| Subject: Re: hot fat |
| From: Rachel Trusheim <rachel@sterlingandross.com> |
| Date: 1/7/10, 14:30 |
| To: Barrett Brown <barriticus@gmail.com> |
Sorry, last one was in Open Office format. Here's one you actually open.On Thu, Jan 7, 2010 at 12:42 PM, Barrett Brown <barriticus@gmail.com> wrote:
Here's an updated version; just changes to epilogue.On Thu, Jan 7, 2010 at 10:51 AM, Barrett Brown <barriticus@gmail.com> wrote:
Just realized I left a couple of loose ends in the epilogue, going to make a couple of changes to it this morning.
On Wed, Jan 6, 2010 at 5:14 PM, Rachel Trusheim <rachel@sterlingandross.com> wrote:
Thanks, Barrett! We'll start reading this!Rachel TrusheimExecutive Editor212.244.2084 ext. 111
On Jan 6, 2010, at 1:33 PM, Barrett Brown wrote:Okay, here it is.On Wed, Jan 6, 2010 at 12:11 PM, Barrett Brown <barriticus@gmail.com> wrote:
Okay, will send it over within 30.
On Wed, Jan 6, 2010 at 12:10 PM, Rachel Trusheim <rachel@sterlingandross.com> wrote:
Whole document in Word attachment would be best for me, so I don't accidentally use an earlier or incomplete version.Thanks!Rachel TrusheimExecutive Editor212.244.2084 ext. 111
On Jan 6, 2010, at 12:05 PM, Barrett Brown wrote:Okay, just about done with epilogue; want me to send you a new master document with that and everything else in it, or do you just want to take it off the shared Google doc when it's done?
On Tue, Jan 5, 2010 at 3:52 PM, Barrett Brown <barriticus@gmail.com> wrote:
Oops, here it actually is. I've also pasted it into the e-mail in the unlikely event that it is formatted better there.Acknowledgment
For my mother, to whom I owe everything and more. No acknowledgment will ever suffice.Introduction: A Word Album, LOL
A firm rule must be imposed upon our nation before it destroys itself. The United States needs some theology and geometry, some taste and decency. I suspect that we are teetering on the edge of the abyss.- A Confederacy of Dunces
In 2002, the Pulitzer Prize in the category of commentary was awarded to New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman. In 2004, Friedman was made a member of the Pulitzer's board of directors. Our nation is killing itself from within.
Every nation is always killing itself from within. Every golden age occurred some fifty years previous, and every such golden age could have gone on forever had it not been brought to an end by some misguided contingent of one's own countrymen. One's political enemies are always in control of the state, if only covertly or indirectly; in the modern age, they've branched out into the media for good measure.
Crime, you'll recall, spiraled out of control in the 1970s, increasing exponentially until such time as the federal government ceased to function altogether. Wealthy citizens moved into self-contained arcologies defended by private mercenary armies, while the poor organized themselves into communal military tribes, some seizing territory within the ruined cities, some taking to the highways in order that they might launch raids on the fortified hamlets into which rural Americans had organized themselves out of desperation.
On another occasion, the proliferation of nuclear power plants throughout the United States resulted in the accidental destruction of several major cities. Likewise, the proliferation of evolutionary theory and the decline of Biblical literalism resulted in the inevitable rise of a global government, itself led by a New Age tyrant who demands to be worshiped alongside some unspecified mother goddess.
The sexual revolution led to an epidemic of lesbianism and infanticide. Welfare reform led just as inevitably to mass starvation in the inner cities. The New Deal continued to snowball until 90 percent of the U.S. workforce was employed by the Works Progress Administration, digging trenches and putting on Eugene O'Neil plays. Megacorporations replaced most remaining national governments in the late '90s. Everyone is now a crack addict.
Eight hundred thousand years from now, the human race will be divided into two species - one shall live on the surface, and the other beneath the ground.
To the extent that we look back and examine the predictions of our predecessors, we find ourselves confronted with a great deal of nonsense. This is a fine thing, as nonsense is wholly important. In studying nonsense, we find certain common characteristics that we may use to identify further nonsense of the contemporary sort, the nonsense that plagues us just now. We may determine, for instance, that many of the foolish predictions that have been made in the past are quite clearly the result of ideology. One opposes nuclear power, and thus nuclear power will lead to disaster. One opposes the theory of evolution, and thus the theory of evolution will lead to immorality. One opposes the sexual revolution, and thus let us ignore him.
If we are to divide the causes of poor predictions into two categories, we would probably make ideology one of them. The other category, just as probably, would be that of extrapolation, the act of making determinations about the future based on the trends that have reached us here in the present by way of the past and which, one tends to assume, will continue their growth into the future.
When I was a kid, I came across an old copy of National Geographic from 1949 or thereabouts. An article within, which had been entitled "Your Future World of Tomorrow" or some such stupid fucking thing in accordance with the low-concept style employed by our ancestors, detailed several technological innovations that would soon come to revolutionize our lives. One of these would be the practice of filling rockets with express mail and then shooting them across the Atlantic, to be retrieved by either Europeans or Americans as the case may be. Note that at the time of this prediction, the transatlantic cable had already been in existence for nearly a hundred years. On the other hand, a lot of rockets had been fired lately. So perhaps even more would soon be fired, except with mail inside of them.
The problem with extrapolation is that it is entirely necessary. When we drive a car - I guess it has two steering wheels - we drive a certain speed in a certain direction. A tree is straight ahead. We extrapolate that, if we are to continue on our present course, we will hit that tree and then the cops will come and they'll probably find what we've got stashed in the glove compartment. But having extrapolated this tree-hitting scenario from our present course, we will probably just turn the car a bit so that we are no longer headed for this problematic tree. Perhaps we will get back on the highway, where there are considerably less trees to hit, but at any rate we have in this case successfully used the art of extrapolation to avoid hitting the tree and thereby we are more likely to successfully make it to our destination, which is Enrique's girl's crib.
If some pedestrian is observing the car at such point as it is headed towards the tree, he might very well make an extrapolation of his own - that, because the vehicle has been heading in a particular direction, this trend will continue until the car hits the tree. This is not the best bet to make, as cars are almost invariably driving in the direction of some object that it ought not hit, yet their drivers almost invariably turn before such time as their cars would have otherwise hit that object. In this case, the pedestrian forgot to allow for another extrapolation - that because cars rarely hit things due to drivers making extrapolations of their own, this car is thus not likely to hit anything either.
Let us not conclude from the failures of past predictions that we ought not to make any of our own; we must simply learn from the errors of the past and properly apply the data of the present. Cars do sometimes hit things, after all, and this need happen only once for everyone inside to be killed.
The purpose of this book is to convince the American reader that our republic is in the midst of an extraordinary structural crisis that threatens to cripple the nation and end its reign as the world's foremost superpower.
***
So, dig this.
Clearly, CNN anchorperson Kyra Phillips was about to lay something heavy on the 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 dapper 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, and most especially to the time in which Psalm 83 was actually written, when Israel faced
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 cable news, 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, as we will see.
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've had the same case of athlete's foot for years. I actually sort of cultivate it because when the respective areas between your toes start to itch and you rub them, oh, man, it feels amazing. I feel sorry for the vast majority of humanity for not having thought of this like I have.
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!
Let's examine 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 books 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.
***
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. 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 been inclined to 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, which seems like an oversight.
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, most 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, two years after Reagan had already left the White House, so one has 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, 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; 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 realm of mundane, secular prophets, which is why William Kristol still has his own magazine.
***
We see that the various great religious prophets of the last century were both perpetually wrong in their predictions and perpetually successful in selling more of them even after the earlier ones had already proven to be wrong. What we shall soon see is that the most respected and influential columnists of the last decade work in a similar fashion. That is the crisis with which this book is concerned - that, and the greater crisis which will almost certainly follow as a result.
Thomas Friedman
The Soviet Union officially ceased to exist on New Years Eve of 1991, replaced in large by the Russian Federation. Such a transition as this was without precedent, although the country itself was still overflowing with precedent, most of it terrible.
In December of 2001, Thomas Friedman took a trip to Moscow in order that the American citizenry might be better informed regarding the nation with which it had previously been locked into a half-century struggle that had ended millions of lives and threatened a billion more. The resulting column began with two observations; it seemed that "sushi bars are opening all over (yes, from borscht to Big Macs to California-Kremlin rolls in one decade!) and so many people have cars now that traffic is permanently snarled."
One could have perhaps ascribed such growth to the 1998 devaluation of the ruble, several years of significant increases in the price of oil and other Russian exports, or to the economic reforms that had been spearheaded largely by former Prime Minister Primakov a few years prior to Friedman's writing, but such things as those lack a certain thematic oomph. The Russians, Friedman explained, had finally gotten themselves a leader worth having in the transformative person of Vladimir Putin. "He's not a tougher Mikhail Gorbachev, or a more sober Boris Yeltsin," our columnist told us then. "He is Russia's first Deng Xiaoping - Mao's pragmatic successor who first told the Chinese that 'to get rich is glorious' and put in place the modernizing reforms to do it." If one was not already convinced that Putin is what Friedman said him to be, one had only to read the words that Putin would himself have written if Friedman were writing them for him, which is exactly what Friedman did:
That is Mr. Putin's basic message to Russians: ''For a decade, we've tried every bad idea, from default to devaluation to shock therapy. Now there's only one idea left: passing real reform legislation so we can get real investment to build a real modern economy. Because in this world, without a real economic foundation, you're nothing. So we're going to focus now on the only line that matters -- the line for money.''
Having expressed the Russian president's views and intentions for him, the New York Times columnist was perhaps in the best position to summarize the significance of the fictional monologue he had just composed. And so he did that, too: "This is Putinism: From Das Kapital to DOScapital."
It is fine to know such things or at least believe them, but faith without works is dead. Friedman therefore ends his column with the following call to action: "So keep rootin' for Putin - and hope that he makes it to the front of Russia's last line."
***
On New Years Eve of 1999, Boris Yelstin suddenly resigned, thereby elevating Vladimir Putin to the presidency of the Russian Federation. Within hours, Putin had signed into law his first decree, which protected Yeltsin and members of his family from any and all corruption probes.
Earlier that year, Yelstin had dismissed the nation's most highly-placed prosecutor, Yuri Skuratov, who himself had been investigating Yelstin and others close to him regarding various allegations of corruption; $600,000 had made it into the credit card accounts of the president's two daughters, for instance, having been put there by a Swedish firm which had previously won a lucrative government contract and thereafter had its offices raided by Swedish law enforcement.
A few days after the sacking, Russian state television ran a video clip of a man resembling Skurativ in bed with a pair of young whores. The following month, a press conference was held in which it was announced that the post-KGB intelligence agency, the FSB, had run an expert analysis on the tape and determined the man to indeed be the nation's former top prosecutor; it was also alleged that the prostitutes had been provided by leading figures of the Russian mafia. The press conference was presided over by two men: Interior Minister Sergei Stepashin and FSB chief Vladimir Putin.
On June 6th of that same year, Moscow-based journalist Jan Blomgren reported that top Kremlin leaders were planning to carry out a series of bombings in Moscow that would be attributed to Chechen terrorists.
On August 9th, Putin was elevated to one of the three First Deputy Prime Ministerships that existed under Yelstin, who let it be known that he intended Putin to eventually succeed him. A week later, Putin was elevated again, this time to the position of prime minister. Yevgeny Primakov, the extraordinarily popular and seemingly incorruptible former prime minister whom Yeltsin had fired from that position the previous May, was widely seen as the favorite to win the upcoming presidential election. In contrast, a major poll showed Putin receiving about two percent of the vote.
On September 9th, an explosion originating from the ground floor of an apartment building in Moscow killed 94 people and injured several hundred others. An anonymous call to the Russian news agency Interfax characterized the strike as "our response to air strikes against peaceful villages in Chechnya and Dagestan;" the latter republic had been invaded by a small force of Islamist fighters led by Chechen militant and political figure Shamil Basayev during the previous month, prompting a successful military response by Russian forces. The apartment bombing was immediately attributed to Chechen terrorists.
On September 13th, another Moscow apartment was hit by a similar bomb, resulting in even greater casualties than the first. Soon thereafter, Gennadiy Seleznyov, speaker of the Duma, interrupted the legislative body's proceedings after having been handed a note by a man who was later identified as being a member of the FSB; he announced that he had just been informed of another massive explosion that had destroyed a portion of an apartment building in Volgodonsk. No such attack had actually occurred.
On September 16th, another massive explosion destroyed a portion of an apartment building in Volgodonsk.
On September 22nd, residents of an apartment building in Ryazan called local police after noticing suspicious activity by three individuals who had arrived in a car with a partly-concealed license plate. A bomb squad discovered and diffused an explosive device which their gas sniffing equipment identified as employing hexagen, the same rare explosive used in the previous blasts. The surrounding area was evacuated for the evening; agents of the FSB arrived to pick up the explosives. On the following morning, government spokespersons announced that the Ryazan police had successfully prevented a terrorist attack.
Later in the day, police located the suspects' car, which had Moscow plates. Meanwhile, a long-distance telephone operator contacted police after overhearing a conversation in which the caller reported that local cops were sweeping the city; the voice on the other line provided the following advice: "Split up and each of you make your own way out." The number that had been called, it was discovered, was to the FSB offices in Moscow.
The three suspects were found and arrested within hours. All three of them were in possession of cards indicating their status as employees of the FSB, and all were soon released on orders from Moscow. The FSB announced that the foiled attack had in fact merely been a test conducted in order to determine the readiness of local investigators and congratulated the Ryazan police force for having passed with flying colors. Spokespersons for that agency claimed that the bags, now in FSB possession, had been filled only with sugar and dismissed the initial police tests indicating the presence of hexagen as an equipment malfunction.
On October 1st, Putin announced that Russian forces stationed in and around Dagestan had entered into Chechnya in an attempt to establish a buffer zone north of the Terek River by which to prevent further terrorist attacks originating from terrorists based in that country. As Russian attention came to focus more on the perceived military triumphs that would follow, and as Putin came to be most closely associated with those triumphs, the prime minister's popularity skyrocketed. Parliamentary elections in December saw major gains for those parties with whom Putin had publicly associated himself.
A few days after Putin's sudden elevation, the U.K.-based newspaper The Independent published excerpts from an interview with Sergei Stepashin in which the former interior minister and one-time prime minister - the same fellow who had presided over the sex tape press conference with Putin back in April - revealed that the plan to invade Chechnya "had been worked out in March" by key Kremlin figures including himself.
After easily winning the March 2000 presidential election, Putin set to work reorganizing Russia's institutions. He proposed that the Federal Council be "reformed" in order to provide himself with direct control of it, a move he described as being necessary due to widespread corruption within that governing body (Putin was now concerned with corruption). In May of 2000, he successfully ended the independence of the nation's semi-autonomous state-level entities by dividing them into seven regional jurisdictions, each presided over in turn by one of his own appointees. By the end of the year, he had also managed to gain effective control over all three national television networks.
In December of 2001, Thomas Friedman traveled to Moscow and reported back that sushi restaurants had sprung up across the city and that more people seemed to own cars these days. He ascribed this economic resurgence to "Putinism."
***Thomas Friedman is among the most respected and widely-read American pundits working today, which is to say that he is among the most influential. His books crowd the bestseller lists. His lectures are much sought out and attended by the economic elite of every city on which he descends. If one goes home for Thanksgiving and waits around long enough, one will hear him praised by both elderly old Republicans and elderly old Democrats. If one meets one's girlfriend's upper middle-class father in his den or study, and if this room is composed largely of hardwood paneling or furniture or some such, one will find a copy of either The World is Flat or The Lexus and the Olive Tree, though usually not both of them.
Friedman's 2003 bestseller Longitudes and Attitudes - which is called that - begins, reasonably enough, with an introduction. The introduction is entitled, Introduction: A Word Album. You've probably heard of a photo album before, but what's all this about a word album?
The columnist is happy to explain; the book is a composite of columns that he wrote mostly in 2001 and 2002, followed by a great deal of previously-unpublished notes from a similar timeframe. My hope is that this collection and diary will constitute a 'word album' for the September 11th experience, he writes. There are many photo albums that people will collect to remind themselves, their children, or their grandchildren what it was like to experience 9/11. These columns and this diary are an attempt to capture and preserve in words, rather than pictures, some of those same emotions."
This is the mentality of Friedman and his readership - that it would be reasonable to compose a personal photo album about September 11th and maybe keep it in a special drawer. Eventually, one's grandchild finds the album while looking for some plaything and, curious, begins flipping through the pages, asking what it all means. One tells him the story of how we had to run for shelter when the promise of a brave new world unfurled beneath a clear blue sky, perhaps with a romantic subplot thrown in. Afterwards, the child ambles off down the hall; one wonders if he understood it, the significance of it all. But then the child turns around, hesitates a moment, and says, "You were all so brave." Then he goes outside, possessed of new insights both simple and profound, regarding both his country and his grandparent. A single tear rolls down one's eye as one watches the child through the window, at play - or perhaps lost in thought?
***
Contempt for the media is now ubiquitous but largely misdirected to the extent that these criticisms are based on the view of the media as some sort of monolithic entity.
The news media is the product of a million individuals, each subject to a million impulses. The cable TV news producer in the pink scarf doesn't understand what's to be debated on this morning's program and doesn't care; she's in the green room talking to another girl from guest booking about the latter's old boyfriend and the former's pink scarf. The freelancer on deadline need not get the feature right if he can just get it done before the girl he's seeing arrives with a bottle of vodka. The publisher lives in the shadow of the father who bequeathed to him the most iconic paper in America; he knows that many see the paper's recent failures as deriving in part from his own; he knows what's said about him in the newsroom; he will prove his worth and his dynamism, he thinks to himself, when he gives William Kristol a column on the op-ed page. Maybe that was too specific.
There is also, of course, the consumer. The woman who subscribes to The New York Times may or may not read the op-ed page, which is to say that she may or may not contribute to the paper's profitability - and thus its continued existence - based on what appears in that section. If she does read it, she is probably unaware that her favorite columnist has been demonstrably wrong about many of the most important issues facing both the U.S. and the world at large. The columnist's errors have been pointed out by several bloggers, but she has never heard of them, and at any rate does not bother with blogs as she subscribes to The New York Times, which is a very respected outlet and has been around for well over a century, whereas these blogs seem to have come out of nowhere. The columnist, she knows, has won several Pulitzers, has written a handful of bestselling books, is forever traveling to some far-off place. She has formed her foreign policy in large part from his writings as well as from the writings of other, similarly respected journalists, and she votes accordingly.
When systems develop under a free society, no one is minding the store. Things happen because they happen, and things do not necessarily happen because they ought to, but rather because they do. The journalist is promoted to columnist, the consumer finds the columns to her liking, the columnist becomes more prominent, the publisher wants columnists of prominence, the editor is disinclined to cross the publisher and is most likely an idiot himself, the columnist writes more books, the consumer buys them, the columnist's prominence increases, and at some point we have entered into a situation whereby it is to the advantage of the publisher, the editor, and of course the columnist to maintain the status quo. Whether the columnist deserves any prominence whatsoever does not necessarily come up, particularly after such point as he reaches a critical mass of noteriety. Once a pundit is made, he is rarely unmade.
***
When I was 22 or thereabouts, I lost my longtime gig as a copywriter and found myself compelled to work six-day weeks as a furniture mover for a Pentecostal church. When companies relocated, they would donate their discarded desks and chairs and whatnot to this church, the employees of which would pick it all up and store it in a warehouse until such time as individual pieces could be refurbished and sold off. Of course, the company paid no taxes on any of this, as the company was a church a church that took free furniture and then sold it.
Each morning I would find myself sitting in the cab of an eighteen-wheeler with one of the ex-meth addicts with whom I was employed. On one occasion, we were joined by this doughy, bearded, bespectacled, middle-aged crackerjack who was technically employed by the church in maintaining its servers and websites and such things but who was on this day recruited to assist us in our grunt work, someone else having failed to show up that morning. The fellow's long term plan was to start his own internet-based ministry. This, incidentally, is the long term plan of about a sixth of all middle-aged Pentecostals.
A song came on the radio and this doughy fellow asked me who it was. I informed him that this was Led Zeppelin, and a secret smile flitted across the fellow's bearded, doughy face.
"Rock stars," he said, shaking his head but still smiling. "I call them Prophets of Baal, because they preach another way."
The doughy fellow was developing his own little terminological conventions in preparation for the ministry that he would someday found. This made a huge impression on me, apparently, as I mention it here for no good reason.
Thomas Friedman, like his Pentecostal counterpart, is forever calling things things. He introduces his readers to the concept of 21st century trade thusly: "These global markets are made up of millions of investors moving money around the world with a click of a mouse. I call them the Electronic Herd, and this herd gathers in key global financial centers such as Wall Street, Hong Kong, London, and Frankfurt which I call the Supermarkets. He elsewhere informs us that he is "a big believer in the idea of the super-story, the notion that we all carry around with us a big lens, a big framework, through which we look at the world, order events, and decide what is important and what is not."
Friedman is correct that it is wholly necessary to conceptualize our data into understandable frameworks in order that we might better understand it. But the framework into which Friedman has forced the world is almost entirely dependent on wordplay, on convenient structural similarities between unrelated terminology, on rhymes and sayings. In 2000, the columnist composed a "super-story" regarding Colin Powell, whose nomination for secretary of state was expected to be confirmed later in the week.
One way to think about Mr. Powell is this: He spent thirty-five years of his life with America Onduty, as a military officer. But for the past two years he's been associated with America Online, as a member of the AOL corporate board. So which perspective will Mr. Powell bring to his job as Secretary of State the perspective he gleaned with America Onduty during the cold war or the perspective he gleaned with America Online in the post-cold war?
No serious discussion of Powell's record or policies follows; no new information is provided; it is never acknowledged that perhaps Powell is capable of thinking of the world in both the terms of a military officer and the terms of an information-age corporate advisory board member even though Powell has clearly served as both of these things. After all, Friedman has already coined the term America Onduty, contrasted it with the term America Online, and provided some allegedly clever distinction between the two mentalities represented thereby. We are informed, for instance, that those who fall under the category of 'America Onduty' enjoy the film A Few Good Men and see the world in terms of walls and nation states, because, you see, a character in that very film delivered some line to that effect and it seems to have made an impression on Friedman. Those associated with the 'America Online' mentality, by contrast, enjoy the film You've Got Mail because such people as these understand that the world is now integrated, and that the receiving of e-mail is a wonderful metaphor for the relatively recent dynamic whereby things occurring elsewhere now effect us all directly and with complete immediacy ("When a Russian financial crisis occurs, we've got mail"). Wrapping up the column, Friedman restates the question: "So which lens is Mr. Powell wearing the one he developed with America Onduty, or with America Online?"
Even such an insufferable framework as this would be of value to the extent that it truly assists in helping Friedman and his citizen-readers to understand Colin Powell and the mentalities that inform him, to draw useful conclusions from this understanding, and to make wiser and better-informed decisions in terms of the manner in which they vote, contribute, advocate, purchase, and otherwise interact with the various entities into which man's efforts are organized. If the public understanding is increased by dividing Powell's consciousness into that of America Online and some variant of that brand name and then
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