The Apocalyptic and American Empire

The apocalyptic occupies a nether world in the self. It describes the collective end of things, the destruction of the human experiment, the death of death itself. Such things are hard to imagine, and in frustration we often turn to metaphors as varied as personal traumas, natural disasters, and political events such as war to carry the weight of ultimate meaning. Such substitutes don’t always work. But there is also no question that in a psychological sense the apocalyptic is ontological. As humans, we not only die but also have foreknowledge of our end. That awareness may well be what most decisively distinguishes us from the higher primates. It may be crucial in the making of culture. In the apocalyptic, in other words, ultimate dread contends with human creativity.

Page 88

Apocalyptic thinking is at least as old as culture. It can manifest within a time frame as millennialism. Its first producers were probably priests and mystics who spoke with special knowledge of God’s purpose in the world. Artists, however, who create on the margins, have given powerful voice to apocalyptic yearnings in their songs and paintings and stories. Psychotics as well, prized before modern times for their special insight, see a larger picture, an image of ultimate death and their place in it. As a culture, we may well lose more than we gain by numbing that vision with antipsychotics and other drugs.

The mystic, the artist, and the psychotic, however, have all been marginalized in the last eight thousand or so years. They have talked, or sung, or painted images of destruction wrought by an angry God. It could not be otherwise. It took a huge act of imagination to summon the idea of the end of everything. Hiroshima changed that sequence dramatically. The apocalyptic is now in our hands. We don’t need God. Such awesome power is ours. The apocalyptic still works most noisily among the traditionally religious. But its real future lies not with Christian fundamentalists like Jerry Falwell, or with Jewish fanatical apocalypticists in the West Bank, but with Osama bin Laden, a man who is intent on making the end happen—destroying the world to save it—as on his specifically religious notions of redemption.

Osama bin Laden makes sense. He speaks for centuries of Arab humiliation and skillfully blends his monumental distain for Americans desecrating Saudi soil with his appropriation of the cause of Palestinians. He is the president of “terrorist university,” not in direct control of actions from Afghanistan to Indonesia, but a charismatic leader who provides a sense of purpose and mission. He inspires others to act, which is why his continued survival is so threatening to world peace.

But if we are to understand the contemporary world we also need to look within. What is this imperial mission all about? It is surely about oil, but the apocalyptic casts its shadow. As a child I was something of an Episcopalian prodigy, confirmed at eight and on track to be a priest or bishop. I also carried the cross on Sunday mornings and lustily sang “Onward Christian Soldiers.” I would like to think I have gone beyond such beginnings. I am not sure about George W. Bush. While he is responding to all kinds of pressure in making two wars in two years, what may be the most powerful lobby in America is without a staff. It lays in the 70 to 80 million Americans who are bedrock Republicans who would die to preserve Israel because that is where Jesus returns.

Ponder that. Jesus returns. Read your Book of Revelation. Jesus can only come back after vast destruction, violence, and the “second death,” involving rivers running red with blood so deep it reaches to the bridles of horses (in an antiquated image). This “end time,” end of the world, is no small thing. Its images inspire George W. Bush, a blue-blooded scion of an American dynasty, who also has a West Texan sense of apocalyptic dread at the edges of political life.

I can only end in hope. I think Americans are finally waking up to the extent to which we have been hoodwinked by Bush and his administration. The turning point of the awakening of the American people to the reality of the current government may well have been his September 7, 2003, televised speech requesting an additional 87 billion dollars for post-war Iraq governance. My good friend, Robert Jay Lifton, has just published The Superpower Syndrome: America’s Apocalyptic Confrontation with the World, a book that I helped him with and that I would urge all readers to consult. I fear we lack a politically viable alternative to Bush, but I also think the scales have fallen from our eyes. We know of apocalyptic violence. We were its victims on September 11. But we cannot let ourselves become in turn its perpetrators. There is much at stake.

Page 89