So far, so good. It's not surprising that a with-it hipster dude like R.A. Wilson would use the historical Illuminati as a head-trip springboard to mock All Things Establishment. The far more surprising matter is that some evangelical Christians, such as the Reverend Pat Robertson, not only take the 217-year-old and extremely dead Illuminati seriously, but are also currently dominating the social agenda of the Republican Party. Reverend Robertson's latest "non-fiction" tome, THE NEW WORLD ORDER, is chock-a-block with straightfaced and utterly paranoiac Illuminati-under-the-bed terrormongering. Robertson publicly credits the "satanic" Illuminati conspiracy with direct authorship of the French Revolution and the Bolshevik uprising, as well as sponsorship of the Trilateral Commission and the comsymp "Eastern Establishment" generally. The good Reverend also expresses the gravest possible reservations about the occult Masonic insignia on the back of the one-dollar bill.
George Bush himself, best-known public advocate of a "New World Order," is cast under suspicion in Robertson's work as an Illuminati tool, and yet Bush gave his accuser prime-time TV in his party's National Convention. One can only marvel!
As a comparative reality-check, try and imagine Robert Anton Wilson delivering his Hail Eris rap at a Democratic Party Convention (while the audience, nodding on national television, listens in sober respect and acts really glad to be clued-in). Odd enough for you? Now imagine ontological anarchists re-writing the Democratic Party platform on abortion, sexual behavior, and federal sponsorship of the arts.
Larry Burkett has taken this way-out sectarian extremist theo-gibberish and made it into a techno-thriller! The result is a true mutant among novels. How many science fiction novels begin with a disclaimer like this one?
"My biggest concern in writing a novel is that someone may read too much into it. Obviously, I tried to use as realistic a scenario as possible in the story. But it is purely fictional, including the characters, events, and timing. It should not be assumed that it is prophetic in any regard. As best I know, I have a gift for teaching, a talent for writing, and no prophetic abilities beyond that of any other Christian."
I was so impressed by this remarkable disclaimer of Mr Burkett's that I tracked down his address (using the CompuServe computer network) and I succeeded in interviewing him by phone for this column. I learned that Mr Burkett has received some six thousand letters about his novel ILLUMINATI from eager readers, many of them previously aware of the Illuminati menace and eager to learn yet more. And yes, many of those readers do believe that the Mr. Burkett novel is an inspired prophecy, despite his disclaimer, and they demand his advice on how to shelter themselves from the secret masters of the coming Satanic computer-cataclysm.
Even more remarkably, a dozen correspondents claimed to have once been Illuminati themselves, and they congratulated Mr. Burkett on his insights into their conspiracy! Mr. Burkett described this last category as featuring "three or four letters that were fairly lucid."
Mr. Burkett himself seems quite lucid. He was clearly "having some fun" with notions he considers serious but not all *that* serious, and in this he is not much different from many other SF authors with active imaginations and vaguely politicized concerns. Now a financial consultant, Mr. Burkett was once a NASA project manager, and dealt with early mainframe systems for the Gemini and Mercury missions. As a father, grandfather, best-selling author and head of a successful investment-counseling firm, Mr. Burkett seemed to me to have at least as firm a grip on consensus reality as say, Ross Perot. In talking to Mr Burkett I found him a calm, open and congenial gentleman.
However, Mr. Burkett is also a committed "dispensational Christian" and he believes sincerely that abortion is an act of murder. He is therefore living in a basically nightmarish society in which hundreds of thousands of innocent human beings are gruesomely murdered through no fault of their own. I believe that Mr. Burkett considers abortion so great an evil that it could not possibly have been inflicted on our society by any merely human agency. It can only be understood as part of an ancient, multi-generational conspiracy, planned and carried out by the immortal and evil Adversary of Mankind through his mortal cats-paws on Earth.
From the pyramid-eye point of view of this belief-system, it makes good tub-thumping common-sense to assume that "Secular Humanism" is a single monolithic entity -- even if its own useful-idiot liberal dupes seem more-or-less unaware of their own true roles in Satan's master-plan.
All enemies are agents willy-nilly of The Enemy, and their plans run toward a single end: the establishment of Satan's Kingdom on Earth. In the words of Reverend Robertson (NEW WORLD ORDER p 6): "A single thread runs form the White House to the State Department to the Council on Foreign Relations to the Trilateral Commission to secret societies to extreme New Agers. There must be a new world order. It must eliminate national sovereignty. There must be world government, a world police force, world courts, world banking and currency, and a world elite in charge of it all."
Of course, if you are going to string all important global events onto "a single thread," you are going to end up with an extremely variegated necklace. When you formally assemble the whole farrago into the pages of a thriller-novel, as Mr. Burkett does, the result is like Lovecraft on laughing-gas. Mr. Burkett's fictional technique owes far more to his favorite authors, Tom Clancy and Michael Crichton, than it does to any genre SF writer. Mr Burkett is not himself an SF reader. Nevertheless, his material itself is so inherently over-the-top that his book resembles the Call of Cthulhu far more than a hunt for Red October.
The pace is whiplash-fast and the set-up entirely mindboggling. In the year 2001, the President, an Illuminati puppet "liberal," stages a coup against Congress in the midst of economic collapse and massive urban riots. The Mossad are bugging the White House and building a cobalt super-bomb with the Red Chinese. We learn that the Illuminati began as Druids and transmuted into Freemasons; the wily Jews, of course, have known all about the Illuminati for centuries, though never bothering to inform us goyim. The gay Governor of California is a feminist church-taxing coke addict. The "liberal" President sells "brain-dead" crack babies to fetal-tissue medical entrepreneurs. Meanwhile, evil liberal civil-libertarians tattoo everyone's right hand with the scanner-code of the Beast 666. It just goes on and on!
The yummiest item in the whole stew, however, is the identity of the book's hero, one Jeff Wells. Jeff's a computer hacker. A genius hacker for Christ. Somewhat against his will and entirely without any evil intent, Jeff was recruited to design and build the gigantic Data-Net financial network, which the Illuminati secular one-worlders then use to consolidate power, and to pursue and harass innocent Christian activists. When Jeff discovers that the feds are using his handiwork to round up Baptists and ship them by the trainload to dismal gulags in Arizona, he drops out of the system, goes deep underground, and joins the Christian revolutionary right.
With the moral guidance of a saintly televangelist, Jeff, using his powerful and extremely illegal computer-intrusion skills, simply chops up Data-Net like a cook deboning a chicken. In defence of his Savior, Jeff basically overthrows the US Government by digital force and violence. He defrauds the government of billions of dollars. He creates thousands of false identities. He deliberately snarls train traffic and airport traffic. He spies on high government officials, tracking their every move. The Pentagon, the Secret Service and the FBI are all rendered into helpless fools through Jeff's skillful tapping of a keyboard. It's like a Smash-the-State Yippie phone-phreak's wet-dream -- and yet it's all done in defense of family-values.