The apocalypse is upon us

The sky is falling! The end is near!

Just in time for the Christmas season, Pat Buchanan has published yet another jeremiad warning that America is about to go belly up. You'd think that the American public would get tired of the unrelenting gloominess of the far right and left. But you'd be wrong. Already the book is climbing up the bestseller lists, giving us further proof that, despite our collective obsession with living the good life, we Americans love the sweet rush of anxiety. Maybe it's just the antidote for our apathy.

You have to admit that there's something unseemly about citizens of history's most powerful country -- economically, militarily and culturally -- always fretting about their coming demise. Sometimes it gets downright pornographic.

But like it or not, it's part of who we are, the flip-side of our patriotic jingoism and a legacy of those intensely religious Puritans that lives on in this secular age. In the 1980s, when Ronald Reagan called the United States a "shining city on a hill," he was borrowing -- and embroidering -- a famous line from the 17th century governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, John Winthrop. Winthrop didn't use the word "shining" in his original 1630 sermon; his message was not triumphalist.

Winthrop and his fellow Puritans believed that in their escape from religious persecution and their settling of a new world, they had entered into a covenant with God. They were ordained to be an example to the world and to establish God's kingdom in wild, chaotic North America.

That meant they had a high standard to live up to. If they pleased the Lord, the Almighty would bless them. But if they did not, Winthrop cautioned, "We shall shame the faces of many of God's worthy servants and cause their prayers to be turned into curses upon us till we be consumed out of this good land."

Read the rest of Gregory Rodriguez's column here.

'Like hearing a well-dressed boardwalk preacher shouting that the world will end at midnight'

So USC is threatening to leave the crumbling Coliseum for the beautiful Rose Bowl unless they are offered a more favorable deal. I pray the Trojans do not come to call Pasadena home; that is our house, even if we couldn't beat hapless Notre Dame there. Weighing in on the likelihood of this happening, Bill Plaschke nails it with an apocalyptic analogy:

Hearing USC's threat to move its football team from the Coliseum to the Rose Bowl is like hearing a well-dressed boardwalk preacher shouting that the world will end at midnight.

You walk past, you shake your head, you know it's baloney.

But later that night, if only for a moment, you quietly check your watch.

'LA is the apocalypse'

I'm taking off right now to interview Jonah Lehrer about his first book, "Proust Was a Neuroscientist," so I saw it fitting to finally write about this post I saw on his blog a few weeks ago, a link to BLDGBLOG, a well-written architecture blog.

L.A. is the apocalypse: it's you and a bunch of parking lots. No one's going to save you; no one's looking out for you. It's the only city I know where that's the explicit premise of living there – that's the deal you make when you move to L.A.

The city, ironically, is emotionally authentic.

It says: no one loves you; you're the least important person in the room; get over it.

What matters is what you do there.

And maybe that means renting Hot Fuzz and eating too many pretzels; or maybe that means driving a Prius out to Malibu and surfing with Daryl Hannah as a means of protesting something; or maybe that means buying everything Fredric Jameson has ever written and even underlining significant passages as you visit the Westin Bonaventura. Maybe that just means getting into skateboarding, or into E!, or into Zen, Kabbalah, and Christian mysticism; or maybe you'll plunge yourself into gin-fueled all night Frank Sinatra marathons – or you'll lift weights and check email every two minutes on your Blackberry and watch old Bruce Willis films.

Who cares?

Literally no one cares, is the answer. No one cares. You're alone in the world.

(skip)

Los Angeles is where you confront the objective fact that you mean nothing; the desert, the ocean, the tectonic plates, the clear skies, the sun itself, the Hollywood Walk of Fame – even the parking lots: everything there somehow precedes you, even new construction sites, and it's bigger than you and more abstract than you and indifferent to you. You don't matter. You're free.

I used to hate LA. When I first moved here for college, I started referring to San Diego as the Promised Land that I once took for granted. But now I love it here. I don't feel as lonely as this writer implies most Angelenos do; I've never felt like I'm missing the neighborly support that other big cities supposedly offer. But, then again, I've got quite a few UCLA buddies still around, and I'm married.

What implications, though, does this psychological breakdown carry for religiosity and spirituality in the carefree city?

Latinos who love Israel, maybe Jews too

Wandering through a sukkah at Sinai Temple, Jesus Alfredo Alfonso, a Pentecostal Christian, wore a navy tie embroidered with the Star of David, a menorah and the words "Amigos de Israel."

"Every day," Alfonso said, "me and my congregation pray three times for you. For Israel."

Alfonso is the pastor of Iglesia Centro Christiano de Los Angeles, a 14-member church he founded two months ago. He was among about 200 Latino evangelical Christians who were guests for a Sukkot meal and Israeli flag ceremony hosted Monday by the American Jewish Committee (AJC) and the Israeli consulate.

The event was designed to strengthen relations between Jews and a specific segment of the Latino community -- evangelicals. On the whole, surveys have found that Latinos harbor stronger feelings of anti-Semitism than most Americans. But among Latino evangelicals there resides a powerful love for Israel and gratefulness to Jewish tradition.

"Ahavat Zion," said Randy Brown, AJC-LA's director of inter-religious affairs. "They are lovers of Israel. They've followed the history; some of them have visited Israel. They clearly are Christian in their faith, but for the roots of their faith they are very appreciative of Judaism."

That's the opening of a story I wrote for today's Jewish Journal, and it's welcome news considering the Anti-Defamation League and Pew Hispanic Center have found that Latinos often don't think warm fuzzies about Jews. A 2005 ADL survey found that 35 percent of foreign-born Latinos held "hardcore" anti-Semitic opinions, down from 44 percent in 2002.

Observers generally blame this on a South American Catholic Church slower to adopt the Nostra Aetate declarations of the Second Vatican Council. But the pentecostal Latinos hanging out at Sinai Temple are more theologically in line with other evangelical Christians who see the state of Israel as part of God's continuing covenant with his children and as the staging ground for the end of the world.

Armageddon, Simpsons style

That's me on the right, inspired by the "Simpsons" movie. I saw it Friday night, and found it funnier than any combination of episodes I can remember.

As usual, religion and morality are strong undercurrents in the latest Simpsons snafu. Marge has a minor crisis of faith, Homer goes on another hallucinogenic spiritual journey and Grandpa ends up rolling around the church floor screaming "Twisted tail, a thousand eyes, trapped forever! EPA! EPA!"

Is The End near?

I don't know, but it seems I could create an argument one way or the other, write a book about it, and make some OK cash. That's because apocalyptic literature -- fiction and non -- are a popular genre for publishers. We are obsessed with the coming apocalypse.

But Jeff Sharlet, the magazine religion writer and editor of The Revealer, says in book review for the New Statesman that "we" refers not to the small portion of humans (in fact, a small portion of Christians) who have a literal reading of the last book of the Bible and the Armageddon it reveals, "but those of us who find apocalyptic believers - especially American apocalyptic believers - to be a source of sufficient anxiety that publishers churn out explanatory volumes such as Nicholas Guyatt's Have a Nice Doomsday: Why Millions of Americans are Looking Forward to the End of the World."

Guyatt's breezy investigation is only the latest response to the success of books that skip the "why" and go directly to The End, most famously the fundamentalist Left Behind novels that have sold more than 60 million copies around the world. The secular apocalypse business isn't as lucrative, but bestsellers such as Kevin Phillips's American Theocracy and Chris Hedges's American Fascists, and a spate of lesser accounts of apocalypse-minded Christians, have found a sizeable niche for themselves as well. These range from the deliberately comical - Alex Heard's Apocalypse Pretty Soon: Travels in End-Time America - to the densely theoretical - Catherine Keller's Apocalypse Now and Then: a Feminist Guide to the End of the World, a genuine tussle with the questions concerning apocalypse believers that rivals the original Revelation in its feverish imagination.Such books are designed to frighten or to reassure ...

Christians have been trying for centuries to pinpoint when the end will come. But, as I noted last month, even the great Sir Isaac Newton couldn't calculate such a date. Fortunately, Sharlet says, most people who read apocalyptic literature don't agree with apocalyptic theology. But that is only most people.

In five years of travels in fundamentalist America, I've met hundreds of Christian conservative Left Behind fans. Almost all drew careful distinctions between the mysteries of scripture and the black and whites of LaHaye's imagination. No more than a handful took his books literally and even fewer took any steps to adjust for the coming rapture.

Unfortunately, that handful includes some of the most powerful fundamentalists in the US. Guyatt's strongest chapters deal with Hagee, who "looks like a tubby Donald Rumsfeld" and "sounds a lot like a macaw". That's funny, but Hagee isn't: US politicians court his approval and the huge amounts of money that his Christians United for Israel can channel their way. In return, they parrot his prophecies, cleansed of the references that would reveal them as such - Hagee's conviction that the US may have to attack Iran as part of a scheme foretold in the Book of Ezekiel is sanitised as ostensibly sober-minded policy advice based on the needs of the nation rather than the scripture.

Fundamentalists who have a literal understanding of the book Jonathan Kirsch says "has significantly altered the course of history" certainly can speed up the process of Armageddon. Some would say a preemptive nuclear attack would be a good start, others that letting Iran get too far with its nuclear program would begin the end.

But if man brings about the end of the world, will he like the result?