Mhall46184@aol.com
Does the End of the
World Feature its Own Tee-Shirt?
When
we were young our parents taught us that we are all fallen beings, frail,
suffering, endeavoring to do our best for God and for others on this weary
planet, and again and again falling short.
We should always, then, be kind to each other, because we are all on the
same pilgrimage.
Surely,
though, we can make an exception for the people waiting for spaceships to come
and rescue them.
Yes,
fellow Muggles, the world is coming to an end yet again.
This
go-‘round the world is coming to an end in France, in December, so there’s
plenty of time to secure a passport (“Sir…sir, you’ll need to take off the
Phrygian helmet for your photograph.”) and beg for spare change for a one-way
ticket to eternal vegan bliss on another planet or parallel realm of existential
being-ness or something.
The
free-to-be-you-and-me lot are termite-swarming to the little town of Bugarach
in the French Pyrenees. They are
persuaded by The Voices that on the 21st of December a secret alien
spaceship hidden within a nearby mountain is going to appear (that must be one
heck of a garage-door opener), take all the soap-free granola-eaters aboard,
and transport them to a world safe from any form of work or thought.
The
first clue that something could be very, very wrong might come when the
in-flight movie is The Hunger Games
and the airline magazine is entitled To
Serve Man.
The
sort of people who think that milk comes from a store and that gasoline is
created by polar bear fairies waving magic wands are repeatedly preparing for
the end of the world. They are the
ear-budded non-readers who can manipulate the dials on little plastic boxes
made in China but who cannot split kindling, tie a knot, cook a simple meal,
wash clothes, set a table, change the oil, scan a line of iambic pentameter,
plow a furrow, get a job, or test an idea according to the Hegelian dialectic.
They
are like, y’know, spiritual, and, like stuff, and they know, like, stuff about vibrant,
esoteric, Meso-american magnetic waves, like, alignment of energies that are
like, y’know, totally eschatological, and, like, stuff.
Worse,
they play guitars.
The
Neo-Hale-Boppians are said to climb their holy mountain naked, which wouldn’t
be particularly pleasant for the fellow in the, um, rear, toking on his
reality-denying drug of choice and wondering about all the full moons in the
sky above him.
Jean-Pierre
Delord, the mayor of Bugarach, has communicated to Paris his fears of a mass suicide,
which is the sort of thing that can happen when geriatric hippies who spent
their formative years learning conversational Klingon come to realize that
Captain Kirk is a Canadian.
Those
who are prone to conspiracy theories might suspect M. Delord and his fellow
townsfolk of dreaming up the space-ship-hidden-in-a-mountain thing for the sake
of balancing the budget and re-paving the streets. For the next few months all those visiting,
um, mystics will want to beam up tons of fair trade coffee, hemp sandals,
vegetarian meals, and of course the official event tee-shirt: “Some Old People
Who Might or Might Not be my Parents Went to the End of the World and all They
Got me was this Lousy, Made-in-Indonesia Tee.”
There
might be a booth with folks offering to sell visitors gold because the dollar is
about to collapse, and then a booth next door offering to buy gold with dollars
so that the purchaser can be rich enough to buy a Mooncluck’s cup of coffee,
and next to that a booth selling Rich Radio Guy’s latest book about how The
World as We Know It is about to end, and help him build his big estate in
Florida in which he plans to live for a long, long time.
Whew.
On
the 22nd of December the faithful, disappointed at being alive, will
climb down from their rocks and their roofs, and beg the government of France ("Pardon-moi, senor, moi c'est est stupido, ja.") for
a plane ticket back to their earthly homes.
Before
a month has passed, another discount-store mystic leader will recalculate and
re-conjure on his weewee board or something, and propose a new date for the end
of the world, your credit card welcome, and the lemmings will again line up
obediently.
The
nonreader in our culture…wants to
believe…The world is so vastly confusing and baffling to him that he feels
there has to be some simple answer to
everything that troubles him. And so,
our of pure emptiness, he will eagerly embrace spiritualism, yoga, a banana diet,
or some…strange amalgam…masquerading under invented semiscientific terms, and
sold to the beginner at a nice profit.
- John D. MacDonald, Reading for Survival
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