Essays. Catscan Columns

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 i

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 sca

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 i

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.

One shuts Mr. Burkett's book regretfully and with a skull-tingling sensation of genuine mind-expansion.

But let's now leave ILLUMINATI for a look at somewhat more actual and far more commercially successful Yippie phone-phreak wet-dream, the film (and novel) SNEAKERS. As it happens, the movie tie-in novel SNEAKERS (by one "Dewey Gram," a name that sounds rather suspicious) is somewhat uninspired and pedestrian (especially in comparison to ILLUMINATI). The book has a slightly more graphic sexual-voyeur sequence than the movie does, and some mildly interesting additional background about the characters. The SNEAKERS novel seems to have been cooked-up from an earlier screenplay than the shooting-script. You won't miss much by skipping it entirely.

The sinister Liberal Cultural Elite (and their vile Illuminati puppet-masters) must take great satisfaction in comparing the audience for a Hollywood blockbuster like SNEAKERS with the relatively tiny readership for the eager though amateurish ILLUMINATI. ILLUMINATI was written in eight weeks flat, and will have a devil of a time reaching anybody outside an evangelical chain-store. SNEAKERS, by contrast, cost millions to make, and has glossy posters, promo lapel buttons, pre-release screenings, TV ads, and a video release on the way, not to mention its own book tie-in.

SNEAKERS will also be watched with a straight face and genuine enjoyment by millions of Americans, despite its "radical" attitude and its open sympathies with 60s New Leftist activism. ILLUMINATI will have no such luck. Even after twelve solid years of Reaganism, in which the federal government was essentially run by panic-stricken astrologers and the Republican Party kowtowed utterly to its fringe-nut element, it's still unthinkable that a work like ILLUMINATI could become a mainline Hollywood film. Even as a work of science fiction, ILLUMINATI would simply be laughed off the screen by the public. Even R. A. Wilson's ILLUMINATI would have a better chance at production. Margaret Atwood's HANDMAID'S TALE, which promotes anti-network paranoia from a decidedly leftist/feminist perspective, actually made it to the screen! The Burkett ILLUMINATI's theocratic nuttiness is simply too ludicrous.

SNEAKERS is a professional piece of Hollywood entertainment and a pleasant movie to watch. I'm not one of those who feels that Hollywood movies should be required to teach moral lessons, or to heighten public taste, even to make basic sense. Hey, let Hollywood be Hollywood: SNEAKERS has some nice production values, a solid cast, some thrills and some laughs; money spent seeing it is money well spent.

And yet there's a lot to dislike about SNEAKERS anyhow. The entire effort has a depressing insincerity, and a profound sense of desperation and defeat that it tries to offset with an a