jesus take the wheel (and my credit card number)
by Robert Dean
TikTok just told me there’s a rapture coming. (By the time you read this, it’s probably already passed.) Some lady had a prep list and laminated cards for those left behind, proof their piety wasn’t as legit as hers. Naturally, she was rocking a Charlie Kirk shirt. (The Right is still trying their hardest to blame the Left, and the story the government is selling makes no sense if you buy the whole theory of the gun and the texts between the supposed killer and his roommate + trans lover. No 22-year-old speaks like that. Conspiracy theorists, I’m with you on this one.)
But how many raptures are we gonna get? Does life in America suck so bad we have to slap an arbitrary date on when Jesus will magically surf down from the clouds, saying, “fuck all you who didn’t hate your neighbors correctly,” and take away the assholes from the mega churches? I mean, I’m all for those folks being zoomed into the clouds. But when it doesn’t happen, the blame just shifts, the goal posts moved closer to heaven. There’s always an excuse handy. I assume all the while ol’ Jehovah will be passing out Chick-fil-A coupons in a red hat, going against literally everything in the Bible.
All of this is just another brand of American anxiety. It sucks here. The phones in our hands are the real Anti-Christ they’re so obsessed with finding — misinformation spreads fascism we deal with daily, because look around. We feed on apocalypse like chicken tenders: TikTok prophecies, climate disaster forecasts, election doomsday chatter.
It’s hard to have common sense in the face of religion: no one wants to admit the grift. Believe whatever gets you through the night, that’s fine. It’s hard out there. What I don’t fuck with is the bullshit “war on Christians.” Dawg, you run the country and make up the majority. You write the laws and circumvent every avenue of decency to grab another blood-stained dollar. The Charlie Kirk memorial wasn’t a celebration, it was a merch drop featuring the death of Trump’s kinda-sorta favorite podcaster, complete with WWE-style explosions — Ozzy Osbourne dying had more tact.
At 44, I’ve lived through Y2K, the Mayan calendar, blood moons, QAnon. None of that shit happened. There’s always a new end time because people who live in mediocrity do nothing but find ways to insert themselves into the conversation (see: the cult of MAGA). I wonder how many bought prepper kits? There’s always a guy “telling you what they don’t want you to know,” selling protein powder or beef jerky. And now you’ve got so much jerky you basically own a dried-out cow.
I wish some hooded dudes would come down on horses, ready to fuck everything up. I’m down for that. We could use the break from continual genocide, class war, and a stagnant economy lurching toward depression. The real rapture is trying to afford rent and eggs.
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