Out of the Ashes Part 6, or Just too Much

So, when we last left Ben, he had threatened to kill a man for being anti-white with a semi-decent reason, given how these things go, kissed a woman he'd barely known for half a day, then drove off into the sunset to continue his book. Now that we're all caught up, let the latest section's idiocy begin.

Ben travels as far to the East as he dares, and pretty much stops when he starts finding bodies suffering from radiation poisoning. Forgive me for beating a dead horse (which happens a lot in these books if you haven't noticed), but why radiation poisoning? The nukes were essentially radiation-free! Is Johnstone forgetting his own canon again? If so, why? I mean, this isn't exactly the world's longest book. Really, it's a little shorter than average. Did he not bother to keep notes? And, again a dead horse, did he even have an editor on this thing?

Anyway, after commenting on how hard these people had died, Raines turns southwest, eventually coming to Virginia. He keeps going until, just a few miles north of Charlottesville, he sees a young boy. Of course, when the boy sees Raines coming, he dives for a ditch, apparently injuring himself in the process. Raines gets out of the car and moves to help the boy, who draws a pistol and points it at Raines. Now, normally, this is a killing offence, but there are two mitigating factors here. 1) The pistol's safety is on, which I really don't think is nearly as important as 2) The boy is, in fact, a pretty young woman.

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Ho...

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Wha...

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Okay, someone explain something to me: how does one mistake a noticeably pretty woman for a boy? I mean, is this woman really short and flat as a board, or was Raines thinking he was looking at a tall, kinda fat kid? In addition, does this mean that Ben Raines finds young men physically attractive? I mean, how does one mistake a pretty young woman for a boy. I've never had that problem, personally. Anyone of you ever mistake a 9-year-old for a 19-year-old knockout? Because, you know, within a couple years of 9, we men stop looking like women. Quite noticeably, in fact.

So, this girl's name is Jerre. Never met a girl named Jerre, but let's go with it. Of course, despite having been nearly raped (I was wrong, someone in this world actually DID escape that fate!), she's immediately drawn to the Republican manliness of Ben Raines and the two fall in love. Aww...wait a minute, what happened to Future Wife? You kissed the lady after spending less than a day with her, and here you are already chasing skirts! So, let's compile some of my problems with Ben Raines' character, now that we have several problems to go through.

1) He supports military dictatorship (and will later become a popular military dictator)

2) He's quite willing to murder someone for having the gall to defend themselves against him

3) He's willing to leave you to die if you don't subscribe to his every belief.

4) He's a womanizer. After the end of the world. When building stable relationships with people should really be one of your main priorities. Now, granted, an argument could be made that he's at least making relationships with certain people, but...

Let's just move on. Mercifully, for once, I can skip large parts of this section because it can be summed up in a single paragraph:

Ben and Jerre spend the winter in a conveniently located cabin having lots of nookie, after which Jerre asks Ben to teach her his survival skills. So, he does. Afterwards, they separate, partially because Ben is almost three times Jerre's age and partially because Jerre wants to get out there and help the world while Ben, as we have seen, doesn't. How does she plan on helping the world? Well, she's going to meet up with a bunch of collage students at a certain campus, then spread out and do what they can.

THAT would make an interesting story, to be sure. We've already established that the US is now populated mostly by functional zombie-sheeple waiting for a leader to arise. We've also established that there are many bloodthirsty bandits out there who want to take advantage of all the chaos to do what they do. There's an army of roughly 5,000 Rebels out there just waiting for their leader's orders to wreak their own brand of havoc. These students have so much to contend with, and still they're going out to do their best. In any other story, they'd probably be heroes.

However, they're collage students. Which, of course, means they're libruls. Which either makes them evil or stupid in this tale, sadly. As we discover later in the book, these people are basically doomed. Despite the situation they find themselves in, only a couple of them even carry guns. I'm guessing that even fewer of them know diddly-squat about rebuilding communities. They're just going out there to be naive, just like those stupid, silly people who protested Vietnam and wore their hair in anything but a crew cut.

Not that he says this, mind. He plays at wishing them well, but anyone who has an inkling as to how this writer's mind works can guess how he really feels.

Needless to say, most of them are slaughtered and they don't accomplish a thing. Shame on them for going out in the world to do some good instead of writing a book. Jerre survives and shows up later, but that's a different story.

Anyway, Jerre leaves, and Ben is depressed until he decides that yes, he's an old fart and she needs to be with "her own kind". Incidentally, this does not stop him moping over her for the rest of the series, even when he has another of his hordes of women.

So, what's Raines' first stop after Jerre leaves him? Let's give you the multiple choices again:

A) Find the fraking Rebels and stop ignoring the Call.

B) Find Hilton Logan and what's probably the US government by now and join up with them; there's still much work to be done.

C) Look into the local airforce base where the AEWSOEM MILETARY will have established order and civilization far better than any of the plebs.

D) Go back to doomstead (now located in New Africa, incidentally) and shoot anything trying to force you out?

The correct answer is C. I won't insult any of you that got it wrong, because quite frankly, I haven't the energy. So, what brave new civilization does our hero discover inside the base? Well...he kind of doesn't. It's mostly abandoned, except for a four of card players inside a service club. One of them, a general, brings him up to speed on what's been going on in the world while he was busy rolling in the hay with the girl who looks like a boy: there's about 20 or 30 million people left in the US, the Rebs are still looking for Raines, and that in another few months, Logan shall be made President. Again, we get some bashing on the man, which I still see as completely unfair and indicative of Raines' own character deficits. Raines practically begs the general to take over the country as military despot, rather than have a liberal in office.

I wish he had lived to see the last election. Obama getting into office would have killed him.

The general denies this, and begins expositing on Logan's plan to pull the US out of this mess. So, what is it? A brief totalitarian rule necessary to get the country back on its feet? An economy-focused agenda designed to get up back on our feet and ready to help the rest of the world? Nope; we're just gonna invade the Latin nations and use them as slave labor.

Here's where things start getting trippy. It turns out that Logan was behind WW3, and this whole collapse, and is, in fact, a "pseudo-liberal" who is actually a closet racist who wants nothing more than to become Emperor of the Americas or something along those lines. Umm...was this ever foreshadowed? Did we ever get any indication that Logan was a petty tyrant and hate-filled racist? Nope; we just need to accept that he is, with no investigation whatsoever. A while back, I made a point that you had to root for Raines and the Rebels because the villains are all far worse than he could ever be. It's about here where it becomes the absolute rule.

So, it turns out that this was all Logan's plan after all. He was going to do this even if the Rebs ended up failing, because somehow this very, very liberal man got the entire military behind him (again without anyone noticing) and got them to support him in his bid to become a King.

Here we also have the conversation turn sour. The general Raines is talking to was in on this stupid plot, is also a racist, and after revealing everything to Raines, he foolishly tries to kill him. Ben, despite being outnumbered and caught in a trap, kills them all. After doing so, he finally contact the Rebels, who eagerly accept him as their leader. Raines, however, is still unenthusiastic and tries to pass the buck.

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Okay, I just have to revisit some of the stupider moments of this part of the tale, just to make sure I've got it all. Hilton Logan, despite coming off as a fairly nice man whose only crime was opposing Ben Raines, was all along an evil, racist tyrant who accidentally sparked off WW3. The instant he's in charge, he plans to practically enslave anyone without the good judgement to be born white, and restore the old concept of the Master Race.

In addition, most, if not all, of the United States military is quite willing to go through with this. I assume that anyone who wasn't is a Rebel. To a man, they'll support him.

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You know what? I'm going to stop here. I've done one full section, and a part of another, and I'd fully intended to do both in full, but my God, the sheer stupid is starting to get to me. So, there you go.