Wry Martinis (41 page)

“Dad?” My daughter, Caitlin, six, asked me one day when she was about five, “What’s God?” I broke out in a sweat. This was the Big One, existentially speaking:
Where do we come from? Where are we going? Will we have to change planes in Atlanta?

I suppose in this day and age I should be grateful she didn’t ask, “Dad, what’s a condom?” Still, her question made me feel I had failed, big time, as a father. I’d already filled in about twenty nursery school applications. I’d already started to put money away for her college education. I’d already bought her her first computer so she’d be able to get a job in 2000-something. Clearly, it was time to get cracking on the spiritual side of things.

And yet, how to proceed? A practicing Roman Catholic for almost forty years, I’d recently crossed over into the agnostic camp—which I think of as the “just-the-facts-ma’am” school of philosophy—so I wasn’t quite sure how to answer “What’s God?” I did want Caitlin to grow up open to God and spirituality. Which isn’t to say that I hope she’ll run off with the first Jehovah’s Witness who bangs on the door. Quite the contrary: I want her to be able to look that Jehovah’s Witness right in the eye and say, “You’ve
got
to be kidding.”

What she needed, in other words, was a firm grounding in the Judeo-Christian heritage. Besides, I’d rather she knew something of Abraham and Moses and Jesus than of Barney and Lambchop and Thomas the Tank Engine. She already
knows
about them.

I went out and bought a beginner’s Bible. The stories are nicely told, and the illustrations are friendly. Everyone looks clean and presentable; no one looks too scruffy, even Goliath, though you probably wouldn’t
invite him to dinner. It’s not called a whale in the text. The chapter is titled “Inside a Fish,” which to me doesn’t have the same oomph as “Jonah and the Whale.” The chapter about the Roman discovering Jesus’ empty tomb is titled “Surprise!”—which is sort of cute, even if it does make a pretty crucial New Testament event sound a bit like a panel from
Where’s Waldo?
And Cain and Abel are left out, which is probably for the best, because Caitlin often expresses the desire to murder her two-year-old brother, Conor. No good could come of her learning how common fratricide always has been.

“OK,” I said to Caitlin one Sunday morning. “Today we are going to read the Bible.”

“Actually,” she said, “I’m busy.” That is, watching
The Rescuers Down Under
for the eight hundredth time. I did what any other loving-but-firm father would have done. I asked her if we could read the Bible after her video was finished.

Boy, if she only knew what her dad’s new-found agnosticism was sparing her. Sunday Mass, confession, Communion, confirmation, holy days of obligation, Lent, four years of boarding school with Benedictine monks, trudging up to Mass at 6:15
A.M
. in winter, in the dark … I’ll say this for a Catholic upbringing: great memories.

In fact, the Bible was an easy sell on Caitlin. She gobbled it up. One morning she insisted on reading the entire New Testament. We were halfway through Jesus’ ministry when I asked, “How about a video?” Anyway, she got a firm grounding in her Judeo-Christian heritage. For example, she now knows that God is present in everything. And I do mean everything.

A few hours later: “Is God in Conor even when he does something
really
bad, like putting the firewood log in the toilet?”

(Confidential to agnostic parents: Expect a barrage of questions intended to provoke you, such as “Is God in bubble gum?” The good news is that eventually your kids will tire of provoking you—by which time you are on Prozac.)

She now was ready to explore even more complicated moral and philosophical questions.

You can postpone this moment, but you can’t avoid it. Ultimately, the important thing is to remain true to your convictions. If you lie, they’ll pick up on it and never trust you again. Which is why, as an agnostic dad—difficult as it was—I looked her right in the eye and said, “You go straight to heaven.”

—
USA Weekend
, 1994

As
annus mirabilis
2000 approaches, we’d best start to deal with it: there will be Elijahs on every street corner, cable channel and Web site urging us to repent, repent, for the end is at hand. There’s just something about an impending millennium that brings out the gloom and doom.

The year 999 was a boom year for monasteries. Penitents flocked in, hysterically bearing jewels, coins and earthly possessions by the oxcartful, hoping to cadge a little last-minute grace before Judgment Day. The year 1999 may turn out to be a similarly good one for the coffers of fundamentalist Christian churches—especially if Pat Robertson’s apocalyptic novel,
The End of the Age
, is any indication of what the faithful think is going to happen when the ball atop the Times Square tower plunges into triple zeros.

Mr. Robertson is, of course, no ordinary street-corner Elijah. He is a graduate of the Yale Law School and chairman of both the Christian Broadcasting Network and International Family Entertainment (the Family Channel). He has his own daily television show,
The 700 Club
, and is the author of nine previous books. In 1988, he ran for president in the Republican primaries, giving the distinctly non-fire-breathing Episcopalian George Bush a briefcase of the heebie-jeebies during the Iowa caucuses and establishing the Christian right as an electoral force to be reckoned with. So when he ventures forth into pop-fictional eschatology, attention must be paid—if only for the pleasure of hearing a president of the United States tell the nation in a televised address, “We are the world,” and to watch as an advertising executive is transformed into an angel.

It’s hard to define
The End of the Age
exactly. It’s sort of a cross between
Seven Days in May
and
The Omen
, as written by someone with the prose style of a Hallmark Cards copywriter. The good guys—a born-again advertising executive and his wife, a black pro basketball player and a Hispanic television technician, all led by one Pastor Jack, a descendant of the eighteenth-century American preacher Jonathan Edwards—tend to sound like a bunch of Stepford wives who have wandered onto the set of
The 700 Club
, eerily polite and constantly telling one another to please turn to the Book of Revelation:

“ ‘That’s right, Manuel. Every bit of it is in the Bible. As a matter of fact, whole books have been written about a diabolical world dictator called the Antichrist. He got that name because he will try to perform for Satan what Christ performed for God.’

“ ‘Wow, I hope he fails,’ Cathy said.”

The bad guys tend to sound like the villains in a Charlie Chan movie. In fact, they sound as if they were being simultaneously translated from some sinister Indo-Iranian tongue:

“Panchal, sorry to wake you. Get your people ready. Tonight the gods have given America into our hands.”

That “sorry to wake you” is one of the many unintentionally hilarious moments that relieve the general tedium. For all the apocalyptic pyrotechnics, the book leaves the eyeballs as glazed as a Christmas ham. But just when you start wondering what’s on C-SPAN, there will be a reason to go on:

“The Antichrist raged within his palace.… The final battle was coming. He would march on Jerusalem at the head of his armies. ‘Then,’ he said to Joyce Cumberland Wong, ‘I will win! At last I will have my revenge!’ ”

The book begins with a bang in the form of a 300-billion-pound meteor that lands in the Pacific Ocean with the force of five thousand nuclear bombs, setting off a three-thousand-foot tsunami, earthquakes, fires, nuclear plant meltdowns, volcano eruptions, ash in the atmosphere, floods and food shortages. All in all, a rather bad hair day for old Mother Earth, sending the Antichrist ouching toward Bethlehem to be born. Meanwhile, at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, things are a bit sticky:

“Well, here’s the story,” the secretary of defense explains to his top general over lime-and-sodas while the world burns. “As you know, we
had one President commit suicide. The next was killed by a snakebite, and then the man who left the cobra on the President’s desk was murdered. They say he committed suicide, but don’t you believe it.”

At this point, if I were the general, I’d have asked for some Scotch to go with my soda, but in evangelical literature the good guys don’t drink.

“Now,” the secretary continues, “we’ve got this ex–campus radical in the White House, and if you heard the speech tonight, you know he’s got some mighty big plans.”

That would be the aforementioned “We are the world” speech, and yes, President Mark Beaulieu (read “mark of the beast”) does indeed have some big plans: a one-world government with its own currency and a police force in United Nations—ish uniforms, a grand new $25 billion world headquarters palace in Babylon with some positively kinky special effects, computer-tattoo ID markings for everyone, drugs and orgies for schoolchildren, vintage wines for the grown-ups.

Your basic liberal agenda, right down to the Chardonnay. President Mark of the Beast’s cabinet would certainly provide for some memorable nomination hearings:

“For Secretary of Education, the President had selected a Buddhist monk who shaved his head and dressed in a saffron robe and sandals. For Secretary of Agriculture, he asked for a shepherd from Nevada who lived alone in the hills and spoke broken English. The man’s only known ‘credential’ was that he had once played jai alai in Las Vegas. For Secretary of Energy, he named a Lebanese Shiite Muslim who was a member of the terrorist group, Hezbollah, and ran a filling station in Dearborn, Mich.

“For drug czar, he picked a man who had spent his life crusading for the legalization of all narcotics. For Secretary of State, a professor of Eastern religions from Harvard University”—a Yale man just can’t help himself—“who had close ties to Shoko Asahara, the leader of the Japanese cult of Shiva worshipers known as Aum Shinri Kyo, or Supreme Truth. They had been linked with a poisonous gas attack in a Tokyo subway in 1995. And he chose for Attorney General a militant black feminist attorney who advocated abolishing the death penalty and closing all prisons.”

I’ll bet not one of them paid Social Security tax on the nanny.

The End of the Age
is to Dante what Sterno is to
The Inferno
. When you have a hard time keeping a straight face while reading a novel about the death of a billion human beings, something is probably amiss.

But lest we be too smug, bear in mind two recent events. In March 1989, a large asteroid passed within 450,000 miles of Earth. Had it landed in an ocean, according to scientists quite genuinely rattled by 1989FC’s sudden appearance, it would have created three-hundred-foot tidal waves. If you think 450,000 miles is a country mile, consider that Earth had been in the asteroid’s path just six hours earlier.

Then there was Hurricane Gloria. In September 1985, this violent storm was working its way up the Atlantic, headed for Virginia Beach, Virginia, headquarters of the Christian Broadcasting Network, with murderous force. Mr. Robertson went on the air and prayed, commanding the storm to stay at sea. It did—and came ashore at Fire Island, demolishing the summer house of Calvin Klein.

—
The New York Times
, 1996