333--The half-ass Apocalypse (Immanentizing the Eschaton, Part Six)

There's a man goin' 'round takin' names
And he decides who to free and who to blame
Everybody won't be treated all the same
There'll be a golden ladder reachin' down
When the man comes around

The hairs on your arm will stand up
At the terror in each sip and in each sup
Will you partake of that last offered cup
Or disappear into the potter's ground?
When the man comes around 

~Johnny Cash, The Man Comes Around.

I just saw this a little while ago.

Jerry Falwell Jr. with his pants unzipped, belly hanging out, Speedo showing, a glass of booze in his hand and his arm around a rather immodestly dressed woman who is obviously not his wife.

Just sayin' if I posted a picture like this, my friends would be mocking me over it for years...they've already done so for less.

People keep telling me we're in the End Times.

Well, I'm sorry, but if this is the End Times it's the dumbest, most half-ass ridiculous version possible and I say that as somebody who has actually seen that one dumb ass low-budget Christian "Apocalypse" movie from the late 1990's. And I'm fucking tired of it. Really fucking tired of it.

It's almost like Christianity, but if Jim Bakker was the Messiah instead of Jesus Christ, failed theme park, gaudy obnoxious wife that he cheats on, rumored homosexual relationships and all. It's like somebody took the plot of the Left Behind series, edited out literally all the supernatural stuff and here we are, stuck in a world run by idiots.

These fucking people never fail to come off as bumptious fools weaned on an ideology of self and selfishness, get caught with their dick in the pool boy or some 14-year-old girl, and then try and come at the rest of us as if they're the sober, serious Republicans of old.

Of course, they'll still trot out Bill Bennett or Newt Gingrich on Fox News every now and again, when the volume of the fire dance and the shouts of "Unga Bunga" from their mob of primitive-minded idiots grow too loud and they need some hoary old Tribal Elder to get the mob pointed in a safe direction. But ya know I'm old enough that I remember when Bill Bennett was exposed for having a gambling problem and I remember Newt getting run out of politics for cheating on his wife (while impeaching Bill Clinton for the exact same thing) and I'm not really sure that these motherfuckers ever were that sober or that serious or even that decent or intelligent, but let's be charitable and say that the quality control fell off a cliff in 1992 or so.

Republicans took control of Congress after the 1994 midterm elections.

"Left Behind" was published in 1995.

The rot goes at least that far back, I know, I was there.

It was harder to spot at the time, but, looking back you can definitely see the beginnings of it, like, ya know, elevating an obvious slime ball like Newt Gingrich to the position of Speaker of the House. Not to mention the proliferation of guys like James Dobson and Ralph Reed and, in the wake of Newt, obvious scumbags like Dennis Hastert and Tom DeLay rising to positions of power.

Launder that bullshit through 8 years of the Bush Administration, then wash it furiously in another eight years of fervid racism against Obama, concurrent with six years of Tea Party fanaticism and in 2016, there we were. Add four years of Donald Trump and...well, you do the math.

It's funny how, in the end, for These Fucking People immanentizing the conservative eschaton somehow manages to fail at being either convincingly Christian or convincingly conservative, but it somehow manages to be tacky as fuck and involve the old white man being caught in a vaguely compromising position with a younger woman...and somehow managing to still feel smugly morally superior about it.

 

And of course what Failpocalypse would be complete without Jacob Wohl and Jack Burkman making an appearance.

Zip up your fly, Jack, and make sure this press conference isn't outside where there's a garbage truck.

I mean fucking seriously, here we have a woman in public office who doesn't think women should hold public office? Meet Merritt Corrigan, yo. She's a worker for USAID who doesn't like refugees and for that matter an alleged Christian who doesn't seem to know the first damn thing about Christianity, or possess the ability to identify other Christians, for that matter (last I checked, Cory Booker is very enthusiastically Christian, but evidently he's not her kind of Christian despite having background in both African Methodist Episcopal and Baptist traditions.) Evidently she doesn't like Tim Kaine either, referring to both Booker and Kaine as "anti-Christian Leftists" which is kinda weird given that Tim Kaine is a pretty active Catholic who's attended the same church for 30 years. Actually, judging from what I know of these men, and for that matter what I've heard them say regarding their own religious beliefs I think it's a reasonably fair assumption to argue that either Cory Booker or Tim Kaine is probably more conservative in any sense of what that word actually means and in terms of 'Things as they are' in American society-as-it-is than Merritt Corrigan is. 

Merritt Corrigan's beliefs, so far as I can tell, seem to be entirely composed of hate for...well, everything. She's an American who refers to the United States of America as a "Homo-empire" which sounds vaguely like assorted Russian anti-American and anti-EU propaganda that I've seen in recent years. Apparently all a country has to do to be a "Homo-empire" is...treat LGBT people like human beings? Also, she thinks Tucker Carlson should be the next President.

I'd like to say this is a surprise, or comes off to me as an aberration, but I can't. To me 20 years ago it might have, but my ex-wife is a mentally ill Pentecostal who has turned into an Anti-vaccine conspiracy kook. I saw...and was horrified by...most of this bullshit long before the average person did. Not just the religious craziness...and I was stuck fighting against that long before the average person knew or would even understand what I was talking about. But, most of the ingredients of Trumpism were present among lower-class white conservatives long before this. It made for quite a lonely struggle for a long time to try and deal with that, but at the same time I'd almost prefer that to the level of awareness of this shit that lots of people have today if it meant these assholes didn't have power. These are people who think their rules should apply to everybody else, but not them. Why anybody wanted to give these fucking people power, I don't understand.

And when you don't show up to resist these motherfuckers, or vote against them, that's what happens. They get power.

These are people who literally think they have some kind of a right to fuck shit up for everybody, and that others don't even have the right to get mad about it. In fact, if you're lucky, they'll understand that you are mad. We're dealing with people who basically think they have a right to demand a greater share of resources before they even do anything...and then they get angry when the world doesn't comply with their demands just because they say so and they treat it as some kind of vast conspiracy against them that they are not powerful and rich just because. And of course they all think believing just exactly the right things in exactly the right ways is their ticket to literally Immanentizing the Eschaton and creating heaven on Earth...for themselves. That it might be hell for other people is actually a selling point for the whole idea. These Fucking People don't care. As I've said before, they don't care if they win, so long as everybody else loses too. These are people who think if they screw things up bad enough, Jesus will appear and save them and then they'll get everything anyway and get to watch the rest of us go to hell..

And that, fundamentally is why they're Okay with being on the losing end of capitalism and why they're just fine with Donald Trump's magical 8-ball theory of government and why they're Okay with their version of Christianity being run by libertine assholes like Jerry Falwell Jr.

Nothing matters, not even the Cause, except insofar as they can get something they want out of it, and maybe deny the same to somebody else.

And that, fundamentally, is the conservative Eschaton. That is the world they want.

In that kind of religion, everybody goes to hell.

Part Five.

Intermission.

Hear the trumpets, hear the pipers

One hundred million angels singin'
Multitudes are marchin' to the big kettledrum
Voices callin', voices cryin'
Some are born and some are dyin'
It's alpha and omega's kingdom come
And the whirlwind is in the thorn tree
The virgins are all trimming their wicks
The whirlwind is in the thorn tree
It's hard for thee to kick against the pricks

~Johnny Cash, The Man Comes Around.