• All three seasons of Slings & Arrows are now free to watch (with ads) on YouTube. It’s as good as I remembered.
If you’re worried that enjoying an entertaining show seems frivolous given, well, everything else that’s going on these days, then just tell yourself that you’re demonstrating solidarity with our Canadian neighbors and allies by celebrating this fine example of their culture.
Plus it’s got an all-timer for an opening song:
• Naomi Klein (the good one) and Astra Taylor write about “The rise of end times fascism.”
Interestingly, at a time when previously secular Silicon Valley elites are suddenly finding Jesus, it is noteworthy that both of these visions – the priority-pass corporate state and the mass-market bunker nation – share a great deal in common with the Christian fundamentalist interpretation of the biblical Rapture, when the faithful will supposedly be lifted up to a golden city in heaven, while the damned are left to endure an apocalyptic final battle down here on earth.
If we are to meet our critical moment in history, we need to reckon with the reality that we are not up against adversaries we have seen before. We are up against end times fascism. …
You don’t need to be a biblical literalist, or even religious, to be an end times fascist. Today, plenty of powerful secular people have embraced a vision of the future that follows a nearly identical script, one in which the world as we know it collapses under its weight and a chosen few survive and thrive in various kinds of arks, bunkers and gated “freedom cities”. In a 2019 paper titled Left Behind: Future Fetishists, Prepping and the Abandonment of Earth, the communication scholars Sarah T Roberts and Mél Hogan described the longing for a secular Rapture: “In the accelerationist imaginary, the future is not about harm reduction, limits or restoration; rather it is a politics driving toward an endgame.”
I will, as always, point out that Rapture Christianity is absolutely not compatible with any attempt to be a “biblical literalist.” The arbitrary textual gymnastics required to impose the premillennial dispensationalist Rapture narrative onto biblical texts that literally will not accept that narrative are anything but “literalism.”
But Klein and Taylor make a convincing case for the parallels between the techbro future and the delirious fantasies of folks like Hal Lindsey and Tim LaHaye. Here, for example, is a song we sang in my Rapture-fundie Sunday school:
Somewhere in outer space
God has prepared a place
For those who trust Him and obey
Jesus will come again
And though we don’t know when
The Countdown’s getting lower every day.Ten and nine, eight and seven
Six and five and four
Call upon the Savior while you may
Three and two, coming through
The clouds in bright array
The Countdown’s getting lower every day
And here are Klein and Taylor on Elon Musk’s “end times fascism”:
Much like religious end-timers who long to escape the corporeal realm, Musk’s drive for humanity to become “multiplanetary” is made possible by his inability to appreciate the multispecies splendor of our only home. Evidently uninterested in the vast bounty that surrounds him, or in ensuring Earth can continue buzzing with diversity, he instead deploys his vast fortune to bring about a future that would see a handful of people and robots eke out survival on two barren orbs (a radically depleted Earth and a terraformed Mars). Indeed, in a strange twist on the Old Testament tale, Musk and his fellow tech billionaires, having arrogated god-like powers to themselves, aren’t content to just build the arks. They appear to be doing their best to cause the flood. Today’s rightwing leaders and their rich allies are not just taking advantage of catastrophes, shock-doctrine and disaster-capitalism style, but simultaneously provoking and planning for them.
There is a great deal to chew on in that long essay, but let me highlight the conclusion and add my “Amen”:
To have a hope of combating the end times fascists, with their ever-constricting and asphyxiating concentric circles of “ordered love”, we will need to build an unruly open-hearted movement of the Earth-loving faithful: faithful to this planet, its people, its creatures and to the possibility of a livable future for us all. Faithful to here.
• I told this story in clipped BlueSky form, but let me repeat it here because I think it’s an important parable about, oh, let’s call it the relationship between power and the consent of the governed.
Many years ago, I spent a week fishing on a lake in Maine with a couple of theology professors. One of them, my boss at the time, had a cabin near the shore of that lake, built on land owned by a timber company.
The company only offered short-term, renewable leases on the land, so my boss was worried that he might build his cabin, then have the company decide not to renew the lease and he’d lose the cabin and all the money he’d spent building it. So he visited with some of the other fishermen who had built cabins on leased land there and was surprised to learn that none of them was worried about that.
He couldn’t understand why not, until one old guy with a thick Down East accent explained it to him: “Well, they could decide to do that. But then there’d be a lot of fires.”
The arrangement was sustainable because the powerful corporate landlord knew this and remembered it. It is important that they never be allowed to forget it.
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