Non-Prophet Foundations

Clearly, CNN anchorperson Kyra Phillips was about to lay something heavy on the American viewing public.

“A man was bulldozing a bog in central Ireland the other day when he noticed something unusual in the freshly turned soil. Turns out he’d unearthed an early medieval treasure: an ancient book of Psalms that experts date to the years 800 to 1000. Experts say it will take years of painstaking work to document and preserve this book, but eventually it will go on public display. Now here’s the kicker. The book, about 20 pages of Latin script, was allegedly found opened to Psalm 83. Now, if you’re a scholar, as you know, Psalm 83: ‘God hears complaints that other nations are plotting to wipe out the name of Israel.’”

This would have been a hell of a kicker if it were true; the well-dressed president of Iran had just recently made a campaign promise to “wipe Israel off the map,” and thus said psalm would have neatly applied to the international situation in 2006. It would have also neatly applied to the international situation in 1948, 1967, 1972, as well as every other year since, as one could gather from a glance at the operating charter of the Palestinian Authority. Plotting to wipe out the name of Israel has been a popular pastime among Arabs for quite a while, rivaling even the driving of Mercedes-Benzes and the wearing of gaudy gold chains. Perhaps more to the point, it was a popular pastime among Israel’s dozens of tribal opponents several thousand years ago, when Psalm 83 was written.

But as it turned out, the psalm to which the miraculous manuscript was open – no doubt due to the divine intervention of Yahweh Himself – had nothing to do with complaints, plots, or the wiping out of anyone’s moniker, as Psalm 83 by the Latin reckoning of that period actually corresponded to Psalm 84 of the Greek reckoning from which our modern psalms are taken. And so the psalm in question actually concerned an annual Hebrew pilgrimage and how swell it was to undertake. This was explained in due course by the archaeologists involved, but the various news outlets had already reported the more newsworthy Israel angle – newsworthy in the modern sense, not in the sense of it actually being true – and if the reader is familiar with the way these things work, the reader will consequently be unsurprised that few corrections were printed or reported.

In the dynamics of American cable news, though, a miracle is a miracle whether it’s a miracle or not, and the Incident of Psalm 83 made for a swell segue into Kyra Phillips’ live interview with a modern-day prophet and another modern-day prophet’s co-author. The latter was Jerry Jenkins, who collaborated with Evangelical minister Tim LaHaye in the ominously successful Left Behind series. The former was the increasingly popular Joel C. Rosenberg, lone author of several bestselling prophecy-oriented technothrillers and whose own contribution to the ominousness of the times lies not so much in the success of his books among the sort of people one might expect to read them, but rather in the success of his books with the sort of people who run the country.

For his part, Jenkins was either completely stunned or not stunned at all by the psalm discovery, calling it “amazing,” “incredible,” and “not terribly surprising” all within the space of twenty seconds, further adding that “it would probably have to be told in fiction form because people are going to find it hard to believe,” this sentence being literally true insomuch as that an incident that did not actually occur would indeed have to be told in fiction form, but also being literally false insomuch as that people would not find such a thing hard to believe because people will believe anything, such as the old myth that CNN is a respectable source for news instead of a degenerate entertainment outlet where anchorpersons say things like, “from books to blogs to the back pews, the buzz is all about the End Times,” which is exactly what Kyra Phillips had said just a moment before.

Rosenberg, meanwhile, saw an opening with which to move onto his two favorite topics: the imminent invasion of Israel by Russia, and Rosenberg’s own mysterious ability to predict things that have yet to happen, such as the imminent invasion of Israel by Russia. “Yes, people are interested [in bullshit Hebrew prophecy], because the rebirth of Israel, the fact that Jews are living in the Holy Land today, that is a Bible prophecy.

When Iran, Libya, Syria, Lebanon, Russia, they begin to form an alliance against Israel, those are the prophecies from Ezekiel 38 and 39,” Rosenberg said, pretending for the sake of his own argument that such an alliance actually exists between those nations and that the Old Testament Book of Ezekiel predicted it. “That’s what I’m basing my novels on. I have been invited to the White House, Capitol Hill. Members of Congress, Israelis, Arab leaders all want to understand the Middle East through the – through the lens of biblical prophecies. I’m writing these novels that keep seeming to come true, but we are seeing Bible prophecy, bit by bit, unfold in the Middle East right now.”

One can understand why Rosenberg’s insight into world affairs would be so sought after around the White House and Capitol Hill; the ability to write books “that keep seeming to come true” would be an incredible asset to the national intelligence infrastructure of any geopolitical entity, particularly one as troubled as our own. In fact, it’s a wonder that the NSA is permitting Rosenberg to write anything at all; as things stand now, any Iranian intelligence agent could show up at LAX, amble into a gift shop, and pick up a copy of one of these popular books “that keep seeming to come true,” thus gleaning invaluable information about the not-so-distant future without having to resort to the rigors of human intelligence, electronic intelligence, geospatial intelligence, or – my personal favorite – foreign instrumentation signals intelligence. Likewise, any Chinese spy could download a bootlegged copy of one of these books for his communist masters, and without paying Rosenberg a dime in royalties. Shouldn’t the U.S. intelligence community declare Rosenberg a national resource and whisk him off to some undisclosed location? The answer, of course, is no, because Rosenberg cannot really predict the future. Or, to put it another way, he can indeed predict the future, and so can my cat.

I should probably note here that I am, in many ways, a very immature person. For instance, I will, on occasion, loosely tie a sock around a cat’s midsection, because doing so interferes with a feline’s sense of balance and thus causes it to fall over. As long as the light pressure from the sock is being applied at several points around a cat’s midsection, the cat will be unable to get up. Furthermore, the cat will be confused. I find this to be very amusing. The cat, though, does not, and, being a cat, has no idea why he or she is unable to get up off the floor. All the cat knows for sure is that I’m an asshole, and the probable source of his or her mobility. The cat will also suspect that the sock has something to do with all of this, and his or her suspicions will rightfully increase when I remove the sock and the cat is suddenly able to stand up again.

Now, after this scenario has played out a few times, the cat will begin to understand – in accordance with his or her own feline level of understanding – that if I’m approaching the cat with a sock and giggling and saying, “Hey, cat, ah tell you what, imma tie this here sock around you, hee hee hee,” which is what I invariably say in such a situation, that the cat is about to end up in that same disconcerting state of imbalance – unless, of course, the cat goes and hides under the bed until I’ve left the house or sobered up. And that is exactly what the cat will begin to do. The cat has learned to predict the future.

The obvious question that arises at this point is, “How did the cat manage to figure out that you were going to tie a sock around his midsection again without first reading about it in the Book of Ezekiel?” This is a very good question. The comparably good answer is that the cat didn’t figure anything out by reading about it in the Book of Ezekiel, and neither did Joel Rosenberg.

The next obvious question, then, concerns how Rosenberg manages to write “these novels that keep seeming to come true” if he is incapable of doing so via some sort of supernatural shortcut, such as reading the Book of Ezekiel. There are two potential answers. The first potential answer is that Rosenberg – who worked as a “communications consultant” for various political and corporate figures before beginning his career as a novelist – is a keen geopolitical observer, and is thus able to extrapolate from current and past events in order to hypothesize probable future events. The second potential answer is that Rosenberg cannot do any such thing, and that “these novels that keep seeming to come true” only “seem” to come true in the sense that fortune cookie messages “seem” to come true if one disregards the fortune cookie messages that don’t “seem” to come true at all, such as the one I got recently that said “Romance will soon come your way,” which is extraordinarily doubtful in light of the fact that I spend all of my time tying socks around cats.

But let’s hear Rosenberg – or at least whoever writes his marketing copy – out. According to his website, our prophetic friend has quite a track record of predicting the not-so-distant future. “The first page of his first novel – The Last Jihad - puts you inside the cockpit of a hijacked jet, coming in on a kamikaze attack into an American city, which leads to a war with Saddam Hussein over weapons of mass destruction,” it says. “Yet it was written before 9/11, long before the actual war with Iraq.” That actually sounds pretty impressive. I mean, that’s exactly what ended up happening. Okay, I’m convinced. The rest of this article is about why I’m converting to Evangelical Christianity.

But perhaps we should make sure that I’m not jumping the gun here. Let’s start by examining that last sentence, the one that ends “long before the actual war with Iraq.” A more accurate way of putting this would have been, “long after the first war with Iraq, not quite as long after the establishment of the No Fly Zones in two large sections of Iraq which consequently put U.S. and Iraqi forces into a decade-long series of shooting incidents, and not very long at all after Operation Desert Fox, which had at then point been the most recent military conflict with Iraq, and which was also fought over weapons of mass destruction.” That’s somewhat better, although not quite as impressive from a marketing standpoint, which is to say that it’s now true.

Still, though, Rosenberg did indeed write up a scenario in which we’d fight yet another undeclared war against Iraq over WMDs, which certainly ended up happening. Did he predict that 150,000 U.S. troops would be deployed to Iraq, topple Saddam, occupy the country, and find out that there aren’t any WMDs after all? Because that would be pretty impressive if he did. But he didn’t. Instead, his book details how Saddam tries to blow up the U.S. with ICBMs launched from his super-secret ICBM launchers, at which point the U.S. gets all huffy and nukes Baghdad and Tikrit. My memory is a little hazy, but I don’t remember any of that actually happening.

There’s also the matter of Rosenberg’s hijacked airplane, the one that comes in “on a kamikaze attack on an American city.” In Last Jihad, said plane crashes into the presidential motorcade in an attempt to assassinate the commander-in-chief. Well, that didn’t happen, either, but surely the fact that Rosenberg used a plane crashing into an American city as a plot element makes him an extraordinarily important person whose views should be sought out by the White House, Capitol Hill, and Kyra Phillips. But what if he had written a scenario in which terrorists attempt to crash a commercial airliner into the World Trade Center itself, and said scenario had been released in narrative form just a few months before 9/11? That would be more impressive still, right?

In fact, that scenario was indeed written, and said scenario was indeed released in narrative form just a few months before 9/11. But it wasn’t written by Rosenberg, or by any other modern prophet. Rather, it was an episode of the short-lived X-Files spin-off called The Lone Gunmen. I don’t know who the writer was, but I’m pretty sure he hasn’t been invited to Capitol Hill or the White House or even CNN. But why not? Coming up with a scenario in which such a significant event happens before it actually happens is, as we’ve determined, a valuable skill, perhaps even more valuable than Rosenberg’s ability to predict a few things that sort of happen along with a bunch of shit that will never happen at all. As Condoleeza Rice put it during her 2002 testimony before the 9/11 Commission, “No one could have imagined them taking a plane, slamming it into the Pentagon… into the World Trade Center, using a plane as a missile.” No one but the guy who wrote that one show with those guys from that other show, that is.

I’m kidding; plenty of people aside from that guy who wrote that one show with those guys from that other show imagined that such a thing could happen, and Condoleeza Rice is, of course, a liar. In 1993, the Pentagon itself commissioned a study in which the possibility of airplanes being used as weapons against domestic U.S. targets was looked into; similar reports on the topic conducted by various other agencies would follow over the next few years. In 1995, an Islamic terrorist plot to crash eleven planes into various world landmarks was foiled by international authorities. In 1998, the Federal Aviation Administration warned airlines to be on the alert for hijackings by followers of bin Laden, and a number of reports that circulated through the intelligence community over the next two years warned that said followers might try to crash airliners into skyscrapers. And in 1999, Columbine assailants Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold wrote out their plan to shoot up their school, blow up the building, escape to the airport, hijack a plane, and crash it into New York City, but only got around to doing the first part. Had they refrained from doing any of it and instead simply described that last event in a book, they probably could have looked forward to lucrative post-9/11 careers as novelists/cable news mainstays, insomuch as that they would have been “writing these books that keep seeming to come true” to the same extent that Rosenberg does.

Ah, but Rosenberg has written other books as well. Back to his website: “His second thriller – The Last Days – opens with the death of Yasser Arafat and a U.S. diplomatic convoy ambushed in Gaza. Six days before The Last Days was published in hardcover, a U.S. diplomatic convoy was ambushed in Gaza. Thirteen months later, Yasser Arafat died.”

That a U.S. diplomatic convoy might be ambushed in Gaza is hardly a tough bet; the reason that it was a U.S. diplomatic convoy in the first place, and not a U.S. diplomatic bunch-of-cars-driving around-individually-without-a-care-in-the-world-through-a-very-dangerous-region-where-anti-U.S.-sentiment-is-high-and-everyone-is-armed, is that Gaza is a very dangerous region where anti-U.S. sentiment is high and everyone is armed. For instance, I looked up the search terms “convoy ambush Gaza” on Google News just now, and the first thing that comes up is the headline “Hamas ambushes convoy of U.S. weapons intended for Abbas agencies,” relating to an incident that occurred on May 15th of 2007, that being two weeks previous to the time of this particular writing and a few weeks after I compiled my notes for this particular essay (yeah, I procrastinate). Oh, man! Here I was, writing and thinking about convoys being shot up in Gaza, and here was this convoy being shot up in Gaza! How is that I manage to write these articles “that keep seeming to come true”? Someone should invite me to fucking Capitol Hill and ask me about it. I’ll tell them that I figured it out by interpreting the Norse Ragnarök myth in a literal fashion. Or maybe I’ll just tell them the truth, which is that convoys get shot up in the Palestinian territories all the time, and that if you write a big long book in which things get shot in the Middle East or Middle Eastern terrorists blow something up – which is to say, a big long book filled with things that are constantly happening – a couple of these plot points are going to sort-of-kind-of come true at some point, and then everyone will think you’re neat. I probably won’t tell them that, though. I’ll just say it’s Ragnarök. I can’t wait to launch my career writing Ragnarök-based technothrillers.

In fairness to Rosenberg, his plot points don’t simply involve things that have already happened several times or things that have almost happened several times or things that are happening right now; occasionally, he goes out on a limb by describing events that can only happen once, such as the death of Yasser Arafat mentioned above. The reader will no doubt recall that Arafat did indeed die of health complications in 2003, having reached the age of 75 in a region where life expectancy is a bit lower than that and also after having been in and out of hospitals for several years, which is generally the sort of situation that leads one to die. And so it would have been pretty easy to predict in 2003 that Arafat might very well pass away in 2003 or 2004 from a combination of disease and plain old age.

But as easy as such a prediction might have been to make, it was still too difficult for our prophetic friend Rosenberg; The Last Days opens with Yasser Arafat being blown up in a suicide blast along with the U.S. secretary of state… in 2010. So, although Rosenberg does indeed predict the death of Arafat, whereas many people less astute than himself had no doubt predicted that Arafat might live forever, the actual death of Arafat, coming seven years before his fictional technothriller death in 2010, actually made Rosenberg’s own scenario not more accurate, but less accurate and, in fact, impossible. Nonetheless, this is one of a handful of plot points that Rosenberg uses as an example of how he’s managed to write “these books that keep seeming to come true.”

Well, that’s good enough for Kyra Phillips. Back at the CNN interview, Rosenberg was demonstrating his expertise on matters Middle Eastern by explaining that many Arabs don’t like Israelis and would like to see them conquered and occupied. “Saddam Hussein, or Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, or Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah – they’re all drunk with the dream of capturing Jerusalem,” our friend informs us, although it’s somewhat doubtful that the capture of Jerusalem was at the forefront of Mr. Hussein’s mind when this interview was conducted in July of 2006, seeing as how he was at the time living in a jail cell and being tried by a bunch of Shiites for killing a bunch of Shiites. But the larger point is indeed valid, so I’ll stop interrupting for a second here. “That’s what [Rosenberg’s poorly-written novel The Copper Scroll is about, which is about this battle – this intense battle – to liquidate the Jewish people and liberate Jerusalem,” Rosenberg continued. “I mean, are we seeing that happen? It’s hard not to say that we are. That’s why I’ve gotten invited over to the CIA, and the White House, and Congress,” he reminded us again, later noting for good measure that “Bible prophecy” is “fairly remarkable intelligence. And that’s why my novels keep coming true,” which they don’t, that “they have this feeling of coming true,” which is true in the fortune cookie sense described earlier, that “a million copies have sold,” which is simultaneously true, annoying, and unsurprising, and that “they are coming true bit by bit, day by day,” by which he apparently means that Saddam will come back to life and fire his non-existent nuclear missiles at the U.S., which will in turn nuke Baghdad and Tikrit; that Yasser Arafat will come back to life and live long enough to be blown up by a suicide bomber in 2010 along with Secretary of State Dennis Kucinich; and that a convoy will be shot up in Palestine. In fairness to Rosenberg, one of those things is indeed likely to happen. Again.

But on the question of the imminent destruction of Israel, Phillips – in accordance with established CNN procedure – wanted a second opinion from a guy who totally agrees with the guy who gave the first opinion.

Jerry, what do you think about what Joel wrote, about watching the Russian-Iranian alliance seeking to wipe out Israel?”

“Well, I find it very fascinating,” Jenkins replied, “and of course, Joel is a real geopolitical watcher.”

Of course. Every prophet in recorded history has been a “real geopolitical watcher” for the simple reason that if one wishes to pretend that one’s favored means of magic has managed to predict the current world situation, one must know a thing or two about said situation. The big problem is taking the current world situation and using it to determine the future world situation (whereas the small problem is taking the current world situation and using it to determine the current world situation, which, though this may sound axiomatically easy, is apparently very difficult for Rosenberg, who is wrongly convinced that Syria and Lebanon are allied with each other and that Russia is allied with both of them). The prediction of future events generally entails extrapolation from current trends, which is a pretty tricky process even when undergone by clear-headed observers and becomes nearly impossible when undergone by nitwit theocrats like Joel Rosenberg – and it becomes absolutely impossible when the nitwit theocrat in question insists on dotting his proposed future narrative with magical explosions, as Rosenberg did recently when he explained to Pat Robertson that “God says He’s going to supernaturally judge Iran, Sudan, Lebanon, Syria, these other countries. We’re talking about fire from heaven, a massive earthquake. It’s going to be devastating and tragic. But I believe that afterwards there’s going to be a great spiritual awakening.”