"Armageddon Week"

The History Channel has a special series this week on the year 2012. Think about that one for a second.

Last night's installment was "Nostradamus 2012". It attempts to link together all sorts of evidence from various cultures and individuals -- from the Maya to Nostradamus and the Freemasons -- purporting to warn us about the end of the world in 2012. There's little that's creepy about this if viewed from an even slightly sober perspective, of course. Great lengths are traveled to make the assumption that Nostradamus was even talking about the year 2012. Much is made of a set of pictograms purporting to represent the end of the earth when sagittarius and/or the sun lines up with the center of the Milky Way. Alas!

It's the great lengths I'm interested in here more than anything. I find it fascinating that Armageddon is such a readily accessible topic these days. The History Channel can devote a week of specials to it. As the old Chinese alien spy guy tells Keanu Reeves in the McDonald's in The Day the Earth Stood Still, the tragedy is that we know it's coming and can do nothing about it.

I suppose none of this is surprising. I'm old enough to remember shivering in my bed at night, thinking that the Soviets might just press the button. I've lived through the worst of the AIDS epidemic, and seen circles of friends die off. And, of course, 9/11. It's hard not to watch George Bush fiddling away while Rome burns and wonder if there isn't something a bit pre-ordainedly (pre-ordainedly?!) doomed about the whole thing.

I suspect that more positive developments also have a way of feeding this. Obama's brought a great deal of optimism to the fore. Of course, much of that optimism will be spent digging us out of the enormous ditch we're in. And no one wants to live their life digging out of a ditch. Especially Americans.

Peter Brooks elaborated brilliantly on Freud's notion of a death drive. The drive, of course, is not so much for death per se as the right death. It's a drive to die in a way that properly frames a life. It's a drive to be a hero -- to live up to the ancestors. Most people would happily die dashing about like Jack Bauer on 24. Stopping the terrorists or fighting cancer or convincing aliens of our right to exist and thereby saving the planet are all versions of the right death.

What stands before us now is not terribly propitious in those terms. We'll be paying off the credit card debt on many levels for years -- geopolitically, economically, environmentally. And yes, personally, on our credit cards. Nobody wants to die like that.

We'd much rather the Mayans were right about this. It's more satisfying on an instinctive level somehow. We didn't kill the earth. Time just ran out. We sat on some pinnacle to watch it go. All the problems we see are somehow gilded with that weird, tinny shine of the end times. It's not chaos we're experiencing. It's just the narrative.