The Last Battle

The Last Battle
© 1956 C.S. Lewis
184 pages

"This is my password," said the King as he drew his sword. "The light is dawning, the lie broken. Now guard thee, miscreant, for I am Tirian of Narnia."

In The Magician's Nephew, the great lion Aslan sang Narnia into existence and commissioned a human boy to plant a special tree to protect it against evil. But now the Tree has fallen, and a  Lie reigns.  The story begins with a malevolent ape and his witless donkey companion discovering the skin of a lion. Shift, the ape, has an idea:  skin the lion, dress the donkey in it, and use this guise to awe the woodland folk into doing his bidding!  Hundreds of years have passed since anyone saw the great Lion, Aslan himself,  and the lie succeeds -- to the destruction of Narnia.Consumed by avarice, Shift begins ordering the destruction of Narnia's enchanted forests in the name of "Aslan", selling it piecemeal to the dreaded Calormen and even inviting their soldiers into Narnia. The king Tirian, captured early after falling for the deceit himself, is in no place to prevent his people being massacred and his cities destroyed. At this hour of greatest crisis, Jill and Eustace are called into Narnia to take up the Lion's banner one more time. For this is the last battle, the great battle, and one where Narnia's foe is not a mere witch presuming power, or a greedy horde of warlords, but a winged beast that smells of death and devours everything in its path. Although Narnia's enemies have always cloaked themselves in deceit -- the Witch as a Queen, most consistently -- here lie is compounded upon lie. No sooner do our party of heroes  (Eustace, Jill, the rescued Tirian, and a unicorn to begin with) unravel part of the diabolical plot than does the Ape add another. Yet the Ape is being controlled by another party, and they still by another.  Some Narnians are frightened by all this, and run away; some decide the battle isn't worth bothering with, and retreat into their own narrow issues (like the dwarves, who become nasty little chauvinists). Our heroes know only one thing: they are between the paws of Aslan, and they would rather perish fighting the Ape and his death-god than betray the lion.  So it goes, and such is this literary version of  the Book of Revelation, with its antichrist, astronomic fireworks, and all-consuming finale.   Virtually all of the major characters throughout the series make appearances, making it a glorious reunion of sorts, The Last Battle is darker and more intense than the other books, however, and if I read it as a child I probably would have had nightmares about it.  The witch of previous books was evil, but in a Disney villain way;  the baddies here are positively revolting, between the Ape perverting good to evil and the death-thing invoked by the Calormen.  While I can imagine future re-reads of various Chronicles books, The Last Battle  is a little too rapturous.

Look for a Narnia wrapup tomorrow!

Related:
The Great Divorce, C.S. Lewis
Lord of All, Robert Hugh Benson

Why Waco?

Why Waco? Cults and the Battle for Religious Freedom in America
© 1997 James Tabor
254 pages, including text of David Koresh's manifesto on the "Seven Seals"

  In February 1995, Federal forces arrived outside a large home owned by a religious sect living in expectation of the apocalypse and led by a man who claimed to be the Messiah. Alarmed by rumors of child marriage and the fact that members of the group were involved in the gun trade, agents of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms arrived to execute arrest warrants. An exchange of fire that killed six residents and four agents prompted them to back down and lay siege instead. After token efforts at communication, after fifty-one days tanks rolled in to batter holes in the walls and flood the massive complex with CS case, over the protests of some on the ground who were attempting to reach the group's leader.  One of those dissenting voices was James Tabor, who in Why Waco explains the religious background of the Davidians in an effort to humanize a group derided by the media as suicidal kooks.

This strangely sympathetic account of the group's downfall begins with another group in the 1840s, who, following their century's version of Harold Camping, believed earnestly that Jesus would return to Earth on October 22nd, 1844.   These Adventists survived their 'great disappointment' on the lack of the world ending; those who kept the faith eventually found other issues to coalescence around, including an insistence that Saturday, not Sunday, was the Sabbath.  Certain elements of this denomination grew progressively more estranged from the main current of Christianity, forming an intentional community on the Texas plains that survived for decades, through several successive leaders -- one of whom, a woman, would reveal that the Holy Spirit was in fact a woman, and the Catholic church was an insidious plot to subvert worship of the divine feminine by focusing it on Mary, the mother of Jesus.  The Branch David took its name from its expectation that when Revelation was fulfilled, the world would hail a new Messiah, descended from the biblical David.

Into this group came young Vernon Howell, later known as David Koresh. He came searching, to pit their claims against his studious knowledge of the Bible and its prophecies. Consumed by a desire to understand the secret truths of Isaiah and Revelation, he flourished and eventually inherited leadership of the community.  He was especially charismatic after a trip to Israel,  where he claimed an encounter with the Divine.  Koresh also became increasing messianic, changing his name to conform to a role he felt called to:   the sinful Messiah.  Although modern Christians regard messiah as Jesus' title alone, the word is used several times throughout the Bible, and at one time in connection with Cyrus of Persia, whose name is rendered Koresh.  Cyrus was used by God as messiah, called to wage war against the satanic power of Babylon and restore the Temple and the Jewish people to their rightful place. Vernon Howell, becoming David Koresh, believed he was the new messiah:  He wasn't Jesus, but he was called by God  to gather around him a chosen few and reveal the Final Revelation to the world.  When the Final Revelation came,  Koresh would be at one with the Word of God, comprehending the entire Bible as a mystical whole, and guide the world into a new era.  This greatness would not come without price; the powers of the world would rise against the chosen few, and even kill them just as they did Jesus, but God would prevail.

Against this figure, whose vocabulary was saturated with references to arcane prophecies, whose days were spent in intense discussions about theology, propagating increasingly esoteric doctrines and practices, rose the ATF.  While agents on the ground attempted to talk to Koresh and convince him to surrender, all they heard in response was "bible babble",not comprehending that just as they were trying to squeeze him into the criminal profile boxes that they understood, so to was he understanding them in the light of his own narrative. Their initial attack on the center, followed by their encirclement of it that cut all electricity and communication with the outside world, seemed to him the fulfillment of the "Fifth Seal", in which the forces of darkness rise against the righteous. They were playing the perfect villains, convincing him that he was right and that the end was night.  So they held out and perished in fire, almost eighty souls.

Tabor's goal in this is to humanize the Davidians, and it works for the most part. They obviously weren't too strange at first or on the whole, given how good their relations were with their neighbors: when the raid happened, the Davidians were expecting it, having received numerous tips.  Although the ATF and FBI referred to the siege as a prolonged "hostage situation", Davidians plainly were not under coercive force. They came and left the group as they pleased, drawn mainly by desire to  see what Koresh was teaching, attracted by his energy. The fly in the ointment is that by the time the center was attacked, Koresh was in a pecuilar spot, psychologically. He was the chief fixation of attention for scores of people, whose awe at his abilities at arguing scripture convinced him that he was the chosen one.   Unrestrained by the fear of social reprisal, his body followed its desires, carefully justified by seemingly rational arguments: bit by bit, he convinced himself that it was just and proper for him to be married to several women, including teenage girls, and father children by them. They were to be the new royal priesthood of the next epoch of human history.  The Davidians could have been quirky but harmless even living on a compound by themselves and earning money by selling guns, but once polygamous child-marriage enters the picture even the most sympathetic soul has to say, "...that boy's off his rocker."

However, Tabor's principle object may not be the Waco group themselves, but cults in general.  Tabor objects to their being demonized: what modern religion, he asks, does not match the attempts at quantifying what exactly a cult is?  He rightly criticizes the agents on the ground for not seriously attempting to understanding who they were dealing with, beyond wacky gun-cultists,  but even if the group had been able to send regular messages to the world through the siege,  but who is to say they could?  The group's entire bent was occultic, fixated on its elite status.  Tabor does a good job at comparing Waco to Jonestown, which was more domineering where its members were. David Koresh may have told his followers that that were called to be celibate (unless David felt a call to know another man's wife in the biblical sense), but if they insisted on remaining married to one another, they could leave.  Koresh's group was definitely weird, increasingly dominated by the man's sexual fetish, but from this account they seem more likely just to be a danger to themselves, and especially to their children.  Of  course, the government's brutal attempt to force the group to surrender only led to the deaths of most of the children at risk, so the entire episode is an utter tragedy.

Why Waco? has a jarring sympathy for its bizarre subjects, one that struggles to be professional and errs on the side of indulgence. It does make comprehensible the group's apocalyptic teachings, and can't help but entertain...but the author's lack of judgment, even when horror would be appropriate, is unsettling

Patriots

Patriots: A Novel of Survival in the Coming Collapse
© 1995 James Wesley Rawles
400 pages

So...much...testosterone.

Well, D.C. finally spent itself into oblivion. After decades of deficits and a series of bailouts that do nothing but inflate the problem, the financial sector is hemorrhaging and taking with it the entire American economy.  Few institutions will survive the crash, and now a generation is on its own. Todd Gray isn’t alarmed, though. He smelled the storm coming a long time before it hit; for nine years, ever since  September 11,  he and a group of likeminded friends have prepared for the worst. They’re survivalists, or ‘preppers’:  not only do they maintain extra supplies at home to see them through extended power outages or local disasters, but their group has purchased an expanse of land in rural Idaho to use as a retreat in case something catastrophic happens. From their retreat, this small band of friends will labor to rebuild the Republic.  Patriots follows their trials after the collapse, as they face off against human desperation, disease,  the threat of starvation, and worst of all: the government.

Patriots is a how-and-why argument for prepping in the form of a novel. There are characters and things happen to them, but mostly they’re there to explain what they’re doing to the reader, what they’re doing it with, why one tool or behavior is  better in this or that situation ,and so on. There is action throughout the novel, including car chases, first-fights, pitched brawls between raiders and strongholds, and even a town invasion, and its second half features a looming showdown between cells of free citizens who have survived, and a resurrected Federal government that employs UN soldiers to do its eeevil bidding.  Unlike One Second After or Lucifer’s Hammer, there’s not a great deal of emotional drama, let alone grisly scenes like cannibal hordes.  The book’s characters are preppers, calm in the face of whatever happens. They’ve spent nine years  practicing together, keeping one another’s skills sharp, running through scenarios and improvising solutions. They even purposely recruited members with diverse strengths, so whether they need an arm stitched back together or something welded, they’ve got it covered.

One is almost relieved when a helicopter descends from on high to deposit an overfed bureaucrat announcing that the Federal government is alive and well and on the way to ‘pacifying’ the country. The emergency does require some extraordinary measures on the government’s part, of course – a little suppression of free speech here, a little confiscation of guns there, total wage-and-price controls – nothing to worry over. It reads like a Top Ten List of Evil, and comes off as preposterous given that the United States’ entire civil and economic infrastructure has collapsed. By that point five years have passed, and society has recovered a bit, building around cells of order like the central characters retreat, but this is an armed society with no fond memories of the government, whose gross irresponsibility led to the collapse.  Regardless of the merits of this scenario, including the outlandish invasion of the United States by U.N troops, it at least gives the characters a challenge to overcome.

Whatever else, one must give credit to Rawls for  infusing a massive amount of information into novel form.   His characters’ actions are factual; every book and product they discuss is commercially available. I recognized a fair few of the book titles (The Encyclopedia of Country Living, for instance, and When There Is No Dentist).  Impressive, too, is the range of events he gives information on:  forging IDs, rain cachement, rotation of storage supplies, gun cleaning, home fortification,  and blood transfusions.  The characters are forgettable and the plot weak, but this is a mild kind of wish-fulfillment that combines action and lectures on food storage. It’s a strange kind of fun if you’re into self-reliance, disaster-preparedness, or attacking tanks.

Related:
One Second After, William Forstchen. An EMP attack shuts down most electronics in the United States.  Misery ensues.
Lucifer's Hammer, Larry Niven. Asteroid impact levels most of civilization.
World Made by Hand, James Howard Kunstler.  Peak oil novel.