Damien Broderick wrote:
>
> At 12:58 AM 21/02/01 -0800, Max reposted a Feb 1999 speech by Charlton
> Heston, which said toward the end:
>
> >When Time magazine's cover portrays millennium nuts as
> >deranged, crazy Christians holding a cross as it did last month ...
> >boycott their magazine and the products it advertises.
>
> Presumably he means this one, Jan 18, 1999:
>
> http://www.time.com/time/magazine/0,9263,1101990118,00.html
>
> but what was John Galt complaining about in this odd imperative? Was he
> deeply offended to the point of boycott because `millennium nuts' were
> being unfairly portrayed as Christians? Was he miffed because deranged,
> crazy Christians were being unfairly pilloried as `millennium nuts'? This
> is a nuance that only an American could unpack, I suspect. Could someone
> please make it clear to this poor boy holding up two crossed Vegemite
> sandwiches?
The 'millenium nuts' were primarily focused on the Y2K bug, which
clearly has no holy or unholy origin, and the fact that the true
religious millenium was Jan 1, 2001, NOT Jan 1, 2000, illustrates the
incongruence, beyond the fact that if Jesus were supposed to come again,
he'd be re-born at this time, which is NOT the true end of things (he
has to grow up to be in his mid 30's first) under christian chiliastic
dogma. In fact, the projections of the Singularity occuring in the 2030
range jives more with standard chiliastic dogma than the Y2K bug does.
What Heston was objecting to was Time's depiction of one family that was
preparing for the worst and emphasising the fact of them being devout
christians as if this explains why they were acting so nutty. Fact was
that a lot of people prepared for the worst for a variety of reasons,
and the general attitude among people in the rural areas WAS pretty much
hope that the big city world would self destruct in its own
unwieldiness.
Frankly Time is a rather pathetic magazine. To this day they refuse to
acknowledge that they were a tool of North Vietnamese propaganda warfare
because their Saigon bureau chief during the war has since turned out to
be a decorated Major General in the Vietnamese intelligence service.
Most of the stories he filtered through were picked and rewritten
specifically to benefit the NVA cause.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Mon May 28 2001 - 09:56:46 MDT