Raising the Rapture Stakes


I thought Christians generally disapproved of gambling, Bill Bennett notwithstanding (although I suppose Bennett has at least one argument up his sleeve in his defense: he's less a "gambler," and more a plain old "loser"). But it seems as if they, and their secular wingnut cohorts don't mind rolling the dice when it comes to...the fate of the fucking world:

To some of the leading lights of the right-wing commentariat, what we’re seeing unfold is no mere crisis. Instead, it is literally World War III, a clash of civilizations in which everyone everywhere will have to take a side and take up arms. And they couldn’t be happier about it.

It will surprise no one to hear that this argument is coming from certain fundamentalist Christian quarters, where premillenial dispensationalists see signs that the coming Rapture is accelerating toward its glorious end. But it is also being heard from more mainstream voices...

So just why is it that so many conservatives are so eager to characterize the current conflict as another world war? The answer lies in a deep, abiding need among conservatives to exist in a state of war, the bigger the better. It need not be a war in which actual shots are being fired, but it must be defined as a war so that our political reality, both in practical terms and with regard to our discourse, can be ordered in a particular way...

World War II remains the “good war,” something we can all agree on, despite the fact that many of the things the Allies did during its course were unspeakable. Any debate about the morality of American tactics is relegated to the status of historical esoterica, subsumed deep below the war’s moral clarity. Sure, somebody mentions Dresden or Nagasaki now and then, but they do almost nothing to alter the image of World War II as America’s finest hour, when we saved the world from the greatest evil it had ever seen. And what’s more, the American hegemony that followed was actually welcomed by populations everywhere.

The longing for a repeat of this heroic course of events is palpable in the conservative dreams of World War III. For almost two decades, there has been an empty place in their hearts where global conflict used to be. When the Soviet Union disintegrated and the Berlin Wall fell, the enemy the right used to define itself—communism—disappeared almost instantly, save for a few lonely outposts in various corners of the world. And without an enemy, conservatives are nothing.

This is particularly true with regard to the enemy within. In a state of war every utterance by your domestic opponents can be called treason, and their very opposition to you makes them a fifth column in league with the enemy. And with the inherent ambivalence of the War on Terror, the charges that liberals are not just wrong but actually in league with terrorists have gotten more frequent, shriller and more desperate.

Defining the current conflicts as all part of a world war also raises the stakes. But the idea that Islamic radicalism poses a truly existential threat to the United States in the same way the Soviet Union did is so absurd that no one who suggests it can be taken seriously. The Soviets had the power to kill each and every American many times over, and though a communist takeover of the United States was never a serious possibility, at times it appeared as though it might be. But no sane person could argue that if al-Qaida plays its cards right and we make too many mistakes, America could actually become a Taliban-style Islamic theocracy.

Many of our own home-grown Taliban, the fundamentalists who see moral cataclysm in every sex ed class and gay commitment ceremony, are eagerly awaiting the Rapture. They pray desperately that events in the Middle East mean it really is coming this time, with the godless and the apostate cast to their deserved fate in the lake of fire. To the nominally more reasonable conservatives whose voices emanate from airwaves and op-ed pages, the prospect of World War III brings its own kind of rapture, the return of a time when they were free from doubt, when their thirst for the blood of foreigners could be quenched, when anyone who opposed them could be tried for treason. When they knew they were right, and it all made sense.

You know, I'd like to take these twits--and their notions of some sort of romantic doubt-free era and plunk them down in the midst of New Orleans...or any other devastated community along the Gulf Coast. Let them, and their families, experience the "thrill" of a post-apocalyptic existence up close and personal. And if they're STILL itching for more, well, they can always move to Iraq, though they might want to invest in a good life insurance policy first.