Pandemonium in 2012

Pandemonium in 2012
by Lee Cross
(Virginia City Publishing / 0-978-75962-1 / 978-0-978-75962-9 / January 2008 / 324 pages / $13.95 / $11.16 Amazon)

Reviewed by Celia Hayes for PODBRAM

This book is a polemic, a political roman-a-clef with the key not terribly well hidden. Anyone who has paid the slightest bit of attention to blogs, the internet and the alternative media will be able to identify all of the slightly-disguised real political personalities, and recognize every one of the issues and situations referenced in a briskly paced 320 pages – everything from the undue influence of the higher courts, illegal immigration, Islamic-inspired terrorism and it’s connections to the South American narco-trafficking variety, the biases of main-stream journalism and manufactured controversy.

The characters are many, most of them just quick sketches, due to the complications of an intricate plot, a crescendo of events within a relatively short book. Many of those events might strike the reader as not quite believable – a relatively obscure Congressman becoming President, almost by chance, having a passionate affair with his beautiful female VP, the machinations of a malignant cabal of politicians, murderous plots by narco-traffickers, assassinations, an occupation of American cities by the UN… and a conspiracy to crash an air museum WWII bomber into an ALCU convention. Practically every plot element in the political thriller genre is here, and some of it might even be regarded as totally over the top… but. In the last few weeks and months, we have seen more than a few of these fictional elements come uncomfortably real. A formerly obscure, but well-liked and well-respected local politician vaults to national prominence and is promptly swamped in a tsunami of seemingly coordinated media abuse generated in a matter of days. A nation-wide organization, ACORN is under investigations for filing thousands of fraudulent voter registrations in fifteen states and counting. Even a political moderate might be forgiven for wondering if this is calculated preparation for ballot-box stuffing on a grand industrial scale.

So, the value of Pandemonium in 2012 may not lie so much with the writing, which is spare and workmanlike with occasional disconcerting leaps from third to first person – – but as an brief outline of those matters and issues which have been bubbling up underneath the surface of things over the last few years. Most usually those concerns and issues are grandly dismissed as the province of those banished to the political hinterland, unworthy of notice or concern by the higher minds who presume to control the debate of the great social and political issues in this country. Increasingly, however, such concerns cannot and ought not to be dismissed so lightly. Things start on the fringe, become the obsession of a few, and eventually percolate into the mainstream, when a tipping point has been reached. After all, only a handful of people knew or cared about the words and works of Osama bin Laden before the horrors of September 2001. Pandemonium in 2012 might be a good starting point for seriously considering some of the other horrors which might – in the minds of a good many – imperil the grand American experiment in democracy.

See Also: Celia's BNN Review
Lee Cross's Pandemonium Website