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Panic in the Year Zero
The end of the world is back on your TV
By Mick Farren
Source: http://www.lacitybeat.com
 America has awaited one apocalypse or another
with a morbid fascination for almost as long
as the nation has existed. During the 19th century,
hardly a decade went by without a patriarchal
whack-job persuading a flock of true believers
to scale an isolated mountain because, by some
Old Testament calculations, he had decided the
Final Days had arrived. But The End never materialized,
and the now not-so-faithful came back down feeling
like damned fools.
The 20th century was a little different. After
two world wars with death-counts in the millions,
and almost three decades of living under the
nuclear doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction,
no verses of Ezekiel were needed to remind us
of the fragility of human life. Instead, we evolved
a fairly complicated system of post-nuclear mythology.
(Or else non-human entities started to take notice
of us.) From UFOs to cattle mutilation to Bigfoot
to crop circles, we seemed determined to distract
ourselves from the ever-present specter of ICBM
annihilation.
Then the Cold War ended, but the mythology still
grew – especially through the Bill Clinton
1990s. Black helicopters cruised the skies, the
New World Order would usurp democracy, secret
treaties were supposedly concluded with grey
aliens at Area 51, and The X-Files helped consolidate
the Fox TV Network. This cloud of dire beliefs
culminated with coming of the millennium, Nostradamus’s
predictions for July 1999, and the Y2K fear of
a computer glitch precipitating us back into
the Middle Ages.
Fortunately, instead of civilization as we knew
it grinding to a halt, we passed both the Nostradamus
doom and Y2K unscathed. Except, hot on the heels
of this escape from Hobbesian horror, we had
the fixed election of 2000, George W. Bush, Al
Qaeda, 9/11, and a desperate dose of reality
that seemed to put alien abduction on the national
back burner, and about the only group that hung
on to their imagined Armageddon were the Christian
fundamentlists who prayed for The Rapture on
a daily basis.
But seemingly, we can adapt to anything, and
after more than seven years of the felonous
mendacity of Bush/Cheney, the aliens are back,
UFOs are buzzing Stephenville, Texas, and a
whole new End of the World theory stirs, not
only on outer-fringe cypto-science websites,
but even on the Discovery Channel and the revamped
History Channel. This apocalypse is predicted
for December 21, 2012 (12.21.2012), and supposedly
could come at us from multiple sources. The
prime prophet is the highly complex, but also
highly accurate Mayan calendar, whose “long
count” comes to an abrupt end exactly
on that day.
The cosmos, however, could also be the delivery
system of doom. A slew of websites now make
the case that 12.21.2012 – the winter
solstice – will bring on an extremely
rare planetary alignment of Earth, Sun, and
the plane of the Milky Way that the paranoid
believe could trigger a gamma ray burst, burning
us all to curly fries, or cause an equally
fatal flip-over of the Earth’s magnetic
field. And finally we have the late, neo-psychedelic
avatar Terence McKenna, whose mathematical
analysis of the King Wen sequence of the I
Ching created a fractal waveform known as “time
wave zero”; an algorithm that hits an
asymptote at exactly December 21, 2012 at which
point entropy ends, and (some say) everything
else ends with it.
Do I understand time wave zero? No, and McKenna,
who died of brain cancer in 2000, isn’t
around to elaborate. But a debate has already
started as to whether its abrupt conclusion
means the final elimination of everything,
or a more benign, if radical, reversal of human
attitudes.
Do I believe that we’ll live to see
December 22, 2012? My instinct is those of
us still around certainly will, but for the
next four and half years the media will play
12.21.2012 harder than Y2K, and, perversely,
I won’t complain. I love to see a good
irrational panic.
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