Whilst warrior Christ was busy establishing his banal utopia in the fiction aisle of our Doomsday curricula, Charles Strozier was profiling a darker side of “things that must shortly come to pass” in his essays on the apocalyptic roots of the fundamentalist mindset. What struck me the most, beyond his concise and tactful histories of various fundamentalist touchstones (including Left Behind), was the powerful psychology of paranoia he illuminates in ‘The Apocalyptic Other.’ His clinical conclusions, particularly the case study of his patient Harriet, lend credence to the power of paranoia to overwhelm the complexity of a victim’s life and reduce it to facile, frightening dualities. But what occurs if a society suffers this pathos, radicalizing reality and leaving its inhabitants to cope?
Concurrently with our classwork in the past week, I have been closely reading Gary Shteyngart’s recent novel Super Sad True Love Story. The book deals very intimately with the fatalistic fears of our day, transplanting the reader into near-future New York where Media and Credit are kings, and real human interaction – “verbaling,” in the younger generation’s slang – has been supplanted by FACing (Forming A Community) and following endless Streams through the ubiquitous äppäräti.
