'The end is nigh! Or not'

From Epochalypse soon :

This coming November, 2012 — a big-budget popcorn flick directed by master of disaster Roland Emmerich — will open in theaters. Watch the trailer, in which those awesome tidal waves lay waste to a Buddhist monastery high on a Himalayan peak, at whowillsurvive2012.com. Or lose yourself in the film's spin-off promo sites: home page for the bogus Institute for Human Continuity or thisistheend.com, at which Woody Harrelson's crackpot survivalist character posts videos proffering his theories on pole reversal, Kukulcan, and the "Doomsday Vault" seed bank.

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Lyin' Mayans?

Comedian Patton Oswalt has a great bit about witnessing the apocalypse firsthand. The downside is obvious: a fiery, white-hot death. The upside? A table reserved in the "VIP section of eternity."

Everyone up there is like, "Hey, how'd you die?" And they're like, "Bus accident," and "How'd you die?" And they're like, "Fire ants." Then they go, "How'd you die, man?" "How'd I die? In the fucking apocalypse! Oh my God, it was awesome!"

Fun times! And, hey, it still could happen. But if so it's more likely to come about thanks to policy hangovers from the Bush administration than because of any Mayan prophecy.

"We have reams of things the Maya wrote about their calendar and considered significant," says Zender. "They don't talk about the 2012 date. It's not surprising, because it was so far off that it wouldn't have meant anything to them, really. There's no indication whatsoever, on any of the stone monuments or any of the texts, that 2012 was a matter of concern for them."

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One of the appeals of apocalyptic thought is that, one way or another, it offers an ending. "There is an interesting psychology at work here," says Landes. "I know people who, because they're uncertain about the future, would rather have failure than live in uncertainty."

The hairier things get, the "more we seek a sense of closure," Landes argues. "Psychologically, many people adopt the language of apocalypticism to sort of go cosmic with [their] own personal anxieties."

And, he says, Oswalt's apocalypse routine is spot-on. "The attraction people have to apocalyptic beliefs is megalomaniacal. When you believe that the apocalypse is going to happen in your day, essentially what you're saying is that 'I am one of the people that is privileged to live at the climax of history.' If you take one more step and say 'I have an active part in this,' then you step up on stage. You're on stage in the greatest drama in the history of the human race. That's pretty heady stuff."

So just imagine how many people will be sorely disappointed when the paroxysms of 2012 — like those of 2000 and of every projected date before that — fail to materialize.

But fear not! The end may be coming soon enough. If Weiss doesn't lay awake at night dreading the intrusion of Planet Nibiru in 2012, he does fret over another potential deep-impact event.

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