Yeah. One chapter, and this may be a long post. Grab a beer. Put on a helmet.
I actually read through this part while reading the rest of “8″. Had to cut it out and save it for later. Didn’t want this to be confused with my normal level of goofballery.
Because here’s the thing.
I really do like this book. A lot. I make fun of it when it is odd, and it does slip into melodrama sometimes. But overall it really is … what the hell did I say … an epic of small things. It really is that, and I can see why people love it. Most of this book is like a hundred hours of On The Beach. If you don’t want that I do not understand you.
So. The parts where King gets really lazy and talks about The Army and The Government like a drunk teenager wearing an ironic “I Like Ike” button. I am sincerely angry about those parts. They let the rest of the book down. And this is the worst of it. Right here.
What happens in this chapter is: Starkey (Chief General Silly Coverup) gets relieved of command, because, apocalypse. And he orders Creighton (New CGSC) to go ahead and annihilate the rest of the human race. I have no idea why. But policy all of a sudden is to deliberately spread Captain Trips to other countries. It’s also supposed to be July, 1991. And the Berlin Wall still exists and everyone talks about “the Iron Curtain.” Which you can chalk up to publication schedules. I guess. But it just adds one more layer of weirdness.
I won’t even try to square what is happening physically with Captain Trips. They’re secreting it around the world in vials like it is Zee Meecrofilm. When it is infecting people in minutes, killing in hours, and jumping through walls. I guess the hot towels on Pan-Am cure it until you get from La Guardia to East Germany. Whatever.
So the men in the smoke filled room decide to infect the entire world with a killer virus, because, if we’re dying, um … everyone we’re not fighting … should, too? Because that way, they … can’t help us and we … can’t escape to those places?
I can’t even start to explain it. Is this supposed to be commentary on the nuclear arms race? Because that’s not how that worked. Here is what they say:
We have to assume the worst. It’s out of control now. … no one will ever know. … our opposite numbers may suspect, but there won’t be time enough. Share and share alike.
You know. If we’re going with it’s 1991, There was a thing that happened before 1991. At Chernobyl. At no point after Chernobyl was it seriously considered, even in Soviet Russia, even during the Cold War, that “now we’ve had a nuclear accident, better nuke everyone else. Just because.” Even at its most evil, that’s the exact opposite of how Cold War security state logic worked. Besides Edward Teller, Nelson Muntz, and the bad guy from Watchmen, no one on earth was conducting a foreign policy of “Eh, gotta nuke something!” Deterrence theory is not YOLO.
Also, the “don’t tell the press” thing can now officially get no sillier. The current policy is: 1) kill everyone on earth. 2) SPIN ROOM. This policy is thus explained:
The flu story is the best one, but it is imperative - imperative - that the other side never sees this as an artificial situation created in America. It might give them ideas. Retaliation.
So we’re all clear on this. They aided the spread of the virus by concealing news. So that later, when the virus spread, they would make the completely unnecessary choice to spread the virus other places, thus creating the threat of retaliation, thus creating the need to conceal news.
Pretty sure that justification traveled back in time and became its own grandpa.
And if that is deliberate Cold War commentary, it is either so obtuse or so over the top that it fails. RETALIATE HOW. Our side is already dead. What’s the Red Army going to do, come over here and kill everyone again? And who in the media is going to report anything to anyone after Phase 1 of Plan Kill The Whole World. This isn’t even Dr. Strangelove. This would be like if Dr. Strangelove kept going. “Now that all the bombs have gone off, how are we gonna recall those planes?” Now that we’re all dead, nobody tell the press.
Zombie Tom Brokaw aside, this portrays not only Starkey (who has become a totally different character now, and not in a way that makes sense), but everyone who would have to be involved in this action, from the President to the Joint Chiefs to the officers to the lab techs to the bag men. Tits to toes, the whole chain of command. As pro-suicide and pro-apocalypse. I guess they say the men actually delivering the virus are in the dark. But everyone above them. And there literally must be some layer of people who are handling the virus who know what it is. So there is at least one Lemming Rank. Abstractly, everyone making this insane and pointless policy must know they are killing themselves and their own families.
I think this is how the most tragically earnest Glenn Beck fan thinks the world works.
The next four pages are less epic, but somehow even goofier. Starkey takes off his college rings. Marches solemnly to the site of the original accident. Plays with the corpses, and then I picture him pausing to steeple his fingers, chomp three cigars and molest a bald eagle. Anyway, then he shoots himself. Because coming all the way out there and taking that eagle’s virginity would be ridiculous, if he didn’t.
Of course he salutes one of the corpses. And of course he says “at ease.”
So. He’s dutifully carrying out plan: kill everyone. But then nobly dying with the troops? Because he was taken off the job? So he’s on duty off duty seeing things through while taking himself out. Giving orders after he’s been stripped of authority. Orders people obey. To end the world.
This is why I speculate that there’s a lazy counterculturalism behind all this. King seems to be making his army and government men out of random evil gestures. Starkey behaves like a conehead. His grim stock behavior contradicts his last grim stock behavior. He’s The Last Roman making a Back Room Deal to do Seppuku because You Can’t Handle The Truth. No that doesn’t make any sense. But it’s super martial.
Back to that “destroy the earth” plan. The really strange thing is: there was no need to account for the rest of the earth. The rest of the earth has barely existed in this story. This is About The United States. In all those descriptive sections where Captain Trips devastates the human race, it devastates “this broken land” or “this disintegrating country.” It’s all like that. I think in 170 pages, maybe Canada, Israel and India are each mentioned as existing. Once. And I may be inventing Canada.
So on one page, in two paragraphs. The entire rest of the world suddenly appears. And then is destroyed. This creates a dozen off-putting story problems that didn’t need to exist at all. Yeah, it would have been a contrivance if the rest of the world just went unaccounted for. I would make a joke or two. But it would have been way better than … all this.
It really blindsides the reader, too. A very abrupt tone switch for just seven pages. Alice dies. The ambulance cannot come because the ambulance is overwhelmed. New York perishes intimately. It is heartbreaking. Larry weeps for his mother. Then the next page is this ludicrous cloak and dagger crap.
That’s the closest I can come to describing why these seven pages pissed me off so much. And why all the build-up to it seemed wrong. So much of this book is emotionally and socially honest. It’s such a lovely road trip. But with a few exceptions, portrayal of the military and the CDC and the media is like someone’s kid suddenly punching the radio and playing “We Didn’t Start The Fire” way too loud and out of tune. Then ramming JFK up your ass. This child is staging a complicated attack. I don’t know when he planned this.
