The following iz from the New York magazine website:
www.nymag.com
(Find it yourselves)
HOOROO
UNCLE WALLY
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The End of the World As They Know It
What do Christian millenarians, jihadists, Ivy League professors, and
baby-boomers have in common? They're all hot for the apocalypse.
By Kurt Andersen
The week of September 11 (two weeks ago, not five years), I noticed a
poster up at Frankies, my sweet neighborhood trattoria in Brooklyn: It
advertised a talk on 9/11 by Daniel Pinchbeck-the former downtown
literary impresario who has become a Gen-X Carlos Castaneda and New Age
impresario. My breakfast pal nodded at the poster and said, "The guy
is selling his apocalypse thing hard."
"Apocalypse thing?" I knew of Pinchbeck's psychedelic
enthusiasms, but I'd somehow missed his new book about the imminent
epochal meltdown. In 2012, he interprets ancient Mayan prophecies to
mean "our current socioeconomic system will suffer a drastic and
irrevocable collapse" the year after next, and that in 2012, life as
we know it will pretty much end. "We have to fix this situation right
fucking now," he said recently, "or there's going to be nuclear
wars and mass death ... There's not going to be a United States in
five years, okay?"
The same day at lunch in Times Square, another friend happened to
mention that he was thinking of buying a second country house-in Nova
Scotia, as "a climate-change end-days hedge." He smirked, but he
was not joking.
On the subway home, I read the essay in the new Vanity Fair by the
historian Niall Ferguson arguing that Europe and America in 2006 look
disconcertingly like the Roman Empire of about 406-that is, the
beginning of the end. That night, I began The Road, Cormac McCarthy's
new novel set in a transcendently bleak, apparently
post-nuclear-war-ravaged America of the near future. And a day or so
later watched the online trailer for Mel Gibson's December movie,
Apocalypto, set in the fifteenth-century twilight of, yes, the Mayan
civilization.
So: Five years after Islamic apocalyptists turned the World Trade
Center to fire and dust, we chatter more than ever about the clash of
civilizations, fight a war prompted by our panic over (nonexistent)
nuclear and biological weapons, hear it coolly asserted this past
summer that World War III has begun, and wonder if an avian-flu
pandemic poses more of a personal risk than climate change. In other
words, apocalypse is on our minds. Apocalypse is ... hot.
Millions of people-Christian millenarians, jihadists, psychedelicized
Burning Men-are straight-out wishful about The End. Of course, we
have the loons with us always; their sulfurous scent if not the scale
of the present fanaticism is familiar from the last third of the last
century-the Weathermen and Jim Jones and the Branch Davidians. But
there seem to be more of them now by orders of magnitude (60-odd
million "Left Behind" novels have been sold), and they're out of
the closet, networked, reaffirming their fantasies, proselytizing. Some
thousands of Muslims are working seriously to provoke the blessed
Armageddon. And the Christian Rapturists' support of a militant
Israel isn't driven mainly by principled devotion to an outpost of
Western democracy but by their fervent wish to see crazy biblical
fantasies realized ASAP-that is, the persecution of the Jews by the
Antichrist and the Battle of Armageddon.
When apocalypse preoccupations leach into less-fantastical thought and
conversation, it becomes still more disconcerting. Even among people
sincerely fearful of climate change or a nuclearized Iran enacting a
"second Holocaust" by attacking Israel, one sometimes detects a
frisson of smug or hysterical pleasure.
As in the excited anticipatory chatter about Iran's putative plans to
fire a nuke on the 22nd of last month-in order to provoke apocalypse
and pave the way for the return of the Shiite messiah, a miracle in
which President Ahmadinejad apparently believes. Princeton's Bernard
Lewis, at 90 still the preeminent historian of Islam, published a piece
in The Wall Street Journal to spread this false alarm.
And as in Charles Krauthammer's column the other day: He explained
how a U.S. military attack on Iran would double the price of oil, ruin
the global economy, redouble hatred for America, and incite terrorism
worldwide-but that we had to go for it anyway because of "the
larger danger of permitting nuclear weapons to be acquired by religious
fanatics seized with an eschatological belief in the imminent
apocalypse and in their own divine duty to hasten the End of Days."
In other words: Ratchet up the risk of Armageddon sooner in order to
prevent a possible Armageddon later.
I worry that such fast-and-loose talk, so ubiquitous and in so many
flavors, might in the aggregate be greasing the skids, making the
unthinkable too thinkable, turning us all a little Dr. Strangelovian,
actually increasing the chance-by a little? A lot? Lord knows-that
doomsday prophecies will become self-fulfilling. It's giving me the
heebie-jeebies.
Declinism is the least-troubling species of end-days forecast, but
still, it's apocalypse lite. These forecasts are grandly gloomy,
commonly depicted as a replay of the disintegration of Rome that
ushered in the Dark Ages. "As Rome passed away," Pat Buchanan
writes in his new anti-immigration best seller, State of Emergency,
"so the West is passing away."
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