Is Harambe the anti-Christ?*

Pictured: The Anti-Christ?

On May 28, 2016, a bullet ended the life of a 17-year-old male Western lowlands gorilla at the Cincinnati Zoo named Harambe. When a 5-year-old child somehow stumbled into Harambe's preserve and he began to jerk the child around unpredictably, Zoo officials made the difficult choice to shoot and kill the gorilla to save the child.

Outrage followed in the immediate aftermath of the killing. Suddenly, just about everyone in the world became an expert on parenting, zoo security, and gorilla behavior. How could the child's mother have lost sight of him so egregiously? How did the Cincinnati Zoo not prevent the child from falling in? Why did the zoo act so quickly when it could have been just as likely that Harambe was trying to protect the child, not injure it? All of these arguments, however, dwelt on circumstances, and thus became both retrospective and hypothetical. The brutal reality of nature and gorilla strength compelled quick action from Zoo officials, whatever Harambe's intent was; regardless of how the child got in there, his fellow humans concluded that his life mattered more than the gorilla's. Without a time machine, anything else was just speculation. And so the frightening combination of the Eye of Sauron, the Borg, and the Death Star that is modern Internet outrage culture moved on from the death of Harambe.

But then, a curious thing happened. Harambe came back to life--he was resurrected, if you will. The same Internet that, after its initial obsession, typically displays all the attention span of a cocaine-addled monkey, returned to something it had discarded. According to Google Trends, Internet search interest in Harambe has now reached a sustained level almost equaling the peak reached in the immediate aftermath of his death.

The resurrection of Harambe

This renewed interest has taken many, many forms. Perhaps the most depressing and emblematic of the Internet's hive-mind, sarcasm-as-argument, trolling culture has been the seemingly playful but disturbingly persistent Twitter harassment of the Cincinnati Zoo. Despite the Zoo's retrenchment of the gorilla habitat to prevent future Harambes, entreaties from Zoo Director Thane Maynard to stop the harassment because it's making it harder for the Zoo to move on, and similar urges by the Zoo to honor Harambe by donating to gorilla conservation efforts in the wild, the pestering continued. Hackers even took over Maynard's Twitter account and began spewing Harambe memes. Eventually, the Zoo had enough, and removed its Twitter account.

But that is only one form this resurgent interest has taken. Here is a by-no-means-comprehensive list of ways by which people have tried (successfully and unsuccessfully) to "honor" Harambe:
-Creating a petition to get a Pokemon named after Harambe
-Creating a petition to get a Hurricane named after Harambe 
-Creation a petition to rename the Cincinnati Bengals the Cincinnati Harambes
-Heckling professional golfers with Harambe chants
-A professional golfer adorning his club in Harambe's memory 
-Creating shot glasses for Harambe 
-Creating a T-Shirt for Harambe
-Petitioning to name a college dorm after Harambe
-Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein releasing a statement in support of Harambe, and then "accidentally" flying to Cincinnati instead of Columbus when she had a rally scheduled in the latter (we all know you just wanted to pay your respects, Jill. Or maybe you were looking for political advice, since Harambe regularly outpolls you?)
-Someone dressing up as a gorilla and dragging around a small child at a Cincinnati high school football game 
-The heretofore unprecedented trend of honoring something by "whipping it out" (aka "#Dicksoutforharambe")
-A legion of thinkpieces, of which this is a good example
-An Internet-based baby gorilla-naming popular vote that I'll be shocked if Harambe doesn't somehow crash 
-A college football quarterback dedicating his season to Harambe
-All of this merchandise 
 (Does Harambe's family get royalties on this, by the way, or is it just like that monkey selfie?)
 
But these are only examples of things that either attempt to bring Harambe out of the Internet and into the real world, or to try to take Harambe seriously. There is now an entire corner of the Internet, perhaps equaling or even exceeding in size that devoted to Nigel Thornberry, dedicated to Harambe memes. Here is but a small sampling of those:
-This entire Facebook page
-A "Sexy Harambe" Halloween costume 
-This bizarre video
-Bush did Harambe

-This incredibly obscure Jewish history joke

Just look it up. I can't explain it.

-This existential dilemma

Has there ever been a greater dilemma?

-This Harry Potter meme

"When you see another gorilla at the Cincinnati Zoo"

And thousands, perhaps even millions, more. If you're curious, knock yourself out. 

So, why is this happening? Why all this obsession with a gorilla? Why has Harambe defied what Mark Twain once allegedly said about Cincinnati--that he would go there if he learned the world was about to end, because the city is always 20 years behind the times--and put the Queen City at the forefront, for once, of a global trend? Many reasons. Not to be ignored is the name "Harambe," which is rather felicitous and fun to say (a la "Mufasa"). The circumstances of Harambe's death also lend themselves well to an adoption by a highly sarcastic and often callous collective Internet mind, and to a trolling at once ironic in affect and earnest in persistence.

The Internet, moreover, seems incapable of doing anything other than absolutely loving or hating something. Like the show Stranger Things, Harambe has fallen on the side of absolute love (for an example of the "hate" side, see Turner, Brock). Our divorce from the brutal realities of nature, and decades of romanticizing of animals in film, has also given man an elevated fondness for most animals. The closest we got to Harambe before Harambe (the proto-Harambe, if you will) was Cecil the Lion, killed in Africa by a trophy-hunting American dentist who became the object of momentary Internet outrage, while Cecil himself is now united with Harambe. And now that Harambe has become popular, people are starting to enjoy the comforting thrill of cool conformity (a contradiction, by the way, but one our age ignores as frequently as we indulge in it) by participating in the meme and making it their own. All of this, and much more, could be at work in the apotheosis of Harambe into every bro's inside joke with every other bro.

Together at last

There seems to be something a bit more to all of this, though. Even Cecil, Harambe's nearest precedent, inspired mostly anger, not Harambe's intense--even if weirdly post-ironic--devotion. What if instead of a meme, Harambe were actually the start of a new religion? What if we, right now, are witnessing the taking-root of a new faith, are at the ground-floor of a new creed's emergence? An article I read in The Economist some time ago (but that, alas, I cannot find) noted that many of the world's most popular faiths--Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism--became popularized in a compact period by historical standards, in an age of then-unprecedented global diffusion of trade and knowledge. From this, the article wondered, given our own diffuse age: Where are our new religions? One need not turn to the words of G.K. Chesterton--"where there is Animal Worship there is Human Sacrifice"--to conclude that Harambe may have given us an answer.

Pictured: A new generation's Crucifixion?

Viewing Harambe as a religion allows us to see the phenomenon in a new light. His devotees are the Internet age approximations of disciples. Cecil was his Protoevangelium, or his John the Baptist, prophesying or preparing the way for his arrival. His death was the crucial moment of the upstart faith. Cincinnati, the site of his death, is this new faith's Jerusalem, or its Mecca. And Harambe's "resurrection"  was his renewed search interest, and is soon perhaps soon to be literalized. Will Harambe start appearing to his closest followers, in isolated cases at first hard to believe?

Harambe? Is that you?

Meanwhile, as this new religion crops up, many of us--like yours truly--are left feeling a strange mix of confusion, envy, and stubbornness. Why don't we get it? Why is everybody joining this new faith? It's probably a bit similar to how the Roman Emperor Julian felt in author Gore Vidal's historical novel Julian. Vidal's novel portrays the late, post-Constantine Roman Emperor Julian, known to history as Julian the Apostate, as believing Christianity a frivolous religion, at best, and potentially ruinous for the Roman Empire, at worst (sentiments he no doubt shared with other non-Christian Romans in the early Christian period). Vidal's stubbornly pagan Julian, unversed in and resistant to this upstart faith that is now purportedly the creed of the Roman Empire after Constantine, considers it a "death-cult" of the "back-country" obsessed with a "triple monster" (i.e., the Trinity) and "charnel houses" (i.e., relics). Julian just didn't get it.

Now, my contempt for Harambe-ism does not rise to this level (and, for the record, I think Julian was wrong). Harambe is, in all likelihood, a harmless diversion, a momentary obsession that will continue to manifest innocuously until Harambe and the incident of which he is the center pass into history and curiosity. But now that we are on the subject of religion, heresy, and false gods, it is worth considering another possibility. What if Harambe is neither a fad nor some would-be new deity? What if he, instead, is the anti-Christ?

You may scoff at this bold pronouncement. What evidence is there for such a claim? As much evidence, I submit to you, as there is for Harambe's being the Messiah that the Internet has made him out to be. And perhaps there is even more. Consider the widely-acknowledged-as-prophetic  (by me, anyway) words of Christian apologist C.S. Lewis. In The Last Battle, the final volume of his Chronicles of Narnia series, Lewis tells the story of that world's Apocalypse. In The Last Battle, Narnia falls prey to a false prophet, who goes about Narnia with a false Aslan in the form of a donkey dressed as a lion--the real Aslan being this world's True God--to sway that world into sin. The false prophet's name is Shift.

He is a gorilla.

Is Harambe the literalization of this fictional character, the anti-Christ in the flesh? Was C.S. Lewis warning us about the future, as he did so many times? Again, what evidence do you have that Harambe is not the anti-Christ, the popular, charismatic figure who will entrance the masses in the end times to lead them away from the truth and into the Evil One's grasp, that he has not faked his own death the better to accomplish his diabolical ends? He has already become in death more influential than he ever was in life. Imagine to what ends either he, acting behind the scenes, or some intrepid follower can put this newfound cult status? Might it be something similar to how the anti-Christ is described in the Book of Revelation?

And he had power to give life unto the image of the beast, that the image of the beast should both speak, and cause that as many as would not worship the image of the beast should be killed.

Is this too far-fetched? I think not. We have already seen to what lengths the Internet will go in Harambe's service. Perhaps Harambe's memory is already being used to sway man to sinfulness. Might not #dicksoutforharambe be an elevation of sexuality above the human person (out of alignment with what is proper), much like one theory explains the profane images on the Stone Tower Temple as literal rebukes to the proper gods in the Legend of Zelda game Majora's Mask? Is there not something devilish, something very "We are Legion"-esque, about the Internet itself (and, worst of all, Anonymous), but especially the Harambe trolls and their treatment of, for example, the Cincinnati Zoo (trolls, by the way, could be considered a form of demon)? Is there not something darkly ironic and perverse about a modern-day anti-Christ using the Internet to spread his message and cement his influence, in a simultaneously trivial and obscene mirror of how Christianity spread via the Roman Empire? Is there not something mockingly parodic about salvation coming to man through a Man, and damnation threatening him through an ape?  Maybe so.

I'm not saying Harambe is the anti-Christ. But I do know a thing or two about would-be Satanists. So  maybe, just maybe...

Pictured: Harambe?

*Note: This post may or may not be entirely in jest.