apocalypse sometime soon

I've been making jokes over the last week or so about the apocalypse.

The apocalypse is just a little bit funny, isn't it?

Well, really, the apocalypse is just weird. Always just around the corner.... that's the nature of apocalypse(s), it wouldn't be what it is if it weren't imminent. Vague apocalyptic language is protean enough to cover just about anything, so it's generally pretty hard to deny, since the story invariably fits.

This securing of the 'mandate' for the bushies may seem like it's one of the signs of the apocalypse, that's what my jokes have been about, I suppose. But the more I investigate it, it's the tantalizing prospect of the apocalypse that brought this all on in the first place. I don't mean that we have some nihilistic desire to, you know, witness our own demise....

Well, maybe I should start that over again, recapitulating the 'we' here - since I think it's a pretty convincing 'they,' and they do, you know, want to see 'us' burn in hellfire and get swarmed by greedy locusts that bite really hard.

Because that would mean the second coming. Just read Revelations. Or google it.

It does seem a little strange among all this language about crusades and holy wars that we are (literally) engaged in a serious conflict in Babylon. And staging some endless war against those who resist the building of the third temple.

And it seems mostly strange that I get seduced by the woo-woo conspiracy theories. I can't believe I've stooped to mentioning the second coming. Even as a joke.

But its just when you read some of this stuff -- and since the catastrophe last Tuesday, I feel compelled to bone up a bit on my crackpot christian theology, including the political rantings of the bible belt ( www.ivotevalues.com is a real nugget of 21st century regression and political genius (engineered, im pretty sure, by sage Rove himself)) -- I find that this is the problem. Or the solution... being nuanced, mostly intelligent people, 'we' tend to scoff at these clash-of-the-civilizations explanations because we've become cushy and comfortable with the concept, with the assurance, of rational thought. But the attempt to intellectualize our/ their experience is precisely why we'll never get it.

To get it, you have to plant yourself deep in the mind of the dumbass and start thinking (or just stop thinking altogether) about good and evil.

My favorite bit I read over this past week was from another christian cuckoo site, an article about 'what we should have learned since September 11,' let's see if I can just quote directly:

"Evil is real:

We in the West have done our best to move "beyond good and evil." Deconstructionism encourages us to believe that there is no good or evil, only power. The therapeutic mindset says that there is only health or disease. Even in the church we refrain from using the word evil, have softened the meaning of sin, and shy away from calling people to repentance.

For most Americans, the terrorist attacks were evil. The moral relativism that was comfortable on September 10 was shown on September 11 to be a sham. Christianity has a theology of evil that explains events like 9/11 and gives the solution for it. Opening eyes to the reality of evil is the Holy Spirits prelude to opening eyes to the reality of the gospel."

(http://www.pfm.org/Content/ContentGroups/BreakPoint/Other_Content/Online_Features/Jim_Tonkowich/Ten_Things_We_Should_Have_Learned_since_September_11__2001.htm)

So, basically, those jew-commie-faggots in their coastal ivory towers, with their Merchant of Venice pointy noses and Dolce and Gabbana pointy glasses are plotting, scheming and.... deconstructing. That's right, folks, keep an eye on your daughter, lest she stumble and get herself impregnated by some college boy who reads Derrida.
Because, you know, she'd have to have it.

I've heard a lot about the death of rationality these days, the triumph of the absurd, that's also sort of seductive: Watch the world go stupid and then 'we,' the smokers and the homos and the chicks with the assymetrical haircuts can construct a more convincing underworld, maybe there'll be cabarets and speakeasies and opium dens, secret passwords and men wearing mascara.

But wait a sec. Last I heard, last I experienced, no one could even smoke over a fucking cup of coffee in New York City, and the populace let out a mutual, let's say muted, harumph; wrapped a scarf a little more tightly around their neck and stepped outside. That's after shelling out $8.50 for a fucking pack of marlboro lights. It's just these little submissions.....

And I don't want to wax nostalgic about the good old days when there were lots of murders and graffiti and how the 00's are somehow this redux of the newyork 70s (hey, the New York Times magazine already did that, anyway...) it's just that I have little hope for my fellow park-slopies and liberal-arties and F-trainers, or if we want to talk about here, the l-word lesbians, the macrobiotic neo-homemakers and the yoga-pilate-jiujitsu heads.... I have little hope for anything astonishingly original. Shit, i would even settle for artifice: just a little bit of glamour, maybe some tragedy, please????

It's great, you know... we've got gay couples who all they fucking want to do is order stuff from their crate and barrel catalogs, get some financing on their mini-cooper, maybe let their partner get a couple sessions with the acupuncturist through their health insurance, and have a cute commitment ceremony with some expensive flowers......... and this, for the biblebeaters is Rome falling from the inside. Don't you see it's just a haircut, it's coffeetable counterculture?

It's counter culture squeezed fucking dry.

It's not just the democrats you know, diluted beyond all recognition. Difference, dissent is diluted. 'Wordly' america on the coasts, and in Chicago and Austin, they just want a couple of tattoos and to read their Jonathan Franzen in peace, as far as I can tell. Maybe smoke a little doobie. I dunno.

I'm just saying, if 'they' want to see the evil, let's give em some evil, you know?

Actually, I don't know what I'm saying anymore.