It's my apocalypse, too
It’s all been done, none more so than end-of-the-world. To be sure, for some people, the apocalypse is the one thing they live for, so much so it’s become a cottage industry in itself — spawning numerous books of spurious scholarship, New Age wackiness and just plain crackpot weirdness. With its potent imagery and the comforting implication that, yes, there is a point (or end-point) to all this, it’s been seized by mainstream media and popular entertainment in films and novels, but also the bombast of religious oratory and the secular thinking of Marx or Fukuyama. How many of the stories that feature consistently on TV and movies (and political theories) pander and operate on a teleological bias, reassuring us of our own importance via more glamorous onscreen surrogates or mythical terms such as Con-Ass and Millennium Developmental Goals? Of course, that shouldn’t be that surprising given that the best stories need a good ending. If anything, the end-of-the-world is perhaps the most satisfying one.
Post-millennium, post-9/11, the one currently in vogue is the Mayan calendar supposedly predicting that the world will come to an end in 2012. Apart from people who genuinely believe in crystals or tarot card readings, no one seriously believes this. To be sure, it’s usually used in coffee-shop conversations (or by columnists, for that matter) when discussing matters of a personal nature albeit in a lighthearted, humorous way. It’s usually thrown in somewhere either at the beginning or at the end acting as an entry point to the discussion or as punch line to conclude. It’s understandable enough given that a date for the world’s extinction is reassuring. Never mind if it’s slightly hubristic, it’s quite comforting to know that your unhappiness will end — even better, everything else will end with it.
But keep it in fiction. Although it may seem trivial or even an inconsequential development, it may be enough to rethink the effects of this Carrie Bradshaw-meets-Zoroaster type of self-help speak. If you look at history, notions like this have had a ruinous influence on religion and politics (or, more often than not, a confluence of the two). From the Anabaptists who in 1534 seized control of a town in Germany and established a theocratic-communist rule wherein all books but the Bible were banned and women who wouldn’t obey their husbands were put to death to the human and environmental cost by the Nazis, Stalin and Mao’s Great Leap Forward, it doesn’t take too much to regard apocalyptic thinking as dangerous. But what possible effects will it have when applied to, let’s say, a broken heart? It may be facetious to ponder — but it’ll be worth it if only to save our collective sanity from the inanities of blog entries about the subject every time you boyfriend cheats on you. Again.
Stop thinking about the end of the world. Watch the movie instead. If you really need a dire metaphor for the horror that is your life there are plenty of ominous signs out there to choose from (and this isn’t referring to the new singles of Miguel Escueta or Angulo either). The world will outlive us all. Get over it.
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