Some of you may remember that I swore off reading any [link|http://z.iwethey.org/forums/render/content/show?contentid=88087|Tom Clancy book] ever again after reading his personal wankjob "Debt of Honor". Some of you may also remember that Susan had her gall bladder out a few months ago.

During this five-day period, I practically lived at the hospital. There were long boring times when nothing was happening, and while Susan can get by on a diet of talk shows and soap operas, my brain was threatening suicide from what passes for "content" on daytime TV. In desperation to save my sanity I went and hit up the "free book/magazine" rack. This rack had nothing on it newer than six months old, and 99% of the magazines were of the Home & Garden/People/Cosmo type - you know, the ones that are 80% advertisements, and the other 20% might as well be ads due to the lack of any kind of actual informative content contained therein, other than to remind you that you are not sexy nor do you smell nice, unless you buy product x. The remainder were mostly 1+ year old news magazines.

The books almost entirely consisted of westerns and bodice rippers. In fact, the westerns seemed to be the kind that are aimed at those who enjoy bodice rippers - some hunky ripped shirt Fabio clone on the cover, a vapid throwaway plot listed on the back. It was as if the whole rack was designed by mad feminist scientists to extract every single last ounce of testosterone from the male body for some unknown nefarious purpose.

I felt my body weakening, my masculinity slipping through my fingers as I descended into a pink haze of femininity. With one last desperate move, I reached out to the one bit of pulsing blue on the rack, and brought back a 1300 page monstrosity \ufffd the sole source of testosterone on the rack, Tom Clancy's Executive Orders. Saved from this pink monstrosity, I retreated back to my chair and started reading.

Warning, there be spoilers here. Not that I think anybody gives a damn, but if you keep reading, don't blame me for any loss of sanity.

And yes, I was not disappointed by Tom Clancy's ability to make himself look like a NeoConservative God amongst men, through his avatar Jack Ryan. The United States faces down old enemies and new, as the Chinese, the Indians, and the Iranians conspire to bring down the US. By the end of the book, Ebola has been used as a weapon, a small cadre of US forces have held off a combined Iran/Iraq invasion of Saudi Arabia through high technology, and the bad guys have been swatted, hard. Meanwhile Clancy uses the book as a chance to promote his own ideas about how government should be run, such as a flat tax on all people (no baseline deductible at all) as well as some antiabortion rhetoric. There is not a good Muslim to be seen in the book \ufffd the only Islamic bodyguard on the Secret Service detail is, of course, a sleeper assassin. Epithets like "raghead" and "sand nigger" get thrown around by armed forces on the ground, and once again Clarke and Chavez are the finger of God, er, President Jack Ryan as he sends down rightous fire to cleanse the world of the dictator that started it all. Oh, and a throwaway subplot about a couple of mountain men who want to blow up the president closes out the book;

The worst part about reading this book is I got about halfway through before Susan went home, and I could not stop reading it. Not because I was enjoying it, but because it was much like watching a train wreck \ufffd you can't stop, even though you know where it is going, and how its going to get there, and how little you are going to enjoy it. I only just now finished it, which should tell you just how pathetic this thing is. Note that this is a problem that is probably exclusive to me. I have never not finished reading a book I start, no matter how awful it is. I wish, oh GOD I wish I could get over that problem \ufffd I'd have about 20 hours of my life back.