While I don't believe in the commonly understood architecture of heaven and hell, I do believe that the centuries of art that attempted to inscribe these very sites were telling us a great deal about good and evil, non-secular or otherwise. Naturally cynical, and so long indoctrinated to believe doomsayers are beneath contempt, it has just now occurred to me to ask: What if they (the men and women who wear biblical citations to ball games) are right? I considered the old Steve Martin routine, performed long before his sense of humour was excised, which involves him going to heaven and saying, "But in college they told us this was all bullshit."Īnd then I imagined the same of a flaming boat ride along the River Styx. While no one has compared Chand to the devil, the illustrations are adequate enough signifiers of another terror at large: the end of the world, an event we have been awaiting so long, in the manner of Beckett's afflicted waiters on Godot. Newspapers this week have been, fittingly, outfitted with ominous drawings of terrorism suspect Steven Vikash Chand, represented by some as resembling a curious cross-pollination of Christ and Lucifer. Disgraced by the non-event that was the last century's passing, these tramplers of the grapes of wrath must be, currently, in a state of near ecstasy. Christian fundamentalists have always wrung their hands with joy at the merest sign that the disgusting events of the Book of Revelation are imminent.
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