Let Me See YOUR I.D.!

I don't want to upset any of you...but I have to break some bad news to the world tonight via this channel, one that I usually reserve for radical screeds that upset some guy named RH. It seems that the end of the world is upon us.

"There is a prophecy in the Bible that foretells a time when every person will be required to have a mark or a number, without which he or she will not be able to participate in the economy," states the Christian website NoNationalID.com. "The prophecy is 2,000 years old, but it has been impossible for it to come to pass until now. With the invention of the computer and the Internet, this prophecy of buying and selling, using a number, can now be implemented at any time. Has the time for the fulfillment of this prophecy arrived?"

My God...Of course! Government-issued identification cards will bring about The Rapture! How come I didn't think of this before? It won't be some crazy mutating virus that wipes us out, or melting Polar ice caps, or nuclear war with all the other countries that suddenly hate us with good cause! It will be ID cards!

But hang on...In trying to ascertain when this horrible annihilation-by-lamination will take place...I made a shocking discovery.

The data required to be included in each card are, among other things, the person's full legal name, date of birth, gender, driver's license number, a digital photo, the person's address and machine-readable technology so the information can be ready easily by government or banking personnel.

Wait a minute...Full name, date of birth, gender...Photo and address! Machine-readable technology! IT'S A DRIVER'S LICENSE! Mark of the beast! We're all doomed!

You guys don't understand. I've been walking around with a Satanic I.D. card in my wallet, right next to my ass, for like years now. By this point, my entire backside is probably condemned to hell. (Please feel free to come up with your own gay sex/vibrating anal thumb jokes at this point.)

Endtime Ministries' Irvin Baxter, a radio host, believes the national ID is a precursor to the forced embedding of radio-frequency chips under the skin.

Baxter told the Concord, N.H., Monitor: "That's where we are headed right now. The prophecy states that you will have to receive a mark on your hand or in your forehead."

Clearly, Mr. Baxter has not seen Minority Report or he would know that, in the future, identification is done by retinal scan and not imbedded microchip. And, after that, it won't matter anyway because everyone will be weird liquidy robots who experiment on Haley Joel Osment that can identify one another by serial number.

Don't get me wrong. I love Baxter's show...Listen every week. That retarded Chinese guy with the cleft pallatte who prank calls Pizza Hut is a genius. I just think he's jumping the gun a bit here with the predictions. He hasn't even mastered being an firebrand radio preacher, I'm not sure he's ready to move into the exciting field of futurism.

My point is, in a nutshell, that the end is nigh. I'm hoping everything happens quickly. Like, an asteroid from outer space just smashes the shit out of us and almost everyone dies on impact, leaving the others to starve to death or die of exposure or radiation or whatever in a matter of days. Cause who wants a prolonged, dystopian, Mad Max universe where you've got to wander around in deserts dressed like an extra from a biker film that had the crap kicked out of him?

I have to confess, though, I wouldn't really mind a Christian-style Rapture, like in those "Left Behind" books Kirk Cameron seems to enjoy so much. In that version, all the good Christians float up to Heaven and leave the rest of us down here to choose either the path of light (siding with JC) or darkness (according to the "Left Behind" books, a guy a lot like Randall Flagg in Stephen King's "The Stand," but I'm thinking they mean Satan).

That would be killer, cause we'd have at least a few weeks on Earth without any obnoxious Christians around trying to ruin all the fun. You knwo the world's going to end, there's no more bullshit moralizers around...It would be like Worldwide Vegas for a while! People walking around, shooting heroin while hitting a bong, pausing only to join an orgy and eat a sheet of Oreos coated in liquid LSD. And that would just be Pete Doherty's flat.

Of course, if the Christian wackos are right, I'll be enjoying one last fling on Earth before the eternal cruelty and torment of Hell. Which is, I won't lie to you, less than ideal. Unless I wind up with Pete Doherty as a roommate, in which case it will probably be pretty sweet, what with all the passed out models.

In all likelihood, we won't get a Jesus-themed Rapture at all, but a gradual slide into a dystopian post-urban nightmare world haunted by overpopulation, catastrophic environmental and ecological shifts and endless tribal warfare. And here are some tips for surviving the coming apocalypse, which as I said, can be blamed solely on government-issue ID cards:

• Never leave your home without a shotgun, and always make sure to avoid areas where you know mutants congregate
• Gasoline may be a valuable commodity in the future, so best to stock up now while it's still really cheap
• Massive electrical failures at satellite towers may render your cellular phone useless as a communication device, but will probably still be capable of taking cute pictures of your girlfriends and playing Christina Milian mp3's
• Most coastal cities will be partially or completely underwater, which can only improve conditions in Atlantic City, NJ
• You'll want to try and repopulate the Earth with more humans, so try to avoid refugee settlements that are total sausage fests
• Super-intelligent aliens bent on our destruction may have been biding their time for centuries now, waiting for our civilization to collapse. So, you know...watch out for that...
• If you happen upon a dead mailman, whatever you do, don't put on his uniform and pretend that the United States government has been reassembled
• If you must loot, please, loot Wal-Mart
• If George W. Bush is still presdient, now might be a good time to begin discussing censure