Right wing wackiness

So we all know that 2012 is going to be the end of the world. This is based on some weird mathematics using the Mayan calendar, which predicts that the intersection of the long year and the short year will occur in 2012, and therefore that will end the world. Sure, and 2000 was the end of the world before, we certainly love to discuss the apocalypse*.

We love it so much in fact, that there have been numerous movies about it, plus some horribly written books, and even a non-religious award winning essay on what's going to happen leading up to that fateful year. It's amazing to me how easily a number can infatuate us.

Now the Christians, those who believe in "suffer not a witch to live," are buying into the Mayan calendar (hurray for hypocrisy), and tying it to the ascension of the anti-Christ. Oh wait, sorry, I mean Barack Obama. Some of these associations are subtle, while some are a bit more direct. Read this blog for a pretty coherent collection of incoherent things being said about Obama. (It took me a few minutes to realize that it was actually non-partisan, there's so much creepy stuff posted to it about Obama) The most recent incarnation of this fear can be seen in the new "Letter from a Christian in 2012" (opens a pdf file) detailing the collapse of the country just four years after Obama's election - doing all the things which the anti-Christ is going to do.

Now, as post-apocalyptic literature goes, this letter ranks somewhere below The Turner Diaries, that classic of postmodern fiction (sarcasm). The two works do share a certain worldview however, the irony of which is lost, I'm sure, on the people who would pay attention to either one. The attempts of any of these works, Turner Diaries, military coups, or stacking the Supreme Court, to create a destruction of American civilization in a few short years is really ludicrous. Now, I don't believe that it can't happen, and I look around me at the venom and hate spewed by both sides, especially when one side invents hate-spewing and self-mutilates in an attempt to blame it on the other side, and I see it happening slowly, but at least Heinlein had the sense to set his civilization's collapse in the far future.


* Apocalypse actually means revelation. Hooray for the stoopids who have managed to convert the meaning.