slacktivist

Hat vs. Hat

2008-09-01T12:35:29-04:00

Some unintentional candor, revealing the speaker's belief in an irreconcilable, binary opposition:

"I want to thank my fellow Republicans as we take off our Republican hats and put on our American hats and say, America we are with you and we are going to care about these people in their time of need."
-- Sen. John McCain, Republican presidential candidate, on plans to downscale the Republican National Convention as Hurricane Gustav approaches the Gulf Coast.

A variation of this also appears on a splash page at McCain's Web site:

"We will act as Americans and not as Republicans because America needs us now."

Two different hats. One of them, McCain says, is appropriate for caring "about people in their time of need." The other, McCain says, must be removed in order to do what America needs.

Two separate hats. And, McCain insists, they can't be worn at the same time.

Actually, that explains a lot.

To his credit McCain has, with only a little self-congratulatory ostentation,* replaced his Web site's usual donation page with links to the American Red Cross and Habitat for Humanity and other charities that will be helping the victims of Hurricane Gustav. That's a Good Thing and McCain deserves unqualified praise for doing that (as does his Democratic opponent, Sen. Barack Obama, who has done the same thing).

But I'm struck by the duality and opposition revealed in McCain's hat metaphor.

Hat one or hat two. To put either on one must remove the other. His instinct was that he could respond to Hurricane Gustav either as a Republican or else as an American, but that he could not do both. The "American hat" response, McCain says, is "to care about these people in their time of need." And to his credit, McCain has chosen that American hat response instead of its opposite, but how strange that he would suggest or admit that the "Republican hat" response would be its opposite.

Or maybe John McCain was just remembering which hat he was wearing when Hurricane Katrina made landfall.

But hold that thought.

Earlier yesterday, on Fox News Sunday, McCain did another Good Thing. Or at least he said another Good Thing. He said this:

"Waterboarding to me is torture, okay? And waterboarding was advocated by the administration, and according to a published report, was used," McCain said. "I obviously don't want to torture any prisoners."

Apart from a bit of subjective hedging, that's a forcefully blunt condemnation of torture and a refreshing rejection of the Bush administration's (and Fox News') use of Orwellian euphemisms such as "harsh interrogation techniques." He calls torture "torture," and he stands against it.

McCain's opposition to torture was one area in which he previously had my respect. He chose to toss away that respect by reversing himself, supporting President Bush's veto of a measure to ban waterboarding by the CIA.

That was back in February, when McCain was still losing to Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee in Republican primaries. To beat them, he realized, he would need to put on his "Republican hat," and go along with the Bush administration's advocacy of waterboarding. McCain was willing to do that, even though, in his eyes, that required him to take off his "American hat," to set aside his convictions, and to endorse Bush's waterboarding policy.

It seems to me that McCain found that choice distasteful. The choice itself -- the fact that he would be forced to choose -- he found distasteful. But even more distasteful, I think, was the realization that he was willing to make it. That may have been, for McCain, the worst such occasion in which his ambition led him to reverse himself in pursuit of his party's nomination. But it was far from the only such occasion. One result, I think, is that this is how McCain has come to view his affiliation with his party -- as a kind of "hat" that one must sometimes wear instead of the "American hat."

This exchanging of hats carries echoes of an earlier exchange -- the one that launched, and perhaps shaped, McCain's political career. McCain recently spoke of that exchange as "my greatest moral failure." Another choice on the side of ambition and another choice he views, perhaps, with distaste.

Distaste, but not regret. He's not comfortable with those choices, but without them he wouldn't be where he is today and he very much wants to be where he is today. So John McCain, I think, resents the Republican hat. But he'll still put it on when he has to if he thinks it'll help him get where he wants to be.

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

* The ostentatious self-congratulation has been delegated to McCain's campaign manager Rick Davis, who clumsily fails to realize that one can't claim credit for not politicizing a potential tragedy by jumping up and down and shouting "Look at me! Look at me! See how I'm not politicizing the tragedy? Aren't I noble? Tell all your friends about how I'm not seeking credit at all, just selflessly doing the right thing!"

L.B.: Vertigo's on First

2008-08-29T17:21:09-04:00

Left Behind, pp. 461-465

In the seven pages remaining in this book there are six phone conversations, some pager and intercom action, a cab ride, another New York-Chicago flight, and the introduction of a new character who dominates a few pages, turns out not to matter much and goes away without affecting the story.

This last is Det. Sgt. Billy Cenni of New York's finest. He is unnamed when we first meet him, just one of the indeterminate number of police and/or "security" to arrive in the U.N. conference room where Jonathan Stonagal and Global Viceregent and Emperor of Britannia Todd-Cothran are lying dead from a single bullet.

A plainclothesman asked questions. Buck headed him off. "You have enough eyewitnesses here. Let me leave you my card and you can call if you need me, hm?" The cop traded cards with him and Buck was permitted to leave.

To recap: Stonagal and T-C tried to have Buck killed. He was forced to fake his own death, racing across continents incognito to escape with his life. One week later, he encounters these men face to face for the first time. This meeting occurs behind closed doors and it ends with both of his enemies dead. No reason to keep Buck around for questioning then, hm?

So the world's worst police detective is letting people leave the scene of the crime and thus the world's worst reporter is able to flee from a still-unfolding story. The authors then provide a more detailed look at Buck's journalistic M.O.:

Buck grabbed his bag and sprinted for a cab, rushing back to the office. He shut and locked his office door and began furiously banging out every detail of the story.

Based on this scene, here are some of the GIRAT's tips for all you young reporters out there:

1. If you see news happening, run away as fast as possible.

2. Don't talk to anyone.

3. Don't take notes or record anything. It's OK to carry around a big tape recorder, just make sure you never use it.*

4. Write in an otherwise empty, locked room without consulting notes. The whole story should exist only in your head -- that's where news comes from.

It's not clear why Buck is in such a hurry here. He's scurrying around like he works for WGW newsradio and he needs to air this story ASAP as a breaking news bulletin. But he actually works for Global Weekly, a magazine with a languid lead time and no way of publishing a fast-breaking story. In any case, Buck's furious banging is interrupted by a phone call, the account of which begins with what may be the five least plausible words in this book:

He had produced several pages when he received a call from Stanton Bailey. The old man could hardly catch his breath between his demanding questions, not allowing Buck to answer.
"Where have you been? Why weren't you at the press conference? Were you in there when Stonagal offed himself and took the Brit with him? You should have been here. ..."

Statement! Two all. Game point. ...

" ... There's prestige for us having you in there. How are you going to convince anybody you were in there when you didn't show up for the press conference? Cameron, what's the deal?

There's a bit of a sequence-of-events problem here. Bailey is upset and asking about things he doesn't know yet.

By the end of this chapter, Stanton Bailey will have talked to Steve Plank and to several U.N. officials and police/security officers who have all been mind-whammied into believing that Buck wasn't "in there when Stonagal offed himself." So eventually, after talking to those people, Bailey ought to be angrily demanding answers from his star reporter. But as far as he knows at this point, Buck was in the earlier meeting. Instead of asking the kinds of questions that would entail ("Are you alright?" "What did you see?") Bailey seems to have already moved on to the kinds of questions he will want to be asking later, such as "How are you going to convince anybody you were in there?"

It's not that hard to imagine reasons why Buck might have skipped the press conference. He might have been busily interviewing the other people with him in the room when the supposed suicide/murder took place. He might have tracked down an interview with Mrs. Todd-Cothran. There are dozens of different ways he might have been racing to move the story forward while his colleagues were all playing catch up at the press conference, scrambling to get the second-hand version of the story Buck just witnessed first-hand.

Once Bailey learned Buck hadn't been doing any of those things, either, then he might be upset that Buck had missed the press conference, but instead he jumps right in with this "Why weren't you there?" questioning because -- like the authors -- he knows ahead of time where this chapter is headed.

That this press conference has already taken place is also remarkable. The police apparently have already finished their investigation of the crime scene, completing their interviews with more than a dozen eerily repetitive and obviously rehearsed eyewitnesses,** wrapping up everything so tidily and quickly that Nicolae was free to go ahead with his presser on schedule, pronouncing his evidently brief RBO and ordering the newly designed flags of the new One World Government to be flown at half-staff while he takes advantage of the paid bereavement leave outlined in the OWG Personnel Handbook. And all of that took place in the time it took Buck to rush back to the office and type up a few pages.

"I hurried back here to get the story into the system," Buck explains. He didn't have time to finish getting the story because he was too busy already writing it. Bailey doesn't care about the story, as he's already said, he's concerned with "prestige":

"Don't you have an exclusive with Carpathia now?"

Yes, it's another post-press conference "exclusive." Buck is a master at lining up these exclusive interviews right after his interviewees have answered questions from the entire press corps, Nightline and People magazine.

Buck had forgotten that, and Plank hadn't reconfirmed it. What was he supposed to do about that? He prayed but sensed no leading. How he needed to talk to Bruce or Chloe or even Captain Steele! "I'll call Steve and see," he said.

Buck has been a born-again RTC for less than half a day but he's already completely absorbed the native idiom. "He prayed but sensed no leading" conveys a raft of beliefs about the meaning, nature and practice of prayer that Buck shouldn't have any experience with or knowledge of. Yet as soon as the "transaction" occurs, the moment he is saved, he emerges full-grown with all of the cultural tics and learned piety of someone who had lived for decades in a particular kind of evangelical church.

That particular kind of evangelical church no longer exists in the world of Left Behind. It was whisked off the planet along with nearly every person who spoke its lingo and adhered to its forms of piety. Yet whenever anyone in this post-Rapture world converts, they instantly begin talking about "sensing the Lord's leading." The specific shape and form of piety in this one culture seems to be for the authors inextricably and indistinguishably intermixed with the meaning and substance of the gospel. They seem unable to imagine a Christian who does not pray, worship and speak exactly as they do.

There's a reason that Pentecost and the Great Commission are emphatically cross-cultural. If everyone you know who shares your faith also shares your culture then you end up with no way of knowing which is which, no way of knowing where the one stops and the other begins, no way of knowing the ways in which they have or haven't been allowed to influence one another.

Anyway, Buck is understandably not relishing the idea of a one-on-one session with the man he just watched kill two people and then brainwash a dozen others:

Should he allow himself to be in a room alone with Carpathia? And if he did, should he pretend to be under his mind control as everyone else seemed to be? ... Would he always be able to resist the influence with God's help? He didn't know.

So Buck calls Steve (actually, he calls Steve's pager and then Steve calls him back, just to get a little more telephony into the story) and asks whether or not the interview is still on. Here we arrive at the part of the story that Stanton Bailey already seems to have known:

"You heard what happened and you want an exclusive?"
"Heard? I was there, Steve."

"Well, if you were here, then you probably know what happened before the press conference."

"Steve! I saw it with my own eyes."

"You're not following me, Buck. I'm saying if you were here for the press conference, you heard about the Stonagal suicide in the preliminary meeting, the one you were supposed to come to."

Buck didn't know what to say. "You saw me there, Steve."

"I didn't even see you at the press conference."

"I wasn't at the press conference, Steve, but I was in the room when Stonagal and Todd-Cothran died."

"I don't have time for this, Buck. It's not funny. ..."

The problem is that it is funny. Jenkins is shooting for a frightening sense of bewildering disorientation -- something like the prose equivalent of Bernard Hermann's score for Vertigo -- but he ends up with something more along the lines of "Who's on First?"

The authors themselves seem far more disoriented than Buck does. Granted, this section calls for a tricky bit of writing -- conveying that two characters hold such wholly unreconcilable perceptions that they are scarcely able to communicate. But it takes Buck a bit too long to figure out what everyone is telling him, and even then he doesn't offer much in his own defense:

Steve hung up on him. Marge buzzed and said the boss was on the line again. "What's the deal with you not even going to that meeting?" Bailey said.
"I was there! You saw me go in!"

"Yeah, I saw you. You were that close. What did you do, find something more important to do? You got some fast talking to do, Cameron!"

"I'm telling you I was there! I'll show you my credentials."

"I just checked the credential list, and you're not on it."

"Of course I'm on it. I'll show 'em to you."

"Your name's there, I'm saying, but it's not checked off."

"Mr. Bailey, I'm looking at my credentials right now. They're in my hand."

"Your credentials don't mean dirt if you didn't use 'em, Cameron."

This business with the credentials is beside the point. Say you're arguing with a friend who doubts you actually went to a concert or a ballgame. You wouldn't bother showing her the tickets as proof because, as Bailey points out, your having the tickets wouldn't prove you actually used them. So instead you would try to convince your friend by telling her what you saw at the concert or the game -- things you couldn't have seen if you hadn't actually been there. Buck never does this, so Bailey keeps at him:

"I just talked to three, four people who were there, including a U.N. guard and Carpathia's personal assistant, not to mention Plank. None of them saw you, you weren't there."

By this point Buck is so caught up in the Duck-Season/Rabbit-Season back and forth over whether or not he was actually at the meeting that he completely misses the repercussions of what Stanton Bailey is telling him: Everyone else who was in that room has been mind-whammied into believing that Buck was never there.

And it's not just Steve, Hattie and the others from the room. It's bigger and more widespread than that:

"A cop saw me!" Buck insists to his boss. "We traded cards!"

He decides to track down Det. Sgt. Billy Cenni -- he'll vouch that Buck was really there. That'll show 'em.

So he calls the precinct and asks for Cenni. He tries multiple pronunciations. He spells the name out for them. He has them look in the directory for the entire department. This is recounted in a page and a half of unwelcome detail, finally arriving at this:

"Personnel says there is nobody in the New York Police Department named Cenni, and there never has been."

And that, in turn, leads Buck to this astonishingly dim conclusion:

All Buck could do now was try to convince Stanton Bailey.

Yeah, because that's what's important here -- that he "convince Stanton Bailey" that he was really in the room.

Buck has just learned that the Antichrist has singled him out, brainwashing dozens of others into forgetting that he had ever been there. Why would he have wiped out every trace of Buck's presence unless he had come to suspect that Buck was onto his secret? When Buck left that room, he was sure that Nicolae had believed that he had been successfully reprogrammed, but now that Nicolae has chosen to mind-whammy him right out of the picture it would seem that, somehow, the Antichrist had figured out that Buck hadn't been fooled. And now Nicolae apparently has henchmen posing as police. Who knows where else they may have infiltrated. Nicolae's spies could be anywhere. They could be everywhere.

That all sounds a bit paranoid, of course, but a bit of paranoia would seem to be called for when one is dealing with the Antichrist, a massive conspiracy and mysterious strangers passing themselves off as the cops. Yet, weirdly, Buck never entertains any such thoughts. Nor does he consider their flipside -- that maybe he is just being paranoid, or maybe he really is losing it.

With all that Buck has just seen and heard, it would seem reasonable for him to question whether or not he was still reasonable. He ought to at least consider the possibility that he's losing his mind.

This would be, at this point, a plausible and rational hypothesis. The entire world seems to be bearing witness to a version of events that contradicts what he believes he has just seen and heard. That seems to leave two possibilities: Either everyone else has gone mad and he alone has kept his sanity, or else the other way around. The latter possibility is simpler, and thus likelier,*** so it at least ought to be considered as a possibility.

Yet neither Buck nor the authors give this likely possibility a second thought. And because they never give it serious consideration, they never definitively rule it out. By refusing even the slightest doubts about his own sanity, Buck comes across as insanely confident in his own certainty. This, sadly, is what the authors apparently think it means to have "faith."

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

* Seriously, Buck had his bag with the tape recorder in it right there in the room where Nicolae was working his mojo. The authors had him leave it, unused, in the corner. Thousands of different plot possibilities would arise from having had Buck surreptitiously tape-recording the entire murder and mojo and every one of those possibilities would have been much, much cooler than leaving the @%#$ bag unused and untouched in the corner of the room.

** Between the implausibly similar and practiced accounts of these witnesses and the unlikely description of the crime itself -- with the elderly Stonagal racing around the room faster than the able-bodied T-C could move to safety -- the detectives' BS-meter should be spiking in the red. Nicolae, of course, must have worked his mojo on these investigators, otherwise, by the twelfth rendition of the witnesses' identical account, they'd have to be suspecting some kind of Orient Express conspiracy in which everyone in the room was somehow complicit in the deaths of these two men.

*** It'd be fun to rework the whole book in a Shutter Island/"Normal Again" vein, with Nicolae Carpathia turning out to be Buck/Rayford's psychologist desperately working to save him ...

Painted Desert to Palo Alto

2008-08-29T08:16:00-04:00

You pay no attention but it won't hurt your grades ...

"The Painted Desert," 10,000 Maniacs
"Painted Moon," The Silencers
"Painter Song," Norah Jones
"Painting by Numbers," James McMurtry
"Pair of Brown Eyes," Peter Case
"Pair of Brown Eyes," The Pogues
"Paisley Park," Prince
"Pale Blue Eyes," Alejandro Escovedo
"Pale Blue Eyes," R.E.M.
"Pale Blue Eyes," Velvet Underground
"Palo Alto," Radiohead

Favorite teachers

2008-08-29T00:03:49-04:00

(I wrote the following before watching Barack Obama's convention speech, so there aren't any specific references to that speech here but, wow, there really probably should be.)

Rick Perlstein recalls a famous anecdote about Adlai Stevenson and explains why it illustrates a dead end for Democrats:

Adlai Stevenson, the Democratic presidential candidate in 1952 and '56, famously quipped when one of his supporters, overflowing with exuberance after one of his speeches, cried, "Governor Stevenson, you'll have the vote of every thinking American!" Stevenson replied: "But I need a majority."
Techically, a true thing to say. But politically, so very, very wrong. In wryly congratuling himself and his audience for comprising some sort of superior intellectual elect, he was calling everyone who didn't like Adlai Stevenson an idiot. And no one likes to hear that they are an idiot. Especially if they are, in fact, an idiot.

Accusing your opponents and their supporters of being idiots is not an effective electoral strategy. Most candidates have figured that out -- although, as Al Gore discovered in his debates with George W. Bush, it can be hard not to treat your opponent as an idiot when he's playing the part with such enthusiasm.

The bigger problem for Democrats nowadays is that no matter how careful they are not to display a Stevensonian condescension, they'll end up being accused of it anyway. Gore and Kerry were accused of "elitism" not because they acted like elitists, but because accusing Democrats of elitism is a standard tactic employed by Republican campaigns. The Democrats could nominate Archie Bunker or some Capra-esque Everyman and their nominee would still be accused of elitism. Whether or not the Democratic candidate treats voters as though they were unenlightened idiots in need of re-education, they will be accused of doing so. And, as Perlstein points out, if that accusation sticks they will lose.

Related to this is what we could call the Smartest Guy in the Room dilemma. Nobody likes the Smartest Guy in the Room. Nobody likes to be lectured. Gore, God bless him, has always had a problem with this. He strikes a lot of people as a very smart college professor giving a lecture and that rubs them the wrong way. Even when they have to acknowledge that he really is a very smart guy. Even when they have to acknowledge that his lectures are, inconveniently, true and urgent and even necessary. They end up resenting him for being right rather than admiring him for it.

Which brings us to Barack Obama. He's clearly a very smart man and he has actually worked as a bona fide college professor. Does this mean he's doomed as a candidate to have his intelligence used against him?

We'll get back to Barack Obama in a minute, but first let me tell you about Mrs. Mog.

Mrs. Mog was my favorite teacher in school. I had plenty of good teachers, many of whom probably knew their stuff better than Mrs. Mog did, but I still got more out of her classes than out of any of those others.

And that wasn't just true for me, she was everybody's favorite teacher. We all loved Mrs. Mog for one very simple reason: We knew that she loved us. As a result, she never had to waste class time on discipline or playing traffic cop. None of us wanted to disappoint her by causing trouble. And we all worked hard to learn the middle school Social Studies curriculum she taught us -- the states and capitals, how a bill becomes a law, how Lenni Lenape longhouses were built -- but none of that was the most important thing we learned in her class. The most important thing that Mrs. Mog taught us was that we could do anything.

Mrs. Mog believed that we were capable of being better, of being good, of being great. And because she believed it, she made us believe it too. She made us want to be better, good, great. We wanted to become the people she seemed to see when she looked at us, and thanks to her we believed we could.

If you're very lucky, then maybe you had a teacher like that too. I hope you did.

The point here, of course, is that Mrs. Mog made all of us, each of us, feel like we were the Smartest Guys in the Room. Whether or not we deserved it, whether or not it was true, she made us believe that it could be true, which led us all to try to make it true -- or, at least, to make it closer to true than it had been before. And she didn't do this through shallow flattery -- we'd have seen through that. She did this by challenging us and inspiring us to meet that challenge.

I'm guessing you see where I'm going with this.

At his best, Barack Obama is a lot more like Mrs. Mog than he is like Adlai Stevenson. That's why, if he continues to be at his best, Barack Obama makes it very difficult for his myriad opponents to brand him as a condescending elitist.

It's become fashionable -- particularly among a certain kind of Stevensonian elite -- to dismiss Obama's oratory and rhetoric as, by definition, insubstantial. The implication, often explicit, is that his audiences are rubes, idiots spellbound by a lot of pretty talk. But it is precisely the substance, not the style, of Obama's oratory that has been winning over his audiences. That substance is egalitarian, democratic, inclusive and aspirational -- precisely the opposite of elitist or condescending.

At his best, in other words, Barack Obama doesn't come across as a college professor lecturing voters, but as the kind of teacher who makes the class want to be better, to be good, to be great, and to believe that such a thing is possible.

That's the kind of teacher you want your kids to have. That's the kind of candidate you want your party to have. That's the kind of president you want your country to have.

1989: A reminder

2008-08-27T08:41:16-04:00

Did John McCain sleep through 1989? Was he on some kind of yearlong bender? Maybe he was just really busy clearing up after that Keating affair.

In any case, John McCain doesn't remember 1989. That means he's forgotten some of the most unforgettable moments in the 20th century. And having forgotten them, or having somehow, incredibly, missed them entirely, John McCain is unable to understand what happened and why.

Instead, McCain tries to rewrite history as though 1989 never happened. And from this foolish and fictional history, he draws some foolish and fictional lessons. Here is John McCain speaking yesterday at a gathering of the American Legion:

My opponent had the chance to express such confidence in America, when he delivered a much anticipated address in Berlin. ... And in that speech, Senator Obama left an important point unclear. He suggested that the end of the Cold War proved that there was, "no challenge too great for a world that stands as one." ... As I recall the world was deeply divided during the Cold War -- between the side of freedom and the side of tyranny. The Cold War ended not because the world stood "as one," but because the great democracies came together, bound together by sustained and decisive American leadership.

To McCain, apparently, talk of unity is wimpy weakness. To McCain, strength comes from division. To McCain, America can't be strong with people from other countries, we can only be strong against them. McCain's notion of America's strength and purpose seems to be a paraphrase of President Eisenhower's notion of civil religion: "Our government makes no sense unless it is founded in a deeply felt opposition to an enemy -- and I don't care what it is."

McCain's speech is such nonsense that he can't help contradicting himself within six words. Here he is again:

... not because the world stood "as one," but because the great democracies came together ...

So, um, I guess the great democracies came together but not as one. Or something.

Anyway, since John McCain doesn't seem to remember 1989 and the end of the Cold War and the inspiring, iconic images of that world-changing year, here are some pictures for his benefit. Let's start with this one, from Prague:

A sane person might view this as a picture of the people of the former Czechoslovakia standing as one. John McCain apparently views this as a bunch of foreigners surrendering to decisive American leadership.

How about Bucharest?

Sane person sees: Romanian citizens helping to end the Cold War by standing as one.

John McCain sees: People lining up to send a Thank You card to John McCain and the American Legion for their standing firmly together (though not as one) against namby-pamby talk of unity.

Ditto for these good people of Hungary:

And for these people in Berlin:

I could go on. And on, and on. 1989 was quite a year.

All of those people in all of those pictures were risking their lives, but they took that risk because they believed that if they stood together -- "as one," even -- then no challenge was too great for them.

But John McCain thinks it's wrong to give them any credit for that. He thinks it's wrong -- un-American -- to give them any credit for their courage in coming together to claim their freedom. After all, McCain argues, America and the "great democracies" had stood for decades against the Soviet Union and that proud history mustn't be forced to share the stage with anyone else's proud history. America and its allies alone deserve credit and praise. To suggest that any of that credit or praise be shared with the people in the pictures above, McCain says, is to be "unclear" on an "important point."

I just don't get where McCain is coming from here. I mean, I recognize it, of course -- we've all seen this same attitude from bullies and abusers and other emotionally warped and soulless types who confuse love and chauvinism. But I don't get it.

How is it possible to look at pictures like the ones above and not be inspired?

More than that, how is it possible to look at those pictures and resent those people -- to view them as insufficiently grateful or as trying to steal the glory you feel is your due and yours alone?

What exactly is wrong with John McCain? Because some vital part seems to be missing. Or dead.

Bankruptcy bill? What bankruptcy bill?

2008-08-24T20:24:36-04:00

The paper has risen to the challenge of the first local son on a national ticket with ambitious, wall-to-wall coverage of all things Biden.

This comprehensive coverage is much like the senator himself -- it's impressive, smart, sometimes witty, knowledgeable and enriched by experience. And it just goes on and on and on.

Unfortunately, like the senator himself, this coverage is also shaped by the culture of Wilmington, Del., a company town once ruled by Nylon and now ruled by plastic. The senator and the paper both seem to share a blind spot when it comes to the credit-card moneylenders who run this company town, and thus the glaring weak spot in the paper's otherwise comprehensive coverage is that it never mentions the glaring weak spot in the senator himself: His leading role in support of the disastrously unwise and immoral bankruptcy bill of 2005.

That legislation was an attempt by the credit card industry to create a legal magic-bullet solution to its irresponsible business practices. The moneylenders are overexposed -- they've made billions in unsecured, uncollateralized loans with scarcely a second glance. A great deal of that money -- nobody has yet calculated exactly how much -- cannot and will not be repaid. So the moneylenders hoped that maybe they could legislate blood from a stone. Having lent billions to people who simply did not have the money to pay them back, they hoped that they could pass a law requiring people to pay them back. Where the money was supposed to come from wasn't clear, and the whole exercise reeked of desperation, but the credit card industry greased the skids with enough campaign contributions to get this absurd measure through the Senate and signed into law.

Since then, we've had the subprime mortgage meltdown. That situation was exacerbated by the 2005 bankruptcy law. That law mandated that debt-ridden households try to pay off their credit card debts and fees first, before trying to pay off their exploding ARMs and NINJA housing loans. The result, predictably, has been quarter after quarter of record-breaking foreclosure rates.

The bankruptcy law forestalled, but could not prevent, the other coming meltdown: the massive write-offs by the credit-card lenders. They bought themselves some time, a few additional years to fatten themselves on fees and interest from the principal of loans they'll never be able to collect, but the end result remains as inevitable as gravity. Billions of dollars of irresponsible loans cannot be turned into good loans by legislative fiat.

The mitigating factor here for Joe Biden -- and for his colleagues in Delaware's bipartisan congressional delegation, Sen. Tom Carper and Rep. Mike Castle -- is that Wilmington really is a company town. Credit-card lender MBNA used to be the largest private employer in the state of Delaware with other moneylenders rounding out the lists of the top 10 and top 20 employers. The delegation's support for the bankruptcy bill was thus typical of the kind of hometown support for bad legislation that is often seen on behalf of a state's or region's largest employers.

The problem with such support for bad legislation, of course, is that bad legislation doesn't actually help those large employers or the people who work for them. (How's that opposition to CAFE standards working out for GM?) Shortly after the bankruptcy bill was signed into law, MBNA was bought out by Bank of America and lots of Delawareans lost their jobs.

On behalf of both the senator and the paper, I'm willing to take the charitable view, believing that their respective advocacy for and silence on the bankruptcy bill had to do with MBNA's status as the state's largest employer rather than with its status as a top political contributor/advertiser. But even from that charitable perspective, I can't say that either the senator or the paper did the people of Delaware any good on this issue. No wonder both of them are still pretending that this sad affair never even happened.

L.B.: The Talking Dog

2008-08-22T20:14:27-04:00

Left Behind, 459-461

"Thank you gentlemen," Nicolae Carpathia says, after mind-whammying a room full of dignitaries into thinking that the double-homicide they all just saw him commit was actually a suicide/murder committed by one of his victims.

"While Ms. Durham phones security, I will be polling you for your version of what happened here."

This doesn't seem like a smart move on Nicolae's part.

Imagine, for example, that you have gone to see a carnival show just off the Midway at the County Fair. It was billed as a Talking Dog Act, so you went in with a skeptical attitude, expecting some kind of bad ventriloquism. Instead, you find yourself amazed by what you have just seen: a Labrador retriever reciting the Gettysburg Address. You're ready to jump out of your chair, to go tell everyone you know that they've got to come see this dog. It can really freakin' talk.

But the show isn't over yet. "Thank you, ladies and gentlemen," the M.C. says, "I will be polling you for your version of what happened here."

And as you're sitting there, trying to figure out why anyone might do such a thing, the M.C. begins working his way through the audience, one by one, asking each person to tell him what they just saw. And then you hear each person in turn repeating the same key words, almost reciting the same description of that amazing talking dog. It wouldn't take too long before you began to suspect, and then to realize and accept, the truth: This wasn't a Talking Dog Act at all, but rather a Hypnotist Act, and you all fell for it.

Similarly, Nicolae's one-by-one "polling" here would also have to seem suspiciously odd to everyone in the conference room. They might have fully accepted the false version of events that Nicolae implanted in their minds, but now, watching him scurrying around the room double-checking with everyone, they'd have to start to wonder why he's so worried that they all get their story straight.

Buck Williams has a unique vantage point for watching this unfold. He's there in the room, but he's got divine immunity from the mojo. Watching as Nicolae polls the others, Buck ought to be wondering what this means. Is Nicolae double-checking because he's not fully certain that his mind-whammy worked? Or is this one-by-one questioning itself the final part of the whammying process, like some kind of sealer-coat? Either way, Buck could be learning something here about the Antichrist's powers and how they function. Being Buck, of course, he doesn't wonder about any of that.

Meanwhile Hattie, as instructed, has gone to "phone security." This also seems odd in that "security" is already there. The security guard, I suppose, can't phone his colleagues himself because he has to wait for his turn to be "polled" by Nicolae. Hattie, being a weak and impressionable woman, doesn't need to get polled:

Hattie ran to the phone and could barely make herself understood in her hysteria. "Come quick! There's been a suicide and two men are dead! It was awful! Hurry!"

And then it's on with a page and a half of the one-by-one polling. The point of this slowly around the table business is to ratchet up the suspense as Buck worries what to say when Nicolae gets to him:

Buck's body felt like lead, knowing that Carpathia would eventually get to him and that he was the only one in the room not under Nicolae's hypnotic power. But what if Buck said so? Would he be killed next? Of course he would! He had to be. Could he lie? Should he?
He prayed desperately as Carpathia moved from man to man, making certain they had all seen what he wanted them to see and that they were sincerely convinced of it.

I can't imagine that either God or the Devil is pleased with the lack of faith displayed by their respective minions here. Nicolae seemed so confident a moment ago when he was sticking the gun into Stonagal's ear, but now he has to double- and triple-check, like he doesn't believe he's really the supernatural Prince of Lies. For his part, Buck seems to have forgotten that he once stood at ground zero, watching a nuclear war explode harmlessly over his head. Now he's petrified by the prospect of having to speak to a no-longer-armed Carpathia.

Silence, God seemed to impress upon Buck's heart. Not a word!
Buck was so grateful to feel the presence of God in the midst of this evil and mayhem that he was moved to tears. When Carpathia got to him Buck's cheeks were wet and he could not speak. He shook his head and held up a hand. "Awful, was it not, Cameron? The suicide that took Mr. Todd-Cothran with it?"

Buck could not speak and wouldn't have if he could. "You cared for and respected them both, Cameron, because you were unaware that they tried to have you killed in London." And Carpathia moved on to the guard.

So Buck is verklempt in the Spirit and thereby saved (pretty much the same thing that happens at some revival meetings). He escapes his dramatic confrontation with the enemy by crying wordlessly.

That dramatic confrontation fizzles in part because the authors weren't as concerned with Buck's question, "Would he be killed next?" as they were with the ones that followed it, "Could he lie? Should he?" The real dramatic tension in this scene, as far as the authors were concerned, had to do with the ethical dilemma of whether it's ever OK to lie, even to the Antichrist, even to save your own life or the lives of others.* The answer, as this scene demonstrates, is No. (A tearful silence that has the effect of deceiving Nicolae, however, is OK, so apparently lies of omission don't count.)

And then suddenly the cops arrive. I think. It's hard to say for sure, since Jenkins keeps interchangeably referring to them as "security." That's not a word we Americans usually use to refer to police officers, but here's Jenkins:

... security rushed into the room. Everyone talked at once as Carpathia retreated to a corner, sobbing over the loss of his friends. A plainclothesman asked questions ...

That plainclothesman is later confirmed to be a "detective sergeant" in the NYPD.

I'm not really certain how jurisdiction works at U.N. headquarters -- a place that's both part of New York City and yet also international territory. Jenkins doesn't seem sure how that jurisdiction works either and, unfortunately for him, he's the one writing this scene. Rather than doing any research into who would actually respond to this situation -- U.N. officials? New York's finest? the FBI? Blackwater? -- he just mumbles and fudges his way through, seeming to treat the U.N. as just another routine crime scene in an episode of Law and Order.

Then again, Jenkins didn't really have to research exactly how such jurisdictional matters are handled at the actual United Nations in the actual world we live in, because his story isn't set in this world. His story starts with a hastily rendered version of this world, but then he blows this world to smithereens. Twice. First there was The Event -- the disappearance of two billion people leaving behind a mystified, traumatized and childless planet. Then -- almost as sudden -- there was the offhanded creation of a One World Government and the imposition of a single currency, language and religion on all the world's people.

Maybe that explains the interchangeable use of "police" and "security" here -- the U.N./OWG security force has already merged with the NYPD as part of Nicolae Carpathia's global army. But if that's the case, why does the god-emperor of all the world need to bother with the fake sobbing, putting on a show to keep the cops off his trail?

Buck departs just as the police arrive, but before he goes, let's just consider the scenario we're faced with here on page 461: A shot rings out at U.N. headquarters. Two powerful men are found dead in an apparent, if logistically unlikely, suicide/murder. A New York City detective arrives ...

That ought to be a great story. I'd want to read that story. It promises mystery, excitement and international intrigue.

Yet in the hands of LaHaye and Jenkins, this scenario produces none of these. They've accomplished something truly remarkable here. By adding the Antichrist and the End of the World into the mix, they've made their story less interesting than it otherwise might have been.

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

* To appreciate the full dynamic here one needs to understand the role that the phrase "situational ethics" plays in the evangelical subculture of L&J's target audience. Situational ethics is a frequently invoked but vaguely defined bogeyman, entailing roughly the opposite of "moral absolutes" (which is itself a frequently invoked by vaguely defined concept). To believe in situational ethics, in this subculture, entails believing that there isn't really any such thing as right or wrong, true or false. It means being groundless, godless and "relativistic" (a closely related bogeyman). Having Buck lie to the Antichrist would seem to the authors to be an endorsement of "situational ethics" and therefore the equivalent of saying that there is no God and the Bible is nothing more than a collection of fairy tales, etc., etc. L&J are likely remembering the controversy that surrounded The Hiding Place. That movie told the true story of a family of righteous gentiles in occupied Holland who -- gasp! -- sometimes lied to the Nazis to protect the Jews they were rescuing. OMG! Situational ethics!

On and On

2008-08-22T12:01:15-04:00

No, this is how it works ...

"On," The Delays
"On an Evening," Martin Crane
"On Hyndford Street," Van Morrison
"On My Street," Hoodoo Gurus
"On My Way," Mavis Staples
"On the Avenue," Aztec Camera
"On the Bus Mall," The Decemberists
"On the Evening Train," Johnny Cash
"On the Fritz," Steve Taylor
"On the Radio," Regina Spektor
"On the Verge," Vigilantes of Love
"On Your Side," Pete Yorn

Steve Taylor also made another video for "On the Fritz" for a live album 10 years later, but the link in the list above features the original with the '80s perm and clownsuit.

Saddleback

2008-08-19T17:28:46-04:00

Barry Lynn doesn't think Barack Obama should have agreed to appear at the presidential forum hosted by Rick Warren's Saddleback Church on Saturday. Lynn argues that the evangelical megachurch was GOP home turf and thus the whole thing was a trap and a set-up the Democratic candidate should have avoided. Lynn thinks Warren's questions for the two candidates were biased and full of Republican talking points.

Alan Wolfe, on the other hand, points out that Warren's church forum didn't offer nearly as many biased questions and GOP talking points as the average CNN panel or that god-awful Charlie Gibson debacle on ABC a few months back.

But I will concede part of Lynn's point: Rick Warren was bound to ask certain questions framed to have a right answer and a wrong answer. The answers he knew John McCain would give would be the right answers and the answers he knew Barack Obama would give would be the wrong answers. But Lynn is wrong to consider that a trap. It's an opportunity.

The big question of this forum, of course, is the litmus-test question that has overshadowed all others for evangelical voters over the past 30 years: legal abortion. Lynn thinks the big news coming out of the forum was that the megachurch audience cheered wildly when John McCain gave the "right" answer to this question. But the bigger news was that the audience didn't boo when Barack Obama gave the "wrong" answer.

Part of the issue here, as Noam Scheiber points out, is that McCain had nothing to gain from telling this audience what they expected him to say. He drew some praise from audience members for answering this question so quickly and "decisively." But everyone knew what was really going on. John McCain was being quizzed on the Republican catechism. He was able to provide the correct answers, but he did so with all the conviction of a student who had memorized those answers by rote.

And what about Barack Obama? The Democratic senator wasn't there to try to win evangelical votes by touting his support for abortion rights. Nor was he there hoping to persuade them to change their minds on that question. What he did instead was this: He disagreed with them. Here was a man, not a monster, respectfully disagreeing with them. He seemed reasonable, thoughtful. He was familiar with the scriptures and with the language of church people -- familiar as in family. And yet he disagreed with them.

Hunh. Imagine that. Devout members of the family supposedly never disagreed on this. The people who disagreed were supposedly never reasonable or thoughtful. The people who disagreed were supposedly monsters. This guy was none of that. I wonder if that means ...

That's it. That's all he could hope to accomplish there, before this audience, when he knew that he'd be confronted with this question. And that's what I think he did accomplish. Not bad for a Saturday evening.

The bottom line was that John McCain went to Saddleback to try to get white evangelical voters to like him; Barack Obama went to Saddleback to show white evangelical voters that he liked them. I think they both succeeded. As such, I think McCain achieved something easy and Obama achieved something important.

Band of outlaws

2008-08-19T15:15:53-04:00

“To abolish God!” said Gregory, opening the eyes of a fanatic. “We do not only want to upset a few despotisms and police regulations; that sort of anarchism does exist, but it is a mere branch of the Nonconformists. We dig deeper and we blow you higher. We wish to deny all those arbitrary distinctions of vice and virtue, honour and treachery, upon which mere rebels base themselves. The silly sentimentalists of the French Revolution talked of the Rights of Man! We hate Rights as we hate Wrongs. We have abolished Right and Wrong.”
--- The Man Who Was Thursday, by G.K. Chesterton

Ron Suskind describes one of several smoking guns presented in his latest book, The Way of the World:

In the fall of 2003, after the world learned there were no WMD ... the White House ordered the CIA to carry out a deception. The mission: create a handwritten letter, dated July, 2001, from [former Iraq Intelligence Chief Tahir Jalil Habbush] to Saddam saying that Atta trained in Iraq before the attacks and the Saddam was buying yellow cake for Niger with help from a "small team from the al-Qaida organization."
The mission was carried out, the letter was created, popped up in Baghdad, and roiled the global newcycles in December, 2003 (conning even venerable journalists like Tom Brokaw). The mission is a statutory violation of the charter of the CIA, and amendments added in 1991, prohibiting the CIA from conducting disinformation campaigns on U.S. soil.

Well, yeah, that was illegal, and exactly the kind of high crime the founders had in mind when they invented impeachment. So normally, in a healthier democracy, that would be a big deal. But ours isn't a healthy democracy, and the Bush administration has committed -- and admitted -- so many of those that one more hardly seems like news. This is a president, after all, who brags about warrantless wiretapping on American citizens.

So, yes, if you're still thinking that laws and the Constitution and conventional morality somehow still apply to this bunch, then you should check out Suskind's book for a fine summary of the prosecution's slam-dunk case for impeachment.

But that's not my main point here. My complaint here is slightly different: This particular crime, this forged letter and disinformation campaign conducted against the American people, was too late to do any good. Manufacturing a pretext for war only works if it's done before the invasion occurs.

I'm not saying I approve of this kind of criminal deception. It's sleazy, illegal and just plain wrong. Manufacturing a false pretext for war is Very Bad. It is only done when the war in question doesn't have an actual pretext, which is to say when the war was not actually necessary. So we're talking about making up lies to excuse sending young people to kill and die when they didn't need to do either. Very, Very Bad.

But it's not the worst alternative. The worst alternative is what the Bush administration chose to do instead: Assert it's right to go to war without a pretext. The former is the action of an outlaw government. The latter is the action of a lawless government. If forced to choose, I'll take the outlaw over the the lawless every time. Neither choice is good, but we'd still be better off being governed by people who break the law than by people who glibly dismiss the very idea of law itself.

When it came to the invasion and occupation of Iraq, the Bush administration took an approach somewhere in between these two Very Bad options of law-breaking and law-abolishing. They manufactured a pretext (several, in fact, some of them contradictory) but they didn't really put much effort into it. They were intent on breaking the law, but they didn't much care whether or not they got caught.

Thus we saw poor Colin Powell disgracing himself at the U.N. with white powder from the prop room, drawings of WMD and mistranslated radio intercepts. Powell himself called that PowerPoint presentation "bullshit," and no one in the room that day found it persuasive. (It dazzled the wide-eyed rubes at The Washington Post editorial board, but that's not much of an achievement.) The whole effort seemed like the kind of last-minute, half-baked work done by a lazy, careless student. It was just barely enough to provide a fig leaf for members of Congress who had already decided that war would be really, really neat, but for the most part the Bush administration just didn't seem to care whether or not their false pretexts really seemed credible. They weren't so much trying to get away with breaking the law as they were trying to demonstrate that, in their view, the law didn't apply to them.

That was even clearer when it came to the discussion of whether or not the proposed invasion of Iraq was a just war. This was an entirely one-sided discussion. No one who looked at the argument for invasion was able to reconcile this with the jus ad bello criteria of that tradition. So how did the Bush administration -- and their many surrogate pundits -- respond to this criticism? They didn't. An outlaw government might have lied, making up reasons why the invasion was justifiable, but this lawless government didn't bother to do even that. The invasion would not be a just war said everyone from John Paul II to the faculty of the war college and the administration's response was not to argue that it was, but to say, in essence, "Just war tradition? F--- that."

In that case, at least, they weren't abolishing an actual law. The just war tradition is only that, a tradition. It isn't written into the Constitution, nor was it ratified as the law of the land in any of the treaties upholding international law (though it does parallel much of that international law). But it does provide another glimpse of the Bush administration's tendency to claim that ignoring the rules -- whether they be moral traditions or legally binding statutes -- is their prerogative.

All of which is why I found it weirdly encouraging, almost, to read Seymour Hersh's description of an idea being kicked around in a brainstorming session in Vice President Dick Cheney's office:

HERSH: There was a dozen ideas proffered about how to trigger a war [with Iran]. The one that interested me the most was why don’t we build — we in our shipyard — build four or five boats that look like Iranian PT boats. Put Navy seals on them with a lot of arms. And next time one of our boats goes to the Straits of Hormuz, start a shoot-up. Might cost some lives.
And it was rejected because you can’t have Americans killing Americans. That’s the kind of — that’s the level of stuff we’re talking about. Provocation. But that was rejected.

I'm glad this Tonkinesque scheme was rejected, but I was pleasantly surprised to learn that such a thing was even being considered. This silly false-flag operation was to have been carried out with the explicit purpose of deceiving the American people and the Congress -- all of which would have been illegal. But that's what I find hopeful here: They're thinking like mere criminals again, like outlaws.

All of that, again, is Very Bad, but not as bad as the alternative of claiming that the law does not apply to them, that the law does not matter, that it can be not just broken, but ignored with impunity. The Bush administration seems to have backed away, slightly, from its agenda of abolishing the rule of law and to have gone back to merely trying to break the law without getting caught. That's progress.

Sort of.

Not stopping for directions

2008-08-19T07:45:12-04:00

Fred Clark

L.B.: Reliably unreliable

2008-08-15T18:02:55-04:00

Left Behind, pp. 458-461

From the outset of this series -- and many times throughout -- we've discussed the question of whether our point-of-view protagonists should be considered unreliable narrators.

Neither of them is reliable, obviously. That's clear from the very first chapter of the book in which Rayford Steele and Buck Williams take turns congratulating themselves for things of which they ought to be ashamed. Nearly every adjective these characters apply to themselves is inaccurate. Nearly everything they say or think about themselves is immediately thereafter contradicted by their actions. Their perception is all readers have to go on in Left Behind, yet it's clear that their perception -- of themselves, of the events unfolding around them and their meaning -- cannot be trusted.

Yet neither of them is an unreliable narrator, either -- at least not in the intentional, literary sense. The authors intend for the characters' accounts to be wholly trustworthy, but neither these characters nor these authors are capable of providing that. Buck and Rayford think of themselves as good and heroic, and the authors share and approve of this opinion, even as both characters behave horrifically, disregarding the needs, the safety, even the humanity of everyone around them.

This is partly due to Rayford's and Buck's "Mary Sue" function as the wish-fulfillment surrogates of the authors, but it goes beyond the usual inflated egoism and self-indulgence of Mary-Sue-ism. The problem isn't simply that the characters are unrealistically good or heroic, or that they conceive of themselves as good and heroic when they really aren't. The problem seems to be that neither the characters nor the authors really understands what things like good and heroic mean.

All of that makes for a confusing reading experience. We readers might be able to handle an unreliable narrator, but an unreliable author goes too far. We are left with no one to trust, no place to stand. We feel a bit like Buck does here, forced to doubt his own senses and to distrust and disbelieve what everyone is telling him:

Buck fought within himself to keep his sanity, to maintain a clear mind, to -- as his boss had told him on the way in -- "remember everything."

We readers come to this novel with certain expectations. We expect that it will tell us a story -- a coherent narrative that makes sense. Those expectations are so habitual and fundamental to our experience of reading novels that it can take us a long time to accept that such expectations are really being thoroughly frustrated. That's why it took me a very long time -- hundreds of pages -- before I finally conceded that the constant, flagrant contradictions between our narrators' perceptions and their reality weren't some kind of deliberate, meaningful narrative device.

But it happens so often, I would tell myself. Or, But it's so blatant, that I'd half-convinced myself that this had to have been done on purpose. But it wasn't. Reading this chapter, finally, I came to accept that. These gaps between characters' perceptions and their reality, between their self-descriptions and their selves, are nothing more than Very Bad Writing and the authors' own deluded unreliability.

That gap between perception and reality is central to the action of this scene. Everyone in the room has just witnessed Nicolae pulling the trigger, killing Stonagal and T-C with a single shot. Everyone watched as he took the gun and placed it in Stoney's hand, clumsily staging the scene as an implausible murder/suicide (or, technically, suicide/murder). But then Nicolae tells them they didn't see what they just saw. He tells them they saw something else:

"What compelled Mr. Stonagal to rush the guard, disarm him, take his own life and that of his British colleague, I do not know and may never fully understand. ...
"All I can tell you is that Jonathan Stonagal told me as recently as at breakfast this morning that he felt personally responsible for two recent violent deaths in England and that he could no longer live with the guilt. Honestly, I thought he was going to turn himself in to international authorities later today. And if he had not, I would have had to. How he conspired with Mr. Todd-Cothran, which led to the deaths in England, I do not know. But if he was responsible, then in a sad way, perhaps justice was meted out here today."*

It's in the middle of that long speech that we get the other passage quoted above -- the boilerplate business about Buck struggling "to keep his sanity, to maintain a clear mind."

That passage likely seems familiar. It's a capable rendition of the stock prose that gets used whenever the hero is struggling to think clearly due to having been struck on the head, slipped a mickey, chloroformed, injected with hallucinogenics, subjected to magical enchantments, or all of the above. The hero in such scenes always "fights within himself," overcoming the physical/chemical/supernatural effects fogging his mind through Sheer Force of Will. That's what Buck does here.

So even though we've been told that divine protection has rendered Buck immune to Nicolae's lies, and that such divine protection was the only thing that could save him, what actually unfolded was that Buck "fought within himself" and won.

It doesn't even seem like it was much of a fight. Despite that business about his fighting "to keep his sanity," Buck is never really in doubt that he's just as sane as he ever was. He trusts the accuracy of his perception and interpretation of events around him with 100 percent confidence, as do the authors themselves.

Two pages from now Buck starts hearing God's voice in his head, but he doesn't find that the least bit disturbing. Nor, again, do the authors. He and they just assume that he is always completely in control of his faculties and that he is always completely able to assess and interpret what is happening around him. And none of them seems capable of imagining any other possibility.

This chapter might have been more interesting if Buck had turned out to be only partly immune to Nicolae's enchantment and he had emerged from this room less than certain of what he'd really seen -- as though he really were having to fight to keep his sanity. He is, after all, a brand-new RTC, a mere infant in the faith, so the divine counter-enchantment might not have been fully operational just yet.

But that wouldn't work because that's not how the authors' notion of RTC magic works. It's a binary system. You're either 100-percent saved or you're 100-percent damned to Hell. There is no half-way, no partial, no blurring of categories. Truth is wholly true and lies are wholly lies. Good is wholly good and evil is wholly evil.

And that, ultimately, is why readers don't have to worry about things like unreliable narrators in this book. The authors can't have intended such a device because the authors don't believe in it.**

Meanwhile, Nicolae is still babbling on about how his "first act as secretary-general" will be "to close the U.N. for the remainder of the day and to pronounce my regrettable benedictory obituary on the lives of two old friends" before finally he instructs Hattie to call security while he ...

Wait, stop. Go back to that.

"Pronounce my regrettable benedictory obituary."

That's awesome. It's like a mistranslation of something from Kierkegaard. And this from Nicolae, the man the authors insist reliably speaks in "perfect" English.

Anyway, Nicolae tells Hattie to call security and announces that he ...

"Regrettable benedictory obituary."

OK, nope, that did it. I'm done for today.

- - - - - - - - -

* Here is a convenient example. The authors have insisted at every turn that Nicolae Carpathia is eloquent, articulate and persuasive. Yet here we get a glimpse of his actual words and find he is nothing like that. Here, where his words need to be preternaturally persuasive, casting a spell over all his listeners, he instead winds up babbling and rambling. Our instinct as readers is to try to make sense of this. We assume that the authors chose these words, rather than others, and that they did so in order to convey meaning while telling a story. That assumption leads us to begin concocting explanations for this apparent contradiction between how Nicolae is described and how he actually speaks. Like maybe the authors meant for us to see this contradiction as evidence of the power of his Antichrist mojo to deceive. But no. Today's lesson is to stop looking for such explanations in Left Behind because they aren't there. These contradictions were not intended by the authors to mean something. They weren't intended at all.

** Readers should also remember the way LaHaye & Jenkins claim to read the Bible. Theirs, they insist, is a "literal" reading. By that they mean, in part, that the meaning of a passage is identical and equivalent to the face value of the words in that passage. This is also how they imagine readers will approach their novel. Literary devices that rely on ambiguity -- such as unreliable narration -- are something they have no use for as readers or as writers.