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"Surviving Armageddon": A Fictional Account of American History 2001 to 20__?
But though I have wept and fasted, wept and prayed
Though I have seen my head (grown slightly bald)
brought in upon a platter,
I am no prophet,
and here’s no great matter;
I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,
And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat and snicker,
And in short, I was afraid. (T.S. Eliot, “Prufrock”)
It was toward the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, and though all those believers with rapture fever had been disappointed that the end of the second millennium had not brought the Second Coming, they had been given new hope by the current state of things. It was no accident that the fundamentalists had found their man in George W. Bush, and that it was his leadership that had primarily brought about the present state of political and spiritual chaos.Bush’s religion was a toxic mix of arrogance, incompetence and fundamentalist Christian dogma. It led to a messianic maniacal bungling of both domestic and foreign policy
Though stealthy, Bush’s dogma was the same brand of End Times misinformation, false prophecies and death wishes that David Koresh, Jim Jones and Marshall Applewhite (remember the goofs who caught the Hale-Bopp Comet as it passed) fed to their followers before they drank the Kool-Aid and bought the farm for their "Prophet.”
We have a National Guard unit (of sorts); we have several components of civil equilibrium: a bar, a church, a gang of convicts newly freed; a clan of Hispanics, generally and usually incorrectly called Mexicans; trailer parkers are out there too!
PROBLEM: each of the above is in a separate and unknown location. They are connected only by cell phones and a satellite Internet of sorts, though several catastrophic events have destroyed a generation of data; actually, they had wiped out the entire past. Ok? God!
I was right on target with my guidebook for surviving the end of the world. At first it was not ideological, just a factual analysis of world affairs, then a whole sleeping population of Kool-Aid drinkers reared their ugly heads and screamed in unison: "Atheists! God haters!"
Not so! True, once the barking false prophets were exposed, we did debunk them all.
People ended up seeing the truth about the false prophets, the end of timers, the same lot that for three hundred years had hijacked Christianity and corrupted it with false rapture predictions and prophecies. Fund Raisers who use end times prophecies every generation to further milk the ignorant of their cash.
These arrogant phonies dust themselves off after every predicted end fails to come and head off to repackage their next end times fundraiser to separate the faithful but spiritually blind from their money.
Back to the guidebook: It caught on and propelled its author, me, into instant fame and fortune. I am not against that, but with it has come a qualification: a codicil, whatever, that says there is a “growing movement” to name Jake Freedom (again, me) as a bona fide prophet.” And I Jake Freedom still say I have always said I am a nonprophet; it started as a bad joke and progressed to this absurdity, where the press frenzy has created its own reality, its own legends.
"What else is the press for?"
"Not this, not with me!"
"What do you have to say to those unknown thousands who believe you were especially sent to them? Yet you don’t claim to be God’s messenger?"
He scratched his chin whiskers and smiled: “I didn’t say that, I said I was a nonprophet.”
"Meaning Prophet against profit, right, really a nonprofit prophet?"
"You guys always want to spin shit; why the hell didn’t we find out in time that y'all weren’t reporting news, you were taping effing reality flicks the whole last ten years. Godammit!"
Starting with the latest rise of militant fundamentalism, which can be dated to the Ayatollah’s Islamic revolution in Iran and co-sponsored by the Reagan election in America, the fundamentalists among Muslims and Christians took power and began working toward control of the mechanics of spiritual realities and toward ultimately, the end of the world. Some of the Muslims, not willing to wait for Allah to end things, donned C4 vests and hurried to Paradise while killing as many infidels as possible. [to be continued]
