A few years ago — just before Obama became the clear front-runner in the upcoming election — John Ringo wrote a post-apocalyptic novel called The Last Centurion, which makes lots of jabs at a thinly veiled President Hillary Clinton and various fashionably progressive causes, like socialized medicine.
I only read the first few sample chapters, before the snarky anti-leftism got to be too much for me, but Manny Howard’s recent New York magazine piece, My Empire of Dirt, immediately reminded me of Ringo’s despised tofu-eaters who try to farm organically — without being good organic farmers, like the Amish — and starve in the ensuing famine:
In three weeks of eating nothing but Farm-fresh food, I lost 29 pounds, down from my pre-Farm weight of 234. Abs: That’s the upside of only two meals a day. The downside is the expense. Not counting my own labor, which was unending, I spent about $11,000 to produce what, all told, is barely enough to feed one grown man for a month. But I did learn something about food: Unless you really know what you’re doing, raising it is miserable, soul-crushing work. Eating food fresh from the farm, on the other hand, is delightful.
His real-life story’s a bit too dark to qualify as darkly comical.
I read the whole thing, but it was frustrating. As you mentioned, the voice of the narrator and author become more than a little conflated. The real annoyance was that the big payoff at the end, the invasion of Detroit, wasn’t even covered, just mentioned in passing.
With a little more work, it could have been not merely interesting, but good, like a lot of Ringo’s work. If a reactionary like me can get irritated by the conservative preachiness, I imagine that leftists who accidentally read it would have their heads explode.
I think one of the central points of the book is actually more credible than most people give it credit for — that if we start applying full on socialist methods in the middle of a crisis like he outlines, rather than in time of peace and relative prosperity, bad things could happen — like Ukraine-in-the-30s bad, if we were dealing with something like the climate conditions that led to the great famine of early 14th century.
I loved Last Centurion. Give it another try. Yeah the smugness is a little thick at times, but Ringo does a great job of detailing the mechanics of how and why everyday civilization could collapse.
I am currently reading One Second After, which is, quite frankly, scaring the hell out of me.
The mechanics were the best part, but Ringo didn’t pay enough attention to the story. One Second After is far superior and well worth reading. It scared the crap out of me, too — utterly plausible, and horrifying in its conclusions.
Is it wrong to order One Second After for Kindle?
I read One Second After last year, and it definitely makes you think how much we take for granted. It would make a good movie.