Wednesday, January 24, 2007
(5:18 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
The Apocalyptic Tone Recently Adopted
Jodi Dean is instructing K-punk in apocalyptic.I note this mainly because I wanted to use the title. But I have a hard time believing that war in Iran -- if it is indeed being hatched -- is being hatched because of apocalyptic passions. Certainly all this kind of stuff can be used to drum up support of the lunatics (too great in number!) among our fellow citizens on the Christian Right, but this time around, it seems that Mr. Bush can hardly be bothered to drum up any support outside the Christian Right. And in any case, it seems improbable that war with Iran will lead to the literal end of the world. (Perhaps I will be proven wrong, but no one will be around to gloat about it if so.) So once again, the Christian Right is getting fleeced! No apocalypse, not now! The poor souls.
My question here, since we're talking about deep theological issues: what the hell ever happened to Bush's messianism? Remember how he was on a messianic quest to reshape the Middle East? Now all of a sudden we've shifted gears to apocalypticism. The two genres are clearly related in some way -- the seamless shift, if nothing else, should show us this. Is it the difference between, on the one hand, believing, however delusively, that one can actually achieve some goal and on the other, basically saying, "Fuck it, I'm all in" when you know you're going to lose? Does Mr. Bush know that he's going to lose? Can the concept of "losing" find a home in the vast and airy corridors of what we will, for the sake of social convention only, call his "mind?" That is, in short: yes, we know that Mr. Bush did not attend seminary. We know that he has not had much in the way of formal theological education. But can he tell messianism and apocalypticism apart?
