THE LOW POST: The End of the World

I've read The Ezekiel Option. It's a compendium of every dipshit hocus-pocus Christian pseudo-scientific political idea you can think of, written in that childishly mechanical literary style peculiar to American blockbusters of the Da Vinci Code and Left Behind ilk -- in which every character has a name like Mike Stormfield or Andrew Porchdale, romance is watching a White House aide plant a church-sanctioned kiss on a CIA agent, and human beings seemingly can only think in italics ("Now Jibril was finally making sense, thought Gogolov"). Moreover, the people in the book only come in two types -- absolutely evil or absolutely good. The evil people are all Muslims, communists, Europeans, academics or lefties, and the good people are innocent peace-loving Americans who all have titles in the American or Israeli government or security services.

The book is a remarkable document if only because it is such an accurate depiction of mainstream delusional paranoia in the Bush era. In Rosenberg's take on modern history, the Iraq invasion was a rousing success ("The White House could barely contain its optimism. A peaceful, prosperous, democratic Iraq . . . would forever transform the modern Middle East"), and the new democratic Iraqi president in the book is an almost perfect representation of Thomas Friedman's mythical "Iraqi Thomas Jefferson" character -- a man who under Saddam had published books full of coded messages aimed at helping readers find contraband copies of the Magna Carta and the Declaration of Independence in Baghdad's public libraries.

Imagining that Iraqi Muslims under Saddam read the Declaration of Independence for inspiration is a little like an Afghan imam dreaming of Kentucky coal miners gathering at a diner to read Ibn al Taymiya before a strike. It's nuts, but this is the way many people in our country view the world; there are people out there who think that even pygmies in Africa grew up dreaming of Ben Franklin's kite.

The plot of the book revolves around the hijacking of a Russian passenger plane. When the hijackers steer the plane towards the White House, the Jesus-loving president MacPherson waits until the last minute before blowing it out of the sky, then weeps for the 173 passengers aboard. Naturally the whole world turns against the United States for this monstrous act, and when ultranationalists seize Russia in a coup in which they are joined by, who else?, France and Germany in denouncing the American "aggression."

Eventually the entire world bands together under the auspices of the U.N. to declare war (with the Antichrist's million ground troops on horseback, no less) on Israel, and only a plucky and intrepid White House aide named Jon Bennet, who comes back to Jesus in the book, realizes (after a half-baked Da Vinci-style Biblical investigation) that history is following the apocalyptic script of Ezekiel. He must tell the president! But it is too late, as both sides destroy each other in a fiery nuclear battle that is presented in the book as a sort of highly satisfying, orgasmic rhetorical release. And in the end, Iraq -- now immensely strong and vital in the wake of the invigorating invasion by America -- rises again as the new Babylon, the new power on earth . . .