Monday, July 17, 2006 | The Trib Trib

Planet Waves Flashback

SO perhaps it will comfort nobody to hear this, but when I was but a tadpole in the spiritual training pond known as Miracle Manor, most people would talk openly about a “tribulation period.” This was held by my fellow future amphibians to be an anticipated timeframe of life on Earth characterized by intense and life-changing developments, including environmental changes which were generally sorted in with the general term “Earth changes.” There was the continuous suggestion that it would really be good to know how to swim.

There was no proof that this was coming, and the traditional basis for the prediction was probably Edgar Cayce: but it seemed to be coming into consciousness through a few different sources. I never really had an opinion on the issue, nor did it concern me that much, except that for a while I worked on a parody of a future newspaper which you could read from the front or the back, depending on your point of view. From the front, it was the New Age News. From the back, it was The Tribulation Tribune, also known as the Trib Trib.

Ah that’s right, it was David Crismond, our resident doctoral student and approximate equivalent to the Professor on Gilligan’s Island, who would refer to it casually as The Trib. That is, he would call the forthcoming Tribulation Period or Tribulation Phase The Trib, like he was on a first name basis with it. He was a disciple of Hilda’s, and it would not surprise me if they talked about it seriously.

Anyway, theologically, it’s easy to lump the Trib in with all of the The End and Rapture stuff we keep hearing about. All you need to do is sit at home, wait for your doorbell to ring, and you will have a Junior Religious Scholar or three tell you all about The End and how you can prepare for it. The fact that the initials of this particular church are an anagram of LSD adds but a little irony, yet The End is in fact a fact of life for these folk and many others. There are also Rapturists, who are awaiting that glorious moment when we are all shed of our clothes and go ascending, in body, to heaven; except for those going to hell. There are the Left Behinders, the scifi-ish book series telling the tale of the sinful who inherit the Earth after all the good people are taken back by God — sells better than ice cream.

To millions and zillions of people, this is all as real as I-5 blazing down the West Coast. I don’t quite know how to put this any more politely, but a fuck of a lot of people are not concerned about the future because they think there is no future.

The whole joke of my newspaper was basically this. We have a choice in the matter. We humanity can head for the “New Age,” a world in which people try to get on together, and heal our stuff, do our thing and in the process, help the world; or we can face the Tribulation, a daemonic catastrophic dystopian mess, of which we are lately getting a taste.