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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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