Sunday Pages: "Babylon Is Fallen"

Notes on an aborted novel and the nature of evil.

Dear Reader,

In my early twenties, having made up my mind to write novels, I decided upon a longterm plan to experiment with different genres. The idea was to write one of each thing: one fantasy, one sci-fi, one thriller, one historical epic, and so on. (This is fun as a lifelong creative endeavor, but it’s not what literary agents like to hear, because: marketing). I’d completed my first novel, a short coming-of-age kind of thing, my senior year of college, and the goal for my second foray into longform fiction was to produce a work of horror. And not just any work of horror: something long and sprawling and epic and ambitious and allusive and original. Something that would re-invent the genre.

The Exorcist was written by a graduate of, and set at, Georgetown University, where I went to school. (The “Exorcist steps” were two blocks from from campus, and we often used them on our frequent beer runs to the liquor store on M Street.) As I saw it, what made that book and movie so scary was all the religious content: the demonic possession, the tortured priest, the crucifixes, the compelling power of Christ, the initial disturbance of the ill spirit at the archeological dig in Iraq (that is, in Babylon). I don’t scare easily. What gave me the shivers in a horror novel was when some or other Biblical prophesy wound up being accurate—or, at least, plausible. Thus the thing to do, I decided, was to concoct some story around vague passages from Jeremiah or Ezekiel or Daniel, or else come up with a novel interpretation of Revelation. Easy peasy!

And so I spent the summer after graduation reading, cover to cover, the entire Bible—for reasons both literary (I really should know all this stuff, because so many works of fiction allude to it) and commercial (the plot I desperately sought was lurking somewhere in those pages). Looking back, I see that I was developing the literary-analytical part of my brain that I use now, every week, to write these “Sunday Pages” pieces. But I was twenty-two, I had no idea what I was doing, and instead of focusing my mental powers on a single poem or novel, and honing in, I was taking the exact opposite approach. I was honing out. I was uploading the entire Hebrew Bible and the entire New Testament into my brain, crunching the data, and trusting that something original and good would, eventually, spit out.

This proved an impossible task—like trying to feed a thousand-page book into a paper shredder. It jammed my brain. Despite my regular church attendance, I wasn’t all that familiar with the source material. I didn’t really know what I was looking for. I wasn’t sure I’d find it. Also, as it turns out, a lot of the Bible is unfathomably boring. Furthermore, as a piece of writing, it’s a giant mess; it’s an anthology, not a uniform work; there is no definitive, overarching interpretation that isn’t immediately contradicted by other passages.

Basically, I was trying to solve an insoluble problem—something my father, who was in therapy, told me explicitly not to do. And the problem I was trying to solve involved predicting how the world would end. This proved deleterious to my mental health. As the days went by, and the riddle continued to confound me, I grew more and more melancholy. My father, no stranger to depression, recognized the warning signs and was rightly worried about me. But I was determined. I worked even harder. For guidance, I bought a few End Times mass-market paperbacks at the crappy bookstore in the mall (this was back when there were still malls, and still bookstores inside them).

After a few months of this—that is, of my brain grinding in high gear, mining the metaphorical bitcoin of creative inspiration—I had a waking dream, a vision. Jesus appeared in my closet. He had a message for me. The message was: Dude, STOP. Chill the fuck out. (It wasn’t really Jesus; I was just exhausted; but it scared the hell out of me.)

And right after that, I figured it out. I had it. I knew what my “take” would be, the part of the book that, if I wrote it properly, would give the reader a cold chill.

The World Wide Web was invented by Tim Berners-Lee in 1991, the year I graduated from high school. By 1995, when I was in my room poring over obscure Bible passages and being visited by closet Jesuses, the Internet was just starting to take off. At my first “real” job—as an assistant in the video library at Young & Rubicam, the advertising agency—I would show employees touring the facility how the Internet “worked.” I would explain, “In this area here, you just type in double-u double-u double-u period and then the name of the company, let’s say Nike, and then period and then cee oh em and then hit enter,” and then watch as their eyes glazed over in paralyzing boredom. (I quickly determined that what the Internet needed was a sort of cyber-phonebook, where you could browse listings to various websites, all neatly vetted and categorized; I spent a few days writing up a rough business plan for such an endeavor, only to find out it already existed and was called Yahoo!)

Okay, so the Internet was evil. Technology bad! That was what the bad guy in my horror novel would believe. And the reason you could tell it was evil is because of the WWW. “W” looks a lot like “VI,” which is the Roman numeral for six. So: VI VI VI. Where have we seen that before? Ah, yes: the Number of the Beast. Now: look at the W on your keyboard. It lives beneath two number keys, the 2 and the 3. Divide two by three and what do you get? A dot and then. . .

666

Did that, Dear Reader give you a cold chill? My guess is no. It’s way too much of a stretch. In a related story, that second novel was awful—far and away the worst long piece of creative writing I’ve ever produced. Like, embarrassingly bad. The plot involved a young, handsome priest who masqueraded as a college student, to knowingly spread plague through the campus, because he thought he was an instrument of God. What he didn’t realize is that he was actually the Devil in disguise! Or something like that. It didn’t make much sense.

I showed the completed manuscript to one of my friends, who was and is a serious writer, and he was taken aback. “Greg,” he cried, “you did not spent the last two years at Georgetown ruminating about the Apocalypse!” But I had. Was that weird?

The only thing I liked about that cringe-worthy abortion of a novel was its title: Babylon is Fallen. That is, as I’m sure everyone recognizes, an allusion to Isaiah 21:9, which reads: And, behold, here cometh a chariot of men, with a couple of horsemen. And he answered and said, Babylon is fallen, she is fallen; and all the graven images of her gods he hath broken unto the ground.

That’s a few lines after the part where the ancient prophet shares this bit of insightful wisdom: “The treacherous dealer dealeth treacherously, and the spoiler spoileth.”

So, like, there you go.

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I’m relating this now because I woke up at three in the morning with a Biblical line about Babylon in my head. Not the aforementioned one; the one from Revelation: Alas, alas that great city Babylon, that mighty city! for in one hour is thy judgment come. The takeaway is not that Babylon fell—all empires fall—but that it fell quickly.

And what triggered this, the reason the passage popped into my head, is the creeping dread I felt, and still feel, contemplating newly-minted Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth—a drunk, a credibly accused sexual assailant, a hardcore misogynist, a believer in some cuckoo medieval strain of Christian nationalism, and a “white DEI” hire—firing all those generals in a “midnight massacre” on Friday night. A disproportionate number of those given the axe were women and Black men, who have no place in the United States of Apartheid Donald Trump and Empress of America Elon Musk are building.

RFK, Jr. will eradicate medical research like vaccines eradicated smallpox, Tulsi Gabbard will give the Kremlin whatever top secret U.S. intelligence it doesn’t already possess, and Kash Patel will turn the FBI into a MAGA Gestapo—but nothing is as ominous as Hegseth firing the generals and the JAGs. There is no more independent rule of law in the military—no recourse for those in the chain of command ordered to commit illegal acts. As the retired Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman wrote, “Replacing JAGs with loyalists enables whatever orders Trump and Hegseth issue to be interpreted as lawful.”

Worse, Hegseth has replaced the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs with a Trump loyalist—a notorious retired three-star general with the Stallone-movie-villain name Dan “Razin’” Caine who, I’m reliably informed, was given a Revelation-esque monicker in Iraq for his notorious shall-we-say unsound methods in Anbar province.

He was known as “the Angel of Death.”

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What I didn’t like, and still don’t like, about the Bible is the sadistic glee with which Jehovah operates. As described in the Hebrew Bible especially, but also in Revelation and parts of the New Testament, He is jealous, angry, vengeful, and extreme. He will lustily wipe out entire nations because some guy got drunk and hooked up with a consenting woman down the street, or failed to make the proper sacrifices on feast days, or some other seemingly minor infraction. Plus: I find the word “fornication” offensive. And I really don’t like the way the Bible presents non-procreative sex—or gay sex, or sex outside of marriage—as sinful, or how it exalts virginity, to the point where stoning is recommended when women are “ruined.” All that rhetoric does is give people hang-ups and screw with their heads; it’s no coincidence that those most steeped in this fire-and-brimstone approach to sex tend to be the most…erotically damaged, let’s call it.

And as readers, we are supposed to root for these gruesome, grossly unfair outcomes—to be on God’s side when He, say, nukes Sodom and Gomorrah because two men made out—and to me, that sort of god isn’t worthy of worship. On the contrary, He’s an embarrassment, like a drunk, pissed-off dad at a Little League game chewing out a volunteer umpire for a questionable called third strike.

But what I realized when I woke up at three in the morning is that I’ve been reading those sections of the Bible all wrong. The O.G. prophets could not explicitly state what they meant, for fear of reprisal; there was no free speech then, of the First Amendment variety or the fatuous kind extolled by Elon Musk and his neo-reactionary buddies. Their messages had to be disguised. The stories—the prophesies—are cloaked in religious imagery, but, as with Paradise Lost, they are not meant to be interpreted that way. To understand the true meaning, then, we must strip away the theological mumbo-jumbo. These are political texts, rooted in history—and they aren’t predictions about what will happen, but warnings about what might happen, if a nation’s leaders start behaving badly.

Take, for example, Jeremiah. He talks about Babylon—which, for our purposes, is the United States, although it could have been Athens, or Rome, or Byzantium, or the Holy Roman Empire, or any other polity in history—as having awakened the wrath of the Lord. We don’t really know what exactly went down in Babylon to make Him lose His shit. But Jeremiah invests a lot of words in articulating God’s anger. This kind of passage is so over-the-top, it could be a dis track in some interminable celestial rap battle: And the land shall tremble and sorrow: for every purpose of the Lord shall be performed against Babylon, to make the land of Babylon a desolation without an inhabitant.

I’m like, “Yeah yeah yeah, the land will tremble and quake, we get it, get to the point.” And he does. How do the leaders of a failing nation behave when faced with a potential existential crisis? Jeremiah explains: The mighty men of Babylon have forborn to fight, they have remained in their holds: their might hath failed; they became as women: they have burned her dwellingplaces; her bars are broken. Nations fall when attorneys general fail to prosecute, much less execute, insurrectionists because of some quixotic need to adhere to “norms” the incoming administration will immediately upend anyway; when sitting presidents offer a seat by the fire to traitors who belong in the Big House, not the White House; when the Senate folds like the title of a Kevin Spacey series. (The part about men becoming “as women” is ridiculous, of course, and does not apply to the U.S., as the opposition leaders bringing the most fight right now are almost all women; but what he really means is that the leaders have become docile and effete.)

Again: this is not a prophesy; it’s a warning. Jeremiah is telling us that when our leaders surrender without a fight, that’s when we have to, as he puts it, “Set up the standard upon the walls of Babylon, make the watch strong, set up the watchmen, prepare the ambushes.”

The “city” is “fallen” because of a coup: One post shall run to meet another, and one messenger to meet another, to shew the king of Babylon that his city is taken at one end, and that the passages are stopped, and the reeds they have burned with fire, and the men of war are affrighted.

And how does the usurpation go down? Why does it succeed? Every man is brutish by his knowledge; every founder is confounded by the graven image: for his molten image is falsehood, and there is no breath in them. In other words, through lies and deception, and careful projection of his fraudulent image, the usurper is able to turn his followers into brutes.

John gives us a similar warning sign in Revelation 18:

And he cried mightily with a strong voice, saying, Babylon the great is fallen, is fallen, and is become the habitation of devils, and the hold of every foul spirit, and a cage of every unclean and hateful bird. For all nations have drunk of the wine of the wrath of her fornication, and the kings of the earth have committed fornication with her, and the merchants of the earth are waxed rich through the abundance of her delicacies.

Strip away the religious talk, decode the weird avian metaphors, think of “fornication” as non-sexual, and what he’s really getting at is: The nation has been taken over by evil people. Other countries run by evil people are now in league with the nation, having “drunk of the wine of the wrath of her fornication”—that is, the intoxicants of greed, power, and cruelty. And the merchants who are rich are the amoral oligarchs, whose fortunes are made through casting their lot with the evil leaders.

Let me reiterate: this is not religious. These are not prophesies of what is to come. These are warnings of what might happen if certain conditions are met. What woke me this morning is the realization that we appear to have met the conditions.

The bitter irony is that the Prætorian Guard surrounding Trump and Musk—the critical mass of influential human beings who have lent their support to the tyrannical usurpers with the most zeal—are in the main Christian nationalists who believe Revelation is literal…and yet fail somehow to see that Trump and Musk bear a greater resemblance to the two satanic Beasts of the Apocalypse than any other political pairing in recent memory.

Distilled to its basic components, all of these prophets have more or less the same thing to say: At some point, the people living in great nations will enjoy so much abundance that they will stop being vigilant, and take their hands off the wheel, and allow the ship of state to be hijacked by the sociopathic, the selfish, the greedy, the cruel, the sadistic, the hateful, the bullying, the despotic—in a word, the evil. The treacherous dealer dealeth treacherously, and the spoiler spoileth. Or, as Taylor Swift would have it, the haters gonna hate hate hate hate hate.

It’s taken thirty full years of crunching data in some closet of my mind, like an application working tirelessly in the background, but this morning, my brain finally spat something out. It’s not a solution. It’s not the plot for a genre-reinventing horror novel. It’s the reason why I was unable to come up with something better back in 1995:

I didn’t really know what evil looked like. Oh, I read books about the Holocaust. I saw Schindler’s List. But I never got—and I was so fortunate to never get—a good, hard look at capital-E Evil.

And now I have. And now I know.

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ICYMI

Our guest on The Five 8 was Victor Rud:

Crimson & Elon. Please share this:

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I will be at the Ukrainian Institute in NYC on Monday, talking to Alexander Vindman about his new book, The Folly of Realism. Please come by if you’re around!

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Photo credit: Detail of a miniature of the angel speaking to John and pointing to the Whore of Babylon, who is sitting on the Beast. Image taken from f. 32 of Apocalypse, with commentary (The 'Queen Mary Apocalypse'), with the prologue of Gilbert de la Porrée translated in French. Written in French.