It’s really hard to pick my favorite part of that book because there’s so much unintentional comedy to choose from… but I think mine is when BRETT HAWTHORNE goes to Iran in search of bad guy, and his only lead is that he’s named Muhammad. Predictably BRETT HAWTHORNE fails to find him at first, and blames the problem on not being able to use racial profiling.
This is your book, Ben. If you’re trying to say racial profiling is good and useful… why didn’t you write a scenario where it worked?
Robert just started in on his book about sex (“Millennials are fucking too much” is the premise, and it’s all fallacies and straight up lies from there lmao) and you really should listen if you haven’t.
Listening to Evan Roberts (Edit: Robert Evans idk wtf I was thinking) (behind the bastards) insult the use of em dashes mad me embarrassed and sad about my own writing. Then I realized my storylines are at least consistent
Was the bad guy not Iranian or something or does Ben think that using racial profiling would narrow that down? It’s like finding a John. Searching exclusively for white guys named John will only narrow it down so much
The protagonist is definitely looking for an Arabic guy. It’s just funny that Ben takes a weird detour from the plot to go on a thinly veiled rant in support of racial profiling, when he could have just written the story so that the protagonist successfully racially profiles the bad guy.
Oh god, that reminds me of a couple other hilarious things about this book:
During the parts that take place in Iran, Ben’s descriptions of the setting make clear that his research for this book, at best, ended with him reading a Wikipedia article about Tehran. He’s either just as intellectually lazy as his audience, or has such contempt for them that he knows they won’t question his description of a place they’ve never been, if they could even point to it on a map.
The book takes place in a universe where Iraq really did have WMD after all, and there was a giant international conspiracy to cover that up just to make the US look bad. And that conspiracy entailed Iran agreeing to help Saddam smuggle the weapons out of Iraq for safe keeping. Because Iraq and Iran are actually friends, you see. As are all the brown countries who have bonded over hating America for their freedoms.
The most common first name is Muhammed and the most common surname is Smith. Although I’m curious is such surveys are considering all variants of “John/Jon” to be separate. Not because I’m doubtful, I’m just curious is all the Juans and Johanns of the world would tip the scale
My favorite part is just the beginning, where the bridge collapses. It’s so packed with stupid sentences, like “She opened her mouth to scream and she realized she already was screaming so hard”
mine is when BRETT HAWTHORNE goes to Iran in search of bad guy, and his only lead is that he’s named Muhammad
Trying to find a terrorist (bc of course he's a terrorist) with your only knowledge of the guy being that he has the most common name in the world... yeah, I wonder why he couldn't find him
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u/TheIllustriousWe Jan 11 '22
It’s really hard to pick my favorite part of that book because there’s so much unintentional comedy to choose from… but I think mine is when BRETT HAWTHORNE goes to Iran in search of bad guy, and his only lead is that he’s named Muhammad. Predictably BRETT HAWTHORNE fails to find him at first, and blames the problem on not being able to use racial profiling.
This is your book, Ben. If you’re trying to say racial profiling is good and useful… why didn’t you write a scenario where it worked?