Eschaton, Yours, Mind, & Ours

"You will hear of wars and rumors of wars, but see to it that you are not alarmed. Such things must happen, but the end is still to come."

-Matthew 24:6

This sleep deprivation thing is getting to be a real problem. Eyes wide open at two, flop around and play on my phone (the worst possible response) until five or 5:30, then back asleep until seven. I've written about what social media intuits I'd like to see in the wee small hours--classic cars, short video clips from Billboard's top twenty songs when I was in the 8th grade, others of the ABC Thursday night TV lineup from this week in 1976. I'm thinking the fact that I paused to watch several of these last offerings over the last couple nights has led to the newest category of videos--AI generated "then and now" images of the cast members of the television shows we all watched (well, not P, whose family apparently didn't indulge in network slop every night, as did ours) as I was growing up.

These videos are frankly troubling.

Here's a typical offering, which you can only open if you have a Facebook account, if I understand correctly. It's the cast of Welcome Back Kotter, one of my favorite shows as a middle-schooler.

https://www.facebook.com/share/r/1BPLMZE1At/

They're always in a beautiful library or lobby of the fanciest hotel you've ever seen, sitting on plush couches. To paraphrase my favorite movie, "Is this heaven? No, it's Mar-a-Lago."

The actor sits to the left, looking as she did when the show aired. We see her age at the time printed just below her. Then her future self walks on-camera from the right, and sits next to her. Wait--why is the future version wearing angel wings, with straps holding them in place visible over her shoulders? Well, you see she's dead. Been dead for years. Half the cast of that show appears wearing those wings, most of whom died around the age we are right now.

I guess that in itself isn't creepy--it's part of life. What struck me about so many of these AI generated, deceased actors, is that they sit next to their old selves, wrap their ghostly arms around their own neck, and smile reassuringly, as if to say everything is going to be okay. Then both smile at the camera.

One who didn't smile with her future late self was Farrah Fawcett, who appeared in that hall of mostly corpses that used to be Charlie's Angels. Fawcett died of anal cancer at a fairly young age, and her angelic version looks tired and sad, as does Farrah in 1976.

Why do these videos call me up short? In part, I guess these characters, Barney Miller and Darren Stevens and the rest of the comedic troupe, would never age, would never die. And yet almost all of them have. It's a stark reminder of where I am in my own journey, with so many of them exiting this existence about the same moment in their lives that I'm walking into right now.

The calm, smiling reassurance from the deceased version (or in some cases the really old and wingless version, if they're still alive) also brings up the hope that in the end we'll realize it was all okay after all, and whatever happened back there that seemed so consequential no longer matters with the infinite horizon stretched out front.

Lent doesn't help, or maybe more accurately it makes me more sensitive to all that. My Lenten resolutions all have fallen by the wayside--church attendance, hewing to the daily office for a few weeks--none of that has happened. Instead, part of the late-night show before I turn it off with my iPhone is the playing out in my head of the anti-CV, the list of failures and people I've hurt over these last six decades. The prosecution is presenting its case-in-chief between my ears, and the images are not pretty at all. And without the religious structure to guide all this regret into something useful, all that's left is repentance with no redemption. No future deceased me is showing up on an opulent couch to hug my neck, and all the actual folks who used to fill that role are dead now.

So there's that.

In other news, it seems the religious right has so thoroughly entrenched itself into our officer corps that complaints are flooding in from the ranks that their commanders are exhorting them with promises that our latest discretionary war is a glorious and much anticipated thing because, of course, it's the beginning of the end times, the eschaton, as King Donald leads us down the path to Armageddon and into the arms of our returning Lord and Savior.

https://jonathanlarsen.substack.com/p/us-troops-were-told-iran-war-is-for

Probably not the most reassuring thing to hear if you're a Muslim or Jew serving in uniform.

Our military has long suffered from Christian nationalists penetrating its leadership ranks--I remember the Air Force Academy starting to force fundamentalist Christianity down the throats of its cadets a couple decades ago, and it obviously hasn't gotten better. So now our military and the Iranian Revolutionary Guards have one thing in common---religious certitude that makes them capable of horrible things, maybe even the end of civilization in one big mushroom cloud. "Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities," Voltaire warned. Fundamentalism, of any religious stripe, is on its face absurd. Having true believers holding the levers of destruction makes this moment particularly dangerous.

Then again, the one guy who's probably not onboard with the program is DJT himself, who'd be loathe to share centerstage with a scruffy carpenter from Galilee. So feel good going into Tuesday knowing that humanity's survival depends on the hubris of a demented pedophile who can't seem to tell Iran from Iraq.

Sorry, no angels are currently available to hug your neck.