THE RISING Authors: Tim La Haye and Jerry Jenkins Tyndale House, Illinois 2005. Left Behind is the latest volume in the fundamentalist 'end of the world' pulp series, The Rising? For those unfamiliar with the series, Messrs La Haye and Jenkins authored an interminable late nineties end of the world series entitled Left Behind. It goes like this: the world suddenly experiences the immediate loss of its entire fundamentalist Christian population, which has been snatched (!) by a sneaky Jesus. Chaos ensues, until the suave and charismatic United Nations Secretary General Nicolae Carpathia steps in. Now, I don't know what La Haye and Jenkins have against Romania, where this bloke allegedly hails from. But I do know La Haye doesn't like us glbt folk much, as he authored a tome entitled The Unhappy Gays in the late seventies, and his wife Beverly used to be queen wasp of Concerned Women for America, the largest US antifeminist group. Anyway, Carpathia is, surprise surprise, the Antichrist, and installs a one-world government that then proceeds to do nasty things to converts to fundamentalism who were unlucky enough to suffer immediate intellectual decompression and bad coiffure and fashion taste after the Rapture, which was the aforementioned global garbage collection of the world's fundamentalist population. Seven years of bad nastiness ensue, and at the end, the annoying clean-cut conservative Christian underground is triumphant at the Second Coming, wherein anyone who isn't a fundamentalist gets incinerated. Sounds dire? Wait until you read the plotline of The Rising, which is the prequel to the malarkey above. The prequel offers us the unholy origins of Nicolae Carpathia. No, it wasn't a stray vampire bite, he isn't from that part of Carpathia. Apparently, he is the product of an illicit and unethical human genetic engineering experiment that mixed together the DNA of two gay men and inserted them within a fertilised egg. I take it that this is supposed to be an attack on same-sex marriage and reproductive cloning, both at the same time. Er, did he get the DNA from the guys sperm cells, because there would be problems. The human ovum is the gamete that carries most of the genetic information that contributes to the growth of any fertilised egg into a fully fledged human at birth. And people read this? Anne Lyckholm has an explanation why this should be so. Forget the filthy rich televangelists and pressure group leaders, most fundamentalist Protestant Americans are breadline working class white trash, and actually suffer as much during the current Republican-spawned spate of uneven economic performance as normal Americans. Unlike normal Americans, though, they project their existential unease over their economic woes onto other marginalised social groups and are susceptible to convoluted right-wing conspiracy theories, in which we play a supporting role. This would all be cheap amusement, except for one thing. La Haye is a member of the Centre for National Policy, a right-wing foreign policy think-tank. In other words, the current Iraq War has supporters who believe that they're engaged in a holy anti-Islamic crusade against enemies of Israel, and they describe the use of nuclear weapons in their end of the world scenarios with relish. Gulp! Recommended Reading: Ann Lyckholm: Rapture Culture: Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 1999. Craig Young - 4th June 2005