I’m not a good person. And neither are you. Even a tiny baby, freshly baptized, is no great shakes. If he makes it to the age of reason, his first order of business will be to get busy sinning. Till then, I’ll grant you, he’s as innocent as an animal. But not by his own virtue — only thanks to a sacrament, and the sacrifice of Jesus. Right up till the moment he dies his eternal fate will be uncertain, as he works out his salvation “in fear and trembling,” dependent completely on God’s grace for every good thing he does. But his sins will be all his. He’ll own those at least.

My twin beagles are unfallen and incapable of sin, and hence in one way better than every human being who ever lived (apart from like … one guy and His mom).

An Unflinching Look in the Funhouse Mirror

I just thought I’d get all that out on the table at the beginning. It’s best not to beat around the bush, or live by lies. Today I’d like to talk about something unpleasant. You might say, “But John, you do that in every column, don’t you?”

But that’s not really true. There is something pleasant about looking on a vast and appalling evil, flying coolly over it and nuking it to oblivion. Then roasting marshmallows and weenies over its radioactive waste. That’s the spirit in which I write about Pope Francis, for instance. Or modern architecture. Or Woke ideology. On such abominations I feel licensed to unleash my inner Jeremiah, or to sidle up alongside old Elijah and taunt the priests of Baal.

And that feels good.

This Column Will Form Part of My Permanent Record, Which Finally Gets Me Cancelled

This probably won’t, though it might be cathartic. Today I’ll shun easy targets like New Atheists, gay Jesuits, ISIS warlords, and NeverTrump grifters. Instead I’d like to help people who think a lot like me to look in the mirror, and assess what isn’t pretty. To address the temptations we face, and how to disarm them. In doing so, I’ll fess up to some pretty unpleasant impulses.

In my defense, you have them too. It’s just not your job to admit to them in print, using your real name, in a column that will float around forever — at least until the Chinese use their EMPs on us and our electricity never works again.

Okay, here goes.

A Dark Little Part of Me Hopes …

That the Dead Baby vaccine turns out to be really, really bad for people. Medically, that is. It’s already bad for us spiritually. Taking it without a really, really good reason (like being over 70 and deadly afraid) makes you complicit in the abortion industry’s profiteering from human baby parts.

Beyond that, succumbing to pressure from employers, the federal government, and our country’s wicked elites doesn’t mark a person out as a profile in courage. As weak bishops obey our evil pope and demand that their seminarians and college students all take a vaccine which those same bishops denounced as unethical two years ago … . I don’t want new priests who obey orders like that. We don’t need young people who fall all over themselves obeying such orders either. They seem like carnivorous sheep.

So the part of my mind that Screwtape occupies encourages me to imagine … a society where all the compliant joiners who follow orders, and all the pudgy pink-faced clerics who give them, suddenly vanished. A kind of negative Rapture, where the drones of Caesar, Mammon, and Sodom just signed off in their millions. And we’d inherit a leaner, less crowded country, inhabited by contrarians, strict pro-lifers, and … paranoid Luddites. Wokeness would vanish too, as the Black Lives Matter anti-vaxxers would just seize empty subdivisions from deceased Facebook censors and hedge fund managers, to co-exist at a distance.

Something tells me it’s wrong to wish mass destruction on millions of fellow Americans, though. It seems almost … malicious. A kind of spiritual eugenics, where we chortle as worldly thinking and character flaws weed out “the weak,” and leave us in charge — flinty-eyed, patriotic, faithful and triumphant. Such visions don’t come from Christ. They’re more like the fervent wish of the disciples to rain fire from heaven on towns that rejected Jesus. He rebuked disciples like that, as you recall, and told them to kick the dust from their feet. And such fantasies from their heads.

A Dark Little Part of Me Hopes …

That the Secret Committee Formerly Known as Joe Biden continues to flail around like a washed-up, drunk ex-boxer picking fistfights at Fenway Park. And losing them. Making catastrophic blunders like fleeing Afghanistan, and committing vast crimes like denying COVID antibodies to red states. Proving to left and right that our “elites” in fact rode in to power on the short bus.

I’m convinced that the people actually running the country are Deep State actors from the cabal that whitewashed the Hunter Biden laptop. For four years of Trump, these spooks pretended that they were the “adults in the room.”

In fact, they’re just the adult diapers that swathe the incontinent haunches of a drooling, brainless Leviathan. Our elites don’t love anything, or have any positive program. They aren’t actually trying to accomplish anything coherent. Like Frankenstein’s monster enraged, they just lurch around destroying people and things that register in their reptilian brains as somehow their enemies:

• White people.
• National borders.
• Any statue of any historical figure whatsoever.
• Plate glass windows.
• Prosperous neighborhoods.
• Functioning red states.
• Vertical structures.

All these things Hulk wants to SMASH. But in fact, so far the left is best at smashing any community it governs. And that dark little part of me wants to see that happen, harder and faster.

Let San Francisco literally choke to death on accumulated hobo poop. Let actual Mexican drug cartels seize control of Los Angeles. Let Portland — now controlled by the Wesen, since the last Grimm left the city — succumb to zombie cannibalism. We’ll sit here in our red states and chuckle, and sometimes sell our homes to refugees for inflated prices. In any Mad Max hellscape future, we end up on top.

I Guess We Should Pray for Our Enemies. What a Buzzkill.

But these are not wholesome, charitable, or patriotic thoughts. No man or state is an island, and our loved ones would surely suffer from the collapse of half the country. Also, though it pains me to admit this, there are millions of mostly innocent or at any rate ignorant citizens in blue states and cities. For instance, my old friends in New York, who don’t somehow “deserve it” because they wouldn’t “get out of Sodom” as I have.

It’s hard to have hopeful thoughts about the future without such apocalyptic daydreams. But we can exist without them. Instead of summoning hells for our enemies here on earth, we’ll just have to think of heaven. Hard as that is to picture, for someone like me, except as “the place without demons and fire.”

Then again, you might be better than me. Though chances are, you’re fooling yourself.

John Zmirak is a senior editor at The Stream and author or co-author of ten books, including The Politically Incorrect Guide to Immigration and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Catholicism. He is co-author with Jason Jones of “God, Guns, & the Government.”