Because Facebook needs a rulebook

Typically when I meet someone out in the world, my interactions with him/her are limited to quasi-formal social or professional gatherings, and I could care less if that person, say, obsesses over horoscopes or sends money to PETA. In fact, I'd rather not know, and thankfully commonly understood social protocols make it awkward for my passing acquaintances to expose their niche interests or psychological quirks in public.

But Facebook is a little different from out in the world. Everybody has that one friend who three times a day posts gooey inspirational quotations, or picks fights, or makes everything political. If you're that person, or if you're that person sometimes, there's hope. Just follow the six rules below, and let me know if you drum up a few of your own.

Never reveal anything on Facebook you wouldn't say to someone you're meeting for the first time in person.

Imagine the following scenario: In the last seven days, your grandmother (whom you didn't know all that well) died; and you've just had amazing casual sex with someone you've had a crush on for a long time. Which of these two events will you share with a person selected at random from your Facebook friends?

If you chose to talk about your sex life, grab a square foot of tin foil out of the pantry, roll it up into a ball, and chew on it. That's how you make everybody feel when you write about your sex life or troubled relationships on Facebook.

Think before you post.


I've had this happen to me way too many times: I'll have the perfect one-liner response to someone's post, but it's not exactly PC. I read over what I've written, and decide that I'm not comfortable having that one-liner under my name, so I move on. And every time I failed to move on, I regretted it later.

Remember that when you respond to a post or comment, everybody who has posted to that thread gets an e-mail.


So, you know how every time your super popular friend says something even remotely witty, he/she gets 35 comments and 60 "likes?" You might not realize this, but your popular friend receives an e-mail for every idiotic "u r so purty grrrl!" and "I'm so grateful to have such a wonderful person in my life!" your dumb ass decides to "add" to the conversation. So don't be the last person to say what everyone else already knows.

There's nothing more irritating than a cause.


Some time ago there was a trend of people changing their profile pictures to cartoon characters to protest child abuse. Here's the thing: People who beat kids don't give a shit what you think. They rough kids up in private, then threaten them into not getting help. It's just about the most heinous, fucked-up thing there is, and changing your profile picture to Goofy isn't going to do anything to stop it. What this show of solidarity amounted to was a bunch of do-gooders agreeing with each other that child abuse is wrong while achieving absolutely nothing.

Election season is coming around. I hear there will be one at the end of next year. So if you're posting Barack Obama's Christmas photos and taking cheap shots at Ron Paul, just remember that you're the reason why some smart people capriciously vote Republican––because anything is better than being like you.

Don't fish for comments.


Do you refer small decisions to your loyal Facebook followers? Does it bother you when you post something and nobody leaves a comment? Do you frequently post provocative details about your life to see if a certain person will respond? I was that guy way back in high school (before Facebook, when MySpace was king), and I only woke up from my sleazy little stupor when I realized how needy and insecure I was being.

People are who they are inescapably in the real world, and even more so on Facebook because social media offer the illusion that you can be whomever you want to be. Thus your crippling personality flaw––in this case, your constant need to be validated on account of your insecurity––is magnified to the point that every right thinking person in your social circle can see it in sharp contrast. It's the social version of Oprah standing against striped wallpaper and the only known cure is, for one collapsing-barn-that-is-your-heart moment, seeing yourself for the ass you really are. You're welcome.

Never, ever post song lyrics or inspirational quotes.


These two things may seem unrelated, but I know what drives you to sing on Facebook or wax philosophical: It's the overpowering (and false) sense that you're an individual, reveling in the joys and calamities of life and sharing perfect gems of articulation with your loving friends and family.

The problem is, people ignore serial inspirers the way they ignore fallen leaves and broken beer bottles on the side of the road, so these nuggets of wisdom and snatched-from-context song lyrics amount to nothing but clutter. What's more, this chicken soup for the Facebook soul advertises the poster's insecurities. Life has given your annoying friend lemons, but the fact that he/she is quoting Bartlett's on Facebook means that your friend isn't making lemonade right now because he/she can't find the sugar.

My guess is, posters of quotes and lyrics are the most likely to take offense by this blog post. They're probably asking, "Where does all this hate come from?" Shut the fuck up. The chronic do-gooders of the world only want to spread peace and love, and for the life of me I've never been able to convince them that painting the world in their saccharine false light doesn't actually make life better.

…

Like I alluded to earlier, this isn't an exhaustive list of annoying behavior on Facebook. There are some great rules out there that still need to be ferreted out and articulated so people will learn good social media citizenship. 

J is for Jeezus

J is for Jesus. I know this because the lady in the dinged-up 1990s minivan told me so.

My interaction with this person began innocuously: I had gotten off my bike at the foot of the Boise foothills to make a phone call. Coming to a halt at a nearby stop sign she rolled down her window and asked me if I was freezing. This is a perfectly reasonable question to ask a person wearing Spandex at five in the evening the day after Christmas. I told her that, yeah, I was fine. That would have been a great moment for this Good Samaritan to roll up her window and go on her merry way.

Instead she took the opportunity to brandish a candy cane and ask if I believed in Christmas; if I knew that J is for "Jesus," and R is for "chevron." Now, a question about one's belief in a major Christian holiday in Idaho is code for "are you a Christian?" and after a brief discussion that consisted of her asking pointed questions about what I believe and me nodding like an idiot bobble head doll, she eventually wished me well, waved, and drove off.

J is for "Jesus?" Chevrons? There's an acronym for that: WTF. It turned my head that after millennia of Christian dominance over the Western world, this woman had the gall to talk to me in ciphers, as though Nero's spies might overhear and feed the twain of us to the lions.

But once an oppressed group, always an oppressed group. Just think about all the people you know who life has kicked around, or social conservatives, or spokespeople for labor unions: Like Nietzsche's slave morality, these people carry the politics of oppression with them wherever they go, even when they're in charge. Within the broader oppressed community, authenticity is defined––as it always has been––by suffering and underground-ness.

So now that Christianity is a mainstream faith cherished two or three times a year by millions of sensible people the question is, who's the most hardcore kind of Christian? After all, these establishment Christians can't be the real deal.

The answer: Christians who speak to each other in code. J can indeed stand for "Jesus." And the chevron (usually with an eye drawn somewhere in it) is the original for the Jesus fish that now adorns so many car bumpers. Clearly I was dealing with one of the most hardcore Christians of all––a modern-day Paul or Arius––; one of those people who sacrifice the warmth and comfort of friends, intelligence, success, social competence for…heaven? Legitimacy? Communion wafers? It's impossible to say for sure.

I'd always been told that there are three topics that shouldn't be discussed in mixed company. Those are sex, politics, and religion. This formula subjects these three areas of life to the rules of propriety, which is the source of my general antipathy towards Pride Week, the Tea Party, and Evangelical Christianity. Some people prioritize their beliefs over manners and decorum just like how someone who hates pants might one day decide to not wear them to work, and the effect is a lot like when someone reads over your shoulder, or how tall people seem to tower imperiously over your personal space.

I'm not religious, and like most decent people I consider on-the-spot religious discussion a kind of intrusion. Though invisible from the waist down on account of her battered minivan, my candy cane-wielding believer was clearly not wearing pants. It was as though during her spiel about whether I was One of Us she had casually dropped them out the window as a token of our newfound familiarity. Except it wasn't. It was like something a crazy person would do.

What critics got wrong about Stieg Larsson

"We're not making any money off these Stieg Larsson novels, so here's my plan: Let's attach an intriguing director and an all-star cast to their movie adaptations so we can disregard Sweden's seminal film interpretations of those same novels and make zillions of dollars."

This conversation (or one like it) had to have taken place in some producer's Los Angeles board room, possibly accompanied by maniacal laughter, lightning bolt. And now that we Yanks have seen fit to make a version of our own, the English language Inter-tubes are aflutter with excitement.

A lot of this critical chaff zeros in on Lisabeth Salander, the trilogy's anti-heroine and feminist stocking-stuffer. The women's studies implications of Salander are voluminous: She's a battered woman with an interesting sex life who hates (and exacts revenge upon) men who hate women. She may or may not have the ladies studies merits of Pippi Longstocking.

Katie Roiphe's recent Slate post hints that there may be more to Salander than the armchair feminists and literary critics give her credit for. At the organs of right-thinking feminist prose, "you will hear the assumption of victimization…and the simultaneous assertion of power." What's more, this character has come to the forefront of our collective imagination on the eve of The Good Men Project and The End of Men. Coincidence? Roiphe thinks not.

Roiphe doesn't go so far as to explain what it is about Salander that makes her more than grease on the literati's gears. This is because critics are stuck on the woman-ness of Lisabeth Salander, and haven't broadened their scope beyond feminist cause celebre: that she's an archangel of democratic values.

Consider what she's up against in the novels. Her nemeses are misogynists, yes, but also the barrage of confusions of the rote application of the law and the pursuit of justice. Salander was committed to a mental institution at an early age because of the political significance of her father, and her further adventures are inhibited by her status as an invalid.

Like the cases of Solzhenitsyn and Ai Wei Wei (as I indicated in an earlier post), the label of mental illness haunts the footsteps of political dissidents, even in a place as genuinely concerned with the wellbeing of its citizenry as Salander's Sweden.

At one point in the first novel, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Salander's caseworker explains that based on Salander's history of antisocial behavior no-one would think twice about his revoking certain of her privileges: Everything would be Ordnung on paper. Much ado derives from how things look in official documents and reports, and the problem Larsson identifies in his novels is the disconnect between those documents and the values of truth, justice and compassion.

On the subject of paper, consider also the role of the press in Salander's life. Mikael Blomkvist is Salander's staunchest ally throughout the Millennium series, and in his capacity as muckraker he's freed to pursue Salander's twisted case down the most unlikely avenues. His investigations reveal more than Sweden's underbelly of corruption––they reveal precisely what is hidden from the police. In other words, the investigative reporter can dig where the detective cannot because Blomkvist remains forever outside the system.

Now consider where democratic values come from. Isn't, say, freedom of speech most important to people who say unpopular things? And surely the presumption of innocence is most valuable to the innocent man who just happens to appear guilty, so it makes sense that Lisabeth Salander embodies these things in series of novels about why those values require our eternal vigilance.

The significance of all this is that if critics merely see Salander as a stand-in for feminist values, the Millennium series becomes nothing more than a revenge tale in the mold of Inglourious Basterds. Yes, Lisabeth Salander is interesting from a feminist point of view, but Larsson's novels are a defense of the whole philosophical framework that makes feminist thought possible.

Steve Bloom: professor, pariah, punk rocker

Steve Bloom has, purposefully or not, become the Sid Vicious of Iowa journalism. And maybe more. Response to his recent article in The Atlantic is divided between those who take umbrage against Bloom's facts and conclusions, and those who see his perspective as a critique of journalism or Iowa or the upcoming caucuses or whatever. At any rate, Steve Bloom is the man a lot of Iowans love to hate––the man who brought a little punk to a place that may (or may not) be the urheimat of corn and hogs.


By now there must be dozens of full-length responses to the offending article. Those responses come from such notable corners as the Columbia Journalism Review and The Washington Post, and the headline is, "University of Iowa journalism professor kicks unlikely and 'frankly frightening' hornets' nest."

Ask his students if anyone really "gets" Steve Bloom

Anybody who has ever spent time in Iowa knows that the last thing the place is, is a hornets' nest. It's full of calm, collected, clean people––with the totally understandable exception of game days––who are proud of being forthright and slow to anger. If it ever seems like a boring place, it's because Iowa is perhaps one of the most normal places on Earth.


––Which is precisely what makes Bloom's article so damned amazing: It has managed to really piss these people off. 


Not every claim Bloom makes in his Atlantic piece is absolutely 100% accurate (as more than one Iowan has noted in the comments section of the article's online edition), but a lot of Iowa is rural. Some of it is crumbling and Podunk. Corn grows. People eat pork and think highly of Jesus. But Iowa's also exceptionally verdant, tidy, and toy-bright. Barns are uniformly painted lipstick red, lawns and men's hair are cropped close as golf greens, and people tuck in their shirts.


The insider truth is that Iowans accept Iowa's contrasts without remark––the green of the corn and the blue of the sky, calloused hands and fresh linens, a disconcerting mix of progressive and conservative––and expect the same from the rest of us. The only thing that could upset such staid and placid folk is a half-truth. They ignore the lie that Iowa is flat or that its people are stupid (no man knows his business quite like an Iowan) or that it's secretly Idaho, but Steve Bloom's half-truths are simply more than respectable people can turn their backs on.


Bloom's take-down of the Iowa caucus tries to prove that Iowans no longer represent mainstream America, but in so doing he painted a picture of Iowa that Iowans themselves swear they don't recognize. And just like punk rock, the more some finger-wagging, latte-sipping, city-dwelling liberal tries to define you, the more you're likely to rebel against his definition. As one Iowan mentioned on my Facebook wall, "Reading [the article] the whole time I felt a square peg / round hole vibe when I looked at my own life here."  


This is where most of Bloom's haters miss the point. Of course, they're justified in their quarrel with his depiction of their home, but Bloom's comments about "scuzzy" towns and corporate farms are just set pieces in an argument over whether Iowa can, through the caucus, continue to lay claim to being the "real" America. The bulk of America's population now lives in the 'burbs and on the heavily urbanized coasts, as do the media corporations that are increasingly the masters of public opinion.

Outside the world of Pace sauce, New York is the new Real America

There's a general consensus that the Iowa caucus plays a disproportionate role in the Republican nomination process, playing into the hands of the social conservatives who make up that party's grass roots. Like a Frenchman wearing a beret or Africans with bones in their noses, the Iowa farmer showing up at a caucus with his hog and flannel shirt is a quaint anachronism that defrauds political discourse. In a much more recognizable Iowa, that farmer might make his entrance in a coat and tie, just like everyone else in America. 


The irony is that in order to debunk Steve Bloom, Iowans will first have to debunk the image of Iowa the media presents to the rest of America through the spectacle of their caucus.

Why 'Huck Finn' is still the Great American Novel

Last weekend my aunt and uncle moved into a new house down in the valley after 30 years of living in Boise's highlands. When I arrived for the moving party I was shocked to see their old abode––which had always struck me as fabulously filthy and hopelessly infested with black widows––devoid of objets d'art and the nooks and crannies that usually hide dust bunnies and poisonous spiders.

As my aunt packed some miscellaneous books into boxes, she handed me a copy of the Autobiography of Mark Twain: Volume I. "Do you want this," she asked. Of course I did.

I began reading it in earnest when I got home in much the same way he dictated it, haphazardly jumping from one story and set of reminiscences to another, and found myself laughing aloud at characters the master was able to paint in the space of a sentence or a paragraph. Twain is at his best when he's describing just what kind of hero or villain a given person really is.

In a fit of enthusiasm I drew from my bookshelf my copy of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and in doing so it fell to the ground, opening to pages 226 and 227, about three quarters of the way through. What I found there startled me with its prescience regarding the American soul and that novel's place in the canon.

But before I quote from the novel, let me suggest that like my aunt and uncle, the American novel has relocated from the heights and down into the lowlands. If, as Hemingway and Faulkner suggest, American literature grew from the seed that is Huck Finn, it's clear that much of the artistic work that followed in its footsteps has in some way been a reaction to it.

In my opinion, most authors side with either Twain's remarkable ear for the American voice, or his uncanny eye for the expanse of the American landscape. Few have tried––fewer still have succeeded––in capturing both. Consequently their readers must content themselves with being either deaf or blind.

Just take the work being produced today by the Jonathan Franzens, –Safran Foers and Eugenides of the world: So much of its focus is trained on the "alive"-ness of history and the 20th century's upheaval of sensibilities. Would The Help be much improved if it didn't take for granted the wrong-ness of mistreating house servants?

––Which leads me to what I found on page 227 of Huck Finn.

"So I was full of trouble, full as I could be; and didn't know what to do. At last I had an idea; and I says, I'll go and write the letter––and then see if I can pray. Why, it was astonishing, the way I felt as light as a feather, right straight off, and my troubles all gone. So I got a piece of paper and a pencil, all glad and excited, and set down and wrote:

'Miss Watson your runaway nigger Jim is down here two mile below Pikesville and Mr. Phelps has got him and he will give him up for the reward if you send. 

Huck Finn'"

The hilarious disgrace of the outcome of Huck's reasoning undoes the American fallacy of the easy decision. Huck faces a problem of the conscience, and his solution is to trivialize it.

Our hero wants to have his cake and eat it, too, figuring he can literally send his faithful companion up shit creek and pray for his own conscience later. Given its location within the novel, it's clear this isn't the catalyst for Huck's rambling adventure––it isn't the joke––: It's the punchline. When confronted with a choice between what's right (acknowledging the property of others) and righter still (acknowledging that Jim is a human being), Huck chooses what's merely right.

His dual sense that Jim is both man and chattel is an enduring feature of a distinctly American ethic. Wall Street holds that capitalism is the system that best puts security and material prosperity into the hands of the greatest number of people, and has admirably maintained as much in the face of millions of Americans losing their jobs and homes. 

A lot of bankers have made millions of dollars for themselves, their clients, and their shareholders, and I have to assume that they spend no small amount of their spare time praying for their eternal souls.

Like Huckleberry Finn, America is still a child trying to make sense of right and wrong, and we continue to feel blindly for the line between doing right by ourselves and doing right by the people around us. Russian novelist Mikhail Bulgakov acidly noted in his novel The Master and Margarita that "To speak the truth is easy and pleasant." But America is a young, naive place, and Twain's America hasn't yet the moral or ethical firmament to make Huck's––or Bulgakov's––dilemma a moral one until Huck feels the weight of his actions on his own conscience.

We can't laugh at either until we've felt for ourselves the pain of disregarding humanity or telling a convenient lie.

Inventing the news, FOX style

When I tell people that I'm looking for work as a journalist I hear a lot of complaints about the news. Some of them are warranted, some aren't. My dad, for example, only watches Brian Williams so he can shout at the TV. "Why is there so much fluff?" people whine. "Where's the other side of the story?" ask others.

The most valid complaint, in my opinion, is that there are too damned many talking heads. "Why," my friends ask, "does CNN have the same panel of 'experts' discuss every news item? Who do they think they are, the Doctors Who?" These so-called experts are secretly just intelligent people who read the news and can be expected to faithfully maintain a persona and ideological stance. 

Sometimes those personas run wild.

"Who's Roland Martin?" Now we know.

Roland Martin's ascot was the stroke of genius that transformed him from CNN panel set piece to object briefly worth our attention. Martin isn't charismatic or intelligent enough to stay in the spotlight–– unlike Anderson Cooper, he can't use his elvish good looks to conduct pathos like gold wire conducts electricity––but for just a moment, he had the courage and ingenuity to break away from the pack.

Fox News has the blessing (and burden) of having a single political viewpoint, and has largely dispensed with the farce of trying to give the proverbial both sides of the story. Sure, guys like Karl Rove, Mike Huckabee and Larry Miller will do the rounds of Fox's news analysis shows and occasionally get themselves elevated to shows of their own, but Fox has had to mix it up by recruiting commentators from right-wing think tanks, and that has meant exposing viewers to a diverse set of conservative viewpoints––a necessary evil Fox News wants desperately to dispense with.

Enter Donald Trump. Fox has long sought a truth-teller who has the credentials and stupidity to appear credible without delving into any sort of nuance. He paints his opinions in broad strokes, freeing his hosts to ask him questions about anything at any time without fear of stumping him or tangents. 

Even better, he's allowed to say crazy things like, "Our country is blowing up," with impunity because nobody expects Donald Trump to be anybody but Donald Trump. 

But the best part is all those shots of Sean Hannity barely upholding the social contract. It's his show, and sometimes he has to ask a question or assert himself, but Hannity is realizing what the rest of Fox already knows: If you invite Donald Trump onto your show, your only obligation is to make eye contact.

Sean Hannity lets the Trumpster do the editorializing for him

Americans love winners, and Trump has long been perceived as one: He's allowed to say crazy things, he marries top shelf supermodels, and he has a haircut that only the rich and famous could possibly pull off. A real estate magnate, he's a one-trick pony who has managed to fail at the most fool-proof industry of all, gambling. A self-proclaimed billionaire, he will viciously sue anyone who suggests otherwise to protect the veneer of his fabulous wealth.

He is, in short, the perfect Fox guest. He's greedy, he's brash, he's conservative, and people seem to like him for it––never mind that he's a Birther whose political knowledge is informed exclusively by the news network on which he regularly appears. So while Roland Martin has to pull out an ascot to rise above the din of the other stock CNN personalities, all Donald Trump has to do is be himself.

Conservatives have long prized unity and cohesion, but the Tea Party's frightening anti-establishment views have frightened mainstream Republicans. What Fox seems to be realizing is that even among adherents to the political philosophy that the solution to all our ills is to cut taxes, there are still too many ideas and perspectives to hold that movement together. Fox's reaction has been to use the narrowest possible set of ideas and perspectives to deliver the news in the most ideologically consistent possible way.

"Conservative" and the Eleventh Commandment just don't cut it anymore. Just look at the media blackout of Ron Paul during his presidential campaign.

Who's Ron Paul?

Ron Paul is a hardcore libertarian with an ideologically consistent plan for America. Regardless of whether or not you think that plan's correct, you have to hand it to the guy: He was Tea Party before Tea Partying was cool. Being a libertarian means decriminalizing drugs and allowing gay marriage and no longer pushing American military might abroad. So while Sarah Palin and Rick Perry are objectively idiots, at least they don't alienate wealthy Christian conservatives or big business. Letting Ron Paul into the Big Tent means pushing a lot of conservatives out. 

I predict that Fox's strategy of ideological exclusion will eventually achieve Stalinism. Spouting politically conservative theory on Fox News must inevitably become taboo because talking about what viewers have already internalized opens theory up for interpretation––and therefore difference of opinion. 

Making the rounds on the Internet is a Fox Business segment about the new Muppets movie brainwashing young people. The plot of the film is that the Muppets have been displaced from their studio because some tycoon has discovered oil under it. Using this as a plot device has ignited canned indignation over liberal media conditioning.

It's precisely this kind of commentary that will disappear from Fox News.

"Liberal Hollywood depicting a successful businessman as evil––that's nothing new" is all he had to say!

All this says a lot about who Fox feels its audience is––and what that audience will eventually become. At some point, it will no longer need to be reminded of how to interpret the news, and like Donald Trump, it will be relied upon to respond to the news predictably. 

The other day I went to my neighbor's house and ended up watching Sean Hannity's Donald Trump interview. I was shocked when my neighbor, a nice guy and definitely-not-stupid person, told me how much he respected Donald Trump. Today's conservative no longer values goodness, competence or intelligence the way he used to––those values have been replaced by a single one, success. 

My hope is, Fox's programming will evolve to the point that hosts and even the news can be done away with entirely. Instead, images of good things will be accompanied by images of beautiful women or steaming piles of food, and those of bad things will be accompanied by steaming piles of shit.

Maybe that isn't too far off.

Violence, Evangelism, and the Culture War

I've found that the best kind of family time is time spent in front of the television. If it weren't for that glowing beacon of mindlessness, family time could be divided into my parents bickering, my mom talking loudly over the phone, and dad exhaustedly collapsing into his John Grisham novel.

But last night we grew tired of AMC's never-ending cowboy marathon and Comedy Central's senseless failure to play The Colbert Report. We switched from cable to the networks, and my mom stopped my channel surfing at an episode of CBS' 'The Good Wife,' "Parenting Made Easy."

In it, an Evangelical Christian defends her anti-homosexual workplace language as religious speech, citing a passage in Leviticus. When asked by the prosecuting attorney if she also advocated stoning homosexuals to death (as per the passage), she replied that Christ's compassion and forgiveness should stay our hands against homosexuals, but it does not change what's right and what's wrong. 

It's an extremely elegant argument. Christians, it would seem, hold themselves to the highest possible moral standards because their ideal is Jesus, who was ostensibly sinless and therefore the moral paragon. Let God sort the sinners out. The rest of us are left to fight against moral relativism and the pull of our baser instincts. 

But does this reasoning hold up outside of 'The Good Wife?' The answer is a resounding "No." The episode my family watched last night mitigated anti-homosexual violence, but under the surface it presented Evangelicals with an opt-out from The Culture War; and while its plea for tolerance and free speech is touching, it's a weak argument against the hard line stance of Evangelical Christianity. 

The Culture War

The Culture War is the Evangelical reaction to the threat posed by secularism, and just like its moniker connotes, it's tinged with the threat of violence.

The Apocalypse is a period of time when the forces of absolute Good and absolute Evil do battle here on Earth, and moral ambiguity becomes synonymous with moral turpitude. Needless to say, it's a situation in which the non-violence of Jesus' philosophy becomes a mute point. 

Millennialism (the term for the belief in End Times) dispenses utterly with moral relativism, and encourages believers to take an active hand in suppressing it. Thus when social conservatives talk about the Culture Wars, they're talking about the conflict between those who see the Bible and Constitution as living documents, and those who see them as hard and fast laws chiseled in stone. 

So where does the violence come from? Millennialism takes the internal struggle against good and evil out of the mind of the believer and out into the streets. And if you believe that the end of the world is right around the corner or that Barack Obama is the Antichrist, the rivers are already running red with blood and the dragon is at your doorstep.

Eternal Forces PC game pitch takes the "Us vs. Them" approach

When I learned through a friend about "Left Behind: Eternal Forces" from a friend on Facebook, I recognized its overture to Evangelism's violent underbelly immediately.

"Left Behind" is a series of video games based partially on the successful novel series. In it, an Evangelical sect must convert Jews, Muslims, and atheists in the streets of a post-Apocalyptic New York––or kill them should they refuse Salvation. 

When I saw the trailer, I was, like, "Hell yeah, I saw that on TV last week when the police turned out the Occupy Wall Street protesters!"

If ever America was a "Christian country" as so many right wingers claim, it was because Christianity symbolized a general consensus on what was good, civilized behavior. But Christianity has always been divided, and today, it seems like even the most core Christian beliefs are up for grabs. 

The truth is, people will see what they want to see. There are still people who believe Herman Cain never cheated on his wife, that the government destroyed the Twin Towers, and that JFK was killed by aliens. 

The dangerous number of people who believe the Antichrist walks among us are stockpiling guns and canned food in preparation for the signs of the Apocalypse. But the rest of us have a powerful weapon: time. When no Antichrist waves the banner of pure, unadulterated evil; when the Chosen never rise bodily into Heaven; when Jesus fails to show up for his thousand-year reign––that's when these crazies are going to do some hard thinking about the snake-handling laying-on-of-hands specialist radio host they're listening to these days.

They'll just have to accept that Christianity is about faith and not about having your righteousness affirmed by cataclysm. Just ask that failed 2011 Doomsday prophet Harold Camping what he's doing these days.