EDGE on the Net

The first time I heard about Armageddon was on a family day-trip to San Francisco. I was in Mom’s Ford Country Squire station wagon, headed across the Bay Bridge, when my older brothers broke the news. I couldn’t have been more than seven or eight, and we were off to spend a day in Golden Gate Park, a glorious place where you could gaze at waterfalls in the Japanese Tea Gardens, then run over to the aquarium and throw coins in the jungle-like alligators’ pit. On that sunny blue day the world’s reflections bounced like eternity sparkles. Who knew it could end in a flash.

The triangle skyline had just come into focus when my brothers pointed out, with almost deviant euphoria, that a nuclear holocaust could hit any moment and vaporize the lot of us. It made me want to skip Seal Beach and head back, not to home, but to that innocent time when all my brothers got euphoric over was Raquel Welch’s cave-girl bikini, or terrorizing me with rubber-band shots.

By junior high I’d made the mistake of reading "Hiroshima," a book that confirmed my fear that soon enough I’d be a tar-like imprint. By now it wasn’t a question of if, but when. I’d fall asleep with the radio on, knowing that, as long as the Emergency Broadcast Channel didn’t interrupt the Top 40, I was safe. As I got older, TV took over as my security blanket, and I dreaded those end-of-night anthem blackouts. MTV had many virtues, my favorite being that it stayed on 24/7.

My baby-sitter’s apocalyptic sermons had been spooky fun. Becky told my older sisters and me about Heaven and Hell and which way we were headed, third degree burns for eternity and all. Then she’d turn on "Mary Tyler Moore" and tell us we were too young to understand the show. Becky’s end-of-days version titillated me, for it involved floods and fires and mudslides and all sorts of other special effects that were just making the rounds in films like "Earthquake" and "The Towering Inferno." I couldn’t wait for something even better than Sensurround.

Becky fell out of favor after she chaperoned my sisters on a bus trip to see my grandmother in Minnesota -- and then fled en route. Carrie’s mom would have been a more suitable sitter. We’d been crossing our fingers in hopes that she gotten swallowed up by a lava flow, until she showed up at our door one day, unannounced, with family in tow. Next to civilization’s demise, Becky’s biggest dream was to get married and have children. With her eczema, extra weight, and oily straight hair down to her waist, she’d never had much luck. I almost felt happy for her, until she introduced her Jesus-meets-Charles-Manson husband and matching baby. One look at the child’s glazed-over stare and I knew which book she’d been rocking him to sleep with.

The beginning of the end popped up daily in the 80’s, when Ronald Reagan ruled and front-page headlines told us the missiles were about to fly. "The Day After" replaced "Night of the Living Dead" as the scariest movie ever made, the English Beat promised to melt with me, Blondie went "Atomic," and those zombie-like Jehovah’s Witnesses raided street corners with cheery Watchtower Armageddon reminders. They greeted me on my way to higher education.

I heard a story on the radio about families who’d deserted their homes and moved to the desert. The world was about to blow, and they saw no reason to educate their children or mow their lawns or be productive. Sometimes I wonder how long it took for them to realize they’d miscalculated. I’m fairly certain they went on to become the creators of "The Bachelor."

Prince reminded us that everybody’s got a bomb so we should party like it’s 1999, then Y2K hit, and a friend informed me of the New Year apocalypse. For proof, he cited a naked woman running around San Francisco to warn people. My sister’s ex-boyfriend told us of aligning planets and world’s end. He was the same guy who once told me everything in "The Amityville Horror" was true. I was curious if that also meant the cheesy effects. I won’t delve into the (falsified) Nostradamus emails after 9/11, but I never understood why, by 9/12, people were bombarding me with time-consuming number-11 theories. Less-philosophical earthlings were preoccupied with slightly more urgent matters, like searching for loved ones under the rubble.

The end of the world’s a no-brainer, and a biblical excuse for lack of introspection. Just ask the woman who didn’t make it to the top, and exploited her leadership loss by leaving her job and responsibilities, and writing a book in which every non-believer is blamed for her failure. She started a media circus to damn to hell the media, and spewed biblical nonsense to deter anyone from asking a question she didn’t care to answer. And if Carrie Prejean thinks it’s an inappropriate query, ask Sarah Palin instead.

The people with little to offer on this earth obsess over any alternative; even worse, they’re determined to bring you down with them. Just as audiences forked over $65 million for "2012"’s opening weekend, a movie based on a Mayan prophecy that, sorry guys, has been debunked, street-walking Christians pass out "End of World" pamphlets in New York subway stations -- then ask for money to survive. Doomsday is profitable. Just in time for the holidays we have "The Road," the apocalyptic movie based on the novel that actually made me wish for the end -- of the book. Diehard fans will tell you the story is about hope, not destruction, and even simpletons can tell you which holiday film will keep the studios from extinction.

The Kool-Aid-drinking, doomsday-dependency cultists (aka Right Wing Evangelicals) use the end of your world to make their own future bright. (Jim Jones kept his flock obedient by telling them nuclear war would strike in 1967; little did they know their real apocalypse would occur eleven years later.) Wouldn’t it be nice if the Religious Right liked Jewish people because they’re, well, people, as opposed to chess players in the Rapture? Anti-Semites like Pat Buchanan remind me of my grandparents who supported black people provided they never came out of the kitchen unless it was to mop the rest of their floors.

Religious warfare’s the talk of the town, at least in regards to healthcare. (Jihad’s nothing next to Hell on our own turf.) Utah senator Orrin G. Hatch said the healthcare bills would start a "holy war," without irony or repercussions. Hatch, along with much of the New GOP, are on a crusade to destroy the heathens; defined, in their book, as "he who disagrees with me." The rightful disciples’ first target is Satan-in-Chief. You always work your way down.

Trendy Christian T-shirts, bumper stickers, and Tweets ask you to "Pray for Obama," with the fine print underneath citing Psalm 109:8. The Psalm, which starts by asking that "his days be few," follows with "Let his children be fatherless, and his wife a widow." In days of yore, around 2002, 44 percent of Americans believed it was Islam, not Christianity, that was most likely "to encourage violence among its believers." That was the about the same time in which praying for the President’s death would be considered a sin. We know how the Bible ends, and the sickest among us dangle it over our heads like a brick held up by gum.

One of my favorite flicks as a kid was "The Omen," the 1976 film about the anti-Christ’s ascent to earth. It was a roller coaster thrill ride, with its creepy kid, creepier priest, nannies hanging themselves, baboons running amuck, and heads a rolling. It was also just about the silliest thing in the world (on a par with that Bugs Bunny Martian who planned to blow the Earth up because "It’s obstructing my view of Venus"), opening with that creepy -- and made-up -- prophetic poem, and ending with little Damien/Satan managing to off everyone around him before being adopted by the President of the United States. While I saw it as escapist fun, others viewed it as an instruction manual.

In reality, Armageddon is true horror, not a subject to terrify your children with -- or your constituents -- and something that should be avoided like the plague, or locusts, or blood-filled rivers. While there are plenty of reasons to fear our demise (war, pollution, Oprah’s exit), it’s hope, not Hell, that deserves our attention. Fear isn’t a bargaining chip; it’s blackmail. The end is useful only when justifying the means to our survival.

I asked my mother once if the world were coming to an end. She didn’t think so, and told me that, as a child herself, no more than seven or eight, she’d heard FDR speak of war on the radio, and was certain a bomb was about to drop. When you’re an only child on a farm in Minnesota, the planet doesn’t get much bigger than your immediate surroundings. The radio is your gospel. Mom’s lived through a few wars since then, the Bay of Pigs, Harbors and Towers, environmental manslaughter and murder, earthquakes and fires and tornadoes and snowstorms, and her own Book of Revelations-preaching mother. She’s still here, and so am I, and so are we. It isn’t divine intervention that’s saving the planet; it’s the world within us.