Review of Christian Nation From USAToday

Boy howdy does this look dumb.

Oh, you know when I said "F3" probably stands for "Fox 3," like Fox has now taken over four or five channels? So that they're F1, F2, F3, etc.? Like you can watch whatever you want, so long as it's Fox?

Ehh, I guess that was sort of clever because that's not what F3 is. So I guess the author missed a chance to be clever. I know, don't be shocked.

It's called F3 because...

Fox News merges with the Faith & Freedom Coalition, the political arm of conservative Christians, to form Fox Faith & Freedom News.

So F3 for three F's.

It sort of gets sillier after that:

It opens in 2029, narrated by a survivor of a bloody civil war between "the Holies," the Christian fundamentalists who control the federal government, and the "Secs," the secular opposition centered in Manhattan.

The federal Purity Web – think Big Brother on steroids – has rewritten American history.

The novel's narrator, a young lawyer named Greg, slowly explains how dissent, homosexuality and abortion were outlawed.

....

In New York, the city's openly gay mayor, Christine Quinn, along with her wife, is gunned down at a gay wedding. (In real life, Quinn is a mayoral candidate. I find the fictional assassination of a living politician creepy, at best.) In San Francisco, the Air Force bombs the Castro neighborhood, killing 12,000 people, mostly gay men.

Sure, why not.

So, anyway, I don't know if you can tell this from the structure, but the book seems entirely undramatized. By which I mean: the reader is not present with the action when it is happening. It is told by the three protagonists, whose names are I guess "But Emilie," "And Greg," and "San dear," remembering what happened twenty years older, telling each other things in dialogue (or a dialogue-like substitute) that actually all of them would remember, so why are they narrating to each other the events of 2009-2029?

To the extent there is action, it appears to just be action of people attempting to correct each other as to their memory. So I guess that excerpt we have is representative: The "action" consists of people correcting each other.

zsasz called it "Daily Kos: The Novel." Seems spot-on. If Sartre had had the internet, he would have observed that Hell is other people correcting your minor typos forever.

Given that in 2029, when the book is actually set, there is an actual Civil War going on between the "Holies" and the "Secs" (hey that sounds like Sex! Clever!), it's kind of hard for me to believe they'd be sitting there yapping about Terri Schiavo. Note that Terri Schiavo isn't discussed all that often in 2013. In 2029, during a period of outright civil war, with tens of thousands of Gay Casualties and possibly even some bi- or straight ones, I gotta think it would be less relevant.

Oh, USAToday thought the book was crap. Or, as the Christian Nation page might say, "Required reading."

Thanks to @rdbrewer4.

Oh Dear Lord Thou Hast Provided Us Enough Comedy For The Day, Please Provide No More: Oh, you're going to love this: the Christian Nation study/review guide, from the publisher.

Is this a joke?

Preview: Someone is effing with us.

This cannot be real.

More: Lifted from noted hysteric Andrew Sullivan's silly site. (No, really, he has a whole post dedicated to this important book. Probably more than one, I'd guess, given he's so earnestly promoting it.)

posted by Ace at 09:31 PM

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