From Gene Lyons' "The Apocalypse Will Be Televised" (Harper's, November 2004) - it's about (what else?) Left Behind:
There's a scene in Nicolae in which Buck Williams, by now a so-called tribulation saint and married to Rayford Steele's daughter, hears on CNN radio that Nicolae the Antichrist has nuked Manhattan. (Although, of course, the godless media don't put it that way.) Fleeing Chicago, Buck sees a mushroom cloud rising near O'Hare airport. Thinking fast, he drives across the median, whips into a Land Rover dealership, plunks down a company credit card, and drives off—“carefully,” we're told—in a “beautiful, new, earth-toned Range Rover.” Scolded by his dutiful suburban wife for reckless spending, he explains his decision, sounding like nothing so much as the gospel version of Chuck Berry's “No Money Down”:
“Chloe . . . look at this rig. It has everything. It will go anywhere. It's indestructible. It comes with a phone. It comes with a citizen's band radio. It comes with a fire extinguisher, a survival kit, flares, you name it. It has four-wheel drive, all-wheel drive, independent suspension, a CD player that plays those new two-inch jobs, electrical outlets in the dashboard that allow you to connect whatever you want directly to the battery.”
World War III has begun, the city is under nuclear attack, and car salesmen are sitting around the showroom writing up contracts and—somewhat improbably—accepting credit cards.
Before long, in the name of peace, World Potentate Carpathia has also dropped megaton devices on London, Montreal, Toronto, Mexico City, Dallas, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Washington. The “wrath of the Lamb” earthquake has exterminated one quarter of the world's surviving population. Yet the Tribulation Force warriors experience no difficulty zipping all over the world by Learjet, keeping in touch by cell phone, spreading the Gospel over the Internet, and tracking Nicolae Carpathia's schemes on CNN.
It's not until Glorious Appearing, the twelfth and final novel in the Left Behind series, that the comic-grotesque aspects of this whole rapture business become simply disturbing. Here are our heroes, zipping around the Holy Land on ATVs, when G.I. Jesus finally materializes in the sky, mounted on a white horse and costumed like a professional wrestler:
He wore a robe down to the feet so brilliantly white it was incandescent and bore writing, something in a language wholly unfamiliar to Rayford and something else he easily understood. On His robe at the thigh a name was written: KING OF KINGS AND LORD OF LORDS. Jesus was girded about the chest with a golden band. His head and hair were white like wool, as white as snow. His feet were like fine brass, as if refined in a furnace.
Exactly why Jesus has selected this outfit for a horseback-riding expedition is puzzling; perhaps he's mounted side-saddle, like a nineteenth-century gentlewoman. The armies of heaven, also on white horses, follow, though their role in the battle ends up being superfluous. The Antichrist's black-clad legions ride horses, too, possibly because they explode so satisfactorily. No sooner does Jesus speak than the carnage begins. Carpathia's legions begin to fall dead, “their bodies ripped open, blood pooling in great masses.”
Seeking a better view of the action, Rayford abandons his ATV for a Hummer, “riding shotgun,” which, write Jenkins and LaHaye in something less than a Proustian reverie, “transported him back to college when he and his fraternity brothers would compete to call the favored seat, sometimes as much as twenty-four hours before a trip.” Meanwhile, the slaughter runs on for close to eighty gleeful pages:
Rayford watched through the binocs as men and women soldiers and horses seemed to explode where they stood. It was as if the very words of the Lord had superheated their blood, causing it to burst through their veins and skin. . . . Their innards and entrails gushed to the desert floor, and as those around them turned to run, they too were slain, their blood pooling and rising in the unforgiving brightness of the glory of Christ.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
