Syria and the American Apocalyptic Imagination: Isaiah 17:1 as ‘Evidence’ of the End
I once made the grievous error of spending ten minutes of my life watching the opening scenes of Transformers: Dark of the Moon. I was intrigued that it was listed in my Netflix queue as a “conspiracy” film. And though I abandoned it quickly, I was struck then by a shift in the conspiracy idiom since the 1970s, one that I have been thinking about of late.
We can see in older films like Three Days of the Condor a suspicion and a paranoia which seem superficially consistent with the present; but in these early, post-Watergate films there was an idealist’s sense of betrayal that always pointed to the desire for transparency and restitution—a conviction that the world may be darker and graver now but that the possibility of right still existed (provided that the protagonist lived long enough).
Now, as I have written elsewhere, the conspiracy and the apocalyptic idioms are so ubiquitous—those black-suited agents of the Leviathan state, those flashy secret technologies, that endless night pregnant with threat and meaning—they have made the conspiratorial almost an aesthetic.
As I wring my hands along with the rest of the world, anxious about what has happened in Syria and about what might happen still, I perceive that one of the many discourses swirling around this focus is what I’d call a permanent religious apocalyptic.
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