Armageddon

No one ever seems to see the positive side of Armageddon.

Let's say you live in a little midwestern town full of Christianny goodness. Everyone goes to Church, everyone hates people with "different" lifestyles, everyone agrees that the Government is in league with The Devil. Well, maybe not "everyone", but at least most of the people you talk to on a regular basis, and enough people to convince you that there are a majority of right-thinking people in your little corner of the world.

But you watch enough teevee and listen to your cranky preacher-man rant about rampant immorality, and you notice that the even the young'uns in your peaceful little town are starting to pierce their noses and bare their midriffs -- and it begins to seem totally obvious that things will get worse and worse and worse as time goes on. In thirty years, there will be transvestite hookers on Main Street, and in fifty there will be giant neon-signed Churches of Satan on every corner. The further you push your imagination into the future, the worse the picture becomes. Because the preacher-man has made it clear that all you can do is stand against the tide. Sending it rolling in the other direction is unthinkable.

But the preacher-man has an answer to your fears. And it's not just that the good will be forgiven, or that the evil will be punished, but that this horrible future of your nightmares will NEVER HAPPEN. No hookers, no crack-houses, no weirdos doing things God Never Intended, but a clean, crisp blackened landscape, burnt to a lifeless cinder by the All-Loving Hand of the Lord. In order to save the village, it will become necessary to destroy it.

Now, once you understand this basic principle, it's time to put aside your prejudices against small-minded midwestern Christianfolk and see where your own feelings lie. I went to a lovely liberal-arts college in Santa Cruz that's now turning into an overpopulated idiot factory, cutting down hundred foot redwood trees like they were plucking dandelions, to make way for ugly buildings, bad teachers, and students who will graduate as illiterate morons. Would I, if I knew I wouldn't get caught, be tempted to cover its grounds with a fatal nerve agent, killing any human who came within five miles of it over the next 50 years? You betcha! I mean, I'd probably give them advance warning so they could pack up and leave, but better it be preserved in my memory as a special place than continue circling down the toilet bowl towards the inevitable. Perhaps you have your own special place. Think Burning Man should just end now that it's gotten too big? You had such a good time in its early years, you don't want to be associated with the mindless followers of today. Perhaps you're a Madonna fan, but secretly think she's not really getting sexier as she approaches fifty? Maybe it's about time that she had a little "accident" before she ends up like Elizabeth Taylor? Think about it: isn't Pompeii an infinitely more interesting little Roman town than it probably seemed to the locals the day before Vesuvius blew?

Armageddon isn't about destruction. It's about preserving a place, an image, in an instant of time. Like preserving a butterfly by killing it and encasing it in lucite, sure, but preservation nonetheless. It's a way of saying "Things are better here, now, than they ever will be."

That it also says, "the future can suck my ass" is entirely incidental.