Nobody’s saying George Bush is the Antichrist . . . just a lousy president. But the Antichrist had a helluva bad year too, and Bush’s humiliating defeat was a big part of it.
Highlights of the EEC’s year began when Danish voters rejected the Maastricht Treaty, which would create a single European currency if all 12 countries ratified it. Next the stubborn German Bundesbank’s high interest rates fueled currency speculation that drove the British pound so low that Britain dropped out of the European monetary system. Finally they all bickered over uniform European requirements for consumer products. The EEC proved it can’t agree on runny French cheese, much less rule the world.
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Nor did the world end as scheduled on October 28. For the Antichrist that’s like canceling the Superbowl. That day an estimated 20,000 South Korean fundamentalists were expecting “the Rapture,” in which many fundamentalists believe they will be physically lifted into the sky to meet Christ. This, they think, will happen just before something like a nuclear war inaugurates the Antichrist administration. They plan to watch from a comfortable seat in the clouds while the Antichrist rules the earth and God rains down hideous tortures on the heathen unbelievers left behind, like you. But no such luck: October 28 came . . . and so did October 29.
Maybe, but Gorbachev didn’t do much emerging this year. After getting bounced as Soviet president, he was kicked out of his luxurious Moscow apartment and reassigned to a three-room flat. When he criticized the Yeltsin government Yeltsin replaced his limo with three unimpressive Volga sedans. One got stolen from a parking lot. The former communist leader ended up flying around the U.S. scaring up funds for his Gorbachev Foundation in the Forbes corporate jet, aptly named “Capitalist Tool.” In October Yeltsin locked him out of the Gorbachev Foundation’s rent-free Moscow offices and awarded the building to a government academy. The foundation will get back about one-third of its office space, for a presumably hefty lease. The only thing Gorbachev avoided this year was a coup. No one wants to trade places with him anymore.
Karl von Hapsburg. Hapsburg is a neophyte, barely 31 years old, whose main qualification is his membership in a European royal chain. Thus he is a potential ruler of the “revived Roman Empire,” or the EEC, as it’s otherwise known. Hapsburg’s candidacy is strengthened by his leadership in an Austrian political group, the Pan-European Movement, which supports European unity. We should also note that Hapsburg, alone among the major Antichrist contenders, possesses the youthful vitality needed to serve the seven dark years of his term and still battle the forces of Good at Armageddon. Hapsburg remained relatively unscathed by the year’s events, but made no discernible progress toward world dictatorship.
Unfortunately, potential Antichrists are characteristically publicity-shy. King Juan Carlos’s spokesman denied the king’s Antichrist aspirations altogether. “There is not any beginning of proof or anything. It is just an opinion,” he insisted. Papal spokesman Joaquin Navarro-Valls concurred: “The two questions which you raised . . . are so much hypothetical and so far from reality, that I cannot reply, not even as a mere joke.” Kissinger’s spokeswoman was surprised that her boss is being considered for the job. “Oh, lovely,” she moaned. “You’re not taking this seriously, I hope.”
“I know the group, the name sounds familiar,” Hapsburg mused, “but I couldn’t think of one specific song of that group. So the question is quite a problem for me. I’m so sorry. I do apologize.”
