State Of The Apocalypse

The whole article is worth reading, but I am interested primarily in the title and the passage I cite below: TomPaine.com - State Of The Apocalypse.

No peace, no law, no social contract—that is the state of the union, thanks to the Bush regime. In the wake of six years of such savage mauling, the nation and the world require reparations—repair!—for the damage done by the administration’s assaults on the fragile edifices of civilization, erected over centuries.

For 'reasons' I can't fathom, K-punk continues to deny American apocalypticism parsing the question with distinctions between apocalyptic dread and apocalyptic ecstasy (which are two sides of the same coin) and rejecting the way that post-apocalyptic narratives of life thereafter are nonetheless apocalyptic. He also says I 'concede' that Apocalypto is not apocalyptic in the relevant sense, which is odd. My point is not a concession but rather an indication of the difference modes or forms of appearance that the apocalyptic can take.

Back to the passage above: it nicely captures the apocalyptic dread enfolding many on the left, the sense that the world ended when the Supreme Court appointed Bush president. Katrina confirmed it--it's the end of the world as we know it.

For the Right, the apocalypse began on 9/11. Now we are in the last battles between good and evil that herald the ultimate return of Christ. For "premillennial dispensationalists" or those influenced by this view (like some readers as well as the writers of the best selling apocalyptic book series, Left Behind), these are clearly the last days, the end times. Some Bush appointees to science boards have had no interest in either oil or global warming because they are convinced that Jesus will return before we run out of oil or the polar ice cap melts (which I why I think the frog should have died in An Inconvenient Truth rather than being raptured).

Apocalypticism in American life is strong--it's a key element of American history; references to it are frequent--there was discussion of the end times in the movie Hell House, a gesture to the prominence of the theme in the religious life of many pentecostalists. As I scan the radio, I come across religious broadcasts with preachers discussing the end times daily. The Weekly World News regularly talks about signs of the apocalypse and the prophesies of Nostradamus.

All of politics in the US today, which isn't much, unfolds in the context of an apocalyptic determination of the terms of discussion (my very close friend Lee Quinby has written a lot about this; her books include Anti-Apocalypse and Millennial Seductions). Notions of the saved and damned, the chosen and the left behind structure mainstream political rhetoric. Homeland security, for example, relies on a quasi-religious connotations of a return to a promised land. Additionally, whereas criticisms of decadence in Europe generally have a class dimension, in the US, the religious element is more pronounced--and, the more decadent, the more in need of cleansing, of divine intervention and destruction, of apocalypse.

Comments

[Wade]

I think it's misleading to explain the political bent you've described as originating in some kind of apocalypticism or millennarianism. Some of Lionel Trilling's writing, for example (particularly Sincerity and Authenticity, and his essay on William Dean Howells), describes very convincingly how this stance can derive from moral themes common throughout the modern West---progress through alienation, transcendence of contingency, etc. It seems to me that the politics it engenders is Christian only insofar as this sort of idealism is Christian.

[Jodi]

apocalypticism doesn't have to be Christian; but Christian apocalypticism has been especially influential in the US

[highlowbetween]

Deeply influential in the US. It's also making marks in other countries though-I can't tell you how many pentecostals there seem to be in NY's Caribbean community -just as one example.
Listening to W tonight I flinched everytime he said Victory - i kept waiting for him to say In Christ immediately after each utterance.
I do think that our brand of apocalypticism is deeply rooted in the Sublime.

[The Constructivist]

Jodi, thanks for keeping the extended tribute to Berube's WAAGNFNP going! I've got some nuclear apocalypticism for ya from Marshall and Devi at Mostly Harmless (1/11/07)!

[Adam Kotsko]

In all fairness, Weekly World News has been carrying Nostradamus stuff since the dawn of time.

[gofigure]

I think your case is both over and understated. You overstate the current apocolypticism suggesting that 'it's all Bush's fault' (paraphrasing), while understating the historical apocolypticism in order to emphasize your political point.

[Wade]

Whether this apocalypticism you're finding in contemporary US is Christian or not, I think it's pretty much agreed that apocalypticism fits into a religious eschatology of some kind.

[dr x]

Within the first 2 minutes of his SOTU address, Bush mentioned the "No Child Left Behind Act." Coming from Bush's lips, I will always hear the cryptic reference to the 'Rapture.'

http://www.leftbehind.com

[Hattie]

I never thought of the "left behind" association.
Vonnegut once said, and I paraphrase, that you might not be interested in war, but war is interested in you. That's how I feel about the evangelicals: my interest is so minimal, and yet they keep forcing themselves on my attention because they are such big pests and potential disrupters of my peaceful and harmless existence.

[The Constructivist]

Jodi, in case you want to revisit the apocalypse from down under, the Blogocalypse Carnival is coming to Mostly Harmless April 1. Submissions due March 31. Sorry for the short notice.