Armageddon in Amarillo
Day, Samuel H. Jr.
BOOKS Armageddon in Amarillo BLESSED ASSURANCE: At Home with the Bomb in Amarillo, Texas by A.G. Mojtabai Houghton Mifflin. 255 pp. $16.95. by Samuel H. Day Jr. Each year in early August, to...
...Each year in early August, to mark the anniversary of the atomic bombing of Japan, peace activists from all over the Southwest trek to the gates of a Texas Panhandle factory, called Pantex, which serves as the final assembly point for all nuclear warheads produced by the United States...
...A. I never heard that discussion...
...11A near-revolution in Amarillo's news media, which, prodded by peace activists in and out of Amarillo, have moved from silence to volubility in their treatment of Pantex, the city's major industry...
...Q. End-Time thinking, that we are terminal...
...Mojtabai's most absorbing interest is in the End-Timers, whose juxtaposition with the Bomb is the centerpiece of her book...
...For Pickens and other technocrats, Pantex provides a different kind of assurance—the assurance of continued slow but steady growth, of diversified economic development, of continued peace through strength...
...A. Oh, I don't think that way...
...It would also have afforded welcome relief from the feeling of helpless drift toward an inevitable doomsday that emerges from Mojtabai's unblinking look at the technocrats and the true believers...
...Because, friend, when you leave here in the Rapture of the church, you're going to be traveling 186,000 miles a second...
...If you're ready to go, it would be fantastic...
...The state of mind into which she leads us is weird and wild and hyperbol-ically Texan, but readers will have no difficulty finding reflections of it in their own lives...
...A. End, oh E-N-D...
...Her book is essentially a study of two contrasting forms of accommodation to nuclear reality...
...But have hope...
...What she found is summed up by her book's title, taken from a Nineteenth Century hymn, "Blessed Assurance, Jesus Is Mine," popular in the churches of Amarillo...
...For many Amarillans raised on fundamentalist Christian beliefs, the presence of the nearby bomb factory fits neatly into expectations of a coming End Time—a time of relief from earthly troubles for the deserving...
...Attention to these missing elements would have allowed for a more complete and authentic view of life in the shadow of the Bomb...
...Matthiesen enjoys a place of honor and respect in Blessed Assurance but his role seems mainly that of foil for the back-to-Jesus End-Timers who are the real subject of the book...
...The other is technocratic—the conviction that even so vexatious a problem as nuclear annihilation must yield to the power of steady technological progress...
...Q. Yeah, that we are living in the last days...
...Mojtabai recounts an interview with T. Boone Pickens Jr., an Amarillan who heads Mesa Petroleum: Q. You haven't encountered any of this End-Time thinking...
...When you get struck by that heavenly lightnin', you're gonna have a glorified body instantaneously...
...While few holy-roller stones are left unturned, missing from her account is any serious trace of the ferment which others have observed in Amarillo during the four years of the author's stay...
...Oh, that'd be fantastic...
...And she reminds us that the Hallelujahs so often heard in Amarillo are by no means confined to the Bible Belt: For millions of Christians in the United States today, including the President and his Secretary of Defense, both of whom have alluded to scriptures on this point, "the Rapture is seen as the final solution for all our human ills...
...11 A slowly but steadily evolving Amarillo peace community, part native and part outsider, part clerical and part lay, which has grown to the point of establishing a settlement on newly purchased land just across the fence from Pantex...
...Jubilee Tabernacle is just one of many places where the End Time is awaited in Amarillo...
...The barrier that separates the two sides is more difficult to penetrate than the barbed wire and steel-mesh fences that protect Pantex from intruders...
...Q. No, but you haven't encountered it among people with whom you meet...
...The author has moved to Amarillo to stay...
...Her ear attuned to every nuance, Mojtabai takes us on a tour of the city's many fundamentalist churches and the living rooms of their Bible-thumping pastors...
...And that is where Mojtabai's otherwise commendable reporting falls short...
...A. What kind of thing...
...For two or three days they pitch their tents along the barbed-wire fence, hold workshops and prayer vigils, and line the farm-to-market road that takes workers to and from the factory...
...She also introduces two deviants from the city's fundamentalist religious consensus—a moderate Lutheran pastor and, most notably, Roman Catholic Bishop Leroy T. Matthiesen, a native Texan who shocked the community five years ago by setting up a fund to enable Pantex workers to quit their jobs if called to by conscience...
...The demonstrators hold signs aloft and wave as the cars and trucks flash by...
...Occasionally there will be an epithet in response, a gunning of the engines, but mostly the vehicles stream past with their windows rolled up, the faces of the occupants lost in shadows...
...The encounter between worker and demonstrator, between those who make the Bomb and those who protest it, is but a pantomime...
...Why don't you do it tonight, Jesus...
...Grace) Mojtabai, author of four earlier books, all novels, succeeds admirably...
...She returned to stay four years, seeking a deeper understanding of the city's psyche...
...Francis, some of them Texas born and bred, who, in their Franciscan habits, have taken to monitoring Pantex with their field-glasses, watching for the departure of the "white train" carrying nuclear warheads to distant destinations...
...surance that Jesus will rescue true believers from the holocaust foretold in the Bible...
...Perhaps there will be a second book...
...We hear little or nothing about: 11 The antinuclear Sisters of St...
...You say, 'Who's going to patch the hole in the roof?' There won't be any holes in the roof...
...In her pursuit of Armageddon in Amarillo, Mojtabai has overlooked an important part of what's happening in the shadow of the Bomb—in Amarillo and elsewhere in the United States...
...Mojtabai, a New Yorker, went to Amarillo in 1982 to write an article about living in the shadow of the Bomb...
...Interacting with the End-Timers but seldom merging with them are the bankers, business managers, and bureaucrats of Amarillo who look upon Pantex not as an agent of spiritual ecstasy but as just another stepping stone on the road to progress...
...Blessed Assurance: At Home With the Bomb in Amarillo, Texas is an attempt by a gifted writer to penetrate the barrier not only in Amarillo but also in the larger society of which that community is a microcosm...
...One is apocalyptic—the asSamuel H. Day Jr., formerly editor of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, is a member of The Progressive's Editorial Advisory Board...
...Do it tonight...
...Listen to the Reverend Royce Elms, pastor of Jubilee Tabernacle: "When we leave this old Earth, we're going to shoot by the moon so fast, we won't even have a chance to say hello and goodbye...
Vol. 50 • October 1986 • No. 10
