Mr. Burkett himself seems quite lucid. He was clearly "having somefun" with notions he considers serious but not all *that* serious, andin this he is not much different from many other SF authors with activeimaginations and vaguely politicized concerns. Now a financialconsultant, Mr. Burkett was once a NASA project manager, and dealt withearly mainframe systems for the Gemini and Mercury missions. As afather, grandfather, best-selling author and head of a successfulinvestment-counseling firm, Mr. Burkett seemed to me to have at leastas firm a grip on consensus reality as say, Ross Perot. In talking toMr Burkett I found him a calm, open and congenial gentleman.

However, Mr. Burkett is also a committed "dispensational Christian" andhe believes sincerely that abortion is an act of murder. He istherefore living in a basically nightmarish society in which hundredsof thousands of innocent human beings are gruesomely murdered throughno fault of their own. I believe that Mr. Burkett considers abortionso great an evil that it could not possibly have been inflicted on oursociety by any merely human agency. It can only be understood as partof an ancient, multi-generational conspiracy, planned and carried outby the immortal and evil Adversary of Mankind through his mortalcats-paws on Earth.

From the pyramid-eye point of view of this belief-system, it makes goodtub-thumping common-sense to assume that "Secular Humanism" is a singlemonolithic entity -- even if its own useful-idiot liberal dupes seemmore-or-less unaware of their own true roles in Satan's master-plan.

All enemies are agents willy-nilly of The Enemy, and their plans runtoward a single end: the establishment of Satan's Kingdom on Earth.In the words of Reverend Robertson (NEW WORLD ORDER p 6): "A singlethread runs form the White House to the State Department to the Councilon Foreign Relations to the Trilateral Commission to secret societiesto extreme New Agers. There must be a new world order. It musteliminate national sovereignty. There must be world government, aworld police force, world courts, world banking and currency, and aworld elite in charge of it all."

Of course, if you are going to string all important global events onto"a single thread," you are going to end up with an extremely variegatednecklace. When you formally assemble the whole farrago into the pagesof a thriller-novel, as Mr. Burkett does, the result is like Lovecrafton laughing-gas. Mr. Burkett's fictional technique owes far more tohis favorite authors, Tom Clancy and Michael Crichton, than it does toany genre SF writer. Mr Burkett is not himself an SF reader.Nevertheless, his material itself is so inherently over-the-top thathis book resembles the Call of Cthulhu far more than a hunt for RedOctober.

The pace is whiplash-fast and the set-up entirely mindboggling. Inthe year 2001, the President, an Illuminati puppet "liberal," stages acoup against Congress in the midst of economic collapse and massiveurban riots. The Mossad are bugging the White House and building acobalt super-bomb with the Red Chinese. We learn that the Illuminatibegan as Druids and transmuted into Freemasons; the wily Jews, ofcourse, have known all about the Illuminati for centuries, though neverbothering to inform us goyim. The gay Governor of California is afeminist church-taxing coke addict. The "liberal" President sells"brain-dead" crack babies to fetal-tissue medical entrepreneurs.Meanwhile, evil liberal civil-libertarians tattoo everyone's right handwith the scanner-code of the Beast 666. It just goes on and on!

The yummiest item in the whole stew, however, is the identity of thebook's hero, one Jeff Wells. Jeff's a computer hacker. A geniushacker for Christ. Somewhat against his will and entirely without anyevil intent, Jeff was recruited to design and build the giganticData-Net financial network, which the Illuminati secular one-worldersthen use to consolidate power, and to pursue and harass innocentChristian activists. When Jeff discovers that the feds are using hishandiwork to round up Baptists and ship them by the trainload to dismalgulags in Arizona, he drops out of the system, goes deep underground,and joins the Christian revolutionary right.

With the moral guidance of a saintly televangelist, Jeff, using hispowerful and extremely illegal computer-intrusion skills, simply chopsup Data-Net like a cook deboning a chicken. In defence of his Savior,Jeff basically overthrows the US Government by digital force andviolence. He defrauds the government of billions of dollars. Hecreates thousands of false identities. He deliberately snarls traintraffic and airport traffic. He spies on high government officials,tracking their every move. The Pentagon, the Secret Service and theFBI are all rendered into helpless fools through Jeff's skillfultapping of a keyboard. It's like a Smash-the-State Yippiephone-phreak's wet-dream -- and yet it's all done in defense offamily-values.

One shuts Mr. Burkett's book regretfully and with a skull-tinglingsensation of genuine mind-expansion.

But let's now leave ILLUMINATI for a look at somewhat more actual andfar more commercially successful Yippie phone-phreak wet-dream, thefilm (and novel) SNEAKERS. As it happens, the movie tie-in novelSNEAKERS (by one "Dewey Gram," a name that sounds rather suspicious)is somewhat uninspired and pedestrian (especially in comparison toILLUMINATI). The book has a slightly more graphic sexual-voyeursequence than the movie does, and some mildly interesting additionalbackground about the characters. The SNEAKERS novel seems to havebeen cooked-up from an earlier screenplay than the shooting-script.You won't miss much by skipping it entirely.

The sinister Liberal Cultural Elite (and their vile Illuminatipuppet-masters) must take great satisfaction in comparing the audiencefor a Hollywood blockbuster like SNEAKERS with the relatively tinyreadership for the eager though amateurish ILLUMINATI. ILLUMINATI waswritten in eight weeks flat, and will have a devil of a time reachinganybody outside an evangelical chain-store. SNEAKERS, by contrast,cost millions to make, and has glossy posters, promo lapel buttons,pre-release screenings, TV ads, and a video release on the way, not tomention its own book tie-in.

SNEAKERS will also be watched with a straight face and genuineenjoyment by millions of Americans, despite its "radical" attitude andits open sympathies with 60s New Leftist activism. ILLUMINATI willhave no such luck. Even after twelve solid years of Reaganism, inwhich the federal government was essentially run by panic-strickenastrologers and the Republican Party kowtowed utterly to its fringe-nutelement, it's still unthinkable that a work like ILLUMINATI couldbecome a mainline Hollywood film. Even as a work of science fiction,ILLUMINATI would simply be laughed off the screen by the public. EvenR. A. Wilson's ILLUMINATI would have a better chance at production.Margaret Atwood's HANDMAID'S TALE, which promotes anti-network paranoiafrom a decidedly leftist/feminist perspective, actually made it to thescreen! The Burkett ILLUMINATI's theocratic nuttiness is simply tooludicrous.

SNEAKERS is a professional piece of Hollywood entertainment and apleasant movie to watch. I'm not one of those who feels that Hollywoodmovies should be required to teach moral lessons, or to heighten publictaste, even to make basic sense. Hey, let Hollywood be Hollywood:SNEAKERS has some nice production values, a solid cast, some thrillsand some laughs; money spent seeing it is money well spent.

And yet there's a lot to dislike about SNEAKERS anyhow. The entireeffort has a depressing insincerity, and a profound sense ofdesperation and defeat that it tries to offset with an annoyingnervous-tic mockery. The problem resides in the very nature of thecharacters and their milieu. It's certainly an above-average cast,with Sidney Poitier, Robert Redford, Dan Aykroyd and River Phoenix, whoare as professionally endearing and charismatic as they can manage.Yet almost everything these characters actually do is deceitful,repulsive, or basically beside the point; they seem powerless,hopeless, and robbed of their own identities, robbed of legitimacy,even robbed of their very lives.