Here's what Norman Mailer would call an Advertisement for Myself. Two Tuesdays ago - just after this column's 'End Times a'Coming' piece appeared - CNN held a talk show on the putative arrival of the End of Days, featuring US evangelism's leading snake oil salesmen, Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell. And last Sunday the NYT ran a feature, 'Doomsday: The Latest Word if Not the Last', on the same subject.
('The fixation on the so-called end times,' reported the NYT, 'may be greater than ever on the American religious landscape. The preoccupation these days stems mainly from the outsized influence of a literalistic approach to biblical prophecy'. And, one might add, from the new political power in G W Bush's America of the primitive minds espousing that approach.)
It's always nice to beat the competition.
'End Times', though, was written before the terrible Pakistani earthquake, whose victims are still dying; before Western authorities began hitting the panic button over the global threat posed by the avian flu, currently crawling westward through Eastern Europe; and before Wilma announced itself in the Caribbean - much too close for comfort to us here - as the most powerful Atlantic hurricane on record, both inducing and feeding off the torrential rains that beset Jamaica for a full week and threatening Yucatan, Cuba and Florida as this is being written.
The Rapture crowd may be full of anticipatory excitement, but this certainly has been a long summer of uncommon tribulation for the millions rendered homeless or worse by Earth's recent, tentative rehearsals for bigger things. We really are sitting ducks, homo sapiens, with so many of our over-populated, technology-dependent societies crowding the coasts and fault lines of a fidgeting planet.
Meanwhile, much nearer to home than the cantering Horsemen, there's a punier - and really quite funny - agitation: the one emanating from the Bush White House as, prodded by not one but five investigations, its gagsta' underbelly threatens to bulb into the light.
Speculation is rife (including within the White House) that the special counsel looking into the 'outing' of the CIA's Valerie Plame will next week indict either Karl Rove or 'Scooter' Libby or both on criminal charges. Rove and Libby are, of course, Bush's and Cheney's right-hand men respectively.
Next, Mr Bush's indispensable ally in Congress, the Texas Republican and House Majority Leader Tom 'The Hammer' DeLay, has been not just indicted but arrested and booked for alleged campaign funding illegalities. (DeLay's mug shot - for which the man satirist Jon Stewart last week called 'a swamp creature' posed with a Hollywood heartthrob's grin - is somehow both hilarious and unnerving.)
And the Justice Department has been fixing Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist in its crosshairs for insider trading.
These developments are crippling news for Mr Bush. Rove has long been nicknamed 'Bush's brain' - for the obvious reason - and DeLay's departure as House Majority Leader sets his Republican underlings free to take their distance from a newly-toxic president (newly toxic to Americans, that is) in the hope of not seeing their electoral chances next year go down the chute with him.
There's even increasing speculation in the US media (naïve, unfortunately, in this columnist's view) that in light of the Libby probe his boss, Dick 'Abandon Hope All Ye Who Enter Here' Cheney, may decide to retreat to an undisclosed location, this time for good.
Yet, dramatic and far-reaching as these inquiries are, it's in fact two other, much less publicised investigations currently underway that have the potential to blow the Bush presidency out of the water. Twin probes of the conservative lobbyist Jack Abramoff appear headed to take down a number of key Republican lawmakers upon whom the White House has depended for passage of its legislative agenda.
Abramoff is what in Trinidad politics we call a 'bag man', a greasy character whose job is to turn power into profit for inner-circle members of the ruling party.
The story of Abramoff's behind-the-scenes and under-the-table dealings is the real 'backstory' of the Bush administration, the glint-eyed greed which from the start has lain behind such measures as Mr Bush's Treasury-plundering tax cuts for the rich, his failed attempt to privatise Social Security and his infantile grab at Iraq's oil; and the two investigations of Abramoff now underway are full of danger for the jefes of the Beltway.
Already they have produced two casualties: the top White House procurement official, who was recently arrested on charges that he lied about his dealings with Abramoff, and Bush's nominee for deputy attorney general, who withdrew himself from consideration a fortnight ago when the Abramoff searchlight swung towards him.
Two other Bush insiders - House Administration Committee chairman Robert Ney, and Ralph Reed, the former Christian Coalition leader- are currently pinned and wriggling on the wall by the Abramoff investigations and quite unable to ride to the rescue of their imperiled heroes: Ney is a DeLay man, Reed, a Karl Rove man. And these are only the beginning.
Abramoff's contacts stretched from deep inside the White House, on the one hand, all the way to murderers on the other. (Yes, murderers: specifically, the mob-style killing of a Florida cruise ships' owner who'd accused two politically well-connected purchasers of his company of fraud.) If any of the current investigations secretes a Watergate, not just for Frist or DeLay or Rove or Libby or even Dick 'Spiro Agnew' Cheney, but for Bush himself, it's Abramoff's.
Opined a former Republican congressman, currently a lobbyist with close ties to the White House: 'The [investigation] that people are most worried about is Abramoff because it seems to have such long tentacles. This seems to be something that could spread almost anywhere.' The reader can safely ignore that 'almost'.
The House Ethics Committee has been stalled over a staffing dispute. When it gets back to work, look for the DeLay and Abramoff investigations to merge. That's when, to borrow a line from the late Jamaican poet Tony McNeill, 'the zombies will go to town'.
Now, the collapse of GW Bush's approval ratings - which, at around 38, 39 per cent, have been stuck in the cusp of implosion for the past six weeks - has many causes. All by itself, incompetence on the scale of Bush White House incompetence will out, sooner or later. But Bush's presidency will one day be seen as book-ended by his response to two disasters.
On the morning of 9-11, minutes after the second plane exploded into the tower, TV cameras were on hand to capture the president's 7-minute 'deer in the headlights' freeze - after which, Mr Bush took to the spacious (and safe) skies and headed west, away from his responsibilities in Washington.
But most Americans were terrified and badly needed a leader, and they conspired to overlook Mr Bush's performance that day (and to let him lead them next into the furnace of Iraq).
Four years later, however, came Katrina, news of which reached Mr Bush while he was at his Crawford ranch - no doubt, 'bicycling'. His response was once again to take to the skies and head west, away from both a drowning New Orleans and Washington, where someone in California presented him with a guitar for something or the other. This time, Americans were appalled - and offended.
In between those bookends, however, there's been Iraq, with its unquellable insurgency, and the administration's procession of blunders there, and Americans' growing dismay at the steady drip-drip of American bodies falling without cease in faraway sands: Mr Bush's daily cup of gall. (The Damocles sword currently hanging over Rove, Libby and their bosses is also, of course, about Iraq.)
Last week, the blunders went right on. In a poll in which, in several districts, up to 99 per cent of eligible voters supposedly turned out to vote - yes, just as in Saddam's days- Iraqis ratified a US-approved 'Iraqi' constitution which (1) in effect gives the wealthiest third of Iraq to Mr Bush's 'axis of evil' member, Iran (2) ensures the outbreak of a real civil war by dooming the Sunnis to be Iraq's Palestinians (3) hugely strengthens the insurgency, for the same reason, and (4) isn't really a constitution at all, since it specifies that any of its provisions can be changed at any time. (This was a last-minute change forced into it by the American ambassador in a silly attempt to draw the Sunnis into the charade.)
But the further comedy was Mr Bush - who a few months ago denounced the prospect of elections in a Lebanon under Syrian control, declaring that free and fair elections couldn't take place under foreign occupation - now praising Iraq's referendum. (What is that - cynicism so huge it trumps itself, or an infantile absence of self-awareness?
Scary as the thought may be, Mr Bush's next self-inflicted Waterloo, his nomination to the Supreme Court of a not-so-sweet little old lady from his office - Harriet Miers helped frame the Bush Administration's new 'Torture' policy- suggests the latter.)
The Bush Administration's celebrations of its ruinous Iraq constitution may have been loud enough to distract many Americans from the fact that, in the six days beginning with referendum Saturday, 15 US soldiers and marines were killed in Iraq. But even the spawn of Karl Rove can't dance forever (Mr Rove himself has reportedly stopped dancing these days), and as the dust settles, this latest 'milestone' in the March of Freedom in the Middle East will be seen to have been even more viciously counterproductive than its predecessors.
Meantime the next circus, the trial of Saddam, was hastily set in motion, never mind that responsible international agencies were warning that the US had created what was effectively a kangaroo court to try him.
This columnist has no brief for Saddam, no less a torturer and mass murderer than other, much more powerful torturers and mass murderers. And if, in getting Saddam killed, Mr Bush - who likes to while away his time in the Oval Office showing visitors Saddam's captured pistol - finally achieves at least one of his real reasons for invading Iraq, I don't see why anyone other than Iraq's Baathists should care.
Yet even here, events are unfolding almost comically. The day after the showcase trial opened, insurgents captured one of Saddam's lawyers.