End Time
The rain is pretty well passed, for now. The Arab Tribune, our community biweekly that arrives on Wednesdays and Saturdays with less and more news than we want, announces that a total of 5.5 inches fell on Greater Metropolitan Arab and that the city park was submerged in places to a depth more than sufficient to inundate whiskey drinking indians. The rain continued yesterday in an almost unsensible fashion but today is supposed to be clear and not so warm. So aside from a freeze tonight the main task facing those abused by the weather is recovering from a more than token immersion.
The podcasts this morning were the BBC’s (Melvyn, Lord Bragg’s) “In Our Time” and NPR’s (Garrison Keeler’s) “News from Lake Wobegon”, saving the best for the last day of the week at gym. The first was an episode on the Great Fire of London, the one famously reported by Samuel Pepys who I always associate with the comedian (?) Jackie Gleason for the catch phrases “and hence to bed” and “away we go”, and an episode on flatulence, respectively.
As a result I was rather directly reminded of all the dire prediction that have been floating about for the last ten years or so, promulgated in no small amount by the superstitious and mystical. The arrival of the change of date signifying an increment beyond 2,000 was one of the first, in a modern way perhaps mirroring the insanity rampant as the date passed 1,000 and some expectation of mundane doom and destruction. Now the grrr brrr is some supposed confluence of onrushing disaster supposed to culminate in mundane doom in the year 2012.
To contrast this, consider what was about in England in the 1660’s: an ongoing, alternating hot and cold war with Holland over trade; outbreaks of plague; the collapse of the protectorship and the restoration of the monarch; expectation of a war with France initiated by an invasion of England; and a fire that burned down more than half of the commercial, government, and residential floor space of the capitol city.
Clearly an indication of the wrath of the deity – although it is yet unclear whether this was an indication of divine ire over the restoration of regal licentiousness or the effrontery of a “republic” – portending the “end of days”.
The aftermath was largely a snapshot of what organizations do: blame those who can be labeled as incompetent scapegoats; and exalt the natural strengths of humans that restored livability.
But so far as I can determine the world did not end in 1666, at least except in the sense that the world ends every Planck time increment and is recreated instantly, unremarked and unsensed by barely sentient humans.
