I remember when Ronald Reagan was elected. I was in elementary school, and heard Jimmy Carter concede on the radio while my mother and I sat in the parking lot of a gigantic mall. (I’ve always thought that was symbolic of the years to come.) That night I couldn’t sleep because I was certain Reagan was somehow going to start a nuclear war. This was when my sister and I began our hobby of drawing concentric circles on maps of Washington to find out whether we’d be killed in the initial blast or survive to die in the subsequent firestorm.
But it turned out there was no nuclear war. All Reagan did was rachet up international tension so high we merely came within minutes of nuclear war. I’m still a little mad at Stanislav Petrov for proving me wrong.
Anyway, I haven’t felt the same level of gut level terror because of a politician until George W. Bush came along. Welcome back, gut level terror!
Joel C. Rosenberg, who writes Christian apocalyptic fiction, told me in an interview this week that he was invited to a White House Bible study group last year to talk about current events and biblical prophecy.
Rosenberg said that on February 10, 2005, he came to speak to a “couple dozen” White House aides in the Old Executive Office Building — and has stayed in touch with several of them since…
Rosenberg — like Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins, the authors of the phenomenally popular “Left Behind” series — writes fiction inspired by biblical prophecy about the apocalypse. The consistent theme is that certain current events presage the end times, the Rapture, and the return of Jesus Christ. Rosenberg’s particular pitch to journalists is that his books come true…
Rosenberg says he got a call last year from a White House staffer. “He said ‘A lot of people over here are reading your novels, and they’re intrigued that these things keep on happening. . . . Your novels keep foreshadowing actual coming events. . . . And so we’re curious, how are you doing it? What’s the secret? Why don’t you come over and walk us through the story behind these novels?’ So I did.”
It would almost be worth it to me for these guys to start a nuclear war if I could live long enough to see their faces afterward when Jesus doesn’t show up. Whoops!
“Boy, are our faces red,” I imagine them saying, “and not just because of our fatal radiation poisoning!”