TRYING TO IMAGINE HELL
John Chuckman
Christians have always had it wrong. Hell
is not a place loaded with terrifyingly dramatic scenes and flaming Hollywood
special effects. That not only seems improbable, it actually is rather
unimaginative.
Hell must be a place where all the people
you would hate spending five minutes with become your intimate neighbors for
eternity. It would be filled with people who never had an interesting thought,
who never cared about the beauties of the universe, who only ever grasped for
more, and people who spewed hate and ignorance their entire lives.
Of course, it contains figures like Hitler,
and the Fuhrer's closest associates sit gathered around to feel the
mind-deadening, unremitting pain of hearing his views repeated in late evening
monologues forever. Henry Kissinger will sit at Hitler’s feet, forced eternally
to just listen, learning from the master as it were. One also finds the banalities
and droning platitudes of George Bush. Imagine an eternal replay of his barely-literate
mumbling, often stumbling over his own tongue while reciting his contributions
to democracy and the goodness of America. Tony Blair will smirk, count his blood
money, and display the smug stupidity of his smarmy smile forever. Madeleine
Albright sits holding broken children’s bodies in her arms, an impious parody
of Michelangelo’s Pieta.
But the halls of hell must also resonate
with the sounds of lesser dark figures: the chirping vapidity of Sarah Palin pleading
for campaign contributions over a bleeding moose carcass; the cowardly John
McCain alternating between the black-faced rage of a world-class spoiled brat and
his pose as the boyish hero who was shot down while bombing civilians in Hanoi;
Bill Clinton’s syrupy Arkansas slop about integrity; Jonathon Edwards reciting
his sugar-plum visions of America a million, million times; Newt Gingrich posed
in a perpetual tableau telling his wife dying of cancer that he’s divorcing her
for a hot babe; J.Edgar Hoover, cross-dressed as he was wont to do in his
off-hours, shares an eternal loveseat embrace with his beloved Clyde Toland.
Folks who spent their entire lives grasping
desperately for the substance of others fill the halls of hell with their moral
emptiness, grasping still where there's nothing left to grasp. There are puffed-up
philanthropists sitting eternally on corporate thrones in castle-like headquarters,
one pretending to humility in turtleneck sweaters, offering dollops of tax-free
interest earnings from their foundation-intact fortunes to humble petitioners. Phony
pitchmen of every description spend eternity repeating and refining their
insincere friendliness. You hear the words “folks” and “my friends” echoing frequently.
An eternity of unwanted telephone calls, unwanted mail offers, and e-mail spam
awaits everyone in hell.
The phony pitchmen of American think-tanks will
be generously represented, still posing as genuine academics while
regurgitating their paid propaganda eternally, much resembling actors in white
lab coats pretending to be scientists in television headache commercials.
Indeed, when you think about it, Americans seem very likely to fill a
disproportionate space in hell.
The Jerry Falwells, Pat Robertsons,
Franklin Grahams, and Jimmy Swaggarts thump their Bibles, sputter, gush theatrical
tears, drop to their knees, and beg for money endlessly - all done to a
background accompaniment of Tammy Faye Baker warbling hymns in a voice
resembling a cat in heat at midnight in the backyard. Imagine, ten quadrillion
years of that, and then in the words of the wonderful old hymn, "with no
less time…than when we first began."
I suspect Hell actually looks a great deal
like the world in which we live. It just excludes all the things that give us
any hope and beauty and truth in life.
