Almost twenty five years later, it’s interesting to contemplate the role that fundamentalist Christian apocalyptic eschatology played in the political discourse of the time. Let’s take a look.

Hal Lindsey’s Late Great Planet Earth

Back in 1970, fundamentalist Christian author Hal Lindsey published a book that earned him world-wide fame and millions of dollars: The Late Great Planet Earth. This book popularized a strain of fundamentalist eschatology that had a long history, but which had never been articulated plainly to a mass audience. Lindsey argued, among other things, that the world would probably end before 1988 (40 years after the foundation of the state of Israel). Lindsey believed that there would be a single government of Europe consisting of 10 states (there are now 27 member states), and that it would be led by the Antichrist, who would initiate World War III. Weaving together a decidedly non-literal interpretation of Iron Age prophecies from Ezekiel 38-39, Zechariah 13, and many other texts, he predicted that final war would begin after the Soviet Union and China invaded Israel. This would force the U.S. to intervene, leading to nuclear war. At last, Jesus Christ himself would appear in military splendor at the valley of Megiddo in Israel (Har Megiddo = Armageddon), where he would wipe out the commie hordes in a spectacular final showdown. By 1978, the book had run through 66 printings (my copy is from 1978). To date, more than 30 million copies of this book, which was reissued in a revised (and updated) version in 1998, have been sold.

Evangelicals and Armageddon in the 1980’s

In 1980 Lindsey published another book called The 1980’s: Countdown to Armageddon. By now, Lindsey was world famous, and he was interviewed by members of the press and received wide publicity for his book in the popular press. (See, for example, a syndicated article on Lindsey by AP religion journalist George W. Cornell, printed in many local papers such as the Klingman Daily Miner, in May 1981).

Fed in part by Lindsey and the media attention he drew, in the 1980’s the fires of fundamentalist eschatology burned brightly in popular evangelicalism in America. People were especially worked up by interpretations that suggested the involvement of the cold-war superpowers and nuclear weapons. It turns out, Americans liked to see that, in His holy word, God himself had already declared victory against the godless communist evil empires. Who wouldn’t?

The U.S. President and the End of the World

But things changed when this politico-theological complex reared its head in the White House. In 1984, while President Ronald Reagan was running for re-election, he admitted during the October presidential debates that he accepted the popular fundamentalist doctrines concerning Armageddon, although he discounted the idea that one could plan political policy around them. This caused a storm of bad publicity and controversy. Liberals attacked the President, while even the evangelicals (at least, the academic ones) publicly backed away from Lindsey and his doctrines (as New York Times journalist Walter Goodman reported at the time). Hand-wringing editorials were printed (such as this one by George Plagenz), and academic Biblical scholars found themselves talking to reporters a bit more frequently than they normally do.

Academic and popular books were written and conferences held, attacking the eschatological beliefs of premillennial dispensationalism. One author charged that American fundamentalists were actually praying for nuclear war. Scholars of popular religion in America now noted with concern the widespread belief in a nuclear Armageddon. Many people feared that a fundamentalist theology could influence public policy in a way that might turn prophecy into self-fulfilling prophecy.

The End (of the Hysteria)

As Lindsey’s predicted deadline for the tribulation approached, the year 1988, many people remained extremely concerned that a fundamentalist mindset was influencing foreign policy. Yet, at the same time, Lindsey’s 18 year old predictions were already looking a bit dated. There was no progress towards a unified Europe led by the Antichrist, no revival of the Roman empire, and no sign of war between the Soviet Union and Israel.

In 1987, Dinesh D’Souza, then a fairly young and little known conservative writer (but now a rather more famous public intellectual), wrote an interesting editorial in which he argued, rather unconvincingly I think, that there was no good reason to fear fundamentalist eschatology in the halls of power. “Evangelicals and fundamentalists realize,” D’Souza wrote, “as most secularists do not, that eschatological prophecies cannot be speeded up or altered to suit human timetables.” He goes on to quote Pat Robertson (remember: he was a presidential candidate in the 1988 campaign season) denying that he had any intention of trying to speed the plow of Armageddon. Whew!

The Aftermath

The cold war is over, but Hal Lindsey is still with us, maintaining a website, and writing books. Unchastened by his failure to visualize the future from 1988 to 2010, he has realigned his interpretation of Biblical prophecy to fit the changing political landscape of post 9/11 America. Whereas, in 1970, the Arabs were minor players in his vision of Armageddon, in the past decade Lindsey has embraced Islam as a better and more likely eschatological enemy of the people of God.

How long can one man continue to profit from such willful misreadings and misunderstandings of the Biblical prophetic books?

Russia will play a momentous role, in the last day prophesies. As a matter of fact, Russia is featured in three of the most important prophecies of the players at the battle of Armageddon. Russia is featured in Ezekiel, chapters 38 and 39, Joel chapter 2, verse 20, and Daniel, Chapter 11 verses 40 through 45, which all talk about the beginning of the battle of Armageddon. And it’s Russia, leading a Muslim confederacy, that’s under Iran, that will start the last war of the world, that we call the war of Armageddon. — Hal Lindsey, in the Hal Lindsey Report January 15th, 2010.

I have just finished reading the quite entertaining book Rumo and His Miraculous Adventures by German author Walter Moers. It is doubtful whether I ever would have purchased this book for myself — it being both outside of my typical choice of genres and relatively obscure — yet I did read it because it was given to me by one of my most intellectually distinguished friends, the anthropologist Alexander Mawyer (an old U of C buddy, now a professor at Lake Forest College). And because Alex is both a cultivated student of fine literature and a voracious consumer of culture both popular and fringe, and also has so often recommended fine reads to me in the past, I trusted his guidance, even though this dauntingly sized 600+ page trade-paperback promised to suck up many long hours of my precious and limited reading time.

After reading the book, I remain unsure as to how to categorize it. It is tempting to classify it as children’s literature. Moers is both a writer and an illustrator, and his book is animated in both words and pictures by a fanciful and delightful wit and whimsy that many people would associate with Juvenile fiction. A blurb from the Washington Post on the cover of my copy shows that its critic so classified it; the writer describes Rumo as “Equal parts J.K. Rowling, Douglas Adams, and Shel Silverstein … a work of monumental silliness.” In truth, that’s an inept and pathetic description, a failure of critical imagination. The only thing Moers has in common with Silverstein is that they are both self-illustrating writers. And while there could be many points of comparison with J. K. Rowling (a male central character, a school, a struggle with the forces of Evil, a prevalence of strange and inventive names and fantastic creatures), it is doubtful whether any of these comparisons would prove particularly fruitful, I think, since Rowling’s fantastic parallel world of English schoolchildren has an entirely different generic feel, literary purpose, intended audience, and, most importantly, stylistic level. Rowling is a writer whose simple style and schoolchildren’s theme is meant to ensnare the minds of (our inner) ten year olds longing to grow up. Her whimsical side is mere color; the humor found in her books has the stale feel of adolescent television programming, and the focus throughout is on the drama of coming of age. Whatever else Rumo may be, it is not really a “coming of age” story. The writing style could be argued to come closer to Adams, I suppose, whose central character in the Hitchhiker’s Guide books also wanders through a series of unfamiliar and fantastic adventures set in a twisted and humorous imaginary universe. But again, the comparison is fruitful only if one highlights the differences. Adams uses extremely economical language, tells a straightforward adventure story, and employs his humor in a satirical and critical fashion entertaining to both young readres and adults. His novels are short and uproariously, bitingly funny. That isn’t Moers at all. Rumo is sprawling, epic in scope, and, while it is occasionally quite funny, humor seems not to be its central purpose. Adams is a humorist; Moers is more like a dungeon master.

Seting apart the German Moers from these English authors, the Juvenile Rowling and the Adolescent Adams, is a literary fascination and preoccupation with violence, bloodshed, warfare, and destruction. Moers’ mixes a dead serious, Homerically clinical poetry of bloody violence with his madcap literary hallucination. In my view, this moves the book out of the category of Juvenile and adolescent fiction and into the domain of geek lit. He is a comic-book Tolkein. The story takes place in a completely fantastic imaginary world (Zamonia). This world doesn’t seem unfamiliar. In literary terms, Rumo seems rather to be a lampoon, or a lark, constructed from an unlikely literary composite of familiar epics, fairy tales, legends, fantasy novels, horror pictures, biology and physics textbooks, and natural history museum exhibits.

As a writer, Moers’ greatest gifts lie in two areas; the first is “the fantastic synthesis of unlikely juxtapositions” (for example, one of the main characters is an amphibious creature called a “Shark Grub”) and the second, even greater gift, is his talent for world-creation through composition of lists.

Hardly a page of this novel goes by without one of Moers’ fabulous lists. Moers uses lists to create and describe scenes, rooms, persons or creatures, histories, landscapes, events… you name it. For an example, consider this scene in which the main character, Rumo, a kind of bipedal horned talking swashbuckling dog called a Wolperting, visits a fairground:

Rumo pricked up his ears. The air was throbbing with sounds that were never to be heard on other occasions: singing saws, glockenspiels, demonic cries, Vulphead madrigals, wooden rattles, mouth drums, foot bells. Laughter rang out on all sides, mingled with shrill cries of terror from the ghost trains and the squeal of bagpipes. Hordes of musicians playing curious instruments competed for the public’s attention and strove to drown each other. Bassophonists made the ground shake, a Bufadista soprano sang of unrequited love in old Zamonian, stallholders did their best to outshout one another, rockets soard hissing into the air, paper ducks quacked, tin drums beat a tattoo (283).

The next paragraph lists the amazing sights that Rumo’s eyes beheld, and then, on the same page, comes this paragraph:

Then there were the smells: cinnamon, honey, saffron, grilled sausages, roast marsh hog, dried cod, mulled wine, smoked eel, baked apples, onion soup, incense, tobacco smoke, goose dripping. Outside most of the booths that sold food were small braziers in which garlic and onion bulbs were burnt to lend the night air an appetising aroma. Goose, chicken and turkey legs encased in clay cooked slowly in pits filled with glowing charcoal. A thick, fragrant soup of pigs’ trotters and peas simmered in a massive cast-iron cauldron. Potatoes and onions were sautéed in thyme-flavored oil, quail fried in lard, trout grilled on sticks. Legs of lamb sizzled over open fires, corn cobs and loaves of bread were baked in clay ovens. A whole ostrich revolved on a spit while ravenous Montanic Dwarfs sat round it clattering their knives and forks. Myrrh was burnt, joss sticks smouldered, masked Moomies tossed curry powder into the air. Rumo continued to cling to Urs.

This is an ancient and epic literary technique, found as early as the Illiad, where Homer makes frequent use of lists, both to sketch vast tableaux of actions and events, and also to describe ornate objects, such as Achilles’ shield. Moers uses and abuses the technique marvelously, transforming it into a style rococo, and in the process giving himself free reign to sketch in and invent the fascinating details of his imagined world. One can flip almost randomly through the book and find scores of them: “Saponic Leeches, Oilsnakes, Dungworms, Suckerfoot Spiders, Bateriomorphs, Plauge Frogs, Trogloticks, Speleovampires — those were the true masters of this dark damp domain” (521).

And his lists aren’t the only thing that remind me of Homer. Rumo’s adventures seem to be modeled after the Odyssey right from the start. When the Wolperting begins his adventures as a prisoner and potential food source, held captive in a floating cave by terrifying but incompetent one eyed “Demonicles,” one is hard pressed not to recall Odysseus and the Cyclops.

Rumo is self-consciously modeled on the form of a saga, retold in the world of the comic-fan convention. Near the end of the novel, Rumo’s telepathically talking sword Dandelion admonishes him for failing to speak up during a campfire session of storytelling:

“Why didn’t you say anything?” Dandelion demanded. “Our own experiences would surely have made the best story of all. The fight in Nurn Forest! Yggdra Syl! The casket! The Icemaggogs! The Vrahoks! General Ticktock’s innards! Ideal subjects for inclusion in lessons on the heroic sagas!”

“I’m no good at telling stories,” Rumo protested.

Rumo may not be a great Bard, but Moers is more than up to the task, the Arrian to Rumo’s Alexander.

I don’t have anything much profound to say about this book. I just want to indicate my appreciation for the imaginative impulse that brought this world to life. It’s a good read, and worthy of your attention, if you like macabre and bloody action stories set in improbable landscapes peopled by talking horned dogs and five-brained absent minded professors. Thanks Alex!

Walter Moers, Rumo and His Miraculous Adventures (trans. John Brownjohn; New York: Overlook Press, 2004; Paperback edition 2007) 688 pages; $16.95; ISBN-10: 1-58567-936-4 / ISBN-13 978-1-58567-936-2.

See Philip Hallie, “Magda and the Great Virtues”.

The phrase “banality of evil” has been so widely appropriated, reimagined, and reappropriated into new contexts that it has completely lost its original bite. Not to mention the fact that it has repeatedly been called into question; both Arendt’s analysis of Eichmann’s psychology and the wider application of the notion to human activity in general have been criticized. But perhaps critics are missing the essential insight of the phrase. The philosopher invents the phrase as a phenomenological description of the facts in a particular case. In so doing she calls into question the common practice of understanding atrocities as somehow transcendentally other in origin. We go out to see the monster, and find only the man. In Eichmann’s case one cannot detect “any diabolical or demonic profundity.” His participation in evil can not be said to be accidental, unintentional or even “commonplace;” but it is mundane.

Milton described a tragic rebel Satan, a being who purely refuses to serve the Good, who would storm heaven with his minions. Augustine claimed that, as a youth he stole some pears because he “loved to perish.” Freud hypothesized the existence of an inner thanatos, a drive towards death that is everywhere alloyed with our other motives. But Arendt described a mediocre functionary whose evil is contextualized by his participation in a system. Perhaps she means not to say what evil is, but only what it can be. In some cases of evil, when you open the box, nothing is there. There is no great scheme, no army of rebel angels, no dark concupiscence of the flesh, no inner impulse towards self-negation. And this is in some ways the most frightening account of evil we can imagine.

I recently finished reading Philip K. Dick’s wonderful novel Dr. Bloodmoney, which is perhaps the least read deeply influential masterpiece in twentieth century science fiction. The characters and situation of the novel could only emerge from the mind of Dick. Dick unfolds a tangled story set in post-nuclear holocaust Marin county. The characters include a schizophrenic expat German nuclear physicist who just might have brought on the war with his mind; a hostile telekinetic phocomelus mimic for whom the disaster is the key to personal power; an insouciant psychic fetus in fetu, the unlikely hero of the story; a plucky “negro” TV repairman, who survives by eating rats and sellin traps; a secretive and conniving nymphomaniac housewife, and a preternaturally charming celebrity astronaut who, stranded in orbit, runs a radio show for the end of the world. From this motley assemblage Dick constructs a eerie story of American culture, fear, transformation and redemption. That the plot of the novel is implausible, impossible, and bizarre stands not at all in the way of its greatness. Dick’s creation is a collective fever-dream hallucination, an uncanny exploration of post-nuclear insanity, a space-age cultural freakshow, a novel of race and infirmity, of hatred, stupidity, community, and desire, of madness, politics, and economics. Its imprint is everywhere in the fringes of literature. Highly recommended.

Further Reading

Wikipedia entry on Dr. Bloodmoney

I just finished rereading the Watchmen Graphic Novel last night. The book deserves, in my opinion, every bit of the critical acclaim which has been lavished upon it. But to fully appreciate it, as with all works of literature and art, one must offer first an appraisal in historical-critical terms.

Watchmen was originally released from 1986 to 1987, during my junior and senior years in high school, as a series of independent comic books. I read these comics when they were first issued, and as such I consider myself a part of the book’s original audience.

Life was a bit different back then. Remember? There were no cellphones or internet. Personal computer technology was pretty new (as one of the editors of my school newspaper, I did photo-ready layout for the printers using glue and tape). Add to the cultural mix 1980’s music and fashion. Enough said.

Politically, it was a troubled time. Reagan was president, and American politics were driven by a wicked combination of unhealthy emotions: fear of nuclear annihilation, social-conservative rage at the remnants of 1960’s boomer drug and sex culture, anguish over environmental devastation, lingering guilt and regret from Vietnam, despair and cynicism caused by the memory of JFK’s assassination and Nixon’s Watergate, a persistent resentment of Johnson’s great society, embarrassment over Carter’s weakness… the list goes on. Many of these emotional maladies are still with us, though they are muted, and they go largely unfelt, it seems to me, by the tech-savvy, information overloaded, analysis impoverished youth of today.

Watchmen came into this milieu. Alan Moore wrote the book for me, but also for many others of similar and slightly older age, guys who were even more deeply and fully steeped in the world of superhero comics. The comic book audience… we were mainly boys and young men who were looking for escape, titillation, and illumination in the books we read. We were all addicted to the testosterone heavy air of the comix and game shops. I had a subscription cubby at a comic store on Burnside avenue in Portland, OR; the latest issues of whatever series I wanted were placed in that box as they came in the store, and once a month, sometimes once a week, I would stop in and purchase as many comics as I could afford.

Anyway, Watchmen blew me away. In my memory, Watchmen was absolutely groundbreaking in storyline and art. Today, the art seems less impressive… I suppose that is inevitable, since computer aided design and coloring has utterly transformed comic book production in the past 20 years. But truly, the art and design is still fantastic. The storyline bent genres and techniques with virtuosity, conducting readers through a complicated, multifaceted tale told in panels that had a storyboard like, cinematic urgency and immediacy. The volumes were punctuated with appendices of documents which had been “copied” into place from the fictional world of the text, adding depth, realism, and backstory. And showcasing Moore’s writing talents, which are considerable. Here was a postmodern comic par excellence, that broke apart the already changing conventions of comic book narrative and superhero identity and fractured them. For me it may have fractured them permanently. In retrospect I have to suggest that Watchmen was a part of the forces that drove me away from comics.

The new literary energy of Watchmen was not without precursor. Beginning in the 1980’s, the classic title X-Men had grown much darker in outlook. In this new direction it drew on an old underground tradition of gothic comic book tales (linked of course to pirate, war, horror and crime comics going dating from the pre-code era). Thus, before Watchmen, Marvel comics had already began to introduce moral complexity to the superhero archetype.

Then, from 1984 to 1986, one of the most astounding comic book titles of all time was published, Matt Wagner’s Mage. For me and others I think this title redefined what was possible in superhero storyline and art.

In 1986, Frank Miller’s Dark Knight unpacked and revealed the violence and the moral ambiguity and deviance which had always lurked just under the surface of the Batman character. And lo, moral complexity entered the DC comic universe.

I’m not trying to tell a full history here. I’m just saying that the emergence of a pivotal moment in a given body of literature is never without precedent. The ground had been laid well before Alan Moore wrote Watchmen.

But Watchmen was different. Whereas these previous titles only explored the dark side of heroism, Watchmen gave us an apocalyptic self-destruction of heroism. Not just dark, Watchmen was a hallucinatory eschatological revelation. It imagined the possibility of an alternate world, one which, from the perspective of superhero comic books, had been turned upside down. Moore’s America still had Nixon for president, and was apparently operating about one step away from a conservative martial law. In this world, superheroes are illegal. But with good reason. Moore’s superheroes (they are better called costumed adventurers, in the old style) have been reimagined and reunderstood as they probably should have been understood all along: the characters are all too human figures, products of a fascist political tendency in our psychological response to societal evil. Psychologically, in Moore’s hands, the superhero was more than a common vigilante. He or she was at best a neurotic loser, more likely a narcissistic sociopath, and at worst a real psychopath.

Moore’s “Comedian” was a nihilistic mercenary, a right wing bully and rapist, without a trace of humor. “Rorschach” exhibits the brilliant but almost autistic behavior of what Simon Baron-Cohen would call the extreme male brain, his vigilantism is deeply violent and driven by a childhood wounding that makes Batman’s upbringing seem normal. Moore’s “Nite Owl,” a character clearly modeled on Batman, is a super-smart and extraordinarily strong nerd. But his strength, braininess and underappreciated good looks are overwhelmed by his awkwardness, his self-consciousness and self-doubt, and ultimately by the pointlessness and uselessness of his work as a “hero.” What he does mostly is long for past glory, and engage is clumsy and goofy costumed play. Teamed up with Rorschach, Nite-Owl’s talents are channeled towards futile brutality, and ultimately, towards cooperation with the cynical and horrific eschaton which Nite-Owl feels powerless to oppose. The

The female hero named “Silk Spectre” is, deliberately I think, portrayed as ineffectual and weak. What drives her is a tortuous and mildly perverted family history. She is a girl in a man’s world, and the sexuality of her character overwhelms her heroism. This is, I think, a deliberate critique of the role of female heroes generally. Unconsciously longing to replace her missing father, she finds herself trapped by her costume, and constantly in the orbit of men playing superhero. Although she’s a talented martial artist, she plays a role which is at best adjunct to the various other heroes in the story, and along with Nite Owl she is forced in the end to acquiesce to a final nightmare posing as millennial utopia.

The utterly strange character of Ozymandias — he is the true superman of the book, in the Nietzschean sense of the term — has as his main talents an unrivaled capitalist brilliance melded with super good looks and Olympic-level gymnastic abilities. The character is fascinating; he lives his life in imitation of a great Egyptian solar-king, longing to surpass Alexander the Great in greatness. He has merely to speak, and he spews words reflecting an unfathomable genius for understanding social forces; well, pseudo-genius (it’s a comic book, after all). Without warning, he drops a reference to the total warfare described in the stele of Mereneptah. He is a twisted product of an excellent liberal education. The genius Ozymandias himself engineers the eschaton, driven by the isolation of his brilliant mind and far-reaching fortune to play God… the God of Genesis 6-9.

Meanwhile, the only true superbeing of the bunch, Dr. Manhattan, is not really a superhuman because he is not human at all. Endowed with truly God-like powers, this formerly human being, represents, I think, the unlimited destructive capacities of science — particularly nuclear science. He represents as well the tendency of our science and technology to outstrip ethics, rendering them entirely irrelevant, blown away by the larger perspective of the detached scientific mind, which finds magnificent, almost endless power in the vast reaches of space and in the void which separates atoms. At these scales, the desires and spiritual strivings of mankind either appear insignificant, or they appear to be best approached through the cold logic of unaccountable utilitarianism.

These are the heroes who together “save” humanity in Watchmen. What they offer us is vacant brutality, moral forgetfulness, and self-righteous paternalism.

At the heart of this book there is a really interesting pirate story, a comic within a comic. Oblivious to the eschatological scenario unfolding around him, a boy repeatedly visits a newsstand to read the story “Marooned” from The Tales of the Black Frigate. In the tale a deranged man is shipwrecked on an island. He had been driven there by a pirate ship. He becomes convinced that the Black Frigate is heading towards his homeland, and he longs to save his people from destruction. Fashioning a raft made from the corpses of his former crewmates, he races to the mainland, hoping to stop the slaughter of his family and neighbors. He arrives, he thinks, too late to save them, and so steals into town to take revenge. But he is psychotic. The ghostly evil Black Frigate had never threatened his family. It has come for him, and his soul. Mistaking friends and neighbors —fellow townsmen— for enemies, he kills and murders the people he meets. Arriving home, the would be hero then slaughters his own wife and child, mistaking them for the evildoers he fears. Finally, he is permitted a tortured self-anagnorisis. He accepts his fate as that of the damned, and swims out to join the devilish Black Frigate, which is waiting for him off shore. His story is the story also of the Watchmen. “Who watches the watchmen,” reads the graphitti on wall after wall through the book. Our “heroes” use villainy to fight an evil only they can see, and we are all the victims.

For the film, I hear they changed the ending. I had forgotten, or repressed it. If they changed it the way now I expect they might have, then certainly I understand. New York city has been purged and slaughtered in apocalyptic/post apocalyptic fantasy way too many times (most recently, in the film Cloverfield, which I recommend by the way). There’s just something about that particular fantasy that moves the modern world… I guess New York City is the New Babylon. In the Watchmen, it therefore makes sense that Ozymandias conquers it; but unlike Cyrus or Alexander before him, he accomplishes what the prophets of Israel and Christianity had only prayed for: its utter punishment for its service to the tyranny of Zion’s God.

One has to respect Moore for his capacity to utterly reframe the comic book hero, and to rethink it in an era of Republican militaristic and Christian right wing ascendancy. For that reason, it seems to me that a reissue of the comic as a movie would have made more sense in 2006-2007. Maybe that was the original plan. I understand that there were massive production delays. I really look forward, even in today’s more hopeful time, to seeing this story brought to life with 21st century effects. There is something timeless and moving about this dark apocalypse. Thank you Alan Moore (writer), Dave Gibbons (artist) and John Higgins (colorist), for your terrifying visions. May we remember your warnings and take comfort that we haven’t yet murdered all our own.