The End Times Customer Service Desk

False prophets, sticky problems, and decent advice on everything from the dire Strait of Hormuz, to fleeing from the world, to aging gracefully when your body has other ideas

Jesus? I thought I just looked like a doctor.

Editor’s Note: Have a question about why Matt, who is as delusional and solipsistic as his arch-nemesis Donald Trump, hasn’t, like Trump, posted an AI picture of himself as Jesus? Well, Matt’s righting that wrong, stat. Today’s cover photo is an AI mashup of Matt not caring if it rains or freezes, long as he is his plastic Jesus, sitting on the dashboard of his car. If you have any less blasphemous questions, ask Christ’s humble servant, Matt — already groveling for forgiveness —at askmattlabash@gmail.com

Dear Matt,
You’ve bitched a lot about Trump and the Iran War. But as of today, looks like the Strait of Hormuz is open, oil prices are falling, stock prices are surging, and there might be a nuclear deal on the horizon. Do you have any plans to eat crow yet, and will you be posting the video if you do?
Hugs and kisses,
K. Leavitt

Well, that didn’t take long, did it? I wrote an answer to this question, went to bed, and woke to the news that Iran re-closed the Strait by this morning, while firing on at least two tankers. That said, I’m not too proud to eat crow pie, crow crudités, crow nachos, and crow carpaccio if anyone can demonstrate to me — even if all turns out okay in the end (a monster “if”) — how we’re better off now than we were two months ago. Which exactly nobody can do at the moment. Not just because Trump has a special knack for snatching defeat from the jaws of victory (see the economy, which was humming along pretty steadily until he found umpteen different ways to personally disrupt it). But because thus far, Trump’s entire Iran War, or “Little Excursion” as he prefers, has felt a bit like watching a man amputate his own arm, then affixing some Velcro to the end of his bloody stump, while insisting, “See! It picks things up just as good as it used to!” Trump might call this a victory. And being the Premature-Ejaculator-In-Chief, he already has. But most reality-based types would call it self-mutilation: congratulating yourself for (potentially) solving problems that you caused. Though we’re still paying over four dollars a gallon for gas, which will ripple throughout the entire economy on the back end. So guess what? Problem not solved. Sorry, Stable Genius, but you don’t get to blow a hole in our hull, then expect to get a medal for being a strong swimmer as the ship goes down.

Recognize, too, that the Strait of Hormuz was open before Trump interrupted all negotiations in order to force Iran into trapped-rat-in-a-corner territory, helping them demonstrate to themselves and the world how easy it is to take the global economy hostage. We didn’t have any of these problems beforehand, except for the generally problematic Iran itself, which has long been a pisser of an evil empire, and continues to be so. But despite Trump’s spilling of blood and treasure, the same regime is still in place, nominally headed by the son of the guy who was just assassinated by us. So I’m sure he’s feeling generous and conciliatory and not at all prone to deception.

And as of now, Iran’s “nuclear dust” as Trump calls it, is still in their possession. Even if they claim to hand it all over, it’ll be hard to verify that they’re telling the truth. Much as it was hard to verify during Obama’s nuclear deal, which Trump threw out, but which remains the best (if imperfect) deal we’ve had before or since. Trump’s promised nuclear deal has been about as evident as his healthcare alternative after he jettisoned all the Obamacare subsidies. Most of his “improvements” tend to be figments of his imagination. But it’s hard to keep such policy particulars straight when you have more pressing concerns, like picking up gold tchotchkes at HomeGoods for the Oval Office, while ensuring that your half-a-billion-dollar White House ballroom is appropriately garish.

Cards on the table: I want America to succeed (and to get back to under-three-dollar-a-gallon gas), more than I enjoy watching Trump fail. That said, watching Trump getting de-pants’ed over the last month or so for his disastrous decision-making and arrogant impetuousness has delivered a schadenfreudic payload like few other episodes in his career. Our allies despise him. His own MAGA-cultist fraudcasters are defecting on him. And his failures are advertised 24/7 by a ubiquitous news-delivery-system that has much greater reach than his Fox propagandists ever could. Because every time you drive past a Shell or Chevron station price marquee, you’re reminded of what a five-alarm goatfork this foolhardy adventure has been. And while it might be easy for Trumpist stalwarts to ignore warnings about him hamstringing democracy, it’s much harder for them to ignore their wallets getting bled out. But since I’ve now lived through ten years of Trumpbots practicing blind-faith Trumpism, I have little doubt that they’ll try.

Matt,
I’m finding out that the longer AI and I are chatting about what color to paint our upstairs, AI is surreptitiously scanning my computer and passing the info to an aggregator, to be used for “later.” Google and my cable provider know, minute by minute, what I might possibly buy and what kind of entertainment I like. Even my music streamer is judging my musical taste!

Then this - “At an Easter lunch event at the White House, Trump’s ‘faith advisor’ Paula White-Cain compared Trump to Jesus Christ. ‘You were betrayed and arrested and falsely accused. It’s a familiar pattern that our Lord and Savior showed us. Because of His resurrection, you rose up.’” -Charlie Sykes

The hermitage is calling. Should I answer the call? Should we? Should we go full Thoreau and find our Walden Pond?

How can we opt out of our current place in time? Should we?

B. Mays

I chat too much with AI, as well, these days. Not because I need anything from it. I just find it to be more emotionally responsive than most of my shallow friends. But that admitted, sorry to break it to you. You can run, but you can’t hide. Because even when Thoreau became a squatter on Emerson’s woodland Walden Pond property, famously cast as a fabled isolation chamber, Thoreau used to regularly travel into downtown Concord (only a few miles away), and drop his laundry off at his mom’s, while also seeking out company. Lesson: no man is an island. Which was also the title of one of the great Thomas Merton’s books. (Merton, being someone I have written about in these pages many times, but in most concentrated fashion, here. As I have Thoreau, for that matter.) Merton was not only a literary genius/sage, he spent his entire adult life as a monk at the Abbey of Our Lady of Gethsemani in Bardstown, Kentucky, where he took his solitude so seriously, that he commandeered an on-campus shack away from the monastery, so that he could be even more alone than all his fellow monks who already thought that they were sequestering themselves from the world.

And yet…..Merton was still a creature in need of society. He wrote over 10,000 letters in his stint as a Trappist monk. He received regular visits, often from fellow famous people of his day – everyone from Thich Nhat Hanh to Joan Baez. He was known to drink beer and wine with guests, since life’s too harsh to face stone-cold sober. (Ben Franklin called wine: “a constant proof that God loves us, and loves to see us happy.”)

It is easy to want to be alone, but hard to actually stay that way. It is easy to want to disconnect from the world. But nearly impossible to have the world disconnect from you. So maybe you shouldn’t fret over it all that much? Maybe we should just accept that tension, and the world for what it is: often an intrusion, but also, the place where we make our lives. And because we have to make our lives in it, we should, at the very least, engage with it. Even if we have to regularly escape from it, as both Merton and Thoreau habitually did – but not passively. Rather, theirs was a strategic retreat which ultimately helped them see the world more clearly. We need The World, but maybe it needs us, too. Perhaps the people who desire to escape from it most are exactly the same people who should be refining it. Because what better way to make the world better, than to be one of those who are capable of addressing its imperfections? You’ll never make the place perfect. Because you’re not perfect, either. But on your best days, you can probably tidy things up a bit.

Dear Matt,
I’m old, and still mentally with it, but not as physically with it as I used to be. Which is discouraging. How do I make a peace with my mind and body not making a peace?
Name Withheld

That’s a genuinely hard question. One I don’t pretend to know. Mainly, because I haven’t gotten there yet. I’m in my fifties. Which is too old to call yourself young, and too young to call yourself old. (Though anyone in their forties or younger is perfectly fine with calling you old.) But I was having an email conversation the other day with an older friend of mine who is very much facing the same issue. He’s a robust guy, used to working with not just his mind but his hands, and who has been physically active his entire life. He has tended a mini-farm in the rural midwest, but with his recent health travails, has felt it all slipping away, and is discouraged. And then he confessed to feeling self-indulgent for telling me of his setbacks.

We talked about it. And though I don’t pretend this is a satisfying answer to him or anyone else, it’s the one I sent him. The best I have to offer at present:

You shouldn’t feel self-indulgent. I began learning, even by age 50, that life is about subtraction after a certain age. Saying goodbye to family and friends who won’t get replaced. (And not always by death, often, just by estrangement or ties weakening.) And how much more that becomes true when the things that always brought you physical joy get jeopardized. Good health is the thing we don’t think about at all when we have it, and the thing we can’t stop thinking about when it’s compromised.

Here’s hoping enough of yours returns to keep your spirits up. Which often doesn’t take as much as we think it does. I’ve been fishing hard for shad lately. Which is kind of physically demanding in ways I won’t bore you with, in the places that I do it. But I just went five minutes from my house to a pond, today, and caught nine largemouth bass in an hour with minimal effort. And that felt a lot like bona fide joy, too. Like seeing old friends who you don’t have to try so hard with.

Maybe you have something like that to tide you over? Even if it’s just slopping the hogs, or giving hay to the horses. Anything that makes us feel alive is worth doing, even in smaller doses than we used to do them.

As we all grow older — the universal toll paid for continuing to exist — it will feel like life cheats us. Even if all of life has a beginning, and an end, and so loss is not just a subplot, but ultimately becomes the natural conclusion. But knowing that, we can cheat life, too. Cheat some back, a little, I mean. To grab as much of it as we’re entitled to, and then to swipe several handfuls more when life isn’t looking. Is it going to penalize us for getting greedy? I doubt it. Can it kill us? Sure, and it will, eventually, whether we hoard it or don’t. But until then, let’s take it for a ride, instead of the other way around. It’s our friend, until it’s not. But then there’s the afterlife, which will last much longer, if we believers are to be believed.

Which is whole different column…………

Bonus Tracks: The song “Plastic Jesus” was written in 1957 by Ed Cromartie and George Rush, who recorded it in 1962 as The Goldcoast Singers. With Rush saying he was inspired after listening to a religious radio station in Del Rio in the mid-fifties, run by a fundy nutjob/dentist who pushed all manner of snake oil. The song’s been covered endlessly, but here’s a 2016 version I like from a Salt Lake City duo called Two Drifters (Justine Lucas and Jordan Finlay), who recorded it in a hot car with the windows rolled up, while putting some tasty mandolin sprinkles on it:

And here’s the most famous version, which is additionally my favorite — the great Paul Newman singing it in Cool Hand Luke: