Headlines From The Book of Revelation
Tell me who’s that writing? John the Revelator. Tell me who’s that writing? John the Revelator. Tell me who’s that writing: John the Revelator wrote the book of the seven seals—that’s me. That old song is talking about me.
Well, not exactly. My name isn’t John, for one thing. I’m not a prophet, and I’m sure as hell no one’s idea of a saint. I’m just a reporter—graduated cum laude from Boston University in 1995 with a BA in Journalism, and I’ve worked for the Boston Globe ever since.
But old Saint Jack and me, we do have one important thing in common: we’ve both seen the end of the world. Except that we’re different even in that. If there were any experts left to interview, a True Believer—maybe Billy Graham or Jerry Falwell—might argue that old Jack only dared to speak in symbols, he only saw symbols—pretty standard for a Religious Vision—or that whatever he saw (or whatever he was on) crisped every neuron in his skull. All I know is that while I may not be a prophet, Johnny-boy was a pretty piss-poor reporter, because he got all of his facts wrong.
But enough with the music and book review. Everybody got it wrong. So it’s up to me, the reporter, to get the facts. And the facts are that there was no Judgment Throne, no armies of angels fighting for us against armies of demons. No Pomp and Circumstance playing as humanity marched off the stage. The planet Earth didn’t get any kind of big finale. I guess we weren’t worth it. Oh, there was plenty of famine and death and even war when there were still enough people left to fight them, but it’s really pestilence that’s running the show right now.
You see, it all comes back to one line. Not one of Old Saint Jack’s, though. This one goes back to the Big Guy himself. Mr. Jesus H. Roosevelt baldheaded Christ on a pogo stick. But then, who was he? Back before it all went to hell, there were all kinds of arguments over that. Some people were so busy with their jumping and clapping and shouting “Christismightyhallelujahamen!” and throwing blood at abortion clinics that they never really got around to actually learning about the guy. Probably afraid it would be sacrilegious anyway. The historians who were trying to learn something suspected that his followers put words in the real Yeshua ben Yussef’s mouth a hundred years after the fact, and Holy Mother Church refused to release the scrolls that might have settled that matter. And of course—who knows? He might really have been the Son and Avatar of God Almighty, come to Earth to give us a warning and an instruction manual to keep our asses out of the fire, for which we nailed him to a board and never followed a single word he said.
Or he might have been just another prophet like Ol’ Jack, his brain fried by whatever he saw, spewing gibberish that pretty much ignores what eternal, unchanging God used to be like and replaced Him with some big, loving Daddy in the Sky. Remember, this is the same God who drowned the whole world because an intelligent species of monkeys pissed Him off. Sure, after it was over, He promised never to destroy the world with a flood again, but do you notice how He left all of his other options open?
I just bring up that last option, because all that love-thy-neighbor stuff never came to anything, people being what they are.
But I’m rambling, and that’s a cardinal sin for a reporter. Sin. Maybe that’s a word we threw around too lightly back in—
No. I’m a reporter, and reporting is all about the Headline. And I have the perfect headline, because it all comes down to that one line that JC got absolutely, 100%, grade-A right.
The headline?
The Meek Shall Inherit the Earth
Thing is, where we got it all wrong, is thinking that this inheriting would be the result of the Final Judgment. It’s not, and the only reason we ever thought that it could be is because we all forgot what God used to be like, too. It’s not the result of the Final Judgment—well, it is, but it’s also the means.
It was easy to miss, the way it all started. After all, it seems like everybody and their uncle’s dog has a gun these days, and society is going to Hell anyway. You hear about somebody going postal every other day. Well, not anymore, but…anyway, what’s a few more headlines like this?
Three Killed, 12 Wounded In Office Shooting Spree
HS Student Kills Seven Classmates, Self
Subway Horror:
Multiple Shooting Linked to Gang Violence.
That last one was a bit of a stretch. It was only “linked to gang violence” because everyone who got shot on that train was a gang member. The guy who shot them, on the other hand, was a timid, bespectacled, middle-aged CPA who had started carrying a gun after getting mugged one too many times.
But then things started to get weird:
Little Ripper
Elementary-School Stabbing
What happened there is a third grader stuck a pencil in the class bully’s throat. By all accounts, the stabber was no “little ripper”, but a shy little bookworm who had been the bigger kid’s favorite victim. Guess he got tired of getting his lunch money stolen.
Then there was:
Secretary Stabs Boss:
“I didn’t know what else I could do”
Seems that this boss had been sexually harassing his secretary for a good while. He was an institution at the company, so complaining to the higher-ups just got her in trouble. She was feeding three kids on her own, so she didn’t think she could leave. The situation was halfway between an old-style company town and an abusive marriage. Then the day came that the boss decided to step up from groping to trying to blackmail her into bending over the desk, and she stuck her house keys in his right eye.
That one was big. Brought the whole feminist crew out of the woodwork—legal defense funds, celebrity protests, the works. I think they were on their way to making a TV movie before it all went down. And of course, there was the usual backlash. The Monday-morning quarterbacks saying “she could’ve left, should’ve sued”—whatever. And of course there were the ones saying that this whole sexual-harassment issue was getting blown all out of proportion, it was really just “He Said, She Said”, oversensitive femi-nazis with no sense of humor taking things out of context—but what she did to him was real.
Then, just as all that was going on, everybody’s attention was caught by this one:
Tragic Fire at Upstate NY College Declared Arson
Hoo, boy. You thought the feminist and anti-feminist crowd went crazy about the secretary. Picture the reaction to this breaking story: a girl claims that she was gang-raped at a Frat party (Phi Kappa Sigma house at St. Lawrence University—gotta get all the facts, first rule of reporting). Not implausible, given some previous complaints that have been lodged against some of the brothers. Problem is, she doesn’t report it for weeks after the fact and she never had a medical exam. Looks like the case is going to go nowhere for lack of evidence.
So she pours gasoline all around the place in the wee hours of a Monday morning when they’re all sleeping off their hangovers and sets it on fire.
Stories like that were pretty easy to spot. Of course they were: they were the Headlines! They were splashed all over front pages and magazine covers and News-at-Eleven commercials. The people need their latest guilty thrill or big outrage, and we need our grab-‘em headlines so we can be the one to give it to them. Everybody’s always looking for the next Big Story. But in the midst of all these big stories, it was easy to miss the page three four-liners—and there were suddenly a lot of them—where some abused wife put drain cleaner in hubby’s evening martini.
And there was more than that. There were other things you didn’t hear about unless you were listening, didn’t see unless you were looking.
I was. So I did. But I have no idea why I was.
I saw the first one of these hidden things in the summer of 2004. I was in New York City to cover the Republican Convention and I must’ve gotten lost on the train, because I somehow found myself in the Jackson Heights area of Queens. I wanted something to read on the number 7 train back into Manhattan, so I grabbed a paper. I guess that area has a big Indian population, because I picked up a copy of the New Delhi Times or something. Don’t ask me why. I didn’t even ask myself that question until later that day.
Anyway, back on page eighteen, there’s about two inches of story and a title whose print barely stood out on the page:
Newlywed Woman Murders Husband, Mother-In-Law
I had to do a little research to get to the meat of that one. Ever heard of a dowry killing? There are places in India where marriages are still arranged, and the girl’s dowry is a major consideration in the arrangements. Sometimes, if hubby and the in-laws feel that they got a raw deal, wifey suffers a fatal accident. Usually involving fire.
Seems that the blushing bride in this case did it to them before they could do it to her.
Why would I do research on a buried-in-the-middle story from some backwater in India when all I really wanted was last night’s baseball scores? Because it was my first clue that something really weird was going on. How so? I passed another newsstand later that day, and I saw a paper that looked just like the one I’d read that morning—same letterhead, same pictures, same everything—except it was in Hindi. I couldn’t even recognize the letters, let alone read it.
I kept stumbling on articles like that. Articles that I shouldn’t have been able to read, but that demanded I see them and find out the truth behind them:
Girl Kills Eight Family Members, Self
The girl lived in Afghanistan, and she blew away half her menfolk with an assault rifle before they took her down. No, she didn’t kill herself—that was a bit of spin. It seems that they’d just decided to kill her with that same assault rifle to cleanse the family honor—apparently, it didn’t matter to them that she hadn’t wanted to have pre-marital sex, in fact, she’d done her best to fight uncle Ahmed off—but she got to it first.
Eight Year Old Girl Charged With Murder
That girl was from Sudan, and what she did was grab the razor from the old hag who was about to circumcise her and slit her throat.
Those two were in Arabic.
So far, it doesn’t sound so bad, does it? I mean, it’s pretty gruesome, but in most cases, it sounds like people getting what’s coming to them. Well, that’s what I would have thought. Maybe you’re not as vindictive as I am—which is pretty vindictive for a guy who hasn’t raised a hand in anger since that fight with Bobby Sinclair in fourth grade. It’s just that it always seemed to me that the bullies get away with it far too often in this world. Why do you think that in every movie you ever watched, from comedy to horror, the bullies always got their comeuppance? Because that’s not what happens in real life.
Happened.
Sure, we all like—liked—to cling to the image of the schoolyard thug growing up into a beer-bellied loser while the geek gets rich, and sometimes that even happened. But more often, the prettyboy jocks went from high school to the frats, and then their frat brothers out in the world would hook them up with cushy executive jobs while the geeks shuffled papers for them, and they would never even think about the people they’d scarred for life along the way.
Think like that for too long, and you’ll almost start rooting for the kids who shoot up their high schools. Maybe if that varsity lineman knew that the pimply-faced little geek he was giving a swirly today might put a bullet in his brain tomorrow, he might think twice about giving that swirly. And if not, it’ll at least serve as a lesson to what’s left of the team after pizzaface is done with them: you’re not invincible, and you never know what’ll happen if you push someone too far. A few lessons like that, in enough different places to prove that “it can happen anywhere—even here”, and they might just get the point.
Do I sound bitter? Well, I became a reporter in the hope of bringing the bullies down, only to find myself working for a different set of bullies—or that the old bullies were twisting my boss’s arm.
Anyway, it may sound great in theory, but once it started happening for real, I figured out real quick why the Lord saith “vengeance is mine”. When we try to take it, things get out of control. Some of those fratboys had their girlfriends sleeping over with them, and they burned up, too. And that schoolyard bully, mean or not, was still just a kid—an unhappy kid whose father was one of those beer-bellied losers.
Even if none of that bothers you, things started getting even weirder. It wasn’t just oppressed humans anymore. I’d see things in nature journals:
Dysfunctional Pack Hierarchy
In Northern Timber Wolves
Which took a lot of very big words to say that wolf packs all over the world were suddenly starting to pull down their Alphas.
Heightened Aggressive Response
In Fish Species of the Great Barrier Reef
Heightened aggressive response was one way to describe it. Huge schools of fish were attacking sharks and stripping them to the—well, cartilage, I guess.
Anomalous Fern Growth
In the California Redwood Forest
The ferns were overgrowing and choking off the trees.
All of these were big news—at least in the nature journals. Cover stories. Because no one had ever even heard of such things before. They went straight through improbable and came out the other side, into the border regions of impossible.
It wasn’t long before the center couldn’t hold, and things started to fall apart:
Real Life Children of The Corn:
Children Slaughter Parents In Foster, Kansas
That was just the first town of many.
Boston Priest Crucified By Congregation
Government Troops Unable to Quell Revolution
In China’s Largest Province
83-Year-Old Woman Killed by Pet Cat
The Strong fought back. Of course they did. A lot of them took a few—or more than a few—of the Meek with them when they went. But what a lot of them had never thought about was how much their domination depended on intimidation. They took their own power for granted and never considered just how very many of the Meek there were.
Well, that, and the fact that a lot of the Strong had no particular reason to expect attacks from the Meek who took them out. A lot of the abusive ones were taken out early, so what you’d get later on is a mommy and daddy who’d never laid a hand on little Billy or Susie getting their throats cut in their sleep by little Billy and Susie anyway.
And when there were no more Strong left, the Meek would turn on the strongest among them. And so on. It got to the point where, before the power died and the last of the TV stations went off the air, I’d see broadcasts—from on-location cameras that hadn’t stopped running when they’d dropped, transmitted from newsrooms full of bodies whose equipment hadn’t been turned off—of insects swarming over cities of rats where the last human child had been pulled down by her pet puppy days before.
So where was I when all this was going on? I was right here. I’m not a particularly Strong guy, but I’m not especially Meek, either. Why didn’t I kill my boss, and get taken out by a mob of third-graders in my turn? I don’t know, but I haven’t been affected by any of this. Not even touched. Boston is burning around me, and I’m sitting in what used to be the Boston Common before fungi smothered it.
I have to wonder why. If it really is God doing this, then it makes some kind of sense. He always did love an audience. He’d want somebody left alive who was intelligent enough to bear witness and realize what He was doing. Maybe this is even supposed to be a record, a warning for whatever comes next. Someone else is going to have to carve it in stone, though. I work in ink and paper.
Funny thing. Those of us who didn’t expect the world to just end when we left it always expected the cockroaches to take over after we were gone. Doesn’t look like they’re going to, though. I’ve caught a few—they don’t scurry out of the way near as quick as they used to—and they’ve all got these weird fuzzy, purple lumps on their shells. Guess that’s a nature journal headline that’ll never get printed:
Cockroach Population Decimated by New Disease
I guess the world is going to pass to the microbes. And even they will probably eat each other until the very smallest and simplest are all that’s left. The cycle will go all the way back to the beginning.
The chances of anybody ever reading this are nil. But that doesn’t matter. I’m a reporter, and it’s my job to get the story. And hey, stop the presses, this one has the perfect headline. The final headline: