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CounterPunch
February
13, 2003
Signs from Above?
An Anxious America
Waits--and Watches
By JENNIFER C. BERKSHIRE
The pieces of the space shuttle Columbia had barely
fallen to earth before the heavens were invoked. The Iraqis summoned
Allah, describing the disaster as heavenly retribution. "God
wants to show that his might is greater than the Americans,"
an oft-quoted government employee is reported to have said. "They
have encroached on our country. God is avenging us."
President George Bush was the next to
point to a higher-up that day. In his address to the nation after
the crash, Bush would quote the words of the prophet Isaiah,
imploring Americans to look to the heavens for comfort and hope.
"Who created all these?" asked Isaiah, as relayed by
his earthly rep, the president, as he craned skyward. "The
same Creator who names the stars also knows the names of the
seven souls we mourn today," said Bush. And while the astronauts
may not have made it back to earth, he concluded, we can pray
that they are all safely home.
Not everyone in the audience was convinced.
Hours after the president's address, a heretic post appeared
on a popular Christian web site: "[S]ince Bush is a fundamentalist
Christian," wrote the naysayer, "he certainly believes
that many of the astronauts are actually on their way to hell."
Heaven or hell, Bush didn't specify; perhaps home can be either.
Whether Americans took the explosion
at 250,000 feet as a sign of His divine retribution is unclear,
but many certainly took it as a sign of something. With nerves
rubbed raw over the prospect of war, and the economy moribund,
people here were suffering from a kind of national edginess long
before last weekend. You could hear it in their voices as they
flooded cable TV and radio stations with calls about the disaster.
"I just can't believe this is happening," said Charlene
from Lubbock, TX. "It's like we just got over the last thing
and now there's something else," said Martin from Houston.
There was the usual bravado, bold claims
about how Americans have a special responsiblity--a destiny even--
to chart the heavens. "They need to get right back up there
and get the space program going again because that is what makes
this country great," said Louis from Albuquerque. But underneath
the bluster, doubt was creeping, and anguish worrying: are we
now the sort of people to whom bad things happen? What will happen
to us next? Will war produce the worst thing of all?
For the millions of Americans who gathered
in front of their television sets that day, watching as the shuttle
blazed its fiery trail over and over again, a religious explanation
of what's happening to us might have proved soothing. But for
every born-again Christian like President Bush, secure in the
knowledge that he will proceed direct to heaven, there are two
non-believers who are pretty sure that it's all over when it's
over. And more still are merely muddling through. So instead
of the big religions we console ourselves with the small ones:
television, pseudoscience, celebrity. As we stared at our screens,
we let ourselves be lulled by the well-modulated tones of the
commentators, and sought refuge in a wealth of scientific terms
we would never really understand: debris trajectory analysis,
reboosting, reinforced carbon carbon. By afternoon, the world
was back to normal; the first pieces of shuttle debris had been
placed up for auction on E-Bay.
One might suspect that the more prophetically-minded
Americans would have found irresistible the heavy-handed symbolism
of the event: the presence of an Israeli astronaut on board;
the fact that the shuttle broke up over Palestine, TX. But the
prophet seekers are watching for bigger signs these days, the
kind that flash "apocalypse."
With tensions simmering in the Middle
East, and war with Iraq likely to ignite them further, fundamentalist
Christians in the US are more convinced than ever that Armageddon
is nearly upon us. These biblical literalists believe that in
order for Christ to return, Israel must first be reconstituted,
and the Jewish Temple, destroyed in 70 AD, rebuilt so that the
Antichrist can desecrate it. Thus will be kicked off a period
in which the non-faithful among us will not fare well at all.
"The stage is being set for what Jesus' disciples called
'the sign of His coming and the end of the age,'" writes
the Reverend Tim LaHaye, whose end-of-time novels sit perennially
atop the New York Times best-seller list.
Despite the burgeoning strength of the
conservative Christian movement--and its disturbing influence
within the Bush administration--most Americans are not preoccupied
with end time matters; the present moment is disturbing enough.
Less than a week after the Columbia fell out of the sky, US Attorney
General John Ashcroft, himself a true believer, raised the nation's
terror threat level to high. The warnings are at once impossibly
vague--'soft targets' including apartments, hotels, sports arenas
and amusement parks have been placed on high alert--and agonizingly
specific: computer simulated graphics of dirty bombs are detonated
on television night after night.
Describing the moment at which the faithful
will be summoned, suddenly to their heavenly home, leaving the
non-believers to endure seven final years of war and fury, Reverend
LaHaye writes that "[w]e know that the rapture of the church
is a signless event." For those of who dread deeply the
prospect of unending war, the signs couldn't be clear enough.
Jennifer C. Berkshire is a writer in Boston. Contact her at jenniferberkshire@hotmail.com.
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February 8
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