| Subject: Samples from Barrett Brown |
| From: "Barrett Brown" <barriticus@gmail.com> |
| Date: 9/8/07, 20:00 |
| To: mike.tatum@gmail.com |
A Review of William Bennett's The De-Valuing of America and of William Bennett Himself
by Barrett Brown
To judge from the dust jacket review blurbs, Bennett's first foray into the literary genre of the ex-politico memoir traditionally a haphazard mash-up of policy suggestions, political narrative, and personal musings - appears to have been a well-received one. Rush Limbaugh calls the book "inspiring." Beverly LaHaye, president of Concerned Women for America (and, tellingly, wife of Tim LaHaye, brainchild of the Left Behind empire) gushes that "[h]is keen strategies help equip all of us involved in the accelerated warfare for the very heart and soul of America's children." And the Wall Street Journal refers to Bennett as "Washington's most interesting public figure," apparently intending this as a compliment.
But praise from allies is like a mother's love. More surprising is the dust jacket quote from The New York Times, of all things, informing us that Bennett "brings refreshing intelligence and common sense to a debate long dominated by ignorance and confusion." This strikes me as a nice way of saying that Bennett is better educated than most of the people who believe the things that he believes.
Whether or not this is what the Times meant, it's certainly the case. Bennett is fairly unusual among cultural conservatives in that his background is in academia in general and liberal arts in particular, a status that's somewhat comparable to being a cultural liberal whose background is in truck driving in general and the transport of veal calves in particular. And just as our hypothetical cultural liberal might have a few choice words for the veal calf industry, Bennett is none too fond of modern American academia, certain members of which he groups together with a cadre of unspecified media heavies and then categories under the designation of "elites." These elites, as Bennett informs us early on, derive particular satisfaction from criticizing the beliefs and practices of "the American people," a term he uses throughout the course of the book and which, from the context in which it invariably comes up, appears to mean "people who agree with William Bennett." Now, the elites are motivated in their criticisms not by any legitimate concerns they may have with "the American people," who are presumably beyond criticism by virtue of being people who live in America, but rather by a desire for status. The liberal elites "hope to achieve reputations, among other elites especially, for being original, deep, thoughtful, and unconventional ," we're told by Bennett, who, being a spirit entity from Neptune and composed of pure energy, lacks the sort of universal mammalian regard for one's own reputation with which the rest of are unfortunately cursed.
Bennett summarizes the elites thusly: "Odi profanum vulgus ('I hate the vulgar crowd') is a fitting slogan." It's an expansive sort of hypocrisy that can criticize others for desiring to be considered "deep" and then, in the very next sentence, throw out an unnecessary Latin phrase so that it may then be explained to the reader what the phrase means. But then, Bennett is an expansive fellow. We must give him that.
Bennett is so disdainful of the elite mentality that, in a show of solidarity with the common man, he limits his writing style to that of an awkward seventh grader who's still getting the hang of sentence parsing. "At a gathering of the elite, an often performed ritual is to mention a derided object or individual, followed by a superior laugh and roll of the eyes," he explains to us with some effort.
The "derisive" nature of those incorrigible elites seems to be a sticking point. In the course of his overarching indictment, Bennett denounces them chiefly as "critics of American practices." This is an odd enough thing to take issue with in and of itself; surely any society has practices that are worthy of criticism, even if that society happens to be one's own. But such a denunciation is doubly odd when one remembers that Bennett himself has spent a good portion of his own career as a "critic of American practices." The use of drugs, for instance, is certainly an "American practice," this being a pursuit that Americans practice on a regular basis. And Bennett has been quite famously critical of this "American practice." But whereas the "elites" are content to simply study and sneer when they find something about the American character of which they don't particularly approve, Bennett goes a step further and actually seeks out political appointments that will allow him to take an active role in putting "American practice" practitioners in prison.
In 1988, a few months after resigning from his position as secretary of education under Reagan, Bennett lobbied for the newly-created position of drug czar under incoming President Bush. In the fourth chapter of De-Valuing , entitled "The Battle to Save Our Kids from Drugs," the reader is treated to both the behind-the-scenes jockeying and subsequent birth pains, all in excruciating detail.
"Things got off to a rocky start," Bennett notes, "at least as far as some outside observers were concerned." Actually, things got off to a rocky start by Bennett's own admission; the "outside observers" remark is simply an excuse to attack the press by implying that the media narrative of the time was somehow inaccurate. But it plainly was not; Bennett himself has just spent an entire page describing how Bush was reluctant to take him on, and in the very next sentence after the "rocky start" comment, he points out that he wasn't invited to the nascent administration's first cabinet meeting, further noting that Bush refused to include Bennett in the cabinet at all. Thus Bennett is essentially saying, "A is true, but the press wrongly reported A, and also, A is true." An odd duck, that Bennett. An odd, disingenuous duck.
Bennett claims not to have been fazed by the cabinet snubbing. "I was not particularly distressed at this turn of events; I had my fill of cabinet sessions while I was secretary of education." Bennett had never wanted that sort of prestige, and besides, he'd already had it.
After going to great lengths to show the reader how nonchalant he'd been about his lack of cabinet-level status and how unconcerned he was regarding what everyone might say about this, Bennett goes on to relate what everyone was saying about this, treating us to several old media blurbs on the subject including one from U.S. News and World Report indicating that he might "slowly sink into bureaucratic quicksand and be rendered irrelevant." On the contrary, Bennett tells us, "Sinking into bureaucratic quicksand and being rendered irrelevant was, frankly, never much of a concern of mine." He then goes on to explain why it was a concern of his that he might sink into bureaucratic quicksand and be rendered irrelevant: "Here I had little direct authority, no ability to dispense government grants, a 100-person staff (infinitesimal by Washington standards)... There were some inherent, potentially debilitating, institutional weaknesses that I had to overcome." Many people contradict themselves now and again, but William Bennett manages to do so in perfect ABAB stanza.
Bennett was so innately drawn to the role of drug czar that he began practicing for it well before the position even existed. In De-Valuing , Bennett describes his first big bust, pulled off in his capacity as a dorm administrator while studying at Harvard and which involved two students caught selling drugs out of their room. Bennett triumphantly details how the two pushers feared that Bennett might physically harm them, though he reports having been equally disappointed that Harvard failed to punish the students to his own specifications which is to say, expulsion and criminal prosecution.
This slash-and-burn approach to illegal drug use would become a familiar theme. Upon taking over as secretary of education under Reagan, one of Bennett's first tasks seems to have been getting rid of all those excess teachers that had for so long been plaguing the nation's educational system. "Early in my tenure," he writes, "I contacted the heads of the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers, urging them to adopt a policy of requiring teachers using drugs to resign." This was more than just a clever attempt to cut art and music programs out of the local school budgets; in a 1986 speech given in Tennessee, Bennett explained his reasoning: "They should be drug-free, not for reasons of national security, but for reasons of setting an example." It's not entirely clear what he meant by this; presumably, there were already policies in place that would have led to the firing of any teacher caught lighting up a spliff in fourth period English. What Bennett seemed to be calling for was a policy that would have either required the unprecedented monitoring of adult private lives, or instead be totally meaningless and thus it would have served as a great metaphor for U.S. anti-drug policy in general, and thus also as a great teaching aide for our hypothetical fourth period English class when it came time to cover poetic constructs.
The president of the Metro Nashville Education Association wasn't buying. "Teachers should be careful of their actions in front of the student, but teachers are still part of society," he responded in a statement. "It's unrealistic for teachers to be so different. Substance abuse is an illness and should be treated as such. No group is going to be 100 percent clean, be it chiefs of police, ministers or teachers." Bennett's aside to us: "Here again was an example of the teachers' union getting in the way of sound reform, this time because of a startling lack of moral clarity or moral courage," which is to say that the teacher's union didn't want teachers to automatically lose their jobs for issues unrelated to their teaching.
But the nation's educational ills wouldn't be solved just by getting rid of teachers, of course; the kids would have to be gotten rid of, too. Upon becoming drug czar, Bennett fought to implement a national policy whereby any student found to have come in contact with any drugs in any manner whatsoever would be automatically expelled from school. Between the crusade against teachers and the crusade against students, Bennett may have really hit upon something here. Most of the problems that a school faces can be easily solved by just getting rid of all the people associated with it, and thus this would be a fantastic set of policies if the purpose of a school is to simply exist as a pretty building, rather than to educate children, a good portion of whom would have been eligible for expulsion if Bennett had gotten his way.
Luckily for those students, he didn't. Testifying before the House Committee on Idiotic Policy Implementations (or something like that), Bennett came up against some resistance from the always energetic New York Representative Charlie Rangel. During a contentious back-and-forth over Bennett's proposed mandatory expulsion policy, Rangel expressed some reservations about the idea of denying education to students caught with drugs. Though Rangel's preferred policy is here unreported and thus left to our imagination, Bennett summarizes it for us thusly: "I think what Rangel hoped for from us was something less severe; a course of instruction, a drug-education program, lectures, slides, and tapes in short, a magic bullet that would inoculate the young from ever using drugs." Which is to say that Rangel wanted a series of measures in place that would seek to discourage and reduce drug use among students, whereas Bennett wanted a single, forceful measure that would allegedly solve the problem in one fell swoop in short, a magic bullet. Wait a second.
Okay, so Bennett doesn't seem to know what the term "magic bullet" means. That's understandable; I myself used to have trouble with the term "ruled out." When it was said that "police have ruled out the possibility of foul play," I wasn't sure if that meant that the police had spread the possibility out on the table to get a better look at it, or rather that they'd thrown it out so that it wasn't really something they were still considering as a possibility. But that was when I was, like, twelve.
Luckily, Bennett does a slightly better job of explaining the "moral clarity" of his position in a down-paragraph metaphor. "Of course we want to teach children not to play with matches. But if a house is burning, we've got to put out the fire and we've got to grab matches out of some hands before they start any more fires." Actually, this is a terrible metaphor, unless, of course, he meant to add, "and then we've got to throw the little bastards out on the street." He is, after all, talking about a mandatory expulsion policy, not a "taking drugs out of some hands before they use any more drugs" policy, which is what the schools have always had.
If Bennett's use of metaphors and common English terminology leaves something to be desired, his use of supporting evidence is atrocious. Having just firmly established his position that zero-tolerance, one-strike-you're-out policies are totally the way to go, he attempts to illustrate the point with an anecdote. This is a reasonable enough thing to do; anecdotal evidence is a kind of evidence, after all, even if it's often countered by contrary anecdotal evidence, and is thus not all that useful as a policymaking tool. But whereas you or I might try to use a piece of anecdotal evidence that lends weight to our position, Bennett does something quite a bit more unconventional - he uses a piece of anecdotal evidence that runs contrary to his own position, apparently without even realizing it.
In discussing a Miami school that appears to have steered clear of the drug menace and which he describes as an example of his "principle in action," Bennett notes the school's drug policy: "The first time a student is caught using drugs, he must enroll in a drug-intervention or private rehabilitation program or, depending on the severity of the infraction, he may face suspension. Subsequent infractions lead to suspension and possible expulsion from school. If a student is caught dealing drugs, he is turned over to a police agency and faces either suspension or expulsion from school." Which is to say that, in this particular high school, students caught with drugs aren't necessarily suspended from school, much less expelled (and are in fact enrolled in what sounds very much like one of Charlie Rangel's strangely multifaceted "magic bullet" programs of the sort to which Bennett was opposed just fifteen seconds ago, back when it was convenient for Bennett to feel that way), and the possibility of expulsion doesn't even arise unless the student is caught several times, while even those found to be actually dealing drugs aren't automatically expelled, either. This is the example that Bennett has chosen to use in order to illustrate for us how his preferred policy of automatic expulsion for all levels of drug use could be used to improve the nation's public schools. Again, just to be clear, here's what Bennett is saying: "I think schools should do A. Here's a great school that does B. Isn't it swell how doing A helped that school become great?"
In addition to mass expulsions, bad metaphors, the misuse of anecdotal evidence, and the butchering of English idioms, Bennett's inherent sense of moral clarity also called for large, theatrical explosions. During the Reagan administration, the U.S. military was already doing plenty of this by way of its air bombing campaign in Bolivia, but it takes more than a few bombs to please Bennett. After being told that nine planes were currently being used for this purpose, and that a minimum of 15 would be needed to eradicate Bolivian coca production for a year, Bennett wanted to know how many planes were available. A Defense Department official told him that this was classified information, which we can imagine probably pissed Bennett off quite a bit. Then he was told that an increase in American military planes dropping an increase in American bombs on an increase of Latin American peasants might lead to an increase in anti-American sentiment in an already volatile region, particularly if those American planes were clearly marked as being American.
"Then paint the face of Daniel Ortega [the head of the communist government in Nicaragua] on them," Bennett claims to have replied, once again exhibiting his moral clarity. After all, why just kill Bolivians when you can lie to them, too? To be fair, though, Bennett probably didn't mean this as a serious proposal; rather, it appears that he includes the exchange here simply in order to give the reader a taste of the gruff, take-no-prisoners wit to which his colleagues were no doubt treated on a daily basis.
Bennett's unusually hands-on approach to the drug war wasn't just limited to sitting around in Washington and second-guessing the military; Bennett writes extensively about his drug czar-era experience on the "front lines" of major urban areas, where he undertook nifty tours of crack house raids and was thus in a position to second-guess the police, too. In Detroit, Bennett encounters a beat cop whose forays into the drug war are presumably more professional than touristy, and who at some point summarized the problem by asking Bennett, "Why should a kid earn four bucks an hour at McDonald's when he can make two or three hundred dollars a night working drugs?"
"For a lot of reasons," Bennett replies. Instead of listing those reasons, though, Bennett goes on to explain to the reader how the beat cop in question had been unwittingly brainwashed: "The police officer had picked up this line of reasoning from the media." A bit later: "Not surprisingly, a lot of youngsters picked up on this argument." The implication, made on the basis not of evidence but rather of inane conjecture fueled by convenient media hatred, is that the desirability of illegal, high-profit activities over legal, low-profit activities is something that "the media" had to come up with, after which it was duly "picked up on" by hapless Americans (of whom Bennett famously hates to be critical unless it suddenly becomes convenient to do so). This is why smuggling had never occurred in human history until 1851 , when the New York Times came into existence, shortly after which the term "smuggling" had to be invented, presumably by the New York Times.
According to Bennett, "the media" came up with all of this due to some sort of inherent racism; in the course of building on his argument, he claims that the four-bucks-at-McDonalds versus three-hundred-bucks-selling-drugs meme is some sort of slur against American blacks. "If people think poor black children aren't capable of moral responsibility, they should say so," Bennett writes in response to his unspecified adversaries. "I think otherwise. I know they are capable of it."
This would be a very lovely sentiment if it wasn't an outright lie, intended to paint those who sympathize with (or excuse) black Americans as racial determinists, while at the same time depicting Bennett himself as a champion of colorblindness. Nor do we need to simply assume this on the basis of the drug czar's overall taste for the disingenuous turn of phrase; Bennett made his position quite clear during a 2006 broadcast of his syndicated radio program.
In the course of a general discussion on demographic arguments put forth in the influential book Freakonomics , Bennett took a call from a fellow who noted that the practice of abortion had probably robbed the federal government of some large chunk of taxable income in the years since Roe v. Wade. Bennett countered by noting that this particular argument wasn't necessarily a useful criticism of abortion, and further explained, "But I do know that it's true that if you wanted to reduce crime, you could - if that were your sole purpose, you could abort every black baby in this country and your crime rate would go down. That would be an impossible, ridiculous, and morally reprehensible thing to do, but your crime rate would go down. So these far-out, these far-reaching, extensive extrapolations are, I think, tricky."
Unsurprisingly, this particular incident led to criticism from some quarters, and so Bennett released the following statement in his own defense: "A thought experiment about public policy, on national radio, should not have received the condemnations it has. Anyone paying attention to this debate should be offended by those who have selectively quoted me, distorted my meaning, and taken out of context the dialog I engaged in this week. Such distortions from 'leaders' of organizations and parties is a disgrace not only to the organizations and institutions they serve, but to the First Amendment." The funny thing about this or, rather, one of the funny things is that one of these "'leaders'" who had allegedly become a "disgrace not only to the organizations and institutions they serve, but to the First Amendment" as well, was none other than President George W. Bush, who had released a statement calling Bennett's comments "not appropriate." And thus it was that, by simply criticizing something that Bennett had said, the president had finally managed to do something to attract his moral outrage.
In Bennett's defense, his comments had indeed been "a thought experiment about public policy," and not a serious proposal to abort black fetuses. Bennett is not only a staunch opponent of abortion, but is also, in his own, confused way, a humane sort of guy. On the other hand, "in Bennett's defense" might be a poor choice of words on my part, because no serious commentator was claiming that this was the case, and thus Bennett need not be defended from charges that never existed. Bennett chose to take issue with a largely non-existent, red herring set of criticisms in order to avoid having to defend his unambiguous statement to the effect that aborting the fetuses of the nation's black population would result in a decrease in the crime rate.
Aside from illustrating Bennett's tendency towards intellectual dishonesty when defending himself, the aborting black babies comment also illustrates Bennett's similar rate of intellectual dishonesty when attacking others. A man capable of criticizing his opponents for supposedly operating under the assumption that "poor black children aren't capable of moral responsibility" while simultaneously believing that "you could abort every black baby in this country and your crime rate would go down" is a man who is clearly not debating in good faith, but rather in an effort to score cheap points. Whereas many of Bennett's obvious intellectual contradictions may be written off as the accidental collisions of a disorganized and mediocre mind, this particular fender-bender can be considered nothing less than intentional, malicious dishonesty, in apparent service to some higher Truth for which lesser, mundane, run-of-the-mill truths are only accessories, to be discarded when inconveniently cumbersome. One might even be tempted to adopt a melancholy attitude regarding the fellow, wondering why a citizen who might otherwise have contributed to his nation's public life has instead seen fit to make himself into yet another partisan hack. On the other hand, the guy doesn't even know what a "magic bullet" is, so to hell with him.
***
This is not to imply that Bennett is entirely useless, of course. I did learn a few things from his book. Did you know that Prohibition was a resounding success? Neither did I. Actually, I still don't, because it's not true. So, I guess what I really learned is that some people still think that Prohibition was a resounding success, and that at least one of these people has gone on to help shape American drug policy.
During a wider discussion on the merits of federal fiddlin', Bennett drops the following bombshell, almost as an aside: "One of the clear lessons of Prohibition is that when we had laws against alcohol, there was less consumption of alcohol, less alcohol-related disease, fewer drunken brawls, and a lot less public drunkenness. And, contrary to myth, there is no evidence that Prohibition caused big increases in crime."
This is a pretty incredible statement to just throw into a book without any supporting evidence. Bennett hasn't just expressed an opinion on an ambiguous topic, like, "Gee, the old days sure were swell" or "Today's Japanese role-playing games are all flash and no substance" or something like that. Rather, Bennett has made several statements of alleged fact which can be easily verified or shot down by a few minutes of research. But Bennett didn't bother to research it, and I know this because the federal government has a tendency to keep records, and the records prove Bennett wrong.
Less "alcohol-related disease?" In 1926, a number of witnesses testified before the House Judiciary Committee regarding the ongoing effects of Prohibition; several New York State asylum officials noted that the number of patients suffering from alcohol-related dementia had increased by 1000 percent since 1920, the year after Prohibition had gone into effect. Also in 1920, deaths from undiluted alcohol consumption in New York City stood at 84. In 1927, with Prohibition in full swing, that number had swelled to 719.
But those are just snapshots in time. A look at the larger picture shows Bennett to be not just kind of wrong, but entirely and unambiguously wrong about every single thing he's just said.
In 1991 the Cato Institute commissioned a retroactive Prohibition study by Mark Thornton, the O.P. Alford III Assistant Professor of Economics at Auburn University. Citing hard data gleaned mostly from governmental records, Thornton concluded that Prohibition "was a miserable failure on all counts."
Despite Bennett's assertion that "when we had laws against alcohol, there was less consumption of alcohol [italics his]," a cursory glance at the federal government's own data shows that there was not [italics mine, thank you very much]. Now, per capita consumption did indeed fall dramatically from 1919 to 1920, but then increased far more dramatically from 1920 to 1922 after which it continued to increase well beyond pre-Prohibition levels. So, when Bennett says that "there was less consumption of alcohol," he's right about a single one-year period, but wrong about the next dozen or so years or, to put it another way, he's entirely wrong. If I decided to reduce my drinking for a week, and I drank quite a bit less than usual on Monday but then drank the same amount I usually do on Tuesday and then drank more than I usually do on Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, and if the average alcohol consumption on my part during that week was much higher than my average alcohol consumption on the previous week, then one could hardly say that "there was less consumption of alcohol" in my apartment that week. Or, rather, one could say that, but one would be wrong. In this case, though, one could be excused for being wrong, because I don't usually keep exact records on my alcohol consumption, and neither does the federal government (I think). But in the case of Prohibition, there is no excuse for ignorance, and even less for spreading it around.
Not only did alcohol consumption not decrease during Prohibition, but the American taxpayer was now paying quite a bit of extra coin to enforce the decrease in alcohol consumption that they were now not getting. From 1919 to 1922 a period which, as mentioned above, saw an overall increase in alcohol consumption - the budget for the Bureau of Prohibition was tripled. Meanwhile, the Coast Guard was now spending 13 million dollars a year, Customs was blowing all kinds of cash, and the state and local governments which had been stuck with the majority of enforcement issues were throwing away untold amounts of money to boot.
Beyond the easily calculable nickel-and-dime costs of running an unsuccessful nanny state boondoggle, the American citizen was being screwed on other fronts, too. Unlike those umbrella-twirling, petticoat-clad temperance harpies of the time (and their equally insufferable apologists of the present day), Thornton considers other social costs of a massive government ban on non-coercive behavior. Of the alcohol consumed under Prohibition, hard liquor made a jump as a percentage of total alcohol sales that had not been seen before, that has not been seen since, and that will probably never be seen again. The sudden ascendancy of whiskey over beer can be easily explained (and could have easily been predicted): if one is smuggling something above the law or consuming it on the sly, it makes more sense to smuggle or consume concentrated versions of the product in question than to deal with larger, more diluted concoctions. A similar phenomenon occurred in the cocaine trade under William Bennett's watch as drug czar.
So alcohol consumption was up, and the alcohol being drunk was now of the harder, more brawl-inducing variety. But what about the savings? The aforementioned busybodies in the petticoats had predicted great social gains for Americans money spent on alcohol would now go to milk for babies, life insurance, and, presumably, magical unicorns that grant you three wishes. Of course, this didn't turn out to be the case. Not only was alcohol consumption up, but records show that people were now paying more for it, too. Of course, they were also paying higher taxes to aid in the government's all-out attempt to repeal the law of supply and demand. And don't even think about approaching one of those unicorns to wish for more wishes. That's against the rules.
What about crime? Apparently, there are some wacky rumors going around to the effect that crime actually went up during Prohibition. But Bennett clearly told us that "contrary to myth, there is no evidence that Prohibition caused big increases in crime."
Pardon my French, but le gros homme possède la sottise d'un enfant humain et la teneur en graisse d'un bébé d'éléphant. And if you'll indulge me further by pardoning my harsh language, Bennett is so full of horse shit on this one that he could fertilize every bombed-out coca field from the Yucatan to Bolivia. The idea that "Prohibition caused big increases in crime" is not so much a myth as it is a verifiable fact. Again, believe it or not, the feds tend to keep records on such things, and again, believe it or totally believe it, Bennett has failed to consult these records before providing his sage commentary on the subject.
In large cities, for instance, the homicide rate jumped from 5.6 per 100,000 residents in the first decade of the 20 th century to 8.4 in the second, during which time 25 states passed their own localized Prohibition laws in addition to the federal government's implementation of the Harris Narcotics Act, which in turn paved the way for the then-nascent drug war. And in the third decade, during which Prohibition was the law of the land not just in rural states governed by puritanical yahoos but in every state of the union, that number jumped to 10 per 100,000. Meanwhile, the rates for other serious crimes increased on a per capita basis by similar leaps and bounds. This, despite an environment of booming prosperity for which the twenties are known to this day.
Now, a particularly stubborn statist of the William Bennett school of disingenuous argumentation might try to counter by claiming that this increase in serious crime could have been attributable to other factors, such as increased immigration; Bennett himself might be tempted to remark that things would have been different if only we had aborted every Italian baby in the country or something like that. But this hypothetical counter-argument would not hold up, because the crime rate continued to soar until 1933, when it saw a sudden and dramatic decline.
1933, of course, was the year when Prohibition was repealed.
So, William Bennett to the contrary, Prohibition did indeed lead to "big increases in crime." But Bennett is incapable of recognizing this, because he's already made up his mind. After all, Bennett advocates the federalization of private conduct, and, as the nation's first drug czar, acted to implement this vision. And because Bennett is a possessor of both "moral clarity" and "moral courage," his views must be both morally clear and morally courageous. And because America's failed experiment with Prohibition was an early and dramatic example of the federalization of private conduct, and thus an early version of Bennett's chosen ideology, Prohibition must have logically been a success, rather than a failure.
Indeed, Bennett was enthusiastic about the possibility of replicating the glorious Cultural Revolution of Prohibition. "This is one issue, Mr. President, where I, a conservative Republican, feel comfortable in advocating a strong federal role," Bennett reports telling Bush senior in 1988. Putting aside the question of whether or not this is how Bennett really talks and if so, he's certainly more eloquent in private than he is in public this is a telling remark, and it's unfortunate that Bennett doesn't explain why a strong federal role would be merited here and not elsewhere. Something about the criminalization of private conduct scratches an itch that social assistance programs just can't seem to reach.
"Often it seems that any idea that fits the zeitgeist , that can be linked to a 'need' - anyone's need, anywhere, anytime is funded," he writes at one point. "Frequently, it is funded at the costs of hundreds of millions, or even billions, of dollars without the slightest regard to whether the program will work, whether it will be held accountable, whether it is appropriate for the federal government to fund it, or whether it is something people can or ought to do for themselves." It does not occur to Bennett that he has just described the Office of National Drug Control Policy. Elsewhere: "I know of no other group in America that is more cocksure of its right to full entitlement to the United States Treasury than the leadership of higher education," says Bennett, who apparently believes the drug war to be funded by voluntary subscription and perhaps further offset by vouchers, and seems to have seen nothing "cocksure" in demanding that the military bomb more of Bolivia at his command. And during his no doubt Marcus Aurelius-inspired treatise on the education of children found elsewhere in the book, he tells us that if "we want them to know about respect for the law, they should understand why Socrates told Crito: 'No, I submit to the decree of Athens.'" Perhaps they should also understand why Socrates was sentenced to death by the mob in the first place. The answer, of course, is that he was found guilty of "corrupting the youth."
Like the Athenian mob, Bennett is also opposed to the corruption of the youth by way of such things as marijuana and favors the death penalty for those found guilty of selling it. At one point in the book, he recalls an appearance on Larry King Live when a caller suggested that drug dealers be beheaded. The moral clarity of the proposal seems to have excited Bennett. "What the caller suggests is morally plausible. Legally, it's difficult... morally, I don't have any problem with it." But the moral plausibility of this was, as usual, lost on the nation's intellectuals while being perfectly understood by the common folk, who adore their drug czar (and it is also understood by the totalitarian Chinese, who have been executing drug dealers for quite a while, no doubt due to the inherent moral clarity of its communist dictatorship). "Many of the elites ridiculed my opinion. But it resonated with the American people because they knew what drugs were doing, and they wanted a morally proportional response." Bennett's evidence of this, seriously, is that then-chairman of the Republican National Committee Lee Atwater called him from South Carolina and reported that the people he had spoken to there seemed very keen on the idea. Meanwhile, as Bennett points out, the elites had the audacity to run headlines like "Drug Czar: Beheading Fitting" to describe an incident in which the drug czar had said that beheading is fitting. "The reaction was illustrative," he writes.
Indeed, much of the book (and much of Bennett's public career since) follows a familiar pattern. Bennett says something wacky, the "elites" criticize him for it, and then Bennett either sticks to his guns or pretends he didn't mean what he obviously meant. Weirdly, he sometimes manages to do both at the same time. Speaking to a Baptist group during his tenure as drug czar, Bennett told attendees the following: "I continue to be amazed how often people I talked to in drug treatment centers talk about drugs as the great lie, the great deception indeed a product, one could argue, of the great deceiver, the great deceiver everyone knows. 'A lie' is what people call drugs, and many, many people in treatment have described to me their version of crack, simply calling it 'the devil.' This has come up too often, it has occurred too much, too spontaneously, too often in conversation, to be ignored."
This time, the reaction was not simply "illustrative," as had been the case with the beheading thing. Rather, "The reaction was absurd but illustrative." I should have pointed out that the Bennett Pattern described above invariably ends with Bennett describing the situation as "illustrative." Anyway, the reaction was illustrative of the media's tendency to report things that government officials say when they say something unusual, a practice to which Bennett seems to be opposed, no doubt on moral grounds. The San Francisco Chronicle story was headlined "Bennett Blames Satan for Drug Abuse." Bennett reminds us that he was simply "reporting what I had heard from people in drug treatment and speaking of drugs in a moral context," but then immediately goes on to refer to this as "my view." Nor would he have been very likely to report all of this and describe it as having "come up too often, too spontaneously, too often in conversation, to be ignored" if he didn't believe it had some sort of merit. If Bennett had, for instance, gone to a number of drug treatment centers and been told that crack was invented by the CIA under the direction of George Bush Sr. in order to exterminate the black population, Bennett probably would not have gotten up in front of several hundred people and began "reporting what I had heard from people in drug treatment" and then noted that Bush Sr.'s alleged black-op narco-genocide "has come up too often, it has occurred too much, too spontaneously, too often in conversation, to be ignored," because Bennett would not have agreed with such a sentiment, or, if he did agree, he would not have said it because he would have known all of this to be true as he had in fact helped to launder the drug money by way of his casino mobster connections, and at any rate he would not find it prudent to talk about all of these things in public.
Occasionally, the media will go so far as to directly confront Bennett about his silly utterances. In 2006, John Roberts the CNN anchor and thus a member of "the elite," rather than the conservative chief justice of the Supreme Court, who is presumably not a member of "the elite" asked Bennett about something he had recently said to the effect that certain reporters should have been thrown in prison.
ROBERTS:
Let's talk about your comments earlier this week about James Risen,
Eric Lichtblau of The New York Times and Dana Priest of The
Washington Post who won Pulitzer Prizes for their work uncovering CIA
secret prisons in Europe and, as well, the NSA spying scandal. What
were your listeners saying about that this morning?
BENNETT:
Well, we had a lot of people weigh in. I said that I wondered whether
they deserved the Pulitzer more, or actually more deserving was a
subpoena or perhaps going to jail. Look, [former New York Times
reporter] Judy Miller went to jail, and I don't know why we should
treat these folks differently than Judy Miller, particularly, when
this is --
ROBERTS:
Yeah, but Judy Miller went to -- Judy Miller went to jail for
contempt of court.
BENNETT:
Right, well, let's see if these guys are asked --
ROBERTS:
These people haven't been charged with contempt of court.
BENNETT:
Well, if James Risen is asked, right, or Dana Priest is asked, "Who
are your sources?" the people who gave them this information
committed a crime, leaked classified information. If they are asked,
and they do the same thing Judy Miller does, which I expect they
would, don't you?
ROBERTS:
Right.
BENNETT:
Then, they -- then, they would go to jail. Also, there's the
Espionage Act.
ROBERTS:
But, they -- but, they -- but they haven't been asked yet. You know,
they haven't been asked yet, though.
BENNETT:
We -- I don't know. If they haven't been asked yet, I assume they
will. Then, you can change the tense of my remarks, but not the
substance of them.
Which is to say that Bennett was asking why three people had not yet been imprisoned for crimes they might potentially commit in the future. This is a very interesting question. Similarly, one wonders why it is that Bennett has yet to be imprisoned for the triple homicide he will pull off in 2014 at the behest of a Russian mobster to whom he owes three million dollars in gambling debts, and for whom Bennett will also have been acquiring legislative favors for by way of a network of friendly congressional staffers who are mixed up in the Southeast Asian slave trade. I myself have made repeated calls about this to the FBI, where I was hung up on, and to MI5, where I was listened to politely for a few minutes and then hung up on in a very charming and understated manner.
Even
while proposing more executions for drug dealers, more bombs for
Bolivia, and more prison time for reporters, Bennett means well. "I
always speak with good will that is, with the hope of arriving at
a conclusion we can all share," he writes. And if his style is
blunt, perhaps the times demand it. "The modern age and the bearers
of some of the modern age's sentiments pushed hard against me. I
pushed back." Bennett will not compromise with these modern age
sentiments. He is, like his church, uncompromising until compromise
becomes convenient, which it often does.
There
is something to be said for the holding of strict moral standards,
after all, but there is also something to be said for taking a break
from this every once in a while, such as during the tail end of the
Reagan administration. "I was appalled, when the Iran-Contra crisis
broke out," Bennett recalls, unable to bring himself to refer to it
as a scandal, "to witness how silent many people in the Reagan
administration, including the cabinet, were in defense of the
president. They headed for the tall grass and waited out events. The
first impulse in this kind of situation should be to rally to the
defense of the president." Bennett has some sort of secret reason
for why this is the case which he does not choose to share with us.
At any rate, the portion of the book in which he glosses over
Iran-Contra is one of the very few in which he does not call for
firings, expulsions, more jail time, executions, "moral clarity,"
"moral outrage," "moral courage," "moral plausibility,"
or for children to be taught why Socrates told Crito that he submits
to the rule of Athens, the government of which must also have had a
law against secretly selling weapons to Iran back when Iran was
Persia (one could, in fact, be executed for even displaying warm
feelings towards Persia at this time). When Bennett takes his break
from morality, we are spared from much.
Bennett
does not take his break for long. "Washington at its worst can be a
viscous, sick city. Nothing so captivates the Washington mind as the
anticipation of a scandal or that a person in power is about to fall
from grace." These words, of course, were written just before the
Clinton years; otherwise they would not have been written. There was
a period between 1992 and 2001 in which the viscous sickness of
Washington underwent divine transubstantiation back into "moral
clarity." I do not know why this is because I am neither a chemist
nor a theologian, but at any rate, Clinton had been involved, not in
an affair or a crisis, but in a "scandal," as Bennett accurately
called it in 1998, although suddenly no longer associating its
"anticipation" with "viscous sickness." "Through his
tawdry, reckless, irresponsible conduct, he has plowed salt in
America's civil soil," Bennett wrote of Clinton in that year. "For
that, and for much else, he has rightfully earned our obloquy." I
am unclear on the meaning of this last word but from context I assume
that it means "moral outrage." It is, however, a shame about the
salt in America's civic soil, from which neither the wheat of virtue
nor the barley of justice was ever to be yielded again; the harvest
was now tyranny. "We know that Mr. Clinton has invoked claims of
executive privilege that are even broader than Richard Nixon's -
claims few legal scholars defend."
Mr.
Bennett has since taken another break from his vigilance on the
subject of executive privilege, and has anyway expanded the pool of
legal scholars who may be found to defend broad claims of same;
January 2001 brought on another transubstantiation, a miracle of the
sort upon which both Catholic and Evangelical may agree.
My Hand Shall Be Against the Prophets
by Barrett Brown
"So, dig this."
Clearly, CNN anchorperson Kyra Phillips was about to lay something heavy on the American viewing public.
"A man was bulldozing a bog in central Ireland the other day when he noticed something unusual in the freshly turned soil. Turns out he'd unearthed an early medieval treasure: an ancient book of Psalms that experts date to the years 800 to 1000. Experts say it will take years of painstaking work to document and preserve this book, but eventually it will go on public display. Now here's the kicker. The book, about 20 pages of Latin script, was allegedly found opened to Psalm 83. Now, if you're a scholar, as you know, Psalm 83: 'God hears complaints that other nations are plotting to wipe out the name of Israel.'"
This would have been a hell of a kicker if it were true; the well-dressed president of Iran had just recently made a campaign promise to "wipe Israel off the map," and thus said psalm would have neatly applied to the international situation in 2006. It would have also neatly applied to the international situation in 1948, 1967, 1972, as well as every other year since, as one could gather from a glance at the operating charter of the Palestinian Authority. Plotting to wipe out the name of Israel has been a popular pastime among Arabs for quite a while, rivaling even the driving of Mercedes-Benzes and the wearing of gaudy gold chains. Perhaps more to the point, it was a popular pastime among Israel's dozens of tribal opponents several thousand years ago, when Psalm 83 was written.
But as it turned out, the psalm to which the miraculous manuscript was open no doubt due to the divine intervention of Yahweh Himself - had nothing to do with complaints, plots, or the wiping out of anyone's moniker, as Psalm 83 by the Latin reckoning of that period actually corresponded to Psalm 84 of the Greek reckoning from which our modern psalms are taken. And so the psalm in question actually concerned an annual Hebrew pilgrimage and how swell it was to undertake. This was explained in due course by the archaeologists involved, but the various news outlets had already reported the more newsworthy Israel angle newsworthy in the modern sense, and not in the sense of it actually being true - and if the reader is familiar with the way these things work, the reader will consequently be unsurprised that few corrections were printed or reported.
In the dynamics of American cable news, though, a miracle is a miracle whether it's a miracle or not, and the Incident of Psalm 83 made for a swell segue into Kyra Phillips' live interview with a modern-day prophet and another modern-day prophet's co-author. The latter was Jerry Jenkins, who collaborated with Evangelical minister Tim LaHaye in the ominously successful Left Behind series. The former was the increasingly popular Joel C. Rosenberg, lone author of several bestselling prophecy-oriented technothrillers and whose own contribution to the ominousness of the times lies not so much in the success of his books among the sort of people one might expect to read them, but rather in the success of his books with the sort of people who run the country.
For his part, Jenkins was either completely stunned or not stunned at all by the psalm discovery, calling it "amazing," "incredible," and "not terribly surprising" all within the space of twenty seconds, further adding that "it would probably have to be told in fiction form because people are going to find it hard to believe," this sentence being literally true insomuch as that an incident that did not actually occur would indeed have to be told in fiction form, but also being literally false insomuch as that people would not find such a thing hard to believe because people will believe anything, such as the old myth that CNN is a respectable source for news instead of a degenerate entertainment outlet at which anchorpersons say things like, "from books to blogs to the back pews, the buzz is all about the End Times," which is exactly what Kyra Phillips had said just a moment before.
Rosenberg, meanwhile, saw an opening with which to move onto his two favorite topics: the imminent invasion of Israel by Russia, and Rosenberg's own mysterious ability to predict things that have yet to happen, such as the imminent invasion of Israel by Russia. "Yes, people are interested [in bullshit Hebrew prophecy], because the rebirth of Israel, the fact that Jews are living in the Holy Land today, that is a Bible prophecy. When Iran, Libya, Syria, Lebanon, Russia, they begin to form an alliance against Israel, those are the prophecies from Ezekiel 38 and 39," Rosenberg said, pretending for the sake of his own argument that such an alliance actually exists between those nations and that the Old Testament Book of Ezekiel predicted it. "That's what I'm basing my novels on. I have been invited to the White House, Capitol Hill. Members of Congress, Israelis, Arab leaders all want to understand the Middle East through the - through the lens of biblical prophecies. I'm writing these novels that keep seeming to come true, but we are seeing Bible prophecy, bit by bit, unfold in the Middle East right now."
One can understand why Rosenberg's insight into world affairs would be so sought after around the White House and Capitol Hill; the ability to write books "that keep seeming to come true" would be an incredible asset to the national intelligence infrastructure of any geopolitical entity, particularly one as troubled as our own. In fact, it's a wonder that the NSA is permitting Rosenberg to write anything at all; as things stand now, any Iranian intelligence agent could show up at LAX, amble into a gift shop, and pick up a copy of one of these popular books "that keep seeming to come true," thus gleaning invaluable information about the not-so-distant future without having to resort to the rigors of human intelligence, electronic intelligence, geospatial intelligence, or - my personal favorite - foreign instrumentation signals intelligence. Likewise, any Chinese spy could download a bootlegged copy of one of these books for his communist masters, and without paying Rosenberg a dime in royalties. Shouldn't the U.S. intelligence community declare Rosenberg a national resource and whisk him off to some undisclosed location? The answer, of course, is no, because Rosenberg cannot really predict the future. Or, to put it another way, he can indeed predict the future, and so can my cat.
I should probably note here that I am, in many ways, a very immature person. For instance, I will, on occasion, loosely tie a sock around a cat's midsection, because doing so interferes with a feline's sense of balance and thus causes it to fall over. As long as the light pressure from the sock is being applied at several points around a cat's midsection, the cat will be unable to get up. Furthermore, the cat will be confused. I find this to be very amusing. The cat, though, does not, and, being a cat, has no idea why he or she is unable to get up off the floor. All the cat knows for sure is that I'm an asshole and the probable source of his or her immobility. The cat will also suspect that the sock has something to do with all of this, and his or her suspicions will rightfully increase when I remove the sock and the cat is suddenly able to stand up again.
Now, after this scenario has played out a few times, the cat will begin to understand - in accordance with his or her own feline level of understanding - that if I'm approaching the cat with a sock and giggling and saying, "Hey, cat, ah tell you what, imma tie this here sock around you, hee hee hee," which is what I invariably say in such a situation, that the cat is about to end up in that same disconcerting state of imbalance unless, of course, the cat goes and hides under the bed until I've left the house or sobered up. And that is exactly what the cat will begin to do. The cat has learned to predict the future.
The obvious question that arises at this point is, "How did the cat manage to figure out that you were going to tie a sock around his midsection again without first reading about it in the Book of Ezekiel?" This is a very good question. The comparably good answer is that the cat didn't figure anything out by reading about it in the Book of Ezekiel, and neither did Joel Rosenberg.
The next obvious question, then, concerns how Rosenberg manages to write "these novels that keep seeming to come true" if he is incapable of doing so via some sort of supernatural shortcut, such as reading the Book of Ezekiel. There are two potential answers. The first potential answer is that Rosenberg, who worked as a "communications consultant" for various political and corporate figures before beginning his career as a novelist, is a keen geopolitical observer, and is thus able to extrapolate from current and past events in order to hypothesize probable future events. The second potential answer is that Rosenberg cannot do any such thing, and that "these novels that keep seeming to come true" only "seem" to come true in the sense that fortune cookie messages "seem" to come true if one disregards the fortune cookie messages that don't "seem" to come true at all, such as the one I got recently that said "Romance will soon come your way," which is extraordinarily doubtful in light of the fact that I spend all of my time tying socks around cats.
But let's hear Rosenberg or at least whoever writes his marketing copy - out. According to his website, our prophetic friend has quite a track record of predicting the not-so-distant future. "The first page of his first novel - The Last Jihad - puts you inside the cockpit of a hijacked jet, coming in on a kamikaze attack into an American city, which leads to a war with Saddam Hussein over weapons of mass destruction," it says. "Yet it was written before 9/11, long before the actual war with Iraq." That actually sounds pretty impressive. I mean, that's exactly what ended up happening. Okay, I'm convinced. The rest of this article is about why I'm converting to Evangelical Christianity.
But perhaps we should make sure that I'm not jumping the gun here. Let's start by examining that last sentence, the one that ends "long before the actual war with Iraq." A more accurate way of putting this would have been, "long after the first war with Iraq, not quite as long after the establishment of the No Fly Zones in two large sections of Iraq which consequently put U.S. and Iraqi forces into a decade-long series of shooting incidents, and not very long at all after Operation Desert Fox, which had at then point been the most recent military conflict with Iraq, and which was also fought over weapons of mass destruction." That's somewhat better, although not quite as impressive from a marketing standpoint, which is to say that it's now true.
Still, though, Rosenberg did indeed write up a scenario in which we'd fight yet another undeclared war against Iraq over WMDs, which certainly ended up happening. Did he predict that 150,000 U.S. troops would be deployed to Iraq, topple Saddam, occupy the country, and find out that there aren't any WMDs after all? Because that would be pretty impressive if he did. But he didn't. Instead, his book details how Saddam tries to blow up the U.S. with ICBMs launched from his super-secret ICBM launchers, at which point the U.S. gets all huffy and nukes Baghdad and Tikrit. My memory is a little hazy, but I don't remember any of that actually happening.
There's also the matter of Rosenberg's hijacked airplane, the one that comes in "on a kamikaze attack on an American city." In Last Jihad, said plane crashes into the presidential motorcade in an attempt to assassinate the commander-in-chief. Well, that didn't happen, either, but surely the fact that Rosenberg used a plane crashing into an American city as a plot element makes him an extraordinarily important person whose views should be sought out by the White House, Capitol Hill, and Kyra Phillips. But what if he had written a scenario in which terrorists attempt to crash a commercial airliner into the World Trade Center itself, and said scenario had been released in narrative form just a few months before 9/11? That would be more impressive still, right?
In fact, that scenario was indeed written, and said scenario was indeed released in narrative form just a few months before 9/11. But it wasn't written by Rosenberg, or by any other modern prophet. Rather, it was an episode of the short-lived X-Files spin-off called The Lone Gunmen. I don't know who the writer was, but I'm pretty sure he hasn't been invited to Capitol Hill or the White House or even CNN. But why not? Coming up with a scenario in which such a significant event happens before it actually happens is, as we've determined, a valuable skill, perhaps even more valuable than Rosenberg's ability to predict a few things that sort of happen along with a bunch of shit that will never happen at all. As Condoleeza Rice put it during her 2002 testimony before the 9/11 Commission, "No one could have imagined them taking a plane, slamming it into the Pentagon... into the World Trade Center, using a plane as a missile." No one but the guy who wrote that one show with those guys from that other show, that is.
I'm kidding; plenty of people aside from that guy who wrote that one show with those guys from that other show imagined that such a thing could happen, and Condoleeza Rice is, of course, a liar. In 1993, the Pentagon itself commissioned a study in which the possibility of airplanes being used as weapons against domestic U.S. targets was looked into; similar reports on the topic conducted by various other agencies would follow over the next few years. In 1995, an Islamic terrorist plot to crash eleven planes into various world landmarks was foiled by international authorities. In 1998, the Federal Aviation Administration warned airlines to be on the alert for hijackings by followers of bin Laden, and a number of reports that circulated through the intelligence community over the next two years warned that said followers might try to crash airliners into skyscrapers. And in 1999, Columbine assailants Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold wrote out their plan to shoot up their school, blow up the building, escape to the airport, hijack a plane, and crash it into New York City, but only got around to doing the first part. Had they refrained from doing any of it and instead simply described that last event in a book, they probably could have looked forward to lucrative post-9/11 careers as novelists/cable news mainstays, insomuch as that they would have been "writing these books that keep seeming to come true" to the same extent that Rosenberg does.
Ah, but Rosenberg has written other books as well. Back to his website: "His second thriller - The Last Days - opens with the death of Yasser Arafat and a U.S. diplomatic convoy ambushed in Gaza. Six days before The Last Days was published in hardcover, a U.S. diplomatic convoy was ambushed in Gaza. Thirteen months later, Yasser Arafat died."
That a U.S. diplomatic convoy might be ambushed in Gaza is hardly a tough bet; the reason that it was a U.S. diplomatic convoy in the first place, and not a U.S. diplomatic bunch-of-cars-driving around-individually-without-a-care-in-the-world-through-a-very-dangerous-region-where-anti-U.S.-sentiment-is-high-and-everyone-is-armed, is that Gaza is a very dangerous region where anti-U.S. sentiment is high and everyone is armed. For instance, I looked up the search terms "convoy ambush Gaza" on Google News just now, and the first thing that comes up is the headline "Hamas ambushes convoy of U.S. weapons intended for Abbas agencies," relating to an incident that occurred on May 15th of 2007, that being two weeks previous to the time of this particular writing and a few weeks after I compiled my notes for this particular essay (yeah, I procrastinate). Oh, man! Here I was, writing and thinking about convoys being shot up in Gaza, and here was this convoy being shot up in Gaza! How is that I manage to write these articles "that keep seeming to come true"? Someone should invite me to fucking Capitol Hill and ask me about it. I'll tell them that I figured it out by interpreting the Norse Ragnarök myth in a literal fashion. Or maybe I'll just tell them the truth, which is that convoys get shot up in the Palestinian territories all the time, and that if you write a big long book in which things get shot in the Middle East or Middle Eastern terrorists blow something up which is to say, a big long book filled with things that are constantly happening a couple of these plot points are going to sort-of-kind-of come true at some point, and then everyone will think you're neat. I probably won't tell them that, though. I'll just say it's Ragnarök. I can't wait to launch my career writing Ragnarök-based technothrillers.
In fairness to Rosenberg, his plot points don't simply involve things that have already happened several times or things that have almost happened several times or things that are happening right now; occasionally, he goes out on a limb by describing events that can only happen once, such as the death of Yasser Arafat mentioned above. The reader will no doubt recall that Arafat did indeed die of health complications in 2003, having reached the age of 75 in a region where life expectancy is a bit lower than that and also after having been in and out of hospitals for several years, which is generally the sort of situation that leads one to die. And so it would have been pretty easy to predict in 2003 that Arafat might very well pass away in 2003 or 2004 from a combination of disease and plain old age.
But as easy as such a prediction might have been to make, it was still too difficult for our prophetic friend Rosenberg; The Last Days opens with Yasser Arafat being blown up in a suicide blast along with the U.S. secretary of state... in 2010. So, although Rosenberg does indeed predict the death of Arafat, whereas many people less astute than himself had no doubt predicted that Arafat might live forever, the actual death of Arafat, coming seven years before his fictional technothriller death in 2010, actually made Rosenberg's own scenario not more accurate, but less accurate and, in fact, impossible. Nonetheless, this is one of a handful of plot points that Rosenberg uses as an example of how he's managed to write "these books that keep seeming to come true."
Well, that's good enough for Kyra Phillips. Back at the CNN interview, Rosenberg was demonstrating his expertise on matters Middle Eastern by explaining that many Arabs don't like Israelis and would like to see them conquered and occupied. "Saddam Hussein, or Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, or Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah - they're all drunk with the dream of capturing Jerusalem," our friend informs us, although it's somewhat doubtful that the capture of Jerusalem was at the forefront of Mr. Hussein's mind when this interview was conducted in July of 2006, seeing as how he was at the time living in a jail cell and being tried by a bunch of Shiites for killing a bunch of Shiites. But the larger point is indeed valid, so I'll stop interrupting for a second here. "That's what [Rosenberg's poorly-written novel The Copper Scroll] is about, which is about this battle - this intense battle - to liquidate the Jewish people and liberate Jerusalem," Rosenberg continued. "I mean, are we seeing that happen? It's hard not to say that we are. That's why I've gotten invited over to the CIA, and the White House, and Congress," he reminded us again, later noting for good measure that "Bible prophecy" is "fairly remarkable intelligence. And that's why my novels keep coming true," which they don't, that "they have this feeling of coming true," which is true in the fortune cookie sense described earlier, that "a million copies have sold," which is simultaneously true, annoying, and unsurprising, and that "they are coming true bit by bit, day by day," by which he apparently means that Saddam will come back to life and fire his non-existent nuclear missiles at the U.S., which will in turn nuke Baghdad and Tikrit; that Yasser Arafat will come back to life and live long enough to be blown up by a suicide bomber in 2010 along with Secretary of State Dennis Kucinich; and that a convoy will be shot up in Palestine. In fairness to Rosenberg, one of those things is indeed likely to happen. Again.
But on the question of the imminent destruction of Israel, Phillips - in accordance with established CNN procedure - wanted a second opinion from a guy who totally agrees with the guy who gave the first opinion.
"Jerry, what do you think about what Joel wrote, about watching the Russian-Iranian alliance seeking to wipe out Israel?"
"Well, I find it very fascinating," Jenkins replied, "and of course, Joel is a real geopolitical watcher."
Of course. Every prophet in recorded history has been a "real geopolitical watcher" for the simple reason that if one wishes to pretend that one's favored means of magic has managed to predict the current world situation, one must know a thing or two about said situation. The big problem is taking the current world situation and using it to determine the future world situation (whereas the small problem is taking the current world situation and using it to determine the current world situation, which, though this may sound axiomatically easy, is apparently very difficult for Rosenberg, who is wrongly convinced that Syria and Lebanon are allied with each other and that Russia is allied with both of them). The prediction of future events generally entails extrapolation from current trends, which is a pretty tricky process even when undergone by clear-headed observers and becomes nearly impossible when undergone by nitwit theocrats like Joel Rosenberg and it becomes absolutely impossible when the nitwit theocrat in question insists on dotting his proposed future narrative with magical explosions, as Rosenberg did recently when he explained to Pat Robertson that "God says He's going to supernaturally judge Iran, Sudan, Lebanon, Syria, these other countries. We're talking about fire from heaven, a massive earthquake. It's going to be devastating and tragic. But I believe that afterwards there's going to be a great spiritual awakening."
***
The first great prophet of the 20th century was Herbert W. Armstrong, a former advertising copywriter who dispensed his dispensationalism by way of a radio program called World of Tomorrow, a monthly newsletter entitled Plain Truth, and the occasional booklet, and whose second career as a harbinger of doom spanned more than fifty years. Like most advertising copywriters of his time, Armstrong had nothing but contempt for the written form of the English language. In his popular 1956 pamphlet entitled 1975 in Prophecy!, Armstrong's jihad against subdued English communication begins on the title page and continues without pause; let the reader be warned that this is only the first of many inappropriate exclamation points used therein. More to the point, Armstrong here pioneers the art of modern eschatology and serves as a shining example for those would come later, largely by being wrong.
1975 begins with an acknowledgment of the general sense of optimism for which the post-war U.S. is often remembered, and concedes that man's technological feats will indeed usher in a new era of convenience. "You'll no longer bother taking a bath in a tub or shower," Armstrong tells his contemporaries. "You'll take an effortless and quicker waterless bath by using supersonic waves!" An exciting prospect, to be sure; from the beginning of time, man has yearned to be free of his bubble baths. But instead of going on to describe how the drudgeries of adolescent love will soon be performed by robots, thus leaving young people with more free time in which to labor at the robot factories, Armstrong warns us that our budding, supersonic way of life is already threatened by a familiar enemy: the Germans. This may seem counter-intuitive; one would think that no other race would be more inclined to leave undisrupted a world in which love and leisure are soon to be sacrificed on the altar of robot efficiency. Nonetheless, the signs of the times were present for all to see, if only one knew where to look.
It seemed, for instance, that the Krauts were already protecting themselves against the elements. One picture of Berlin is captioned, "Notice MODERN apartment building a common sight in the NEW Germany." That these NEW Germans were disinclined to replace their bombed-out dwellings with reproductions of 11th century Crusader fortresses, opting instead to build 20th century apartments in the 20th century, would probably have ranked pretty low on most people's lists of alarming German behavior, even bearing in mind that such a list would, at that point in history, be pretty fucking long indeed. But there was more to be worried about, said Armstrong. "Already Nazis are in many key positions in German industry in German education in the new German ARMY!" To be sure, the concept of a new German ARMY is quite a bit more alarming than the concept of a new German PRE-FAB CONDOMINUM. And in addition to what Armstrong lists here, Nazis already occupied "key" positions in the American rocket program, the feds having by this point made pets of many of the more useful fascists by way of Project Paperclip. With the benefit of hindsight, we now know that nothing particularly bad came of any of this. Armstrong, though, was supposed to have possessed the benefit of foresight.
Nonetheless, the Germans were clearly preparing for something. "They plan to strike their first blow," Armstrong continues, "NOT at France or Poland in Europe, but with hydrogen bombs by surprise attack on the centers of AMERICAN INDUSTRY!" Had I been writing this sentence, I would have probably put "hydrogen bombs" in all caps and just left "American industry" with conventional lettering; incidentally, the "hydrogen bombs" in question are elsewhere referred to as "Hydrogen Bombs" and "hydrogen-bombs". Anyway, the resourceful Krauts were conspiring not only to blow up Flint, Michigan with unconventional weaponry, but also to unite Europe under the inevitable Fourth Reich which in turn would be led by the nefarious Antichrist. But who? "At a certain moment" - by which Armstrong apparently means "an uncertain moment," since the moment in question is not cited with any certainty at all - "the new LEADER of this European combine will suddenly appear in the public eye. He's already behind the scenes in action! But the world does not yet recognize him! He still works under cover," even to the extent that such an accomplished futurist as Armstrong himself had yet to identify him, although he does venture a guess. "Already I have warned radio audiences to watch TITO." Anyone who followed Armstrong's advice would have been occasionally amused by the Yugoslav dictator's wacky antics, but otherwise disappointed with his failure to unite the Greater European Combine under an apocalyptic, hydrogen bomb-tossing regime. One might also wonder why all these meticulous Nazis would be inclined to put a Slavic untermensch in charge of their hard-won Aryan shadow empire. This seems to be out of character.
But Armstrong's most stunning prediction is that not all of the problems of tomorrow will be caused by Europeans, as had been the case in the recent past; Americans will soon be to blame as well. "Our peoples have ignored God's agricultural laws," he notes. "Not all the land has been permitted to rest the seventh year." Although largely forgotten today, the failure of American agriculturalists to follow Old Testament farming guidelines was once akin to homosexual nuptials in its allegedly mortal threat to our national viability. The collective failure to follow these gastronomic guidelines, Armstrong knew, would result in a major famine that would strike the U.S. "probably between 1965 and 1972." The imminence of this catastrophe was quite plainly evident even back in 1956; as the ongoing de-Yahwehification of our soil continued apace, the nation's "food factories are removing much of what minerals and vitamins remain while a new profit-making vitamin industry deludes the people into believing they can obtain these precious elements from pills and capsules purchased in drug stores and 'health food' stores!" If only these misguided nutritionists had gotten into something legitimate, like the supersonic bath industry.
The rest of 1975 consists of what has become fairly standard Christian End Times spiel insomuch as that the Antichrist briefly takes over the world, much of which is eventually blown up. Armstrong's text does deviate from the norm in that instead of inviting the reader to accept Christ into his or her heart and then put all trust in Him, he invites the reader to accept Christ into his or her heart and then await further instructions from Armstrong, who has an idea about what might be some good places to lay low for a while; unlike most of his modern-day contemporaries, Armstrong does not subscribe to the concept of the pre-Tribulation Rapture, which is to spirit away the world's Bible-believing Christians before all the bad shit goes down. Also somewhat unique to Armstrong is the charming admonition printed on the final page: "This booklet is exceedingly brief and condensed. The reader is advised to read it a second time. This disclosure is so amazing, so different from the common conception, you probably did not really grasp it all the first reading."
Aside from such minor novelties, Armstrong is a fundamentally typical specimen of the professional prophet insomuch as that he possesses the one attribute common to all of them, which is persistence, persistence having been Armstrong's strongest characteristic, stronger even than his penchant for exclamation points, which was very strong indeed. This is to Armstrong's credit; in matters of prophecy, persistence is what separates the men from the boys, or, rather, what separates the men from the crazy old men who think they can divine the future. If you or I had predicted in 1941 that Hitler would eventually take over the planet as the "beast of Revelation," as Armstrong had done before later moving on to Tito, and if Hitler ended up dead four years after this prediction, as Hitler did, you or I would probably give up right then and there and gone into real estate or something. Not Armstrong, though. Armstrong kept at it for forty more years.
Like real estate, prophecy is a crowded field, and Armstrong eventually came to face just as much competition as you and I are going to come up against when we go into business together doing land flips in Southern California. Billionaire faith healer Benny Hinn, for instance, has dozens of failed prophecies under his belt, ranging from the wacky (1989 prediction that all of the nation's gays are going to be killed by "fire" no later than 1995; perhaps he meant that they would be "thrilled" by "Fire Island") to the not-so-wacky-yet-unfulfilled-nonetheless (another 1989 prediction that Fidel Castro would die in the '90s). Ditto with Pat Robertson, who predicted that the apocalypse would occur in 1982, and then again in 1984. Luckily, it didn't, and thus Robertson was able to run for the GOP presidential nomination in 1988 that being the same year in which an engineer named Robert Faid wrote a book called Gorbachev! Has the Real Antichrist Come?, the title of which sort of makes it sound as if he's trying to get the Russian premier's attention and then ask him his opinion on the matter, but the text of which, of course, posits Gorbachev himself as the Antichrist. In 666: The Final Warning, a fellow named Gary Blevins proposes that the Antichrist is none other that Ronald Reagan; Blevins wrote this in 1990, so you've got to give him some credit for going out on a limb. The very prolific author Yisrael Hawkins predicted that nuclear war would occur on September 12th , 2006; when this didn't turn out to be the case, he decided that such a war had simply been "conceived" on that date. As of this writing, though, the world's water has yet to break.
One of the more financially successful of these modern prophets was Edgar Whisenaut, who appears to have sold something on the order of four million copies of his 1988 book, 88 Reasons Why the Rapture will Occur in 1988, in which he puts the event at sometime between September 11th and September 13th of that otherwise uneventful year. Then, on the 14th , he changed his prediction to the 15th . Then, October 3rd . Then he wrote another book called 89 Reasons Why the Rapture will Occur in 1989, and I would imagine that the extra reason had something to do with 1988 having been ruled out by process of elimination. When the world made it to 1990 unscathed, Whisenaut wisely decided that his particular brand of prophecy might work better in a periodical format, and so he began putting out a new publication entitled Final Shout Rapture Report 1990. The next year, it was called Final Shout Rapture Report 1991. This went on for several years, but what's truly unusual is that it didn't go on forever. Whisenaut's eventual obscurity in the face of failed predictions is the exception, not the rule, to the usual career arc of the modern Evangelical prophet, who may generally depend on a reliable income stream regardless of whether or not any of their predictions actually hit the mark. To be fair, this phenomenon isn't limited to the Evangelical world, and in fact often applies to the world of mundane, secular prophets, which is why William Kristol still has his own magazine.
If we measure the success of a prophet by how wrong he can be for how long he can be it without losing his income stream as a result and there is no more polite way to measure such a thing then Hal Lindsay is, by that reckoning, the most successful prophet in modern history by virtue of having been the most unsuccessful at actual predictions for the greatest length of time without having had to get a job. Lindsay's once-ubiquitous 1970 book The Late, Great Planet Earth, for instance, sold millions of copies and went through dozens of printings, and was later followed up by several sequels, including The 1980's: Countdown to Armageddon, which asserts that "the decade of the 1980's could very well be last decade of history as we know it." I'm not sure what else it says, though, as I can't seem to find a copy.
I was, however, able to score an early edition of The Late, Great Planet Earth, and I'm glad I did, because according to the dust jacket copy, this is a very important book, or at least it was in 1970, before all the things that Lindsay predicted would soon happen didn't happen. "Prophets and astrologers are enjoying the greatest revival since the ancient days of Babylon," warns the text on the back cover, right under a picture of Lindsay leaning on a tree while clearly enjoying his mustache. The onset of all this mystical nonsense to which Lindsay is so clearly opposed is to the wrongful detriment of the "authentic voices which have been overlooked by modern, sophisticated man... the voices of the ancient seers of Israel, the Hebrew prophets. Three milleniums [sic] of history are strewn with evidence of their prophetic marksmanship and to ignore their incredible predictions of man's destiny and the events which are soon to effect this planet will be perhaps the greatest folly of this generation," which is a pretty serious charge when one considers that this is the generation that elected Lyndon Johnson out of concern that Barry Goldwater might turn out to be some sort of warmonger.
To hear Lindsay tell it, the aforementioned Hebrew prophets certainly sound like the real deal, particular in relation to their modern counterparts. "What would you think of prophets today who would be willing to stake their lives on their claims?" Lindsay asks us. The ancient Hebrew prophets, he says, were such fellows, and those among them who failed in their short-term predictions were promptly put to death, and presumably not rewarded with their own column in Time , as the aforementioned Mr. Kristol has been. The clear implication is that the ensuing natural selection weeded out all the bad prophets, and so we should listen up to what they have to say about the latter 20th century, with just a little bit of help from Lindsay.
One of the more prominent of these prophets was Jeremiah, who predicted "that the capital city, Jerusalem, would be destroyed and that its people would lose their capacity to laugh." Luckily, they didn't lose their capacity to make other people laugh, and Curb Your Enthusiasm is now in its fifth season without having jumped the shark. But Jerusalem was indeed destroyed, just as most cities on the Levant were destroyed at some point or another during that general period, which is why you and I aren't going to be buying up many residential lots in the area, no matter how good the schools may be. Then there was Isaiah, who "foretold that the mighty invincible Babylonians would be conquered and so completely destroyed by the Medes that Babylon would never be inhabited again," a prediction which would have been somewhat more impressive if the first half weren't obvious (had these "invincible" Babylonians managed to avoid being conquered, theirs would have been the only empire in history to do so) and if the second half weren't obviously wrong (Babylon is indeed "inhabited" right now, just as it always has been, and is in fact home, as of this writing, to 22 million native Iraqis and 150,000 visiting Americans).
"It's ironic that man never seems to learn from past mistakes, especially when they relate to major catastrophes," Lindsay later notes, ironically enough, before adding, even more ironically, that "[m]any Bible students in recent years tried to fit the events of World War I and II to the prophetic signs which would herald the imminent return of Christ. Their failure discredited prophecy," although not to such an extent that prophecy was ever discredited in the eyes of those who lent prophecy credit in the first place, which is why Lindsay's own attempt to "fit the events" of the latter Cold War years to those very same "prophetic signs" sold so many millions of copies. But Lindsay didn't see himself as doing any sort of fitting at all; no modern prophet believes himself to be in the business of interpretation. "God's word should not be interpreted!," Herbert Armstrong wrote in the '30s. "To INTERPRET it is to place human meaning into it. God's Word is a REVELATION from the Almighty revealing to us TRUTHS we do not otherwise know and could never find out." Inimitable emphasis aside, Armstrong's interpretation of his own lack of interpretation is common to those who came before him and to those who would come later, including Lindsay in the '70s, Whisenaut in the '80s, LaHaye and Jenkins in the '90s, and Joel C. Rosenberg today, all of whom believe themselves to be simply restating the unambiguous and unchanging prophecies of the Bible, which leads to the obvious question of why we need Armstrong, Whisenaut, LaHaye, Jenkins, and Rosenberg in the first place. The not-so-obvious answer is that the unambiguous and unchanging prophecies of the Bible are shrouded in ambiguity and subject to constant change.
This is not to say that there aren't some points of agreement among the various interpretations of the various non-interpreters. Everyone seems to agree that the Temple of Jerusalem, having been destroyed twice in antiquity, must be rebuilt a third time before Jesus can return. Armstrong, writing in the '50s, decided that this would happen at some point around 1972; Lindsay, writing in 1970, decided that this would happen "soon." However, "There is one major problem barring the construction of a third Temple," Lindsay reminds us. "That obstacle is the second holiest place of the Moslem faith, the Dome of the Rock. This is believed to be built squarely in the middle of the old temple site." Problematic as this problem may be, Lindsay believes that it will be solved. "Obstacle or no obstacle, it is certain that the Temple will be rebuilt. Prophecy demands it."
Prophecy tends to get its way. Lindsay notes a then-recent interview with Israeli historian Israel Eldad, who was in agreement with ever-so-demanding Prophecy that the Temple would soon return.
"What about the Dome of the Rock which now stands on the temple site?" the interviewer asks.
"It is, of course, an open question," replies Eldad. "Who knows, maybe there will be an earthquake."
Who knows?
Just as Armstrong and Lindsay then agreed that the Temple would make its appearance in Jerusalem sometime in the early '70s, Lindsay and Rosenberg today agree that the Russians will make their appearance in Jerusalem sometime soon. For Lindsay, "soon" has meant various things at various times. In 1970, when he wrote The Late, Great Planet Earth, "soon" meant some time during the '70s. Then, in 1980, when he wrote The 1980's: Countdown to Armageddon, "soon" meant some time during the '80s. Today, it means some time in the near future. The important thing to understand, though, is that the Russians are going to invade Israel "soon," with the chronological proximity of such an event being an eternal attribute of time, the concept of time being, as the physicists tell us, subjective.
Back in 1970, Russia was going to invade Israel "soon" because the temple was going to be rebuilt "soon," and the Bible not-so-clearly states that Magog, the great enemy from the North, will invade Israel "soon" afterward, and Magog, as everyone knows, apparently, is Russia. Lindsay also cites the 1968 prediction of renowned Israeli military genius Moshe Dayan. "General Dayan's statement that 'the next war will not be with the Arabs but with the Russians' has a considerably deeper significance, doesn't it?" In fact, it does, insomuch as that it marks a rare lapse in Mr. Dayan's usual prescience, assuming that he really said any such thing at all; Israel's next war was with the Arabs, as have been all of its military conflicts since. Meanwhile, the Russians have been in Russia, except when they were in Afghanistan, from which they were eventually dislodged by U.S.-supported freedom fighters, and in Chechnya, from which they have yet to be dislodged by Muslim-supported terrorists. Not even the Bible could have predicted the amazing transformation of the Central Asian patriot from hero to villain in the space of two decades.
When the Russians invade, they'll have plenty of company, including that of Persia. "All authorities agree on who Persia is today. It is modern Iran," notes Lindsay, correctly enough. "This is significant because it is being wooed to join the United Arab Republic in its hostility against Israel," although this is somewhat less significant in light of the fact that the United Arab Republic no longer exists, and that what was then the de facto leader of this now non-existent entity, Egypt, has been at peace with Israel for nearly three decades. Nor was it ever a significant possibility even back then; the Iranians, not being Arabs, would probably not have been all that inclined to join a political entity that designated them as such, and Iran's then-ruler, the pro-Western shah, would have been less inclined still, and thus this was a pretty silly prediction to make.
But perhaps the Egyptian regime will be peer-pressured into attacking nonetheless; our Hebrew seers also predict a military attack by "Cush," a term which Lindsay tells us refers not only to Ethiopia but to all of black Africa. "The sobering conclusion is this: many of the African nations will be united and allied with the Russians in the invasion of Israel." Anticipating the obvious question of why this would be the case, Lindsay provides the answer which seemed plausible in 1970: "One of the most active areas of Evangelism for the Communist 'gospel' is in Africa. As we see further developments in this area in the future, we realize that it will be converted to Communism." Today, of course, there is not a single black African nation which could be said to be Communist, nor is there a single black African nation that cares anything for Russia at all (although several are increasingly keen on China, which itself is decreasingly keen on communism). On the other hand, black Africa is now "one of the most active areas of Evangelism" for the actual Gospel, Pentecostalism is sharply on the rise, and the few black Africans who today march on Jerusalem are religious tourists intent on buying jars of mustard seeds.
Ah, but what about the inhabitants of North Africa? The reader can probably guess. "The territory of Northern Africa is becoming solidly Pro-Soviet." Oops. But there's always "Gomer," another Hebrew proper noun that allegedly refers to Eastern Europe. "This includes Eastern Germany," which, as the reader will remember, remains behind the Iron Curtain, its peoples united with the Soviet bloc and its resources dedicated to Stalinist objectives. Western Germany, meanwhile, is likewise under the control of the Holy Roman Empire. Woe unto the Teutons thus torn asunder!
The next chapter is entitled "Yellow Peril," in apparent reference to the yellow men of the Orient who will soon be threatening the peace. Lindsay tells us that China is well on its way to becoming a great power, although it's left unclear whether he figured this out by deciphering passages of the Old Testament or whether he read it in a 1964 issue of Time like everyone else. There is quite a bit of talk in this chapter of the 200 million-man infantry force that the People's Republic is preparing to field against Israel for some reason known only to Lindsay, the Chinese, and perhaps God.
Like Armstrong before him and LaHaye after, Lindsay is convinced that the Europeans are intent on reviving the Roman Empire. "Twenty years ago no one would have dared to believe that Rome as an empire would be put back together," except for our friend Herbert W. Armstrong, who was an unusually daring fellow. But Lindsay is correct in his proposition that "Rome as an empire" will be put back together, and it is in fact in the process of being put back together right now, although it will not be centered in Rome, will consist of essentially independent democratic states governed mostly from within instead of imperial provinces governed from afar, will not be in the business of imperial conquest, and, if recent history is any indication, will be busy with factional disputes over largely inconsequential matters of commercial agricultural policy for the next seven thousand years, and will thus not be in any way analogous to the Roman Empire at all.
But innocuous as it may first appear, the very existence of the European Union is itself ominous to Lindsay, Armstrong, LaHaye, and the millions who give them money and credence; that a collection of states would become united is a frightening prospect to many residents of the United States. This decidedly non-Roman and non-imperial Roman Empire will consist of ten such states, as Lindsay tells us in 1970 with some great certainty gleaned from the Book of Revelation and its reference to a dragon with ten horns or some such. Today, the European Union consists of 27 states. Not only was Lindsay correct, but he was over two-and-a-half times more correct than he had expected to be.
While the Europeans play into the hands of the Antichrist by lowering their trade barriers and providing for streamlined work permits, the rest of the world's peoples are were, rather - driving headlong into oblivion by way of their nasty habit of getting married and having children. Lindsay cites a 1968 study claiming that the world population would hit 7.5 billion by 2000, which, of course, did not happen. He then quotes J. Bruce Griffing, chairman of the genetics department at Ohio State University: "Unless mankind acts immediately, there will be a worldwide famine in 1985, and the extinction of man within 75 years." Apparently, mankind did end up acting immediately, although I've been unable to figure out exactly what it was that mankind ended up doing. Anyway, kudos to mankind.
Lindsay then makes what was a common mistake in 1970 he quotes Stanford University gadfly Paul Ehlrich, author of the 1968 book The Population Bomb . Ehlrich has made a career for himself by being wrong about things even without the assistance of Hebrew prophecy, which is quite a talent. "Mankind may be facing its final crisis," Ehlrich had written. "No action that we can take at this late date can prevent a great deal of future misery from starvation and environmental deterioration." Take that, J. Bruce Griffing! Ehlrich was also convinced that hundreds of millions of people would starve to death in the 1970s, and the fact that millions of liberal environmentalists believed him is often cited by conservatives as evidence that millions of liberal environmentalists are damned fools, although the fact that millions of conservative Evangelicals believed the very same thing does not seem to have struck these same conservatives as evidence of anything at all.
Anyway, with everyone now starving to death, the great powers reasonably decide that this would be the perfect time to field and supply infantry brigades of unprecedented size for the purpose of invading Israel, a nation with no natural resources. According to Lindsay, the Soviet Union attacks first, with the assistance of the Africans, Arabs, and East Europeans (including East Germany, of course). Then the Soviets betray everyone and invade Africa. The Neo-Roman Empire, now led by the Antichrist, attacks the Russians, or the Israelis, or both, or something (I'm sort of skimming at this point), and then the Chinese attack the Soviets near Jerusalem, and not, as one might expect, on their thousand-mile long common border. Then Neo-Rome, which is now allied with the U.S. for some reason, attacks the Chinese. Hundreds of millions are killed in a single battle.
"As history races towards this moment, are you afraid or looking with hope for deliverance? The answer should reveal to you your spiritual condition," Lindsay says, finally getting something right.