Doom’s date

Dear Mayans: Let me be the first member of my particular millennium to apologize for what we’re going to be making of you all over the next couple of years. I mean, there you were, thousands of years ago, just trying to make sense out of how the stars move, and why one time of year is better than another to plant corn. So, lacking both telescopes and Al Roker, you do the best you can, carving out this “Long Count” calendar to make sure your great-grandchildren don’t starve to death because they planted corn during Man-Eating Ant Season or something equally tropical. And now, because we are a culture full of suckers not half as smart as you were, we’ve decided that your calendar says that the world is going to end on December 21, 2012. Someone maybe should have asked why, if the Mayans could see the world end in 2012, the conquistadors came as such an unpleasant surprise, but nobody did. (How self-involved do you have to be to demand a pre-scheduled apocalypse, by the way? You’re going to want to reschedule that big sales meeting on the 22d, I guess.) Rest assured, it’s not your fault. After all, we’re a sophisticated people, blessed with a superior technology, who have come to interpret your ancient Farmer’s Almanacs with the tool that comes most readily to hand for us these days -- to wit, blind, heedless animal panic. At the very least, we owed you all a much better movie.