Up the airwaves without a paddle

I had a very unusual experience this morning. I was scheduled by the excellent PR folks at HarperCollins for an hour-long interview on a radio show to talk about CROSSED. Only after I was on the air, live, did I realize it was a conservative Christian call-in show based in an unnamed Southern state, pictured above.

It all started out fine. The host and I (and the first few folks who called in) were talking intelligently about the Fourth Crusade and its similarities with Iraq. But some listeners, apparently, tuned in mid-show and just heard references to Iraq, so they called in to opine on a wide variety of Things Middle Eastern, without really understanding the context (like, I am a historical fiction writer, not a member of the state department).

So I spent about half of the hour explaining – for example – why our bombing the hell out of “them” (apparently the entire Middle East) would not have the same effect (i.e., creating a new democracy) as bombing the hell out of Japan or the Germans during WWII. I was also asked simple, typical ask-the-novelist questions like, “In the history of the world, has there ever been a successful attempt to unify the Middle East?”

As we came to the end of the hour, the host – a charming, sardonic Southern Gentleman – wanted to talk about Israel. His perspective is that God made a real estate deal with Abraham, and said real estate deal should determine the future of the region. He wanted me, with my Ivy League degree in Comparative Religion, to validate this perspective. I could not do so, on the grounds that Comparative Religionists believe all faiths are equally valid to their respective practitioners, and so we cannot expect Moslems to obey a faith-based narrative that is not part of Islam’s own faith-based narrative. That’s why the rule of law and political negotiation, rather than the bible, should determine how to deal with things in the region. In response, he gave me his interpretation of Revelations, which proves statistically (yes, statistically) that Jesus Christ is God and Allah therefore is not, and therefore anything Jesus said was the law. Part of the Revelations exegesis included the assertion that the book of Revelations reveals the name of somebody who is going to get hit by a cab on the corner of 42nd street in Manhattan on a particular day in 2018. “And anybody who can do that has got to be God,” he concluded.
To my enormous relief, the hourly national news headlines pre-empted us, so I did not have to respond to this.