There's No Affleck to Save You Now

I've lived through my share of Armageddons.

I stared right at Hale-Bopp and lived back in 1997. But then comets as a sign of the End-Times is an idea as old as... well, older than modern science-based empirical astronomy which, in the grand scheme of things, isn't old at all. Imagine a cosmology based on sets of inset, concentric crystal spheres forming the clearly defined and ordered universe, humming along with purpose and intent. Now imagine looking up and seeing a giant runaway ball of fire rampaging through it, well in your line of sight, for like a month. I think I can imagine the level of unease that would engender. Hell, even now, when I know it's a big ball of space ice driven by Newtonian gravity, I still get the shivers, but it's more in the realization of my own fragile, mammalian smallness that, if probabilities are to be understood on a universe-sized scale, cannot possibly be. Seeing that movie Gravity just brought that same point home, that everywhere--everywhere--in the universe is hostile to life as we know it. And it would only take one tweak of a fraction of a degree in the trajectory of some ancient, unthinking, hurtling thing to render this planet as unlivable as all the others, in toxic, genocidal conformity with Venus and Mars, et cetera and literally ad infinitum.

But those Heaven's Gate weirdos spoiled the point of reflection by dying in a weirdly voluntary way, with their face shrouds and low-market Nikes. Yeah, we all obviously survived it, but the only lesson it really afforded us was to avoid drinking poison, no matter how much the skinny old white man you live with tells you it's a good idea. Which, not to brag, I kind of already knew.

The Y2K thing seemed way more plausible because that relied less on unknowable monsters, space-magic and bad luck and more on the very relatable idea that Microsoft makes an awful lot of shitty software. And it's in everything. Again, like comets, big fat round year numbers have always made people a bit edgy. The reason of course is just anxiety based on change, where we had got so used to writing "19--" with our years that the "20--" seemed so... uncertain. We were about to start running through all the years we'd been promised the jet-pack future by science fiction, knowing full well now that we'd be stuck in fossil-fuel-burning cars for the foreseeable future. Sure, we'd get pocket computers and consumer space flight but no teleporters? No robot maids? No full-service synthetic sex droids? What more of a basis does one need than that to panic?

By the time that came and went and I had had just enough children to take the panic-honed edge off my will to live, I weathered the Mayan Calendar Death Countdown of 2012 without breaking a sweat. I even bought my tickets for The Hobbit movie in advance. And this was even with the understanding that it was the first part of what will likely be a 10-hour trilogy based on a children's book that's about 250 pages long. No big whoop. Besides, I wasn't all that keen on the precognitive abilities of a culture that had missed predicting its own demise like 500 years before 2012. But then, to be fair, I don't read Yucatecan. Maybe there was a footnote* or something.

The predicted apocalypse this past week was more in line with the Y2K thing in that it was a thing man-made, reliant only on hubris, idiocy, obstinance and a profoundly narcissistic form of sado-masochistic and delusionally heroic laziness that speaks to the truest stem and seed of human nature. A lot of commentary over the whole shutdown and debt ceiling talk was in breathless contemplation of how it might be possible for human beings to engage in self-harming behavior in the service of a short-term dopamine wash across the nucelus accumbens. Considering we are the same species that gave ourselves cigarettes, thermonuclear weapons and whippets, I'm frankly surprised shit like this doesn't happen more often.

The danger was more real here, I think, because it was financial and, as I've said many times before, our entire financial system is based on a shared, agreed-upon set of barely comprehensible delusions. And it's one of life's great paradoxes that the things that are the most real are the ones we've had to wish into being. A comet heading at you affords very little by way of response. No amount of consideration is going to change its course one way or the other, even the really really serious kind of considering where you offer to stop touching yourself in exchange for intervention by an unseen, personified extraterrestrial force existing in contravention of all knowable evidence AND who can alter events beyond the limits of planetary astrophysics.

The threat from a small group of cranky Republican congresspersons wasn't to affect economic policy change, not directly, but to pull back the curtain and expose the machinery underneath the thin skin of the clockwork pussycat that is the fraud of modern capitalism. Turns out nobody wants to see it. And despite my tone, let me be clear: I don't want to see it either. I want the bullshit numbers on my bank statements to keep pretending to mean something.

Not forever, though. We'll go through these stresses of threatened exposure and collapse a couple more times, but it's only going to matter until April 13, 2036 anyway. Truth be told, I wouldn't mind a nice apocalypse at this point. I could use the breather.


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*Much like this is a footnote! But probably with an upside-down exclamation point to start it out. And, hopefully, something about gringos.