Out of the Ashes Part 1, or Yay, Dictatorship!

Like I said in my Anthem review, the first paragraph of a story is the most important. So, let us see what Out of the Ashes has to offer:

“Louisiana, 1984

Ben Raines fought off an urge to laugh in the man’s face. “Are you nuts? I mean, honest to God, fellow, have you got both oars in the water?”

On the whole, not the worst opening paragraph I’ve ever read. Not as annoying as Anthem’s, that’s for certain. It introduces the main character (who actually has a name this time!), gives you a little bit of situational information (Raines is talking to a man he thinks is spouting crazy-talk), and it even introduces at least something of a setting (Louisiana, 1984).

…if you don’t get the reference, I may have to hit you.

Anyway, on we go with the story. Raines is talking to a gentleman who is trying to recruit him for something. As it turns out, this man represents a movement to overthrow the US government. Why is this happening? Well, because the evl libruls in Washington have finally managed to do what’s been on their demented minds since the invention of evl-librulism: the banning of firearms. In America. Where the bearing of arms is one of our most cherished rights.

How did this come about? Well, we’ll get to that later. For now, let us focus back on the story.

Throughout this section, we learn quite a bit about our protagonist. He’s a successful writer, who makes enough money off of it to have bought his nice house, a nice bit of land, a nice dog, and a lot of booze. See, as it turns out, Raines is an alcoholic. Why? Because he doesn’t like the way the United States is going, and he’s drinking to try and forget about it.

Let me give you a bit of information here: Raines is, as mentioned above, a popular novelist, with apparently a nice bit of money. Almost every literate character we see in this series mentions they’ve read his work. And that work, much like Johnstone’s own, apparently preaches Raines’ own philosophy. Now, assuming he’s popular, rich, and has a large number of people who agree with him, why doesn’t he try to get into politics himself? Change it all in the legal way? Logically, he’d have a decent shot at it.

Sadly, logic does not work in the Ashes universe. I personally think that most people buying his books did so for the same reasons I buy Johnstone’s: to laugh at how bad they are. After all, the people we meet later are a tiny portion of the population. But I’m getting off-track. Let’s get back to this turkey.

Raines continues to deny that he’ll join this rebellion, because he’s become comfortable with his life as it is. He emphasizes, however, that he’s not happy; just comfortable. The recruiter leaves, telling him how to contact them if he changes his mind. He then tells him a bit of cryptic information: two men, Bull Dean and Karl Adams, are still alive and leading the rebellion. This infuriates Raines, who insists that he saw their dead bodies. The recruiter disappears before Raines can get even angrier, leaving Raines to drown his sorrow in alcohol and forget all about it.

We then cut to four years later, when Raines is considering WW3. He gives us a little foreshadowing about how most of the missiles pointed by the US at Russia, and vice versa, are germ-type warheads, and then we get a flashback to Vietnam, where for some reason all the good soldiers of America speak perfectly grammatical English. They’re debating how to correct the US government, which they all “know” is not working. We’re not told any of the particulars of the debate, but afterward, we meet one of the mysteriously alive leaders of the rebellion, Bull Dean.

When Raines is alone with him, Dean tells they’re losing the war, and that back in the US, things’ll get worse. “Patriotism will take a nosedive, sinking to new depths of dishonor. There is no discipline in schools; the courts have seen to that. America is going to take a pasting for a decade, maybe longer”. After all these horrid predictions (people’ll stop throwing away their lives meaninglessly for their country? My God!), Bull predicts that the military will step in and take control before things get even worse. I mean, Heaven help us, they might even start allowing gays to marry!

Despite acknowledging that military rule would be detrimental to the country, Johnstone is still trying to paint these military dictators in a good light. As he emphasizes, they won’t want to do it, but they’ll be forced to overthrow the legally elected government of the United States before they do something stupid. Hell, they might even elect *gasp* a non-Christian to the Presidency! My God, if that happened, we don’t know what we’d do!

I’d remind you that all of this was long before the improbable weapons ban. At the time, all this man had to go on was a dip in patriotism and the inability to beat his schoolchildren for wearing their hair long. And he’s already talking about destroying the government. I’m noting a theme in bad writers by now; just like Rand, Johnstone seems to believe that all people who do not at least partially adhere to his own philosophy are either incompetent morons or evil demagogues.

Anyway, back to the story. Bull finishes his discussion with Raines by telling him to remember the words “Bold Strike”. He says that all this won’t mean anything for Raines now, but to wait a couple decades and see where it leads. And wouldn’t you know it, it’s been almost two decades since Raines received these little nuggets of...I hesitate to call them “wisdom”, so I’ll just say “information”. A few days later, Bull’s supposedly mangled-beyond-recognition body is found by scouts, then Karl Adams (who we are not introduced to in the audiobook) goes MIA, then listed as KIA. Didn’t Raines say earlier that he say the “bodies”? As in, both that of Bull Dean and of Karl Adams?

I don’t know, I stopped looking for reason a long time ago. Anyway, Raines goes home wounded and is disgusted at how the Vietnam vets are treated. For once, I actually agree with Johnstone; it was horrible what those young men went through in Asia, and they returned home hated and reviled for it. But here’s where I start to get a bit iffy. “He had been sent home to a land of hairy, profane young men who marched up and down the street, shouting ugly words, all in the name of freedom. Their concept of freedom.” So…what, you’re free to oppose the evl librul government, but people on the other side aren’t supposed to oppose you? It’s one of the chief freedoms of America, the right to protest, to legally assemble and attempt to get your point across. But, according to Ben Raines, America is by now evil, because we no longer live in the 1950’s. So, he leaves America as soon as he can and works as a mercenary in Africa for a while. Evidentially, he would prefer to kill people than to reason with them, so he’s working out his excess aggressions as a merc for “anyone who wanted and appreciated fighting men”. I’m sure that many of those who signed on with him would be regarded by the rest of the world as evil. But, as we’ll see later in the book (and later in the series if I can stand it), Raines himself is a pretty evil man.

One day, by chance, Raines meets a writer who recommends that he write a book and send it to the man’s agent. He has been writing ever since, and has been in Louisiana for almost 15 years. Finally, we end the flashback to hear the phone ringing. Raines hears two words spoken before the call is ended.

“Bold Strike.”

After this, Ben, of course, turns on the news. Sounds logical; it’s what I would do. He learns that certain military units have been put on low alert, with no reason given. The Pentagon says it’s just testing security, but Ben angrily demands more information from the screen. Of course, none is forthcoming. In his quest to learn more, he dials up his old super-secret special unit, the Hellhounds. And with a name like that, you know they’re supposed to be awesome. Sadly, we never see any of them, at least as far as my recollections go, aside from Raines. Who is the Chuck Norris of the Ashes universe.

The Hellhounds, of course, no idea what’s happening, and prove singularly unhelpful. All the advise they can give him is to hunt a hole and keep his head down.

We now cut to the White House, where the good, belabored President is bemoaning his fate. Here, we get the plot exposition and a list of the usual Republican reasons why the country’s going down the tube. “The unions are bitching and striking as usual. Every minority group in this nation is complaining, loudly, that I am discriminating against them.” He also includes some complaining about how people are being imprisoned for resisting the anti-gun law. The law that the legally elected government of the US passed. Apparently, the disgruntled minority is more important than the evl librul majority. He also complains about Hilton Logan and his “pack of liberal bastards”. Logan, by the way, is the champion of the illogical anti-gun laws. He’s also apparently the shoe-in for President. That actually makes sense to me.

This part of the book finally ends with the President being informed that there is a rebellion on his hands. The President heads to Camp David, and we end the section there.

I went over most of my problems with this story before, but let me sum them up for you: the “good guys” support military dictatorship, liberals are evil, the American people are stupid, and somehow the Constitution has ceased to matter to either side.
For the record, there are 18 sections. I had originally planned to do two sections per update, but that kind of flew out of the window. So there are 17 more of these, at least. Whoop.

…it’s times like these that I wish I actually had a gun. I’ve got a blunt axe; think I could get through the skull in one blow?