What was the original ending of Beck's book?
Written by Ben Dimiero
Published
While promoting his hilariously awful forthcoming novel, Glenn Beck claimed that while writing the book for “over two years,” he had to “change it several times because things kept happening. This time I hope the ending stays fiction.”
Considering how painfully outlandish the published climax of the book is, one has to wonder what form the original ending took.
Here's the quick plot synopsis we included in our sneak peek yesterday:
First, a quick summation of the plot, such as it is. The protagonist, Noah Gardner, works for an impossibly powerful public relations firm in Manhattan that has been the driving force behind pretty much every political and cultural movement of the 20th century. Their latest and grandest scheme is the culmination of a lengthy plot to change the United States into some sort of ill-defined progressive plutocracy, and the catalyst for this change is a nuclear explosion that will occur outside the home-state office of “the current U.S. Senate majority leader,” which happens to be at the same address as Harry Reid's Las Vegas offices. The nuclear attack is to be blamed on the Founders Keepers, a Tea Party-like group -- led by Noah's love interest, Molly Ross -- that is working to foil the plot.
After much panther-teasing, romantic flat-tax discussions, and mail clerk espionage, we reach the finale.
WARNING: MAJOR, INCOMPREHENSIBLE SPOILERS AHEAD
At the end of the book, YouTube superstar/quick-draw expert Danny Bailey and undercover FBI agent Stuart Kearns succeed in derailing the nefarious plot with the help of Noah and Molly, and the nuke ends up detonating in the middle of the desert, far from Las Vegas.
Noah is then shipped off to an unidentified facility, where he is waterboarded for several days by his father (the main villain in the novel) and his minions -- more on that in a subsequent post - in order to both find out any information he knows about the Founders Keepers and also to see if the “infection” of their ideas is curable. He is able to convince his bizarrely gullible father that he is no longer under the sway of their ideology by quoting the Rudyard Kipling poem that is featured prominently in the comparatively artsy trailer. He is then free to secretly rejoin “the fight,” which the last line -- in the form of a note from Molly -- informs us “starts tomorrow.”
Got all that? Me neither.
Regardless, since Glenn hopes “this time” the ending “stays fiction,” what in the world was the original ending that didn't “stay fiction?”
After the heroine sneaks through security disguised as Natalie Portman, the evil plot inexplicably falls apart when the President signs a health care reform bill?