Things get weird at the end of centuries, and they get really weird at the end of millennia.
Yes, I know we’re 20 years past that, but have you noticed that the weirdness not only didn’t go away this time, it just keeps getting more and more strange.
My favorite story of what can happen took place at a French village at the end of the first millennium. A few weeks before the end of the year 999 AD, the people of the village decided there wasn’t any point to working anymore if the world was coming to an end. So they climbed a hill outside the city and just sat there to wait.
When the calendar flipped from December 999 to January 1000 and nothing happened, they shrugged their shoulders, got to their feet and went home, presumably to resume their lives.
I love that story, even though it is far more likely to be legend than reality. I mean, people are going to sit outdoors 24 hours a day in late December? Maybe in Australia, where it’s summer then.
What I like about it is that there was no meanness or evil in the story. People didn’t castrate themselves waiting for the Mothership that was hiding behind the Hale-Bopp comet. That actually happened in California about a thousand years later.
I don’t know if this was true in 999, but we have been getting dozens if not hundreds of conspiracy theories. My favorite is the one pictured in the intro. When I saw it in a bookstore — remember those? — I knew I had to get it for my good friend who never met a conspiracy theory he didn’t like.
I actually thought at one point that the 1997 movie “Conspiracy Theory” might be the story of his life.
He lost his cherry, conspiracy-theory wise, on the one that captured so many people with those tendencies, the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963. I suppose it’s possible that Oswald didn’t act alone, but my biggest problem with some massive conspiracy is that people just aren’t that good at keeping secrets.
I do think the David Icke book is certainly the most entertaining. Icke posits that we are ruled by shape-shifting lizards from another planet, and he proves his Englishness by saying the most powerful of them is … wait for it … Queen Elizabeth II.
The two biggest recent ones are the 9/11 Truthers and the Obama Birthers.
The first one insists that the attacks on the Twin Towers were staged, and the second says that Barack Obama was not born in Hawaii. The birth certificate thing is the silliest. For all the arguments over whether the long-form birth certificate was real or fake, there is one fact that can’t be explained away.
At the time Obama was born, there was a birth announcement in the Honolulu Advertiser newspaper. How on earth do you fake a birth announcement in 1961 so that a mixed-race baby from an obscure family can run for president 47 years later?
To believe this, you have to be way out there with some theory involving time travel, although I guess if it comes down to it, it might be something the shape-shifting lizards could do.
Was Queen Elizabeth seen anywhere near Hawaii in August 1961?
Honestly, this is all way above my pay grade.