The Einstein Sisters Bag the Flying Monkeys: A Political Satire

EBook, Adobe Reader format (PDF) download, 628 pgs., 3.1 mb, Not In Kansas Press. Revised.

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It’s the year 2000. It’s just days from Election Day in Florida. Can Albert Einstein’s three (fictional) great-great-granddaughters change the course of history?

In this timely satire, past and future come together as the home-schooled sisters fall through the rabbit hole into a bizarre parallel universe after they enroll in Shepherd’s Vale School when their previously liberal parents mysteriously abandon them to serve a sinister neo-conservative think tank in Washington that is planning a “new Pearl Harbor” to launch a disastrous war in the Middle East. Because the girls love The Wizard of Oz, they call the neo-conservatives “Flying Monkeys” after the Wicked Witch’s infamous death squad. With Angela Jordan, their loyal and feisty African-American Baptist bus driver, they find themselves trapped inside ex-wrestler Reverend Moriah Godley’s authoritarian Ten Commandments charter school with hundreds of too-perfect students in a mythical hardscrabble town not featured on Florida’s tourist maps.

Seven-year-old prodigy Tina is a closet Christian in her wacky Jewish household. Her wholesome values are the first to clash with Principal Godley’s doom-and-gloom End Time scenario. Fourteen-year-old genius Norma has invented a penny-a-mile electric motor scooter that she naively hopes the principal’s Christian supporters will fund to save the world from global warming. Fearless sixteen-year-old Maxine loves to humiliate famous American and Israeli leaders in public to prove she’s the world’s last truly ethical Jew. She jumps at the opportunity to help free the school’s athletes and cheerleaders from the prejudice of anti-Semitism. Meanwhile, the entire school in caught up in the principal’s frantic preparations for a memorial for a local boy killed in a foreign terrorist attack, which attracts a star-studded cast of neo-con politicians. And, yes, Jesus does return, but not in the way most of his followers would expect.

This book is more than comic fiction. It explores seriously a popular but little understood branch of American Christianity — dispensationalism, or Christian Zionism. Millions of sincere evangelicals have accepted pieces of this theology (the Rapture, Tribulation, Armageddon and support for Greater Israel) without knowing its underlying theory — which traditional Christians condemn as contrary to Jesus’ teachings, profoundly anti-Semitic and, potentially, a self-fulfilling prophecy that could destroy the world.