"America's Finite Future" (or, the "moral right" is insane).

[Carolab]

America’s Finite Future?

January 11, 2005

Near the beginning of "Saturday Night Fever," John Travolta's Tony Manero, frustrated that his boss thinks he should save his salary instead of spending it on a new disco shirt, cries out, "Fuck the future!" To which his boss replies: "No, Tony, you can't fuck the future. The future fucks you! It catches up with you and it fucks you if you ain't prepared for it!"

Well, I don't know if you've noticed, but America has morphed into a nation of Tony Maneros — collectively dismissing the future. And nowhere is this mindset more prevalent than at the Bush White House, which is unwavering in its determination to ignore the future.

The evidence is overwhelming. Everywhere you look, it's IOUs passed on to future generations. Record federal debt. Record foreign debt. Record budget deficits. Record trade deficits.

And this attempt to fuck the future is not limited to economics. You see the same attitude when it comes to energy policy, health care, education, Social Security and especially the environment — with the Bushies redoubling their efforts to make the world uninhabitable as fast as possible. (See their attempts to gut the Clean Air Act, gut the Clean Water Act, gut the Endangered Species Act, gut regulations limiting pollution from power plants.)

And the even bigger problem? They don't see this as a problem. In fact, it actually all may be an essential part of the plan.

If this last sentence doesn't make a wit of sense to you, then you are clearly not one of the 50 million Americans who believe in some form of End-Time philosophy, an extreme evangelical theology that embraces the idea that we are fast approaching the end of the world, at which point Jesus will return and carry all true believers — living and dead — up to heaven ("the Rapture"), leaving all nonbelievers on earth to face hellfire and damnation ("the Tribulation"). Christ and his followers will then return to a divinely refurbished earth for a thousand-year reign of peace and love.

(more) http://www.ariannaonline.com/columns/column.php?id=753

[shraby]

1. I guess the rest of us are just

along for the ride..and it will be a bumpy one.

[tngledwebb]

2. 50 million could be high or low,

but given the horrors they have inflicted on the world, it seems logical to assume that many of those running this country must be true believers. The powers behind Nazi Germany had a similar apocalyptic mind-set.

[DaedelusNemo]

3. A distinction to be made - egging on the apocalypse

Not all people who believe Revelations is prophecy perforce think that we ought to be doing what we can to hasten armageddon. (I'd like to know the numbers on that one, but i'm going to guess at least half.) For that matter, not all of them are authoritarian theocrats either. It probably seems that way because the Dominionists present themselves as speaking for all Christians and seem to hold the whip hand in the republican party.