the empty freeway, never wondering about the parking lot of cars headed the other way?  Was no-one tempted to drive the wrong way (on the other side of the freeway) in order to make faster progress?

Or was this a teensy-tiny nuclear explosion?

In a sequel it is determined that Nicky had Bruce poisoned. 

Because apparently world conquest, planning his wedding, the murder of his bride Hattie, and blaming Rayford for it aren’t enough to occupy his time.  He also has to destroy his nemesis and the one threat to his diabolical plan – a visitation pastor from suburban Chicago.

There’s Pestilience right there!

Considering that plagues are supposed to be coming, Barnes could well be an early patient.  I’ll give the writers that much credit.  Unfortunately given their track record to date even this clumsy bit of foreshadowing may not get a follow-up.

The sad thing is that there is so much material here that could be made into a *good* story: Barnes is one of the first victims of a pandemic that will be exacerbated due to a shortage of trained medical professionals after the Event.  The OWG’s persecution against the post-Event church starts as a series of quarantine restrictions intended to restrict large groups of people from meeting and further spreading the sickness.  The ‘mark’ is intended to show immune status–anyone not having it cannot conduct business, period (nobody will want to take the risk of dealing with someone who might be infected). One thing leads to another and pretty soon all remaining Christians are on lockdown.

The writers have given themselves the ball on first and goal…and elected to punt.

Actually, if I recall correctly, Job wound up with even more family and servants, so he came out AHEAD.

Which is just…yeah.

I figure if the wages of those stolen from can cry out then family members killed off while Job relaxes with his new family ought to as well.

Right.  I always forget I can consolidate blame for Gil Thorpe with this.

Yeah, never mind.  It’s my charitable nature showing through again.

 The best I can come up with is that his family are, like, high church bourgeois snobs who look down on New Hopers as hicks and writers as crassly bohemian … Except that, again, this just sounds like the authors again.  

The fact that your idea “just sounds like the authors again” is probably the strongest possible argument in favor of it. 

._.

I’m gonna go crawl back into bed and pretend this entire series doesn’t exist again.

It’s too bad he missed the double agents working his as his press secretary and pilot. You would think that they would have been more worrisome.

Then again, maybe he read their minds and found out what kind of men they were and decided, “Nah, I’ll leave these guys alone. If I take them out, the next people they send might actually try to stop me!”

He’s just clinging to whatever he can get. Rayford can’t really be sure that he will ever that experience; Bruce might have told him that they will all be reunited in Heaven, but he doesn’t know yet if time will have passed for Rayford Jr. (ie will he be an adult when Rayford gets there?). On the flipside, what if everyone is ‘frozen’ at the age they are upon Rapture? What if Junior stays 10 years old forever?

You probably took more time and care writing that post than these guys did in the 10 (?) years+ they’ve been milking this franchise.

 Cameron’s parents were still faithful attendees, but they resented that their church was apparently not good enough for their daughter-in-law.  

How in the world does this translate to “narrow-minded”? Is this another version of the half-assed attempts at mental jujitsu that gave us “you’re intolerant because you don’t tolerate my intolerance”?

Which basically makes Buck and Rayford into Klink and Schultz to Nicolae’s Hogan.  Nice.

I call Buck as Schultz–Schultz was the smartest guy in the camp and knew *exactly* what was going on no matter how much he denied it, but never told anyone else.  Rayford, like Klink, just likes to stand around and look pretty in his uniform.

But, you guys?  This is so exciting — we’re back in the suburbs where I
grew up!  I had some tests at Northwest Community a few years ago.  My
piano teacher used to live around there.  And do you think they had to
shut down Arlington Park Racetrack on account of World War III?  I hope
they got the horses out in time!

Do you have any idea what the Nike site in Arlington Heights looks like?  There was one right down the street from my old apartment in Brookfield and I can assure you, there wasn’t any there there.  Unless you wanted a decent-sized geodesic dome sitting between a quarry and a four-lane road.  But while that might allow you to use mind mojo to find all the mutants in the world, I fail to see how it would allow anyone to destroy DC and New York.

Oh wow. Heaven forbid that a woman continue to have a life of her own, rather than completely assimilating into her husband’s family. 

<_< It's no problem; I figured it best to just say something so we can avoid the potentially massive awkwardness b crisis averted.

To be fair, it wouldn’t have to.  An informant inside the group could set it up so that all the principals are arrested as soon as they show up (or better yet, *before* they show up–a few midnight knocks on the door by men in dark, nondescript suits driving a nondescript sedan is more the style of an effective global dictator).  They wouldn’t even get to unlock the bunker.  Barring that, a special operations raid would involve a lot of small arms fire but nothing noticeable from several miles away.

But these writers love gaudy spectacles.  The GC probably carpet-bombed the place using all those nice, shiny aircraft the world’s governments surrendered to them.  Even so, these clowns still wouldn’t notice the Thousand Bomber Raid on Chicago even as the bombs were raining down on them.

This is a very interesting kind of bad writing, in that the actual plot (a soap opera starring the telephone and a small group of evangelicals who ostensibly have important jobs but are nonetheless available for hijinks every episode) is entirely unrelated to the stated setting (the Rapture, as told by Tim LaHaye). If there weren’t a nuclear attack and it was just Bruce coming down with some mysterious ailment and his inner circle rushing to the hospital, it would be fine. You could even play the secretary’s nonchalance for comic effect: show her with her feet up on the desk and a magazine open, clearly uninterested.

I… just…

Great, so instead of only being an anticlimax it’s yet another example of Buck being at-best criminally negligent, and really pretty much downright evil just by virtue of not-giving-a-shit.

Lovely.

I think these books are going to be the death of me. Mein Gott… >,<

 Then again, maybe he read their minds and found out what kind of men they were and decided, “Nah, I’ll leave these guys alone. If I take them out, the next people they send might actually try to stop me!”  

The problem is that by that standard (which is a perfectly reasonable one) there would be no reason to kill Bruce “dig a big hole and crawl in it” Barnes. I guess I’m supposed to believe that the trip to Indonesia somehow made him dangerous. Not buying it. 

It is interesting to see L&J’s continued failure to put any thought into what a post-Rapture world would actually look like in favor of simply writing the world they live in, with a thin coating of imitation awesome sauce on top. Does Bruce try to save the people in his own congregation, never mind his own city? Nope, he has to fly off to some “exotic” foreign land to save the heathens. It wouldn’t do to shirk taking up The White Man’s Burden. 

These are some of the worst “heroes” ever.  They’re self centered assholes who don’t mind millions of people dying as long as it’s not them.  Rayford sent someone off to die because Buck couldn’t be arsed to tell anyone about the ex-president’s insane plan.  Why do I seriously doubt that this will ever come up again?  (Or that it would have mattered if Buckyboy had passed on the information.)  Never mind that Buck – were he not a psychopath – should feel horrible about every death in Washington DC.  He is, arguably, partly responsible for their deaths since he told no one that the ex-president was planning something.

Worse, given the horrible, horrible god of this universe, the people who died are condemned to hell for eternity now.  Buck, you monster.

Of course, this is the guy who hasn’t bothered to tell his family the magic words.

Why is Nicky Sierras the antichrist again?  Ray n’ Bucky look pretty anti-Christ-like, too.  Maybe it’s a group effort.

Nope, he has to fly off to some “exotic” foreign land to save the heathens. It wouldn’t do to shirk taking up The White Man’s Burden.

That’s an interesting point.  In the hands of a better writer I would say it was subtle criticism of today’s churches which applaud themselves for mission trips to other countries while sneering at the homeless person on the street corner.*  Alas, to say that this book is poorly written would to say the Great Wall of China is long.

*In all fairness, there are also many churches which offer aid to both.

Yes, exactly.  In the sense of ‘Real True Christianity is so obviously correct that outsiders are certainly being willfully evil by disagreeing with it.  Therefore you can assume out of hand that their arguments are deliberate lies and ignore them.  And this is something you would already know if only you wern’t so narrow-minded.’

 Actually, if I recall correctly, Job wound up with even more family and servants, so he came out AHEAD.

Which is just…yeah.

I figure if the wages of those stolen from can cry out then family members killed off while Job relaxes with his new family ought to as well.  

No, Job ends up with the same number and distribution of children that he started with, 7 sons & 3 daughters*. He gets twice as much livestock as he started with. (Compare the first few verses of Job chapter 1 with the last verses of the book.) This is one of those (fairly rare) things that I can readily recall from the Bible because it always creeped me out and made me angry. 

*I always thought it was interesting that we’re told the names of Job’s second set of daughters, but not the names of any of the 1st set of children or the 2nd set of sons. I don’t think I’ve ever heard a good explanation for that. 

If this were a world where the heroes weren’t employed by the villain, and he actually had to do a little work to find them, this could have worked….
In the morning Buck took a call from one of the women who helped out in the office at New Hope. “We’re a little worried about Pastor Barnes,” she said.
“Ma’am?”
“He was gonna surprise y’all by comin’ down there for lunch.”
“We thought he might.”
“But he picked up some kinda bug in Indonesia and we had to get him to the emergency room. He didn’t want us to tell anyone, because he was sure it was something they could fix real quick and he could still get down there. But he’s slipped into a coma.”
“A coma!”
Amanda glanced back from the driver’s seat, startled at Buck’s words, and immediately pulled onto the highway shoulder to stop.  She hit the emergency blinkers and both she and Ray twisted in their seats to stare at him.
“Like I say, we’re a little worried about him.”
“We’ll be praying for him.  What hospital is it?  Let me get a pen.  What room?”
Buck yanked the tiny notepad he always carried free from his back pocket and clicked his pen open.  He squeezed the phone between his ear and shoulder, and braced the notepad against the car door to write.
“Okay, thanks for telling us, Carol.  Please let me know the minute there’s any change.  We’ll be there as soon as we can.”
He hung up the phone, looked around the car at three pairs of shocked eyes, and explained what Carol had told him.  Meanwhile, he passed his note to Amanda.
They have Bruce, get off the main roads.

Carol hung up the phone and turned back to the Global Community soldier, trying not to show her fear at the very large rifle he was ostentatiously not-quite-yet pointing at her.  “There, you heard.  They’re on their way to the hospital.”
“What was all that about Indonesia?”  The soldier glared at her, suspicion making his voice hard as granite.  “If you’re trying to pull something-”
“No, no, Bruce was on a missions trip last month to help build a school,” she lied.
He grabbed her by the arm, hard, and pulled her toward the front door.  “You’re coming with me to the hospital.  We’ll wait for them there.”

All this time I was hearing about Bruce dying, I sort of
figured/hoped/expected that this would finally be a chance for Nick
Teapot Dome to do something vaguely evilish.  Like have Bruce
assassinated or made an example of in the aftermath of the attacks.

Don’t the later books try to kind of retcon the illness thing by implying Nicky Sandcastle of Size sent someone to purposely infect Brucemeister?

Aha, if you want to know what Jenkins is like when he’s purely writing for himself, Ruby happens to know plenty about it. I do like your theory, but I’m afraid he’s not much better on his own. In fact… I’m not going to say he’s worse, because that would be phenomenally difficult, but at least the names in LB aren’t 100% excruciatingly stupid wordplay. That’s not just the names of characters I’m talking about there, either. I mean that he has written entire books where literally every single time Jenkins had to think of a name for a thing, he went with something dumb. Painfully dumb. And he thinks he’s being clever when he does it, too. 

Huh: I should’ve checked BibleGateway before saying that, then, because I recalled it as he got a larger family in the end, and that was his “reward”.

 In the hands of a better writer I would say it was subtle criticism of today’s churches which applaud themselves for mission trips to other countries while sneering at the homeless person on the street corner.*  Alas, to say that this book is poorly written would to say the Great Wall of China is long.  

Exactly. These books are genius at pointing out just what’s so awfully wrong about RTCs, which would be great if that wasn’t the total opposite of the books’ intended purpose. 

And thus, “narrow-minded” joins the list of words that Jekins uses as code for “bad”, with no regard to actual meaning.

The way I’ve heard it used in fundamentalist circles is “not accepting the truth of what I say.*”  For example, one person I was speaking to was complaining about being unable to convert the atheist speakers in a discussion.  He said, “They’re just so narrow-minded.”  I’ve also had it directed at me whenever I challenge poor apologetics e.g. “You think you’re so smart but you’re really just being narrow-minded by not considering the evidence.**”

*Generally this means Jesus and a literal interpretation of the Bible.

**”Evidence” meaning “my assertations which have not been/can not be verified (or have already been disproved) and do not correlate with reality.”  If fundamentalists could learn only one thing, I would have them learn that they are not entitled to their own facts.  It would save so much effort.

I’m gonna go crawl back into bed and pretend this entire series doesn’t exist again.

Forget bed.  I’ve got a nice big hole.  Wanna join me?  The only catch is that there’s only room for four so the rest of y’all are pretty much doomed.  Go dig your own holes.  Bootstraps, people!

 I recalled it as he got a larger family in the end, and that was his “reward”.  

I think that might have been the only way that aspect of the story could have been worse because that would have treated children as explicitly equivalent to money—-totally interchangeable and more is better. 

Someone upthread said the same   I (thankfully) never had to read the series – though my dad tried to get me to.

I was too into Star Wars and Battletech novels Federated Suns forever <..>

(Sorry now I’m thinking how much more entertaining these books could be with 100-ton battlemechs stomping around )

Maybe the telephone should be the POV character in this series.  It seems to have more  development than anyone else!

I don’t know, he’s not dead yet is he ? I’m holding out hope for a twist. Washington just got nuked after all, surely even Bruce in a coma can find an interesting way to die in this environment.

There’s an old Nike missile site in the Marin headlands, right across the bay from San Francisco. I have toured the wretched thing. (My feet hurt. My father and grandfather loved it.)

I can see how one of these old installations might be appealing to a militia. If they could instal some new doors on the bunkers, the rest should be intact, and quite secure, easy to guard. If there’s actually been some breakdown of society, such that they didn’t get moved out as a matter of course, it would be a good place to cache weapons and hunker down playing Cold Warrior.

anti-christ, militia’s, nuclear attacks, people disappearing.
And it is still BORING.

Well, it could have been a “dirty bomb”; no mushroom cloud, just throwing lethal levels of radioactive material all across the city. People dying from severe radiation poisoning would jibe with the arrival of Pestilence, the Third Horseman.

But that would be giving L&J far too much credit (although I will give them props for the reference to the Nike base, as I was unaware that was an actual thing until today).

Worse, given the horrible, horrible god of this universe, the people who died are condemned to hell for eternity now.  Buck, you monster.

It gets better — or worse, depending on your perspective.

In the later books, our heroes have the opportunity to offer protection or help in an escape for the people threatened by Nicky’s minions.  They could help save the lives of the undecided — those who with more time might be persuaded to become RTCs and thus avoid eternal damnation.  But instead, given a choice they save the confirmed RTCs — those who are already guaranteed salvation.

I’m thinking of two scenes in particular.  In Book #8 Buck, while undercover, has an opportunity to save teenagers who are about to be beheaded.  He helps two who bear the telltale crosses that indicate their RTC status, while ignoring any of the hundreds of unsaved souls who will be sent to hell in a matter of minutes.

And in Book #9 Chaim leads thousands of Israeli Orthodox Jews from Jerusalem to Masada in the desert in order to proselytize them.  Many of the Jews end up converting to Christianity, but many do not.  At the end of his sermon, he offers to the new RTCs safe passage to the Trib Force’s sanctuary, where they can remain in safety for the remaining 3 1/2 years of the Great Tribulation.  To those who don’t accept Jesus, he tells them that they’re on their own – and they must to return to Jerusalem where they are certain to face Nicky’s wrath.

Cameron’s parents were still faithful attendees, but they resented that
their church was apparently not good enough for their daughter-in-law.

“How dare she marry into our family, and yet still maintain some connection to her pre-married life! That bitch!”

You know I read an article about paul von Lettow-Vorbeck and I got to say if I ever have to fight a guerrilla against the anti-christ I want him to be my commanding officer.

The trouble is, I find myself having no interest in the Rayford-Barnes contingent. Except when they do something so unfeeling and selfish that they become “interesting” in the same way that the gunk a plumber might fish out of a blocked pipe is “fascinating”. I keep wanting to know what all the other left-behinders are getting up to, the ones who literally don’t have a snowball’s chance in hell. The ones who are (one can only presume) having extramarital and/or deviant sex, instigating offstage crime waves and generally taking the lord’s name in vain. I can only presume that the authors can’t describe anyone else having a good time because they have no idea how to have one themselves. 

Which is the real reason Bruce has to die. Raymond married Amanda, and the Hole in the Ground(tm) can’t hold five!

Dirty bomb makes sense.  But if a bombs gone off, and it’s been long enough for some sort of military counterstrike, there should still be enough knowledge that there’s been an attack for people to be fleeing the city, right?  There should be more than a big traffic jam on the way *into* town – there should be a wall of people coming at them the wrong way down the freeway trying to get *out*, hoping that they were far enough away that they got little enough exposure for getting out *now* to do them some good…

“He was gonna surprise y’all by comin’ down there for lunch.”

Something just occurred to me.  Random Church Lady is supposed to be adding some dialectical flavor here, I think.  But that’s not Chicago dialect.  Not at all.

A Chicagan says, “You guys.”  Or, if one is a true Chicagan, one says, “Youse guys.”  I, as a Chicagan, do say, “Y’all,” but I started saying it ironically when I returned from my year and a half exile in Dallas.

Did anyone ever present Mrs Job’s take on the whole business?

Did anyone ever present Mrs Job’s take on the whole business?

Yeah.  She was recorded as telling Job to, “Curse god and die,” during the middle bits.  Since it’s believed Job was actually the earliest written book that’s now in the Bible, that pretty much means that she’s the meme-starter for all kinds of misogynist twaddle.

As to how she felt about producing a new passel of kiddlins after telling Job to tell god off, I don’t recall that being in the record.

 Did anyone ever present Mrs Job’s take on the whole business?  

In the official version, not really. Early in the story she tells Job that he should curse God and die, but it isn’t even made really clear what she meant by that (I can think of a couple ways to interpret it). We never hear from her again. It’s not even clear if she’s the mother of the 2nd batch of children or if Job takes another wife for the second round of begetting.

I seem to recall that there’s fanfic about her, but I can’t remember the name of the book.  

And in Book #9 Chaim leads thousands of Israeli Orthodox Jews from
Jerusalem to Masada in the desert in order to proselytize them.

I’m not Jewish and that just evoked a shudder of revulsion.

A European in the 1910′s who insisted that his black troops were the equal of his white troops (and demanded they be treated equally, later on working to ensure they received pensions)?  A high-ranking German officer who later *literally* told Adolf Hitler to f— off *and got away with it*????  I’d serve under such a man if he were the night manager at Taco Bell!

Can’t help but wonder what Phil Knight thinks about this…or was he perhaps not one of the Left Behinders? Some wealthy will make the heavenly cut, I suppose…

As an Oregonian, that thought came to mind. The entire LB series is just mind-bendingly soulless and idiotic–as Fred says, terrible theology and even worse writing. One of the first things I did when my Mom went home a few years ago was take her LB books to a local thrift shop. Thank God I found Fred. He’s validated my opinion about the series, and when I hear anyone expounding on how great LB is, and that Jerry Jenkins is conducting writing workshops for Pete’s sake, I really-really have to bite my tongue. Talk about crazy-making!

That’s the biggest weakness of this series. The only action that is “interesting” is narrowly limited to the POV characters – i.e. Rayford and Buck, with interspersed perspectives from other characters (i.e. Hayseed and Chloe) as strictly necessary to be sure we know what the ebil Antichrist is up to at all times.

The rest of the world becomes just a dull roar as we see the Tribbles watch, watch some more, and…. watch. The closest they get to doing anything is when they deviate from the script (i.e. Rayford buying a gun to off Nicolae).

And deviations from the script, of course, are not permitted. Rayford’s bullet is slightly off-course, and proceeds to do nothing except blast some curtain to smithereens.

Makes me wonder if L&J weren’t purposely aiming their books at the statistically larger audience likely to exist in the american South.

With any other writer this would be a vicious satire of upper middle class and wealthy folks, so ensconced in their privilege and money that nuclear Armageddon registers as only something that snarls up their travel plans. But no, this is supposedly an action packed globetrotting adventure with a core group of brave, likable, admirable people. Ye gods and little fishes. 

The Three Graces 

Loretta set the empty kerosene can by the desk, she took a deep breath and picked up the phone. 

“We’re a little worried about Pastor Barnes,” she heard Buck say to the others in car, “it’s one of the women who works in his office, it’s a about Bruce.” One of the women? One of the women, Buck had never bothered to learn her name or any of the others. She didn’t think three names were too tall an order. Loretta at the phone, Ella pouring a pool of paint thinner on the window sill at the opposite end of the room, and Sarah busy stuffing old garage rags into the pews. She pressed on. 

Her native Georgia drawl creeped in “He was gonna surprise y’all by comin’ down there for lunch.” Ella overheard that and snickered. Bruce had been surprised first by Sarah bringing in a cup of coffee and two Snickerdoodles, Bruce’s favorites, from work, the coffee dosed enough to put Bruce out like a light for hours, more than enough time. 

“But he picked up some kinda bug in Indonesia and we had to get him to the emergency room. He didn’t want us to tell anyone, because he was sure it was something they could fix real quick and he could still get down there. But he’s slipped into a coma.” Sarah appeared in the doorway and held out her hand to Loretta, she slapped a box of kitchen matches in Sarah’s palm. She turned and vanished back into the sanctuary. “A coma!” His tone was credulous, and Loretta thanked the Lord again that all the hair product he was so fond of using had apparently sunk into his brain over the years. “Like I say, we’re a little worried about him.” She gave them directions to the hospital and hung up. Ella had emptied the can over Bruce’s desk. 

Loretta nodded in satisfaction, a smell of and snap of fire begain to curl in her nostrils. The smell of death and destruction, but new life too, clearing the bad so the good could grow in the ashes. She handed another box of matches to Ella who exited to Bruce’s personal, no parishoners allowed shelter fort.

Taking one last glass around the surroundings Loretta grabbed the last box of matches off the desk.  She struck one, she held it a moment, “Forgive me for my sins, and for not wanting to leave those GC bastards any kind of trail. She flicked the lit match at Bruce’s desk and rushed out  of the room and towards one of the exits. Sarah and Ella where there waiting for her. And all three stood at the end of the parking lot watching the flames lick higher and higher and devour the church from within.

As we are hurtling towards nuclear annihilation I think some details are getting lost.

The good guys nuke New York City and Washington D.C. because that’s what good guys do, apparently. Make of that what you will.  Nicolae retaliates by nuking Chicago (and other places too) because that’s what bad guys do.

Buck doesn’t actually know Chicago is going to be destroyed.  That information is going to come to Rayford early in the next book.  Rayford learns a list of ten cities in North America soon to be nuked by Nicky.  (Washington D.C. and New York City are on his list too, so apparently they get nuked twice.  Sucks to be them.)  His response to this potentially life saving information:
“Were Buck and Chloe going to stay at the Drake Hotel again tonight?”

Everyone else can burn.

-

*I always thought it was interesting that we’re told the names of Job’s second set of daughters, but not the names of any of the 1st set of children or the 2nd set of sons. I don’t think I’ve ever heard a good explanation for that.

I always thought it interesting that we’re told their names at all.  I’m used to things like, “Isn’t this Jesus whose brothers are [list of names] and doesn’t he have some sisters too?”  That the girls got names stood out to me.  That they got names when the boys didn’t even more so.

-

anti-christ, militia’s, nuclear attacks, people disappearing.And it is still BORING.

Allow me to explain the death of Nicolae.

Chaim will devote his life to fashioning the sharpest blade imaginable, a nice little monomolecular edge on the blade of a big honking sword.  Chaim will then study up on stroke victims, practice, and finally fake a debilitating stroke thus making himself seem harmless and allowing him an excuse to be pushed around in the wheelchair he has specially designed to conceal the previously mentioned awesome sword of awesomness.

At the oppotunit monment he will stab Nicolae in the head thus killing the Antichrist and doing more to oppose him in that one moment than the Tribulation Force ever dreamed of.

He will do this not because of prophecy but because he has come to the conclusion it is the right thing to do.

He will do this on his own with no support or backup of any kind.

And it will be boring.

The only part of the whole afair that will be the least bit interesting is Nicolae’s last words.  Which will be pittiful.  You will want to hug this evil, evil man (and by that point he will have been quite evil, most notably to Hattie) and tell him everything is going to be all right.

Well, unlike Buck and Rayford, Bruce actually told other people about the prophecies and stuff. That wouldn’t be impressive in a real novel but in Left Behind, that makes him the embodiment of Shaft, James Bond, and Jason Bourne.

That should be just misleading enough to keep them from testing for ethylene glycol in the autopsy.

Ah Fred serves up the snark!

I’m not sure if we’ve just hit the limitations of the authors as writers, or if these characters have passed some kind of moral Event Horizon, but while I can see what L&J were trying to do, it just never materializes.

Your home is now on across the ocean and in the middle of a desert, and your old hometown just feels vacant now. You’ve lost your wife and your son, and your whole world is turned upside down, and has been for the last year and a half. You get off a plane after flying from half way across the world, to be greeted by your new wife, your daughter, and your new son-in-law, and for a few fleeting moments, things feel almost normal. It’s a car full of people, the same as before, and even though the people aren’t the same, it still feels more ‘normal’ than anything else in the last 18 months. Yes, there’s bad news, with the pastor being strangely ill, but it’s easier to face bad news with family around, and this, this is your new family.

Then the traffic stops. There’s no smoke or signs of a wreck, no sirens coming up from behind. Just traffic jammed. And when you finally pull up alongside the peacekeeper… that moment of comfort? Gone, maybe forever. Comfort is temporary, but the spiritual duty of a Tribulation Saint will last until the final trumpet.

That’s obviously what was intended. But why does it fall so horribly flat? Is it entirely due to L&J’s painful literary deficencies? Is it that these characters have become so reprehensible that we aren’t pleased with their moment of happiness, however fleeting? I’m not reading the book, just the exerpts, but I would think the imminent nuclear attacks would loom large in the consciousness of any reader, and make the Tribbies little reunion seem shallow and empty.

I guess what I’m wondering is: plot fail? Characterization fail? Writing fail?

*headdesk*
*headdesk*
*headdesk*

My reaction exactly.

In this conversation, she’s just giving Buck the same cover-story she gave to the EMT — “some kinda bug in Indonesia.”

That should be just misleading enough to keep them from testing for ethylene glycol in the autopsy.

“Such a shame.  On a completely unrelated note, I’m worried that I might need to hide underground one of these days and was wondering if you knew of any four-person secret bunkers where a spot just opened up.”

@Lori:

If your family was Left Behind in the Rapture then I’m guessing that by now they’ve figured out that they weren’t the Christians they had previously thought they were.

Maybe not.  It depends on how many people have been spreading the word that these are the End Times (we know that Buck hasn’t been, but Tsion and the witnesses were IIRC), how many people believe it when they hear it, etc.

But yeah, no hurry Buck.  Even though they could die at any time (just like Bruce!) and end up in that lake of fire your god created.

@chris the cynic:

I think Fred is being too charitable.  Buck isn’t thinking about how he’ll save his family from eternal damnation and Hellfire here.  He’s thinking about how he’ll be able to say, “I’m right and you’re wrong.  Wrong, wrong, wrong.  Wrong.  Wrong.”

With all the comparisons made between The Event and 9/11, I think about how you sometimes hear neo-cons talk about how people who disagree with them have a “pre-9/11 mentality”.  I hate to sound like those neo-cons, but in this story Buck has a “pre-Event mentality”.  Or rather, he has the mentality of the authors, neither of whom has lived through the Event like Buck has.

That authors want to tell people that they aren’t the right kind of Christians, and tell those people “instead of doing what you were doing, you should do what we do”.  When they do it, yeah, they probably derive some satisfaction over thinking “I was right and they were wrong, I’m so smart!”

But is that the kind of thing that they would be doing if they lived through the Event?  I think not.

For all that LaHaye talks about the Rapture now, if he had better proof that things were going to unfold the way he said then he would be shouting it from the proverbial rooftops.  Whether he would do that to gloat or to warn people or some mixture is open to speculation, but regardless I don’t think he’d be silent like Buck is here.

Thinking about it a little more, I don’t think LaHaye would even gloat, because he would’ve been left behind after expecting to be raptured.  That would prove to him that he’s not right about everything, and I think that’d be a humbling experience.  Buck shouldn’t feel superior either, because he was left behind as well.  It doesn’t matter if he’s a RTC now, the fact of the matter is that when it counted, he didn’t make the cut, and he’s in no position to judge others for being like he was.

Fred skipped over one of the most nauseating and narcissistic passages in the book:

Chloe leaned against Buck and slipped her hand into his. He was grateful she was so casual, so matter-of-fact, about her devotion to him.

I hate him I hate him so much I want to crush his balls with a sledgehammer and after that I will hit Rayford in his face with the so called bane of buck’s balls.

Only one way to solve this dilemma… Gladiatorial Combat!

I bet 500 Quatloo’s on the Newcomer J Johnson!

Rayford’s bullet is slightly off-course, and proceeds to do nothing except blast some curtain to smithereens.

There is something very wrong with me.  My first thought upon reading this was “Holy hopping nematodes, Rayford can’t even shoot straight!”

Well that is how the Game of Life works i believe.

“Bruce Barnes was in a coma: to begin with. This must be distinctly understood, or nothing wonderful can come of the story I am going to relate.”

Surprising how much can come out of so little.  Just a few quoted paragraphs of “Tribulation Force” and I’ve got a hundred thoughts already buzzing.

“NIke Base?”  Really?  Yes, there was one up in the hills around here.  When I was a little boy it was rumored you could sneak in and look around (at least, at the parts that weren’t flooded and/or caved in.  By the time I was a teen, it had been filled in with concrete.  WHY would you go to anything like this to store weapons?  Especially when there are — just for the one thought — about a million totally empty Toys “R” Us around.

In the meta novel, though, it totally makes sense that there are caches of weapons all over, some hidden intentionally, some just lost in the paperwork, and others to be shipped Any Day Now …when the giant backlog of trying to disarm the entire WORLD and ship everything to the middle of the desert is clear evidence of how easy it is to order something done and how hard it is to actually do it.

And the office gal at the Ministry.  Dang.  Such an opportunity for a character there.  I’d go for a whole episode of black humor, though, where she has become so shell-shocked her only recourse to sanity is a completely flat value system.  The kind that looks out at a pool of lava coming down the street and goes “Dammit, there goes my parking spot.”

And TV Tropes needs a new entry for when “Idiot Plot” isn’t idiotic enough.  I mean, what’s next, for Rayford to look up at the sky and go “What the heck, is that some kind of a horse?”  Actually…given that it is Buck’s job to know a little about this sort of thing, it’s like Rayford at an airport going, “Whoah, big metal bird!  How does it fly?”

And, yes, I can’t help imagining the Global World Whatever guys lobbing dirt clumps at holed-up resistance fighters who ACTUALLY HAVE GUNS.

A bit of flash fiction:

Cpt. Patrick went over the situation again in his head.  

The facility was surrounded on all sides.  A combination of IFVs and other infantry transports were stationed around the perimeter, their weapons manned, most trained on the main and secondary entrance, the rest on overwatch in case there were any unknown bolt-holes.  The main and secondary entrances would be easy to keep covered with fire zones, but that also meant that they would be easy to defend against someone pushing in.  Hence, the teams would go in using the battery’s main munitions elevator.  

They had close air support standing by in case something extraordinary happened, but this had to be a ground op.  Though the decommissioned Nike facility was dismantled, the magazine had been built underground and hardened against low-altitude airstrikes.  Any bunker buster powerful enough to take the place out was too powerful, they would lose anything useful from it.  Global Community Intelligence was quick to follow the satellite recording of the missile strike on Washington source the launch to this facility.  It had to have been something like an IRBM, something further out would have been spotted and intercepted, or at least have enough time to sound an evacuation.  They needed a playbook on the terrorists, and they needed it now.  This site represented the most expeditious opportunity to gather intel they had, and blowing the entire thing now could cost countless lives if the next strike could not be uncovered.  Their was literally no time to delay, this was an act of war and hesitation could be disastrous.  

He radioed command that they were in position, and they gave the go-ahead, the Prowler above would begin radio jamming.  He signaled the first go-code with his hand.  Squads stationed around the munitions elevator began suppressing fire down below, a pair of soldiers tossing smoke into the shaft.  There were a couple cracks of returning fire, but it was wild.  Any sentry down there obviously knew they were coming, but against that volume of fire the only thing they could do is take a few pot-shots while falling back.  Seconds passed, and the smoke was billowing out of the top of the shaft, thick and dark.  The squads eased off the suppressing fire, scanning the shaft below through their thermal goggles.  The assault teams attached their lines to the rusting railings around the munitions elevator and repelled into the smoke below.  The rest of the squads maintained the fire zone to support them.  

The sound of a few more shots echoed up from below, calm, precise.  Those would be the first tangos down.  Another minute, a bang and more distant shots.  A room flashed and cleared.  Two more minutes past, a team leader looked up through the clearing smoke at the bottom of the shaft.  ”All clear, site secure,” he signaled.

Cpt. Patrick told his comm operation to send the signal to get the Prowler to cease jamming.  If the place had been booby-trapped, anyone who could have set it off was dead.  He told the NEST leader, and his team descended via the rappelling lines.  Patrick went with him.  

The NEST squad was quick to break out their equipment.  There were a chorus of confirmation of traces of radiological material.  Patrick stepped over a dead terrorist, retired assault rifle in his stiffening fingers, and scanned the magazine interior.  Along with the usual winches, racks, and loading rails, several tables had been set up with a variety of tools.  Buzz saws, blowtorches, and the like.  Several aluminum tube sections were stacked against the wall.  They built the missile here, must have brought it in pieces disguised as other things, then put it together underground.  It was not inconceivable that they would be able to get their hands on this kind of hardware, the Global Community disarmament program made it easy enough for scheduled to be scrapped items to be “misplaced” on their way to destruction.  What had Patrick and the brass at GCI frustrated was the fact that they had a nuclear warhead.  Those were kept under quite a bit more scrutiny.  

The NEST guys found a specialized crate, the one used to pack warheads.  The code on it identified that it was a former U.S. owned warhead, and its storage facility of origin.  When the relayed these findings back to GCI, they would be able to trace the path this warhead took to get here, and where it got lost along the way.  Hiding something like this required a lot of pull, and there were only a few people who could possibly have been in a position to divert it and cover it up, and those positions had to be pretty high.  This could have been nothing less than deliberate treason.  

And when they found out who was behind this, there would be hell to pay…

hapax: Well, to be fair, it’s implied in the books that some external force is making Rayford’s aim difficult.

I suppose we’ll be needing the Amok Time theme music then? >_>; 

Chloe leaned against Buck and slipped her hand into his. He was grateful
she was so casual, so matter-of-fact, about her devotion to him.

She would probably appreciate some reciprocation, Williams…

*Mind Blown*

 I guess what I’m wondering is: plot fail? Characterization fail? Writing fail? 

Yes. 

I suspect the casual tone that Bruce’s secretary takes about his hopitalization has to do with exactly what disease he contracted. I mean, just the other day, I heard of a soldier’s falling off. Some Indonesian junk that’s going ’round.

Anyway, Rayford’s all right, Amanda’s all right, they just seem a little weird.

(I nearly left work early just to bet home so I could post that joke.)
—

So, is the actual point of putting Bruce in a coma to justify him dying in the forthcoming explodiness when we’d previously established that he had plans ready to bug out when the end came?

That doesn’t seem to sit right with the implication LeJenkins have made about how, as they came to wriitng the scene., they were suddenly surprised and upset to find that they had no choice but for Bruce to die. If the reason he dies is tied up in “Randomly gets hospitalized for the flu,” that smacks of them having rigged it against him.

 Maybe not.  It depends on how many people have been spreading the word that these are the End Times (we know that Buck hasn’t been, but Tsion and the witnesses were IIRC), how many people believe it when they hear it, etc.  

I’m an atheist and the version of Christianity that I was raised in not only doesn’t believe in the Rapture, they sort of mock the entire idea. If all the children in the world disappeared and then some guy rose to be the boss of everyone and folks the world over were kissing his ass I think I’d put two and two together and at least suspect Rapture. I find it really difficult to believe that there are many American Christians, even among those who got an F from God on the midterm, couldn’t do the same. 

And TV Tropes needs a new entry for when “Idiot Plot” isn’t idiotic enough.

Nah, just put “Idiot Plot” and qualify that it is played as an “Exaggerated Trope”.  

Great, L&J even try to do something with swords.  I can’t wait to see my favorite hobby in the hands of these hacks…

Off hand fashioning a sword, particularly one with a “monomolecular edge” (eyeroll) isn’t really something you can just pick up in a year or so, particularly if you are studying stroke victims, plotting, etc.  And even with that super edge, getting a good cut on a sword isn’t all that easy.  And if we were stabbing anyway, why bother with a super edge?  A good tuck, or rapier would be easier.  And how exactly do they justify a stroke victim having a big, and probably obvious, sword just laying around anyway?

Nice one, FearlessSon.

To be honest, the “monmolecular edge” might be my own attempt to describe the insanely sharp, no really, watch this it cuts with no effort whatsoever, I just drop this crumpled up thing above it and via the force of gravity alone it is effortlessly sliced in half … and so on, really sharp edge described in the books.

Everyone who meets it goes on about how the edge is unimaginably sharp and can slice through things at the slightest pressure and I swear it’s like we’re talking about a lightsaber here … and I think in order to get around saying all this at some point in the past my subconscious said, “Fine, it’s as sharp as sharp can be.  How sharp is that?  You probably can’t get it narrower than a single molecule, so that’s what it is.  No need for pages of description,” because now that I think about it, the last time I tried to look it up I don’t think it used any term, it was just sharp, sharp, unbelievably impossibly sharp.

Sharp, sharp.

-

So the term is probably my fault.

Wut. O.o

I wouldn’t blink if the two of them started acting like lovestruck teenagers, honestly. Why do L&J have to make it seem like some kind of horrid thing for Buck and Chloe to act like human beings in love? (>_<)

Come on, just leave it alone. It’s probably the best scene in the books. First, the epic fail of Rayford the Big Hero choking like a big wuss and missing his Big Hero shot at Nicolae, only to have the goofy old guy in the wheelchair pull out his kickass sword from his kickass wheelchair and do the job himself. If the series had ended then, it might have even been pretty cool, the equivalent of Harry Potter ending with Voldemort being killed — not by Harry or even Neville but by Malfoy’s mom or Horace Slughorn or someone like that.

Alright.  So they are killing off a main character and initiating WWIII with nuclear explosions, and the “heroes” are concerned that they are stuck in traffic.  That’s it.  I’m done.  From now on L&J have set up a meta-critique on American Christianity and how banal a lot of it is. 

L&J noticed that RTC’s get up and arms about little things and are completely oblivious to the reality that surrounds them and decided to make a story about how even when the world is ending and Jesus is waiting in the wings, they are still trying to get posh rooms and angry about traffic and ignoring the suffering around them and wanting God to be a petty tyrannical narcissist to get the people they don’t approve of.  Only the target audience didn’t get the joke and they decided to milk it for all its worth. 

That is how I am approaching these books now, and no one is going to change my mind.  Just like the Republican party is a giant Poe right now trying to discredit conservatism.  It’s just easier to accept than the idea that they really wanted to be like this.

26, and the only non-shoe Nike I knew of before reading your comment was the Greek goddess herself–and that only because I’m a huge mythology buff.

“Wow, the Legendary Sword of Heroes.  Said to be so sharp that you can cut yourself just by looking… OW!”

Okay I’m going to be hearing Chaim speaking in Master Shifu’s voice from now on.

Sorry to ruin your few remaining hopes, but the scene is told in poorly executed flashbacks using verbal accounts and video recordings because none of the viewpoint characters could be bothered to pay attention when it was happening the first time.

-

Entirely unrelated to that, I do think that Bruce poses more of a threat than Ray and Buck.  He’s traveling the world setting up churches, churches that will themselves attempt to grow and spread the truth.  If so much as one person who learns the truth from these churches decides to try to take action, that one person will be more of a threat than Ray and Buck could ever hope to be.

Bruce in himself might be as harmless as all the rest, but by spreading his message far and wide he introduced the risk that a non-harmless person might learn the truth, and so Bruce had to go.

Mind you there’s absolutely no sense in waiting this long.  By this point the damage has probably already been done.

A world-wide pandemic in a world now devoid of upright, moral human beings, with Patient Zero just coming back from a furtive trip to Southeast Asia? Yeah, that’s some sort of super-VD that no one wants to admit the pastor caught, hence the completely unconvincing coma story.

I once read a novel called Sacred Fire with that plot if I remember the title right. Some sort of mutant HIV that was only spread through semen or something like that. Amazon says it’s by Isi Beller.

Here’s a review with a few details

Buck was in the middle of zipping up his pants, having just finished procreating in amazing, masculine, mustachioed, holy Christian sex with Chloe, when the phone rang. “Hello?” he said into the light tan, smoothly polished receiver. “Mr. Williams?” It was one of the nameless, faceless, females who sometimes spoke to men and wore high heels. “We’re a little worried about Pastor Barnes. He’s in a coma, at the hospital.”

Buck, nonplussed, answered into the light tan, smoothly polished telephone receiver, “What is it?” he intoned in his masculine, steady voice, his leather jacket undulating to the sound waves emanating from his golden throat. The nameless, faceless, human with a uterus replied, “it’s a large white building, filled with doctors and sick patients, but that’s not important right now”. Buck could tell she wanted him, as all women did. He could hear it in her voice, he could feel it emanating from her fertile hips. For a fleeting moment, Buck let his mind settle on images of he and this nameless, faceless, human with an internal reproductive system, together, outside the Jesus approved sacred bonds of sexual intercourse. Buck gasped. She was such a harlot for invading his masculine thoughts!

“Madam”, he said, in his most commanding timbre, “I’ll kindly ask you to refrain from soliciting me over the phone so soon after a dear friend has been admitted to the hospital. Why is Mr. Barnes in that hospital?” He could hear momentary shuffling as he assumed the female was shifting her evil breasts, before she replied, “he is in a coma. We think he picked up a bug from Indonesia that causes repeated hammer blows to the base of his skull.” ‘Hmph’ Buck thought to his self, ‘as if a woman could deduce things on her own without the help of her husband’, but instead, he said “Hmm.. sucks to be him. Well, we’ll be there shortly, after I pick up my friends and we have lunch discussing super secret club plans of which I cannot tell you since you failed to purchase the decoder ring, oh, and I have to say, woman, you could break the news with a little more compassion.”

With that, Buck hung the light tan, smoothly polished receiver upon the beautiful and elegant AT&T telephone’s cradle, and buttoned his shirt. It was so awesome being him. No one would understand just how awesome, and how difficult it was, to be the Greatest Investigative Reporter of All Time.

Of ALL Time.

Thanks.  Based on the place they are heading to and the traffic backup, I would estimate that Nike battery C-80/81 in Arlington Heights would be the most likely location they are referring to in this scene, but those locations were re-zoned after they were decommissioned and turned into a park and a golf course, being almost completely disassembled except for a some concrete foundations where the radar dome used to be (unlike the authors I can actually spend a few minutes doing some research.)  I admit I fudged the story a bit here to reflect an only partially disassembled site, one in which the underground magazine (assuming it was one of the later-built ones) was not filled with concrete.  

But at least that makes for a bit more entertaining of a scenario, and L&J’s uncharacteristic use of detail in this instance gave me less room to wiggle.

They really think that “scientist” is equivalent to “miracle-worker,” and that the different fields of science simply don’t exist, huh?

They really think that “scientist” is equivalent to “miracle-worker,” and that the different fields of science simply don’t exist, huh?

I am guessing it is something more like the source of Bibleman‘s suit.  The guy who built it was divinely inspired after reading the Bible.  

Man, that show is narmy… 

Have every single internet in our universe, as well as all of the internets in the parallel ones!

Well, it’s not impossible, per se.  Supposedly some katana’s could cut leaves in a river just by meeting them on edge, but that level of mastery of swordsmithing is a LIFETIME commitment by the maker.  And the materials mentioned are not exactly the most resistant materials to begin with sooo… Yeah?

And then there is the whole, what’s the point?  Katana’s are pretty specialized, but they do pay for that edge by being more easy to chip and dull.  Other swords are pretty dull in comparison but that gives them often better edge retention and more practicality and are still “sharp” by most definitions.  And even fairly dull ‘wallhangers’ can give pretty decent cuts to an unarmored man.  So, again what exactly is the point of the “sharpest sharp of all sharpness?” if its going to stab one person through the head?

Sorry, personal “thing” with me.  Trying to explain that swords and how they are used is a very broad topic with lots of variable is hard sometimes.  No, longswords aren’t as sharp as katana’s.  No that doesn’t mean they are worse.  That kind of edge wouldn’t be practical for how the longsword is used and how they were used is just as deadly as the katana in most.  It’s better against armor, but worse against layered cloth.  Both are incredibly bad to get hit with and the differences in damage will probably be academic to you if you are.  As with all weapons you have to balance strengths against weaknesses.  So it’s really sharp as shorthand to really good… irritates me.

The being frozen in time idea would really suck for the Raptured fetuses 

Ye gods, are they serious? :S  The first sentence is tolerable, but the second is sickening on so many levels…

It’d be like someone interpreting Dr. Strangelove as urgent propaganda advocating strong national defense against the Russians (the point of that being, even in the face of armageddon, politicians and military leaders will still be myopically focused on international competition).

Just wanted to throw in here: the problem with a so-called “dirty bomb” is that they don’t actually work. Most of the deaths would be from people panicking and hurting each other inadvertently. The radioactive material is easily cleaned up since it won’t be aerosolized.

The big danger of real atom bombs is the massive heat of the airblast, the massive firestorm that the airblast causes, and the fission products of the nuclear reaction. For those unfamiliar with the properties of radioactive materials and nuclear reactions: uranium and plutonium are heavy elements, meaning that they have a huge nucleus made of many protons and neutrons. When these elements undergo fission, they split up into fission products, which tend to be extremely radioactive and are aerosolized into the dust that we call fallout. They also irradiate other particulate matter, causing it to become radioactive, as well.

Dirty bombs, on the other hand, don’t create fission products, and rely on the natural radioactivity of the material that they’re seeded with. Would some people get radiation poisoning? It seems likely, but you’re talking about a few very unlucky people. Would the area be rendered uninhabitable? Not at all. If Washington DC was hit with a dirty bomb, there would be dudes in radiation suits and hazmat crews cleaning up for a week, and then things would go back to relative normalcy.

One of the reasons for that is that the only radioactive elements that you could realistically seed a dirty bomb with are just not that radioactive. Uranium and plutonium sound scary because our culture has, understandably, been taught to fear ATOMZ!!!

In reality, though, you can hold uranium and plutonium in your hands. They’re both alpha emitters, which means that, unless you ingest some or get it under your skin, you’re gonna be fine. Plutonium is warm to the touch, because it’s a fairly strong alpha emitter. But, alpha radiation can be stopped by the skin. Or a piece of paper.

Just wanted to share that as an aside so that you know that, if there ever is a dirty bomb attack, don’t panic. Panic is the dirty bomb’s only real danger. If you were near it, cover your face and get out of the area, you’ll likely suffer absolutely no ill effects.

Do you have any idea what the Nike site in Arlington Heights looks like?

This question intrigued me enough to sneak an extra-long lunch and drive out there myself.  I took a quick spin around the site in question (which is now mostly a golf course), then had a burger at the Fratello’s on Kirchoff Road and came back.  This is, I’m sure, exactly the same as the research performed by Jerry Jenkins for this section; thus I now feel qualified to comment on it.

For those unfamiliar with the Mount Prospect – Arlington Heights – Des Plaines area, where these parts of the books are set, I want to emphasize that these towns are located in the very heart of Chicagoland suburbia.  Which is to say, they’re not exactly hotbeds of militia activity.  You are as likely to spot a herd of African okapi trotting across Euclid Avenue as you are to find an organized group of anti-government survivalists operating out of Arlington Heights.

As for the former Nike installation, as I noted above, most of the land has long since been annexed by the town and is now the Lake Arlington Golf Course.  (Which leads me to wonder whether the so-called “militia takeover” was nothing more than an unusually aggressive tee time reservation.)  What little remains seems to have been given over to the Defense Contract Management Agency and, from what I could see from the road, offers a few nondescript brick buildings and a pool of supply trucks.  You’ve got Northwest Community Hospital across the street; the other three sides brush directly against apartments and single-family neighborhoods.  All told, not an especially imposing symbol of raw governmental might.

Visiting the area really drives home how magnificently stupid Ellenjay’s scenario is; namely, “Militia had taken over an old Nike base to store contraband weapons.”  So first you have this big outfit of crazed militia in the Arlington Heights area (apparently imported from somewhere less … Arlington Heights).  They’ve stockpiled so many weapons that they can no longer contain them in whatever holes they’ve previously dug for themselves, so they decide to take over a local military base.

What they’re hoping to find there that makes this base a more attractive target than any random abandoned building, of which there ought to be plenty post-Rapture, I’ve no idea.  Certainly not more weapons: they’ve all been destroyed or sent to New Babylon, right?  Heck, the DCMA probably doesn’t exist anymore either; anything in that place that was ever useful would’ve been moved out long ago.  It’s no wonder the government didn’t bother kicking the militia out until now.

I still don’t grasp all the specifics of President Fitzhugh’s plan.  Are we supposed to believe that, because the Arlington Heights site was once (~30 years ago) home to an antiaircraft missile installation, that it would be possible to move in and use it to launch *nuclear* missiles at Washington, DC?  Because, on the unbelievability scale, that rates about 4 out of 5 Battlefield Earths.

“And in Book #9 Chaim leads thousands of Israeli Orthodox Jews from Jerusalem to Masada in the desert in order to proselytize them.”

Masada. Yes, that’s an ideal place to urge people to abandon Judaism. Jews have such a long history of being reasonable in the face over overwhelming force at Masada.

(If I had two faces and four hands, I could do the facepalm I want to do here.)

Because romance is caused by LUST, and everybody knows that lust is of the devil!!!  Godly husbands and wives totally have no urges whatsoever to do the hanky-panky.  Just ask Maggie White.

You had me with the first sentence.  Well done, sir.

Visiting the area really drives home how magnificently stupid Ellenjay’s scenario is; namely, “Militia had taken over an old Nike base to store contraband weapons.”  So first you have this big outfit of crazed militia in the Arlington Heights area (apparently imported from somewhere less … Arlington Heights).  They’ve stockpiled so many weapons that they can no longer contain them in whatever holes they’ve previously dug for themselves, so they decide to take over a local military base.

Well, when these books were written the Oklahoma City bombing was the biggest act of terrorism inflicted upon the United States, and it was carried out by domestic terrorists affiliated with the Michigan militia.  I am guessing that might have influenced the authors.  

As for the site, yes, it has been made into a golf course.  I can still see this being interesting if, say, there were some bricked-over but still empty underground magazines where they could stash their armaments.  Perhaps the owner of the golf course is a sympathizer, and they smuggle the guns in by stuffing them in golf bags and putting them into the golf carts, then letting those carts drive into a garage for the night, where members climb out of an indoor manhole and collect the goods to stash.  Perhaps they wanted to use this as a staging area for when they would bring members in to liberate Chicago?  

At least that sounds somewhat plausible.  Hell, it might have been actually interesting, if they put half a brain to it.  

Masada. Yes, that’s an ideal place to urge people to abandon Judaism. Jews have such a long history of being reasonable in the face of overwhelming force at Masada.

Another tragedy is that L&J are in fact perfectly aware of the site’s historical significance.

All over the vast historic fortress — where legend said Jewish parents chose to slay their own children and themselves rather than fall into the hands of the Romans — men and women prayed [the sinner's prayer that Chaim recited] aloud.

From Desecration

This sword of Chaim’s,

Does it slice atoms in half? Is there blue light around the edge? Is it kept in an umbrella stand?

TRiG.

(If I had two faces and four hands, I could do the facepalm I want to do here.)

This is the best I can do for you.  Will two faces work?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8EePgsgPbEI

Unfortunately, you don’t know how awful it is.  You see it’s superliminally* sharp and it maintains it’s edge with absolute perfection.  It is completely durable.  Through the magic of botany chemistry SCIENCE! he has created a sword, by hand and with no training, with all possible strengths and no weaknesses.  (That he will only use once.)

How sharp?

Whatever you do, Cameron, do not touch the edge.  I say this with utmost gravity.  You would lose a finger before you felt the edge touch your skin, let alone before you felt the pain.

Maybe I’m underestimating the almighty katana, but i’m pretty sure that even a really sharp blade requires more than the gentlest of touches to cut through something with bones, even cute little finger bones.  (The blade, by the way, is restrained at the time and thus stationary.)

In the next book the coroner also believes that the stationary blade (lodged in Nicolae’s skull), if brushed up against, would sever fingers.

-

*I’m trying to stop using ableist terms, hence sharp beyond all reasonable limits is superliminally sharp instead of using a term associated with mental illness.  On the other hand superliminally does have a lot more words than what it’s replacing, so I’m not sure if it’s the right fit.  If anyone has suggestions for alternate terminology, I’m open to them.

Wallbanger. That’s still an entry right?

“superluminal” = faster than the speed of light, if you’d like a closely related term that conveys the beyond-the-beyond nature of these books when it comes to the epic fail.

I find “absurdly” to be a handy all-purpose emphatic adjective.

One of the things I wonder is why would Chaim need a “perfected blade” for the kind of assassination he is going for?  Why not a more conventional blade?  

I mean, granted, his method of assassination was pretty inspired, and a wheelchair gives him ample room to conceal it, though he would need a blade that could be convincingly passed off as part of the wheelchair’s structure, and yes, that would probably require a bit of customization to pull off.  But he could take an existing blade, maybe remove the hilt and modify it with some additional holes drilled into one part of the blade to make a grip, or something like that.  Sure, it is not as fine as a blade balanced for combat, but conceal-ability is the priority, and if he catches the target by surprise it should not matter much.  

Of course, if he does not kill the target in that initial surprise, the target’s bodyguards will likely kill him before he gets a second chance, so he better damn well exploit that surprise for all it is worth…

If anyone has suggestions for alternate terminology, I’m open to them.

Uhm… “Really fucking sharp”?

I got nothing.

Besides Fred’s murder theory, another way to explain the church lady’s extreme under-reaction to Bruce being in a flippin’ coma is that so many horrible things have already happened that she’s just become totally desensitized.

If this was any other author, that might be another way to look at it, but with Jenkins, I’m pretty sure it’ s meant to be taken at face value. In small snippets many of the comments throughout Fred’s posts have already written a far better version of this whole ridiculous story.

It was kind of you, though, to try & give JJ some credit for actually thinking anything through!

 Just wanted to share that as an aside so that you know that, if there ever is a dirty bomb attack, don’t panic. Panic is the dirty bomb’s only real danger. If you were near it, cover your face and get out of the area, you’ll likely suffer absolutely no ill effects.  

I took a class in grad school on nuclear proliferation. At one point we played around a bit with scenarios of various sizes and types of bombs being used against DC. The prof’s advice in case of a dirty bomb was walk away. Heavy emphasis on walk. 

The same advice basically applied to a nuke as well. Assuming you’re outside the blast radius the thing you want to do is avoid as much of the fallout as possible, so figure out the wind and then transport yourself out of it. The roads will be too jammed to drive, so biking or walking are better options.  

Also, have a go bag. 

You are as likely to spot a herd of African okapi trotting across Euclid Avenue as you are to find an organized group of anti-government survivalists operating out of Arlington Heights.  

That’s what they want you to think. Hide in plain sight, man. Hide in plain sight. 

All over the vast historic fortress — where legend said Jewish parents chose to slay their own children and themselves rather than fall into the hands of the Romans — men and women prayed [the sinner's prayer that Chaim recited] aloud.

From Desecration

Desecration seems like the appropriate title.

I’m wondering if “small-minded”, for Buck, means “doesn’t believe God is real” or “doesn’t believe Lahaye’s prophecies”. 

But yeah … the idea of BUCK being upset that someone else is small-minded is … freaky. 

Since they were stuck in traffic anyway, Buck thought about the times he had tried to contact his family. He had left three or four messages for mom and dad after the disappearances, but never got a response. A recorded message told him Aunt Rose’s number was no longer in service. The same thing happened when he tried to call his sister and that roommate of hers who never wore lipstick or heels and left the room whenever Buck tried to tease her about it. He really should try to make more of an effort to get in touch.

Unknown to Buck, there was a letter lying under a desk at his old office in New York. It read, “Dear Cameron, I don’t know if you remember me, but I live next door to your mom and dad. I haven’t seen your parents since the day all those kids disappeared. Your Aunt Rose hasn’t been at church, either. I tried calling your sister, but the phone has been disconnected. Have you heard from them at all? Are they all right?”

I still need to make a go bag. And buy a bike…

I kid you not,my legs litteraly snapped shut reading that opening.

I’m not sure whether to admire you for you’re ability to write something that creepy,or hate you for it.

“All over the vast historic fortress — where legend said Jewish parents chose to slay their own children and themselves rather than fall into the hands of the Romans — men and women prayed [the sinner's prayer that Chaim recited] aloud.”

First, allow my non-ecumenical Cardiac-Zionist brain to speak briefly: “OH, HELL NO.”

Now, on to a question for those of you who understand the whole culture behind this amazing series of books better than I do: How do Ellenjay probably understand Masada? Are the defenders sinners because they’re suicides, or heroic martyrs who reflect the present-day Tribulation Force, or what? Also, do they understand that the significance of the site to Israelis is largely nationalist, and would not resonate as a particularly spiritual place to go? 

Also, I’m intrigued by the word “legend”, which suggests that it might or might not have happened. The events at Masada are not perfectly known, but I’d say they go well beyond ‘legend’.

Look, people, I’m reading through the first page of comments and keep wanting to post “ROFLs”, snorts and such because a like isn’t enough, but there are too damn many of you. Curse you all and your collective wit!

In Alex Ross’s Kingdom Come, which is basically the evangelical concept of Revelations – avec superhero comics! – Wonder Woman has a sword that’s supposedly able to slice the electrons off an atom. Handwaved because, well, it’s Diana.

Wait, did I miss an update?  When did Bruce go to Indonesia?  Was this part of his offscreened evangelical stadium tour?  You’d think that L&J would love the chance to send their characters to some exotic locale, so why did they offscreen it?

Someone I know once had the idea that Job gives his children new names as a sort of passive-aggressive shot at God. The three names apparently mean Dove, Cinnamon, and Eyeshadow. She pointed out that most of the Biblical names have something to do with God, so maybe Job was just not in the mood for a lot of “whoohoo, God!” when he was naming them, and that the dig at God is supposed to be part of the story. I don’t know if that’s true, because I don’t know the meanings of most of the names in the Bible, but it struck me as a funny thought. Someone who knows a lot more about the OT than me could probably say if that’s a plausible idea. 

Someone I know once had the idea that Job gives his children new names as a sort of passive-aggressive shot at God. The three names apparently mean Dove, Cinnamon, and Eyeshadow. She pointed out that most of the Biblical names have something to do with God, so maybe Job was just not in the mood for a lot of “whoohoo, God!” when he was naming them, and that the dig at God is supposed to be part of the story. I don’t know if that’s true, because I don’t know the meanings of most of the names in the Bible, but it struck me as a funny thought. Someone who knows a lot more about the OT than me could probably say if that’s a plausible idea.

Thinking about it a little more, I don’t think LaHaye would even gloat, because he would’ve been left behind after expecting to be raptured.  That would prove to him that he’s not right about everything, and I think that’d be a humbling experience.  Buck shouldn’t feel superior either, because he was left behind as well.  It doesn’t matter if he’s a RTC now, the fact of the matter is that when it counted, he didn’t make the cut, and he’s in no position to judge others for being like he was.

Oh, no, no, no…  You see, if all the children of the world and a third of the adults disappeared suddenly and with no warning, leaving LaHaye to wonder what happened, well, obviously *that* wasn’t the Rapture.  It must have been a FakeRapture manufactured somehow by an evil anti-Christ (presumably with the help of liberals and atheists).  It’s a sign that the End (and the RealRapture) is coming, and just that much more evidence that when LaHaye is RealRaptured, those of us who were Left Behind will see he is right.

One of the things I wonder is why would Chaim need a “perfected blade” for the kind of assassination he is going for?  Why not a more conventional blade?

Our friend Chaim finds himself in a book series with the…

Greatest Investigative Reporter of All Time,
Greatest Airline Pilot of All Time,
Greatest Biblical Scholar of All Time,
Greatest Computer Hacker of All Time,
Greatest Teenage Whiz of All Time,
Greatest Document Forger of All Time,
Greatest Black Market Dealer of All Time,
Greatest Soldier of All Time,

and the Most Evil Person Who Has Ever Lived.

And you’re wondering why he feels the need for a perfectly sharp blade?

And TV Tropes needs a new entry for when “Idiot Plot” isn’t idiotic
enough.  I mean, what’s next, for Rayford to look up at the sky and go
“What the heck, is that some kind of a horse?”  Actually…given that it
is Buck’s job to know a little about this sort of thing, it’s like
Rayford at an airport going, “Whoah, big metal bird!  How does it fly?”

That’s it! Rayford could only be played by Patrick Warburton. And that, I would totally pay to watch.

How do Ellenjay probably understand Masada? Are the defenders sinners because they’re suicides, or heroic martyrs who reflect the present-day Tribulation Force, or what?

They are heroic martyrs who nevertheless died as unsaved sinners because they rejected Jesus.

Also, do they understand that the significance of the site to Israelis is largely nationalist, and would not resonate as a particularly spiritual place to go?

Probably not. 

If the fake Rapture takes the children and the non-RTCs, and the real Rapture takes all of the real RTCs… then who else is left? Animals? Plants? Either you’d have to cancel the apocalypse or turn it into Left Behind: Veggie Tales edition. Either that, or make a book reveling in the anguish and sorrow of puppies and kitties after all the waters turn to blood and the moon falls out of the sky — which would, of course, pretty much end premillennial dispensationalism right here.

aunursa’s answer is probably the best, but I think it’s probably a mistake to imply that Lahaye and Jenkins really “understand” anything, about Jewish or Israeli history and culture (or anything else, really). Can a boulder really “understand” particle physics? Do plastic bags really “understand” the works of Shakespeare? Not on any meaningful level, right?

There’s an old Nike base, just west of San Pedro, that’s been turned into a park. It’s called White Point State Park. (Currently it’s also pretty much inaccessible, as nature decided to turn several hundred feet of road into beach. They’re not sure how much more is going to go downhill.)

Wow. I never knew before today that Chicagans spoke bogan.

(Disclaimer: I am part bogan myself and use the term affectionately)

One thing I really like about the play J.B. is that the devil’s last-ditch attempt to break Job isn’t covering him in boils. It’s telling him God’s end-game: what he drops on Job is that after all this suffering, all this loss, God’s going to give it all back. “But I lost my crops,” J.B. says. “They’ll grow back!” says the devil.  ”But my children are dead,” J.B. protests. “You’ll have better ones!” the Devil answers (When I saw this in college, the children were played by my Marxism professor’s young children. In the next class, she pointed out that she was still waiting on those “better children” she’d been promised).

When the new receptionist offered to call Buck with the news, Loretta agreed. She wasn’t much impressed with the young woman, but Buck had insisted they give her a job when she was terminated by the television station she’d worked at. She was a talented journalist, he insisted, the best of the best, and she deserved a second chance. It’s just that Global Weekly was overstaffed at the moment….

Loretta could hear her on the phone in the next room.
“But he picked up some kinda bug in Indonesia and we had to get him to
the emergency room. He didn’t want us to tell anyone, because he was
sure it was something they could fix real quick and he could still get
down there. But he’s slipped into a coma.”
“A coma!” Buck’s voice came clearly through the receiver.
“Like I say, we’re a little worried about him.”
The young woman hung up the phone and glanced up to see Loretta standing in the doorway staring at her.
“A little worried? Megyn, the man’s in a coma!”
“Yeah, well,” the former Fox anchor said, “Isn’t that just a nap, essentially?”

 You’d think the shockwave would clue them in. (The flash ought to be enough, for Ghu’s sake. It’s visible at least that far away.)

You know, I wonder what would happen if a Rapture honest-to-goodness did happen, and (at least some) people who preached it were left behind. What would they do? How would they react?

I like to think that it would make people like LaHaye sit down and really re-assess their thoughts on the Rapture, but perhaps I’m giving them too much credit. (>_>)

 You know, if I wanted Chaim to kill Nicolae, I wouldn’t have him use an absurdly sharp, hand-forged blade. I’d have him use a silver dinner knife, one that he just picked up from next to his plate.

 Perhaps Chaim is having dinner with the potentiate and whichever of our pathetic faux-heroes are present at the time. He’s barely paying any attention to the food, or the company – he’s far too busy waging an internal war with himself, trying to justify his actions over the past few years, trying to justify how he can be sitting here eating a lavish meal when he KNOWS that millions of people are starving just five miles away. Maybe throw in a line that indicates how Carpathia is entirely aware of Chaim’s moral crisis, and that he’s enjoying it – even if its just a barely-noticed smile.

 Then something happens, and Chaim finally snaps. It doesn’t have to be anything large – say, an aide brings Carpathia a report on how GC Unit 15 has completed its strike against the rebel enclave in Area 11. Carpathia casually asks after the death toll, and is told that estimates place it in the same ballpark as, say, three hundred. The Anti-Christ smiles and nods, and Chaim suddenly snaps.

 He has no plan. He has no backup. He has no faith in the divine to reassure him. He doesn’t even have a gun. What he does have is six inches of mildly sharp steel and a brief window of opportunity. He grabs the knife, makes a desperate lunge, and buries it in Nicolae’s heart. The Potentiate of the New World Order blinks, coughs, and dies.

 Everyone is silent for a long moment, and slowly Chaim realises that he is still alive. He didn’t expect to be – everyone knows that only the most lethally efficient GC troops are picked to form the personal guard of Carpathia. He looks over at the soldier standing against the far wall, who returns the look with a bland expression. The soldiers hand aren’t even anywhere near his gun. After a long moment, one of the other guests at the table musters the courage to speak, and asks:

“Chaim? But… why?”

 And Chaim Rosenburg, Noble Prize winner and one of the smartest men on the planet, slowly comes to the realisation that he doesn’t have an answer.

I love this. 

Yes, even the katana needs a fair amount of force to do damage.  It’s just physics. 

And with that one line (leaving aside the absurdity of that sharp of a blade) is why an exceptional sharp blade can be a hindrance.  Can you imagine trying to handle such a thing?  I mean you can, being careful, pick up razor blades edge on and not get cut, but that?  One bad stroke and you’ve lost a leg.  And imagine trying to sheath such a thing? Cuts right through it, then your fingers, then hacks you leg as it falls to the floor and buries itself up to the hilt.  While great potential for a comedy skit, real life it would not be as amusing.

You have insufficient internets sir. Please accept this one.

(Though every time I see Megyn Kelly, she seems to have her head cocked slightly to one side with an expression that conveys that she can’t quite believe what she’s reporting, and it makes her angry for reasons she can’t quite express. I like to pretend that’s meta-Megyn trying to break free.)

Tin foil is real good for stopping alpha (and beta) particles, too. (Things I got from my short course in measuring radioactivity. Along with lasting knowledge that it’s mostly statistical number crunching.)

Given that there’s also a National Guard armory there, or was one until recently, according to the Google, it’s even easier to get the stuff in. ‘It’s just a shipment of stuff to be stored for the OWG forces in the Chicago area.’

Either you’d have to cancel the apocalypse or turn it into Left Behind: Veggie Tales edition.

I am fully behind either option.

Either that, or make a book reveling in the anguish and sorrow of
puppies and kitties after all the waters turn to blood and the moon
falls out of the sky

That, on the other hand, would break me.

 Tin foil is real good for stopping alpha (and beta) particles, too. 

A discovery which led to a particularly sad form of haberdashery . 

Jenkins has done some homework — enough to know that there was a base
in Arlington Heights which isn’t far from Mount Prospect.

Jenkins doing research? [mind boggling] It must be for the first time! I suspect that it was just something he happened to know.

Jenkins has done some homework — enough to know that there was a base
in Arlington Heights which isn’t far from Mount Prospect.

Jenkins doing research? [mind boggling] It must be for the first time! I suspect that it was just something he happened to know.

This question intrigued me enough to sneak an extra-long lunch and drive out there myself.

Everything about this comment was brilliant and I would like to thank you for your research.  It’s also nice to know that the Nike site is actually less apt than the one in the Brookfield/La Grange/McCook area, since at least that one is next to a giant hole.  And we all know how useful giant holes are in the End Times.

I have been told that one of my personal failings is that I fail to
ascribe bad motives to people, even when it’s clear and am always seeing
their actions in the best possible light.

I have the same ‘fault’. Used to drive my husband crazy. He’d be swearing at somebody who cut him off in traffic and I would invent a reason why it wasn’t intentional. That was (and is) what I do to calm myself and talk myself out of anger. I could drive him into a sputtering rage by this little maneuver.

I raise you Bremsstrahlung radiation from said beta particles.

Ah, so I shouldn’t have been thinking of Death’s sword. I should have been thinking of the Subtle Knife.

TRiG.

There’s a very useful web site on the locations and status of Nike bases. For Illinois, they show:

http://ed-thelen.org/loc-i.html#Illinois

There are three Nike components in Arlington Heights:  C-80, C-80DC, and C-81.

C-80 was a radar site. There’s still an Army Reserve unit in the what’s left of the formerly large base; the military bit is surrounded by the golf course mentioned in prior comments.
C-80DC was a subsidiary radar site; not much there now.
The C-81 site is also now a Reserve/National Guard location.

I think a more accurate statement by the police would be “someone’s taken over a National Guard post.”

Wow. I never knew before today that Chicagans spoke bogan.

I have no idea what bogan actually sounds like, but it’s entirely possible.  The pure Chicago accent is actually pretty rare.  Most people think of the old SNL Super Fans skits when they think of Chicago accents (I have no idea why the video is mirrored).  That’s a total over the top Chicago accent, but it’s close enough, as far as parodies go.

The Chicago accent is basically the accent of the working-class Polish and Italian immigrants that made up the bulk of the city’s population during it’s Packingtown days and it stuck around, but it’s slowly dying in most of the city now.  Although my old landlord in Brookfield totally had a Chicago accent.  It was kinda funny.

I, personally, along with probably most Chicagoans, always pronounced the “o.”  I started in with the “Chicaga” and “Chicagans” as an overexaggerated mark of origination when I moved to Texas.  Weirdly, though, the other day I was told by someone that I had a bit of a Texas twang, which doesn’t seem particularly likely.  But that’s neither here nor there.

Anymore, the Chicago speech style mostly lives on in verbal quirks.  There’s the aforementioned “you guys.”  My parents and I spent the last week or so using the term, “Over by,” which is pretty funny, as in, “Hey, youse* guys, come over by here,” or, “Let’s go over by there.”  “There,” for the record, is pronounced with a “d,” and sounds like “dere.”

———-

*”Youse,” for the record, isn’t pronounced like “mouse.”  It’s closer to the double-o in “moose.”

Most people think of the old SNL Super Fans skits when they think of Chicago accents (I have no idea why the video is mirrored).

The mirroring is probably an attempt to fly under the radar of webcrawlers which try to match videos looking for uploaded copyrighted content.  I think that only Hulu is authorized to host SNL videos, and some providers are more hard-assed about their intellectual property hosting than others. 

And you’re wondering why he feels the need for a perfectly sharp blade?

He is not content to be the Greatest Botanist of All Time? 

Lori wrote: I think that might have been the only way that aspect of the story could
have been worse because that would have treated children as
explicitly equivalent to money—-totally interchangeable and more is
better

Are we sure Job wasn’t playing Life? Y’know, where kids get traded in for money at the end?

Could it be because there were people actually claimed descent from Job’s second crop of daughters and would feel snubbed if their great-grandmas weren’t mentioned?

I think I’ve figured out why Chaim needed a sword you can shar/ pen on da/ ylight. Nicky Mt. Doom is the Antichrist, after all, and you’d expect that to be good for something beyond the most efficiently tiny bureaucracy ever and the occasional mind-whammy. I’d expect Chaim to temper it in holy water and and have a saint’s fingerbone set in the pommel, but I suppose that’s all a bunch of papist nonsense to an embryonic RTC.

Sounds like a mono-molecular blade to me which could possibly maybe do that.  Monofilament wire is a fun technology in some cyberpunk settings where you can basically fling a molecule thick string at an opponent and it’ll dice em for you.

That said… this isn’t cyberpunk, so I dunno.

Honestly it almost makes me think of Death’s scythe from Reaper Man (Discworld).

If I remember right, it’s so sharp that he ends up sharpening it on sunbeams. It’s been awhile since I read the book – it may have been moonbeams or the wind instead… one of those ephemeral things that definitely you would not sharpen a blade on.

Granted I m ostly bring that up because I like Discworld and Death in particular.

 Could it be because there were people actually claimed descent from Job’s second crop of daughters and would feel snubbed if their great-grandmas weren’t mentioned? 

Presumably there were even more people who claimed decent from Job’s second batch of sons (since there were more than twice as many of them), and yet they’re not named. Even for a culture where identity passes through the mother (you’re Jewish by birth if your mother was) that seems odd. 

Oh darnit Rikalous… you got to Death before I did (just now noticed)

Aaand I’ve noticed chris the cynic had an earlier post mentioning the whole monomolecular thing.  Oi.

I’m claiming exhaustion.  Then going to sleep.

Because that’s what he does ! The two laws of Jenkins scene-writing :

1) Everything interesting must happen offscreen.
2) If something interesting threatens to happen onscreen, make it incredibly boring.
3) Telephones.

So… it’s a sword made of a very strong acid, basically ?

Monofilament wire is a fun technology in some cyberpunk settings where
you can basically fling a molecule thick string at an opponent and it’ll
dice em for you.

Which brings up another issue: How do you fling said string without slicing your own hand/appendage/throwing device?

If I remember correctly, it has handles or is launched from a device in most role playing games. (Which is the only place I’ve seen it.)

I’ve honestly never understood to be honest.  Most sources I’ve seen where it’s in use practically treat it more like a lightsaber than anything   I think the real answer is basically *handwave* Pay no attention to physics, this is about cool factor.

I’m sure someone somewhere has actually figured it out though… someone almost invariably does… (Or maybe my taste in cyberpunk is too soft <_< I don't know.)

Virtually any change would make them more entertaining. It’s not just that the heroes are a bunch of po-faced self-centred psychopaths that makes them bad. Edmund Blackadder is a po-faced self-centred psychopath.

The business with Barnes’ coma suggests that Jenkins learned plotting and character development from old soap operas, not realizing that such devices were often used when actors were involved in contract disputes.

Damnit.  My Nike explanation was stolen.

I was surprised to see Jenkins refer to an old Nike base — I can remember seeing Nike missiles when I was about 8 years old but as I recall they were to defend against manned bombers and became obsolete in the 60′s.

True enough, but it’s hardly surprising to see him get things horribly wrong – I suspect he just picked it out of a (mental) list of missiles and went with it.  Although the Nike Zeus was apparently also intended for ASAT and anti-ballistic roles.

On the nuclear ignorance:
I like to imagine our heroes are simply driving along when the bomb goes off, the sky turning white for a moment as a thunderous boom rattles the entire car.  People lose control, swerve off to the side of the road, or accelerate in a mad rush to get away, only to collide with others… and Rayford drives on, wondering if they’ve just hit a pothole.  Their obliviousness is now officially a superpower.

Or was this a teensy-tiny nuclear explosion?

The Nike Hercules can only mount a 20 kiloton warhead.  Not exactly small potatoes – it wouldn’t neccessarily hurt you at that distance, but you’d notice…The Nike Spartan, meanwhile, can mount a 5 megaton warhead.  In which case they should have not only damn well noticed, but gotten a bit of an instant suntan from that blast… at the least.

But that would be giving L&J far too much credit (although I will give them props for the reference to the Nike base, as I was unaware that was an actual thing until today).

A real thing, yet, sadly, a real thing that *makes no sense*.  At least if they’d made something up they couldn’t be *wrong*.

“NIke Base?”  Really?  Yes, there was one up in the hills around here.  When I was a little boy it was rumored you could sneak in and look around (at least, at the parts that weren’t flooded and/or caved in.  By the time I was a teen, it had been filled in with concrete.  WHY would you go to anything like this to store weapons?  Especially when there are — just for the one thought — about a million totally empty Toys “R” Us around.

Because the base is presumably fortified, at least somewhat?  A big box store is perhaps one of the *worst* places I can think of to try to defend…

“Snip Military Flash-Fic.”I like the cut of your jib, Fearless Son (Occasionally).  It seems like L&J *want* to write mil-fic, but don’t know anything about it, and it would take away from their opportunity to preach arrogantly.  So instead we get… Left Behind.  Of course, based on the utter hilarity that is Edge of Apocalpyse… maybe it’s for the best.  (Also, Soon, in which one of them (can’t remember which) tries sci-fi!)

On the other hand, think of all the cool command and communications toys they could play with.

Well, it’s not impossible, per se.  Supposedly some katana’s could cut leaves in a river just by meeting them on edge, but that level of mastery of swordsmithing is a LIFETIME commitment by the maker.  And the materials mentioned are not exactly the most resistant materials to begin with sooo… Yeah?
And then there is the whole, what’s the point?  Katana’s are pretty specialized, but they do pay for that edge by being more easy to chip and dull.  Other swords are pretty dull in comparison but that gives them often better edge retention and more practicality and are still “sharp” by most definitions.

Traditionally made katana’s aren’t that sharp compared to the kinds of things modern science can get up to (some razor blades, for instance), or even something like an obsidian knife – which can have a bona-fide monomolecular edge.  It’s also less a tradeoff of durability for sharpness than poor quality metal… the Japanese developed a very clever technique for making a sharp, relatively resilient blade out of bad ore, but it’s still more brittle than other steels.  And they *definently* cannot cut through tanks, although I hopefully don’t have to say that.

The thing about the leaf/hair is supposedly true, though.  It’s actually harder the lighter the object in question is…

In reality, though, you can hold uranium and plutonium in your hands. They’re both alpha emitters, which means that, unless you ingest some or get it under your skin, you’re gonna be fine. Plutonium is warm to the touch, because it’s a fairly strong alpha emitter. But, alpha radiation can be stopped by the skin. Or a piece of paper.

Don’t try this.  Plutonium, is not only radioactive… but *very fracking poisonous* and quite granular (it easily forms dust, which can be inhaled).  Yeah, the alpha radiation won’t hurt you (much).  Too bad you’re dead of heavy metal poisoning.  Also, if you have more than… 8 kilograms or so, then it will begin chain-reacting and emitting high levels of alpha, beta and gamma radiation, which will kill you in short order.  As if that’s not bad enough, it can also catch fire!

Uranium is also poisonous, but less frangible and not as severe – it’s the ‘makes you sick if you’re exposed to large quantities’ sort of poisonous.  And it also has the criticality problem, but is not as reactive.

That said, yeah… dirty bombs are not terribly threatening.  The probable worst case scenario is that people in the conventional blast radius get irradiated.  A chemical or biological attack (or, obviously, a proper nuke) is much more of a concern.

Are we supposed to believe that, because the Arlington Heights site was once (~30 years ago) home to an antiaircraft missile installation, that it would be possible to move in and use it to launch *nuclear* missiles at Washington, DC?  Because, on the unbelievability scale, that rates about 4 out of 5 Battlefield Earths.

As mentioned, the Nike has a surface-to-surface option and can mount nuclear warheads.  (It was the cold war, where putting nukes on everything seemed like a reasonable thing to do.  Nuclear SAMs?  Moderate by comparison to the nuclear bazooka.)

Maybe I’m underestimating the almighty katana, but I’m pretty sure that even a really sharp blade requires more than the gentlest of touches to cut through something with bones, even cute little finger bones.  (The blade, by the way, is restrained at the time and thus stationary.)

Yeaah.  Katanas aren’t actually magic (at least not most of them).  If you tried to grab it, you could cut your fingers off… but you’d feel it long before you actually managed (but within time to seriously hurt yourself).  With a theoretical perfectly sharp blade meanwhile… yeah, you could ‘cut’ yourself on the blade without noticing… but unless it’s also a perfectly *flat* blade – i.e. a plane – the *rest* of the blade would still be there, and to do any actual damage, you’d have to cut with that.  A plane-sword *might* be able to do some harm, but the traditional ‘monowire’ is, quite simply, silly.  Even if you could somehow avoid the thing breaking, objects are mostly empty space – a molecule-width object passing through won’t be noticed, and any bonds that *do* get broken will be reformed in a matter of microseconds at best.  You might give your target cancer, though.  So again, what you do is stick a monomolecular edge on a real sword.  It’s not magic, but it’ll give your sword much better penetration properties…

One of the things I wonder is why would Chaim need a “perfected blade” for the kind of assassination he is going for?  Why not a more conventional blade?”Perhaps he’s operating under the assumption that Nicolae is unusually difficult to penetrate or magically protected.  Although I question whether MORE SHARPA is an appropriate countermeasure to divine protection.  Or maybe he just wanted it to be a *really* epic kill.

Sounds like a mono-molecular blade to me which could possibly maybe do that.  Monofilament wire is a fun technology in some cyberpunk settings where you can basically fling a molecule thick string at an opponent and it’ll dice em for you.

Again… either breaks or goes right through, potentially increasing cancer risk.  Forgot the problems of holding the thing… my god, the air resistance!  Plus, It wouldn’t actually weigh anything, would be *invisible* – have fun using a weapon you can’t see, and oh yeah, backswing.  trying to come up with a way such a weapon could actually work is a fun pastime, though.  Maybe a thin, flexible strand of monoblade with a gyroscope-type setup in the center, to keep it aligned with your swing? 

Ross:

One thing I really like about the play J.B. is that the devil’s
last-ditch attempt to break Job isn’t covering him in boils. It’s telling him God’s end-game: what he drops on Job is that after all this suffering, all this loss, God’s going to give it all back.

 
Which the Devil finds just as shocking as the rest of us:

Nickles (who plays Devil): It can’t be borne twice over! Can’t be!

Mr. Zuss (who plays God): It is though. Time and again it is–
Every blessed generation…
Time and again…

—-
Another thing about that play is that MacLeish gives Sarah (Mrs. Job) the last word:

Sarah: You wanted justice, didn’t you?
There isn’t any. There’s the world….
Cry for justice and the stars
Will stare until your eyes sting. Weep,
Enormous winds will thrash the water.
Cry in sleep for your lost children,
Snow will fall…
You wanted justice and there was none–
Only love.

J.B. He does not love. He
Is.

Sarah: But we do.

…
Sarah comes forward into the dim room, J.B. behind her. She lifts a fallen chair, sets it straight.
Blow on the coal of the heart.
The candles in churches are out.
The lights have gone out in the sky.
Blow on the coal of the heart
And we’ll see by and by…

J.B. has joined her, lifting and straightening the chairs.
We’ll see where we are.
The wit won’t burn and the wet soul smolders.
Blow on the coal of the heart and we’ll know…
We’ll know…

The light increases, plain white daylight from the door, as they work.
CURTAIN.

[Responding to Dash1]
You have insufficient internets sir. Please accept this one.

Unless I am very confused* and have been for quite some time, Dash is female and I have met her.
Dash definitely deserves internets.-* Which, given the thing with the two JJohnson’s, is perhaps more possible than I would have thought

—-

I don’t think Chicago has been hit with a nuclear weapon yet.  It gets nuked next book.

In fact, looking at this book, it will later be specifically stated that nuclear weapons were not used on the militia stronghold (then again the source is the OWG, which Jenkins might want us to assume is lying.)

Also, looking back at the conversations with Fitzhugh I think I may have judged him too harshly in the past, I’m not seeing a clear indication that hes thinking of ending the cities so much as reclaiming them, and his narrow minded focus on getting Buck out of the way could be more about getting Buck out of the crossfire than the blast radius.  Fitzhugh says it might be problematic for Buck to return home to New York, but he plans to move back into the Oval Office, which probably isn’t what you’d expect if he were planning on nuking DC.

Which could explain why New York and DC make it on Nicky Cheyenne Mountain’s “Cities I intend to destroy” list.  If the resistance is focused on reclaiming those two cities it must be in those two cities, and thus destroying those two cities takes out a wide swath of the resistance.

On the other hand, or perhaps back on the first hand depending on how we’re counting, Fitz might be planning on doing different things to different cities and it is stated (again, by the OWG) that the resistance threatened to go to nuclear war with New York City.  By which I mean Kennedy International Airport.  Because when I think nuclear war, I think targeting a specific airport.

-

Putting it all together what I think happened is this.

The militia had been hiding weapons at a golf course in Chicago.

In DC the militia attempted to take over the city.

In Chicago someone said, “Oh my God/Lucifer/Nicolae!  We’re at war!  If it could happen there it could happen here.  Quick, has anyone seen anything suspicious?”

To which someone else responded, “Well I did notice some bazookas and ICBMs at the golf course, now that you mention it.”

And there was a whole back and forth about, “Ok, I see how you might not feel the need to mention bazookas, but how could you not bring up the ICBMs before now?” and the other persons saying that they assumed it was just decorative.

The GC forces bravely recaptured the golf course and vanquished the militia.  Someone said that that it didn’t sound so impressive when you put it like that, so they said, “Well it used to be a Nike base, right?  Say we vanquished them from the Nike Base.”

At this point traffic was disrupted because they didn’t want anyone seeing that they allowed contraband weapons to be stockpiled in plain sight on a golf course, so they declared the area too dangerous to civilians, or something.

Then the militia threatened to nuke an airport in New York, around which point the book ends, but next book Nicolae responds with, “An airport?  Really?  *snort*  I’ll take out the whole city and nine others in North America I’ve had my eye on.  And what’s all this about threats?  I’ve already nuked London.  If your going to go nuclear, you go nuclear, you don’t threaten to do it.”

-

I was originally thinking that it was an old Nike site used to store contraband weapons.  As in the GC was using it and then then the the militia took it over to get the weapons.  I see now that what it actually says is they took over the site to store the weapons.  No “used”.  The takeover was for the purpose of storing the weapons, the GC was not involved in the choice.  So this doesn’t fit at all:

There were a lot of weapons that needed to be shipped off to be stored or destroyed.  Too many to ship all at once.  The conversation on where to house those weapons went like this:

“I want to play golf.  Do you want to play golf.  I want to play golf.”

“I wouldn’t mind playing golf, but we’ve got these weapons to guard.”

“Well why not keep them at the golf course?”

“I… that’s… what?  Are you serious?”

“Why not?”

“It doesn’t sound right to say we’re keeping a stockpile of weapons at a golf course.”  Thinks for a moment.  ”That golf course is an old military base right?”

“I think I heard something about that.  An old Nike site or some such?”"So we’ll say we’re storing the weapons in an old Nike base.”

I don’t think Chicago has been hit with a nuclear weapon yet.  It gets nuked next book.

In fact, looking at this book, it will later be specifically stated that nuclear weapons were not used on the militia stronghold (then again the source is the OWG, which Jenkins might want us to assume is lying.)

Also, looking back at the conversations with Fitzhugh I think I may have judged him too harshly in the past, I’m not seeing a clear indication that hes thinking of ending the cities so much as reclaiming them, and his narrow minded focus on getting Buck out of the way could be more about getting Buck out of the crossfire than the blast radius.  Fitzhugh says it might be problematic for Buck to return home to New York, but he plans to move back into the Oval Office, which probably isn’t what you’d expect if he were planning on nuking DC.

Which could explain why New York and DC make it on Nicky Cheyenne Mountain’s “Cities I intend to destroy” list.  If the resistance is focused on reclaiming those two cities it must be in those two cities, and thus destroying those two cities takes out a wide swath of the resistance.

On the other hand, or perhaps back on the first hand depending on how we’re counting, Fitz might be planning on doing different things to different cities and it is stated (again, by the OWG) that the resistance threatened to go to nuclear war with New York City.  By which I mean Kennedy International Airport.  Because when I think nuclear war, I think targeting a specific airport.

-

Putting it all together what I think happened is this.

The militia had been hiding weapons at a golf course in Chicago.

In DC the militia attempted to take over the city.

In Chicago someone said, “Oh my God/Lucifer/Nicolae!  We’re at war!  If it could happen there it could happen here.  Quick, has anyone seen anything suspicious?”

To which someone else responded, “Well I did notice some bazookas and ICBMs at the golf course, now that you mention it.”

And there was a whole back and forth about, “Ok, I see how you might not feel the need to mention bazookas, but how could you not bring up the ICBMs before now?” and the other person saying that they assumed it was just decorative.

The GC forces bravely recaptured the golf course and vanquished the militia.  Someone said that that it didn’t sound so impressive when you put it like that, so they said, “Well it used to be a Nike base, right?  Say we vanquished them from the Nike Base.”

At this point traffic was disrupted because they didn’t want anyone seeing that they allowed contraband weapons to be stockpiled in plain sight on a golf course, so they declared the area too dangerous to civilians, or something.

Then the militia threatened to nuke an airport in New York, around which point the book ends, but next book Nicolae responds with, “An airport?  Really?  *snort*  I’ll take out the whole city and nine others in North America I’ve had my eye on.  And what’s all this about threats?  I’ve already nuked London.  If you’re going to go nuclear, you go nuclear, you don’t threaten to do it.”

-

I was originally thinking that it was an old Nike site used to store weapons.  As in the GC was using it and then then the the militia took it over to get the weapons.  I see now that what it actually says is they took over the site to store the contraband weapons.  No “used”.  The takeover was for the purpose of storing the weapons, the GC was not involved in the choice.  So this doesn’t fit at all:

There were a lot of weapons that needed to be shipped off to be stored or destroyed.  Too many to ship all at once.  The conversation on where to house those weapons went like this:

“I want to play golf.  Do you want to play golf.  I want to play golf.”

“I wouldn’t mind playing golf, but we’ve got these weapons to guard.”

“Well why not keep them at the golf course?”

“I… that’s… what?  Are you serious?”

“Why not?”

“It doesn’t sound right to say we’re keeping a stockpile of weapons at a golf course.”  Thinks for a moment.  ”That golf course is an old military base right?”

“I think I heard something about that.  An old Nike site or some such?”

“So we’ll say we’re storing the weapons in an old Nike base.”

Speaking of dirty bombs, there’s a movie that really overestimates their effect and kind of is the movie-justification-of-torture: Dirty War.

Other parts of it aren’t so bad, such as the police-investigation aspect of things by carefully following up leads and trying to piece together what might be going on.

Props to BaseDeltaZero’s comprehensive post.  I feel like I’ve been riddled with bullets — KNOWLEDGE bullets.  And it feels terrific.

As mentioned, the Nike has a surface-to-surface option and can mount nuclear warheads.  (It was the cold war, where putting nukes on everything seemed like a reasonable thing to do.  Nuclear SAMs?  Moderate by comparison to the nuclear bazooka.)

Thanks for the info; that’s something I wouldn’t have guessed to be true.  But Cold War logic and all.

I’m anxious to see how the rest of this chapter goes (*) — what’s actually occurred in DC, what this militia takeover business was all about, whether it’s happening in other places at the same time, and how it relates to everything else.  I’ll try to hold off on plausibility judgments until then.

—

(*) Note that this does not mean Jenkins and LaHaye have successfully generated a degree of suspense.  It just means I’m confused.

 Speaking of dirty bombs, there’s a movie that really overestimates their effect and kind of is the movie-justification-of-torture: Dirty War.

Other parts of it aren’t so bad, such as the police-investigation aspect of things by carefully following up leads and trying to piece together what might be going on.  

That movie was very frustrating. I thought parts of it were quite good, but as you say other parts were really a problem. I wanted to love it and just couldn’t. 

For a comparison to Jenkins inability to create suspense even given an onrushing nuclear war, I recently watched Hugo that has an extremely suspenseful scene in which the only thing happening is two kids searching a dresser.  Not a magical bit of furniture (it does not contain a gateway to Narnia) not some evil person’s furniture.  Two kids, in the house of one of them, searching something mundane.  If the adults in the next room find out the only real danger is hurt feelings.

The suspense was beyond anything Jenkins and Lahaye could ever dream of.

I don’t think Chicago has been hit with a nuclear weapon yet.  It gets nuked next book.

Not quite.  Downtown Chicago is reportedly nuked in Book #3 and is labeled a restricted area.  But it’s a false report designed to fool enemies of the Global Community.  Why?  The readers are never told.

In Book #7 the Trib Force escape from Hiding Place #2 just as it is discovered by the GC and relocate to an office building in downtown Chicago, which has become a ghost town.  They remain there until Book #10.  Bear in mind as you read this quote that our heroes stayed at their previous hideout for roughly one year, and the timespan from Book #7 to the middle of Book #10 is just five weeks.

“Disband the safe house and disperse your people before they are found out, for then you could lose everyone at once. Surely you all know you have stayed in one place long past a reasonable hour.”

“Oh, I know that, Chaim,” Rayford said. “In reality, we have not been at the Strong Building [in downtown Chicago] very long. Too long, no doubt, but not even as long as we were at our previous location.”

From The Remnant

Spider Robinson did a much better job at using a disused Nike installation in a novel.  His setup involves a bunch of barflies, old hippies, and Key West oddballs stumbling across evidence that on a certain date, a cascade of natural events and human error will start a chain reaction that reboots the universe–wiping out the existing one.  Launching something from the planet at exactly the right moment will solve the problem (long story).  So first they have to find the chips that the military ripped out of the Nikes before they closed the installation down.  Then they have to sneak in and install them.  Then they have to make the launch rack actually move after decades in the Florida climate.  Then they have to sneak out again, after the launch, through a small airport.  The solution involves some hapless air traffic controllers getting mooned by Nikola Tesla.

Now that would make one hell of a book: one day, everyone in the world who is poor is raptured.

I’m curious to see how it would go down if Buck ever actually decided to get around to warning people about what he’s known for over a year. For this example I’m going to pick his sister we never see and almost never hear about for extra awkwardness.

Buck: So that’s the jist of it. Carparthia is the Anti-Christ and we all have at most five more years to live.

Sister: Jesus Christ Buck -

Buck: Lord’s name in vain.

Sister: Whatever. How long have you know about this? This is horrible.

Buck: Oh about a week, maybe two, after the Event.

Sister: That was a year ago! You’ve known for over a year that the pontetate is the incarnation of all evil? Why the hell didn’t you tell people sooner?

Buck: Sorry I’ve been too busy working for him.

Sister: WHAT?

Buck: Also I agreed to bury his story in return for saving my life.

Sister: You’re unbelievable.

Buck: So are you going to say the magic words to save your soul?

Sister: Not anymore.

And in Book #9 Chaim … the remaining 3 1/2 years of the Great Tribulation.

Hum. Let me see if I have this straight.  The Tribulation, thus the series, lasts seven years.  Book 1 covers the first two weeks or thereabouts.  Book 2 covers another couple weeks, then jumps eighteen months, then covers another week or two.  And by book 9 they’re all the way to the mid-point of the seven-year Tribulation.

Are there more big skips, or does Jenkins finally find some sort of happy medium?

The solution involves some hapless air traffic controllers getting mooned by Nikola Tesla.

Is there any problem that wouldn’t solve?

Maybe that’s it!  Barnes realized what a crappy book he was in and wanted out of his contract!

mmy: (quoting the book) “Chloe leaned against Buck and slipped her hand into his. He was grateful
she was so casual, so matter-of-fact, about her devotion to him.

DX  Oh, gods, that actually makes me physically ill.

Which could explain why New York and DC make it on Nicky Cheyenne Mountain’s “Cities I intend to destroy” list.

The past few days of @RealTimeWWII:twitter  tweets has been the USSR saying “Look, Finland attacked us! We have to retaliate!” and Finland saying “No we didn’t, you attacked your own cities.” In a better book (*) there’d be something like that going on here.

(*) which should be a macro, we need it often enough.

Which brings up another issue: How do you fling said string without slicing your own hand/appendage/throwing device?

It varies by the setting.  

Known Space has a “variable sword” which contains a spool of mono-filament in the hilt, and does… something to it to make it extend out and become rigid, up to a user-selectable length below the maximum length of the spool (hence “variable” part in the name.)  It does have a brightly colored little ball at the tip of the mono-filament which extends out with it, the primary purpose being so the user can tell where the end of the blade is.  

Eldar Warp Spider Aspect Warriors in Warhammer 40,000 wield a mono-filament “spinner” weapon, which is fired like a gun that sprays the mono-filament forward in a wide arc.  Its range is relatively short, but it is used like a flamethrower, to sweep over areas and slice people to bits.  But then in that settling, such sharp filament is pretty poor at cutting through hard surfaces like concrete or heavy armor, but it is very good at cutting through soft surfaces like flesh.  It tends to make quite a mess out of light targets, and possible heavy targets if it gets worked into a little chink in the armor.

Wait…did you say that they lied about nuking a major city?  I suppose the folks in Gary, Indiana were in on the whole thing, too.  Even people in Milwaukee would notice a bright flash (or absence thereof).  That’s got to be some major mind mojo, but so far Nicolae’s mind-control seems limited to a range of 1d20 feet (+10 against investigative reporters and airline pilots)

To the best of my knowledge, matrilineal descent does not go back to the Biblical period. The Karaites still do patrilineal.

The line following the names states that Job gave them an inheritance with their brothers.

I do think this may be the one Biblical situation I know of where women are named, and their known-to-exist brothers are not. 

Wasn’t it David Hayseed who first figured out the GC claimed Chicago was nuked, but had actually just been blasted by large conventional explosives?

 To the best of my knowledge, matrilineal descent does not go back to the Biblical period. The Karaites still do patrilineal.

The line following the names states that Job gave them an inheritance with their brothers.  
Now the naming of only the second set of girls really makes no sense to me. I agree that I can’t think of another Biblical situation like this and I would really like to know what’s up with it. I try never to discuss Biblical issues with my dad (nothing good comes from that, ever), but maybe I’ll ask my BIL when I see him later. 

aunursa: (quoting from Desecration) “All over the vast historic fortress — where legend said Jewish parents
chose to slay their own children and themselves rather than fall into
the hands of the Romans — men and women prayed [the sinner's prayer
that Chaim recited] aloud.”

There’s a desecration going on all right.

I’m blanking on the author and title, but there’s an old short SF story – WHICH I’M ABOUT TO SPOIL COMPLETELY.

The End Times begin, and the angels set forth to break the seals and sound the trumpets and pour the bowls, but each returns after a bit.  “Lord, I was to destroy the trees and grass, but there are no more trees and grass.” “Lord, I was to poison all the fish, but there are no more fish.”  “Lord, I was to pour out the wrath on the waters, but there are no more waters.” And so on.  Even the dust will not yield up the dead.  God goes to investigate, and Earth is completely barren, smoking, ruined, without need of the Tribulation.  He commands the Earth to yield its secrets, and a deep NORAD-like cavern breaks open.  Written across the wall is the message “We were here.  Where were you?”

Anyone remember the author and title? 

Hum. Let me see if I have this straight.  The Tribulation, thus the series, lasts seven years.  Book 1 covers the first two weeks or thereabouts.  Book 2 covers another couple weeks, then jumps eighteen months, then covers another week or two.  And by book 9 they’re all the way to the mid-point of the seven-year Tribulation.This is the timeline to the best of my recollection…

Book #1: 2 weeks
Book #2: 1-2 weeks, then skips ahead 18 months
Book #3: 2 weeks
Book #4: 1 week, then skips ahead 10 weeks
Book #5: 9 months
Book #6: skips through 10 months

*** TRIBULATION HALFWAY POINT ***

Book #7: 3 days
Book #8: 1 month
Book #9: 1 week
Book #10: 1 day, then skips ahead 2 years
Book #11: skips through 1 year
Book #12: 1 very long day

Pace yourself, L&J!  If you do not, you might run out of material before the apocalypse happens!  Then you would have to write a bunch of crappy spinoff books and hackneyed sequels that undermine the significance of the original story, if you have become so used to the income stream given to you by ignorant readers with no imagination.  

And that would be bad.  

That is just so mind-boggling in it’s awfulness. How is it possible that Jenkins not only makes his living as a writer, but has gotten very, very rich off of it. That is just so wrong I so many levels that I can’t even. 

In a weird way I am finding the horror vaguely inspiring though. I seriously may get out that file of plot bunnies I have stashed away and try to make something out of one of them. Because if Jenkins can get rich as a writer I should at least be able to finish something. Right? 

You’d think, but then again, I give you the likes of J. R. Ward. The stuff Ward writes is Twilight-esquely problematic, TBQH.

Ken, the story is “Shall the Dust Praise Thee” by Damon Knight – at least the summary on this Wiki page matches the summary you’ve given: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shall_the_Dust_Praise_Thee%3F

Ah, and I knew I had actually read it – it’s in the wonderful and sadly obscure compilation “100 Great Science Fiction Short Short Stories.”

I’m damned if I can figure out how all the phones are working after this.

I’m damned if I can figure out how all the phones are working after this.

Because the Left Behind ‘verse has The Greatest Switchboard Operator Of All Time.  

Whatever you do, Cameron, do not touch the edge.

Does he insist that Chaim call him “Buck” right after this, or does he only do that with Verna?

 You’d think, but then again, I give you the likes of J. R. Ward. The stuff Ward writes is Twilight-esquely problematic, TBQH.  

The thing that makes me so nuts about Jenkins’ success isn’t just that the writing is bad. Bad stuff succeeds all the time. Why just this morning I had a bit of a rank on another blog about how annoying Stella McCartney’s success as a fashion designer is. So it goes. 

And sure, Ward and Meyers are not good writers and there is subtext (and often text) in their stories that make that vein in the side of my head throb. Their success bothers me a lot less than Jenkins’ though and I think it’s because of the what seems to underlie it. 

As Kit Whitfield has pointed out very eloquently, Meyers sold a bizzion books because she wrote a story that acts as a kind of blank canvas onto which readers project what they want to get from it. There’s a certain gift in that, if not real skill. I think something similar can be said about Ward. Her heroines are older, but at least in the books I read they aren’t much more developed as people than Bella is. We’ve talked many times about the ways that L&J are doing something similar in the LB books. They create a sort of void onto which readers can project themselves. 

And for me that’s the rub. Meyers and Ward are calling to readers’ desire to vicariously experience Great Big Love. We could talk about other, rather poorly written adventure stories and most of them would be about being heroic or saving the day. Love and heroism are lovely things and I will never look down on people for wanting more of that in their lives, even if I’m not personally thrilled with the delivery method. Jenkins is pretending to be about love and heroism but is actually calling to his readers’ desire to dance around singing “Neener, neener, neener. Told you so” while their enemies burn. That’s what makes the suckitude so unforgivable. The books have made him rich and they’re not just terrible, they’re evil. 

I’m going to try to stick with putting a good spin on this though. Really, if Jenkins managed to make it so far with such little talent then I think I can finish a story. It may suck and I probably won’t ever show it to anyone, but it’ll be a complete story. 
 

He doesn’t.

I think somewhere in some book it’s explained that Chaim is all special-like and thus doesn’t have to call him Buck.  Or at least GIRAT doesn’t mind being called Cameron by him.

Chaim calling him Cameron is a sign of their very close relationship.
Verna calling him Cameron is a sign that she’s evil.

It makes perfect sense.

To L&J.

In a Book #1 flashback and Prequel #3, Lucinda Washington, Global Weekly’s Chicago bureau chief, refuses to use his nickname and always calls him “Cameron.”  When he calls her “Lucy,” she glares at him.

That gives me an idea.  LET’S GET TO WORK ON A FAKERAPTURE!  IT’LL BE AWESOME!!!  WHO’S WITH ME??!!!! XD

aunursa: and the Most Evil Person Who Has Ever Lived

He doesn’t always let Satan indwell within him, but when he does, he… um… lets Satan indwell within him.

Stay evil, my friends.

Dash1: That’s it! Rayford could only be played by Patrick Warburton. And that, I would totally pay to watch.

Congratulations.  I will now be reading all of Rayford Steele’s lines as if they were being done by Brock Sampson, Sweedish Murder Machine.  This is far more awesomeness than the character deserves, but it will be hilariously amusingg in a sort of rictus manner. =)

Congratulations.  I will now be reading all of Rayford Steele’s lines as if they were being done by Brock Sampson, Sweedish Murder Machine.  This is far more awesomeness than the character deserves, but it will be hilariously amusingg in a sort of rictus manner. =)

Aw crap, now I am reading Chloe’s lines in the voice of Michael Sinterniklaas.  :p

Brock Sampson, Swedish Murder Machine.

Awww, I was hoping he was a vocalist for a death metal band…

Right on both counts. We’ve met and I’m female. However, I’ve
got one of those non-gender-specific handles, and it’s often nearly impossible
to figure out what someone is just from their comments. I thank both Ross and chris the cynic for their kind remarks.

As for the third count, deserving internets, in
this thread, all I can think of to do is take a page from LaHaye/Jenkins and throw them (the internets, not LaHaye and Jenkins) at the feet of Driftwood2K11. Because I was laughing so loud that it caused consternation elsewhere in the house.

In fact, looking at this book, it will
later be specifically stated that nuclear weapons were not used on the militia
stronghold (then again the source is the OWG, which Jenkins might want us to
assume is lying.)

I do not see in Mr. Jenkins’ writing the level of
sophistication required for the kind of unreliable narrator who does not arrive
with a nametag saying, “Hi! My name is Unreliable, and I’ll be your narrator
today.” Whether that lack of sophistication is Mr. Jenkins’ own or simply
something he attributes to his readership, I don’t know.

Then the militia threatened to nuke an
airport in New York, around which point the book ends, but next book Nicolae
responds with, “An airport?  Really?  *snort*  I’ll take
out the whole city and nine others in North America
I’ve had my eye on.  And what’s all this about threats?  I’ve already
nuked London.
 If you’re going to go nuclear, you go nuclear, you don’t threaten to do it.”

When Rayford confronted Nicolae about the destruction of so
many cities, the Potentate replied, “Two things, Captain Steele. First, we
simply do not have the capacity for conventional bombing. Perhaps you forget
that 90 percent of the world’s weaponry has been destroyed. Nuclear attacks were the only available method to achieve our aims. Second, it’s
pronounced nu-klee-ar. What the hell is wrong with
you people? Seriously, it’s not that hard to say!”   

Dash1: However, I’ve got one of those non-gender-specific handles, and it’s often nearly impossible to figure out what someone is just from their comments.

I suspect that based on my alias*, I’ve been presumed to be a woman more often than you’ve been presumed to be a man.

* Either because it contains “nurs[e]” — traditionally a female role; or because it ends in “a”, which identifies feminine words in Spanish (and IIRC other Romance languages.)

Now, bear in mind that matrilineal tribal membership not being a feature of the biblical world doesn’t mean that people don’t trace descent from various female figures. It’s been suggested, for example, that the mention of Dinah and her story–when none of Jacob’s other possible daughters are named or discussed–may indicate that at some point a tribe considering her their founder existed, and it’s been suggested, in fact, that the whole rape-and-revenge incident at Shechem might be a story about the destruction of that tribe, rather than a literal story. Not sure how seriously that theory is taken, but it is one that I have heard.

There is, in fact, something to be learned from people who just write the thing. I am starting to learn this, after years of being the sort of ‘work on and polish for years’ kind of writer who never gets anything done for sure.

I suspect that based on my alias*, I’ve been presumed to be a woman more often than you’ve been presumed to be a man.

Yes, you have.

True.

Though I maintain that there’s no excuse for calling your hero “Rhage.” Good. Lord.

I might have assumed Dash was male only because of The Incredibles.

Would our Dash have children named Em and En?

I was prepared to let that one go. The one that broke me was “Zsadist”.

And they weren’t kidding.

Book #12: 1 very long day

Wait, what? I shudder to imagine the events in that book.

 Though I maintain that there’s no excuse for calling your hero “Rhage.” Good. Lord.  

The names, oh the names. The extra h’s. WTH?

Still, I try hard not to judge too much. There is seriously cheesy stuff that I love so much it isn’t even funny. Sometimes something just works for you. 

I do judge people who don’t get that it’s cheesy, but I consider that a separate issue. 

 

 
Book #12: 1 very long day

 

Wait, what?

 
It was written well after “24″ became a hit so I’m not exactly stunned that they decided to go with the 1 long day concept. 

Wait, what? I shudder to imagine the events in that book.

Nicky’s troops prepare to attack the Old City in Jerusalem and the RTCs at Petra.
Jerry Jenkins drags out the “Which one died?” cliffhanger from Book #11 for 2 or 3 chapters.
Nicky’s troops mass in anticipation of an imminent attack.
Biblical scholar Chaim explains to the readers Rayford what’s going to happen in the second half of the book.
Nicky’s troops complete their preparation for an all-out assault.
As Nicky’s army’s begin their assault, Jesus and his entourage appear.
Jesus smites the GC forces.
Jesus and the RTCs walk super-fast to Jerusalem.
Chaim continues to explain what’s going to happen in the upcoming chapters.
Jesus slays the GC forces surrounding the Old City.
Jesus sends Leon, Nicky, and Satan to hell.
Jesus sends the surviving penitent non-Christians to hell.
Jesus praises the OT saints, NT saints, and RTCs from throughout history.
Rayford is reunited with his daughter, son*, son-in-law, and wives.

* Raymie is 12, his age at the time of the Rapture.  But in the sequel, Kingdom Come, the closing passage from Book #12 is repeated, but changed so that Raymie appears as a full-grown man.

the closing passage from Book #12 is repeated, but changed so that Raymie appears as a full-grown man.

Consistency. Not just for pudding, you know.

The RTCs were hiding out at Petra? Were they expecting to find the Holy Grail in the Treasury or something?

Knowing the kind of characters L&J come up with, they’d all choose poorly and save Nicky the trouble of killing them.

Though I maintain that there’s no excuse for calling your hero “Rhage.” Good. Lord.

Well, that’s a bit more subtle than naming your heroine “Xhex”. 

Srsly.

I do not see in Mr. Jenkins’ writing the level of
sophistication required for the kind of unreliable narrator who does not arrive
with a nametag saying, “Hi! My name is Unreliable, and I’ll be your narrator
today.”

Odd Thomas is one of those narrators in the first book. He basically says “My friend told me I should write this book, and when I was reluctant to do so, he suggested I be an unreliable narrator. You have been warned.” The unreliability shows up in the very end, when he admits that the happy ending he just described was actually more tragic than he likes to think about, and explains what really happened.

I bring this up only as an example of an idea that sounds awful being executed well.

 Can I glow in the dark, too?

XD

Does Nicolae really “let” Satan indwell in him though? It seemed like an involuntary relationship; Chaim strikes down Nicolae, and Satan rises again in Nicolae’s skin. I don’t really understand the concept of indwelling though; is it like Satanic possession? If that’s the case, then the person walking around as the supreme leader of the GC isn’t Carpathia at all — he died during that gala. If it’s not, then what difference does it make?

Pitchblende (which is a kind of uranium ore) is downright crumbly. When I was in said class in measuring radioactivity, we had some real pitchblende*, and we handled it with tongs. Most of the stuff we used in experiments was a lot safer to deal with.

*Not, unfortunately, from Poland, which the teacher really wanted because that’s what the Curies used.

Depleted uranium is also safer than natural uranium from a radioactiviity standpoint, since uranium’s half-life is so long its parent alpha activity is fairly low. It’s when the daughters begin to build up in sizable amounts that you need to start worrying about betas and gammas.

 There’s another story by Niven where they’re locating a molecular strand by carrying sausages, and when the sausage gets sliced, they spray the area with yellow paint to make it sort of visible.

I’m not sure that the paint would actually work – you’d need a pretty thick coat of it, I would think, on something that’s that thin, but the sausage idea is probably workable.

The names, oh the names. The extra h’s. WTH?

Too much bheer the night before?
(No, they wouldn’t get that one at all.)

Really, if Jenkins managed to make it so far with such little talent
then I think I can finish a story. It may suck and I probably won’t ever
show it to anyone, but it’ll be a complete story.

I know, I feel the same way!  Whenever I start to despair that I’ll never publish anything, I think, “If Jerry Jenkins can make millions, I can at least get a story published!”  It might only sell 10 copies and wither away in the basement of used bookstores forever after, but at least I’ll have the satisfaction of knowing I’m a better writer than Jerry Jenkins.

And Lori, if/when you finish, you should post a link to your completed story on here!

Does Nicolae really “let” Satan indwell in him though?

As far as I remember, he’s actually pretty happy to be indwelt.  Nicolae worships Satan the same way RTCs worship Jesus, so from what I remember he seems thrilled with the whole arrangement.  There’s a scene in one of the later books where Satan steps out of Nicolae for a while and starts viciously insulting him, and Nicolae’s like, “You’re so right, Satan!  I suck, and you’re totally awesome!”  Not in those words, but you get my meaning.  It’s sort of interesting because Satan starts chastising Nicolae for his hubris *while* he’s indwelt, which in the hands of a better writer could show that there’s some sort of power struggle going on between the indweller and the indwellee.  In this case I think it just shows that Jenkins doesn’t really understand the details of indwelling either, though he displays astonishing talent in his ability to make a conversation between Satan and the Antichrist boring.

In Book #7 the Trib Force escape from Hiding Place #2 just as it is
discovered by the GC and relocate to an office building in downtown
Chicago, which has become a ghost town.

In Book 10, Chloe comes across a group of Christians that’s been living in a bomb shelter in Chicago. They’d been living there ever since Book 3 because they didn’t realize the bombing was a fake.  They spent the entire Tribulation in a bunker, and even then I’ve always thought that would make a much better story than the Tribbles’ little escapades.  I mean, can you imagine spending four years of your life hiding from toxic radiation underground, only to find out that–surprise–there was never really any radiation to hide from!  I’d be pissed.

Now that I think about it, it kind of sounds like the plot of Blast From the Past.

There’s a scene in one of the later books where Satan steps out of
Nicolae for a while and starts viciously insulting him, and Nicolae’s
like, “You’re so right, Satan!  I suck, and you’re totally awesome!” 
Not in those words, but you get my meaning.  It’s sort of interesting
because Satan starts chastising Nicolae for his hubris *while* he’s
indwelt, which in the hands of a better writer could show that there’s
some sort of power struggle going on between the indweller and the
indwellee.

And now I want to see this scene played by William Macy.

 In this case I think it just shows that Jenkins doesn’t really understand the details of indwelling either, though he displays astonishing talent in his ability to make a conversation between Satan and the Antichrist boring.  

The ability to make anything boring seems to be Jenkins’ super power. 

There’s a funny story there, maybe a satiric version of Heroes. Of course Jenkins can’t write it because if he did it would be boring. 

 Now that I think about it, it kind of sounds like the plot of Blast From the Past.  

Which was actually kind of cute. Proving again that it’s not the plot that’s the problem, it’s the underlying ideas and the horrible execution. 

That’s interesting (well, at least it SHOULD have been!) I didn’t get that far into the books though. Did Nicolae voluntarily accept Satan or was it another prophecy thing? I never got the sense that he could have said “no” if he didn’t want to (being dead). So Nicolae’s mind still exists even after indwelling — while Satan is at work, does Carpathia just chill out in some corner of his psyche, playing a game of 8-dimensional sudoku with his superego or something?

There’s a scene in one of the later books where Satan steps out of Nicolae for a while and starts viciously insulting him

“My lord king, why have you forsaken me?…
“Silence!” came the response in a voice so phantasmagorically piercing and awful that it made Mac recoil and want to cover his ears. “You disgust me! Look at you! You dare suggest you have anything to offer me besides your pathetic frame?! You are drunk with a power whose source is far beyond your own! You are merely a vessel, a tool, a jar of clay for my purposes, and yet you parade yourself as if you had a shred of value!”
“Oh, my king!” Carpathia gasped. “No! I–”
“You do not even understand the meaning of the word silence! You are nothing! Nothing! You had no power to rise from the dead! You were a carcass, stiff and decaying. Look at you now. Aside from my grace, you would return to the earth, ashes to ashes and dust to dust.”
“Spare me, oh my lord! I love you and long to serve you! I will do anything for–”
“Oh, spirit of nothingness, mere speck of my imagination. I will borrow your otherwise worthless skeleten again….”

[pause]

“Thank you, sir.  May I have another?”

From Glorious Appearing

Thanks for the Cole Porter reference, Fred.

I’m envisioning Neil Patrick Harris again.

I think he would make an awesome Nicolai.

I once saw a picture of an out-of-order elevator with sign on it that read “This Otis Regrets It’s Unable To Lift Today”.

The Glorious Appearing bit reminds me of the scene at the end of Good Omens where the legions of heaven and the legions of hell are lined up across from each other, and the narration notes that someone with very precise instruments might have been able to tell the difference.

Although now that I think about it, the Tribs are a bunch of arrogant asshats who might benefit from that kind of talking-to. So Nicky Mt. Doom still comes out ahead. At least Ellenjay succeed in making the Devil looks as evil as their god.

I’m envisioning Neil Patrick Harris again.

I think he would make an awesome Nicolai.

He does have experience with mind control and world domination plots. Plus, Ray and Buck become much more palatable when I picture them as Captain Hammer.

The passage from Glorious Appearing aunursa quoted is only of only three scenes post indwelling that Nicolae actually appears in the main series (I think Kingdom Come has another where Nicolae is shown in Hell being tortured with fire and screaming “Jesus is Lord,” or some such.)

In none of the scenes where Nicolae appears does he seem happy.

First there’s the one described, where Lucifer is a jerk for Nicolae for no readily apparent reason.  Also it should be noted that apparently being dead without a Lucifer in you is not comfortable, aunursa cut out the set up in which Nicolae went from someone who seemed like a god in human form to someone who seemed like a badly reanimated corpse.  Very badly.  At least zombies don’t seem profoundly uncomfortable, but Nicolae not so much.

So that’s the first Nicolae scene post indwelling.

The second one is pretty simple.  Nicolae, Lucifer, and the false prophet all flee the last battle on food.  Lucifer outruns Nicolae.  Presumably Nicolae’s not too happy about being left behind, especially since (based on the first scene) without Lucifer in him he has difficulty standing, much less running.  Perhaps it was fear of the greatest mass murderer in all of history (Turbo Jesus) that sustained him while he ran.

The third one is at the not-so-final Judgement.  Lucifer has crawled back inside Nicolae and is smugging it up in Nicolae’s body, Jesus separates the two, Nicolae begs for forgiveness.  Jesus sends him to Hell.

In none of the times Nicolae gets to be on his own instead of a shell for Lucifer am I left with the impression he’s happy with the situation.  In the first one I get the impression that he’s terrified of Lucifer.

This is not part of the deal he was promised (he was promised that he’d rule along side Lucifer, not that he’d be an ill respected tool) and he wasn’t expecting to die at all.  Nicolae’s last words, in their entirety:
“But I thought… I thought… I did everything you asked.”

Those are not the words of someone who was planning to die and be indwelt.

-

The last words of someone planning on dying and being indwelt would go something more like this (this would belong in A World Without God):

[Note that "fearless leader" is a codename (because if you can't find humor in your codenames, where can you?), the narrator is so used to using it that even though there is no reason for it anymore, that's still what he says.]

Hello darkness, my old friend.

The Antichrist is dead, and it brings me no joy.  I slept through the whole ordeal.  I know that it was one of the most important moments in human history.  I know that we saw it coming years ago so I can’t say I wasn’t given advanced warning.  But there’s this whole time difference thing and I was tired.

I saw what happened anyway.  Had a vision.  The’d set up the stage for the event in a closed box of bullet proof glass.  That’s what they called it anyway, but to my eyes it seemed more like bullet resistant multilayered plastic of some kind.  Locks on the doors that were electronic and supposedly unpickable, which is impossible but they’ve never been known for their humility or honesty.

So there was Declan, largely undisputed ruler of the world, cut off from all of humanity.  Even his security forces were left outside of the enclosure.  The perfect time for an assassination.  Sure enough, this was the time Fearless Leader chose to strike.

He was trusted enough to get close, involved enough in the preparations to move his weapon in ahead of time, and apparently knew how to bork an electronic lock.  For three and a half years he’d been within an arm’s reach of Declan and been forced to do nothing, knowing that Declan was protected.  Occasionally having to step around the charred remains of those who tried to kill Declan too soon, reminded, he once told me, by the smell of burned flesh of why he had to stay his hand.

He never said anything about it, but I know that sometimes he wanted to try anyway.  We’ve all had times we didn’t want to face another day, and if you’re going to die who wouldn’t want their last act to be trying to kill the Antichrist?  I assume that what stopped him was the knowledge that one day it could be done, one day Declan’s protection would lapse.

He’d been waiting for this day, you could hear it in his voice every time he talked about a failed assassination attempt or people wanting to take more direct action.  It’s a shame it didn’t go down the way he wanted.

Fearless got inside the safe space, Declan turned off the microphones.  He didn’t want anyone but his killer to hear what he had to say.  Some of us have visions you dumb fuck. And what he had to say was unexpected for someone facing death by katana.

He said, “I was starting to think you’d never come.”  It wasn’t false bravado, it wasn’t a lack of understanding of what was happening.  It was calm with a hint of annoyed impatience.  Fearless Leader faltered.

Declan was still facing the controls for the sound system.  ”Come now, I’m ready.”

My contact, my boss, my friend, was confused.  He clearly didn’t know what to think.  He tried to regain his resolve, he said, “You’re not going to talk your way out of this,” but it was less a statement of fact than a desire.  Like shouting, ‘You can’t trick me,’ when you’re not convinced the other person is lying.  His tone revealed his uncertainty.

Declan explained, in that condescending way that he does.  ”Did you think it was an accident I kept you around these last years?  Did you think it was divine providence that the only interpretation of your religion that made it passed my censors was the one that said I would die now?  Did you think it was God who arranged for you to be in a position to steal that sword from a museum?  Did you think I left the security outside this one time out of pure coincidence?  I want this.

“A year ago, a month ago, even ten days ago I would have fought this tooth and nail.  I wasn’t ready then.  There were preparations yet to be made.  But now… oh but now I’m ready.  The world is ready.”  Can a vast network of disgusting fleshy tendrils stretching throughout the globe like a web of ick and nerve fiber be said to purr?  I think it can.  I think it can and I think it did.  I think that the network of cancerous material that’s made it’s way thorough our sewers and storm drains, that lies hidden in our walls, that grows in our infrastructure and makes it’s way through our cords and electronics and toasters heard what Declan said and responded.

I think it knew that this was the reason it had been set to grow, this day was its purpose. And I think it knew something akin to joy and expectation.

Declan faced my friend, opened his arms wide, and said, “Strike me down and I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.”  No.  Just, no.  The most evil thing to crawl out of the depths of nightmares in the whole of human history should not be allowed to quote Obi Wan Kenobi.

Fearless said, “I hate you,” and put away his sword.

“You’re going to do it.”

“If you want to die, kill your own damn self.”  He walked toward the door and started trying to break the covering off the lock’s electronics by bashing it with the hilt.  Probably not the best solution, but given time it was clear that either he or the security team outside, desperately trying to get in all this time, would open the door.

“You will kill me.”

“If you’d wanted me to do it, you shouldn’t have told me it would be helping you.”

“Now where would the fun in that be?  You’re going to do it, and you’re going to do it knowing that it’s what I want, that it’s part of my plan.  Power is the ability to make people will what they do not wish.”

And my friend turned back to the Antichrist.  ”Only you would quote Atreus.”

“But Atreus realized too late that it would have been all the sweeter if his brother knew what he had been doing as he did it.  I’m not that shortsighted.  When this is over I will have no regrets.  You will do it knowing what you do.  You will execute my plan.”

And Fearless Leader turned away.  ”No, I won’t.”

“The Hebron Reeducation center.”

And suddenly Fearless was in a state of noticeable terror.  His voice remained calm, his body did not.  The absolute stillness of the rest of him contrasted the racing of his heart, and the look in his eyes was one of purest dread.  His voice remained emotionless as he asked, “What about it?”

“It’s nothing much, just a facility for holding the children of dissidents.  Only a few hundred children, ages ranging from 15 and a half to 21 and two months.”

“I know that,” Fearless snapped, “What about it?”

“You’re planning a rescue.  You’re planning to use the distraction that comes from killing me to get them all out without a single casualty.  It’s a good plan.  It will work.  If you follow the plan.  Or you could let me live, the high explosives I’ve wired throughout the reeducation center will go off, and your worthless little children will die.

“Then I’ll find someone else to kill me and ascend to godhood later.”

Fearless turned back to Declan, One hand on the hilt, the other on the scabbard, still unsure of what to do.

Declan continued, “I don’t care what happens to those pathetic creatures, you can take them.  They’ll be killed along with the rest of you anyway.  But it doesn’t matter what I care about.  You care.  That’s why you’re going to do what I want now, and that’s why your side will lose in the end.

“The explosives are wired to a heart monitor, they will go off if my heart is sti-”

The blade didn’t quite cut through Declan’s skull, and it didn’t quite break through it.  It did something between the two.  A mess of brain and bone.

Not long afterward, the security team finally overrode the supposedly unbeatable electronic lock.  Fearless killed three of them before he died.  I don’t think that’s bad for someone who brought a sword to a gun fight.

The raid on the reeducation center went off without a hitch.  One could claim that Declan decided to keep his word for any number of reasons, I think it was because if what he said to Fearless Leader, now departed, he wanted my friend to know exactly what he was doing as he did it.  He wanted him to know that he had been manipulated, now exactly the extent to which he had been manipulated, and do what the manipulator wanted him to do all the same.

And the unholy network of the earth is humming.  I think Declan’s plan, whatever it actually is, is working.

Nicolae looked wasted. His formerly full head of hair appeared sparse now. His clear, piercing eyes were bloodshot and droopy and thought it made no sense [Mac McCollum] believed he could see veins spidering across the man’s face, framing his hollow eyes.

Carpathia’s fingers looked thin, his skin papery, his shoulders bony. It was if he had lost fifty pounds i minutes. His pale, bluish lips were parted, and his teeth and gums showed… the mouth of a dead man.

“You must drink, Excellency!” Fortunato whined.

“I am spent,” Carpathia said, and though Mac could barely hear him, his was clearly not the voice Mac had come to recognize. His words seemed hollow, faint, echoey, as if he spoke from a dungeon far away. “Hungry.” Carpathia said flatly. “Exhausted. Dead.”

No doubt he meant that last as a figure of speech, but to Mac he did look dead. Were his skin any worse he could have passed for a decomposing corpse. Even his ears had lost color and appeared translucent.

After the speech that aunursa quotes — which goes on and on for about 4 pages of solid ranting, a good chunk of which are just Satan describing himself by taking Bible quotes and putting them in the first person (“The servants of God are wrestling against MY powers and MY principalities”…), he returns to Carpathia’s body.

“I have need of your shell again for a brief season.”

“I am yours.” Carpathia said.

And with that, the light disappeared and Nicolae stood, chin lifted, arrogance restored. His color returned as he button his shirt and straigthened his clothes. It was as if he had come back to life, his voice again crisp and sure.

It’s unclear how much of that transformation was actually caused by the indwelling itself. In an earlier chapter, it is revealed that Carpathia hadn’t eaten or slept once in the three years since his ‘death’. That’s got to inflict quite a bit of damage in and of itself.

As far as Carpathia’s receipt of Satan being “voluntary”, their relationship sounds more like Stockholm Syndrome than anything else. Considering that he needs Satan’s presence to even be able to move unaided (and also to resist the effects of three years starvation and exhaustion), it’s not like he’s free to cancel the deal and go back to his real life.

Except they probably don’t turn the bomb shelter into a nightclub at the end.

Digital communications (except for military grade stuff) would be dead, of course.  But old-fashioned rotary phones on a local exchange would still work (provided the exchange and the lines are intact) and there were still quite a few around in the mid- to late-90s when this was written.

These people wouldn’t know symbolism if they were hit over the head with Magritte’s pipe.

Though I maintain that there’s no excuse for calling your hero “Rhage.” Good. Lord.

If they were a ’90s comic-book character, it would have been “RAYGE”, or similar, so it could have been worse…

There’s another story by Niven where they’re locating a molecular strand by carrying sausages, and when the sausage gets sliced, they spray the area with yellow paint to make it sort of visible.

I’m not sure that the paint would actually work – you’d need a pretty thick coat of it, I would think, on something that’s that thin, but the sausage idea is probably workable.

I think I remember that one. IIRC, they spraypainted the walls at the monowires’ anchor points, not the wires themselves, but it’s been a long time since I read it.

Besides Niven, the first place I remember reading about monofilament weapons was one of William Gibson’s early cyberpunk works – the antagonist was a hitman with a prosthetic thumb with a weighted tip connected a spool of monofilament.  He use the weight of the thumb to whip it around and cut up one guy.

He ended up accidentally cutting off his own hand, I believe.  Whoops.

In Schlock Mercenary, Captain Tagon has what they call a ‘Dorothy Wire’, which is a spool of monofilament inside the heel of one of his boots, and a sensor and gripper inside the other boot.  He activates the system by clicking his heels together (hence the ‘Dorothy’ name), and the wire stretches out between his feet, with a tension monitor on the spool to make sure the wire stays reasonably taut while it’s in use.  It’s a little awkward to use in combat unless you’re fairly athletic, but it’s easy to hide, simple to activate, and a lot more difficult to cut yourself on it than some other methods.

There was a Tom Swift (1990s-era) book I read that involved a monofilament wire. I wonder why such wires were so popular with science fiction authors for a while there. (<_<)

DUUUDE!!! That would be so AWESOME!!! *headbangs*

/90s kid

(sorry, couldn’t resist)

The Harry Harrison novel West of Eden has the “string knife” (possibly hyphenated or a compound word), which is essentially a monomolecular blade produced by sapient reptilians who rely on specially bred animals for all their technology. Like the gun-equivalent is a highly modified lizard and the submarine is an icthyosaur with an enormous hollow fin/hump. Oh, and soldiers ride into battle on twelve-legged sauropods. Anyway, I suspect the string knife is some sort of silk-derivative whose manufacture is slightly squicky.

I stopped at the library on the way home to get Glorious Appearing, so I
could post the scene in question, but y’all beat me to it.

I didn’t get that far into the books though.

Haha, you’re not missing out.  The books get progressively worse.

So Nicolae’s mind still exists even after indwelling — while Satan is
at work, does Carpathia just chill out in some corner of his psyche,
playing a game of 8-dimensional sudoku with his superego or something?

I don’t think this is ever really explained.  Which makes me really sad as a reader, because I think the whole concept is really interesting, and I think Jenkins missed an opportunity to explore a really awesome and creepy idea.  It
seems like he’s trying to show that even though
Satan inhabits Carpathia’s body, Nicolae can still act on his own
sometimes (which prompts Satan’s outburst in Glorious Appearing).  But
it’s not very clear.  And it’s not clear either whether it was voluntary
or what.   I always assumed it was, but Alicia’s point about Stockholm
Syndrome makes more sense. 

I would have loved to read about what happened during the three days
Carpathia spent in hell, which might answer this question, although with
the way Jenkins writes that would probably take another couple of
books.  And he’d somehow find a way for Satan to spend most of his time
on the phone.

Nicolae’s last words, in their entirety: “But I thought… I thought… I did everything you asked.” 

I don’t care how evil he was, and I don’t care how many people he
killed–every time I read this scene, it’s like watching a puppy getting
kicked in the face.

I pronounce it an-neur-o-sa
Like aneurism.
Nothing personal I just seriously suck at pronouncing words words x(
Though I did think you were a woman.

You know what Jenkins managed to make me do, in the LB book series and especially in Glorious Appearing?

Make me feel sorry for Leon Fortunato.

@Alicia: Out of context, those quoted sections look they came from a competently written story.

Honestly I’ve only reada bit of the books and that was from random browsing through the later ones.

And honestly from what I’ve read, I just wanna give everyone at the GC a hug.

“Plus, Ray and Buck become much more palatable when I picture them as Captain Hammer.”

“The hammer is my penis.”

(Late to the party again.)

“A coma!”
“Like I say, we’re a little worried about him.”

See now, this dialogue works perfectly — if it’s filmed in front of a live studio audience. In my head, this is a scene from a Saturday Night Live skit, possibly with the Church Lady on the punch line, and it is hilarious.

On the other hand, there’s always Vermic’s interpretation on page 1 of this thread (in terms of lyrics by The Smiths), which had me laughing until I choked.

In any case, it only works if laughter is involved.

So by page 5 of the thread, what have we learned?

1. Mommy’s all right, if unorthodox
2. With great sharpness comes great responsibility
3. The okapi are positioning themselves to attack DC from their stronghold in Arlington Heights.

I feel smarter already!

That happens sometimes. I saw a pronoun (“she”) in one of the books that looked exactly like one I saw in an actual novel once.

I seem to recall that there’s fanfic about {Mrs. Job}, but I can’t remember the name of the book.

Rebecca Bradley, in The Lateral Truth:  an apostate’s Bible stories, treats the after-story from Job’s wife’s POV.  Bear in mind that when the Book of Job opens, she’s borne ten children and they’re all grown.  She’s very aware, in this story, of just what she is to God and to Job:  a child-making machine, a walking womb forced to keep bearing into her sixties and seventies until Job gets his full reward.  Because “his” children — the children she bore in her own body and gave birth to — are seen as replaceable.

ObBruce Barnes snark:

“Pastor Barnes is in the hospital in a coma. He’s lying at death’s door!”
“Don’t worry, I’m sure they’ll pull him through.”

Going back a few days:

This is a small thing in the overall pile-up of terrible, but since when does Bruce go to Indonesia? Was it a mission trip of some sort? Why would Bruce “dig a big hole in the ground and crawl in with your 4 best buddies” Barnes be on a mission trip?

Presumably Bruce was doing missionary work and converting people.  Dunno why he’d need to travel halfway across the world to preach to unbelievers, but still, this is noteworthy enough to remark upon: Bruce Barnes was doing exactly what we’ve repeatedly said should be the Trib Force’s main (perhaps only) job, saving souls.  He wasn’t in a Fifth Avenue penthouse cashing paychecks and burying stories, he was out there doing the only work that really matters.  And LaHaye and Jenkins couldn’t be less interested in showing it.  But they are very keen on showing him get sick and die for his troubles — that’s worth bringing him back, apparently.

The lesson of Tribulation Force is that helping others gets you nothing but obscurity, followed by perfunctory illness and death, while being a self-absorbed hypocrite gets you ADVENTURE and TOP BILLING and HOT YOUNG WIVES.  And that’s why these are the Worst Books Ever Written.

Odd you should mention the White Man’s Burden, given the extremely large African-American and Latino population in Chicago.  Arguably, Barnes could have fulfilled the WMB in Cicero rather than Indonesia.  But then again, would such people be *worth* saving in L&J’s scenario?  How many non-white protagonists are there in this series?

 Odd you should mention the White Man’s Burden, given the extremely large African-American and Latino population in Chicago.  

The White Man’s Burden attitude tends to be all about non-whites Over There. The populations of foreign lands are both condescended to and exotisized in a way that local populations rarely are. Non-whites in other countries are treated almost like children. They’re heathens living in squalor and darkness who have never heard the word of the Lord and thus can’t be held fully responsible for their state. They need both the salvation and the civilization that the great white Bible-wielder can provide. 

Non-whites closer to home are just a problem. Taking our jobs and living off the taxes of the hard working and having too many babies. They’re often treated as the undeserving poor in a spiritual sense as much as in an economic sense. 

 Presumably Bruce was doing missionary work and converting people. 

This was my assumption, but I’m honestly confused about when that happened. When did Bruce Barnes go from huddling in his office with his inner circle and digging a hole in the ground just for 4, and traveling the world to seek and save the lost? How did he become the only one of the Tribbles actually making an effort? 

That’s a pretty major change and would require tremendous character growth on Bruce’s part. And it apparently took place off screen and is never discussed at all, really. IOW, these books suck. 

You know, Jenkins really should have written an early 1980s-era BBS hacking book. There’s all the ingredients he needs!

1. Socially maladjusted misanthropes
2. TELEPHONES! (Acoustic couplers are sexy)
3. MODEMS! (anything to do with telephone lines is sexy)
4. Computers!

He missed his calling. Alas.

It was during the 18 months later.  Almost everything interesting to happen in these books so far happened in a few paragraphs explaining what went on during the 18 months skipped over.

It’s mentioned that Bruce was doing things that actually made sense.  He was preaching the world over and setting up a network of … let me just quote it:

Bruce Barnes had done his share of traveling, too. He had instituted a program of house churches, small groups that met all over the suburbs and throughout the state in anticipation of the day when the assembling of the saints would be outlawed. It wouldn’t be long. Bruce had gone all over the world, multiplying the small-group ministry, starting in Israel and seeing the ministry of the two witnesses and Rabbi Tsion Ben-Judah swell to fill the largest stadiums on the globe.

So you see, Bruce has been doing actual meaningful things.  He’s been spreading the word, he’s been planning ahead.  He’s creating an underground network of small churches set up in houses in preparation for the day when going to an actual physical church will be punishable by death.  (Though it seems to me like it would be long before that happened.  As I recall Christians are able to stay in the open for a while yet, but it has been a long time since I read the series.)

Those house churches basically amount to resistance cells, which are being set up in advance so that when the time comes for resistance they’ll be ready instead of having to scramble to set something up.

Bruce has been doing important and meaningful things, that was glossed over entirely and soon he’ll be dead.  We get left with Buck who has decided to eventually conduct a feasibility study on running an underground website from his cushy penthouse, and Rayford who resents having to wear a gaudy uniform while he acts as the Antichrist’s chauffeur.  Our heroes.  Yay.

Bruce turning into an organizer, instigator and agitator isn’t the only interesting seeming thing to have happened during the timeskip.  One World Government went from something only known to Buck and Nicolae (for everyone else in the room had been mind whammied into forgetting) to the way things worked.  New Babylon was built.  One world currency was implemented.  The crime wave went even higher.  The One World Religion was becoming more popular and the idea of using force to make it mandatory is being publicly floated (mind you One World Religion pretty much implies that anyway, but still.)

The militia prepares to make war, Fitzhugh is stupidly put in charge of disarming America, something tells me that he does an intentionally bad job at this given that he’s planning to use the not-disarmed militia to try to take back the country.  The things he has to do to get weapons to them without arousing suspicion would no doubt make an interesting story in themselves.  Glossed over entirely.

If a one world language was implemented, it’s a fair bet it happened there as well.  And we shouldn’t forget the first births, which would have happened at the midpoint of the timeskip.  They must have been a big deal, no mention of those.

 It wouldn’t be long. Bruce had gone all over the world, multiplying the small-group ministry, starting in Israel and seeing the ministry of the two witnesses and Rabbi Tsion Ben-Judah swell to fill the largest stadiums on the globe.  

The idea that Bruce has become some sort of church spreading super star is making me laugh. It’s so typical of L&J to act like the salvation of the world totally depends on one of their characters, even if it is a non-POV character who is about to be killed off. It’s literally the end of time and they can’t allow anything to happen off the edge of their little created world. At the same time, their little created world is cramped and boring and useless. 

These books are So. Awful. How can a person write something this bad without that being the goal? The mind reels. 

Another example of where the writers have all the elements of a really good story and neglect to use them in favor of the hack job we’re stuck with.  Your assumptions about Bruce’s story *alone* would make a worthwhile End Times novel: small town pastor who wasn’t taking his job seriously is confronted by the Rapture and decides to bring his game up several levels, only to be eliminated as a threat by the Antichrist’s minions. 

I wonder though, given the loss of most of the congregation along with the general economic collapse the Rapture would entail, where he’s getting the funding for all his global missions work?  Is Rayford letting Barnes deadhead on the plane when Nicolae isn’t using it?  Because then Rayford might actually be doing something useful for the cause.

It’s even worse than you’re saying.

They chose to make the salvation of the world totally depend on one of their characters… and they made him a non-POV character and forced the reader to piece together his activities based on a few unexplained throwaway lines a few pages for he’s killed off. Most self-absorbed narcissists put themselves into the center of big and exciting events; these guys fantasize about being helpless bystanders while everything important is done by someone else (Carpathia, Bruce, Jesus) off-screen.

 Your assumptions about Bruce’s story *alone* would make a worthwhile End Times novel: small town pastor who wasn’t taking his job seriously is confronted by the Rapture and decides to bring his game up several levels, only to be eliminated as a threat by the Antichrist’s minions.  

Except for the bit about getting eliminated by the Big Bad, that’s the basic plot of a staggering number of books and movies. Because it’s a good story. There are a lot of ways to make it interesting because it’s relatable. You have to work to make it as lifeless as L&J did. 

  Most self-absorbed narcissists put themselves into the center of big and exciting events; these guys fantasize about being helpless bystanders while everything important is done by someone else (Carpathia, Bruce, Jesus) off-screen.   

Their is something about their fantasy passivity that just works in the back of my brain, like an itch I can’t quite scratch. These are books written by gender essentialist defenders of the natural role of men and women who have cast their ostentatiously manly man heroes in their idea of the “girl” role. It’s just so weird that it makes it really difficult for me not to speculate about meta L&J trying to claw their way through. I hate that, because I think it’s generally an inappropriate way to read a book, but I can’t turn it off. 

These books are So. Awful. How can a person write something this bad without that being the goal? The mind reels.

As Fred once said, it is not so much a function of their quality as snake-oil salesmen as it is they found a group of marks so eager to buy snake-oil.  

Even if that snake-oil tastes awful and leaves you feeling worse after imbibing it.

IIRC, in Shadowrun, the monowhip is explicitly *not* monomolecular, but is a “monofilament”. (The marginal notes in the manual are full of hackers saying “I don’t see what the big deal is, it’s not like it’s actually monomolecular.”) Every time you use it, you have to make a saving throw against accidentally hitting yourself on the backswing.

What gets me is that Bruce can’t be the only pastor doing all this – there must be many all over the world going about doing the same things. Are they mentioned? Apparently not; we are expected to believe that only he is doing it. Is that remotely believable? But of course, we all know by now that “believability” isn’t exactly something one should expect in these books.

I suppose that they are “believable” enough to those who have a very narrow perspective.  Unfortunately, those steeped in RTC culture are encouraged to keep their perspective narrow… 

 Every time you use it, you have to make a saving throw against accidentally hitting yourself on the backswing.

Heh.  I remember one character commenting:  ”I hate that stuff.  It’s an industrial-strength paper-cut waiting to happen.”

Speaking of interesting stories we don’t get to see: I’m now picturing Chaim Rozenweig as the child of Lisbeth Salander and the Dark Lord Harry.

He’d have to be a disturbed polymath whose mind goes down some strange alleys, because nothing that he does quite makes sense. Though we could hand-wave the absurdly sharp sword. Maybe he figured religion is about faith, and instead of silver bullets or a saint’s thigh-bone he decided to have faith in lightsabers. (Even Chaim couldn’t think of a way to hide an Eva.)

That’s a pretty major change and would require tremendous character growth on Bruce’s part.

Someone did ask about character growth a few weeks back, and I did answer that every character that experienced character growth dies.

Because L&J wants to send a message.

You all make very good disciples.

Just then “Amanda answered a page from Chloe” and they too learn that Bruce is in a coma, in the hospital, in Arlington Heights.

Jenkins worked for Moody Bible Institute in Chicago for many years. He’s put Bruce Barnes in an actual Chicago-area hospital — Northwest Community. This is in Arlington Heights, and Jenkins knows just where that is and the best way to drive there, either from downtown or from the airport. And he’s very excited to share this information with readers.

We know Jenkins is from Chicago, so it’s no surprise he has Local Area Knowledge.  Note that THIS is the only accurate geography in the entire series so far, after cruise ships on the Jordan River and all-day treks across Manhattan from east to west.

Again, this doesn’t reflect well on the best-selling GCAAT.  You can see he could have given accurate geography in his 16-volume epic if he’d only taken the trouble to research it.

It’s also striking, but not surprising, that Buck doesn’t seem to want to *save* his family, and certainly has not forgiven them for being narrow-minded (which, what dies that mean in this context?) with charity and lovingkindness in his heart. No, he hopes someday to rub their faces in how wrong they were and how right he now is.
– Jules

“The important thing in the Devil’s Theology is to prove yourself absolutely right and to prove everyone else absolutely wrong.”
– Thomas Merton, “The Moral Theology of the Devil” (searchable online)

Presumably Bruce was doing missionary work and converting people. Dunno why he’d need to travel halfway across the world to preach to unbelievers…
– Vermic

In RTCdom, Missionaries are one of THE Godly Prestige positions.  And “Missionaries to Darkest Africa” was always THE Prestige posting for Missionaries.  I think it’s a variation of that; Bruce making converts in a faraway Heathen land (Indonesia is almost literally on the other side of the world from Chicago) is Big Brownie Points at the Great White Throne.

We get left with Buck who has decided to eventually conduct a feasibility study on running an underground website from his cushy penthouse, and Rayford who resents having to wear a gaudy uniform while he acts as the Antichrist’s chauffeur. Our heroes. Yay.
– Chris the Cynic

AUTHOR SELF-INSERTS, REMEMBER.

(You know, I’ve been reading My Little Pony fanfics until brains ooze out my ears for the past six months, and I have NEVER read Author Self-Inserts used THIS bad.  Come to think of it, some of the best of those Pony fanfics — including one about a Reluctant Antichrist (literally!) — echoed the Gospel a LOT better than this GCAAT ever did.)