Mayan Apocalypse, Decoded...

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Enough wacky speculation. We can explain why the ancient Mayans knew the end would arrive on December 21, 2012. We can explain it in just one word: Congress.
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The Mayans, prognosticating through coming millennia from a viewpoint five thousand years back, could have deemed that it would all be over based on their own interests. But they didn't.
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Strange, because they could have predicted Ayn Rand and followed her axiom of self-interest as the only part of "the end" that mattered. Like when the Aztecs would come to steal their hearts. Or when any of their many local volcanoes would blow its top and bury them, in a New-World version of Pompeii.
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Or when ruthless bastard conquistadors would destroy the native civilizations of the Americas because they wanted to steal all the gold. Or when most of the Mayans -- along with everybody else in their world -- were horribly wiped-out by the festering smallpox the invaders brought from pestilential Europe.
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But the Mayans did not base the end of THE world on the end of THEIR world. They looked beyond it.
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So, that suggests they could have seen the end as something else on the global stages of nature or the human tableau. Like an asteroid impact. Or the pharaoh Ahkenaten and his heretical monotheism that disempowered the preists and rich temple cults of Egypt's pantheon. Or they could have seen it as the burning of the Temple in Jerusalem (either time it happened). They could have timed their dire prediction for the fall of the Roman Empire. Or the Alamo. Or the Black Hills. Or the end of the Southern Confederacy. Or Bataan or Corregidor. Or Berlin. Or the bomb.
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They could have picked the time of the apocalypse as the Dustbowl; after all, they were farmers who built great cities themselves, so it would resonate with them.
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But no, they waited to pick the moment for the end of days. They waited until after all those things would pass.
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Oh, it's significant that they waited until our time, an age filled with hubris; a time when the unsinkable Titanic would sink on its first voyage; when our overconfident reliance on computers is as durable as the interval before nature's next massive electromagnetic pulse; a time when genetically-modified frankenfood dominates our diets, brings record rates of diabetes, kidney and digestive ailments, and comes from crops engineered with diminished resistance to plant plagues and voracious insects.
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Even as a society of farmers, the Maya could not have comprehended any of that bioengineering. Drought, yes. Plagues, yes. Genetically-altered crops? That one is more terrifying to those with more knowledge than to any people who don't understand it, or its unintended consequences.
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Clearly then, the agronomist Maya did not see failed agriculture as the harbinger of apocalypse. If they had, they'd have picked one like the Dustbowl, one they could understand.
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Or, perhaps their reckoning transcended it. The Dustbowl, and the rest of the Great Depression, recent as they were, had a key difference: they happened when we had a Congress that passed FDR's New Deal, enabling a nation to recover and become a United States that would save the world from the apocalypse of tyrannical fascism.
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Not this time. Then, we had Congress, and no Mayans. Now, we have Mayans, and no Congress. We are faced with crippling inequities that exceed the difference between feudal lords in their castles and the serfs who did all the real work. And we have a do-nothing Congress.
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All those other times that the Mayans could have picked as the end. But no. They waited. They picked our time. They did not pick the day the atom bomb was first detonated. They picked now.
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The Mayans could have picked the moment when Nero fiddled while Rome burned. That was not apocalyptic enough for them.
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No, they waited until our time to envision things would get bad enough to be irredeemable and irreconcilable.
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That's the difference. It's the damned Congress.
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Did they foresee our paralyzed Congress, committed to doing nothing, lest someone, somewhere, get credit for something? A Congress that acts only to stop all action dead in its tracks, because the rich fat-cats have bought the membership of Congress?
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After all, a government that can't do anything can't oversee or regulate what the fat-cats do to increase or consolidate power and control by any and all means. That holds for everything from frankenfood to piratical banking and lending.
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The fat-cats greed knows no end. They own Congress. They pillaged and plundered Wall Street and see no reason why they can't keep doing it. You pay taxes. They don't. They're rich, privileged, entitled, just like the hereditary royalty of the Maya -- before the ordinary Mayans threw them down the well. But even that was insufficient grounds for citing the End-of-Days.
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So we're back to considering alternatives. The sacking of Rome as the time of Apocalypse? The Rape of Nanking? Nope. The Mayans passed on those and waited for us.
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They waited for us to have a Congress that demands austerity in a time of crumbling infrastructure, high unemployment, record-low interest rates for funding public works projects, technology for environmentally-friendly energy that languishes for want of investment and government leadership? A confluence that would be the answer to everything -- except demands for austerity?
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Did the Mayans foresee global warming, melting glaciers, coming inundation of the sites of their coastal cities, devastation from wildly unstable weather and killer storms driven by climate change, and intransigent political denial of abundant scientific evidence? That, alone, would explain why they picked now to fade the screen to black.
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Did they foresee a time when weapons of war, intended for mass-killing in combat, would slaughter the innocent?
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It's anticlimactic to ask if the Mayans could foresee the plutocracy of our grossly exploitive economy with home mortgage foreclosures and the college-degreed working three part-time jobs, and the backdrop of our do-nothing Congress dithering at the brink of a looming, if cliched, Fiscal Cliff.
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More valuable to ask, did they foresee the French Revolution and pass on that in favor of waiting for our times to be the end of everything? And if so, did they sense what may yet derive from public disgust with this elitist and intransigent Congress?
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Copyright (c) 2012, L. Wines, and the Acoustic Americana Music Guide. All rights reserved.
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