2012: What's your plan?

November 14, 2009
Op-Ed Columnist
Once Again, Into the Apocalypse
By GAIL COLLINS
A lot of people are worrying about the world coming to an end in 2012.

Bummer. I thought we’d gotten over all that in 2000.

The question of whether the End of Time will arrive during the holiday shopping season three years hence is already the subject of a veritable library of books. We also have what “The Complete Idiot’s Guide to 2012” claims are almost 600,000 Web sites devoted to worrying about it.

This seems to be the fault of Nostradamus, the Mayan calendar, angst on the left about global warming and angst on the right about the election of Barack Obama. Or the health care bill. Or government bailouts. Or the repositioning of “In God We Trust” on the nation’s coinage.

Really, for ultraconservatives, the last year has been one sign of the apocalypse after the other. Soon, the rivers will run red with Starbucks Raspberry-Flavored Tazo Passion Shaken Iced Tea. Owls will give birth to two-headed frogs who shriek the lyrics to Lady Gaga songs.

Hollywood is unleashing a raft of movies about humanity tottering on the edge of extinction. In “2012,” a G-8 summit convenes to discuss the fact that “the world as we know it will soon come to an end.” Actually, I would not be surprised if the participants found this preferable to another round of the Doha trade talks.

The film characters who are best prepared for the planetary calamity had been consulting the ancient Mayan calendar, which runs through more than five millennia and then comes screeching to a halt on Dec. 21, 2012. Some say that for the Mayans, this was just the end of a cycle, like completing a really long year, and that if they’d been able to hang around for a few more centuries they’d simply have issued a new, post-2012 calendar, this time perhaps including some nice pictures of puppies.

Others see more dire forces at work. In “2012,” the crust of the earth starts bouncing around like Tom DeLay in that cha-cha competition. No one can save us, not the black president or the governor of California with an Austrian accent. Certainly the Europeans can’t help, since not even the collapse of every tall building on the planet can get Americans to pay attention to non-American ideas.

Also coming soon to a theater near you are: “The Road” (Viggo Mortensen struggles across a barren landscape after a mysterious cataclysm) and “The Book of Eli” (Denzel Washington guards a book that could save post-apocalypse humanity from Gary Oldman). Obviously, Hollywood has determined that the reason all those Iraq-war-themed movies failed was that the moviegoers felt the scenery wasn’t bleak enough.

I’ve been disappointed that, so far, almost no one has noticed that St. Malachy’s List of the Last Popes has been running out of gas almost as fast as the Mayan calendar. Malachy was an Irish bishop who died in 1148, after allegedly having seen a vision of the future 112 popes who would reign until the end of the world. By this count, the current Benedict XVI would be 111.

Each of the popes gets a little hint as to his identity. For the most part, Malachy cannily chose to keep them general enough (“angelic shepherd”) that it was hard not to hit a lot of home runs. But good luck in figuring out how Benedict is “glory of the olives.”

Keeping things vague, or subject to multiple interpretations, is the real key to apocalyptic predictions. It’s what made Nostradamus a household name. He’d stare at a bowl of water for hours on end, and then come up with something like:

For the merry maid the bright splendor

Will shine no longer, for long will she be without salt.

With merchants, bullies, wolves odious,

All confusion universal monster.

Which is obviously a foretelling of the Sarah Palin book tour.

My own favorite prognosticator, The Amazing Criswell, always got into trouble with specificity, including his prediction that a black rainbow would circle the earth in 1999 and suck out all the oxygen. He lost a lot of credibility even earlier, after he announced that the United States would move its capital to Wichita and that pressures from outer space would turn Denver into jelly. Really, people tend to remember stuff like that.

I’m predicting that by the time we reach 2011, the 2012 Web sites will hit the million mark, not to mention the Twitters of Terror. But we’ve survived end-of-the-world panic many times before.

When I was a kid, the nuns at my school filled us with stories about prophecies of doom, frequently from Our Lady of Fatima. They always revolved around the Communist menace, and we were occasionally sent home on Friday with assurances that the End was coming by Sunday. We were credulous enough not to question why, in that case, there were homework assignments.



Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

*The film caught on fire during the showing.

I heard a rumor they are going to take our anti-depressants away.

Joe(or make us take more. They weren't sure.)Nation