| Subject: Magazine Writer |
| From: "Barrett Brown" <barriticus@gmail.com> |
| Date: 8/23/07, 14:47 |
| To: gigs-404080669@craigslist.org |
BARRETT BROWN________________________________________
512-560-2302 barriticus@gmail.com
COPYWRITER/ FEATURE COLUMNIST/ CONTRIBUTING EDITOR/ BOOK AUTHOR
Published Work/ Freelance Media Experience
The Onion A/V Club
Current, ongoing copywriting for The Onion's features department.
Anglesey Interactive, Inc.
Undertook copywriting of online marketing collateral (web text, press releases, etc.) in support of firm's "Riight.com" integrated search engine in June 2007.
Organic Motion, Inc.
Undertook copywriting of both print and online marketing collateral, general marketing consultation for noted New York tech start-up.
Sterling and Ross Publishers
Nonfiction book "Flock of Dodos: Behind Modern Creationism, Intelligent Design, and the Easter Bunny", political humor, authored in 2006, released in March 2007. Received praise from Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz, Rolling Stone, Skeptic , Air America Radio, Huffington Post, other sources.
Avacata
Occasional freelance work starting in 2007 for Dallas ad agency, researching and creating entertainment/dining/venue blurbs for clients' marketing collateral, including that of luxury resort real estate firm.
National Lampoon
Occasional contributor; past features included "Pick-Up Lines That Don't Seem to Work," "Craig's Conspiracy Corner," "A Guide to Dealing with Housecats," more.
Weekly columnist for political analysis site from October 2004 to November 2005
Features included - - "JohnKerry.com is Web-Tastic!" "Politicos Should Heed the Perry Incident," "Hot Senate Races," "Hot House Races," "109th Congress - What They Really Wanted for Christmas," "Political New Year's Resolutions," "State of the Union 2005: Dreams and Ironies" "The Long Kiss Goodnight," "The Strange Case of Jeff Gannon," "Libby Indicted, Dems Excited," "The Best Little Decoy in Texas," "Faith of Our Fathers: A Mildly Mean-Spirited Review," "McClellan is No Fleischer," "A Response to Our Catholic Readers," "The Known Unknown," "Dr. Frist Prescribes Himself a Dose of Moderation," "Meet John Roberts," "2008 Preview," Roberts Confirmation Hearings Largely Bloodless," more.
AOL CityGuide
Web content writer from Summer 2000 to December 2003 Researched/ created content coverage of event and entertainment venues. Served as regional correspondent for Dallas, Austin, New Orleans, Houston and Little Rock markets.
Additional magazine work
Ongoing, have contributed feature articles from serious political commentary to humor pieces to children's recreational activity coverage to fine dining overviews for outlets including business-to-business publications Pizza Today, Club Systems International, Dallas Market Center, D.C.-based public policy journal Toward Freedom, London-based public policy journal Free Life, humor magazine Jest , regional publications The Met, Austin Monthly, Dallas Child, men's magazines Oui and Hustler , literary journal Swans , dozens more.
Additional writing projects
Have created marketing copy for Verizon via Dallas ad agency Sullivan Perkins, produced website copy for design firm NPCreate.com , provided public relations pieces for Texas energy company EBS and Dallas real estate firm Dunhill Partners, more.
Education
1999 - 2003 University of Texas at Austin, College of Communications
***
My Hand Shall Be Against the Prophets
by Barrett Brown
"So, dig this."
Clearly, CNN anchorperson Kyra Phillips was about to lay something heavy on the American viewing public.
"A man was bulldozing a bog in central Ireland the other day when he noticed something unusual in the freshly turned soil. Turns out he'd unearthed an early medieval treasure: an ancient book of Psalms that experts date to the years 800 to 1000. Experts say it will take years of painstaking work to document and preserve this book, but eventually it will go on public display. Now here's the kicker. The book, about 20 pages of Latin script, was allegedly found opened to Psalm 83. Now, if you're a scholar, as you know, Psalm 83: 'God hears complaints that other nations are plotting to wipe out the name of Israel.'"
This would have been a hell of a kicker if it were true; the well-dressed president of Iran had just recently made a campaign promise to "wipe Israel off the map," and thus said psalm would have neatly applied to the international situation in 2006. It would have also neatly applied to the international situation in 1948, 1967, 1972, as well as every other year since, as one could gather from a glance at the operating charter of the Palestinian Authority. Plotting to wipe out the name of Israel has been a popular pastime among Arabs for quite a while, rivaling even the driving of Mercedes-Benzes and the wearing of gaudy gold chains. Perhaps more to the point, it was a popular pastime among Israel's dozens of tribal opponents several thousand years ago, when Psalm 83 was written.
But as it turned out, the psalm to which the miraculous manuscript was open no doubt due to the divine intervention of Yahweh Himself - had nothing to do with complaints, plots, or the wiping out of anyone's moniker, as Psalm 83 by the Latin reckoning of that period actually corresponded to Psalm 84 of the Greek reckoning from which our modern psalms are taken. And so the psalm in question actually concerned an annual Hebrew pilgrimage and how swell it was to undertake. This was explained in due course by the archaeologists involved, but the various news outlets had already reported the more newsworthy Israel angle newsworthy in the modern sense, not in the sense of it actually being true - and if the reader is familiar with the way these things work, the reader will consequently be unsurprised that few corrections were printed or reported.
In the dynamics of American cable news, though, a miracle is a miracle whether it's a miracle or not, and the Incident of Psalm 83 made for a swell segue into Kyra Phillips' live interview with a modern-day prophet and another modern-day prophet's co-author. The latter was Jerry Jenkins, who collaborated with Evangelical minister Tim LaHaye in the ominously successful Left Behind series. The former was the increasingly popular Joel C. Rosenberg, lone author of several bestselling prophecy-oriented technothrillers and whose own contribution to the ominousness of the times lies not so much in the success of his books among the sort of people one might expect to read them, but rather in the success of his books with the sort of people who run the country.
For his part, Jenkins was either completely stunned or not stunned at all by the psalm discovery, calling it "amazing," "incredible," and "not terribly surprising" all within the space of twenty seconds, further adding that "it would probably have to be told in fiction form because people are going to find it hard to believe," this sentence being literally true insomuch as that an incident that did not actually occur would indeed have to be told in fiction form, but also being literally false insomuch as that people would not find such a thing hard to believe because people will believe anything, such as the old myth that CNN is a respectable source for news instead of a degenerate entertainment outlet where anchorpersons say things like, "from books to blogs to the back pews, the buzz is all about the End Times," which is exactly what Kyra Phillips had said just a moment before.
Rosenberg, meanwhile, saw an opening with which to move onto his two favorite topics: the imminent invasion of Israel by Russia, and Rosenberg's own mysterious ability to predict things that have yet to happen, such as the imminent invasion of Israel by Russia. "Yes, people are interested [in bullshit Hebrew prophecy], because the rebirth of Israel, the fact that Jews are living in the Holy Land today, that is a Bible prophecy. When Iran, Libya, Syria, Lebanon, Russia, they begin to form an alliance against Israel, those are the prophecies from Ezekiel 38 and 39," Rosenberg said, pretending for the sake of his own argument that such an alliance actually exists between those nations and that the Old Testament Book of Ezekiel predicted it. "That's what I'm basing my novels on. I have been invited to the White House, Capitol Hill. Members of Congress, Israelis, Arab leaders all want to understand the Middle East through the - through the lens of biblical prophecies. I'm writing these novels that keep seeming to come true, but we are seeing Bible prophecy, bit by bit, unfold in the Middle East right now."
One can understand why Rosenberg's insight into world affairs would be so sought after around the White House and Capitol Hill; the ability to write books "that keep seeming to come true" would be an incredible asset to the national intelligence infrastructure of any geopolitical entity, particularly one as troubled as our own. In fact, it's a wonder that the NSA is permitting Rosenberg to write anything at all; as things stand now, any Iranian intelligence agent could show up at LAX, amble into a gift shop, and pick up a copy of one of these popular books "that keep seeming to come true," thus gleaning invaluable information about the not-so-distant future without having to resort to the rigors of human intelligence, electronic intelligence, geospatial intelligence, or - my personal favorite - foreign instrumentation signals intelligence. Likewise, any Chinese spy could download a bootlegged copy of one of these books for his communist masters, and without paying Rosenberg a dime in royalties. Shouldn't the U.S. intelligence community declare Rosenberg a national resource and whisk him off to some undisclosed location? The answer, of course, is no, because Rosenberg cannot really predict the future. Or, to put it another way, he can indeed predict the future, and so can my cat.
I should probably note here that I am, in many ways, a very immature person. For instance, I will, on occasion, loosely tie a sock around a cat's midsection, because doing so interferes with a feline's sense of balance and thus causes it to fall over. As long as the light pressure from the sock is being applied at several points around a cat's midsection, the cat will be unable to get up. Furthermore, the cat will be confused. I find this to be very amusing. The cat, though, does not, and, being a cat, has no idea why he or she is unable to get up off the floor. All the cat knows for sure is that I'm an asshole and the probable source of his or her mobility. The cat will also suspect that the sock has something to do with all of this, and his or her suspicions will rightfully increase when I remove the sock and the cat is suddenly able to stand up again.
Now, after this scenario has played out a few times, the cat will begin to understand - in accordance with his or her own feline level of understanding - that if I'm approaching the cat with a sock and giggling and saying, "Hey, cat, ah tell you what, imma tie this here sock around you, hee hee hee," which is what I invariably say in such a situation, that the cat is about to end up in that same disconcerting state of imbalance unless, of course, the cat goes and hides under the bed until I've left the house or sobered up. And that is exactly what the cat will begin to do. The cat has learned to predict the future.
The obvious question that arises at this point is, "How did the cat manage to figure out that you were going to tie a sock around his midsection again without first reading about it in the Book of Ezekiel?" This is a very good question. The comparably good answer is that the cat didn't figure anything out by reading about it in the Book of Ezekiel, and neither did Joel Rosenberg.
The next obvious question, then, concerns how Rosenberg manages to write "these novels that keep seeming to come true" if he is incapable of doing so via some sort of supernatural shortcut, such as reading the Book of Ezekiel. There are two potential answers. The first potential answer is that Rosenberg, who worked as a "communications consultant" for various political and corporate figures before beginning his career as a novelist, is a keen geopolitical observer, and is thus able to extrapolate from current and past events in order to hypothesize probable future events. The second potential answer is that Rosenberg cannot do any such thing, and that "these novels that keep seeming to come true" only "seem" to come true in the sense that fortune cookie messages "seem" to come true if one disregards the fortune cookie messages that don't "seem" to come true at all, such as the one I got recently that said "Romance will soon come your way," which is extraordinarily doubtful in light of the fact that I spend all of my time tying socks around cats.
But let's hear Rosenberg or at least whoever writes his marketing copy - out. According to his website, our prophetic friend has quite a track record of predicting the not-so-distant future. "The first page of his first novel - The Last Jihad - puts you inside the cockpit of a hijacked jet, coming in on a kamikaze attack into an American city, which leads to a war with Saddam Hussein over weapons of mass destruction," it says. "Yet it was written before 9/11, long before the actual war with Iraq." That actually sounds pretty impressive. I mean, that's exactly what ended up happening. Okay, I'm convinced. The rest of this article is about why I'm converting to Evangelical Christianity.
But perhaps we should make sure that I'm not jumping the gun here. Let's start by examining that last sentence, the one that ends "long before the actual war with Iraq." A more accurate way of putting this would have been, "long after the first war with Iraq, not quite as long after the establishment of the No Fly Zones in two large sections of Iraq which consequently put U.S. and Iraqi forces into a decade-long series of shooting incidents, and not very long at all after Operation Desert Fox, which had at then point been the most recent military conflict with Iraq, and which was also fought over weapons of mass destruction." That's somewhat better, although not quite as impressive from a marketing standpoint, which is to say that it's now true.
Still, though, Rosenberg did indeed write up a scenario in which we'd fight yet another undeclared war against Iraq over WMDs, which certainly ended up happening. Did he predict that 150,000 U.S. troops would be deployed to Iraq, topple Saddam, occupy the country, and find out that there aren't any WMDs after all? Because that would be pretty impressive if he did. But he didn't. Instead, his book details how Saddam tries to blow up the U.S. with ICBMs launched from his super-secret ICBM launchers, at which point the U.S. gets all huffy and nukes Baghdad and Tikrit. My memory is a little hazy, but I don't remember any of that actually happening.
There's also the matter of Rosenberg's hijacked airplane, the one that comes in "on a kamikaze attack on an American city." In Last Jihad, said plane crashes into the presidential motorcade in an attempt to assassinate the commander-in-chief. Well, that didn't happen, either, but surely the fact that Rosenberg used a plane crashing into an American city as a plot element makes him an extraordinarily important person whose views should be sought out by the White House, Capitol Hill, and Kyra Phillips. But what if he had written a scenario in which terrorists attempt to crash a commercial airliner into the World Trade Center itself, and said scenario had been released in narrative form just a few months before 9/11? That would be more impressive still, right?
In fact, that scenario was indeed written, and said scenario was indeed released in narrative form just a few months before 9/11. But it wasn't written by Rosenberg, or by any other modern prophet. Rather, it was an episode of the short-lived X-Files spin-off called The Lone Gunmen. I don't know who the writer was, but I'm pretty sure he hasn't been invited to Capitol Hill or the White House or even CNN. But why not? Coming up with a scenario in which such a significant event happens before it actually happens is, as we've determined, a valuable skill, perhaps even more valuable than Rosenberg's ability to predict a few things that sort of happen along with a bunch of shit that will never happen at all. As Condoleeza Rice put it during her 2002 testimony before the 9/11 Commission, "No one could have imagined them taking a plane, slamming it into the Pentagon... into the World Trade Center, using a plane as a missile." No one but the guy who wrote that one show with those guys from that other show, that is.
I'm kidding; plenty of people aside from that guy who wrote that one show with those guys from that other show imagined that such a thing could happen, and Condoleeza Rice is, of course, a liar. In 1993, the Pentagon itself commissioned a study in which the possibility of airplanes being used as weapons against domestic U.S. targets was looked into; similar reports on the topic conducted by various other agencies would follow over the next few years. In 1995, an Islamic terrorist plot to crash eleven planes into various world landmarks was foiled by international authorities. In 1998, the Federal Aviation Administration warned airlines to be on the alert for hijackings by followers of bin Laden, and a number of reports that circulated through the intelligence community over the next two years warned that said followers might try to crash airliners into skyscrapers. And in 1999, Columbine assailants Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold wrote out their plan to shoot up their school, blow up the building, escape to the airport, hijack a plane, and crash it into New York City, but only got around to doing the first part. Had they refrained from doing any of it and instead simply described that last event in a book, they probably could have looked forward to lucrative post-9/11 careers as novelists/cable news mainstays, insomuch as that they would have been "writing these books that keep seeming to come true" to the same extent that Rosenberg does.
Ah, but Rosenberg has written other books as well. Back to his website: "His second thriller - The Last Days - opens with the death of Yasser Arafat and a U.S. diplomatic convoy ambushed in Gaza. Six days before The Last Days was published in hardcover, a U.S. diplomatic convoy was ambushed in Gaza. Thirteen months later, Yasser Arafat died."
That a U.S. diplomatic convoy might be ambushed in Gaza is hardly a tough bet; the reason that it was a U.S. diplomatic convoy in the first place, and not a U.S. diplomatic bunch-of-cars-driving around-individually-without-a-care-in-the-world-through-a-very-dangerous-region-where-anti-U.S.-sentiment-is-high-and-everyone-is-armed, is that Gaza is a very dangerous region where anti-U.S. sentiment is high and everyone is armed. For instance, I looked up the search terms "convoy ambush Gaza" on Google News just now, and the first thing that comes up is the headline "Hamas ambushes convoy of U.S. weapons intended for Abbas agencies," relating to an incident that occurred on May 15th of 2007, that being two weeks previous to the time of this particular writing and a few weeks after I compiled my notes for this particular essay (yeah, I procrastinate). Oh, man! Here I was, writing and thinking about convoys being shot up in Gaza, and here was this convoy being shot up in Gaza! How is that I manage to write these articles "that keep seeming to come true"? Someone should invite me to fucking Capitol Hill and ask me about it. I'll tell them that I figured it out by interpreting the Norse Ragnarök myth in a literal fashion. Or maybe I'll just tell them the truth, which is that convoys get shot up in the Palestinian territories all the time, and that if you write a big long book in which things get shot in the Middle East or Middle Eastern terrorists blow something up which is to say, a big long book filled with things that are constantly happening a couple of these plot points are going to sort-of-kind-of come true at some point, and then everyone will think you're neat. I probably won't tell them that, though. I'll just say it's Ragnarök. I can't wait to launch my career writing Ragnarök-based technothrillers.
In fairness to Rosenberg, his plot points don't simply involve things that have already happened several times or things that have almost happened several times or things that are happening right now; occasionally, he goes out on a limb by describing events that can only happen once, such as the death of Yasser Arafat mentioned above. The reader will no doubt recall that Arafat did indeed die of health complications in 2003, having reached the age of 75 in a region where life expectancy is a bit lower than that and also after having been in and out of hospitals for several years, which is generally the sort of situation that leads one to die. And so it would have been pretty easy to predict in 2003 that Arafat might very well pass away in 2003 or 2004 from a combination of disease and plain old age.
But as easy as such a prediction might have been to make, it was still too difficult for our prophetic friend Rosenberg; The Last Days opens with Yasser Arafat being blown up in a suicide blast along with the U.S. secretary of state... in 2010. So, although Rosenberg does indeed predict the death of Arafat, whereas many people less astute than himself had no doubt predicted that Arafat might live forever, the actual death of Arafat, coming seven years before his fictional technothriller death in 2010, actually made Rosenberg's own scenario not more accurate, but less accurate and, in fact, impossible. Nonetheless, this is one of a handful of plot points that Rosenberg uses as an example of how he's managed to write "these books that keep seeming to come true."
Well, that's good enough for Kyra Phillips. Back at the CNN interview, Rosenberg was demonstrating his expertise on matters Middle Eastern by explaining that many Arabs don't like Israelis and would like to see them conquered and occupied. "Saddam Hussein, or Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, or Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah - they're all drunk with the dream of capturing Jerusalem," our friend informs us, although it's somewhat doubtful that the capture of Jerusalem was at the forefront of Mr. Hussein's mind when this interview was conducted in July of 2006, seeing as how he was at the time living in a jail cell and being tried by a bunch of Shiites for killing a bunch of Shiites. But the larger point is indeed valid, so I'll stop interrupting for a second here. "That's what [Rosenberg's poorly-written novel The Copper Scroll] is about, which is about this battle - this intense battle - to liquidate the Jewish people and liberate Jerusalem," Rosenberg continued. "I mean, are we seeing that happen? It's hard not to say that we are. That's why I've gotten invited over to the CIA, and the White House, and Congress," he reminded us again, later noting for good measure that "Bible prophecy" is "fairly remarkable intelligence. And that's why my novels keep coming true," which they don't, that "they have this feeling of coming true," which is true in the fortune cookie sense described earlier, that "a million copies have sold," which is simultaneously true, annoying, and unsurprising, and that "they are coming true bit by bit, day by day," by which he apparently means that Saddam will come back to life and fire his non-existent nuclear missiles at the U.S., which will in turn nuke Baghdad and Tikrit; that Yasser Arafat will come back to life and live long enough to be blown up by a suicide bomber in 2010 along with Secretary of State Dennis Kucinich; and that a convoy will be shot up in Palestine. In fairness to Rosenberg, one of those things is indeed likely to happen. Again.
But on the question of the imminent destruction of Israel, Phillips - in accordance with established CNN procedure - wanted a second opinion from a guy who totally agrees with the guy who gave the first opinion.
"Jerry, what do you think about what Joel wrote, about watching the Russian-Iranian alliance seeking to wipe out Israel?"
"Well, I find it very fascinating," Jenkins replied, "and of course, Joel is a real geopolitical watcher."
Of course. Every prophet in recorded history has been a "real geopolitical watcher" for the simple reason that if one wishes to pretend that one's favored means of magic has managed to predict the current world situation, one must know a thing or two about said situation. The big problem is taking the current world situation and using it to determine the future world situation (whereas the small problem is taking the current world situation and using it to determine the current world situation, which, though this may sound axiomatically easy, is apparently very difficult for Rosenberg, who is wrongly convinced that Syria and Lebanon are allied with each other and that Russia is allied with both of them). The prediction of future events generally entails extrapolation from current trends, which is a pretty tricky process even when undergone by clear-headed observers and becomes nearly impossible when undergone by nitwit theocrats like Joel Rosenberg and it becomes absolutely impossible when the nitwit theocrat in question insists on dotting his proposed future narrative with magical explosions, as Rosenberg did recently when he explained to Pat Robertson that "God says He's going to supernaturally judge Iran, Sudan, Lebanon, Syria, these other countries. We're talking about fire from heaven, a massive earthquake. It's going to be devastating and tragic. But I believe that afterwards there's going to be a great spiritual awakening."
***
The first great prophet of the 20th century was Herbert W. Armstrong, a former advertising copywriter who dispensed his dispensationalism by way of a radio program called World of Tomorrow, a monthly newsletter entitled Plain Truth, and the occasional booklet, and whose second career as a harbinger of doom spanned more than fifty years. Like most advertising copywriters of his time, Armstrong had nothing but contempt for the written form of the English language. In his popular 1956 pamphlet entitled 1975 in Prophecy!, Armstrong's jihad against subdued English communication begins on the title page and continues without pause; let the reader be warned that this is only the first of many inappropriate exclamation points used therein. More to the point, Armstrong here pioneers the art of modern eschatology and serves as a shining example for those would come later, largely by being wrong.
1975 begins with an acknowledgment of the general sense of optimism for which the post-war U.S. is often remembered, and concedes that man's technological feats will indeed usher in a new era of convenience. "You'll no longer bother taking a bath in a tub or shower," Armstrong tells his contemporaries. "You'll take an effortless and quicker waterless bath by using supersonic waves!" An exciting prospect, to be sure; from the beginning of time, man has yearned to be free of his bubble baths. But instead of going on to describe how the drudgeries of adolescent love will soon be performed by robots, thus leaving young people with more free time in which to labor at the robot factories, Armstrong warns us that our budding, supersonic way of life is already threatened by a familiar enemy: the Germans. This may seem counter-intuitive; one would think that no other race would be more inclined to leave undisrupted a world in which love and leisure are soon to be sacrificed on the altar of robot efficiency. Nonetheless, the signs of the times were present for all to see, if only one knew where to look.
It seemed, for instance, that the Krauts were already protecting themselves against the elements. One picture of Berlin is captioned, "Notice MODERN apartment building a common sight in the NEW Germany." That these NEW Germans were disinclined to replace their bombed-out dwellings with reproductions of 11th century Crusader fortresses, opting instead to build 20th century apartments in the 20th century, would probably have ranked pretty low on most people's lists of alarming German behavior, even bearing in mind that such a list would, at that point in history, be pretty fucking long indeed. But there was more to be worried about, said Armstrong. "Already Nazis are in many key positions in German industry in German education in the new German ARMY!" To be sure, the concept of a new German ARMY is quite a bit more alarming than the concept of a new German PRE-FAB CONDOMINUM. And in addition to what Armstrong lists here, Nazis already occupied "key" positions in the American rocket program, the feds having by this point made pets of many of the more useful fascists by way of Project Paperclip. With the benefit of hindsight, we now know that nothing particularly bad came of any of this. Armstrong, though, was supposed to have possessed the benefit of foresight.
Nonetheless, the Germans were clearly preparing for something. "They plan to strike their first blow," Armstrong continues, "NOT at France or Poland in Europe, but with hydrogen bombs by surprise attack on the centers of AMERICAN INDUSTRY!" Had I been writing this sentence, I would have probably put "hydrogen bombs" in all caps and just left "American industry" with conventional lettering; incidentally, the "hydrogen bombs" in question are elsewhere referred to as "Hydrogen Bombs" and "hydrogen-bombs". Anyway, the resourceful Krauts were conspiring not only to blow up Flint, Michigan with unconventional weaponry, but also to unite Europe under the inevitable Fourth Reich which in turn would be led by the nefarious Antichrist. But who? "At a certain moment" - by which Armstrong apparently means "an uncertain moment," since the moment in question is not cited with any certainty at all - "the new LEADER of this European combine will suddenly appear in the public eye. He's already behind the scenes in action! But the world does not yet recognize him! He still works under cover," even to the extent that such an accomplished futurist as Armstrong himself had yet to identify him, although he does venture a guess. "Already I have warned radio audiences to watch TITO." Anyone who followed Armstrong's advice would have been occasionally amused by the Yugoslav dictator's wacky antics, but otherwise disappointed with his failure to unite the Greater European Combine under an apocalyptic, hydrogen bomb-tossing regime. One might also wonder why all these meticulous Nazis would be inclined to put a Slavic untermensch in charge of their hard-won Aryan shadow empire. This seems to be out of character.
But Armstrong's most stunning prediction is that not all of the problems of tomorrow will be caused by Europeans, as had been the case in the recent past; Americans will soon be to blame as well. "Our peoples have ignored God's agricultural laws," he notes. "Not all the land has been permitted to rest the seventh year." Although largely forgotten today, the failure of American agriculturalists to follow Old Testament farming guidelines was once akin to homosexual nuptials in its allegedly mortal threat to our national viability. The collective failure to follow these gastronomic guidelines, Armstrong knew, would result in a major famine that would strike the U.S. "probably between 1965 and 1972." The imminence of this catastrophe was quite plainly evident even back in 1956; as the ongoing de-Yahwehification of our soil continued apace, the nation's "food factories are removing much of what minerals and vitamins remain while a new profit-making vitamin industry deludes the people into believing they can obtain these precious elements from pills and capsules purchased in drug stores and 'health food' stores!" If only these misguided nutritionists had gotten into something legitimate, like the supersonic bath industry.
The rest of 1975 consists of what has become fairly standard Christian End Times spiel insomuch as that the Antichrist briefly takes over the world, much of which is eventually blown up. Armstrong's text does deviate from the norm in that instead of inviting the reader to accept Christ into his or her heart and then put all trust in Him, he invites the reader to accept Christ into his or her heart and then await further instructions from Armstrong, who has an idea about what might be some good places to lay low for a while; unlike most of his modern-day contemporaries, Armstrong does not subscribe to the concept of the pre-Tribulation Rapture, which is to spirit away the world's Bible-believing Christians before all the bad shit goes down. Also somewhat unique to Armstrong is the charming admonition printed on the final page: "This booklet is exceedingly brief and condensed. The reader is advised to read it a second time. This disclosure is so amazing, so different from the common conception, you probably did not really grasp it all the first reading."
Aside from such minor novelties, Armstrong is a fundamentally typical specimen of the professional prophet insomuch as that he possesses the one attribute common to all of them, which is persistence, persistence having been Armstrong's strongest characteristic, stronger even than his penchant for exclamation points, which was very strong indeed. This is to Armstrong's credit; in matters of prophecy, persistence is what separates the men from the boys, or, rather, what separates the men from the crazy old men who think they can divine the future. If you or I had predicted in 1941 that Hitler would eventually take over the planet as the "beast of Revelation," as Armstrong had done before later moving on to Tito, and if Hitler ended up dead four years after this prediction, as Hitler did, you or I would probably give up right then and there and gone into real estate or something. Not Armstrong, though. Armstrong kept at it for forty more years.
Like real estate, prophecy is a crowded field, and Armstrong eventually came to face just as much competition as you and I are going to come up against when we go into business together doing land flips in Southern California. Billionaire faith healer Benny Hinn, for instance, has dozens of failed prophecies under his belt, ranging from the wacky (1989 prediction that all of the nation's gays are going to be killed by "fire" no later than 1995; perhaps he meant that they would be "thrilled" by "Fire Island") to the not-so-wacky-yet-unfulfilled-nonetheless (another 1989 prediction that Fidel Castro would die in the '90s). Ditto with Pat Robertson, who predicted that the apocalypse would occur in 1982, and then again in 1984. Luckily, it didn't, and thus Robertson was able to run for the GOP presidential nomination in 1988 that being the same year in which an engineer named Robert Faid wrote a book called Gorbachev! Has the Real Antichrist Come?, the title of which sort of makes it sound as if he's trying to get the Russian premier's attention and then ask him his opinion on the matter, but the text of which, of course, posits Gorbachev himself as the Antichrist. In 666: The Final Warning, a fellow named Gary Blevins proposes that the Antichrist is none other that Ronald Reagan; Blevins wrote this in 1990, so you've got to give him some credit for going out on a limb. The very prolific author Yisrael Hawkins predicted that nuclear war would occur on September 12th , 2006; when this didn't turn out to be the case, he decided that such a war had simply been "conceived" on that date. As of this writing, though, the world's water has yet to break.
One of the more financially successful of these modern prophets was Edgar Whisenaut, who appears to have sold something on the order of four million copies of his 1988 book, 88 Reasons Why the Rapture will Occur in 1988, in which he puts the event at sometime between September 11th and September 13th of that otherwise uneventful year. Then, on the 14th , he changed his prediction to the 15th . Then, October 3rd . Then he wrote another book called 89 Reasons Why the Rapture will Occur in 1989, and I would imagine that the extra reason had something to do with 1988 having been ruled out by process of elimination. When the world made it to 1990 unscathed, Whisenaut wisely decided that his particular brand of prophecy might work better in a periodical format, and so he began putting out a new publication entitled Final Shout Rapture Report 1990. The next year, it was called Final Shout Rapture Report 1991. This went on for several years, but what's truly unusual is that it didn't go on forever. Whisenaut's eventual obscurity in the face of failed predictions is the exception, not the rule, to the usual career arc of the modern Evangelical prophet, who may generally depend on a reliable income stream regardless of whether or not any of their predictions actually hit the mark. To be fair, this phenomenon isn't limited to the Evangelical world, and in fact often applies to the world of mundane, secular prophets, which is why William Kristol still has his own magazine.
If we measure the success of a prophet by how wrong he can be for how long he can be it without losing his income stream as a result and there is no more polite way to measure such a thing then Hal Lindsay is, by that reckoning, the most successful prophet in modern history by virtue of having been the most unsuccessful at actual predictions for the greatest length of time without having had to get a job. Lindsay's once-ubiquitous 1970 book The Late, Great Planet Earth, for instance, sold millions of copies and went through dozens of printings, and was later followed up by several sequels, including The 1980's: Countdown to Armageddon, which asserts that "the decade of the 1980's could very well be last decade of history as we know it." I'm not sure what else it says, though, as I can't seem to find a copy.
I was, however, able to score an early edition of The Late, Great Planet Earth, and I'm glad I did, because according to the dust jacket copy, this is a very important book, or at least it was in 1970, before all the things that Lindsay predicted would soon happen didn't happen. "Prophets and astrologers are enjoying the greatest revival since the ancient days of Babylon," warns the text on the back cover, right under a picture of Lindsay leaning on a tree while clearly enjoying his mustache. The onset of all this mystical nonsense to which Lindsay is so clearly opposed is to the wrongful detriment of the "authentic voices which have been overlooked by modern, sophisticated man... the voices of the ancient seers of Israel, the Hebrew prophets. Three milleniums [sic] of history are strewn with evidence of their prophetic marksmanship and to ignore their incredible predictions of man's destiny and the events which are soon to effect this planet will be perhaps the greatest folly of this generation," which is a pretty serious charge when one considers that this is the generation that elected Lyndon Johnson out of concern that Barry Goldwater might turn out to be some sort of warmonger.
To hear Lindsay tell it, the aforementioned Hebrew prophets certainly sound like the real deal, particular in relation to their modern counterparts. "What would you think of prophets today who would be willing to stake their lives on their claims?" Lindsay asks us. The ancient Hebrew prophets, he says, were such fellows, and those among them who failed in their short-term predictions were promptly put to death, and presumably not rewarded with their own column in Time , as the aforementioned Mr. Kristol has been. The clear implication is that the ensuing natural selection weeded out all the bad prophets, and so we should listen up to what they have to say about the latter 20th century, with just a little bit of help from Lindsay.
One of the more prominent of these prophets was Jeremiah, who predicted "that the capital city, Jerusalem, would be destroyed and that its people would lose their capacity to laugh." Luckily, they didn't lose their capacity to make other people laugh, and Curb Your Enthusiasm is now in its fifth season without having jumped the shark. But Jerusalem was indeed destroyed, just as most cities on the Levant were destroyed at some point or another during that general period, which is why you and I aren't going to be buying up many residential lots in the area, no matter how good the schools may be. Then there was Isaiah, who "foretold that the mighty invincible Babylonians would be conquered and so completely destroyed by the Medes that Babylon would never be inhabited again," a prediction which would have been somewhat more impressive if the first half weren't obvious (had these "invincible" Babylonians managed to avoid being conquered, theirs would have been the only empire in history to do so) and if the second half weren't obviously wrong (Babylon is indeed "inhabited" right now, just as it always has been, and is in fact home, as of this writing, to 22 million native Iraqis and 150,000 visiting Americans).
"It's ironic that man never seems to learn from past mistakes, especially when they relate to major catastrophes," Lindsay later notes, ironically enough, before adding, even more ironically, that "[m]any Bible students in recent years tried to fit the events of World War I and II to the prophetic signs which would herald the imminent return of Christ. Their failure discredited prophecy," although not to such an extent that prophecy was ever discredited in the eyes of those who lent prophecy credit in the first place, which is why Lindsay's own attempt to "fit the events" of the latter Cold War years to those very same "prophetic signs" sold so many millions of copies. But Lindsay didn't see himself as doing any sort of fitting at all; no modern prophet believes himself to be in the business of interpretation. "God's word should not be interpreted!," Herbert Armstrong wrote in the '30s. "To INTERPRET it is to place human meaning into it. God's Word is a REVELATION from the Almighty revealing to us TRUTHS we do not otherwise know and could never find out." Inimitable emphasis aside, Armstrong's interpretation of his own lack of interpretation is common to those who came before him and to those who would come later, including Lindsay in the '70s, Whisenaut in the '80s, LaHaye and Jenkins in the '90s, and Joel C. Rosenberg today, all of whom believe themselves to be simply restating the unambiguous and unchanging prophecies of the Bible, which leads to the obvious question of why we need Armstrong, Whisenaut, LaHaye, Jenkins, and Rosenberg in the first place. The not-so-obvious answer is that the unambiguous and unchanging prophecies of the Bible are shrouded in ambiguity and subject to constant change.
This is not to say that there aren't some points of agreement among the various interpretations of the various non-interpreters. Everyone seems to agree that the Temple of Jerusalem, having been destroyed twice in antiquity, must be rebuilt a third time before Jesus can return. Armstrong, writing in the '50s, decided that this would happen at some point around 1972; Lindsay, writing in 1970, decided that this would happen "soon." However, "There is one major problem barring the construction of a third Temple," Lindsay reminds us. "That obstacle is the second holiest place of the Moslem faith, the Dome of the Rock. This is believed to be built squarely in the middle of the old temple site." Problematic as this problem may be, Lindsay believes that it will be solved. "Obstacle or no obstacle, it is certain that the Temple will be rebuilt. Prophecy demands it."
Prophecy tends to get its way. Lindsay notes a then-recent interview with Israeli historian Israel Eldad, who was in agreement with ever-so-demanding Prophecy that the Temple would soon return.
"What about the Dome of the Rock which now stands on the temple site?" the interviewer asks.
"It is, of course, an open question," replies Eldad. "Who knows, maybe there will be an earthquake."
Who knows?
Just as Armstrong and Lindsay then agreed that the Temple would make its appearance in Jerusalem sometime in the early '70s, Lindsay and Rosenberg today agree that the Russians will make their appearance in Jerusalem sometime soon. For Lindsay, "soon" has meant various things at various times. In 1970, when he wrote The Late, Great Planet Earth, "soon" meant some time during the '70s. Then, in 1980, when he wrote The 1980's: Countdown to Armageddon, "soon" meant some time during the '80s. Today, it means some time in the near future. The important thing to understand, though, is that the Russians are going to invade Israel "soon," with the chronological proximity of such an event being an eternal attribute of time, the concept of time being, as the physicists tell us, subjective.
Back in 1970, Russia was going to invade Israel "soon" because the temple was going to be rebuilt "soon," and the Bible not-so-clearly states that Magog, the great enemy from the North, will invade Israel "soon" afterward, and Magog, as everyone knows, apparently, is Russia. Lindsay also cites the 1968 prediction of renowned Israeli military genius Moshe Dayan. "General Dayan's statement that 'the next war will not be with the Arabs but with the Russians' has a considerably deeper significance, doesn't it?" In fact, it does, insomuch as that it marks a rare lapse in Mr. Dayan's usual prescience, assuming that he really said any such thing at all; Israel's next war was with the Arabs, as have been all of its military conflicts since. Meanwhile, the Russians have been in Russia, except when they were in Afghanistan, from which they were eventually dislodged by U.S.-supported freedom fighters, and in Chechnya, from which they have yet to be dislodged by Muslim-supported terrorists. Not even the Bible could have predicted the amazing transformation of the Central Asian patriot from hero to villain in the space of two decades.
When the Russians invade, they'll have plenty of company, including that of Persia. "All authorities agree on who Persia is today. It is modern Iran," notes Lindsay, correctly enough. "This is significant because it is being wooed to join the United Arab Republic in its hostility against Israel," although this is somewhat less significant in light of the fact that the United Arab Republic no longer exists, and that what was then the de facto leader of this now non-existent entity, Egypt, has been at peace with Israel for nearly three decades. Nor was it ever a significant possibility even back then; the Iranians, not being Arabs, would probably not have been all that inclined to join a political entity that designated them as such, and Iran's then-ruler, the pro-Western shah, would have been less inclined still, and thus this was a pretty silly prediction to make.
But perhaps the Egyptian regime will be peer-pressured into attacking nonetheless; our Hebrew seers also predict a military attack by "Cush," a term which Lindsay tells us refers not only to Ethiopia but to all of black Africa. "The sobering conclusion is this: many of the African nations will be united and allied with the Russians in the invasion of Israel." Anticipating the obvious question of why this would be the case, Lindsay provides the answer which seemed plausible in 1970: "One of the most active areas of Evangelism for the Communist 'gospel' is in Africa. As we see further developments in this area in the future, we realize that it will be converted to Communism." Today, of course, there is not a single black African nation which could be said to be Communist, nor is there a single black African nation that cares anything for Russia at all (although several are increasingly keen on China, which itself is decreasingly keen on communism). On the other hand, black Africa is now "one of the most active areas of Evangelism" for the actual Gospel, Pentecostalism is sharply on the rise, and the few black Africans who today march on Jerusalem are religious tourists intent on buying jars of mustard seeds.
Ah, but what about the inhabitants of North Africa? The reader can probably guess. "The territory of Northern Africa is becoming solidly Pro-Soviet." Oops. But there's always "Gomer," another Hebrew proper noun that allegedly refers to Eastern Europe. "This includes Eastern Germany," which, as the reader will remember, remains behind the Iron Curtain, its peoples united with the Soviet bloc and its resources dedicated to Stalinist objectives. Western Germany, meanwhile, is likewise under the control of the Holy Roman Empire. Woe unto the Teutons thus torn asunder!
The next chapter is entitled "Yellow Peril," in apparent reference to the yellow men of the Orient who will soon be threatening the peace. Lindsay tells us that China is well on its way to becoming a great power, although it's left unclear whether he figured this out by deciphering passages of the Old Testament or whether he read it in a 1964 issue of Time like everyone else. There is quite a bit of talk in this chapter of the 200 million-man infantry force that the People's Republic is preparing to field against Israel for some reason known only to Lindsay, the Chinese, and perhaps God.
Like Armstrong before him and LaHaye after, Lindsay is convinced that the Europeans are intent on reviving the Roman Empire. "Twenty years ago no one would have dared to believe that Rome as an empire would be put back together," except for our friend Herbert W. Armstrong, who was an unusually daring fellow. But Lindsay is correct in his proposition that "Rome as an empire" will be put back together, and it is in fact in the process of being put back together right now, although it will not be centered in Rome, will consist of essentially independent democratic states governed mostly from within instead of imperial provinces governed from afar, will not be in the business of imperial conquest, and, if recent history is any indication, will be busy with factional disputes over largely inconsequential matters of commercial agricultural policy for the next seven thousand years, and will thus not be in any way analogous to the Roman Empire at all.
But innocuous as it may first appear, the very existence of the European Union is itself ominous to Lindsay, Armstrong, LaHaye, and the millions who give them money and credence; that a collection of states would become united is a frightening prospect to many residents of the United States. This decidedly non-Roman and non-imperial Roman Empire will consist of ten such states, as Lindsay tells us in 1970 with some great certainty gleaned from the Book of Revelation and its reference to a dragon with ten horns or some such. Today, the European Union consists of 27 states. Not only was Lindsay correct, but he was over two-and-a-half times more correct than he had expected to be.
While the Europeans play into the hands of the Antichrist by lowering their trade barriers and providing for streamlined work permits, the rest of the world's peoples are were, rather - driving headlong into oblivion by way of their nasty habit of getting married and having children. Lindsay cites a 1968 study claiming that the world population would hit 7.5 billion by 2000, which, of course, did not happen. He then quotes J. Bruce Griffing, chairman of the genetics department at Ohio State University: "Unless mankind acts immediately, there will be a worldwide famine in 1985, and the extinction of man within 75 years." Apparently, mankind did end up acting immediately, although I've been unable to figure out exactly what it was that mankind ended up doing. Anyway, kudos to mankind.
Lindsay then makes what was a common mistake in 1970 he quotes Stanford University gadfly Paul Ehlrich, author of the 1968 book The Population Bomb . Ehlrich has made a career for himself by being wrong about things even without the assistance of Hebrew prophecy, which is quite a talent. "Mankind may be facing its final crisis," Ehlrich had written. "No action that we can take at this late date can prevent a great deal of future misery from starvation and environmental deterioration." Take that, J. Bruce Griffing! Ehlrich was also convinced that hundreds of millions of people would starve to death in the 1970s, and the fact that millions of liberal environmentalists believed him is often cited by conservatives as evidence that millions of liberal environmentalists are damned fools, although the fact that millions of conservative Evangelicals believed the very same thing does not seem to have struck these same conservatives as evidence of anything at all.
Anyway, with everyone now starving to death, the great powers reasonably decide that this would be the perfect time to field and supply infantry brigades of unprecedented size for the purpose of invading Israel, a nation with no natural resources. According to Lindsay, the Soviet Union attacks first, with the assistance of the Africans, Arabs, and East Europeans (including East Germany, of course). Then the Soviets betray everyone and invade Africa. The Neo-Roman Empire, now led by the Antichrist, attacks the Russians, or the Israelis, or both, or something (I'm sort of skimming at this point), and then the Chinese attack the Soviets near Jerusalem, and not, as one might expect, on their thousand-mile long common border. Then Neo-Rome, which is now allied with the U.S. for some reason, attacks the Chinese. Hundreds of millions are killed in a single battle.
"As history races towards this moment, are you afraid or looking with hope for deliverance? The answer should reveal to you your spiritual condition," Lindsay says, finally getting something right.