The Crook(s) Of Revelation |
CounterPunch Exclusives
CounterPunch Exclusives
The Crook(s) Of Revelation
There is the banality of evil and the evil of banality
Part and parcel of the phenomenology of hyper-authoritarian Christians: The more they claim their affinity and psychical binding to Jesus Christ, the more pronounced their shadow half, that could be termed as demonic. In essence, individuals who insist they are light-bearers — who insist they are delivering good news to the world — who claim the mantle of divine radiance, yet, as a rule, cast a huge shadow within which broods palpable evil, and are bad news for all they have been given dominion. To wit:
Sports reporter Sarah Spain on sitting near JD Vance at the Milan Olympics: “When I see JD Vance’s eyeliner face, I literally feel ill. I feel like I just looked at a demon, like the devil, and I don’t even believe in that. My body felt like when you have been spooked and you have a little tingle that feels like, ‘Ooh, something’s not right.’ Or like when you get in a situation and you feel like, ‘Oh, some of the energy’s bad, something could go wrong here, maybe I should get out of here,’ or something’s dangerous. He’s a human being, allegedly, but he exudes demon energy….[His presence] was disgusting to me.”
JD Vance’s mentor and key financial backer is Peter Thiel. The capitalist tech elite are maneuvering men like themselves to be the leadership templates of the future. The mythology of The Book Of Revelations was a Lovecraftian pulp jeremiad against the Roman Empire. Sarah Spain has sent back a dispatch from being within cringing distance of The Beast.
I had a friend since high school, an individual for whom the 1960s counterculture term, Jesus freak, would have been applicable. In those reefer-reeking, muscle car-deafening days Bill evinced the role of A lank-of-hair, love-you-neighbor sort of Christian. He and I had gone our individual ways over the span of decades. But, in recent years, we reestablished contact.
In the years since, his born again proclivities had drifted – then careened – rightward and authoritarian. His Episcopal Church domination had lapsed into schism between a liberal and conservative approach to Doctrine. Somewhere along the lines, he had donned the psychical mantle of a Christian Zionist thus he regarded me, a Jewish person, as somehow bearing a crucial element, expedited in the Final Days, that will summon Lord Jesus to appear in and then descent from the clouds and begin the redemption of thIs sin-sullied world.
In the days following the Oct 7 Israeli/Hamas hostilities, he became particularly solicitous, even to the paranoia-plangent point of offering his home as a place of refuge when (vaguely defined) forces would initiate US-style Nuremberg Laws against Jewish Americans. When I informed him that Jews were in zero danger from the US government, instead, due to the conflation of Zionism and Judaism, we posed a far greater danger to ourselves, he seemed dumbfounded, and even more so, and even to the point of taking offense, when, I posited, the role of Righteous Gentile should be fulfilled by shielding and sheltering the people that the US government terms as illegal. Withal, I requested he........