Time to dive into the fourth part of this, Leviathan. See, leviathan starts with Lev and we have a character named Lev so…uh….well…okay, the shared letters are about it.

SURGEONS HARVEST ORGANS AFTER EUTHANASIA
by Michael Cook, May 14, 2010, BioEdge web journal
How often is this going on in Belgium and the Netherlands? Bioethics blogger Wesley Smith drew our attention to a conference report by Belgian transplant surgeons about organ procurement after euthanasia. As the doctors from Antwerp University Hospital explained in the 2006 World Transplant Congress (in a section called “economics”), they killed a consenting forty-six-year-old woman with a neurological condition and took her liver, two kidneys, and islets.
In a 2008 report, the doctors explained that three patients had been euthanased between 2005 and 2007. . . .
At the time of writing the article, the doctors were enthusiastic about the potential for organ donation in countries where euthanasia is legal. . . .
The curious thing about this is how little publicity this has received, even though the Belgian doctors published their achievement in the world’s leading journal of transplant surgery. ~ Transplantation, July 15, 2006; Transplantation, July 27, 2008.

Possibly because this is only a big deal to people who always freak out at anything like this, and they’re just a boring broken record on the subject so everyone’s sick of hearing about it.

There’s a wonkiness to the whole story and I wonder if it’s a matter of not really understanding why things are good or bad.

If someone says, “Killing people for parts is bad!!!” it’s such a reasonable position you can fill in the why easily. But I’m starting to think the author is just repeating it without really any grasp of it. That’s why they don’t see anything weird about the idea of pro-choice = force people to have babies then kill them later, and it’s why they don’t see any difference between mugging someone and yanking out their kidneys and euthanasia. Because that’s what it means when you put “killed” and “consenting” next to each other, it was euthanasia. That thing people decide on when things are really, really bad, and never going to get any better, and the best option for them is to die faster before they go through even more suffering. It’s not that they asked her permission to kill her for parts, she decided to kill herself due to a really horrible disorder and also donated her organs.

Did you know there’s this one that just shuts off your ability to move? You’re still alive. All your parts still work otherwise. It does nothing to your brain. Or your sense of pain. You’re there, trapped, unable to so much as blink on your own. Without major medical help you ultimately suffocate as you lose the ability to breathe. With medical help, you live until something goes wrong with your feeding tube or respirator, or your bedsores slowly rot their way through your body.

Point is there’s never any valid reason for it and that’s why euthanasia remains illegal throughout the US, hooray for freedom!

There could certainly be ethical questions about if doctors are pressuring people to do this…except, if you dig up the actual stuff, you’ll see the doctors claim it’s illegal to bring up at all until the person’s decided on euthanasia. So the only point of controversy is

1) How’s the regulation of this otherwise great idea, are we keeping an eye on things to make sure it’s being done properly?
2) It’s euthanasia!!!

There totally are people talking about this – the very fact he found an article shows this. And they’re all groups who just hate euthanasia. They’re only talking about the organ thing because it’s another way of reminding everyone that this is spooky and sinister and must be kept out at all costs.

And why? You’ll hear them talking about the value of life, but you’ll also see something about the terrors of Islam next to their anti-euthanasia article and then go on to talk about how great it is when women raise children instead of working.

Because Christianity bans suicide – and doesn’t have the best history with medicine in general, either. Both things involve humans making decisions about themselves rather than putting it in God’s hands.

I don’t think that has anything to do with the author’s writing. Honestly, the longer I read this, the more I don’t think anything has anything to do with it. It’s like he just finds the idea squicky so he assumes there must be some validity to it, and decides to write the controversy.

Anyway, time for a different thing to hate. It’s a Lev chapter! That wouldn’t be bad, but it’s time to talk about clappers so it’s going to be just terrible.

It’s a very rare thing that a clapper doesn’t clap, because by the time one gets to the stage of being willing to make one’s own blood explosive enough to take out a whole building, that soul is far beyond the point of no return.

Like I said, I don’t think the author’s complaints about organ donation necessarily trace back to the bad fundamentalist Christianity that spawns most of it.

I’m totally willing to say that his attitude toward suicide bombers comes down to racism, though.

It’s really convenient to say that suicide bombers are unstoppable monsters. If you think about the part where some of them stop and take off their vests when faced with really doing it, you start to wonder if others could’ve been talked out of it. You ask why they felt this was what they should do, and what else could’ve been done.

Much better to say that anyone who decides to do this should just be shot. Way easier.

There had still been a spark of light in Levi Jedediah Calder, however. Enough to ignite a powerful change of heart.

Now, to recap, Lev’s plan for clapping was to try to blow up the slaughterhouse to stop them from killing Connor.

But it was suicide bombing therefore he was a hideous monster with only a tiny spark of light that only mattered in that it told him suicide bombing to blow up mass murderers is wrong. And he was the only one ever, because again, regular non-main-character suicide bombers are just monsters.

Now Lev is trying to chat with kids at a detention center. Why they even have one when it means not getting their hands on those sweet, sweet organs, I don’t know. It seems to just be because the author wants to do the stock scene where the main character is trying to talk to people to help them turn their lives around.

“I would guess you’re sixteen, right? You’re labeled a ‘divisional risk,’ you know that, don’t you? It means you’re at risk for being unwound.”
“What, you think my mother would unwind me? She wouldn’t dare. Who’d pay her friggin’ bills?”

I suspect we’re to view this as foolish given this book has repeatedly said kids never believe their parents will unwind them, but I prefer to take it at face value.

The thing is, what the government doesn’t want in kids is not necessarily the same as what parents don’t want. A kid who causes no trouble to anybody else but is annoying at home could be unwound for it, a kid who’s dealing drugs but paying the rent with the profit is only a headache for the cops.

The kid asserts his only mistake was being caught, and perhaps that’s a sign that this is a depressed area (we’ve been seeing plenty of signs that the economy isn’t too good in general) where this is the only kid of job he can get.

Then he rolls up a sleeve, revealing that the tattoos visible on his wrists go all the way up to his shoulder. Bones and brutality painted on his flesh. “Besides, who’s gonna want these arms?”
“You’d be surprised,” Lev tells him. “People actually pay extra for ink as good as yours.”

Why would he be surprised? He should see people bragging about their secondhand tattoos. People shouldn’t be endlessly surprised by the basic functioning of their own surroundings.

Anyway, the kid eventually manages to place Lev, and it’s unclear why Lev tried to dodge the issue because it makes the kid open up and he then says that’s how it always goes.

He goes on to explain he’s under a gag order:

it was “in the public’s best interest” to get Lev out of the news as quickly as possible and keep him from becoming the national voice against unwinding. In the end, he was sentenced to house arrest, complete with a tracking chip embedded in his shoulder, and 520 hours of community service every year, until his eighteenth birthday. His service consisted of picking up trash in local parks and ministering to wayward youth about the ills of drugs and violent behavior. In return for the relative lightness of his sentence, he agreed to give them all the inside information he knew about clappers and other terrorist activities. That part was easy—he knew very little beyond his own clapper cell, and the other members were all dead. He was also put under a permanent gag order. He could never speak in public about unwinding, tithing, and what happened at Happy Jack. He was basically sentenced to disappear.

…

“We should call you the little mermaid,” his brother Marcus had joked, “because they let you magically walk, in exchange for your voice.”

Yeah, that sure was a selfish deal he took, wasn’t it?

I’m not really mad at Lev over it – you shouldn’t have to sacrifice yourself – but I am annoyed the book isn’t acknowledging there was a choice made here. Lev could’ve chosen to talk over getting the light sentence. In fact, even having agreed, a gag order doesn’t literally rip out your tongue, he could still talk.

And there’s the obvious face of a movement thing, but also…

Now, normally, kids blowing themselves up would just make adults crack down harder (this would be the fatal flaw of so much anarchist reasoning), but I guess whatever bizarro characterization leads to parents murdering their kids all the time means they also seem quite successfully terrorized by the clappers. With this in mind, the message that might do the most would be “someone blew up the place butchering kids, and then there was a very successful riot”.

Right now, for, again, bizarro reasons, the clapper kids are blowing themselves up at random. If they started trying to blow up the places harvesting kids, if the successful terrorism of the clappers could be linked to a thing they wanted that’d make them stop, people would have second thoughts about unwinding. And Lev could make the point that he was a good kid. And he was willing to blow himself up. And he thought it could stop them from unwinding his friend.

I realize this would probably encourage suicide bombings at the mass murder camps along the way, but seriously, it’s literally a death camp but specifically for kids so that’s a positive. If you didn’t want a situation where suicide bombing is heroic maybe don’t write a story where it’s a way of stopping Super-Hitler.

within a few months Lev became very good at reaching into the hearts of strangers, figuring out what made them tick, and then defusing them before the tick became a countdown.

Except kids can be killed for all sorts of ridiculous reasons and we have yet to hear of a single kid getting unwound for actually committing crimes. Hell, Roland would still be alive if he’d been out vandalizing cars that night instead.

Also, given what we know about government price fixing, it may well be that for every regular kid you save it just means one more state ward getting slaughtered.

Anyway lots of puns from Pastor Dan that we’ll be skipping. Just know the author seems to think they’re really clever to the point of using them for horribly inappropriate things.

Oh, and his brother who took him in is now disowned too, and sad about it.

We then learn that, remember how last book it claimed somehow Lev’s clapperjuice was sticking to all his organs just enough no one could harvest them? Well, the author’s retconned that to make more sense and now it actually caused damage throughout his body despite his constant transfusions to filter it out, because the stuff is toxic in a way that had no actual effects for the days and days he and the others were just hanging out having their vitals monitored constantly.

Now Lev’s body is perpetually trapped at the age of thirteen. The wage of being a clapper who doesn’t clap. The only thing that will still grow is his hair—and he made a conscious decision that he would just let it grow, never again becoming the clean-cut, easily manipulated boy he had once been.

Given he’s only fourteen it’s not clear how he’s sure that he’s not going to grow at all instead of it causing delays. But there’s more:

Luckily, the worst predictions didn’t come true. He was told he would have permanent tremors in his hands and a slur in his speech. Didn’t happen. He was told that his muscles would atrophy and he’d become increasingly weak. Didn’t happen. In fact, regular exercise, while it hasn’t bulked him up like some, has left him with fairly normal muscle tone.

Did I say more? I meant consequences are for suckers and disabled characters are horrible and must be avoided at all costs. Only the pure may be main characters!!!

“I hear ya,” says the punk. “Clean till seventeen—that oughta be the motto.”

And so we see that the government shouldn’t want Lev doing this.

In our world, we don’t have an existing system of murdering kids, so our only options for avoiding troubled adults is to try to deal with them when they’re still troubled kids. In this world, the last thing you want is for troubled kids to behave themselves and then grow up into criminals you actually have to prosecute and incarcerate rather than flay them for their tattoos.

So – why is it that it’s okay for the government to force women to carry pregnancies to term but not okay to force parents to give up their kids?

Is it because women are the ones getting pregnant but parents includes a father and this all goes back adult men owning everyone else?

There’s a jogging path in downtown Cleveland that runs along the marina on Lake Erie.
…
It’s relatively warm for February. Temperatures in the forties. Rain instead of snow that morning, and a dreary afternoon drizzle instead of flurries.

Unfortunately we don’t know exactly when in February this is or we could narrow it down further, but, apparently 40 degree weather in Cleveland during February is unusual, which is would seem to contradict the slight hints elsewhere that global warming fucked us good. I’m not really familiar with Cleveland’s exact projections, though – some areas will remain stable or even get chillier under moderate global warming because when other places become a desert that rain has to go somewhere.

Lev is out running with his brother, who doesn’t enjoy it:

“I swear, if you keep showing me up, I won’t run with you anymore. I’ll call the feds back in. They always keep up with you.”
…
when he first began, there were G-men escorting him. At first they escorted him everywhere on his Sundays out, perhaps to show that there was no leniency to house arrest.

Except for the leniency of letting him out of his house in the first place. House arrest often stops short of literally locking you in your house forever…but it generally also stops well short of letting you have fun jogs.

Eventually they began to trust the tracking chip and allowed Lev to be out without an official escort, as long as either Dan or Marcus was with him.

It sounds like it’d make more sense for Lev’s sentence to be that he’ll be constantly tracked. Ankle bracelets aren’t only used for house arrest situations.

Marcus catches his breath as he drinks, then mentions casually, “You got a letter from Cousin Carl yesterday.”

Ah, subterfuge. Really shitty subterfuge.

The first letter from Cousin Carl was a complete mystery at first, until Lev realized it was a coded message from Connor. With the possibility that Lev’s mail is being monitored by one government agency or another, it was the only way Connor could get him a message and hope that Lev was clever enough to figure it all out.

Because obviously the government won’t see anything suspicious about a mysterious letter from a nonexistent relative talking in convoluted and weighty ways!

I hate this trope so, so much.

Dear Cousin Levi,
A belated birthday card for you. I know fourteen means more to you than to most, what with the things you’ve been through. The ranch has been busy. The big beef companies keep threatening to take us over, but it hasn’t happened yet. We got a business plan that could save us from that, should it come to pass.
Hard work since I took over the ranch, and not much help from the neighbors. Wish I could just up and leave it, but who could handle these ranch hands but me?
We know of your current situation, and how you can’t come visit. Wouldn’t want you to. A lot of mad cow going on around here. Best to stay away and hope for the best.
Take care, and say hello to your brother for us. He’s almost as much of a lifesaver as you.
Sincerely,
Cousin Carl
Lev reads the letter four times, trying to parse out the various possible meanings.

Which he can do about as well as anyone else reading his mail!

It’s obvious this letter is from, if not Connor, someone involved with the escaped kids. It’s obvious what he’s talking about. It should be obvious that telling the government that the kids are currently receiving little to no support from the main organization is a bad idea, and not much better to add that the kids aren’t well organized or behaved and probably couldn’t manage an organized resistance against attackers.

The “code” is pathetic if there’s any concern about the government knowing all this, and if there isn’t, then there’s no point in not just saying things directly.

We then learn that although every second of Lev’s life is watched so he can’t do anything now, Marcus is no slouch when it comes to the resistance. He volunteers time pulling AWOLs off the street and getting them to safe houses, and gives a healthy share of the money he makes as a legal assistant to the cause. because apparently no one thought that the guy taking in his high profile brother might be someone to also watch.

Lev then brings up what I said before about how damn safety, he really should be speaking up. Wow, Lev, you’re shockingly great this book.

“If I speak up, people will listen to me—they had sympathy before, didn’t they? They’ll listen!”
Marcus slaps the letter down on the table. “For a kid who’s been through as much as you, you’re still so damn naive! People don’t have sympathy for you—they have sympathy for the little kid who became a clapper. They look at you like you’re the one who killed him.”

This sounds especially nonsensical when we also just heard about how Lev no longer ages properly and so still looks just like that little kid, so even if that was an issue he’s dodged it. But on the other hand, nothing about how these people work is what you’d expect, so maybe we should defer to Marcus’ experience with how the weird aliens populating this world function.

“You’re not doing nothing—you still have your weekend ministries with Dan.”
The thought of it just makes Lev furious. “That’s my punishment! You think I like being partners with the Juvey-cops? Keeping kids in line for them?” If there’s one thing he knows, it’s that Connor would never do the Juvies’ dirty work.

Here’s what we know:

Juvie cops hate children and love seeing them murdered.
Lev’s work is to keep parents from ordering their kids murdered.

THEREFORE, they want Lev to keep kids from being murdered? We do see them involved with non-unwind kids, but they seem to always be enthusiastically waiting for those kids to commit enough crimes to be killed.

Now, if we go on my theory that the number of state home kids killed is based on how many extras they need after they finish slaughtering the ones whose parents signed them over, then what Lev’s doing is pretty pointless and depressing because every person he saves here is just another person killed elsewhere. Even without that, he could be upset by how little he’s doing by talking to kids one at a time, knowing that even of the few he connects with, for many of them simply behaving better won’t be enough to save them.

But instead Lev is upset because he’s doing something distantly related to cops which are in turn related to childkilling. It’s not a very good argument.

Everything changes the day the Girl Scout comes.

This is a mammoth chapter, however, so we’ll find out what that involves next time!