Manufacturing the apocalypse

Though I try to avoid it, last night I had to go to the ghetto Wal-Mart. It’s about five blocks from my house and opened about a year ago on the former site of a housing project. It very inappropriately was the recipient of a HUD subsidy. It’s a bad place.

While I chained my bike to the bike rack, a short hispanic gentleman had his foot propped up on the rack and was cutting his toenails. There was a horde of wild teenagers congregating around the entrance, but that’s usual. The poor greeter was wearing a red Bozo-the-Clown nose. In the main aisle near housewares, a fully grown teenage girl was sitting barefoot and cross-legged on the floor. I’m not making any of this up.

I’ve been having spasms of fear and regret that this might be the end of my carefree, creative, boho lifestyle. Well, creative? If I were really going to write some astonishingly original work of literary genius, probably I would have done it by now or at least have shown more evidence of having it in me. Actually, I think I will prove to be a late-bloomer in this and other aspects, but then why try to force it prematurely? And why be afraid of changes and new experiences? Well, cause they’re pretty scary changes and new experiences.

But as for carefree and boho…well, I won’t have so many days to while away lying around and listening to the radio, reading and having goofy one-sided conversations with the dog, or spending hours people-watching in the Rue. I do kind of regret that.

As far as running around all night, listening to bands, drinking, socializing and flirting—I wanted to go hear Liquidrone tonight, but the $12 cover was too steep for my broke end-of-the-month self. I’ve had fun and heard lots of amazing music in New Orleans, but I’ve missed a lot of great stuff due to being broke. Also, I’m tired of drinking and I’m tired of the male population of New Orleans.

So instead I was lounging around at home, reading this article in the New Yorker about Patrick Henry College, a new school for Christian home-schoolers with an interest in politics. These kids sign a statement when they enroll that says, among other things, that they believe that non-believers will suffer eternal conscious torment in the afterlife. They can’t go on dates without their parents’ permission and they find it inconceivable that George W. Bush would lie for any reason. This school is only a few years old and has only about three hundred students, but they have as many students in the White House internship program as Georgetown.

That just seems like another reason to go to law school. Someone has got to fight back against these people. We can’t concede power within the system to them. They are quite like the Muslims they consider their enemy (after liberals). They all want to forcibly return the world to some imaginary golden age, they just disagree when that golden age was—the 1950s or the Ottoman Empire? At its root, I think, it’s about fear of the future and of knowledge—they’d rather see the end times than see the world change into something frighteningly unfamiliar. I understand that fear, actually. But that golden age never existed and the future is unstoppable. We should face it with the clearest vision and the coolest head we can manage and try not to wreck it. I very much do not want to live in the world and society they want to bring about.

Their conception of god is extremely disturbing to me. It’s not like I’m some vehement atheist, either. I think we have to use our rationality and the knowledge that science has given us, but there’s so much we don’t understand and may never understand—like why there is anything at all, that’s the biggest one. And right after that one, even though our brains and our selves may be the function of electro-biochemistry, at the deepest level that doesn’t really explain in any satisfying way where the spark of life and consciousness comes from. We’ve become collaborators in our own creation, but we certainly are not our original makers. So there’s plenty of room there for mystery and spirituality and god.

But a god who will condemn us, his creations, to everlasting torment because we didn’t read the right ancient book, or having read it did not accept a particular interpretation of it, and thus a particular bizarre mechanism of salvation (from ourselves or this cruel god?) because it didn' t make any sense to our presumably god-given brains—that kind of god is petty and sadistic. Even if that’s what god is really like (and it seems very unlikely), I refuse to worship him or call him good. Really, I’m more compassionate and tolerant than that, and I’m not a particularly nice person. Such a god, if he exists, should be ashamed of himself.