God Is Dead, OK?

Ron Currie, Jr., is not a writer I have encountered before. A couple of weeks ago in Powell’s bookstore here in Portland I spotted the title of his book, God Is Dead, and thought, “Well, that’s old news.” Flash back to the fifties and the “God is dead” theology that famously made the cover of Time. I picked up the book and was hooked by the first sentence: “Disguised as a young Dinka woman, God came at dusk to a refugee camp in the North Darfur region of Sudan.” I bought the book.

The Dinka woman, aka God, is killed by the Janjaweed, and word of his/her death spreads quickly. The end of the Supreme Being is catastrophic….or is it? This is the implicit question in Currie’s clever and horrifying fiction.

The world of the first chapter is all too familiar and includes a hilarious and outrageous appearance by Colin Powell who tries to rescue the Dinka woman, in spite of official consternation that he is taking an interest in this lowlife woman. She changes Powell, who suddenly begins to tell the truth. In a riveting telephone call with President Bush, he calls the President a “silver-spoon master-of-the-universe motherfucker.” All right.

God apologizes to a young man she has asked Powell to find for her—not actually the one she asked for but an imposter:

“Guilt gathered in God’s throat and formed a lump there. He realized with sudden certainty that this boy, or any of the people in the camp—the men suddenly alone in their old age, the young women with disappeared husbands and hungry children—were as deserving as [anyone] of his apology, would serve just as well as the altar for him to confess his sins of omission and beg forgiveness. God slid from the cot and stooped on his knees before the boy, like a Muslim at prayer.”

As God lies awaiting death, he closes his eyes and wishes “for someone he could pray to.”

That’s the first chapter. What’s an author to do next? Currie describes a world sunk in chaos and war, horror and cruelty. It seems like a cliché—God is dead and now everything, as the philosophers used to say, is possible. Morality flies out the window. As one character says, talking about violence in the world, “there is no why. There’s the impulse, and the act. But nothing else.” Martial law is declared; the National Guard moves into every American city. Suicide among nuns and clergy rises to an epidemic scale. Looting of Little Debbie snack cakes escalates. Serious shit.

But then the cliché begins to turn on itself. Feral dogs that fed on God’s corpse begin to speaking a “mishmash of Greek and Hebrew and walking along the surface of the White Nile as if it were made of glass.” It's a story straight out of supermarket tabloids. Temples are built to them. But among people braced for the end of everything, a gradual realization dawns: nothing has changed. “God had created the universe and set it spinning, but it would continue chugging along despite the fact that he was no longer around to keep things tidy.”

Needing something to revere in place of God, the people of the US begin to worship children: “God has abandoned us. The way to salvation is through the child.” Since, as the author observes, Americans virtually worship children already, the step to actual worship is easy. Evolutionary Psychologists try to break Americans of this idolatry, but it is not easy.
When war erupts between the Postmodern Anthropologists and the Evolutionary Psychological forces, the Evo Psychs threaten invasion of the United States. All hell really is about to break loose in the name of absurd ideologies.

What we realize as we read the evocative and unnerving stories Currie has written is that the world after God is the world we already live in. Time was right. God Is Dead is a fable of our own times and our own culture, our idolatry and indifference, our cruel warrior mentality, our false religions. Despite our high rates of religious observance and our national assertion of belief in God, we Americans in fact behave exactly as we would if we knew for a fact that God does not exist. We simply worship what makes us feel good and secure. For all we know or care, a Dinka woman eaten by dogs in the Sudan might well be God.

What’s the Sudan thing again? I mean, like, whatever.

Currie has written fiction but it is, like all good stories, simply the backside of our daily lives.