Apocalypse How?

In Lisa Parks’s essay, Satellite Panoramas, she examines the Shoemaker-Levy 9 collision with Jupiter, and how this kind of “catastrophe coverage” functioned to reassure our feelings safety, good fortune, and even gratitude and luck that this is isn’t happening to us. Not to say, though, that it never will. This kind of news coverage is comparable to the overwhelming coverage of the Haiti and Chili earthquakes, as well as anxiety about tsunami warnings, and how this is just another harbor for the ubiquitous human fear of the imminence of end days and the possibilities of 2012.

Lisa parks makes a reference to Susan Buck-Morss: “The air is full of rumours and announcements of various terminations, of the end of humanity, of the end of history, of the end of the planet.” (144) And then Parks goes on to describe the collision as becoming an icon for an “imagined end to civilization at the end of the twentieth century”. People are somewhat obsessed with this apocalyptic notion. While news media has not explicitly related this to the 2012 apocalyptic prophesy, there are plenty of blogs, articles, and public opinion to be said about the relationship of these recent catastrophes to future prophecies. And the idea of opinion driven information has become just as popular as actual, objective news. People trust in Glenn Beck and O’Riley like they would C-SPAN reports.

By watching the comet hit Jupiter in 1994, people were essentially watching what could have been a disaster if it hit us, just like with the massive earthquakes in Haiti and Chili, but it didn’t happen to us. Parks says, “This practice of presenting live coverage of catastrophic events happening elsewhere has become one of the dominant television news conventions of our time” (145). But this isn’t surprising, because subconsciously, people know the world isn’t going to end. Time and time again, we watch the world be slated to end, and then breathe a sigh of relief when it doesn’t. And 2012 is another doomsday date that we are set to watch. Unlike Y2K, which had a more objective, pseudo scientific undertone (with computers thought to crash and all that), 2012 is more of a mystical thing where news outlets are able to perpetuate people’s fears by spreading why people are afraid. So, again, 2012 is generating the 2nd round of premillenial anxiety, and people will be there to watch the date come and go, so that it may further ensure our civilization’s feelings of permanence and well-being.