Have you ever read any of the "Left Behind" series? You have? What the hell are you doing on my blog? You'd probably be more comfortable at Christian Spotlight on the Movies.
For the rest of you, the "Left Behind" books are huge massive bestselling pieces of trashy, poorly-composed fiction about the end of the world filled with characters with names like Buck Williams. It's a whole series of books that starts with the Rapture, and all the good Christians being taken up to Heaven, and then follows a group of survivors as they discover Jesus and try to save souls. The enemy, by the way, is The Antichrist, Nicholae Carpathia, who also tries to grab as many souls as he can before the End Times, um, end.
Yeah, it's dumb, but the worst part is, a lot of the fools that read this trash think that there is real Biblical prophecy around to back up all this stuff. Slacktivist is doing a great job of combing through this detestable trash and teasing out all the bizarre assumptions being made by bonehead authors Tim LeHaye and Jerry Jenkins.
When I worked at Barnes & Noble years ago, these things were the new hot shit, and all kinds of suburban assholes were buying them. All the time, middle-aged ladies would come up to the cash register and ask me if I'd read any of these wonderful "Left Behind" books, and didn't I think they were just the greatest book I'd ever read, or failing that, the only book I'd read in the past several years. And I'd always inform them that, thanks for the tip and all, but I'd prefer to read actual books by real authors, like a video game strategy guide, or possibly "Where's Waldo."
These people aren't really the kind of evil bigots at which End Times fantasies are typically aimed. They're just not really readers, so they don't have a concept of media literacy. They can't process what they read and figure out the real message being expressed. They just read stuff and think they've heard a good story, and then go watch "Everybody Loves Raymond."
I feel like this all goes back to the way we teach kids to read in public schools. First off, we only teach children to read novels. Never magazines or newspapers or other kinds of media. So, we make that mistake right away, because though I enjoy fictional pleasure reading, most Americans don't. Most Americans need to know how to read non-fiction, news media and process this information in a thoughtful way. If we trained Americans to look at a piece of media and determine its meaning, biases and journalistic value quickly and efficiently, Fox News would be out of business within a year. But we don't, so Billy O remains the Ratings King.
Secondly, we make reading long novels into homework, a chore, and we assign tests and questions about the reading, to make it even more punishing. Reading should be about exploring new ideas and making your own conclusions, not about remembering what really pisses off Holden Caulfield more than anything else in the world (HINT: phonies). This is why J.K. Rowling is kind of an international hero. The "Harry Potter" books have made children excited to read something. It has given them an ongoing story to look forward to and anticipate, and as much as I enjoyed the third "Potter" film, the books are valuable because they have given children back their imagination from TV and movies and the Internet and other media.
So, my point is that the readers of these idiot "Left Behind" books aren't to blame. It's our education system for letting students down, for not fostering a love of reading from a young age, for dumbing down the lessons so that any kids can pass and feel informed.
Ma, come on. Clearly I didn't mean you personally...
ReplyDeleteAnd as for your claim that you "do teach non-fiction," you're wrong. You don't teach it as reading, in terms of reading comprehension. You teach it as an efficient way to get the information off the page and into your student's heads. If there was a filmstrip that did the same thing, you'd show it. The Battle of New Orleans occured two weeks after the war was over. Ponce de Leon was looking for the Fountain of Youth. Goebbels was Hitler's propaganda minister. Those are facts, that's all.
I'm talking about media literacy. Reading a National Geographic article or a National Review article and spending a half hour discussing the author's point of view. What would he have to do to get a story like that? Whose idea was the story? What biases were implicit in his reporting of the story? Who else probably had an opinion about what should go into the story? How does the language of the article reflect the point of view?
If people were taught that, for both fiction and non-fiction (right now, that's the kind of langauge we reserve for novels), I think kids would grow up with a much more clearly-defined sense of how to use reading in their own day to day lives. Of course, this is just my opinion.