Our Time Zone

His or Her story or both together,

“Words can be twisted into any shape. Promises can be made to lull the heart and seduce the soul. In the final analysis, words mean nothing. They are labels we give things in an effort to wrap our puny little brains around their underlying natures, when ninety-nine percent of the time the totality of the reality is an entirely different beast.

~ Karen Marie Moning

Dostoyevsky (who was Orthodox) wrote in The Brother’s Karamazov:

Since man cannot live without miracles, he will provide himself with miracles of his own making. He will believe in witchcraft and sorcery, even though he may otherwise be a heretic, an atheist, and a rebel.

https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2025/03/salting-the-earth-and-the-vandalism-of-america.html

It feels like we have entered a dystopian world in just the seven weeks since Trump took office. One reaches for the dystopian literature to understand what’s happening and some of the classics—1984, Brave New World, The Trial—don’t capture the bizarre era as well as some obscure novels rarely discussed. Take The Sheep Look Up, a book written by John Brunner in 1972. In the science fiction novel, the earth has been so decimated with pollution and abuse that the water is largely undrinkable, the air too toxic to breathe, and the beaches of the world strewn with garbage. The President, called Prexy, has no solutions, just cute sound bites. As the world deteriorates to the point of collapse, he blames everything on communist rebels from Honduras. Sound familiar.

It would be one thing if Trump had a carefully thought-out plan to reduce government spending and reduce any corruption. But he is powered only by a thirst for vengeance and a need to destroy. His efforts to tear apart Biden’s Infrastructure Bill will hurt farmers in the reddest states and professors driving EV cars in the bluest states. Yes, his (and Musk’s) dismantling of USAID initially thrilled the MAGATS (most of whom know nothing about USAID). Then they learned that USAID was a major customer of grain-belt farmers, buying a million metric tons of commodities like wheat, rice, sorghum, and chickpeas every year. That’s a few billion dollars that states like Nebraska and Kansas won’t see anymore.

Then there’s the firing of so many men and women who manage public lands. As of this writing, 3,000 people have been fired from The Forest Service and 2,000 people have been fired from The Department of the Interior. I live near the White River National Forest and I know that it was understaffed before the firings. The Forest Service heavily relies on volunteers to patrol trails and campsites because they don’t have enough paid staff to do it. The BLM and Park Service never have sufficient staff to manage the millions of acres under their control. The National Park Service contributes about $55 BB to the US economy every year, so the savings of a few million dollars in salaries and what will consequently result in summer chaos is what’s called bad business.

Like Huysmans, Bloy expressed dissatisfaction with a derelict God who was slow to anger, who for too long had restrained the punishing fist that would strike the hedonist and unbeliever. Both Bloy and Huysmans professed acceptance of Church teaching, yet at the same time they behaved like refractory children, exhibit- ing an insubordination that moved them to question an absentee Savior, «dont il[s] pressentai[ent] la prochaine Venue, quoiqu’il ait l’air de dormir profondément depu- is tant de siècles»5. As God failed to sanction transgressors or to raise up the stricken, he was chided for his inaction. For Bloy especially, as this paper argues, the writer was both an accuser and a prophet, using his text of vatic indignation to incite the dilatory messiah, whom Bloy hoped «à force de clameurs désespérées, faire, une bonne fois, crouler de son ciel»6.

It was against a backdrop of increasing laicization, economic liberalism, and democratic reform that Bloy and Huysmans saw institutional Catholicism as coming under attack, beleaguered by forces of secularism and money-worship, all harbingers of the coming Weltuntergang. In L’Oblat (1903), Huysmans had impugned the moti- vations of Pope Leo XIII himself, accusing him of harboring sympathy for republican ideas and social reforms. Horrified by his vision of a world controlled by Satanists and Freemasons, Huysmans anticipated a cleansing Armageddon.

Léon Bloy (1846-1917), today a largely forgotten literary figure, is often count- ed among those whom John Coombes calls the “grands exaspérés”7. The most full- throated of the Catholic reactionaries of the fin-de-siècle, Bloy propounded a politi- cal ideology that was «antirationalist, antidemocratic, and anti-Semitic»8, which he combined with a mystical expectation of eschatological catastrophism. More than Huysmans, Bloy displayed a paranoid discernment of omens of approaching doom, and so evolved his own cult of suffering, poverty, and degradation. Fueling his dia- tribes against charity-sponsoring society ladies, Bloy’s outrage at the apotheosis of the wealthy caused him to predict the redemption of the indigent. The nihilism of both Huysmans and Bloy assumes a paradoxically regenerative quality since, only when nothing remains and the devastation is complete, can the Holy City rise up from a blasted world.

In foretelling the end time, Bloy uses his text to diffuse into an audience that harkens to his warnings. Readers become converts joining a community of the misbe- gotten, the lowly, and wretched raised up by Bloy’s prophesy. On Judgment Day, the doomsayer escapes the desert of his loneliness. «This», as Mortimer Ostow writes, «is the source of fascination of the apocalypse: the opportunity to act out one’s fury upon a target and to be rewarded for doing so by the sense of messianic deliverance into a loving and blessed group that will survive the cataclysm.

For Bloy, the dream of millenarian retribution had been caused by resentment that literary celebrity had eluded him, that his books had not sold better, and that others enjoyed the fame that was rightly his. Worthlessness became for Bloy an em- blem of distinction: those subjected to contumely in this world would be crowned with glory in the next.