The Apocalypse is nigh (It always has been)

It is true: all around us, signs that the world is ending. Earthquakes, Tsunamis, Volcanoes, Moral Depravity; Women’s rights; Homosexuality, Hurricanes; Plagues.

PROOF! Barack Obama and (the now deceased) Osama Bin Laden are the anti-Christs.

You can see it in the dates; numbers; names; bible passages; movies; bathroom walls; AIDS pamphlets; status updates and global weather patterns.

Which makes living through the Apocalypse an increasingly dull affair.

The rapture? Easily survivable if you’ve read Max Brooks’ The Zombie Survival Guide. Also, if you were paying attention the Centre For Disease Control’s Website which released a guide to surviving the Zombie Apocalypse in May 2011.

Alien invasion? We’re covered as long as we have Will Smith as a welcoming party and Jeffrey Goldblum as a reluctant super-scientist. You should note that Mr. Goldblum will also be useful if ever dinosaurs walk the earth again.

I have survived 239 doomsday predictions in my two decade long life, according to Chris Nelson’s not so brief A Brief History of the Apocalypse

However, none of them have drawn together the most logically terrifying set of deductions. Let me lay it out:

1) In the case of the rapture, the dead will walk the earth.

2) Dinosaurs are dead.

————————————————————————–

Conclusion: Dinosaur zombies will walk the earth.

(This is discounting the mammoth that the Japanese are in the process of cloning, which will not it fact be a zombie)

I see this as a major oversight on the behalf of both Family Church Radio and Movie Directors everywhere. This is a major gap in the market and I intend to capitalise on it as soon as possible with my upcoming article Raptor Rapture. As Heinrich Heine so succinctly put it in the 1842 Ausberg Gazette:

“Wild, dark times are rumbling toward us, and the prophet who wishes to write a new apocalypse will have to invent entirely new beasts, and beasts so terrible that the ancient animal symbols of St. John will seem like cooing doves and cupids in comparison.”

Isn’t that fantastic? That’s real spine-tingling stuff that is.

That’s because the Apocalypse has a decadent vocabulary; an ever expanding collection of awe-inspiring words. ‘Prophesy’;‘Moral Decay’; ‘Second Coming’; ‘Anti-Christ’; ‘Armageddon’; ‘Velociraptors’.  They’re all fire and brimstone and it’s thrilling.  One of my all time favourites must be ‘Harbinger of Doom’.

In comparison, the newest catch phrases are a great let down. ‘Greenhouse Effect’; ‘Polar Ice-caps’ and ‘Ozone layer’ just don’t have the same bowel-loosening resonance. There’s no booming voice of reprisal in there – at least ‘Universal Entropy’ sounds like a vicious disease. I think we should make the conscious decision to replace these terms with more appropriate ones. Something like ‘Harbinger of the Ice Age’ would work nicely to indicate our fast-approaching doom.

You may be wondering at this point how I have the nerve to completely ignore the difference between the scientific end of the world; and the religiously expounded ‘days of final judgement’. The fact of the matter is it all comes down to the same thing: It’s our fault. Either we don’t recycle or we have offended our Gods in some irreconcilable way – like allowing survivors of testicular cancer to attend church: “He that is wounded in the stones, or hath his privy member cut off, shall not enter into the congregation of the Lord.”  (Deuteronomy 23:1)

We have always been and always will be falling into irreparable moral decay. Take this quote for our best example:

“Our earth is degenerate in these latter days. There are signs that the world ispeedily coming to an end. Bribery and corruption are common.”

This is a universally applicable accusation, as any person living under a government should know. However, according to Isaac Asimov’s Book of Facts, this just so happens to be the first prediction of the end of the world, made by a very worried Assyrian on an ancient clay tablet in 2800BC- and he hadn’t even heard of Jesus.

Jesus’ promise of a ‘Second Coming’ has misled many people for very many years. It started off with him saying “Verily I say unto you, there be some standing here, which shall not taste of death, ‘til they see the Son of Man coming in his kingdom.” (Matthew 16:28). His apostles took it as meaning that he would return within their lifetimes. He has been a great disappointment since then. Not so verily after all, Jesus.

It seems that every human generation has delighted in the thought that they will be the last. Not only delighted, but at some points truly believed. I must admit that I myself lay on the roof of our house on New Years Eve 1999, my brothers beside me, all of us eyeing the night’s sky for any suspicious movement. Eventually we were just staring up in boredom until a firework landed in our garden and my father nearly fell off the roof.

It seems that there is something universally appealing about being the ‘chosen ones’, an idea reinforced by every Apocalyptic and Post-Apocalyptic film ever created. It seems that in the Global Village of Lonely People, this communal terror brings us all closer. Even if it is just closer to other insane people. What the Prophets of ‘End of the World By Natural Pollution’ and ‘End of the World by Moral Pollution’ groups need to realise is that they are not so different after all. They are ‘Profiteering Prophets’.

Predicting the end of the world is very financially beneficial.

For Harold Camping of the Family Church, his 3rd Rapture prediction on 21 May 2011 amounted an estimated $80 million dollars for the non-profit organisation, despite it being postponed for the 4th time to 21 October of 2011. The wily 89 year old explained the non-event as the ‘Invisible Day of Judgement.’

There is one group of Prophetic Profiteers however that are forerunners of this field, taking advantage of the fact that there are no consumer protection laws surrounding defective Apocalypses, and who cleverly avoid making any false predictions whatsoever: Eternal-Earthbound Pets. Based on the premise that they are a bunch of sinners who will not be sucked up in the vortex of Rapture, they promise to take care of your pets in the case that the Rapture occurs. As their website boasts “For $135.00 we will guarantee that should the Rapture occur within 10 years of receipt of payment, one pet per residence will be saved.” As all apocalypse movies show us, this kind of service is only available in the USA.  

On the other side, ‘Going Green’ is one of the most financially beneficial moves one can make. It’s just that no one seems to want to make it. Individuals, yes, we can make it. But organisations, governments? The feeling is that we can’t save the world by separating our plastics from our papers, it’s just too… unlike…Will Smith? There are really no awesome lines to accompany it. Dumping a musty sandwich  in a wormery and shouting “Welcome to Earth Motherfucker” lacks authentic bravado. And having mouldy cheese spread on your fingers is not the time to strike a great pose.

We take every volcanic eruption; every earthquake, every unseasonal rain as a triumph. It’s an egotistical pronouncement when we admit to having irrevocably altered the state of the world. We delight in the idea that some scientist will sit quietly in his lab until that big-ass Tsunami is coming for us, and then we will be the chosen ones to hop on his space ship-Ark and zoom into the universe, to seek another home. Now that is a romantic image. None of this namby-pamby vegetarianism and growing ones own vegetables and using solar panels and collecting rain water.

I hope to put this in terms that could possibly cause us to act.

The changes we see, in the world around us today, they are all Harbingers of Doom.

The scientific proclamations about rising sea-levels; droughts; rising global temperatures? These are not  ancient civilisations whose data we misappropriate to spell out our doom and sell merchandise. These are not heretical poops sitting on a hill muttering to themselves about the ‘nigh’ness of the end. These are the same people we expect to create the space-Ark and zip us away from this smoggy hellhole. We just aren’t listening very well to what they say we need to do.

The Apocalypse is intimately linked with humans. We have always known it would be us to fuck it all up. No one ever preached against the moral decay amongst penguins. This is in part because we consider penguins natural, and ourselves unnatural. No idea will be more harshly invalidated than this when the effects of Climate Change begin to take more serious and consistent effect: our thin little hides are not thick enough to survive this.  We are part of the natural system, but just as important for our ideas on Climate Change is the fact that we are also parts of human systems.  And yet, many people believe individuals cannot make a difference. It is true, what is needed to make a difference is governments and inter-governmental institutions. Some argue that the data reveals that we have already passed the point of no return. In both of these idea there is a serious flaw: this does not give us the liberty to take our hands off the handle bars. Governments are made up of individual people. We are those individual people, and we have the ability to teach these truths to other individual people. Who have the power to shout at their governments and give them a smack upside the head for not paying attention.

On January 23, 1556, an 8.0 magnitude earthquake struck Japan and approximately 820 000 people died. The only foreign reaction was from a Portuguese Dominican friar who happened to visit Japan later that year and decided to write about it in his book. Of course he believed that it was punishment for the people’s sins; just as he believed the Great Comet of 1556 was the herald of the Antichrist. Japan tickled our Apocalyptic funny bone when they built a nuclear reactor within reach of the ocean. Our foreign reaction was to run around flailing our arms quite helplessly for a while, and then pretend explain that this horrific occurrence was a freak event of nature.  Events of this magnitude do  appeal to our romantic sense of what the Apocalypse should be like, but what we should really be more concerned about is that slow change of things around us: That shift from green to yellow; the burning of caterpillars, and the wondering where the butterflies are. The bitterness of our vegetables; the heat of the sun.

Strangely enough, we need to do just as the Dominican Friar did: realise that this portends a much larger problem. This Apocalypse is in fact a result of a lack of moral fortitude. We are the corrupt, we are the morally decayed. We are the dinosaurs who see the asteroid coming and say ‘Bugger-it, another round of drinks?’

People react differently to awareness of the mortality of the earth. There are many suggestions that we live this day as if it is the last. In the words of Oq Mondino:

“Remember that you will only find ‘tomorrow’ on the calendars of fools…This is it. Doomsday. All you have. Make it the best day of your year.”

But that’s horse-poo on a rainbow.

I want to live today, and I want to live tomorrow too. And if it means I have to change things about the way I live today, then so be it. Our fascination with the Apocalypse isn’t there to urge us to live everyday as if it is our last, it is an urge to live everyday as if there is a future. We want legacies, we want our lives to have consequence and we want to be able to save the world.