Hardship, Persecution and Suffering

Focus on the Family offers a chilling vision of the End Times:

"Hardship," "persecution" and "suffering" are among the prospects in a hypothetical letter from a "Christian from 2012" released today by evangelical leader James Dobson's political activist group Focus on the Family Action....

"I get tears in my eyes and a lump in my throat," says the fictional writer. "Now in October of 2012, after seeing what has happened in the last four years," America is no longer "the land of the free and the home of the brave."

Although these predictions are fictional, most of them are "based on established legal and political trends that can already be abundantly documented." In other words, the rigorous process of making shit up has not been tainted by bias, ideology, or wishful thinking.

Thus, we learn that in 2012, homosexual marriage "has been ruled a constitutional right that must be respected by all 50 states." Those of you who say it'll never happen are forgetting that there was a time when women couldn't vote, and blacks couldn't marry whites. Who can say how much further the gloomy path that leads away from bigotry will take us?

Once you've depicted the United States writhing under the lash of Teh Gayz, all other horrors seem trivial. But a few of them deserve mention, all the same.

By the fourth year of the Obama/Ayers regime, church buildings will be deemed "public accomodations" and will be as generously stocked with dental dams, condoms and lube as a Tribeca sex club. Adding insult to injury, high school students will no longer be allowed to pray together (or at least, not publicly, and we all know how insistent the Bible is on the importance of praying in public).

Also, the Boy Scouts will disband, kindergartens will replace Dick and Jane with Judith Butler and Monique Wittig, guns will be pried out of cold dead fingers by HIV-positive fags under the command of Janet Reno, in space no one will hear you scream, everybody will Wang Chung tonight, und so weiter.

Somewhat less surprisingly, it turns out that American healthcare will be inadequate in 2012. Some people actually may not get it when they need it.

"The great benefit is that medical care is now free for everyone – if you can get it," the letter writer says. "Now that health care is free it seems that everybody wants more of it....

"Because medical resources now must be rationed carefully by the government, people over 80 have essentially no access to hospitals or surgical procedures. Their 'duty' is increasingly thought to be to go home to die, so that they don't drain scarce resources from the medical system."

God forbid! If we ever limit access to hospitals and surgical procedures, it should be due to the patient's inability to pay the going rate, at which point the denial of care will be the just reward for a misspent life and a useful object lesson for lollygaggers and layabouts.

Interestingly, Obama's decision to reinstate the Fairness Doctrine will drive conservative talk show hosts off the air.

Conservative talk radio, for all intents and purposes, was shut down by the end of 2010.

This seems like a confession that these shows can only survive in carefully maintained hothouse conditions. But either way, the loss of principled men like Michael Savage and Sean Hannity, who'll inevitably choose silence before dishonor, is a comparatively minor inconvenience, given all the terrorist bombs that will be going off in American cities, and the fact that Russia will seize Ukraine, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic and Bulgaria "with no military response from the U.S. or the U.N." (I have to add that cramming all of this exciting activity into four short years strains my credulity, somewhat. If I'd written this letter, I would've set it in 2015, three years after Obama suspended the Constitution and declared himself Dictator for Life.)

Lest anyone think this letter is simply a matter of stirring up outrage against the usual suspects, the author is not shy about laying the blame for these imaginary outcomes squarely on misguided Christians who somehow failed to perceive that activist judges, homosexuals, environmentalists, the NEA, the ACLU, feminists, supporters of gun control, pacifists, and liberals in general are out to destroy everything God loves. That said, "Focus adds that evangelicals on both sides of the election should 'continue to respect and cherish each other's friendship as well as the freedom people have in the United States to differ on these issues and to freely speak our opinions about them to one another.'"

I agree wholeheartedly, and it is in this precise spirit of comity and benevolence that I offer this startling E-mail from 2012, every word of which has its roots in the deep, honest soil of Fact:

Hello from 2012!

First off, I'm sorry to have to inform you that Focus on the Family continues to comprise a gaggle of pathologically dishonest, power-hungry, pseudo-Christian fuckheads. Fortunately, not many people listen to them anymore, thanks in large part to the fact that James Dobson was recently caught sucking three men's dicks at a rest stop on I-10 near Rancho Mirage, CA. Despite stacks of incriminating photos, plenty of DNA and fingerprint evidence, and the eyewitness testimony of dozens of witnesses (including a busload of Boy Scouts), Dobson still maintains his innocence. Currently, he's claiming that he was kidnapped and drugged by a cabal of UN one-worlders, and didn't actually wake up 'til the flashbulbs started going off.

As for President Obama, he's pretty much what you'd expect: a smart, cautious centrist with limited interest in rocking the boat. I wish I could say that we're living in some kind of socialist wonderland, but that's not really the case. You'd never know it from listening to the Limbaugh and his ilk, though...they've all convinced themselves that they're suffering as no free people has ever suffered before. Their stately homes are mere outposts of the Gulag, to hear them tell it, and they condemn each of Obama's modest infrastructure projects as a new Belomorkanal.

On the bright side, Obama's not censoring scientists, he's reversed the global gag rule, he's made some wise investments in renewable energy and sustainable design, and he doesn't seem to mistake every single idea that wanders into his head for God's own truth. Things could be worse.

Not much else to report, except that Jonah Goldberg is writing a book on Pinochet. The working title is Tough Love: A Modern Day Man of Steel and His Lessons for the United Socialist States of America. In the only excerpt I've seen, he inventively links Pinochet's execution of Victor Jara with Plato's argument against "the assumption that in music there is no such thing as a right and a wrong." Plato calls this a "reckless excess of liberty" that leads ineluctably to the "refusal to submit to magistrates [and] emancipation from the authority and correction of parents and elders," and Goldberg's inclined to agree:

Much as we may deplore the inevitable excesses of a socialist like Hitler, the ongoing problem of entartete Kunst remains one that cries out for a final solution, whether we're speaking of the "universal confusion of forms" in Plato's time or the corrupting spirit of collectivist battle-cries like "People Who Need People" in our own era, which I think could arguably be called "Streisandian" for lack of a more authoritative scholarly term....

Liberals take great pains to pretend to find the idea of censoring musicians shocking, but if Toby Keith has not yet been lynched for his pro-America anthem "I Remember When That House Was White," it almost certainly has more to do with the feminizing effect of the metrosexual lifestyle than with any philosophical ideal of "tolerance." If liberals ate rare steak instead of wilted arugula, Keith would probably already be hanging from the nearest lamppost.

As you can see, not that much has changed in American political discourse in the last four years. On the other hand, a new pill from Eli Lilly makes it possible to take this stuff in good humor. The only side effect, so far, seems to be an increased tendency towards multiple orgasms, but I understand they're working on that.

See you when you get here!

Best,

P

(Photo of Ed Schrock via Pam Spaulding.)