As a teenager, I was forced—on pain of unrelenting parental pressure—to attend the Chinese Southern Baptist Church. My parents were not believers, but there were few Chinese people in Arizona, and most of them went to the church. Even as a child I intuited that I had little in common with the congregation. Only after I went away to college did I meet Chinese Americans who were not Southern Baptists, Goldwater Republicans or amoral businessmen.
Sunday school was often taught by a popular congregant only a few years older than I, a former pep squad girl who spoke with a Betty Boop lilt and led everyone in what could only be described as cheerleading sessions for Jesus. Although I was not a sullen or rebellious teenager, it must have been obvious that Sunday school bored me to death. The teacher took an instant dislike to me. She would describe in vivid detail what happened to non-believers in hell, all the time looking directly at me. And she liked to say that we urgently needed to give our hearts to Jesus because you never knew when all the real Christians might suddenly vanish into heaven. Once, just before I left the church forever, I fell asleep in class only to be awakened by our teacher, who was leaning over my chair and yelling, "The Rapture is nigh!"
Apocalypse has never done anything for me. Nuclear winter seemed like a longshot in the age of mutually assured destruction, and the Y2K bug was always faintly ridiculous even before it was a big fizzle. I've always preferred my infernos literary and mythological. Give me the visions of Kali Yuga and Ugolino, of Urizen and Judge Holden, anytime.
For most of my life American politics has been held hostage by forces of fear and ignorance, which seem increasingly the by-product of a majority culture in existential crisis. So far in the Obama years we've seen lunatic birthers, raving Tea Partiers, anti-immigrant bigots, American IED bombers radicalized by the leftover Bush wars, corporate thugs ravaging our livelihoods and the Gulf of Mexico, global warming doubters who prefer unreal Biblical apocalypses to the truth of melting glaciers and the displacement and extinction of millions of people and other animals. All of these fanatics share one trait: a terminal lack of irony, which is the death of culture.
It is enough to make a poet long for a little Zoroastrian cleansing, a bit of ancient fire. Too bad that if the One were to arrive today to renew our souls he might have a hard time finding a soul in the first place.
“No more apocalypses!” the fanatics never cry. Extinction
is bliss for those who resent human life. We mocked
the fizzle of New Year’s 2000. We mock the wingnuts
who let the icecaps melt because the Rapture is nigh.
How to be good if a caul covers the prospect of your faith?
Create an image, any image, haloed, scimitared, thrust it
through Time’s wasp-waisted birth canal, let it emerge
bearded, lank, rebarbative. Tell yourself he’s the Man.
Now sit back as He pries the world apart. This is the end,
you’ll surmise, the end of dalliance, of amity, the last gasp
of afflatus, of consequent sorrow. Watch as He scythes
the last wheat, which flies like the severed heads of infidels.
Then why does the bread we break savor of no body
but the embodied ghosts of ancient grass? What infinity lives
in the turning leaves but a vaulted vision of our bonhomie?
What life basks at this homely fire but sees Saoshyant’s flame?
The embers will hold an American absence, ashes that leave
no mark of ankh or enso on him who frees critical mass
from a suitcase bomb. The last cloud will rain fire on flesh
that chars to faithless marrow. Even now the soul is fugitive.
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