Marcus Brigstocke: British People Are Naturally Funnier

And He Knows I'm Right

Book Review: The Paperback Apocalypse

In the course of researching my next novel (and how I love the fact I don’t have to think up new hooks for these articles) I came across Robert M. Price’s The Paperback Apocalypse, a wonderfully thorough overview of fundamentalist End Times literature. Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins’ Left Behind series is neither the first nor the most interesting entry in the field, which has a long and storied history. Left Behind only did for Apocalypse novels what Straight Outta Compton did for Gangsta Rap, propelling the sub-genre into national prominence. The Paperback Apocalypse functions as a road map through this Tribulation territory, with Mr. Price, a professor of scriptural studies at Johnnie Coleman Theological Seminary, as our ecumenical tour guide.

Our Humble Author doesn’t skimp on this trip, making sure to take the scenic route. We begin with genesis—the god Yahweh’s genesis in the moral power struggle between priests and prophets in fifth century Israel. Once an ass-kicking, plague-bringing, god of kingship and nationhood, Yahweh El Elyon morphed into his more-familiar, judgmental self after the Babylonian Exile. With Israel’s upper classes carted off whole hog, the laypeople were (ahem) left behind to puzzle out what the hell could’ve happened. How could their mighty God desert them so callously?

A quick glance at the lives of the prophets provided what we now call the Deuteronomic answer: Israel and Judah’s sins caused God to withdraw His favor. Surprise: it was all King David’s fault. His Royal Highness’ wandering penis had condemned the whole nation. Even if the priests and kings returned (as they would, relatively soon, with the support of Persia’s self-deifying emperor) it could all happen again the next time someone in high office violated the covenant. Better to believe that, someday soon, God would flex his warrior-king muscles and upend the whole status quo, returning to cast the priests into Gahenna. With God dwelling among them, Israel would become a land of priestly people, with all the world’s pagan kings reduced to servile servants of the restored Temple.

Meanwhile, the returning priestly aristocrats did what aristocrats like to do and cracked down on the people’s ad hoc worship. From Persia they brought with them a view of the world we now call Manichean, though back then it was simply Zoroastrian. A Persian prophet and (alleged) contemporary of Moses, Zoroaster taught that all the world’s a battleground between the forces of Good, represented by the god Ahura Mazada and Evil, represented by the antigod Ahriman. Balanced but not equal, Good would surely win out in the end, but until then every human deed, and every historical event, was a proxy battle in their Great War, its outcome a point for one side or the other.

Put these two beliefs together and you’ve got fertile ground to grow yourself a Revelation. Ground lain, Price devotes chapters two through six to an almost-exhaustive dissection of the modern fundamentalist Apocalypse. “Messianic Prophecy”; “The Gospel of the Anti-Christ”; “The Second Coming”; “The Secret Rapture”; all receive point-by-point, Scriptural refutation from our author, who swings a mighty big theological pipe. Actually, he’s Dr. Price, a fact I had to find on the Internet, despite his receiving the degree (in systematic theology from Drew University) twenty-six years before writing this book. Do I smell false modesty? Or is Dr. Price preemptively dodging the anti-intellectual arrows fundamentalists so-love to throw at anyone who questions their beliefs?

Price confesses a personal interest in Apocalyptic literature (calling it a “guilty pleasure” the same words we around this corner of the internet use to defend our love for Bad Movies) but never once mentions his own falling-out with fundamentalism. This isn’t about him; it’s about the indefensibility of modern fundamentalist beliefs. Price (rightly) identifies the “faith” of the Rapture Ready as a collection of half-baked misinterpretations, compounded by willful ignorance of the very Bible they claim to idolize. Like a certain Golden Calf I know, their doctrine breaks under the weight of all these scriptural quotations, from Isaiah to Revelations, which Price helpfully restores to their historical and cultural context, something beyond the keen your average, jumped-up, Southern Baptist.

With a firm grounding in the genre’s “classics,” Price jumps to the early twentieth century, and the first End Times novels. Given the fundamentalist condemnation of novel-reading as a sinful, worldly pursuit—like drinking, whoring, and card playing—its no surprise the first real entry in the genre comes in 1905, with Joseph Birbeck Burroughs’ Titan, Son of Saturn: The Coming World Emperor - A Story of the Other Christ. Now if that’s not a rip-roaring, full-throated, modernist title, I don’t know what is. Can’t you just picture Henry James off to the side, clucking his tongue at it?

From thence we move straight on ‘til morning—past Left Behind (which, fittingly, receives its own chapter at the very end) and right up to more-modern, less-successful, and (believe it or not) less-well-written entries in the genre. Raise your hand if you’ve heard of Hal Lindsey’s Blood Moon. Or William A. Stanmeyer’s Catholic-toned Day of Iniquity: A Prophetic Novel of the End Times. Or James BeauSeigneur’s Christ Clone Trilogy. Or Pat Robertson’s own entry, The End of the Age.

If you have, by now you’re probably pretty pissed at my flippant dismissal of your faith. (I invite you to utilize the Comments button below, and please don’t hesitate to describe the yawning torments of hell awaiting me in the Next World.) If you haven’t heard of these books you probably don’t care, except in an academic sense—marveling at the genre from a distance. Like most speculative fiction (call it “mainstream” as Price does when he reviews "mainstream" Apocalypse novels, like The Stand), fundamentalist End Times novels are the center of a multibillion dollar, international media industry, with more published every year. More, certainly, than anyone could read in a lifetime devoted to the subject.

Thankfully, Dr. Price reads these things for fun, and presents this book as a gift to us. Half-Biblical exegesis, half-book review anthology, The Paperback Apocalypse is just the ticket if you’d like a superficial knowledge of the genre and a thorough knowledge of how to refute its theological underpinnings. Unlike Dr. Price, I make no bones about my personal stake in both projects.

Michael Crichton and the Boundaries of Scientfic Prognostication

The author of Jurassic Park, Congo, Sphere, and a half-dozen others much better than State of Fear or Next, speaks at a National Press Corps event in 2006. This is about an hour and a half with the obligatory question time.

Tune in Saturday night for part three of our continuing quest through Godzilla The Series.

Old Assholes Never Die, They Just Move to California

I'm not surprised to find California's Attorney General coming out against Proposition 8, officially washing his hands of the damned thing in a publish-before-the-weekend-and-hope-no-one-will-notice filing with the California Supreme Court.

Like John Kerry before him, AG Brown was all for Jim Crowing gays and lesbians out of marriage before he turned against it.

Asked about his change of position, Brown said Friday evening that since his initial comments the day after the election, he and senior lawyers in his office had looked closely at the court's precedents and at the recent marriage ruling and concluded they couldn't defend Prop. 8.

"We have a conflict between the amendment power (through voter initiatives) and the duty of the Supreme Court to protect minorities and safeguard liberty," Brown said.

Fundamental rights in the state Constitution, including the right to marry that the state's high court has recognized, "become a dead letter if they can just be amended" by popular vote, Brown said.

To which I can only ask Brown, "Why in the hell couldn't you have 'looked closely' at these court precedents before the election? That might've done something to, oh I don't know, influence debate, perhaps defeat this evil bit bit of ballot measure bullshit. Prop 8 passed with all of 52%, you fool. And don't give me any of that, 'State's Attorneys General should be above the fray,' bullshit. If you believed that for a moment you be right there in court, defending Prop 8 as the law of your land, whether you like it or not (since that's pretty much the Attorney General's job). Now, you feckless hack, now matter whether you fight in the court or not, the Court of Public Opinion will find you guilty of being a hypocritical jackass with a moral compass as skewed as Berkley undergrad's sexuality...but nowhere near as fun."

Instead, Jerry Brown chose look "closely" at the resounded "No," that greeted his May appearance before the Court, in defense of California's previous gay marriage ban. No trouble defending that one, though it was clear (even to a neophyte like me) that "traditional marriage" (whatever that might mean) is dead, at least in California's public sphere.

Does Jerry Brown hate gay people? Difficult to say. As a former governor of that great republic to my south (inheriting his father, Edmund G "Pat" Brown's office in the manner of an Adams or a Bush) and a current practicing Catholic, Edmund G. "Jerry" Brown hails from The City itself: San Francisco, Seat of the Gay Conspiracy. You'd think that would have some effect on the man...until you learn that this was the San Francisco of the 1940s and 50s--an international mafia battlefield if ever there was one, when you couldn't spit without hitting a pinball joint or a piece of flesh from around the world. Then you think, "Maybe the effect wasn't all for the best." Jerry Brown's San Fran is light years removed from what I selfishly consider my San Francisco. The City where (as I knew they would) my gay brothers and lesbian sisters rolled right out of their sin-drenched beds on the day after Election Day and filed suit against Prop 8.

I've held off commenting on this issue out of fear, honestly. I just sold a short story to a Latter Day Saint who's hosted my website free of charge for the last nine frickin' years. Any serious discussion of Proposition 8 must involve a discussion of the Mormon Church's role in passing it, something I damn site don't want to get into.


But fuck it, I'll get into it. After all, its a hard white elephant to ignore when the New York Times can run headlines like, Mormons Tipped Scale in Ban on Gay Marriage.

“We’ve spoken out on other issues, we’ve spoken out on abortion, we’ve spoken out on those other kinds of things,” said Michael R. Otterson, the managing director of public affairs for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, as the Mormons are formally called [check out that little condescending aside from the Newspaper of Record--D], in Salt Lake City. “But we don’t get involved to the degree we did on this.”

The California measure, Proposition 8, was to many Mormons a kind of firewall to be held at all costs.

“California is a huge state, often seen as a bellwether — this was seen as a very, very important test,” Mr. Otterson said.

[:::]

Shortly after receiving the invitation from the San Francisco Archdiocese [and bully to you Catholics for reaching across the Gentile-Saint divide; look for a Catholic-Sunni jihad to follow in 2009--D], the Mormon leadership in Salt Lake City issued a four-paragraph decree to be read to congregations, saying “the formation of families is central to the Creator’s plan,” and urging members to become involved with the cause.

“And they sure did,” Mr. Schubert said.

Jeff Flint, another strategist with Protect Marriage, estimated that Mormons made up 80 percent to 90 percent of the early volunteers who walked door-to-door in election precincts.

And I am not surprised. “What we're about is the work of the Lord," M. Russell Ballard, one of the Twelve Apostles that make up the Saints' Quorum, told his flock, "and He will bless you for your involvement.” Of course he will. It's an opinion shared by every god-fearing American threatened by the idea of two fags getting hitched, whatever their denomination.

That's why I cannot join with my brother's and sisters who marched on the Temple in Salt Lake City, for two reasons: (1) I'm against protest marches. Riots are simpler and much more effective in the long run. (Don't knock them--riots won us every one of those supposedly-inalienable "rights" we supposedly possess.) And (2): this was not the Church's fault.

Not alone, at any rate. In the end its the direct fault of every individual who worked to pass Prop 8, including all who funded it, volunteered for it, and all those ignorant-ass, Uncle Tom niggas who voted for it. Any organization that marches on the Salt Lake must also stage a march on the Southern Baptist Convention, the California Archdioceses, and wherever the hell Methodists consider sacred, too.

Organized religion will be the ruination of this species. Whatever utility it might've once possessed has long been outweighed by its reliance on exclusion and Other-ing. These are religion's organization principals. No matter how universal (that is, "Catholic") a faith may claim to be, fundamentally it rests on a cleaving of the world into "Us" and "Them"; worshipers of the true god(s) and worshipers of the "false". Right now, I'm worshiping a false god so polymorphus and complicated organized religion doesn't even know what to call it and so calls it "secular humanism" with a dismissive wave.

I'm deluded, you see. I just don't understand how they'll be anarchy in the streets if we allow gays to check "married" on their income taxes. I've failed to realize that my hot red-headed roommate's romance with an even hotter red-headed latteslinger would sound the death-knell of Western Civilization if it ever received state or (God literally forbid) church recognition.


More than anything, I'm surprised to find an old foe leading the attack to make sure we all go back to ignoring gay people, or treating them as diseased.

The Yes on 8 forces' brief was filed by Kenneth Starr[!--D], the former Whitewater special prosecutor and now dean of Pepperdine University law school. He argued that the court should preserve the people's lawmaking powers by upholding the initiative and invalidating 18,000 same-sex weddings performed before the election.

Kenneth-Fucking--STARR! Oh, Jesus himself would start a' rollin in the grave if he saw his saints (Latter-Day or otherwise) allied with the Beast!