2012

Ok, let’s go ahead and address this important issue; the world is definitely going to end in 2012. I know it is true because NASA denies it. NASA denies that there is a face on Mars and NASA denies that people we don’t know and would otherwise never have heard of, people desperate for attention with poor dental plans, have been abducted by alien creatures and have had their anuses violated by technically complex gadgetry. How would NASA know what had been in anybody’s anus? Spooky, right? I do not know what NASA says about Elvis. NASA is a part of the government and anything the government tells us is wrong. They lie to us, alternately, to enslave us or to protect us from our own irrational fears. Perhaps they lie to us to protect us from our own irrational fear of being enslaved. The point is, we can never rely on anything we are told by anyone who is more educated than we are, who wears a suit or who has any interest in ensuring domestic tranquility or promoting the general welfare. If we are not ever vigilant, they will take our goats.

Speaking of goats, the Mayan civilization of Central America was pretty sharp for a bunch of half-naked guys with no television. They had the only known written language in Mesoamerica and were skilled at astronomy, mathematics and architecture. Their monumental structures still stand despite centuries of neglect and their cities were built with a complexity and scale that rivaled anything in the world at the height of Mayan power in the Seventh and Eighth Centuries. They were a culturally and economically diverse society with a complex and expansive trade system and sophisticated agricultural practices which supported massive urban populations. They also had booze, cigarettes, pornography and human sacrifice. Apparently they didn’t sacrifice the right humans, though, since, for suspected reasons of prolonged drought, ecological mismanagement and political turmoil, Mayan civilization collapsed within the span of a few decades in the Ninth Century. Their urban centers were abandoned and the populace returned to a life of agricultural subsistence in the countryside. It should be noted that many renowned Republican scholars, such as Sarah Palin, are still trying to figure out how President Obama pulled it off.

The Mayans had a complex system of calendars that was based upon concepts previously developed by the Zapotec and Olmec civilizations which divided history into a series of nested cycles which could be aggregated into larger cycles to expand the calendar into the past or the future. The Mayan Long Count calendar regulates the largest of these cycles, and the 13th cycle of the Long Count runs from September 18, 1618 until December 20, 2012, which is why that’s the date the world will end. Given that the Mayans had all gone back to living in the jungles before the 13th cycle began, I’m not sure why there even is a 13th cycle in their calendar, and perhaps the world actually ended on September 17, 1618 and we just haven’t noticed it yet. The Mayans believed the world began on September 6, 3114 B.C., which would be big news to the Egyptians, Sumerians, the men of Troy and the rest of the other approximately 30 million Homo Sapiens who were around before that, but I guess you might have a hard time knowing the world had just started unless the tags were still on everything. Nonetheless, it is still pretty sad that the fact that some Mayan calendar bureaucrat never got around to chiseling down the 14th cycle somewhere has doomed us all to oblivion, but that’s how it works.

So anyway, in 2012 the planets will line up on one side of the sun and the resulting gravitational pull will rip the Earth apart, although it has rather conspicuously failed to do so the numerous times in the past that such planetary alignments have occurred, and those liars at NASA tell us that there will not be an alignment in 2012 and that another such alignment will not occur until 2040. Maybe that means the truth is that the rouge planet that NASA has been hiding from us all these years will collide with the Earth and destroy us all. Clearly all the amateur astronomers and telescope manufacturers in world are in on the cover-up and have been hiding this massive celestial object from the public for centuries. Or maybe the cause of our destruction is going to be that plague or war or health-care reform or whatever else it is that we are being lied to about now; it is so tragically disappointing to know that nobody in the whole world can be trusted except me, a demented Congresswoman and some random dude with a website.

The Mayans, like many societies before and since, worshipped a pantheon of gods who controlled things like whether your child was deformed or not and when it rained and who died from drinking too much, and they made sacrifices to incur the favor of these gods. They also worshipped the spirits of their ancestors which they believed inhabited the world around them and they subscribed to the concepts of demons and goblins and numerology and astrology and all manner of divination. Much like modern-day Republicans, they were a superstitious and fearful lot, and their faith was rewarded by the privilege of standing hot and hungry at the fringe of the expanding jungle and looking wistfully backwards toward the towering monuments of their ruined civilization. 2012 baby.