It wouldn’t matter if all the bees died

Wednesday, 28th October 2009

But don’t worry, says Rod Liddle, they’re not going to. The bee holocaust myth is just another example of our strange yearning for catastrophe

The world is going to end in 2012, apparently — hopefully just before the start of the Olympic Games. Armageddon may come about as a consequence of those monkeys firing up the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, where they have al-Qa’eda operatives attempting to create black holes which will swallow the earth whole, or reduce it to the size of an extremely dense tennis ball.

Imagine seven billion of us trying to stand on a tennis ball. You just hope personal hygiene standards won’t be sacrificed. Or perhaps it will be giant solar flares frazzling the earth, or a sudden reversal of the earth’s magnetic field which will see us cooked like cheap burgers in a microwave oven. How do we know this? Apparently the Mayans predicted it. They’ll look pretty stupid if they were wrong, the Mayans. Nostradamus predicted it too and so, of course, did the Bible. My mother-in-law is a born-again Christian who belongs to an obscure sect which believes the world will end in October 2017 (meaning we have to endure two more Olympic Games, plus the accompanying paralympics). On that date she and a few other people are going to be taken up to heaven for a bloody good party — slap-up meal, dance band, personal address by Christ, goody bag — while the rest of us, especially the Muslims, are consumed by fire. One way or another we are destined to perish very soon. There’s a film out soon called 2012 which will explain it all, if you’re interested.

I wonder where this yearning for catastrophe comes from? It seems to exist inside most of us; perhaps it is a Darwinian trait, a by-product of self-consciousness. Obviously, only people with lime jelly for a brain, or those who have become the captives of some psychotic cult, seriously believe the stuff about 2012 (or 2017). That’s all easy to demolish through even the most cursory examination of the evidence, plus the knowledge that the Mayans were, as civilisations go, absolutely useless and shouldn’t be believed about anything. But normal, apparently sane people seem to wish for catastrophe too: they are determined that calamity will befall us all, and are furious when they are gainsaid. In a very minor way you saw this quite recently with the BNP’s appearance on Question Time, when perfectly sensible people feared that as soon as the public cast eyes upon the political colossus that is Nick Griffin, the BNP would sweep all before it, a kristallnacht in Knightsbridge every night of the week and the imposition of a 1,000-year reich. You saw it too on the faces of those dumb-mutt UAF protestors outside the television studio, paralytic with fury; they seemed to need to believe that the BNP is a lot stronger than it really is, and even fouler.

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Noa Zrk

October 30th, 2009 8:47pm Report this comment

It's sad to say, but articles like this do attract all kinds of lunatics with a bee in their bonnets.
I regret that I'm not looking forward to the sort of bee jerk reactions we can expect.

A. MacAulay

October 31st, 2009 9:35pm Report this comment

OK! Just to get it in first and give the others a chance to say something intelligent: To Bee or not to Bee, that is the question?

DennisA

November 2nd, 2009 8:26pm Report this comment

A farmer and a captain in the Anglo-American War of 1812 to 1815, William Miller became convinced that the coming Apocalypse, alluded to in the books of Daniel and Revelation, could be mapped out by interpreting prophetic clues. Using this logic, he predicted the date of the physical Second Coming of Christ as October 22, 1844.

Miller preached throughout New England and upstate New York with the vigor of one waging battle, speaking to hundreds of thousands of people, mostly farmers. As the Millerite movement grew and thousands became "adventists," their faith became fodder for editorials and cartoons in Boston papers, which erroneously depicted them as wearing mythic "ascension robes" and waiting on rooftops for Christ's return.

On October 22, 1844, as many as 50,000 Millerite adventists gathered in prayer on farms, having given up jobs and let fields go fallow. When the sun set that day, they kept singing, for the night was only a dark curtain that God himself would tear aside with light. When he did not and the world survived into the awful burden of October 23, a term was born: the Great Disappointment.

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