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We All Fall Down (Spoiler ridden)

 
 
Foust is SO authentic
16:33 / 18.04.03
All right. Sorry this took so long, but it's taken me a while to sort out my feelings on this book. The more I dwell on the story, the more I've had to re-evaluate my relationship to Christianity as a religion.

We All Fall Down is fairly short, coming in at 253 pages. It covers a lot of time in that space - the 7 years of the Biblical Tribulation, the same period covered with much less panache in the Left Behind books. The main difference being, Fall Down features a protagonist who refuses to sign up with either God (and become a Christ freak, in the book's terminology) or take the Mark of the Beast, effectively becoming a minion of the anti-Christ. He knows exactly what's going on, but intends to handle it all himself.

The protagonist, Jimmy, seems to have been created with Revelation 3:16 in mind - "So, because you are lukewarm – neither hot nor cold – I am about to spit you out of my mouth." In one of many references to Biblical texts, the opening paragraph describes the current weather:

"A few degrees warmer and the rain could have been refreshing; a bit colder and the resulting snow would have covered the town in a beautiful blanket of purity. As it was, the weather refused to commit itself to either extreme, and a thick layer of cold wet slush seeped through my sneakers..."

So with this conflict of commitment vs. non-commitment firmly established, the book goes on to create a series of characters that fall on one side or the other of the fence. The post-rapture world is a grim one; nuclear weapons have been used sporadically, and the anti-Christ uses a thin veneer of democracy to bring the entire western world under his control. In the wake of supernaturally powerful earthquakes, Jimmy travels to Boston to find his parents and convince them to accept Christ, so they can all travel to the God-protected Israel in the short term and avoid hell in the long term.

Arriving in the ravaged Boston, Jimmy is attacked by several teenagers and then rescued by an armed band of Christians. This group of 12 men (the men insist the number is a coincidence) take Jimmy in and feed him, offering to take him to his parents in South Boston once he is rested. The rescuing Christians (who, like Jimmy, were left behind but unlike Jimmy committed themselves to God post-rapture) discuss questions of God's will with Jimmy. Jimmy notices that while the head Christian's language is typically pretty salty, his tone changes entirely when speaking of God.

"When you talk about this stuff, you sound as if you grew up with Moses. That's obviously not you.... Why can't you just talk about God normally.... It's like you're surrendering a piece of yourself every time you want to talk about God."

"That's exactly it, Jimmy. Only I'm not just surrendering a piece of myself, I'm surrendering everything. Jesus, Heaven, God; these are holy subjects which demand a language of their own.... Have you ever heard a priest trying to talk with kids about God using their own language? Christ is the most radical dude you'll ever know.... Which sounds more ridiculous?"

"Yeah, but you're making it sound stupid on purpose. There's an in-between."

"No, there isn't. Not with God. God only wants the hot or the cold; he spits out the warm. That was my mistake, that was all of our mistakes. We all knew God, but we shuffled Him off into the corner of our lives."


Jimmy eventually leaves these Christians behind and finds his childhood home. His mother was apparently a Christian, and was taken in the rapture. She left behind a bitter, angry husband that has little time for Jimmy's warnings. He in fact comes to believe Jimmy; it doesn't take much convincing once Jimmy pulls out a Bible. His father refuses to have anything to do with God, and explains to Jimmy why. In the late 1960's his father was a beat cop in South Boston. Heroin was just hitting the streets, but it was a controlled inflow - the Italians ran the drug trade, and they did so with a mild respect for the neighbourhood. They didn't sell to kids, etc. No one else - not even the numerically superior - was allowed to sell drugs in the Italian controlled neighbourhood. They were brutal enough to intimidate any would-be dealers.

One day, a black guy named Lionel (nicknamed the "Coloured Kike") moves into the neighbourhood and starts selling drugs openly, both undercutting the Italian market and selling to anyone who would buy. A brutal gang war develops between the Blacks and the Italians. Eventually, Lionel himself finds Jimmy's father, and offers him a considerable bribe to crack down on the Italians and protect the Blacks. As an aside, Lionel threatens to kill the father's family if he doesn't comply. Jimmy's father stood up and broken Lionel's arm in four places. One week later, the Italians managed to torture and kill Lionel (his balls were "crushed so badly that they were almost liquid") and end the gang war (without help from Jimmy's father).

Jimmy is rather pissed off that his father would risk the lives of his family rather than take a bribe. His father explains:

"I would've died for any of your. I'd have taken the torture that the Guineas handed to Lionel if it would've meant saving any of your lives. The one thing I couldn't do, though, was compromise who I was by taking that nigger's money. If I had done that, I'd be just as bad as the rest of ‘em, just another bastard doing the wrong thing and making excuses. I wouldn't and I won't bend over for anyone, because that's the only thing in this whole rotten fucking universe that any of us have control over.... Jimmy... if I didn't bend over for the Coloured Kike, and I won't bend over for [the anti-Christ], then what the hell makes you think that I'd ever let Jesus push me down onto my knees?"

Jimmy's travels bring him into contact with various versions of these stories, some even more violent and wretched. Once captured by the anti-Christ's forces, Jimmy's cell mate is also not a Christian, but also refuses the Mark. He says that he's protecting his "Inch," the one part of him that no one can take away from him without his permission. He refuses to hand his Inch over to the anti-Christ, and he refuses to hand it over to God. "Just remember one thing; God can fuck ya in the ass as much as He wants to and there ain't a damn thing ya can do about it. But as long as ya don't turn around and suck Him off, ya still own yer Inch, and as long as ya own yer Inch, you win. That'll get'cha through the beatings. That'll get'cha through Hell."

And that, I believe, has a nugget of truth in it. Christianity is about handing your Inch over to Jesus. Not Allah, not Buddha, not even Grant Morrison. I suppose that's why it's so unpopular.
 
 
Jack Fear
16:43 / 18.04.03
The concept of "the Inch" was also used in V For Vendetta: dunno if Alan Moore originated it, though...
 
 
Brian Caldwell
17:07 / 18.04.03
Yeah, Jack, I clipped it from Alan Moore. Alan used it as the ultimate positive human characteristic and I found it interesting that in any sort of spiritual endevour, it would actually be the opposite. I also named the Antichrist Richard Grant Morrison as a twisted tip of the hat to Grant. Seemed appropriate.

Anyway, this is sort of odd for me, but I'm the guy that wrote We All Fall Down. I've never posted here before, but I've been in the shadows, reading, for quite a while. I'd be happy to talk a bit about the book, but I don't want to get in the way. You guys let me know.
 
 
Brian Caldwell
17:07 / 18.04.03
Yeah, Jack, I clipped it from Alan Moore. Alan used it as the ultimate positive human characteristic and I found it interesting that in any sort of spiritual endevour, it would actually be the opposite. I also named the Antichrist Richard Grant Morrison as a twisted tip of the hat to Grant. Seemed appropriate.

Anyway, this is sort of odd for me, but I'm the guy that wrote We All Fall Down. I've never posted here before, but I've been in the shadows, reading, for quite a while. I'd be happy to talk a bit about the book, but I don't want to get in the way. You guys let me know.
 
 
Brian Caldwell
17:09 / 18.04.03
Sorry, can you tell I've never posted here?
 
 
Jack Fear
17:19 / 18.04.03
No need to apologize--it happens to the best of us.

Welcome, by the way. Nice way to make an entrance
 
 
Brian Caldwell
17:37 / 18.04.03
Thanks. Faust was asking me in a message if there's any way to prove that I'm really who I claim to be. We're both a bit stumped, so if anyone has an idea, I'd be more than happy to provide bona-fides. Although for what it's worth, I don't think me claiming to be Brian Caldwell if I'm not would even really count as a Fiction Suit. More just like being full of shit.
 
 
Foust is SO authentic
00:57 / 20.04.03
Haha. Didn't mean to sound so mistrustful.

My RL friends and I are wondering, though. Are you a Christian, Brian? Through all the explicit violence and sex, the book at heart is highly sympathetic towards Christianity.

And I've got a question about the book itself. I'm having a hard time placing Lou's rip-rape of Jimmy into the story; what was that about? Just a power game? I got the impression that the OWC was trying to force Jimmy's "mouth" open, rather than persuade him to open it himself.
 
 
Brian Caldwell
02:49 / 20.04.03
No, that's cool. I thought it was kind of funny myself. Never had to prove who I was before and found it sort of funny to see how utterly unable I was to do so. So, am I a Christian?

Yeah. Sort of. I guess.

I went into the writing of the novel as a typical lapsed Catholic. Despite being raised with the belief, I found that the older that I got, the less I could intellectually justify the belief system. At the end of it all, it came down to six million jews. If the typical Christian interpretation is correct, then after six million innocent jews had been tortured, terrorized and murdered, they woke up in Hell. God sent them to Hell. A few months or years of horrible terror being inflicted upon them made the word Nazi synonomous with Evil, and that was nothing compared to what God handed them afterwards. How could that be true and God be good? God be Love? How could that be true and God be anything but the worst piece of shit that has ever existed?

I think that that question distilled almost every problem I had with Christianity down to its essence. And if that was true, then how could any good person ever allign themselves with such a belief system and still consider themselves good? Wouldn't we only be doing it, not to be good, but rather only to save ourselves? Wouldn't the truly good people tell God to cram his deal and suffer a rightous eternity in Hell?

That was the midset I started writing the book in. Certainly not a Christian attitude. In the process of writing it, though, a lot of different experiences, not the least of which, I'm sure, was the writing of the book itself, bent my mind in another direction and I began to see that while Jimmy was the protagonist of the book, he was no hero and what was intended to be a scathing attack on Christianity actually became a defense of it.

I could go on about it forever, but what it all came down to for me was a realization that Christianity was simply saying what every other spiritual practice or belief was saying- in order to become something larger, you need to surrender the self. Hell is not an imposed state of existence, but rather a chosen one. The Bible is not a set of imperatives, but rather a set of instructions to achieve Christ-like awareness of the already existing unity with God. Once I stopped reading the Bible as a threat but rather as an explenation of the way concsiousness works, it became much clearer what the true message is and it all made sense.

I'm not sure if this makes me a Christian, though. My interpretation of the Bible is so radically different than Christianity as a whole, that I doubt the catagory would fit me. I think the Bible has been interpreted in a religous, or institutional, manner for so long, that seeing it as a series of spiritual or developmental instructions sets me far outside of any accepted Christian doctrine.

I think it's pretty much identical to The Invisibles, for example. We are all God's fiction suits and Jesus was simply John-A-Dreams- one of the players whos was aware of the game as such. The Holy Spirit is Barbelith. And on and on.

As to the sex and violence and language- fuck 'em. I'm tired of self-rightous assholes limiting a spiritual practice. I flipped through a Left Behind book and it sucked. What good is it going to do anyone to pretend that the world is something it's not? That people are something they are not? You don't become a Christian and then suddenly change. True change is violent and messy and frightning. Handing yourself over to Jesus is the most frightning thing you can do because it is very much like dying. Sanatized crap like Left Behind does nothing except make people who are already Christians feel smug about making the right choice. People are not G-rated, the world is not G-rated, and change is not G-rated. I wanted to write a book that people who lived in the real world could recognize. It also struck me that the Endtimes would be a place and a time where spirituality would be noticably absent and, to an extent, I was trying to define God and spirituality by showing what life would be like with it's absence. Kind of define it using negative space.

Hmm. This was sort of long-winded. Sorry. I'll write about Lou and the rib-rape after I've caught my breath.
 
  
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