Another year, another doomsday prophecy. They pop up so often now we might as well print them alongside holidays in the calendar. However, as fun and terror inducing as they can be, apocalyptic prophecies tend to vary wildly in severity and believability. Harold Camping banged his end of days gong more than once throughout 2011, managing to bilk a few sad, faithful dopes out of their life savings in the process, convinced that the rapture was upon us and eager to buy their spot in the blessed afterlife. The majority of us saw Camping's doomsday prophecy for what it was: a source of amusing Facebook status updates for most, and a con job for a faithful and utterly stupid few. 2012, though, sees the arrival of a doomsday prophecy we can sink our teeth into. There hasn't been one like this since Y2K, when we all partied like it was 1999, waiting to see if a niggling technical glitch would render life as we know it an irradiated memory, leaving us in a wasteland of spontaneously downed jet-liners cluttering up the scorched earth and sentient, rage-filled toasters hungry for our flesh. This time around, the annual prediction of doom isn't fucking about.
Welcome to 2012. According to the Mayan long count calendar, or at least according to a group of dubious "experts" on the Mayan long count calendar, the jig is up; the show is over, it's lights out for the earth. We've all got just shy of twelve months to get out there and live life to the fullest. Take all the drugs you've previously been afraid of. Have copious amounts of increasingly bizarre and unapologetically unprotected sex because all bets are off! Come 21st December, you are a dead human walking. A nebulous, opaque, poorly defined yet unstoppable threat is barrelling toward us from the cosmos. Do you really want to meet your ultimate demise never knowing the joys of a Caligulaesque orgy while tripping on a ridiculous cocktail of hallucinogens and heroin?
Of course, most of these predictions of imminent doom swirling around the Mayan long count calendar come from the sort of websites whose owners seem to think the progress of web design stopped sometime in 1997. In all reality the long count calendar was, much like our own yearly method of time keeping, intended to reset at the end of it's 5000 or so year lifespan -- a tracking of an entire age, rather than a single year. The only great cosmic event coming our way this year, in all likelihood, is the sun's alignment with the centre of the Milky Way, a galactic event that occurs every 26,000 years. So maybe bring a full box of condoms to all those super orgies you plan on attending, and leave the crystal meth at home.
Chances are we will wake up on 22nd December as we do every single day -- still existing. No rogue asteroid from the depths of space will have side swiped the planet. No blast of cosmic gamma rays will wash over us, turning us into withered mutants or super evolved telepaths, depending on whose take on the prophecy you're inclined to believe. Chances are we will wake up to the same sun in the sky with the same lives we led the day before, and we'll continue on.
Unless the powers that be right here on earth have something to say about it.
It didn't take long for the world's power brokers and manipulators to harsh our collective new year's eve buzz. While we were out drinking and cavorting, Barack Obama was in Hawaii pissing all over the Bill of Rights. In these first few days of 2012, Iran and the west have continued their game of metaphorical chicken, with the Mid East oil exporter threatening to close the Strait of Hormuz, making veiled threats at US naval vessels in the area, all while the US, the UK, and the EU continue to make overtures of military action over Iran's nuclear weapons programmes, which western leaders assure us are very real, leaving me with an annoying sense of deja vu.
I feel like I've seen this movie before.
This latest round of international dick swinging by the likes of Barack Obama, David Cameron, Mahmoud Ahmedinajad and Angela Merkel has caught the attention of China and Russia, two nations with a vested interest in Iran and the free flow of its oil, and two nations with more than enough might to stand up to any military aggression coming from the west toward their supplier. With each raised voice, each veiled threat, each rattled sabre, the possibility of World War Three breaking out becomes less and less unthinkable, and more a matter of predicting when it starts, rather than if. We can hope that our world leaders are sane enough not to let things get to the point of no return, but a quick glance back at the past year or so quickly tells us they can, have, and more than likely will again. These are strange days. Once again it seems we live in a time of monsters. The best we can hope for is that none of them just want to watch the world burn.
On second thought, maybe instantaneous and unavoidable death from space is the better option.
