'He is met with an urbane sneer: “What is truth?” Pontius Pilate asks.'

December 24, 2017 2:34 PM

The Year In Apocalypses, Anthony Oliveira for Hazlitt

"I do not know if I am religious, or what it might mean to be “religious.” I think that when I die I am dead, and to wish otherwise is a strange and distasteful selfishness. The matter I am made of has other work to do; I had my turn. I doubt most people who call themselves “Christian” would call me a “Christian,” and Christ himself said that if an eye or hand causes you to stumble, throw it away; I do not think he would have been wedded to labels. But if I am “religious,” I am so insofar as I believe a moment comes when the crushing weight of my responsibility, or guilt, or even sin, is exceeded. There comes a moment, and perhaps it has come in 2017, when I need to believe something better is coming."

What the poet Auden dubbed “the Age of Anxiety” began with the awareness that we had developed the technology to unmake the atom, and thereby acquired the means, for the first time in its history, to eradicate life on earth. A stopwatch then started ticking towards a day when someone callow, venal, and splenetic enough could achieve sufficient political mass, could find as many people as cruel and thoughtless as he, to put his finger on that button.

Cometh the hour, cometh the man.

Donald Trump’s nomination to the most powerful position on earth has been a vertiginous experience—not because it is hard to believe so much malice exists against our fellows, but because it could manifest itself in a form so unbelievably stupid. Trump is only a symptom of a problem reaching critical mass, but he has also been a trumpet-blast unsealing all manner of horror. The fantasy of a “Deep State” has always been the paranoid wish that, even if very wicked, someone is in charge. But now we know: amid the smog, amid the hail of gunfire, amid the posturing imbecilic failsons waving nuclear armament at one another, if left unchecked, we will suffocate our own species to death.

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