Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto

  As far as I can tell, the nicest thing you can say about children is that they haven’t done anything terrible yet.

  So let’s get to the core question in Left Behind: If the Rapture happened tonight, who gets called up to the Big Show? Judging from the text, the answer is “No one I know, and probably no one who would read this essay.” Left Behind is pretty clear about this, and the authors go to great lengths to illustrate how many of the people passed over by God are fair, moral, and—for the most part—more heroic than prototypical humans. This is a direct reflection of the primary audience for hardcore Christian literature; one assumes those readers would typically possess those same characteristics and simply need a little literary push to become “higher” Christians.

  The best example in Left Behind is Rayford Steele, the person with whom we’re evidently supposed to “relate.” Buck Williams is the star and the catalyst (especially in the film version), but his main purpose is to move the plot along and provide the conflict. It’s through Rayford that we are supposed to understand the novel’s theme and experience. The theme is that you’re good, but being good is not enough; the experience is that you cannot be saved until you allow yourself to surrender to faith, even though that’s not really how it works for Rayford.

  On the very first page of Left Behind, we learn that Rayford has a bad marriage, and it’s because his wife had developed an “obsession” with religion. We also learn that—twelve years prior—Rayford drunkenly kissed another woman at the company Christmas party and has never really forgiven himself. However, that guilt does not stop him from secretly lusting after the aforementioned Hattie Durham, even though he never actually touches her (interestingly enough, Rayford and Hattie do have a physical relationship in the film version of Left Behind, presumably because director Victor Sarin didn’t think moviegoers would buy the whole Jimmy Carter “I’ve lusted in my heart” sentiment).

  Suffice it to say that Rayford would generally be described as a very decent person in the secular universe, which is how most Left Behind readers would likely view themselves. However, he can’t see the espoused “larger truth,” which is that there is only a future for those who take the Kierkegaardian leap and believe everything the Bible states (and as literally as possible).

  Rayford can’t do this until his life is destroyed, so his conversion isn’t all that remarkable (it actually seems like the most reasonable decision, considering the circumstances). In many ways, this is the book’s most glaring flaw: It demands blind faith from the reader, but it illustrates faith as a response to terror. And since Left Behind isn’t a metaphor—it presents itself as a fictionalized account of what will happen, according to the Book of Revelation—the justification for embracing Jesus mostly seems like a scare tactic. It’s not a sophisticated reason for believing in God.

  Of course, that’s also the point: There is no sophisticated reason for believing in anything supernatural, so it really comes down to believing you’re right. This is another example of how born agains are cool—you’d think they’d be humble, but they’ve got to be amazingly cocksure. And once you’ve crossed over, you don’t even have to try to be nice; according to the born-again exemplar, your goodness will be a natural extension of your salvation. Caring about orphans and helping the homeless will come as naturally as having sex with coworkers and stealing office supplies. If you consciously do good works out of obligation, you’ll never get into heaven; however, if you make God your proverbial copilot, doing good works will just become an unconscious part of your life.

  I guess that’s probably the moment where I just stop accepting all this born-again bullshit, no matter how hard I try to remain open-minded. Though I obviously have no proof of this, the one aspect of life that seems clear to me is that good people do whatever they believe is the right thing to do. Being virtuous is hard, not easy. The idea of doing good things simply because you’re good seems like a zero-sum game; I’m not even sure if those actions would still qualify as “good,” since they’d merely be a function of normal behavior. Regardless of what kind of god you believe in—a loving god, a vengeful god, a capricious god, a snooty beret-wearing French god, whatever—one has to assume that you can’t be penalized for doing the things you believe to be truly righteous and just. Certainly, this creates some pretty glaring problems: Hitler may have thought he was serving God. Stalin may have thought he was serving God (or something vaguely similar). I’m certain Osama bin Laden was positive he was serving God. It’s not hard to fathom that all of those maniacs were certain that what they were doing was right. Meanwhile, I constantly do things that I know are wrong; they’re not on the same scale as incinerating Jews or blowing up skyscrapers, but my motivations might be worse. I have looked directly into the eyes of a woman I loved and told her lies for no reason, except that those lies would allow me to continue having sex with another woman I cared about less. This act did not kill 20 million Russian peasants, but it might be more “diabolical” in a literal sense. If I died and found out I was going to hell and Stalin was in heaven, I would note the irony, but I really couldn’t complain. I don’t make the fucking rules.

  Just to cover all my doomed bases, I watched a few other apocalyptic movies after Left Behind: I rented The Omega Code and revisited The Rapture. The latter film—a 1991 movie starring Mimi Rogers—was a polarizing attempt to make the end of the world into a conventionally entertaining film, and I still think it’s among the decade’s more interesting movies (at least for its first seventy-five minutes). The Rapture opens with Rogers as a bored sex addict, and it ends with her dragging her child into the desert to wait for God’s wrath. Part of the reason so many critics like this film is because writer/director Michael Tolkin “goes all the way” and resists the temptation to end the film with an unclear conclusion. That’s commendable, but I wonder what the response would have been if Rogers didn’t question God at the very end; her character essentially wants to know why God plays with people like pawns and created a totally fucked world when making a utopia would have been just as easy (and though I realize these are not exactly the most profound of existential questions, it’s hard to deny that they’re not the most important ones, either).

  Within the scope of mainstream filmmaking—it was released on the same day as the Joe Pesci vehicle The Super—The Rapture clearly seems like a religious movie. But it’s really not, because it doesn’t have a religious point of view. When push comes to shove, Tolkin’s script adopts a staunchly humanistic take: The Mimi Rogers character asks God why his universe doesn’t make sense. Like most people, she thinks life should be a democracy and that God should behave like an altruistic politician who acts in our best interests. You hear this all the time; critics of organized religion constantly say things like, “There is no way a just God would send a man like Gandhi to hell simply because he’s not a Christian.” Well, why not? I’m certainly pulling for Gandhi’s eternal salvation, but there’s no reason to believe there’s a logic to the afterlife selection process. It might be logical, and it might be arbitrary; in a way, it would be more logical if it was totally arbitrary. But the idea of questioning God’s motives will always be a fiercely American thing to do; it’s almost patriotic to get in God’s face. I’m pretty sure a lot of my friends would love the opportunity to vote against God in a run-off election. Even I’d be curious to see who the other candidate might be (probably Harry Browne).

  In contrast, 1999’s The Omega Code is much like Left Behind in that it doesn’t really offer any options besides buying into the whole born-again credit union. Since both stories are so dogged about the Book of Revelation, they share lots of plot points (i.e., two Israeli prophets screaming about the Second Coming, the construction of a church on The Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, a miracle agricultural product that will end world hunger, etc.). The main difference is that The Omega Code has ties with Michael Drosnin’s The Bible Code, arguably the goofiest book I’ve ever purchased in a lesbian bookstore. Drosnin’s book clai
ms the Torah is actually a three-dimensional crossword puzzle that predicted (among other things) the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin; more importantly, it allows computer specialists to learn just about anything—the date of the coming nuclear war (2006), the coming California earthquake (2010), and the best Rush album (2112). I have no idea why I bought this book (or why it was assumed to be of specific interest to lesbians), but it forms the narrative thread for The Omega Code, a movie that was actually less watchable than Left Behind. Surprisingly, The Omega Code earned about three times as much as Left Behind ($12.6 million to $4.2 million), even though it was made with a much smaller budget ($8 million and $17.4 million, respectively).

  I’m not sure why The Omega Code made more at the box office than Left Behind; it’s kind of like trying to deduce why Armageddon grossed more than Deep Impact. But the most plausible explanation is that Left Behind tried a marketing gamble that failed: It was released on video before it was released in theaters. At the end of the VHS version of Left Behind, there is a “special message” from Kirk Cameron. Kirk appears to be standing in the Amazon rain forest while explaining why the movie went to Blockbuster before it went to theaters. “You are part of a very select group,” Cameron tells us, “and that group makes up less than one percent of the country…[but] what about the other 99 percent of the country?” The scheme by Left Behind’s production company (an organization that calls itself Cloud 10) was to have every core reader of Left Behind see the film in their living room in the winter of 1999 and then instruct each person to demand it be played theatrically in every city in America when it was officially released on February 2, 2000. “We need you to literally tell everyone you know,” Kirk stressed in his video message.

  I was working as the film critic for the Akron Beacon Journal in early 2000, and—all during January—I kept getting phone calls from strangers, telling me I needed to write a story about some upcoming movie that I had never heard of; I’ve now come to realize that these were Left Behind people. I can’t recall if the film ever opened in Akron or not. Regardless, there is a part of me that would like to see this as an example of how Left Behind is different from other kinds of entertainment. Its audience truly felt it had a social and spiritual import that far exceeded everything else that opened that same weekend (such as Freddie Prinze Jr.’s Head Over Heels). And I’m sure that some of the people who called me that January truly did believe that a Kirk Cameron flick could save the world, and that it was their vocation to make sure all the sinners in suburban Ohio became aware of its existence. However, I can’t ignore my sinking suspicion that the makers of this movie merely assumed their best hope for commercial success was to manipulate the very people who never needed a movie or a book to learn how to love Jesus. They took people who wanted to rescue my soul and turned them into publicists. Which makes me think the people at Cloud 10 are probably a few tiers below Stalin, too.

  There are eleven books in the Left Behind series, and many have excellent subtitles like The Destroyer Is Unleashed and The Beast Takes Possession, both of which may have been Ronnie James Dio records. I am not going to read any more of them, mostly because I know how they’re going to end. I mean, doesn’t everybody? I went back and read the Book of Revelations, which doesn’t make much sense except for the conclusion—that’s where it implicitly states that Jesus is “coming soon.” Of course, Jesus operates within the idiom of infinity, so “soon” might be 30 billion years. Sometimes I find myself wishing that the world would end in my lifetime, since that would be oddly flattering; we’d all be part of humanity’s apex. That’s about as great an accomplishment as I can hope for, since I just don’t see how I will possibly get into heaven, Rapture or otherwise.

  When I was a little boy, I used to be very thankful that I was born Catholic. At the time, my Catholicism seemed like an outrageous bit of good fortune, since I considered every other religion to be fake (I considered Lutherans and Methodists akin to USFL franchises). Over time, my opinions on such things have evolved. But quite suddenly, I once again find myself thankful for Catholicism, or at least thankful for its more dogmatic principles. I’m hoping all those nuns were right: I’m angling for purgatory, and I’m angling hard.

  Acknowledgments

  Due to the schizophrenic nature of this collection, it would be impossible for me to thank everyone who—at one point or another—intangibly contributed to this manuscript. Consequently, I’m not going to try. However, I must express an avalanche of kudos to my editor at Scribner, Brant Rumble. Beyond being a brilliant editor, Brant might be the last sincere human in all of New York.

  Additionally, there are a few random cats whose editorial insight directly influenced certain passages, and they are as follows:

  Kate Condon

  Bob Ethington

  David Giffels

  Scott Lowe

  Jennifer Piro

  Mark J. Price

  Hillery Stone

  Paul Tough

  Michael Weinreb

  I must likewise thank my supercagey agent, Daniel Greenberg, and my superfoxy lawyer, Amy Everhart. I’d also like to unleash my profound gratitude to everyone at SPIN whom I ever had lunch with (and especially to those whom I always have lunch with) and to everyone at SPIN I occasionally have drinks with (and especially to those who I always have drinks with).

  Finally, I want to publicly apologize to anyone who ended up getting mentioned in this book simply because they had the misfortune of knowing me (either in the present or in the past). I’m not sure what compels me to ruin all our lives; I guess that’s just the way I am. Sorry.

  Index

  Abdul-Jabbar, Kareem

  AC/DC

  Ainge, Danny

  Akron, Ohio

  “All for Leyna” (Joel)

  Allen, Tim

  Allen, Woody

  “Allentown” (Joel)

  Ally McBeal

  An Innocent Man (Joel)

  Anderson, Pamela

  Anderson, P.T.

  Anderson, Wes

  Apocalypse Now

  Appetite for Destruction (Guns N’Roses)

  archetypes: Harry-Met-Sally situation; Hitchcock movies; movies and; Odd Couple relationship; The Real World; sexual, television; Woody Allen

  Arm, Mark

  At Budokan (Cheap Trick)

  Backderf, John

  Banks, Tyra

  baseball

  basketball, life compared; Lakers-Celtics rivalry

  Beatles

  Being John Malkovich

  Berkley, Elizabeth

  Berman, David

  Bettencourt, Nuno

  Bible Code, The(Drosnin)

  Big Brother

  Bird, Larry

  Black, Clint

  Black Flag

  Black Sabbath

  Blixt, Jon

  Bon Jovi

  Born in the U.S.A.(Springsteen)

  “Born to Run” (Springsteen)

  Boston Celtics

  Bowie, David

  Braae, Michael

  Breakfast Club, The

  Bridge, The(Joel)

  Bright Lights, Big City

  Brownstein, Carrie

  Buckingham, Lindsey

  Buckley, Jeff

  Buckner, Bill

  Bunim, Mary-Ellis

  Burke, Solomon

  Cameron, Kirk

  Canseco, José

  Carey, Mariah

  Carter, Vince

  Cash, Johnny

  Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

  celebrity; journalism

  cereal, cold breakfast

  Cheap Trick

  Cherone, Gary

  Chinese Democracy(Guns N’Roses)

  Christgau, Robert

  “Close to the Borderline” (Joel)

  Cocoa Puffs

  Coldplay

  consciousness

  consumerism

  coolness; cold cereal; Cusack, John, movies; pop music artists

  Coomes, Sam

  Coppola
, Francis Ford

  Costello, Elvis

  Cougar, John

  Creel, Leanna

  Cross Purposes(Black Sabbath)

  Crowe, Cameron

  Cruise, Tom

  Cruz, Penelope

  Cusack, John

  Dahmer, Jeffrey

  Dallas Mavericks

  death

  Dean, James

  depression; consumerism and, lyrics and; 1980s and, 1990s and; The Sims character and

  Diamond, Dustin

  Diaz, Cameron

  DiMaggio, Joe

  Dirt, The (Mötley Crüe)

  Dischner, Paul

  “Divorce Song” (Phair)

  Dixie Chicks

  Dixon, Glenn

  Donnie Darko

  “Don’t Drive Drunk” (Wonder)

  Dougher, Sarah

  Dr. Feelgood(Mötley Crüe)

  Drosnin, Michael

  drugs: Celtics-Lakers; conversations, parties, and; rock bands; rock music

  Dukes of Hazzard

  Dylan, Bob

  Earle, Steve

  Easy Rider

  Ebert, Roger

  Eggers, Dave

  Electronic Arts

  Eminem

  Empire Strikes Back, The

  “Eruption” (Van Halen)

  Estevez, Emilio

  “Every Day Is a Winding Road” (Crow)

  eXistenZ

  Experience Music Project (EMP)

  Explaining Hitler(Rosenbaum)

  Extreme

  Facts of Life, The

  fantasy, movies and romantic

  Farrar, Jay

  feminism

  52nd Street (Joel)

  Fight Club

  Five Easy Pieces

  “Folsom Prison Blues” (Cash)