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MILLENIUM

25 September 2000, 01:00

It’s my millennium column. Yes, it’s August, but hey, I half expect for the world to end.

I subscribe to “Skeptic”, I taunt magicians, I doubt 90% of all UFO sightings, I think most mediums are charlatans and frauds, I believe religions to be crutches and folklore, and I am firmly rooted in the scientific tradition. But I was facinated by the end time furor, and was actually thinking, “Hey, you know, maybe the Mayan end time prediction will come true and my appliances and domestic animals will all turn on their masters…”

Then another Mayan prediction was that the end of the world would come about May 5, 2000. Pensively I waited. It was too late to dump my stock and buy 15 case of expensive wine that I could make ice cream floats with, or do the naked mambo on the front lawn till the end, so all I did was watch TV. And, to my suprise and relief, the TV didn’t break free from its stand to kick my ass. Cool.

I remember in 1984 or 1986 seeing a rotund Orsen Welles on HBO, narrate the now infamous “Nostradamus” special. Predictions such as world wide famine, cannibalism, war, drought and Ted Kennedy elected President.

Well. We have all that, except for the POTUS Teddy part, but not in the way that would convince me that Nostradamus predicted it.

You would have expect vast earth devestation from the way that most scholars have interpreted the prophet, but no, it’s just human idiocy as usual around the globe.

Edgar Case the sleeping prophet, foretold volumes, so you would think by sheer coincidence, he would get a portion of it right. But, as I paged through a book of his ramblings, I found them to be harder to understand than VCR setup instructions, and was kind of in awe that there ARE Case scholars out there that wade through this crap and pull out anything intelligible. One prediction attributed to Case that I found intriguing is the one where he predicted that we would find a room underneath the left paw of the Sphinx, and the information found in this room would solve the mystery of the fate of the people of Atlantis. As I understand it, they have, but the Egyptian government have not consented to any excavation of it. Rotten bastas, aren’t they…

The last two years before the millennium was chock filled with end timists coming out of the woodwork. I remember a legitimate national news organization covering the birth of a white buffalo – the supposed herald of the Native American culture for the start of the end or the end of the present or whatever. What strikes me is that is that one myth for their end time beliefs are that the white man and the red man were one, but had split onto two different paths. While the red man took “god’s” way, honoring the earth and preserving the good way, the white man went on the wrong path, making war with each other and with the earth and when the white man learns to ride the right path, the two will converge to face the end time that is filled with peace and harmony.

I think the big cottage industry that was developed to deal with the end times is now pretty much defunct unless they are gearing up for 2001, the REAL start of the millennium. There was a couple, Richard Gordon Scalon and some chickadee from the northwest who had similar visions of earth going through a series of worldwide catastrophes (polar shifts, melting polar caps), where California would sink into the oceans and the Mississippi would swell to the size of a continental sea. There would be seafront property available in Kansas and Colorado. The sold maps and books on the subjects and appeared on TV telling of the robed beings that came to them and imparted the future knowledge unto them through the use of telepathy. I almost bought a map just for the hell of it. I may still do it. After all, they may be reduced in price due to lack of earth pole shifting, ice cap melting shit.

I think the first millennium scare probably effected the world more than this one. At the end of Y1K, when the bruhaha died down, and it was seen that the comets weren’t the harbingers of doom and the devil wasn’t going to ride the sinners like shetland ponies down to hell, most of Europe was covered with little white churches and the invisible controls that came with the “security” sought by the fearful and the “sinful.”

What pissed me off is that they cancelled the show MILLENNIUM about a half a season before the actual millennium. I had thought before they actually annouced the cancellation, “Would it be rat bastardly of FOX to cancel this show right before New Year’s??” It was, I would like to tell them.

Oh well. I guess the show probably would have lost a little of the undercurrent of end time fear after the millennium.