The Irony of Dispensationalism

Without going into detail, I will say that the overall message of Revelation is a call to oppressed people to carry on in the midst of their oppression because victory is on the other side of martyrdom and a call to wealthy and powerful folks to end their involvement with the systems of death and oppression, to live in such a way that "the beast" might actually want to kill you, and to come out of those systems which kill and oppress God's people. As for the church's faithfulness to this call, there is little to be said outside of obscure stories and individual examples (i.e. Martin Luther King Jr. and "church" efforts such as "the Simple Way"). The Church, especially the American Church, is still quite buddy-buddy with the Beast and quite enticed by the Whore of Babylon.
However, it was interesting at the end of the video to hear from a "Bible Scholar," who has made plenty of money by writing a book and taking advantage of the economic system, who probably lives quite well-off in the United States, and who should know, through the lens of Revelation, that the beast is alive and well in American systems of economics and "defense," that "the book of Revelation has never been read with more earnest true belief than it is today" (Jonathan Kirsch, author of A History of the End of the World). Not only is this arrogant to say, it is profoundly telling.
The dispensationalist perspective on Revelation which calls for a hermeneutic of "decoding" current events and inserting them into the framework of "end times prophesy" is ironically prepositioned to miss the point of Revelation altogether. Someone who can, while looking at our culture where the Church is so heavily involved in the systems of the world and is apparently getting along quite well with them, say that "the book of Revelation has never been read with more earnest true belief than it is today" cannot be someone who actually understands Revelation (unless they have a pitifully bleak outlook on the history of the Church preceding today).
That's the irony of dispensationalism... it predisposes its adherents to blindness toward the message of their most beloved book because it distracts them and entices them to use it as a key to decode symbolic signs of future events.