Is Ayn Rand the most influential female writer of the last fifty years? Lordy, I hope not, but in these days of race-to-the-bottom capitalism, I think she might be.

Atlas Shrugged, the most widely-read of her tracts, first appeared fifty years ago tomorrow. When the New York Times panned the book back in 1957, one Alan Greenspan rose to its defense in the letters section, calling the story a “celebration of life and happiness.” He went on:

Justice is unrelenting. Creative individuals and undeviating purpose and rationality achieve joy and fulfillment. Parasites who persistently avoid either joy or reason perish as they should.

Mr. Greenspan, of course, later became chairman of the Federal Reserve. There he supported corporate and high-income tax cuts, and deregulation of all stripes, and generally did his best to put into practice Rand’s tenets (though I’m sure hardcore “Objectivists” would say he didn’t go far enough). (Incidentally, have you ever heard read Rand’s charming views on the property rights of American Indians?

[The Indians] had no right to a country merely because they were born here and then acted like savages. The white man did not *conquer* this country. And you’re a racist if you object, because it means you believe that certain men are entitled to something because of their race. You believe that if someone is born in a magnificent country and doesn’t know what to do with it, he still has a property right to it. He does not. Since the Indians did not have the concept of property or property rights [...] they didn’t have rights to the land, and there was no reason for anyone to grant them rights that they had not conceived of and were not using. It’s wrong to attack a country that respects (or even tries to respect) individual rights.)

Rand advocated complete allegiance to selfishness. “My philosophy, in essence,” she said, “is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute.”
 

For the prototype of this noble, moral being, turn to The Fountainhead (a book I must in the interest of full disclosure admit to reading and enjoying at 18, but that is a story for another day), and meet architect Howard Roark. As I recall, Rand’s protagonist repudiates classical architectural forms, lives in obscurity, blows up a building that has deviated from his design, and ultimately delivers a courtroom speech that wins over the jury and enables him to create the most perfect building in the entire universe.

In honor of Ms. Rand, here’s Riviera Real Estate’s (satirical, but actually not wholly implausible) PlatinumEmpireCove, the community Mr. Roark might have designed to herald and encourage the gentrification of today’s Williamsburg, Brooklyn. “What once served purpose as a moat has become a velvet rope,” friends.

(Jennifer Janisch’s less negative thoughts on The Fountainhead appeared at NewCritics in March.)

In the introduction to his 2004 play, “The History Boys,” Alan Bennett accused Britain’s “so-called Labour Government” of “stamping on the grave of what it was once thought to stand for.” Though he offered this indictment while lamenting the death of free university education, his other writings reflect a disgust that encompasses essentially the entire Tony Blair era. It should come as no surprise, then, that the Labor prime minister who visits the queen each week in Bennett’s clever and entertaining new novella, “The Uncommon Reader,” is smug, disingenuous and remarkably ignorant, a politician who does not “wholly believe in the past or in any lessons that might be drawn from it.”"The Uncommon Reader” is about what happens when the queen of England (yes) begins to read. The book opens with Her Majesty’s corgis tearing off along a palace terrace to yap at a traveling library parked outside. Out of politeness, the queen randomly selects a book by Ivy Compton-Burnett — a name she recognizes — and checks it out. “A little dry,” she tells the man when she returns it.

Next, she takes home Nancy Mitford’s “The Pursuit of Love” — “a fortunate choice,” Bennett suggests, for “[h]ad Her Majesty gone for another duff read, an early George Eliot, say, or a late Henry James, novice reader that she was she might have been put off reading for good. . . . Books, she would have thought, were work.”

Luckily, the queen is not put off reading; just the opposite. Soon she has embraced not only light fare but also classics. She becomes a reader, in other words, picking up the eccentricities that a passion for books tends to engender: perpetual lateness, poor grooming, an unwillingness to embark on pointless day trips.

Bennett recently discussed the book at NPR, and you can read the first chapter of The Uncommon Reader here.

Incidentally, I’m not the only Bennett fan around here. Gara LaMarche praised his Untold Stories back in May.

Terrible news: The great Grace Paley, feminist, activist, and until today one of our best living short story writers, has died. Leora Skolkin-Smith (whose fiction Paley created an imprint to publish) sent word in email. “The last thing Grace was working on was my own novels,” she says, “and I am dedicating the film of my novel Edges to her. I am just lucky, no one special, I just had that privilege of closeness with her at very end of her long amazing life.”

I met Grace Paley once. Twice, actually. Under the most embarrassing fangirl circumstances.She was coming to Gainesville for a reading, and I’d been carrying around her book for weeks. The night before the event, she showed up with the local creative writing luminaries at the restaurant where I’d taken my boyfriend for a fancy dinner. Not being gifted in the art of timing, then or now, I hemmed and hawed about whether to go talk to her. We had ordered desserts and their table had started into appetizers before I made up my mind.

I’d had too much wine and, it being the 90s, was wearing a black lycra dress with thigh-high stockings that wouldn’t stay up. So I hobbled rather than walked over to lay on her the same uninspired I just love your work so much! that girls at college campuses the United States over must have bombarded her with every night.

The other people at the table studied their plates and napkins. Some of them knew me: I’d taken or dropped out of their classes. It was clear that, the minute I went away, they would turn to her and mutter some apology. Honestly, these hayseed students of ours. Please, have another glass of White Zinfandel.

But Paley smiled. She was wearing sneakers, a t-shirt, and some sort of pendant, and she looked fragile and luminous alongside the tanned Floridians. “Thank you,” she said. “Will I see you at the reading tomorrow?”

The next night, she not only remembered me, but asked if I wrote, and encouraged me to keep at it.
And this wasn’t a fluke. My friend Michelle met Paley a few years ago at a NOW anti-war protest, and she was just as kind, just as encouraging.

Now that I live in New York City, I realize how rare it is for a writer to be so genuinely warm to someone who has nothing to offer but enthusiasm. And with Grace Paley’s death, it’s more rare than ever.
Further reading, and more:

• “All my habits are bad,” Paley once told Salon.

• Listen to an old 92nd St. Y recording at the Times’ dedicated author page.

• My own past Paley posts can be clicked through here.

• There have been rumors for a year or two about a Paley documentary. Leora Skolkin-Smith may have details.

Scandal erupted in bookish London when the novel appeared in 1930. It was believed to include flimsily veiled portraits of Hugh Walpole and Thomas Hardy. Maugham denied the charge in a letter to Walpole, claiming, “I certainly never intended Alroy Kear to be a portrait of you. He is made up of a dozen people.” After the fellow writer’s death, though, he admitted that Walpole was the model.
The story opens as the narrator, a novelist, arrives home to discover that a far more famous author — one whose career was set into motion with a modicum of talent and a great deal of transparent yet somehow decorous striving — has left a message for him. To his landlady’s disappointment, our hero declines to return the call right away. Instead he lies in bed speculating about the possible reasons for it.

It might be that an admirer of his had pestered him to introduce me to her or that an American editor, in London for a few days, had desired Roy to put me in touch with him; but I could not do my old friend the injustice of supposing him to be so barren of devices as not to be able to cope with such a situation. Besides, he told me to choose my own day, so it could hardly be that he wished me to meet anyone else.Than Roy no one could show a more genuine cordiality to a fellow novelist whose name was on everybody’s lips, but no one could more genially turn a cold shoulder on him when idleness, failure, or someone else’s success had cast a shade on his notoriety. The writer has his ups and downs, and I was but too conscious that at the moment I was not in the public eye…

I had watched with admiration [Alroy Kear's] rise in the world of letters. His career might well have served as a model for any young man entering upon the pursuit of literature. I could think of no one among my contemporaries who had achieved so considerable a position on so little talent. This, like the wise man’s daily does of Bemax, might have gone into a heaped-up tablespoon. He was perfectly aware of it, and it must have seemed to him sometimes little short of a miracle that he had been able with it to compose already some thirty books. I cannot but think that he saw the white light of revelation when he first read that Thomas Carlyle in an after-dinner speech had stated that genius was an infinite capacity for taking pains. He pondered the saying. If that was all, he must have told himself, he could be a genius like the rest; and when the excited reviewer of a lady’s paper, writing a notice of one of his works, used the word (and of late the critics have been doing it with agreeable frequency) he must have sighed with the satisfaction of one who after long hours of toil has completed a cross-word puzzle. No one who for years had observed his indefatigable industry could deny that at all events he deserved to be a genius.

All of Maugham’s fiction bears some relation to his experience. Not long ago I came across a fascinating audio recording of remarks he made on the subject at seventy.

In one way and another I have used in my writings pretty well everything that has happened to me in the course of my life. Sometimes an experience of my own has provided me with an idea, and I’ve just had to invent the incidents to illustrate it, but more often I’ve taken people whom I’ve known, either slightly or intimately, and used them as a foundation for the characters of my own invention. To tell you the truth, fact and fiction are so intermingled in my work that now, looking back, I can hardly distinguish one from the other.

See also Maugham’s “ten best novels of the world.”

Absalom and Achitophel

The year was 1681. England’s King Charles had sired children hither and yon but had no legitimate heir. His Catholic brother, James, stood next in line to the throne.

As fear of an alleged “Popish Plot” to kill the king and usher in Catholic rule swept the land, Charles rebuffed Protestant entreaties that he exclude his brother from succession and appoint instead his illegitimate Protestant son, also named James, Duke of Monmouth, his successor. The Earl of Shaftesbury, the Protestant ringleader, sat in prison awaiting trial on charges of high treason.
Whether Dryden penned “Absalom and Achitophel” of his own accord or at the king’s request is unclear.

But to bolster the monarch’s position, he recast Charles, Monmouth, and Shaftesbury as players in the tragic Biblical tale of King David’s most beloved son, Absalom — a story as universally familiar in Dryden’s day as the image of Pontius Pilate washing his hands is in ours. Maybe more familiar.

Realizing the slim likelihood of converting his adversaries, Dryden makes his intended audience clear in a note to the reader: “if I happen to please the more moderate sort, I shall be sure of an honest party and, in all probability, of the best judges, for the least concerned are commonly the least corrupt.”

The poem is sharp and funny — and even, at the outset, bawdy. (True, it’s no Miller’s Tale, but then accidental cunnilingus doesn’t just… come along every day.) Here are the opening couplets:

In pious times, ere priest-craft did begin,
Before polygamy was made a sin;
When man, on many, multipli’d his kind,
Ere one to one was cursedly confin’d:
When Nature prompted, and no Law deni’d
Promiscuous use of concubine and bride;
Then, Israel’s monarch, after Heaven’s own heart,
His vigorous warmth did variously impart
To wives and slaves: and, wide as his command,
Scatter’d his Maker’s image through the land.Dryden’s epic is arguably the finest work of poetic satire written in the English language. Though his targets are widespread — he mocks not just the Protestants, but transubstantiation, the priesthood, and even the king — his arrows are precisely aimed. As the editors of The Longman Anthology of British Literature observe, “Absalom and Achitophel” was “read, marked, circulated, and treasured as a masterpiece and a menace.”

Yet the very specificity and allusiveness that give the poem its power render it, unlike Swift’s A Modest Proposal, relatively inaccessible to any contemporary reader lacking knowledge of both 17th century English politics and the Old Testament. Which is almost everyone.

Poor Dryden. The few lines of his quoted in the U.S. today — “Great wits are sure to madness near allied; And thin partitions do their bounds divide” — are often attributed to Shakespeare.
Image of Dryden portrait taken from Representative Poetry Online.

Twenty dollars says even — maybe especially — so-called literary hatchet-man Dale Peck is mourning the great writer’s death.

Perhaps, as he insists repeatedly in Timequake, things will be better when he’s dead; perhaps his followers will stop searching his books for some clue as to how their guru lives, and simply read them. But he seems to doubt it.

From my seat of despair, I can manage to bring you only the Times’ featured author page, Vonnegut reading from Slaughterhouse Five, more audio, and these selections from my own site archives:

• Charles Shields to write Vonnegut’s biography, with blessing;
• Vonnegut on censorship, suicide, humor, moralizing, and more;
• Vonnegut on the dangers of reading;
• Vonnegut gives up on signing books with asshole drawings;
• Vonnegut smokes in face of smoking ban;
• Vonnegut and I play poker — in my dreams.

See also Blue Girl’s Why There are Any Bluebirds Left I Don’t Know, and Ed Champion’s massive collection of links.

The strip has reached new heights lately — “Champions of Winning” (at left) is a recent favorite — but it’s always been good.

“Conformity” has hung on my pantry since 2002. “Don’t forget! Be severely competitive within the narrow range of acceptable behavior.”

South Vietnam has fallen. North Vietnamese soldiers are marching into Saigon. Yet the Soviets have “let it be known that the North [will] let the U.S. evacuation continue until midnight”; they’ve implied that evacuation of “many thousands of South Vietnamese” will not be opposed. Indeed, the North’s leaders will later admit “that the expatriation of so many southerners had helpfully prevented them from having to reeducate them.”

Soldiers, Americans, and South Vietnamese promised rescue flock to the embassy for the airlift. Guess who gets screwed?

Hundreds of translators working for the CIA — men and women who were, in [the words of Frank Snepp], “the best acquainted with CIA operations and personnel” — were left behind because the officer in charge of their evacuation took an early choppper out. Snepp also wrote of the loyal U.S. Embassy guards of Nung descent — the Nung are one of Vietnam’s eternally oppressed aboriginal people — with whom he exchanged words. . . “Remember us,” one Nung guard said to Snepp. It was “one of his few English phrases. That was the last I saw of him. He and all the rest would be left behind.”

The embassy’s switchboard could scarcely handle the number of calls coming in. Lacy Wright, as State Department officer, picked up one call. “We’ve been up here all day and nobody has come to get us,” the caller said, through heavy sobs. Wright swallowed hard, offered some useless advice, and hung up. More calls. One hundred and fifty people were trapped here. Two hundred more were trapped there. “We were told to come here. What do we do?” “I’m a Vietnamese, but I got my American citizenship in 1973. I’ve got three kids. What can I do?” Eventually, the embassy’s phone was simply not answered. Meanwhile, according to Snepp, Graham Martin overheard this exchange over the walkie-talkie in his office: “Hey, there’s another gook climbing over the wall. Shoot him!”. . . .

By 12:30 a.m., the approaching rumble of PAVN artillery could be heard within the embassy’s reinforced walls. Parties of eighty Vietnamese at a time were slowly making their way up stairs to the embassy roof “like toothpaste through a tube,” in the words of one American. On the roof itself, a few Marines, no doubt driven to something resembling madness by the day’s activity, began to “conduct” the crowds of Vietnamese to sing. The Marines, CIA agents, and embassy factotums not on the roof were going through the embassy destroying everything of possible use. One Marine was seen reading a copy of The Fall of Rome. . . .

At 4:15 a.m., [Ambassador Graham] Martin cabled the White House for the last time: “Plan to close mission at about 0430 30 April local time. Due to necessity to destroy commo gear, this is the last message from embassy Saigon.” Minutes later, the embassy’s communications officer whacked the “commo gear” with a sledgehammer, and Marines destroyed the rest with explosives. Martin made his way to the roof, which was, in Snepp’s account,

a vision out of a nightmare. In the center of the dimly lit helio-pad a CH-47 was already waiting … its engines setting up a roar like a primeval scream. The crew and controllers all wore what looked like oversize football helmets, and in the blinking under-light of the landing signals they reminded me of grotesque insects rearing on their hindquarters. Out beyond the edge of the building a Phantom jet streaked across the horizon as tracers darted up here and there into the night sky.

After an aide checked the courtyard to make sure he didn’t “see any white faces,” Martin climbed aboard the Lady Bird 9 carrying the American flag. It was 4:47 a.m. . . .

[A]nywhere from 400 to 420 Vietnamese were still in the embassy waiting for their promised evacuation. Army Captain Stuart Herrington was with some of them. As Martin’s helicopter left, Herrington screamed at them in Vietnamese, “Khong ai se bi bo lai!” Nobody’s going to be left behind! “And I believed it,” he later [said]. Among those left behind were Vietnamese firemen who had been providing crowd control (their families had gone out earlier), a gaggle of drunk and unconscious South Korean diplomats, and a German priest, who, in Herrington’s words, “helped out,” Before they could board choppers, the evacuation was terminated by White House order. The remaining Americans were told to be on the next flight out. Herrington argued, but it was no use. He informed the Vietnamese waiting with him that he was going to the bathroom and ducked away for the roof. . . .

By 5 a.m., Herrington and three American civilians were the only non-Marines left in the embassy. One was the journalist Bob Tamarkin. The others, an American man and an American woman, refused to give Tamarkin their names. History will know them only for their deluded bravery, as they had come to help their Vietnamese friends escape the country before realizing the situation was hopeless. . . . The last civilian helicopter left the U.S. Embassy with only four people on it. Herrington: “I was sickened, naturally. I never in my life felt worse, never will feel worse than at that moment walking away from those people. I just couldn’t stop crying.” In his memoir, Henry Kissinger would claim that he had no idea how the roughly four hundred Vietnamese had been abandoned. This is strange if only because the military officials present at the embassy said the evacuation had been terminated “by presidential order” after it had been made clear that many Vietnamese were behing left behind. As he was borne aloft, Tamarkin looked down into the embassy courtyard. There, “hundreds of Vietnamese looked up,” waiting for the next helicopter. . . .

Operation Frequent Wind was not, by any metric, a victory, despite its success in extracting from Saigon 1,373 Americans, 5,595 South Vietnamese, and 85 third-country nationals. . . . Over the month of April, 51,888 people (45,125 Vietnamese and 6,763 Americans and other foreigners) had been airlifted from South Vietnam. Another 6,000 left by barge, and an unknown number thought to be in the low thousands excaped on unrecorded “black flights” engineered mainly by the CIA. Another 65,000 South Vietnamese excaped on their own. But the number of Vietnamese abandoned must exceed this total number by factors of five, ten, fifteen. In a war of such endless ambiguity and suffereing, it is somehow fitting that even the stunning success of the evacuation was qualified with so many dismal failures and betrayals.

Nor was it over. Shortly after Herrington and Tamarkin’s helicopter cleared the roof, Kissinger learned that “elements of the 9th Marine Amphibious Brigade protecting the evacuation — comprising 129 Marines — had been left behind for some inexplicable reason.” The airlift was resumed. Major Jim Kean, the commanding officer of the Marine unit responsible for protecting the evacuation, later told Larry Engelmann that he knew the Marines’ withdrawal could trigger “a big donnybrook” in front of the embassy door. After slinking away from their posts unnoticed, many of the Marines in Kean’s command were thinking, “My God, we’re only thirty seconds away from pulling this thing off without a fight.” Of course, “all hell broke loose. The crowd outside realized what was happening … and they panicked.” The Marines retreated deeper into the embassy, locking out the Vietnamese charging after them and littering the stairway to the roof with “big old fire extinguishers” to slow any who made it past the bolted doors. A CH-46 arrived, and the Marines were forced to leave behind their flak jackets and helmets in order to squeeze more men on board. Soon only eleven Marines were left. They were, as Major Kean notes, the last U.S. ground forced in Vietnam. . . .

Eventually the Vietnamese smashed through the barriers the Marines had established and were now pounding against the locked rooftop door. “An arm smashed through the window of the door under the helipad,” David Butler wrote. One Marine “got to it fast and pulled the arm into the broken glass, and it was yanked back with a cry. . . . More arms reached through the broken window. So they kept a man there to grab the arms and jam them into the glass.” This Marine also sprayed the intrusive Vietnamese with mace. One Vietnamese man had succeeded in crawling up the side of the embassy, but someone dropped something heavy and knocked the man off as though he were nothing more than a barnacle. The final chopper set down on the roof at 7:53 a.m. Major Kean ordered that the helipad be teargassed as they lifted off. The last Marines to leave Vietnam thus caught a rotored-up miasma of gas while keeping their weapons fixed on the Vietnamese still trying to break through the rooftop door. The last words spoken by a Marine in Vietnam: “Hey, Major, they want to know what kind of pizza you want in Manila!” Kean was not sure if he would be court-marshaled for using tear gas. “Ultimately,” he told Engelmann, “they gave me a medal.”

Throughout The Father of All Things, Bissell weaves his own father’s pain through a clear-eyed account of the disaster that was U.S. intervention in Vietnam. “Of course,” he writes, “I do not intend to equate the destruction of my parents’ marriage with the collapse of South Vietnam, yet in my mind they are endlessly connected, just as the largest house can be entered through the smallest door.” The book is out next month.
 

Previously at New Critics: Tom Watson’s Jim Webb & Graham Greene: With a Vietnamese Baby on Your Mind.

Like Ethan Frome, The Great Gatsby, and A Farewell to Arms, the book was a gift from my mom. I’m convinced she passed it along in part so we could pass our time stuck in traffic by identifying similarities between my father and Steinbeck’s feral sociopath, Cathy Ames.

Steinbeck is so out of vogue these days that expressing anything but disdain for his work is tantamount to proclaiming Lonesome Dove or The Prince of Tides a seminal work of American literature. Even praise for The Grapes of Wrath has all but dried up. So when I returned to East of Eden recently, I wasn’t sure what to expect.

Despite the repetition and the melodrama, and the often clumsy ways set pieces are pushed into place, though, I was sucked into the story as if for the first time. Is this because I imprinted on the story and its characters at such a formative age? Quite possibly. I’ve rarely been as haunted by a literary passage as I used to be by this one:

I believe there are monsters born in the world to human parents. Some you can see, misshapen and horrible, with huge heads or tiny bodies; some are born with no arms, no legs, some with three arms, some with tails or mouths in odd places. They are accidents and no one’s fault, as used to be thought. Once they were considered the visible punishments for concealed sins.

And just as there are physical monsters, can there not be mental or psychic monsters born? The face and body may be perfect, but if a twisted gene or a malformed egg can produce physical monsters, may not the same process produce a malformed soul?

Don’t worry, I’m not recommending that you run out and read the book. I might give a copy to my stepdaughter, but it’s not something I’d feel confident about pressing on another grown-up. All of this is really just an extended segue.

Returning to East of Eden led me do some digging into Steinbeck’s life, and I discovered that he wrote letters to his editor, Pascal Covici, every day alongside his manuscript. These were published in 1969 as Journal of a Novel: The East of Eden Letters. They narrate not just the progress of Steinbeck’s book, but the minutiae of his days.

On and on and on he goes — about his new desk, his electric sharpener, his urgent need for four dozen new long pencils.

He forges ahead with his writerly plans, saying he has to write this book his way, in his time. He can’t be rushed. He won’t be questioned. This is the novel he’s been preparing for all his life. Soon, though, he’s hinting around: are the characters believable, the scenes clear, the themes subtle enough? Finally he hits up the editor for an honest reaction — and, upon receiving it, slides into a depression.

I want to ask and even beg one thing of you — that we do not discuss the book any more when you come over. No matter how delicately we go about it, it confuses me and throws me off the story. So from now on let’s do the weather or fleas or something else but let’s leave the book alone…. Once it is done, you may tear it to shreds if you wish and I won’t object, and I’ll go along with you, but right now you and I forget the delicate sets of balances involved. There are no good collaborations and all this discussion amounts to collaboration. So, we’ll do that, if you don’t mind. And let’s stop counting pages too. I am not being difficult, I hope. It is just too hard on me to try to write, defend an criticise all at the same time. I can quite easily do each one separately. Let me keep the literary discussions on these poor pages. Then we will have no quarrels.

The letters manage to be dramatic and monotonous simultaneously — no small feat. They are relentlessly, ridiculously self-important. And I read every word.

Here’s a guy who won the Nobel Prize, and his moanings about writing were as tedious as anybody’s. Maybe even mine, though I wouldn’t put money on it.

I tend to shrink from reimmersion in the whacked-out, storefront-church world of my childhood. Also, I worried that the tone of the film might be broadly mocking, and I always find that kind of thing hard to stomach in large doses. Making zealous fundies look crazed and ridiculous is, as a friend of mine would say, like shooting retarded fish in a very small barrel.

But the directors of Jesus Camp trained their cameras on true believers, so that you actually enter this horrifying world rather than snickering outside it. Of all the worshippers in the film, only Ted Haggard comes off as a cynical opportunist. “Work that cute kid thing until you’re 30,” he tells the budding 12-year-old preacher pictured above. “Then you can worry about whether your content’s any good.” (I’m quoting, here and in the rest of the post, from memory.)

When Jesus Camp appeared, Haggard evidently bought up all related ads on Google, and paid search engine placement services, so that viewers were directed to his attack on the film rather than the film itself. (Oddly, his attention wandered sometime in early November.)
Becky Fischer, the leader and mastermind of the actual Jesus Camp, believes in indoctrinating kids as early as possible — preferably starting before the age of seven. Palestinian children are ready to blow themselves up for Islam, she says, and American children should be prepared to make equivalent sacrifices.

“I can go into a playground of kids that don’t know anything about Christianity, lead them to the Lord in a matter of, just no time at all, and just moments later they can be seeing visions and hearing the voice of God, because they’re so open. They are so usable in Christianity,” she tells the filmmakers.

Fischer’s approach is chilling, and endlessly inventive. The kids gyrate in militant war dances for Jesus, fondle little plastic dolls meant to represent aborted fetuses, and weep over their secret sins as Fischer draws confessions out of them.

Out in the world, they stage an abortion protest in front of the Capitol. And they try to distribute Jack Chick tracts.

“Do you think they think we’re selling something?” a girl asks a boy after repeated rebuffs from presumably heathen passersby.
I avoided the more protracted Jesus camps as a kid, but my sister and stepsister weren’t so lucky. At ten and eleven, respectively, they spent a week at Miami’s “Lights for Jesus Summer Youth Camp.”

There they slept on lawn chairs — all the cots were taken by the time my mom dropped them off — in a closet. On the first day, Sister was called to the front of the cafeteria auditorium, where the boy she’d just broken up with asked her in front of everyone to get back together with him.

“I feel in my heart that Jesus wants you to be with me,” he told her.

“Praise God!” said their fellow campers. “Hallelujah!”

The young counselor took the mike from the boy and turned to Sister. “Isn’t the Lord telling you to go out with Jimmy again?”

She passed the mike on to Sister, who stood there silently for a second before answering. “Uh, I don’t think so,” she said.

She returned to her seat hoping this would be the low point of her week. But her ex- became camp golden boy, and she became one of its pariahs — the one with a stiff neck, thanks to seven nights on a lawn chair.
Anyhow, watching Jesus Camp will make you despair for this country’s future. But here’s a reason to postpone the ritual suicide pact: while the Pentecostal church is growing, the ranks of its youth are shrinking.

Kids are growing up and opting out, just as my sister, stepsister, and I did.