Well, it’s done: my novel The Ten Weeks is now blogged.  I trust that those who have followed it have been blessed and entertained.  For those who have not kept up, it’s not a problem; this site’s traffic has traditionally come from its long-term content.

The novel was an ordeal for its participants; while blogging it, our country has gone through something of an ordeal of its own.  When I posted the novel I made the decision to not interrupt it for current events.  Although it was tempting to break that, I’m glad I didn’t.  This has been a time when thoughtless–and inconvenient–proclamations were punished.  But the confluence of the two was intriguing in some ways, and I’d like to make some comments regarding that.

I said at the start that the novel was started in 2006.  That’s before the Obama-Biden years, and now we’re in the Biden-Harris years.  Left-wing regimes have a common theme; it’s the variations that make them different.  But I’ve also eschewed the label of prophet, and that’s paid off.  The problem in the Evangelical/Pentecostal/Charismatic world is that prophecy, like leadership, tends to be self-validating, and that’s not a good thing.  I think that recent events should convince some of our prophets that they need to find a new line of work.

Having said that, I think that the U.S. has come to its “Allan Kendall” moment.  There are two important differences.  The first is that it’s come to this moment without an Allan Kendall.  That I think is a big part of why the left freaked out over Donald Trump.  They know that they don’t have a Lenin to counter a Kornilov; they don’t have a Mao Tse-Tung to counter a Chiang Kai-Shek; they don’t have a Castro to counter a Batista.  They’re more like an Azaña against a Franco, and we all know how that ended.  So they freak out when a strong person comes against them.  Their best hope is to lean on our tech oligarchy to deplatform their opponents, and although intra-oligarchy fights are not unknown to the left (Nicaragua comes to mind, although that type of struggle occupies the novel as well) it’s not the best way to bring power or justice to the people.

And that leads to the second question: why did it take so long? The Ten Weeks is set in 1970-1, and not a few of us in that era thought that they would roll on to triumph.  It would have been easier because they had a populace who was more used to obeying the government rather than endlessly challenging it.  I think the critical moment came in the wake of Watergate: the left largely squandered the moment that followed, both through laziness and electing a President who was neither invested in the revolution nor motivated by the desire to right past personal wrongs.  The economy went into chaos, the Boomers went into their spectacular volte-face, and the rest, as they say, is history.

So, as always, we are left with Lenin’s question: what is to be done? For the participants of The Ten Weeks who were on the wrong end of the national outcome, the answer was simple: leave.  If I were the age of those participants now, I would be making preparations to do the same.  In fact, I considered doing just that back in the day.  Getting Americans to consider that is hard; most are not prepared for that, either in their style or mind or their skills to make a living.  But if the regulatory and legal web about to be weaved turns making a living and worshiping God into an ordeal, things might look very different.

After all, most of our ancestors came here for a better life (in many ways,) why not leave for the same reason?