Apocalypse Now, Part 1--The Shit Sandwich that is Coming
Charlie has hit every major military target in Vietnam, and hit 'em hard. In Saigon, the United States Embassy has been overrun by suicide squads. Khe Sahn is standing by to be overrun. We also have reports that a division of N.V.A. has occupied all of the city of Hue south of the Perfume River. In strategic terms, Charlie's cut the country in half... the civilian press are about to wet their pants and we've heard even Cronkite's going to say the war is now unwinnable. In other words, it's a huge shit sandwich, and we're all gonna have to take a bite. --Lt. Lockhart, Full Metal Jacket (1987).
Everything is going to shit. In your heart, you know I'm right.
For my American readers, we are collectively living in Year 2 of the slow-motion car crash that is the Trump regime. And, as I sit here on New Year's Eve, every indicator suggests that we are about to enter into some sort of new, more baroque version in Year 3, as the Mueller investigation closes in and some of the more opportunist (and/or more astute) supporters of the regime run for cover. If you are in the UK, you are experiencing a similar slow disintegration in the form of Brexit. Similar outcome, less flamboyant, and thus characteristically British. If you are an Canadian, you seem to be doing OK, but you have the massive problem of sharing a border with the US, and so are first in line to get some of the blowback. Sorry. And, if there happen to be any Russians weirdly reading this blog because I talked shit about Trump, feel free to tell Putin to go fuck himself.
Anyway, where was I? Oh, yes, the apocalypse.
As I have mentioned previously, at the heart of apocalypse is an unveiling of something that was always there, but heretofore difficult to see. For me, the experience of apocalypse has taken the form of the unveiling of the hollowness of so much of the rhetoric we see around us. Most people, I think, have a default of taking what people say at face value, absent some concrete reason to think otherwise. That has certainly been my default position by and large. As a result, I have tended in the past to think that people who ascribe sinister motives to their political or social opponents are alarmists or haters. But, again and again over the last couple of years, those sinister motives have manifested themselves in undeniable ways. Whereas I thought I was balanced and reasonable where those who shouted about sinister motives were alarmists or escalating conflicts unnecessarily, I know think I am naive and they were and are insightful and prophetic.
There are numerous examples that I could point to here, but I would like to highlight two of them that affected me particularly. The first, on the political front, has to do with Russia. When I was a kid in the 80s, the absolute most fundamental mark of being a conservative was to oppose Russia and everything it stood for. Not since the 50s, really, was anti-Russian sentiment higher in the US than in the 80s. At least one half of the ideological and rhetorical emphasis of the Reagan administration, the administration that is held up as the gold standard still in conservative discourse, was about combating Russia. And on what basis? On the basis of ideas like "democracy" and "freedom" and "human rights."
Flash forward to 2018, and we have a President who is clearly and unambiguously bought and paid for by the Russian government, engaging in overtly pro-Russian actions. You have Russian spies running around nakedly influencing US politics. You have a leader of Russia who is literally a product of the greatest symbol of the old Russian oppression, the KGB, who makes no apologies about his lineage. Russia is not meaningfully more free politically than it was during the 80s, and continues to attempt to harass and control other democratic regimes toward a satellite model. This is precisely the nightmare scenario painted by conservatives back in the 80s about the danger of Russia and Russian influence.
And what are those that warned us about the dangers of Russia in the 80s doing now? Cheering it, and pledging unwavering support to the Russian puppet. Yes, yes, there are a handful of "never Trump" conservatives on the internet, but they exist almost exclusively on the internet. And why do they cheer it? Because they never really cared about Russia, and they certainly never cared about democracy or freedom or human rights. They just wanted an enemy to be opposed to, and it happened to be Russia at the time. Now, those folks have moved on to other enemies, now closer to home, and so Russia is fine. If Russia in the 80s had given money to Reagan to support him busting up the unions and dismantling the welfare state and rolling back the Civil Rights Movement, Yuri Andropov would have been a conservative hero. Putin was just smart enough to realize how full of shit US conservatives actually are.
The other one that jumps out at me comes from the Pennsylvania Grand Jury report investigating the Roman Catholic Church. That report is an unending tide of horrors, but there was one story that I couldn't get out of my mind. In the 1980s (after, it should be said, the first wave of sex abuse cases came to light in Louisiana), a priest of the Diocese of Scranton raped a 17 year old girl, got her pregnant, and pushed her into having an abortion. You might think that said priest would try to keep this quiet, and he certainly kept it quiet from his parishoners, but his bishop knew perfectly well what happened. And, upon finding out, Bishop James Timlin wrote a letter stating "This is a very difficult time in your life and I realize how upset you are. . . I too share your grief." But the letter was not to the girl that was raped; the letter was to the priest.
So, if you are keeping score at home, a fellow priest who rapes an underage girl and coerces her into having an abortion is a sad day for the priest involved, per Bishop Timlin. But adult women who choose to have an abortion free of coercion? And those who believe that said women should have the legal right to make such choices? Well, Timlin made an enormous public stink about refusing to attend the commencement ceremonies at the University of Scranton in 2003 (the year my brother graduated from the school, for what it is worth) because the commencement speaker was Chris Matthews. Matthews's sin? Working for now-deceased Senator Teddy Kennedy, who was pro-choice, and for refusing to state that abortion should be illegal everywhere. One must be always and everywhere pro-life if you are to be a Roman Catholic in good standing, according to Bishop Timlin. Unless of course you are a priest who wants to cover up the evidence of child molestation, in which case abortion is fine except insofar as it makes the priest a little sad.
The lesson here, like the lesson of conservatives visa ve Russia, is that all of this pro-life stuff was basically bullshit all along. Whatever the motivations for taking the pro-life position--and I would put "controlling women and women's sexuality" at #1 with a bullet--it sure as hell wasn't about some principled moral opposition to abortion. Because, if that was true, then Bishop Timlin never would have essentially laughed off one of his priests procuring an abortion, regardless of whether or not he cared about the sex abuse dimension (which, obviously, he did not). The "sanctity of life" mattered so long as it was a useful club with which to advance other social agendas, and meaningless when it was not.
So, the point is that we are experiencing an unveiling, where things that were obscure are now clear. And the unveiling is likely to continue, and perhaps even accelerate, in the coming year. In that light, I figured I would do a deep dive into this apocalypse, to see if we can make sense of it, examine its underlying causes, and maybe chart a course to get through it. The next post is going to go into a little bit of theory on apocalypses, with the help of our old buddy Rene Girard. Beyond that, we are going to look at some of the manifestations of apocalypse--race in the US and the collapse of Christendom, to name two of them.
We are all probably going to have to take a bite in 2019. Let's see what exactly we are biting into.
Everything is going to shit. In your heart, you know I'm right.
For my American readers, we are collectively living in Year 2 of the slow-motion car crash that is the Trump regime. And, as I sit here on New Year's Eve, every indicator suggests that we are about to enter into some sort of new, more baroque version in Year 3, as the Mueller investigation closes in and some of the more opportunist (and/or more astute) supporters of the regime run for cover. If you are in the UK, you are experiencing a similar slow disintegration in the form of Brexit. Similar outcome, less flamboyant, and thus characteristically British. If you are an Canadian, you seem to be doing OK, but you have the massive problem of sharing a border with the US, and so are first in line to get some of the blowback. Sorry. And, if there happen to be any Russians weirdly reading this blog because I talked shit about Trump, feel free to tell Putin to go fuck himself.
Anyway, where was I? Oh, yes, the apocalypse.
As I have mentioned previously, at the heart of apocalypse is an unveiling of something that was always there, but heretofore difficult to see. For me, the experience of apocalypse has taken the form of the unveiling of the hollowness of so much of the rhetoric we see around us. Most people, I think, have a default of taking what people say at face value, absent some concrete reason to think otherwise. That has certainly been my default position by and large. As a result, I have tended in the past to think that people who ascribe sinister motives to their political or social opponents are alarmists or haters. But, again and again over the last couple of years, those sinister motives have manifested themselves in undeniable ways. Whereas I thought I was balanced and reasonable where those who shouted about sinister motives were alarmists or escalating conflicts unnecessarily, I know think I am naive and they were and are insightful and prophetic.
There are numerous examples that I could point to here, but I would like to highlight two of them that affected me particularly. The first, on the political front, has to do with Russia. When I was a kid in the 80s, the absolute most fundamental mark of being a conservative was to oppose Russia and everything it stood for. Not since the 50s, really, was anti-Russian sentiment higher in the US than in the 80s. At least one half of the ideological and rhetorical emphasis of the Reagan administration, the administration that is held up as the gold standard still in conservative discourse, was about combating Russia. And on what basis? On the basis of ideas like "democracy" and "freedom" and "human rights."
Flash forward to 2018, and we have a President who is clearly and unambiguously bought and paid for by the Russian government, engaging in overtly pro-Russian actions. You have Russian spies running around nakedly influencing US politics. You have a leader of Russia who is literally a product of the greatest symbol of the old Russian oppression, the KGB, who makes no apologies about his lineage. Russia is not meaningfully more free politically than it was during the 80s, and continues to attempt to harass and control other democratic regimes toward a satellite model. This is precisely the nightmare scenario painted by conservatives back in the 80s about the danger of Russia and Russian influence.
And what are those that warned us about the dangers of Russia in the 80s doing now? Cheering it, and pledging unwavering support to the Russian puppet. Yes, yes, there are a handful of "never Trump" conservatives on the internet, but they exist almost exclusively on the internet. And why do they cheer it? Because they never really cared about Russia, and they certainly never cared about democracy or freedom or human rights. They just wanted an enemy to be opposed to, and it happened to be Russia at the time. Now, those folks have moved on to other enemies, now closer to home, and so Russia is fine. If Russia in the 80s had given money to Reagan to support him busting up the unions and dismantling the welfare state and rolling back the Civil Rights Movement, Yuri Andropov would have been a conservative hero. Putin was just smart enough to realize how full of shit US conservatives actually are.
The other one that jumps out at me comes from the Pennsylvania Grand Jury report investigating the Roman Catholic Church. That report is an unending tide of horrors, but there was one story that I couldn't get out of my mind. In the 1980s (after, it should be said, the first wave of sex abuse cases came to light in Louisiana), a priest of the Diocese of Scranton raped a 17 year old girl, got her pregnant, and pushed her into having an abortion. You might think that said priest would try to keep this quiet, and he certainly kept it quiet from his parishoners, but his bishop knew perfectly well what happened. And, upon finding out, Bishop James Timlin wrote a letter stating "This is a very difficult time in your life and I realize how upset you are. . . I too share your grief." But the letter was not to the girl that was raped; the letter was to the priest.
So, if you are keeping score at home, a fellow priest who rapes an underage girl and coerces her into having an abortion is a sad day for the priest involved, per Bishop Timlin. But adult women who choose to have an abortion free of coercion? And those who believe that said women should have the legal right to make such choices? Well, Timlin made an enormous public stink about refusing to attend the commencement ceremonies at the University of Scranton in 2003 (the year my brother graduated from the school, for what it is worth) because the commencement speaker was Chris Matthews. Matthews's sin? Working for now-deceased Senator Teddy Kennedy, who was pro-choice, and for refusing to state that abortion should be illegal everywhere. One must be always and everywhere pro-life if you are to be a Roman Catholic in good standing, according to Bishop Timlin. Unless of course you are a priest who wants to cover up the evidence of child molestation, in which case abortion is fine except insofar as it makes the priest a little sad.
The lesson here, like the lesson of conservatives visa ve Russia, is that all of this pro-life stuff was basically bullshit all along. Whatever the motivations for taking the pro-life position--and I would put "controlling women and women's sexuality" at #1 with a bullet--it sure as hell wasn't about some principled moral opposition to abortion. Because, if that was true, then Bishop Timlin never would have essentially laughed off one of his priests procuring an abortion, regardless of whether or not he cared about the sex abuse dimension (which, obviously, he did not). The "sanctity of life" mattered so long as it was a useful club with which to advance other social agendas, and meaningless when it was not.
So, the point is that we are experiencing an unveiling, where things that were obscure are now clear. And the unveiling is likely to continue, and perhaps even accelerate, in the coming year. In that light, I figured I would do a deep dive into this apocalypse, to see if we can make sense of it, examine its underlying causes, and maybe chart a course to get through it. The next post is going to go into a little bit of theory on apocalypses, with the help of our old buddy Rene Girard. Beyond that, we are going to look at some of the manifestations of apocalypse--race in the US and the collapse of Christendom, to name two of them.
We are all probably going to have to take a bite in 2019. Let's see what exactly we are biting into.
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