When I got the chance to attend a conservative, evangelical high school in rural Iowa, I was ecstatic. My early education had been in a similar school – where creationism was the one true science, and evolution was satanic propaganda – and I’d spent the interim as a frightened pilgrim in the unholy land of public school. I was a teenage zealot and longed to be among my people.

Throughout those years, my church leaders urged me to proselytize to the public school students, to debate teachers about the age of Earth or the founding of our Christian nation, to be a spiritual exhibitionist, praying loudly at my locker or the flagpole. The apocalypse was at hand, so who had time for algebra?

I viewed my enrollment at Forest City Christian school in my junior year as being honorably discharged from my duty of “reclaiming our schools for Christ”. But what I envisioned as a sanctuary of faith, community and “true” education not only left me more disillusioned and bullied but also robbed me of a high school diploma and set me on a path of crushing financial insecurity that would haunt me for years.

Twenty-five years later, Donald Trump and the Christian nationalist movement that put him in the White House (twice) are seeking to transform public education into something similar to what I was reared on, where science, history and even economics are taught through an evangelical conservative lens, while prayer and Bible reading are foundations of the curriculum.

These efforts test the boundaries of the constitution’s establishment clause, reversing a century of civil rights victories in public schools, and have the potential to fundamentally alter the way American children learn – and what they learn about.

The push comes in two forms: injecting more Christian rhetoric and rituals into public school curriculum and for the first time in history, using tax dollars to subsidize private religious schools, generally via vouchers that cover student tuition. Each has the potential to bolster the education of America’s most privileged students, while downgrading services for children of low-income families.

In Oklahoma, the state superintendent ordered his public schools to teach from the Christian holy book; he later sought to mandate all schools to air a video in which he prays for Trump. On his desk sat a black mug with the Latin phrase si vis pacem para bellum: “If you want peace, prepare for war.”

In June, Louisiana passed a law ordering all classrooms to display the Ten Commandments. And in Florida, Pam Bondi, now Trump’s attorney general, supported a constitutional amendment to allow state funding for religious schools before voters rejected it.

In 2022, a supreme court ruling allowed private religious schools to receive government funding. In response to this, LGBTQ+ advocates helped pass the Maine Human Rights Act in their state, protecting students and faculty from discrimination. Two Christian schools are suing the state for the ability to violate the new law while still receiving government funding. Separately, the supreme court has taken up a case addressing whether to allow taxpayer funds for religious charter schools, potentially leading to the first Christian public school in the US.

In Texas, the state representative James Talarico has been fighting against a new elementary school curriculum that infuses Bible stories into language arts programs, as well as a bill that could allow students to use public funds to attend private schools, including Christian schools, a move he says will harm low-income students while bolstering the most privileged.

“Attempting to indoctrinate public school students into Christianity is not only unconstitutional and un-American, it’s deeply un-Christian,” says the former public school teacher, who is also studying to be a preacher.

And this wave of Christianizing is not limited to the south.

In 2023, my home state of Iowa passed legislation granting taxpayer-funded scholarships to families who enroll their children in private schools, including Christian ones. And last fall, a wildly successful Christian lobbying group, the Idaho Family Policy Center (IFPC), announced the drafting of a new bill that would require Bible reading in all Idaho public schools.

“By bringing back school-sponsored Bible reading, we are bringing God back into public education,” says Morgan MaGill, communications director for IFPC, which has drafted successful state measures restricting rights to abortion and transgender healthcare in Idaho.

Trump’s secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, has characterized the growth of US Christian schools as an “educational insurgency” collecting “recruits” to build an underground army “with the opportunity later on of taking offensive operations in an overt way”, Hegseth said in a podcast appearance. Such militaristic language is reminiscent of the evangelical rallies, camps, youth services and Christian rock concerts I attended as a boy, where we were indoctrinated to be “soldiers in God’s army”, fighting to “take back our schools for Christ”.

That, said Hegseth, is “what the crop of these classical Christian schools are gonna do in a generation”.

Talarico views Texas’s efforts to create a voucher program for private Christian schools as not only bad for Jewish, Muslim and LGBTQ+ students, but also as stealing from the poor to serve the rich.

“If you gave my students on the west side of San Antonio an $8,000 or $10,000 voucher, there’s still no way they can afford a $20,000 a year private school,” Talarico says. “But because the voucher program is universal, the wealthy family that is sending their kid to that private school will now get an $8,000 or $10,000 discount on their tuition, at the expense of the working-class kids on the west side.”

Talarico adds that the voucher program includes funding for home-school students, up to 90% of whom are Christian and whose curriculum is often poorly regulated. “So we taxpayers will be funding homeschool programs that teach students the earth is flat,” he says.

The battle for schools

Trump’s promise to “bring back prayer to our schools”, shut down the Department of Education and embrace “school choice” fulfills an evangelical wishlist I’d heard about throughout my childhood. The belief that our government seeks to brainwash children into liberal atheists, close churches and outlaw prayer – threats that Trump promised to eradicate throughout the last election – were at the heart of the formation of the Christian right in the late 70s. But the clash over Christian education in America began long before.

Protestant education was the norm in the US for nearly two centuries. MaGill points out that Benjamin Rush – a founding father who helped build the US public school system – was a strong advocate for Bible reading in US schools.

And while opponents emphasize the idea of “separation of church and state”, those pushing to re-Christianize US public schools are correct when arguing that the phrase is not in the constitution. But it is misleading to claim that this was ever a settled – or simple – issue.

In 1797, John Adams signed the treaty of Tripoli, which stated: “The government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion.”

The first amendment says: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” Thomas Jefferson later said the amendment created “a wall of separation between church and state”.

When I was growing up in the 80s and 90s, it was often explained to me that this phrase was intended to keep the government out of religion and not the other way around. The issue of religion in public education muddies this divide.

Throughout the 19th century Catholics fought for their unique prayers and scripture to be taught in public schools. When Tennessee passed a law in 1925 banning the teaching of evolution in public schools, the trial of a jailed science teacher captivated the nation, leading to a media circus that portrayed biblical literalists as “yokels”, accelerating the fundamentalist movement in America, as well as a deep distrust of both the media and intellectuals among evangelicals.

In 1962, the supreme court ruled that teacher-led prayer in school violated the first amendment’s establishment clause, essentially banning the practice. Many evangelicals – particularly in the south – felt that their religious rights had been violated years earlier when the court mandated that all US schools be racially integrated, as many white, southern Christians at the time interpreted scripture as mandating segregation.

In response, there was an explosion of what would come to be known as “segregationist academies”, private Christian K-12 schools and universities that believed they could continue to racially discriminate – while enjoying tax-free status – due to protections to their “religious liberties”. In time, they would create their own textbooks and accreditation systems, a whole bubble of education independent from public schools or conventional higher education.

In the late 1970s, the heavily segregated Bob Jones University had its tax-exempt status revoked by the IRS, a move that was interpreted by many evangelical pastors as the government shutting down a church. The ruling was blamed on Jimmy Carter’s new Department of Education (which would become a whipping boy for evangelicals in the years to come) despite the IRS acting on a court ruling from several years earlier.

The perceived attack on segregated Christian schools by the US government helped galvanize evangelicals into voting Republican.

Meanwhile, the Christian right doubled down on the creation of its own, independent education system, one that rejected evolution in favor of creationism, made students pledge allegiance to a Christian flag, and preached against environmental issues, LGBTQ+ rights and progressive policies.

Escaping the bubble

I was born in 1982, and my education began in this isolated world of alternative facts. In my Christian kindergarten, I learned to read using the Bible and did math equations from scriptures on tithing. We were taught a great deal about the dangers of communism, while our working-class parents fell victim to predatory capitalism, manipulated into paying a tuition they couldn’t afford, convinced public schools were unsafe.

The collapse of my parents’ small business, a farm crisis tanking the Iowa economy, and years of tithing and additional “seed faith” donations to our church had left them broke.

When I was in first grade, my mom and I performed janitorial work after hours for a reduction on my tuition. My dad borrowed money from family members to keep us enrolled and away from the dangers of public school. But following a divorce and bankruptcy, they, like many other working families, could no longer afford tuition.

I was terrified of public school, which I imagined to be a cesspool of adolescent sin.

I developed a hypervigilant paranoia when it came to the lessons of my public school teachers, particularly when it came to science and history. I was not only tasked with rescuing my classmates from hell; I had to avoid it myself, mainly through maintaining my belief in (a very specific definition of) God, which the “secular humanist” curriculum was a threat to. This required me to keep a heavy filter on the information I allowed into my mind and censor the thoughts that information inspired.

Consequently, I flunked half of my classes.

At the Christian school I attended my junior year of high school, things were different. We were taught from the lectures of creationists such as Ken Ham and Kent Hovind that our planet is only 6,000 years old, along with a detailed meteorological explanation for Noah’s flood. Hovind often blended conspiracy theories, such as evolution being a communist plot, into his lectures. Ham and Jessica DeFord’s book Climate Change for Kids explains to homeschooled and Christian school students: “Man cannot destroy the earth. God promised that.”

In “Logic” class, we learned about gay rights rallies in San Francisco that were attempting, according to my teacher, to “indoctrinate children into that lifestyle”. It was not uncommon to hear leaders in the Christian school movement, like the “Christian economics” textbook author Gary North, argue for capital punishment for all homosexuals. North believed this should occur through the biblical practice of “stoning”. As a thin, effeminate young man with little interest in sports or hunting (yet perked up if the conversation turned to musicals or Alloy magazine), I was a relentless target for the rural boys at the Christian school, who saw it as their religious duty to shout “fag” in my ear as they tussled my hair and knocked books from my hands.

The longer I stayed at the school, the deeper I fell into a malaise of depression and self-harm. In addition to the stress of bullies, I had trouble getting my mind around the logic of these classes, and knew that if I didn’t understand it, and believe it, eternal torture awaited me. Meanwhile, costs remained difficult. I was working part-time at Subway and Bennigan’s to pay for my Christian education, but it still wasn’t enough.

I headed back to public school for my senior year. I’d been there a semester before it was explained to me that my credits from Forest City Christian school didn’t transfer, because they weren’t “accredited” by the government. (The school has since closed.)

Instead, I was directed toward the GED testing center, where my education came to an unceremonious end with a generic certificate. Colleges and universities, I was told, were even worse than public schools in their liberal indoctrination, so I drifted through a decade of low-wage jobs in factories, restaurants and construction sites, as my fellow students who’d graduated from public school, then college, ascended the socioeconomic ladder.

In time, I developed my own education at libraries and bookstores. But first, I had to, in the words of Yoda, “unlearn what you have learned”. In fundamentalist education, all knowledge and thought must bend itself to unarguable truth that the Bible is 100% factual in all matters. The itchy curiosity of philosophy, the relentless questions of the scientific method, the skeptic probing of journalism, have no place in that world.

It was only through breaking out of the Christian education bubble – defecting from my duty to “reclaim America for Christ” – that I was able to cultivate strong learning faculties, eventually clawing my way into a career in journalism.

Perhaps my financial prospects would have been much brighter if I had stayed in my Christian high school, attended a Christian college like Liberty University (which accepts students from non-accredited Christian schools) and gone on to work at a megachurch like Joel Osteen’s Lakewood church or in a Maga political organization like Turning Point USA. But my inability to get my head around the 2+2=5 logic of creationist science, or the claim that our founding fathers intended to create a Christian theocracy, prevented me from being an effective soldier in the fight for Christian nationalism, despite how eager I was to join the fight.

Instead, I eventually traveled in the opposite direction, reporting extensively on the modern machinations of the Christian right. In the course of that work, I have often felt a deep sorrow for students enduring the bubble of private Christian education – particularly the poor and queer ones. Now it seems that compassion must extend to those in public schools as well.

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After millions of people vanish from existence, the world is thrown into violent anarchy, the streets a playground of theft, murder, rape, looting and suicide. Those “left behind” are about to endure seven years of a Cormac McCarthy nightmare: world wars, plagues and mass starvation, the streets littered with the decaying corpses of half the Earth’s population.

It’s a familiar story to anyone raised as an evangelical Christian in the last century, particularly if you grew up in the 90s with a shelf full of Left Behind rapture novels – which have sold 80m copies – or watched the Kirk Cameron film adaptation in 2000, or the Nicolas Cage version in 2014. Or if, like me, you just attended a screening of the most recent installment, Left Behind: Rise of the Antichrist, starring and directed by Kevin Sorbo (best known for his starring role in Hercules: The Legendary Journeys).

Intended to be taken as a literal prophecy of events right around the corner, these stories terrorized me as a child – and haunt my dreams to this day.

I’m working on a memoir about these experiences and have interviewed dozens of people who grew up under this toxic theology. They all have the same story of being unable to reach their parents or siblings (a much more common scenario back in the pre-smartphone age) and suffering panic attacks at the thought of being left behind. It’s a sensation that strikes to the core of your being, the overwhelming sense of abandonment reducing you to a crying infant unable to conjure its mother.

Unlike Hollywood Bible epics, these films are almost always independently financed, star B-list celebrities like Louis Gossett Jr or Margot Kidder, and are chiefly driven by proselytization over entertainment.

Rise of the Antichrist expertly weaves contemporary Christian right boogeymen (big pharma, Silicon Valley, mainstream media, Davos, the Covid vaccine, mental health experts) into an otherwise typical tale. It’s the same narrative every time with rapture films, books and plays: the antichrist uses world war to manipulate the UN into installing him as leader of a global socialist government centered on the Mark of the Beast, a tattooed credit card – often a barcode bracketed by the numbers 666 – on everyone’s right hand or forehead.

Sorbo’s film also skewers the “globalist mainstream media”, which has supposedly conspired to use Covid, and now the rapture, to keep people indoors, distracted and afraid, all in the name of power and profit. It’s a boldly ironic stance for this movie to take, considering it rests in a tradition of using questionable theology to terrify audiences – often children and teens – resulting in lucrative bestsellers and a motivated voting base.

While every generation since Christ has interpreted modern events as evidence of the Book of Revelation prophecy coming to pass, it was a collection of post-hippie evangelicals in California who created the pop-theology of “the rapture” – a word that never actually appears in the Bible.

As part of “the Jesus Movement” – or, pejoratively, “the Jesus Freaks” – sober hippies like Bob Dylan were getting “born again” and preaching on stage about the coming antichrist. Following the collapse of the hedonistic ideals of the 60s, many flower children were being slowly seduced by the religious right, culminating in figures like Johnny Cash and Kris Kristofferson joining Billy Graham’s Explo ’72 festival, which Time magazine called “the Jesus Woodstock”.

The literary accompaniment for this was Hal Lindsey’s The Late Great Planet Earth, impressively tying modern events (the reunification of Israel, the rise of communism, the loosening morals of the postwar era) to biblical prophecy. One of the bestselling nonfiction books of the 1970s, it fueled the conversion of what would become much of the Christian right voting bloc of the 1980s.

A film adaptation starring Orson Welles hit theaters in 1978, but it was the low-budget rapture scare-fest A Thief In The Night that would set the template for not only countless films and novels about Armageddon, but an industry of fear-based plays, Christian haunted houses, and youth group sermons.

A Thief In The Night was filmed a short drive from where I grew up in Iowa. My parents were part of the tail end of the Jesus Movement (culture always reaches the midwest late) and hosted Bible studies and a youth center focused on end times prophecy. My mother wasn’t certain if the end was near, but my dad regularly told me there might come a time when we would have to live off the grid, grow our own food, avoid money (the Mark of the Beast) and live in hiding in the wilderness. If we were found, we would be tortured by the armies of the antichrist, determined to get us to accept “the mark”.

Our church held a screening of the sequel to A Thief In The Night, which was better financed and produced than its DIY predecessor. In A Distant Thunder, we follow a group of Christians who have been arrested by the antichrist’s fascist army, and have the choice to either receive the Mark of the Beast or be executed. They know that if they receive the mark, they will eventually “drink the wine of God’s wrath”, as Revelation 14:9 says. They “will be tormented with fire and sulfur … and the smoke of their torment goes up for ever and ever, and they have no rest, day or night.”

The task we’re given is to “be faithful unto death, and I will give you the crown of life”.

A Distant Thunder ends with our lead character screaming hysterically as she watches her friends refuse to renounce Christ, then get decapitated by a guillotine.

My Christian friends and I were too young to understand the questionable leaps of biblical interpretation at work in these movies, or the political machinations fueling the cold war, the culture wars and the revolution of the Christian right in US politics. But we understood pain. We understood torture. We knew we were sinful. And we were convinced the world was not a safe place for us, and we shouldn’t get too comfortable in our beds at night.

After my parents divorced and Dad moved out, Mom worked around the clock at a nearby hotel while attending community college at night. I was alone a good deal of my childhood, and at least once a week I was convinced that everyone I’d known had been raptured up to Heaven, and I was about to face the violence, disease, starvation and isolation of the seven-year Tribulation. Worse, I might succumb to torture, agree to get the Mark of the Beast, and accept relief from momentary discomfort in exchange for an eternity of supernatural agony.

By the mid-90s, rapture fever was in full effect with my generation. DC Talk, arguably the Beatles of Christian rock, released a cover of Larry Norman’s rapture anthem I Wish We’d All Been Ready, with the heartthrob Kevin Max singing the bridge with an eerie vibrato: “The father spoke, the demons dined / how could you have been so blind?”

The same year, the evangelist Tim LaHaye and novelist Jerry B Jenkins released the first in a series of 16 Left Behind novels placing biblical prophecy in a modern context. I don’t know how many times I’d meet a new face at youth group or church camp saying the books had scared them straight. Meanwhile, speakers at my camp and Christian rock shows often tied the rapture to the coming Y2K disaster, and on New Year’s Eve I was honestly surprised when the lights didn’t go out – followed by explosions, sirens and gunfire – at the stroke of midnight.

It’s the marriage of ancient prophecy with contemporary tropes that strikes an urgent fear in audiences – especially children. When you’re still figuring out what the world is, it’s easy to be convinced that your home, family, everything that makes you feel safe is ephemeral and can easily be replaced with unspeakable horror.

After watching Left Behind: Rise of the Antichrist last week, we were treated to a special message from Sorbo, followed by footage of Mike Huckabee leading us in prayer.

“As you watched the movie, you probably noticed some scary references to the way the world looks today,” Sorbo explained in that gruff, fatherly voice I remember well from my childhood watching Hercules. “We live in a world of chaos, uncertainty and fear.”

The audience was mostly retirement age, and laughed heartily at jokes mocking “the media”, “trusting the science”, and liberals embracing “mental health experts” over “conspiracy theorists”. Much of the film reads like a Tucker Carlson segment come to life.

But I remembered very well the psychic impact this toxic theology has on a young mind. In fact, I don’t need to remember. I still dream of demons, hell, the Mark of the Beast and the Lake of Fire a few times a week, sometimes sleepwalking – or sleep running – out the front door, convinced the antichrist is coming to tattoo 666 on my forehead, followed by an eternity of torture in hell.

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My parents were home late and my first thought was that they’d been raptured up to heaven. I was a sinner who had been left behind to face the Earth’s destruction.

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So you’d think I’d be as thrilled as a puppy in a box of packing peanuts when I moved to Denver, Colorado, and began work as an A&E journalist, a job that regularly put me in contact with my favorite musicians, writers, and stand-up comedians. But I soon found out that interviewing a person was a million miles from meeting them; and that when it comes to heroes, actually meeting them has the potential to destroy every reason you loved them in the first place.

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Despite watching many hours of Fox News each week, I rarely find myself agreeing with the network’s outrage cheerleaders. But last month when ​Charles Krauthammer appeared on The O’Reilly Factor and referred to President Obama’s gum chewing during a summit in China as disrespectful, I found myself nodding in feverish approval. I’ve said similar things myself, though my remarks are usually met with, “He’s chewing Nicorette gum. Would you rather he smoked?” Yes. Yes, I would, because I think chewing gum is the most disgusting thing you can possibly do with your face.

A few years ago a girlfriend of mine said my aversion to looking anyone in the eye while they chewed gum was symptomatic of a phobia. She did some research, and to my delight she introduced me to the term c​hiclephobia. Although it’s obscure, I’m not the only person who might suffer with this condition outlined in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Although there aren’t statistics available on exactly how many people are afraid of gum, we do know that there are folks diagnosed with chiclephobia in every echelon of life. Even Oprah Winfrey, one of the most powerful women of the 20th century, famously suffers from the disorder.

Back in 2010, Oprah told People magazine, “I hate chewing gum. It makes me sick just to think about it. When people chew loudly or smack it and pull it out of their mouth, that’s the worst.” She is so turned off by gum, she is rumored to have had the stuff banned from her production studio.

As someone who finds his incessant gum chewing the most disgusting thing about Jerry Lee Lewis, a man who married his 13-year-old cousin, I could definitely relate to Oprah’s desire to rid her world of gum. But because most people don’t find chewing a synthetic paste repulsive, people like Oprah and myself are forced to encounter it constantly.

As a child, I almost threw up when reading about Violet Beauregarde sticking her three-month old chewed gum on her bedpost at night in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, (or behind her ear in Wonka). When Kirsten Dunst surprised Josh Hartnett with an unexpected make-out session in his Pontiac Firebird to the soundtrack of Heart’s “Crazy on You” in The Virgin Suicides, an otherwise thrilling scene of pubescent recklessness was ruined for me by the across-the-line disgusting moment when, immediately after they kiss, Hartnett finds Dunst’s old gum in his mouth.

I’ve had desperate crushes on women that I’d suddenly feel nothing for after watching them chew gum. I’ve had important lunch meetings ruined when someone I’m supposed to be paying attention to puts his or her old gum on the side of their plate. Suddenly my appetite is gone, and I can think of nothing but counting the minutes until the waiter takes that plate away.

“Of all the consumer products, chewing gum is perhaps the most ridiculous. It literally has no nourishment—you just chew it to give yourself something to do with your stupid idiot Western mouth,” Russell Brand wrote in his memoir, My Booky Wook. “Half the world is starving, and the other’s going, ‘I don’t actually need any nutrition, but it would be good to masticate, just to keep my mind off things.'”

I often cite Brand’s point when explaining chiclephobia to people. Though if I’m honest, my hatred for gum has nothing to do with class or decadence or famine. I just think it’s gross. Really, really gross. But does a deep-rooted aversion to gum really qualify as a legitimate phobia? ​

“Usually a phobia is defined as an intense fear that is irrational, and the person tends to realize it’s irrational, but still can’t help feeling it,” Dr. Gregory Carey of University of Colorado Boulder’s Department of Psychology and Neuroscience tells me. “A phobic disorder is when a phobia gets so intense it starts interfering in your life or those around you.”

I do have pretty strong reactions to the sight of gum, but I couldn’t say that it impacts my life on a daily basis. When I think of the word phobia, I think of people who are terrified of innocuous things like balloons (glob​ophobia), moths (mottep​hobia), or the color purple (porphyroph​obia, not to be confused with a fear of the Oprah film The Color Purple). Dr. Carey says that these types of cases are rare, and that most common phobias are of usual suspects like heights, enclosed spaces, public speaking, and various sorts of animals.

Like much of our emotional makeup as adults, Dr. Carey says that often phobias have their origins in a negative childhood experience. “We’re evolutionarily predisposed to develop certain fears at certain times in our lives,” he explains. “It’s always been important for children to learn quickly about their environment, especially when it comes to things like animals.”

This was certainly the case with Oprah, who once told  InTouch weekly that as a child her family was so poor they would recycle chewed gum. “My grandmother used to save it in little rows in the cabinet,” she said. “I’d be scared to touch it because it was so gross, so I have a thing about gum.”

I suppose I do have a memory of my sister sticking her gum into my hair as a kid. Having gum in my hair freaked me out more than the time I had a leach stuck to my belly. I was livid. I threw an explosive tantrum until my Mom just cut it out with scissors. I feel nauseous every time I think about that. Though at the same time, I don’t feel I fit Carey’s criteria for a phobia sufferer since I don’t see my feelings as irrational. To me, chewed gum is like used toilet paper, and I don’t understand why no one else sees that. If I had gum stuck in my hair today as an adult I’d react about the same as I did as a child and freak the fuck out.

In our conversation, Carey makes the distinction between fear and disgust by proposing that “if you are walking along and step in dog poop, you say, Yuck, that’s disgusting. But you’re not afraid.” When I take his parable one step further and ask about the person who avoids parks or walking in grass altogether to avoid dog poop, he reiterates that “you’re still just disgusted by the poop, not afraid of it. Unless you’re having panic attacks about it.”

So what’s a gum-fearing boy to do?  Ultimately, I’ve mostly accepted the fact that pretty much everyone in the world other than me and Oprah likes to chew gum. So I typically avoid mentioning my chiclephobia to anyone. You can only pick so many battles in life, and if some people enjoy gnawing on sorbitol, gum base, maltitol, caffeine, Xylitol, and stuff like niacinamide, soy lecithin, calcium pantothenate, taurine, maltodextrin, sucralose, titanium dioxide, refined glaze, carnauba wax, pyridoxine hydrochloride, riboflavin, Calcium silicate, and Red 40, then far be it from me to deprive them of their fun. If I were to mention my disgust with gum, then no one would chew gum around me, which sounds nice, but won’t actually help my condition.

According to Dr. Carey, if I have any interest in desensitizing myself to the sight of humans debasing themselves with their open-mouthed chomping, then I need to soberly face down the source of my discomfort.

“Usually the best [method of overcoming a phobia], is a combination of cognitive therapy and actual in vivo exposure,” he says. “If someone’s afraid of snakes, you work your way into actually handling snakes. People can be anxious during the initial stages of this treatment, but it can be very effective, leading to their anxiety going down by the end of treatment.”

So perhaps it’s for the best that I’m not a gazillionaire like Oprah who can have gum banished from my sight at all times. If I’m ever going to get to the point where I can handle a lunch meeting involving chewed gum on a plate, or even kiss a girl with gum in her mouth (I just squirmed in my seat typing that sentence), then I guess I need to witness this unsightly, inexplicably acceptable culinary custom as often as possible.

…On second thought, fuck that. Gum’s gross.

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A few years ago I was diagnosed as a love addict, my therapist explaining that music was my trigger for addictive behavior. But as I began looking into the neuropsychology of listening to music, I found that the experience often mirrors that of love addiction, leading me to wonder: Can I be straight-up addicted to music?

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For one week during the winter of 2005, I worked for a puppy mill. A friend and I had been hired to drive a van across the country—the company served as a middleman between major dog-breeding facilities in Iowa and various stores between there and New York City. When I signed up for the job, I had no idea that I would be committing a crime, nor that I would be participating in an industry of torture that would haunt me forever.

My friend (whom I will name Pete) and I were in our early 20s and had barely traveled outside of our rural homelands. This was our chance to explore the country while making some quick, much-needed cash (as dropout artists, we went through jobs like tissues). And puppies! My twee little heart fluttered at the idea of it: driving through Chicago, Detroit, Boston, and NYC, the urban jungles of our musical heroes, mythical landscapes we’d only read about in magazines and biographies—all in a van with maybe four or five purebred baby dogs on our laps, eagerly exploring this exotic new world alongside us.

Pete had arranged the job. We were to make the first pickup at 5 AM on a January morning. Half asleep and stumbling across the pre-dawn gravel, I first noticed the smell. Then the screams.

Unlike Pete, I hadn’t grown up working on a farm. Though I’d spent enough time on them to not be phased by the noxious smell of fertilizer or the piercing sound of a pig giving birth, this was something else—like a jet-engine blowing through a garbage dump, a horror show unlike anything I’d seen in my 22 years as an Iowa resident.

The building was a long aluminum hangar lit by pulsing florescent lights shining down on a seemingly endless corridor of wire kennels. The kennels were stacked six or seven high, with three or four dogs crammed into each one. Dachshunds, bulldogs, beagles, huskies, mastiffs, pugs, rottweilers—all less than eight weeks old.  They were everywhere, stacked above my head, hundreds of them, all clamoring for attention with a frenetic urgency. These were not the playful barks of excitement we associate with viral YouTube videos. There was no mistaking the sounds as anything but pained screams.

I couldn’t blame them, since I wanted to scream myself. The stench of hundreds of dogs pissing and shitting all over one another inside an enclosed space sent me running for the bathroom, where I quickly vomited up my morning coffee. We carried two collies and three Great Danes to the van, each of them no bigger than a loaf of Wonderbread. Like the mill, the kennels in the van were also stacked one on top of the other. I began to load each dog into his/her own kennel—which had a wire-floor with sawdust beneath, to catch the waste—but Pete was putting two or three into each kennel, keeping room for the massive amount of dogs to come. My Scooby-Doo fantasy of only half a dozen puppies was clearly a joke.

The entire time we worked, an adult female dog was chained to the ground, barking helplessly as she watched her children being taken away. Her bark was weak and hoarse. I would later learn she’d had her voice box removed.

This is often the part of the story where I’m asked: Why did you continue the trip after seeing what you were getting into? Why didn’t you just refuse the job and run home—by foot if necessary?

“You ate a breakfast burrito from McDonald’s this morning—what do you think it looks like where the chicken in that burrito is made?” Pete asked me in the van after I told him I thought it was disgusting how these puppies are treated “The people who buy these dogs at their local mall, they can afford to not know where their puppies come from. But we’re poor, so we see behind the curtain. We work behind the curtain.”

Pete grew up a proper farmboy, collecting the semen of hogs and slitting the throats of turkeys. My sensitivity toward animals was a liability in that world, something a few years of bullying taught me to keep to myself. When I was a kid my friends cherished torturing cats and squirrels, and if I didn’t hide my tears I might receive the same kerosene and lit match treatment. (Up until the 19th century, public cat burnings were a popular form of entertainment in France.)

I certainly wasn’t raised to have empathy toward animals. The idea of pets baffled my dad, who was unable to see an animal as anything other than meat or a nuisance. So where did this outrage come from? At 22 I didn’t know, and was only just then beginning to realize that there were other people in the world who could read the pain in the eyes of animals like I did. Yet I still didn’t have the resolve to put my foot down and protest when something didn’t feel right.

When the van was full, we had more than 100 dogs in there. We were required to keep this vehicle moving 24 hours a day, with one person sleeping while the other drove. There was little time to feed or give water to the dogs, and none to let them out of their cages. Attempting to dull the smell, we cracked the windows, but this was January in the Midwest with a 30-below windchill, and the company back in Iowa warned us to not let the puppies catch pneumonia and die (though if they did, this was an anticipated bit of collateral damage when shipping product).

Both Pete and I would get quite ill during this trip: Flu-like symptoms mixed with our sleeplessness and the incessant sound of crying puppies to slowly strip us of resolve. My heart lifted slightly each time we unloaded a few of the dogs at some corporate pet store, but when we reached Chicago, one store owner followed us back to our van and said, “Don’t get pulled over in Illinois with your van looking like that: You’ll be arrested for animal abuse.” I began crying in front of the stranger.

Seven years after this conversation, two men were arrested for performing the exact same job we were, for the exact same company. They were charged with dozens of counts of animal cruelty—one for each puppy. Of all the things to be arrested for, I would take treason or kidnapping or armed robbery over animal abuse.

But prosecutions like that one against puppy mills are exceedingly rare.

“There are little slaps on the wrist here and there, but nothing serious,” Mary LaHay, president of Iowa Friends of Companion Animals, tells me. “The USDA bends over backwards to help these folks; if they’re out of line with the regulations, they’ll give them years to improve.”

It was the US Department of Agriculture that first began encouraging farmers to breed dogs following crop failure during World War II. In 1966, President Lyndon Johnson signed the Animal Welfare Act, which required any breeder with more than three dogs to apply for a license, but only required cages be six inches taller than the dogs, and allowed them to live standing upon the wire cages for their entire lives, never touching the ground or seeing the light of day. The ASPCA estimates there are around 10,000 puppy mills in the US, many with over 1000 dogs inside a single facility.

While Iowa ranks second behind Missouri as the state with the most puppy mills, it was the first state to introduce the so-called “Ag-Gag” bills, which criminalizes the act of filming animal abuse in farming practices. And, according to LaHay, of all the top-breeding states in the US, Iowa is the only one with no state oversight for the operations.

“A significant reason there’s no legislative movement to regulate puppy mills is the opponents have very deep pockets,” says Devin Kelly, an Iowa attorney who offers legal services to clients with animal welfare cases.

These deep-pocketed opponents include, among many others, the American Kennel Club, which hires lobbyists to fight dog-breeding regulations under the same premise as the NRA with gun-control: Any regulation, no matter how small, threatens to shut down all dog breeding. (The NRA also lobbies to fight puppy-mill legislation, under the premise of protecting those who breed hunting dogs.)

State legislators in Missouri dismantled a voter-approved anti-puppy mill law in 2011, insisting the new demands for oversight would be too costly for the state (where the dog-breeding industry earns an estimated $1 billion annually). Missouri dominates the Humane Society’s list of the”101 worst puppy mills,” with the Riverfront Times reporting last May that many dogs are currently “fed raw cow meet infested with maggots. Their faces are matted with so much feces that they can’t see. Their wounds bleed and ooze without any medical treatment. They are left outside on wire floors to freeze to death.”

Missouri did pass the Canine Cruelty Prevention Act, which the Humane Society says is not as strong as the original, voter-approved proposition, but at least requires “higher standards of care at commercial breeding kennels than Missouri had five years ago.”

Much of the legislation introduced to fight large-scale commercial dog breeding is not so much concerned with animal abuse as with taxes and consumer protection. These operations often get away without having a state sales-tax permit and report their own income, which allows them to skirt a lot of payments while operating within a multimillion dollar business. (LaHay estimates the industry brings in around $15 million annually in Iowa alone.) And the corners cut in not providing proper care to the dogs often results in pets that are loaded with ailments the new owner must contend with.

“A lot of the puppies coming out of these places are sick and genetically inferior,” LaHay says. “The lack of socialization early on often leads to aggression or fear. Puppies also learn their house-training from their mothers, but the mothers in mills aren’t house-trained. And then there are genetic anomalies like hip dysplasia, allergies, luxating patellas. So people are buying these dogs, falling in love with them, and then only later discovering all of these problems.”

During my week delivering puppy-mill dogs, pet store owners kept discovering serious problems with their health. Each was briefly examined for kennel cough, eye infections and other maladies, and if any symptoms were found, the dog would be rejected by the store and sent back to the mill in Iowa. My heart would leap at the site of these dogs placed into a large bin with toys and other puppies, feeling the warm sunlight coming through the shop windows. And so there was nothing worse when a dog would be turned away, forcing us to return him to the cold, dark van.

By the time we made it to New York City, there were only half a dozen dogs left, the number I’d originally imagined us transporting. But at this point there was little remaining momentum to explore the city I’d so often heard Lou Reed sing about. I just wanted to go home. Pete and I were both running a fever, and had barely slept throughout the week. The only dogs still in the van were sick, too.

Pete had become as disgusted with the operation as I was, and called his boss in Iowa to quit. This allowed us to take our time returning home. Somewhere in Ohio, we stopped at a park and let the remaining puppies out of their cages. It was an unseasonably warm afternoon, and we played with the dogs on a grassy hill. They ecstatically jumped about, experiencing grass and fresh-air for the first time in their short lives. We ran and they chased us. I tumbled to the ground and the dogs all over leapt all over me, licking my face and tickling my skin with their sinewy, cotton-like fur—never once understanding that we were the villains. We were the ones responsible for their misery. All they understood was this one moment of happiness and love, a single instance of grace, quite possibly was the only one they would ever know.

The post I Worked for a Puppy Mill appeared first on Josiah Hesse.

Like San Francisco’s Haight Ashbury in the 60s, or select swaths of Brooklyn in the early 2000s, Denver’s Baker neighborhood is currently in the midst of a familiar transition: A poor but artistically vibrant community has suddenly been “discovered,” attracting big money and changes to the landscape. Now it’s poised to end up a decaffeinated version of the culture that originally made it famous. The two most iconic villains in Baker’s story are the Denver Cruiser Ride (a weekly faux-Burning Man parade of costumed bros riding the bicycle equivalent of an SUV) and the Punch Bowl Social (a Costco-size bowling alley that attracts upper-class beer-pong enthusiasts). As a Baker resident, I have a readied list of grievances against this crowd that I can deliver at a moment’s notice—but whenever I do, I can’t help sounding like a bigot attempting to rally a mob with my hate speech.

In 2012, I wrote an editorial for Denver’s alt weekly, Westword, calling cruiser bikes antiquated cartoon tanks, and argued that anyone who rides one was not a “serious bicyclist.” I accused them of being too drunk and dangerous on the roads, unaccustomed to the silent rules of riding a bike in the city. The Denver Cruiser ride was, to me, “the most unenlightened bunch of Philistines that our city has ever been forced to contend with,” and I self-aggrandizingly appointed myself the Carrie Nation of cyclists, stating that “someone needs to speak up and tell them to go the fuck home.”

The story received a plethora of comments, all but one or two exhibiting an impressive level of scorn and vitriol. In my eight years as a journalist, I have yet to receive hate mail with this kind of passion. One choice example: “Your writer is a fuckin’ prick. HE is the dude who is ruining cycling for everyone! I bet he’s the doucher riding in the middle of traffic like he owns the road….GTFO BRO.”

“Now you’ve got a target on your back you miserable piece of shit,” read another.

One of the editors at Westword said that the volume and venom of the comments reminded him of reactions to immigration-policy stories. Reading these angry replies was a visceral experience for me, strengthening my resolve to despise cruiser bikes all the more. I ignored pleas for bicycle bipartisanship. Hating cruisers became a part of my identity, and I found myself smugly staring down these motorcycle-size bikes as they rode down the sidewalk (the fucking sidewalk!) of Broadway Avenue. “I don’t think I could seriously date anyone who attends the Denver Cruiser Ride,” I’d say, repeatedly bringing up the subject at dinner parties, pontificating about how they were ruining the neighborhood.

If you replaced “cruiser bikes” with “Jews” or “blacks,” I sounded just like Edward Norton in American History X.

I wasn’t alone in this. Throughout the Baker neighborhood a general tension was felt about the Punch Bowl Social, which had become the hive of the weekly Cruiser Ride. With their 900-seat capacity and club-remix DJs, the bowling alley/restaurant was attracting swarms of wealthy meatheads who, up until then, mostly remained in the Lower Downtown neighborhood (LoDo)—the site of Real World Denver and countless disturbing anecdotes involving roofies.

Bumper stickers began popping up around the neighborhood reading “Keep LoDo Off Broadway,” referring to the main strip of Baker containing all our favorite bars, boutiques, and bookstores. The Punch Bowl and Cruisers were responsible for an increase in crime, I’d say—without any statistical proof. The neighborhood had been getting steadily more popular over the last decade, causing rent to skyrocket. One by one the musicians, artists, and writers who had made the neighborhood what it was were unable to afford it, and relocated to cheaper and more dangerous neighborhoods (which will, no doubt, experience a similar fate once the locusts drift that way in ten years time). Thankfully, we had an easily identifiable demographic toward which to channel our hate.

If you were a service-industry artist who rented a house in Baker, the changes were an economic nightmare. If you were a business owner on Broadway Avenue, the fiscal boom was worth the cultural bloodletting. Soon other bars were inviting the cruisers to come in for a pit stop, where they would guzzle down expensive cocktails like Ken & Barbie versions of the Hells Angels for an hour or two, before collectively hopping on their whale wheels and riding to the next alcoholic pillage down the road, cheering and belching all the way as “Blurred Lines” thumped from someone’s rolling speaker system.

I’d been DJing off and on at a Broadway Avenue bar for the last year or so, and was recently disappointed to learn that the bar owners had offered their hospitality to the Denver Cruiser Ride. The bar’s architecture carried a certain Bukowski romanticism, sprinkled with the Tarantino aesthetic of vintage movie posters and rockabilly danger. And now, for two hours on a Wednesday night, it would be home to a crowd who probably consider The Hunger Games a challenging piece of literature.

As an underfunded writer with an ever-increasing rent to pay, last Wednesday I reluctantly agreed to take the Cruiser Ride DJ gig.

I arrived early, setting up my gear before the troops arrived, then went outside to smoke the customary joint in an alley. But once outside I stopped, noticing a Denver Policeman foot-patrolling the area, a phenomenon I’d never witnessed there before. Damn cruisers, bringing cops into our neighborhood, I thought, walking the extra block to another alley to smoke. (Despite what you may think, public consumption of marijuana is even more illegal in Denver than it used to be.)

Killing time while flooding my skull with THC, I read a recent editorial by Ann Coulter on my phone, where the manically divisive conservative argued that America’s increased interest in soccer was due to immigrants and socialism and “can only be a sign of the nation’s moral decay.”

“If more ‘Americans’ are watching soccer today, it’s only because of the demographic switch effected by Teddy Kennedy’s 1965 immigration law,” Coulter writes. “I promise you: No American whose great-grandfather was born here is watching soccer. One can only hope that, in addition to learning English, these new Americans will drop their soccer fetish with time.”

The essay was wildly, beautifully, unintentionally ridiculous, perfectly illustrating the transparent xenophobia and racism of those who fight against the inevitable shifts of national demographics. It reminded me of a bit I’d seen days earlier on Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, in which the British comedian strung together clips of Europeans expressing anti-immigrant sentiments.

“The French want to preserve their way of life and don’t want to adopt the culture’s, traditions, and customs of these foreigners,” one woman grumbled.

“You haven’t seen crime yet, but if you let the Bulgarians come here, you will,” lectured another man with a stabby finger.

“Me and my wife used to go out on a Saturday night, have a few drinks with the locals,” complained an Englishman in one vintage clip. “We can’t go down to the locals anymore—they’re full-up with noisey foreigners.”

My blood went cold and I dropped my smoldering joint on the ground, realizing (perhaps through a THC-induced widening of neurochemistry) that I sounded exactly like these bigots whenever I moaned about cruiser bikes and the Punch Bowl Social.

They drive up crime.

They drink too much and can’t be trusted on the road.

They caused the increase in rent (the economic equivalent of “driving down property value” for the renting-classes).

They should go back to LoDo, where they belong.

Walking back into the bar and turning on my DJ equipment, I looked out at the crowd of Denver Cruiser Ride patrons that were beginning to file in. Scanning them with my judgy eyes, I realized that a lot of them probably weren’t the wealthy residents I’d originally pegged them to be—they just dressed as though they wanted to be mistaken for entitled brats. This made me think of Arthur Miller’s 1946 novel, Focus, where a Gentile man buys glasses that cause him to be mistaken for a Jew, which results in him being ostracized while living in an anti-semitic part of New York City.

The persecution he endures would be reprehensible whether he was Jewish or not, but the fact that a new pair of glasses can inspire all kinds of assumptions against his character highlights how trivial, reactionary, and childishly dangerous a racist or anti-immigrant mentality can be. And how easy it is to get blindly caught up in it.

Suddenly I felt like the diner rednecks in Easy Rider, who sized up Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper with their long-hair and beads, calling them inhuman “troublemakers” who should be “put in a cage,” and threatening that they wouldn’t make it out of the city-limits. The crewcut diners eventually catch up with the hippies late at night, murdering one and injuring the other two in their sleep.

Thankfully, I’d never encouraged any kind of violence against the cruisers or Punch Bowl patrons, and would gladly condemn anyone who did as a petty asshole. (Admittedly, I have daydreamed of spraying them with my garden hose when they ride past my house.) Still, this epiphany broke my heart. Having grown up in a conservative, working-class town where I used to wear make-up and drop ecstasy before sauntering into the local cowboy bars, I always identified with the hippies in Easy Rider, not the intolerant bigots.

Earlier in the day, I’d been told that the cruiser-crowd had been requesting the DJs play more “party music,” instead of the obscure indie and psych-rock they’d been spinning each week. I’d whined about this at the time, citing the indignity of a budding professional music critic like me succumbing to the shallow tastes of these people. But once the bar was full and I began flipping through LPs, I found that our musical ven-diagrams were more intimate than assumed.

There was plenty of blues, punk, and country that I’m sure they wouldn’t have cared for, but I also had Jay-Z, Daft Punk, Outkast, and the Gorillaz—party music for everyone. They may not have been familiar with my Lykke Li, Janelle Monae, or Yelle selections, but they danced to them just the same.

The bar was typically empty when I’d DJ on Wednesday nights, but now there was a large crowd having a blast to the music I’d picked out for them (a heartwarming dynamic for even the most bitter of DJs).

Suddenly the divisions between myself and the cruiser scene began to appear a bit silly. They ride a different type of bike than I do, attend different concerts, order fancier drinks and have different social rituals. The classist in me wanted to point out that they have more money, and hence drive cars for transportation and bikes only for fun, but it was difficult to sustain this attitude while looking into the mass of humanity assembled on that dancefloor.

After riding my bike home later that night, I looked up the old story I’d written about the scourge of Denver Cruisers, attempting to recapture the sharp antagonism I’d once held for these modern yuppies. Scrolling through the comments—so venomous, so hungry to despise—I came across one reader with a very practical message of diplomacy for both myself and my detractors:

“I have had two road bikes and now have a cruiser,” she wrote. “It has a four speed hub. After reading your article I think we should have a course on writing without the negative comments. There is too much hate and egotistical correspondence on the internet. Perhaps we should just start being nice to each other on the roadways. I have seen bikes blocking the roads on Saturday morning rides. They are courteous and wave me by when the way is clear. Most of the cruiser rides are not recreational users of the road. Some of us haul groceries or ride to work. Please play nice as we are all in the same sandbox.”

In the hope of never feeling like Ann Coulter or an English racist again, I will try.

I promise.

The post Am I a Bigot for Hating Cruiser Bikes? appeared first on Josiah Hesse.

Despite being hailed as the man who introduced hippies to literature—this ginger-journalist who refers to his first LSD trip as “the most important day of my life,” the correspondent of the kaleidoscopic who gives his books such vivid titles as Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas and Wild Ducks Flying Backward—it came as no surprise to me that Tom Robbins has been as sober as baby Jesus while writing his stories.

The post How Tom Robbins Taught Me to Use Drugs Like a Grown-Up appeared first on Josiah Hesse.