Ghost of a flea

When Jenkins has to write about Buck's journey from Waukegan to New York, he becomes strangely careful and meticulous. He stops writing to look up the distance in air miles. This never happens when he's writing about that nuclear war, or the disappearance of billions of children. He rattles off those sections without a second thought, any concern for detail, or the slightest apparent curiosity about what such things might actually be like.

This is bad writing, but it's also more than that. Jenkins and LaHaye read the Bible through the same skewed lens. This same obsessive elevation of irrelevant detail shapes their interpretation of the scripture. Thus they read Jesus' sermon on the sheep and the goats in Matthew 25 and ignore everything it says about feeding the hungry, clothing the naked and caring for the least of these. Instead they latch onto the introductory bit about the Son of Man sitting on "his throne in heavenly glory" and speculate what that throne is made of, and where it its, and how big it is, and how many air miles there might be from that seat of judgment to Waukegan.