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By Fred Clark, February 13, 2012 4:10 pm

Left Behind II: Tribulation Force, Part 6

Morning dawns at New Hope Village Church and the establishing shot reminds us of the wanton chaos of a world unleavened by the civilizing presence of real, true Christians.

Trash, furniture and yet more bicycles are strewn across the lawn of the church. (What is it with abandoned bicycles lying all over everywhere in this movie? I’m the sort of liberal Christian that this story insists will be among those left behind, but I’ve never been secretly inclined to toss bicycles about the sidewalk or onto the the lawns of fundamentalist churches. I don’t know for sure how I’d respond if I awoke tomorrow to learn that every RTC had been whisked away by the Rapture, but I’m fairly certain I wouldn’t be thinking, “At last, those annoying Christians are finally gone! Now I can finally start scattering bicycles everywhere, bwa-ha-ha-ha!“)

A toppled newspaper box bears a headline from the day of the Event, suggesting that this disarray has been there, untouched, for more than a week. Why hasn’t Bruce arranged to have this cleaned up by now? I appreciate that the Tribulation Force regards itself as having a vitally important mission — “nothing less than to stand and fight the enemies of God during the seven most chaotic years the planet will ever see,” as the back cover of the book says. But that’s no excuse for allowing such a mess to fester on the lawn of their headquarters. Seriously, the four of them could have this cleaned up in less than an hour. The earthquakes, rivers of blood, fiery hail and demon locusts will be enough of a challenge on their own without compounding the problem by letting trash pile up on the church lawn.

Inside the church, the Trib Force’s executive committee of the whole is having yet another discussion about Buck’s plan to interview the Two Witnesses in Jerusalem. Whenever we see the four of them gathered together like this we realize yet again that we’re seeing three actors and a celebrity. Kirk Cameron has a different agenda here than the others have and it takes us out of the story. Brad Johnson, Clarence Gilyard and Janaya Stephens are trying to show us a story. Cameron is trying to preach us a sermon. He seems perpetually on the verge of turning to the camera to say, “I’m Kirk Cameron, and I approve this message.”

One of my favorite lines from Shakespeare in Love repeats an old theater joke. The actor cast to play the nurse in what will become Romeo and Juliet is asked what the play is about. “It’s about this nurse …” he says. That sums up the difference between what Cameron and Johnson are doing in this movie. If you asked Johnson what the movie was about, he’d have told you that it was about a pilot humbled by the sudden loss of his wife and son. If you asked Kirk Cameron what the movie was about, he’d tell you what he thinks the Bible says about the End Times and the Rapture and the Great Tribulation. He would never say, “It’s about this reporter …,” and so when we see him there on the screen we never see that reporter.

“The Antichrist has powers we may not even be able to comprehend,” Bruce warns.

It’s an apt warning, because the Antichrist of this movie is, indeed, very hard to comprehend. Nicolae Carpathia just doesn’t make much sense as a character.

We’re told who Nicolae is, or at least what he is, but we can’t reconcile that with what we see him doing. What he does conflicts with what he wants. It conflicts with what he’s supposed to want given that he’s the Antichrist. But then that would probably be true no matter what he did, because it’s impossible to imagine anyone wanting what he wants. Why would the Antichrist want to be the Antichrist? Why would he agree to that? And specifically, why would this Antichrist agree to be the Antichrist?

Jerry Jenkins and Tim LaHaye never address that in the books except by authorial fiat. They just assert that Nicolae wants bad things because he’s a bad person and that he wants arbitrarily strange things because that’s what the prophecies say he will want. That’s the Jenkins Method: Tell, don’t show. But that’s not an option on the screen. In a movie everything has to be shown, and that presents a big problem for director Bill Corcoran, screenwriters John Patus and Paul Lalonde, and most of all for actor Gordon Currie. Each struggles with the impossibility of conveying who Nicolae is as a person, what he wants, how what he does relates to what he wants, and why it is that anyone might possibly want or do any of what he wants and does.

Continue reading 'TFTM: The Antichrist’s inbox'»

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By Fred Clark, February 11, 2012 4:52 pm

This is from W. Scott Poole’s 2009 book Satan in America: The Devil We Know:

Left Behind also sought to make an evangelical case for some of the contemporary cultural and political struggles of the 1990s. Its emergence as a publishing phenomenon coincided with a public movement for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender rights. … Conservatives, many of them affiliated with the Christian Right, warned darkly of the “homosexual agenda” and began the so-called pro-marriage movement that would eventually result in calls for constitutional amendments at the state and federal level that sought to “preserve traditional understandings of marriage.”

[Tim] LaHaye had long been an opponent of civil rights for gay and lesbian Americans and was associated with some of the most extreme elements in the antigay movement. His 1980 book What Everyone Should Know About Homosexuality combined scriptural references to homosexuality with the writings of Paul Cameron, a researcher expelled from the American Psychological Association for a variety of absurd claims, including that homosexuals were responsible for half of all sex-related murders and that Thomas Jefferson had favored castration for gay men and facial mutilation for lesbian women.

LaHaye definitely links homosexuality with the devil in Left Behind. In the series homosexuality becomes the literal conduit through which Satan enters the world of the last days. In a prequel novel entitled The Rising, the birth of the Antichrist is described as being brought about by a conspiracy of “international bankers” who accept sperm donations from two gay men. The Antichrist has two daddies, claims LaHaye, a point the authors seems to use to represent a kind of satanic inversion of the Christian doctrine of the virgin birth. … The Christian horror genre created by LaHaye drew on fears about changing cultural mores and the slow but steady gains for human rights in American politics. Satan, once again, was constructed as the ultimate origin of any effort toward progressive political change.

… Left Behind seeks to inspire readers to become fully engaged in contemporary struggles, indeed to become soldiers in the culture war. Given this charge, violence becomes redemptive rather than an aspect of evil. The books feature a symmetrical amorality in which both the forces of the Antichrist and the “Trib Force” (evangelical believers who are “saved” after the Rapture) make use of deadly violence in their struggle against one another. In fact, “Trib Force” resembles nothing so much as a Christian fundamentalist al-Qaida, a secret, underground network willing to make use of cyber-terrorism, assassination, and targeted bombing to challenge a satanic modernity. As one member of the group says, “Woe to those who believe God is only love. We are engaged in a worldwide battle with Satan himself for the souls of men and women.” Jesus Christ himself gives his blessing to these ideas when he returns in Glorious Appearing, book number 12 in the series. His “Second Coming” marks the death of tens of thousands, “their blood pooling and rising in the unforgiving brightness of the glory of Christ.”

The Left Behind series allowed the image of Satan in American culture to grow freely, and often exotically, from the soil of the American culture wars of the 1980s, which only gained strength in the last decade of the century. Often initiated by the Christian Right, the culture clashes brought a vigorous response from critics on both the secular and religious left, and for many evangelicals, they represented the struggles against the forces of darkness at the twilight of the world depicted in the fictional narratives of Tim LaHaye and Frank Peretti.

The anger generated by the American culture wars owed much to the idea that disagreement over social and cultural issues had, at back of them, a struggle with evil. Tim LaHaye has said that a “religious war” is being waged in America. “We,” he explained to one evangelical audience, “need to aggressively oppose secular humanism; these people are as religiously motivated as we are and they are filled with the Devil.” In LaHaye’s understanding, there are only two stark options in America’s ideological divide. The secular left, inspired by Satan himself, and the Christian Right, which seeks to overturn Roe v. Wade, stop the expansion of gay and lesbian rights, introduce prayer into public schools, and remove the teaching of evolutionary science.

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By Fred Clark, January 31, 2012 12:26 am

Left Behind II: Tribulation Force, Part 5

Earlier, in a faithful adaptation of a scene from the book, the filmmakers were no more successful than Jerry Jenkins had been in portraying a phone call to an unlisted number as a sign of the Antichrist’s terrifying power. In this next scene, director Bill Corcoran strays from the book significantly in an attempt to increase the creepy-Antichrist factor.

In the movie, it seems, Nicolae Carpathia can control elevators.

Cam-Cam presses the button for the ground floor and instead the elevator heads up — ignoring whatever buttons he presses to take him to the roof. There the door opens and two large men greet Buck by name, escorting him to where Nicolae is waiting.

That’s a far better entrance than any Nicolae makes in the book, and the rest of this scene is also an immense improvement over the material its adapted from. (Yes, that’s a low threshold, but still.) Corcoran condenses the action, which allows it to seem like action, rather than like the several chapters of treading water he squeezes down into this one scene. In the novel there were several more phone calls, leading up to Nicolae’s arranging for Buck to fly to New York for a meeting. Jenkins recounted every detail of that flight in excruciating detail before belatedly trying to inject some suspense into the story by having Buck fear that the limo driver was a hired assassin. That all took several dreadful chapters to unfold, none of which contributed to the readers’ sense of Nicolae’s menace.

Here, too, we can gratefully appreciate Corcoran’s wise decision to do away with the agonizingly drawn-out business in which Buck and Rayford wasted a hundred pages insisting that they would never, ever take a job working for Nicolae. In the film, both characters quickly decided not just to accept such jobs, but to pursue them. That saves us lots of time and makes the heroes appear more decisive. Oddly, though, in this scene it means that Buck and Nicolae both want the same thing.

Corcoran’s biggest advantage in this scene is that he has Gordon Currie playing Nicolae. Currie doesn’t seem interested in portraying the “young Robert Redford” described in the novel. He seems to be shooting more for a young Christopher Lee or a young Bela Lugosi. He attacks the part with an enthusiastic B-movie turn that sometimes borders on camp (and sometimes sets up camp in camp).

In this scene, Currie is actually a bit more restrained, playing up the persuasive, idealistic side of the character rather than the mustache-twirling, cackling villain he unleashes elsewhere.

The conversation between Buck and Nicolae diverges quite a bit from the book. It’s a condensation of the longer, less-focused discussion there, incorporating much of what both characters should have said.

Nicolae greets Buck and seems to quiz him to see if he remembers witnessing the double-homicide in the last film. Cam-Cam is awkward and evasive and wholly unconvincing.

This is why that name “Cam-Cam” is invaluable here in discussing Kirk Cameron’s portrayal of Cameron “Buck” Williams. When you watch this scene you’re aware that you’re not just watching Cameron Williams acting awkward, but that you’re watching Kirk Cameron acting awkwardly and you’re not sure where one stops and the other begins. (Somebody there on the roof isn’t sure what to say, how to say it, or what to do with his hands.)

Inexplicably satisfied by Buck’s non-responses, Nicolae moves on to his big proposal. He wants to hire Buck to work for him after the takeover of all major media by the U.N.’s new one-world government.

This proposal is indefensible, but — unlike in the book — both characters seem to realize that. “A free press is the cornerstone of a free world,” Cam-Cam says, nobly. And then he even explains why, saying that government control of the press means “leadership without accountability.”

His full line, unfortunately, is “Leadership without accountability does not sound very compelling” — the latter half of which, frankly, does not sound very compelling, and sounds even less compelling as delivered by Cam-Cam. (I’m picturing Cam-Cam in colonial Lexington: “Taxation without representation … does not sound very compelling.”)

Continue reading 'TFTM: The temptation of Buck Williams'»

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By Fred Clark, January 23, 2012 2:02 am

Left Behind II: Tribulation Force, Part 4

Rayford Steele delivers his speech and Chris Smith delivers the gun.

Let’s set aside the content of Rayford’s speech — more or less, “magnets, how do they work? Therefore, God” — and just consider the fact of it and the result of it. This is a major difference between the movies and the books. In the books, Smith, Rayford’s co-pilot, kills himself. Book-Rayford barely notices, and then never gives his long-time colleague another thought. Here in the movies, though, Chris telephones Rayford for help and Rayford offers that help.

So here in the movies, unlike in the books, Chris is still alive.

That highlights the vast difference between book-Rayford, as written by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins, and movie-Rayford, as portrayed by Brad Johnson. If book-Chris had thought of making a desperate final phone call, it wouldn’t have been to book-Rayford, because he would never have come to help. Movie-Chris made that phone call because he knew that movie-Rayford would come. That’s a big change, not just for Chris, but for the reader/viewer.

Back at the church, everybody’s gone. Bruce Barnes delivered his big altar call less than an hour ago, but all those people who came forward — brand-new believers full of questions and in need of guidance — were apparently quickly shooed away so that Bruce, Chloe and Buck could have an inner-circle Tribulation Force meeting.

Cam-Cam is worked up over the Two Witnesses story, announcing what he regards as an innovative and ingeniously sneaky plan. He’s a TV reporter — he could report on the witnesses on TV! Bruce agrees this is deviously brilliant.

Rayford arrives and we come to another welcome change in the story. Tribulation Force, the novel, bogged down for hundreds of pages in the middle with Rayford and Buck insisting for several chapters that they would never, ever, under any circumstances accept a job working for Nicolae Carpathia, each turning away from the jobs being thrust at them from every side. (“Bogged down” is a relative term. It’s not as though this detracted from the otherwise fast-paced action of the plot — which was meandering and uneventful before and after this interlude. But that part of the book seemed even slower and more pointless than the sluggish, meaningless padding that surrounded it.)

Continue reading 'TFTM: This story can’t be part of this story'»

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By Fred Clark, January 17, 2012 9:40 pm

Left Behind II: Tribulation Force, Part 3

“When your fiancé comes, he can stay here too,” Cam-Cam tells flirty not-Alice as she settles in to his apartment, and hundreds of conservative youth pastors sigh in relief as the movie crosses back into mostly acceptable territory.

It’s clear now how the movie’s version of the book’s romantic-confusion subplot will unfold, with Chloe jumping to the wrong conclusion about Cam-Cam and not-Alice and bursting into silly girl-tears. It’s just so much more romantic when you make them cry.

The phone rings — this is a Left Behind movie, after all — and it’s Steve Plank, politely reminding Buck to schedule an appointment with Planetary Potentate Carpathia. The filmmakers try their hardest to make this seem spooky and menacing, since Buck never gave Steve his home number. In the first movie, we saw Nicolae divvy up the world among 10 princes, murder two people in cold blood, and then brainwash a room filled with witnesses, so I’m not sure that tracking down an unlisted phone number really adds much to our sense of him as a powerfully menacing evil presence.

(On the scale of Creepy Movie Phone Calls, I’d score calling an unlisted home number as about a 3, with “Because I want to know who I’m looking at” a 7, “It’s coming from inside the house!” an 8, and realizing the phone isn’t plugged in a 9. A 10, of course, would be any call from Sallie Mae.)

We cut back to Rayford standing in front of New Hope Village Church. It’s nighttime, but we don’t know if this is the same night or the next night. The church we see through the open door behind Rayford isn’t the same church we see once they get inside, which, in a way, is creepier than Steve’s phone call.

“Hey Chris,” Rayford says, greeting his co-pilot from the first movie. Movie-Rayford seems to have more friends than book-Rayford does.

Inside the church, the pews are neatly arranged and filled with curious visitors as Bruce Barnes stands up front ‘splaining to them all about Bible prophecy. Bruce says …

Wait a second. Rewind. Suddenly I’m remembering a scene from the segment we looked at last week. It was only about 30 seconds long and I failed to discuss it then. I think I had pushed it out of my brain because: A) it makes very little sense, and B) it seemed to be included only to reinforce to us that Chloe/women is/are utterly useless.

That scene seemed to take place in New Hope’s sanctuary, but the pews had been removed, replaced with cots and floor-lamps scattered about the room. Wounded people of indeterminate origin and identity lay in the cots, with Bruce and some other people puttering about reading Bibles and/or administering first aid.

It was the sort of scene one would expect to see in the chaotic immediate aftermath of a major earthquake or similar disaster, but what that disaster was here in this movie was never explained. We know it wasn’t the Rapture and the crashes and calamities that came with that, because that was more than a week ago in our story and we’ve seen dozens of scenes showing us that life is back to normal from that. (Completely back to normal, strangely, with the missing children now regarded as old news.)

So I guess this church-based little MASH unit is in response to the random violence and criminality that the movie erratically suggests characterizes the post-Rapture world. And seen from one angle, that’s a nice corrective to what we read in the book. It shows Bruce and the other new believers at New Hope putting their faith into action in a way that none of the believers in the book ever do. And it provides Bruce and Chloe with more of an active role than they have in the book, where they both spend months and months locked away studying Bible prophecy lore that any semi-literate person could master in a day or two.

But how are we to explain the way this emergency field hospital suddenly appears in the church at sundown before disappearing the next morning? Where are all those patients now? Did Bruce and those firefighters finally come to their senses and move this emergency overflow clinic to the newly available elementary school? Or have that poor burn victim and the others been stashed away in some quiet Sunday school room so that Bruce can use the sanctuary for his prophecy lecture the next night?

And at a more basic level, the existence of those firefighters contradicts the whole premise of the scene. The idea of all that post-Rapture criminality and violence is that once the salt and light of real, true Christians are removed from this world, everyone left behind will be irredeemably wicked. As it was in the days of Noah, everyone will do what is right in their own eyes, dogs and cats sleeping together, etc.

So explain those firefighters. They weren’t raptured, so we have to count them among the wicked. Yet they don’t seem wicked. They seem like, well, like firefighters — doing exhausting, back-breaking, dangerous work for paychecks that barely keep them in the middle class. That would seem to indicate the possibility of altruistic and virtuous behavior among the unregenerate unsaved — and if that’s the case, then what’s with all the sirens and chaos and Escape From New York streetscenes?

Continue reading 'TFTM: Leave the gun, take the salvation'»

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By Fred Clark, January 11, 2012 12:29 am

Left Behind II: Tribulation Force, Part 2

Left Behind II: Tribulation Force is, obviously, a sequel. As such it gets a bit bogged down initially in some awkwardly sequel-ish revisiting of stuff from the first movie.

I’m happy to give director Bill Corcoran a pass on that, though, since this early part of the movie also makes me gratefully aware of how much this adaptation condenses, cuts and enlivens scenes that dragged on pointlessly for hundreds of pages in the book.

Rayford’s dream-vision of his raptured wife is a serviceable device for reminding us what he has lost, and an excuse for recycling some of the footage from the Rapture scene in the first film. “May you walk in the faith of the Lord,” Irene says to Rayford, which sounds sort of like it’s something from the Bible, even if it isn’t.

We hear sirens in the background in an exterior shot of the Steele’s home the next morning. Scattered trash cans on the lawn signal that Corcoran is going to be more committed than Jerry Jenkins was to maintaining the notion that the post-Rapture, post-RTC world is marked by chaos and criminality.

Inside the home, Rayford is removing photos of his wife and son that he finds too painful to look at. We know what he’s thinking and feeling here because Brad Johnson is a professional actor who shows us. I can’t say that’s true of other scenes in this film featuring other members of this cast.

Chloe enters and quickly establishes that movie-Chloe is not going to be as capable and mature a character in this movie as she sometimes seemed — or maybe as I wanted her to seem — in the book. Meta-Chloe won’t be making an appearance here. All we see, in this scene and the next, is more of the same petulance she showed earlier.

That next scene is set in Bruce’s office, where Buck bustles in, not noticing Chloe’s brightly hopeful greeting. Kirk Cameron and Janaya Stephens gamely walk through the gender-clichés of that dynamic, but neither conveys his obliviousness and her needy disappointment as well as the fatherly look in Johnson’s reaction shot. His reactions do the heavy lifting in this scene — something that becomes more apparent in later scenes where he’s not present.

This produces a strange sensation for me. Watching this movie, I find myself missing Rayford Steele when he is absent from a scene. That never happened when I was reading the book.

Cam-Cam says of Nicolae Carpathia that: “The way they’re talking, he’s not just secretary-general of the U.N. It’s more like he’s president of the entire planet.”

No one in the book would have made such a distinction because Tim LaHaye thinks those two things — secretary-general and “president of the entire planet” — are identical. He thinks this is how the United Nations really works. In the John Birch Society mythology that provides the framework over which LaHaye has stretched his “Bible-prophecy” scheme, the U.N. is nothing more than a nascent form of the tyrannical one-world government that LaHaye believes the coming Antichrist will make official. If this scene had been written by LaHaye, Buck would have said, “He’s secretary-general of the U.N.  and that makes him president of the entire planet.”

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By Fred Clark, January 3, 2012 12:11 am

Left Behind II: Tribulation Force; part 1.

Two things must be said at the outset.

1. Left Behind II: Tribulation Force is a bad movie.

2. This movie is far better than the book.

Both of those truths are demonstrated in the opening scenes of this film video.

Director Bill Corcoran begins by slowly panning over a bulletin board covered in fliers pleading for information about missing people. Corcoran oddly emphasizes the text of these posters, rather than the faces in the photographs, and there’s a uniformity to the size and design of all the posters, making it seem more like they were done hastily by a single lazy and uninspired production assistant rather than like they’re the handiwork of dozens of disparate, desperate people. And yet the image itself, evoking the sight of such desperate message boards in the aftermath of 9/11 and other tragedies, and the accompanying sounds of children laughing and playing, does more to suggest the human toll of the Event — the Rapture that began this serialized story — than anything Jerry Jenkins and Tim LaHaye ever attempted in the novel.

As this scene inexplicably dissolves into a fireball, we hear Kirk Cameron’s voice, as Cameron “Buck” Williams, providing an expository news summary from the set of the “Global News Network.”

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By Fred Clark, December 19, 2011 11:57 pm

Tribulation Force, pp. 445-450

Stymied by traffic jams and nuclear war, our heroes will be forced to hike half a mile on foot to reach the just-bombed hospital where their friend Bruce Barnes was lying in a coma.

“I’m going,” Rayford said.

“Me too,” Buck said.

“We’re all going,” Chloe insisted, but Rayford held up a hand.

Silly little girl, this is a man’s job.

“We’re not all going. It’s going to be hard enough for one of us to get past security. Buck or I will have a better chance because we have Global Community identification.”

What does “get past security” mean here? Is this part of the military response to the insurgency? Or are military checkpoints some previously unmentioned aspect of life in Nicolae Carpathia’s “Global Community”?

“I think one of us with an ID should go, and the other should stay with the wives. We all have to be with someone who can get past the red tape if necessary.”

“I want to go,” Buck said, “but you make the call.”

“Stay and make sure the car is positioned so we can get out of here and get to Mount Prospect. If I’m not back in half an hour, take the risk and come looking for me.”

Those GC ID cards are a nifty perk of being top-level employees of the Antichrist, ensuring that Rayford and Buck can always “get past the red tape.” (That totalitarian police state can be such a nuisance.) But you know what’s an even sweeter benefit from their jobs working for Nicolae? Not having to do them. We discussed Buck’s journalistic negligence last week, but Rayford is also remarkably unconcerned with having to check in with his boss. He’s in charge of Nicolae’s plane. Nicolae’s plane is being targeted for attack by insurgents. But he’s in no hurry to call the office.

“Daddy, if Bruce is any better, try to bring him with you.”

“Don’t worry, Chloe,” Rayford said. “I’m ahead of you.”

I think he’s a bit ahead of himself as well. Last he heard, Bruce was in a coma. It’s not clear, then, just how Rayford — alone and on foot — is planning on bringing Bruce back.

Buck, meanwhile, is chafing at not going along with his father-in-law. Just staying back and waiting is fine for “the wives,” but not for a manly person of action like himself. And, yes, Buck actually thinks of himself in exactly those words, “person of action”:

As soon as Rayford had jogged through the muddy weeds and out of sight, Buck regretted agreeing to stay behind. He had always been a person of action, and as he watched shell-shocked citizens milling about and commiserating, he could hardly stand still.

Reading that description of Buck Williams here — “a person of action” — makes me wonder if Jerry Jenkins remembers anything at all of what he typed in the previous 446 pages of Tribulation Force, or in all of the previous volume. In those hundreds of pages, the only evidence we’ve ever seen that Buck Williams is a “person of action” is from several scenes like this one, in which Buck sits passive and inert, but stews over how hard it is for him to do so because he’s “a person of action.”

Throughout these books, every time Buck fails or refuses or chooses not to act he mutters about how this angers him, because deep-down he knows himself to be a man of action. And the converse is also true: Every time we hear Buck congratulating himself for being a manly man of action, we see him failing or refusing or choosing not to act.

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By Fred Clark, December 14, 2011 12:57 am

Tribulation Force, pp. 443-445

After crushing insurrectionists in several locations with deadly force, the “potentate” of the one-world government addresses the world via radio:

“Loyal citizens of the Global Community,” came the voice of Carpathia, “I come to you today with a broken heart, unable to tell you even from where I speak. For more than a year we have worked to draw this Global Community together under a banner of peace and harmony. Today, unfortunately, we have been reminded again that there are still those among us who would pull us apart.”

Here again we encounter the all-sheep-are-wolves problem. I fairly sure that we’re meant to be appalled by this talk of “peace and harmony” from the man who just obliterated Washington, D.C. And I’m guessing that the next paragraph is meant to underscore Nicolae’s hypocrisy:

“It is no secret that I am, always have been, and always will be, a pacifist. I do not believe in war. I do not believe in weaponry. I do not believe in bloodshed. On the other hand, I feel responsible for you, my brother or my sister in this global village.”

In any other book, I’d be certain that this was meant as a heavy-handed display of that hypocrisy. But hypocrisy is only possible when the principle being violated is a legitimate one, and in the world of Left Behind it has been firmly established that there is no such thing as pacifism. We can’t read this as a criticism of Nicolae’s phony pacifism, because in the universe of these books, all pacifists are phonies.

I call this the all-sheep-are-wolves problem because that seems to describe how the authors arrived at this conclusion. The Antichrist, they believe, will rise to power “under a banner of peace and harmony,” but he will actually be a wolf in sheep’s clothing, using such talk to disguise his true purpose of global tyranny. Thus, for students of Tim LaHaye’s school of “Bible prophecy,” any leader who speaks of peace and harmony is a potential Antichrist. LaHaye urges his disciples to follow his example by presuming that anyone who speaks in such terms should be presumed guilty until proven innocent — proof of innocence, in this case, coming only when the person in question dies without having created a one-world government and declaring himself the Antichrist. Barring such proof, treat every apparent sheep as a wolf.

Thus after more than 800 pages of the authors insisting that pacifism is always a sham and an illusion, we can’t really be disillusioned by Nicolae’s sham pacifism.

Continue reading 'TF: Battle come down'»

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By Fred Clark, December 6, 2011 11:45 am

Tribulation Force, pp. 440-443

When we last saw our heroes they were in a dire predicament. Traffic leading up to their exit of the tollway was at a standstill and it seemed they would have to exit onto Route 53 and then backtrack for miles.

Oh, and also Washington, D.C., has been destroyed.

Still stuck in traffic, they desperately try to find a local news station:

“Put in on ‘scan,’” Chloe suggested. Finally the radio found an EBS station and Amanda locked it in.

I hope that by quoting only a couple of sentences from that section I haven’t made it seem less dramatic, because this is one of the most dramatic searching-for-the-news-on-a-car-radio scenes in any book in recent memory.

A Cable News Network/Global Community Network radio correspondent was broadcasting live from just outside Washington, D.C. “The fate of Global Community Potentate Nicolae Carpathia remains in question at this hour as Washington lies in ruins,” he said. “The massive assault was launched by east coast militia, with the aid of the United States of Britain and the former sovereign state of Egypt, now part of the Middle Eastern Commonwealth.”

Those expository little tidbits about the shape of the new confederations under Nicolae Carpathia’s one-world government are useful information. Sticking them into the middle of a news report on the outbreak of World War III, however, may not have been the most artful way of conveying that information to readers.

The remarkable thing here, though, is what doesn’t happen in this scene. Buck Williams is the publisher, top editor and star reporter for Global Community Weekly, yet he gives no thought to getting in touch with his office. I don’t know what the Weekly had planned for it’s next cover story, but I’m thinking the destruction of Washington, D.C., might require a change of plans. Yet like everyone else in the car, Buck just sits passively, listening to the CNN radio (?) report. He doesn’t frantically pull out his cellphone to call his close friends Steve Plank or Chaim Rosenzweig to get the inside scoop on the biggest breaking news story since the Event itself.

Yes, I realize that Buck doesn’t have a cellphone. We’ve discussed that before, but since then 18 months have elapsed in our story and Buck has been promoted to his new position as one of the world’s media elite. In 1996, when Tribulation Force was first published, cellphones were not yet as ubiquitous as they are today, but surely the publishers, top editors and star reporters for Time and Newsweek had them.

Again, though, the really strange thing here is not that Buck Williams does not have a cellphone. The really strange thing here is that Buck Williams isn’t wishing that he had a cellphone as he sits, stuck in traffic and unable to do his job as the biggest story in the world unfolds.

The CNN radio report continues:

“Global Community peacekeeping forces immediately retaliated by destroying a former Nike center in suburban Chicago. Reports from there indicate that thousands of civilian casualties have been reported in surrounding suburbs, and a colossal traffic tie-up is hampering rescue efforts.”

“Oh, dear God!” Amanda prayed.

It’s not altogether clear there whether Amanda’s prayerful cry is due to the news of the thousands of casualties or to the news about the scope of the traffic jam.

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