Apocalypse now and then

In a fin de siecle age, one comes to expect end-of-the-world fictions, as the hidden numerologist in each of us gets loose and fancy becomes unmoored, floating off into the mists of myth and fear. Those magic round numbers transform otherwise sane people into cave-dwellers awaiting twilight and the closing of days. What was the Y2K scare (remember that?) but a technologically up-to-date version of millenarian angst?

I remember one uncle of mine who was unusually vigorous in stating his vision of Y2K mayhem that would surely follow January 1, 2000. I tried my best to console him, reminding him that, to the Jew, it was 5761; to the Mohammedan, 1421; to the planetary geologist, roughly 4,575,492,586 (not to mention that the century didn’t really turn until 1/1/2001), but he would not be consoled, and I imagine him spending untold thousands of dollars outfitting his humble abode in the swamps of South Carolina for the impending doomsday. This went way beyond storing up bottled water and alkaline batteries. He had enough firepower squirreled away underground to fight off a small South American army; boxes of nonperishable foodstuffs to feed regiments; off-the-grid telecommunications equipment; solar panels…well, you get the picture.

So Y2K came and went, and what? Nothing. The Y2K apocalypics joined the long list of such folks extending back a few thousand years—the second-century Christian Montanus; the 12th century Joaquim of Fiore; the 16th century Anabaptists led by Melchior Hoffmann…the list goes on. And this type of lunacy is not the exclusive preserve of Christians—take the teachings of 17th century Jewish teacher Sabbatai Zevi in Anatolia.

Eschatology is a powerful thing, all the more so since Judaism and Christianity are the most time-conscious of major religious traditions. For Christians and Jews, Time—History itself—is a revelation, and the special knowledge that descended upon the children of Abraham no mere philosophy, but a story, a narrative—a beginning, a middle, and an end. Indeed, narrative itself—the order of events—is imbued in Western culture with a kind of wisdom or virtue; it is the vessel carrying everything from salvation to sex, from The Passion to, well, just passion. Sequence, it would seem, is not merely a theory of causation, but a reflection of the Godhead, a writ of divine order.

Further, the canonical Christian texts are shot through with the imminence of the end. How disappointed St. Paul would be to discover that, 2,000 years later, we’re still waiting. Given that human vigilance has its limits, one might say that Christianity’s greatest feat is its ability to renew throughout time that apostolic sense of imminence. And while it may be true that a proper understanding of Christianity cannot be attained without accounting for its ‘meta-narrative’, once understood, it explains so very little that is Christian. It could be said to be the mere perfume of Christ, not the body itself.

Much like the television viewer who gets unaccountably cranky when the words ‘To Be Continued’ scroll across the screen, many folks seem unable to deal with the cosmic ‘To Be Continued’ that is the condition of man, for despite the epilogue to Ecclesiastes (“Let us hear the conclusion of the whole matter: Fear God, and keep his commandments: for this is the whole duty of man.”), they’d rather hasten the screening of the next Act. They cheer war in the Middle East as if it is some kind of religio-historical signpost of the Apocalypse. Nothing, it seems, brings the idiot out in mankind as readily as a little spilt blood in the Holy Land.

But it’s difficult for me to be too hard on them. After all, many of these people are simple folks, not particularly bright, and possessed of a profound religious faith, albeit one that renounces life as we know it, that misplaces our obligations to one another as people, but such confusion inevitably occurs when people are less focused on the here and more on the hereafter.

I should know a little something about such a worldview. When I was 10-years old, my parents took me to a series of weeknight film screenings at our church, a fairly typical suburban Southern Baptist church of the early 1980s. It was strange, being in church during the week, and once upon a time, it was kind of strange being there at all. As a small child, my parents were infrequent churchgoers, but they had gotten religion in the late 1970s, and I began finding myself in church whenever the doors opened.

If it was strange being in church on a weekday night, it was doubly so being there to watch a movie. These were the days before mega-churches and praise-song, the days when Protestant churches construed ‘multimedia’ to mean organ or piano accompaniment for the hymns of Isaac Watts. There was no Powerpoint, no guitars, no clapping, and certainly no movies.

But there we were to watch these ‘important’ films, or so said the pastor. The film screenings were those low-budget Donald W. Thompson flicks that dramatized the Christian apocalypse in a sort of St. John-meets-the-Hardy-Boys kind of way. As a 10-year old, I had a morbid fascination with them; they scared the bejesus out of me. I couldn’t get them out of my head, whether aimlessly riding my bicycle around the neighborhood or fending off the tedium and mosquitoes of a little-league outfield.

And further, there was no comfort to be had in sharing the fears inspired by the movies. The words of parents, friends, and pastors only reinforced the sense of dread. I was on my own in making sense of things, as I always have been, it seems, but for years I harbored a certain anger toward my parents for introducing me to this pre-teen apocalyptic angst, one that was only fully put away during my college years, when it dawned on me that all this fuss over the end of the world is so much wasted effort. If there is a moral order to things, I doubt very much our proximity to the end of the world changes it one way or the other.

But there was definitely something in the water during the early eighties (maybe there’s always something in the water), for this was, after all, the Cold War. Thermonuclear annihilation was never far from one’s thoughts, and long before the current craze over Tim LaHaye’s Left Behind series, there were plenty of geopolitical factors to give rise to whackjob foretellings—both secular and religious—of man’s future. Take The Man Who Saw Tomorrow (1981), a movie narrated by Orson Welles that claimed to divine the future by plumbing the depths of some doggerel written by the medieval French doctor Michel de Nostradamus. The movie was basically a pastiche of current events and a loaded-dice interpretation of Nostradamus’s poetry, which often, goes something like this:

Dedans Monech le coq sera receu,
Le Cardinal de France apparoistra
Par Logarion Romain sera deceu
Foiblesse à l’aigle, & force au coq naistra.

(The cock will be received into Monace,
the Cardinal of France will appear;
He will be deceived by the Roman legation;
weakness to the eagle, strength will be born to the cock.)

Obviously, the above passage is a reference to the coming rebirth of the Avignon papacy…or the coronation of Napoleon…or Charles De Gaulle and the restoration of France…or whatever you want it to be. I guess Apocalypse is in the eye of the beholder. This is especially—and comically—true when you review prior apocalyptic texts. For instance, have you ever noticed how the key events of the endtimes tend to occur in close proximity to the revealer of such knowledge? For Melchior Hoffmann, the principal events of the Apocalypse occur in Westphalia. Imagine that. For any number of American doomdayers, the end of world kicks off in places like Zanesville, Ohio and Placerville, California.

The apocalypse has managed something of a (yet another) comeback recently, despite the ho-hum passage of Y2K, as the mention of the word has seen a spike in news-related pieces as well as quite obvious manifestations in pop culture. Take, for example, the music of Son Volt frontman and former Uncle Tupelo member Jay Farrar; Farrar could be called a pioneer of what I’d term Apoca-Rock. On his 2001 solo collection Sebastopol, Farrar included the beautifully stark, apocalyptic vision of “Barstow”:

Anyone caught speaking Esperanto
Is thought crazy or headed for jail
There’s peace in the wilds of West Texas
Where the sun and the sky prevail

Take no notice of the rising waters
Take no notice where rivers run dry
They’ll be digging through the landfills
To find evidence of our great demise

There’s a changing pattern before us
And the past tells the story quite well
By the time we make it to Barstow
We’ll be more than halfway to hell

Waves of adverts that promise revival
Trinket-ware that batters the brain
The Devil bought the key to Branson
Drives a backhoe and wears a gold chain

Now we’re living in the ending time frame
Bets in Reno are all the human race
Woke up in another test market
With a new headache filter in place

While few of Farrar’s songs are so overtly apocalyptic, his entire oeuvre is flavored with an apocalyptic sensibility. Think of the classic “New Madrid,” a song co-written with former Uncle Tupelo bandmate Jeff Tweedy, in which we have yet more landfill imagery and evocations of disaster and destruction, albeit of the tongue-in-cheek variety.

Perhaps the most popular and sustained vision of apocalyptic destruction in popular culture is the re-imagined science fiction TV series Battlestar Galactica, which begins its third season on the Sci-Fi Network this fall. While the show certainly has plenty of soap-opera-in-space touches, à la the Star Trek franchise, its initial premise is one of civilizational destruction. The show begins amid a surprise nuclear attack that completely wipes out a civilization, excepting, of course, the crew aboard the Battlestar and a small civilian fleet, totaling fewer than 50,000 people. Battlestar Galactica’s initial mini-series, first broadcast in 2003, is hard to beat for apocalyptic imagery; the attack sequences were a virtual garden of mushroom clouds.

With television being what it is, the creators of Battlestar Galactica have had to wage a ceaseless battle against the network execs to maintain the show’s gritty and dark image (as if an apocalypse could be anything but). It seems the execs want buff bodies and anodyne scripts; from what I can tell, the creators would delve even further into darkness if they could, but alas, the deep pockets ultimately win out. For example, left on the cutting-room floor for season two was a vicious rape scene. Instead, the network opted to go with a scene in which the rape was interrupted by the actions of two intrepid crewmen. It would seem that even apocalypses must have happy endings.