The end of the equation as we know it

Happy New Frickin Year. If you’re reading this, you made it. With ’09 in the rear-view, there’s all at once something to look forward to. The first day of the year had the almost-magical ring of a binary sequence — 01.01.10 — but that didn’t last long. That day, in fact, in a story in the San Francisco Chronicle, we found out just how short-lived New Year’s good vibes might be. Anno Domini 2010 has barely begun and one man’s gloomy forecast would call a halt to, well, pretty much everything. There’s nothing like beginning a year with the prospect of an ending.

If you’ve been looking sideways at the year 2012 (in light of the doomsday events the Mayan calendar says we have in store), you may want to revise your plans. The year 2012 is soon enough. But according to biblical scholar and evangelical radio personality Harold Camping, the walls of the world can be expected to come tumbling down the year before that.

Unlike others in recent years who’ve prophesied the end days, Camping, a civil engineer and a student of the Bible for 70 years, has taken a seemingly novel approach: pegging the demise of our world to a purportedly tested, rigorously analyzed mathematical formula. His bottom line: Don’t make plans for doing anything on this plane of reality beyond May 21, 2011.

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Camping runs Family Radio, an evangelical station based in Oakland, Calif., and one with millions of listeners around the world. In a position of some influence in Bay Area media, Camping has a radio talk show, “Open Forum.” Camping told the Chronicle his company owns more than 50 stations in the United States alone.

Camping’s entrepreneurial bent extends to predicting the end of our fair blue planet. The Chronicle explains:

This is not the first time Camping has made a bold prediction about Judgment Day.

On Sept. 6, 1994, dozens of Camping's believers gathered inside Alameda's Veterans Memorial Building to await the return of Christ, an event Camping had promised for two years. Followers dressed children in their Sunday best and held Bibles open-faced toward heaven.

But the world did not end. Camping allowed that he may have made a mathematical error. He spent the next decade running new calculations ...

By Camping's understanding, the Bible was dictated by God and every word and number carries a spiritual significance. He noticed that particular numbers appeared in the Bible at the same time particular themes are discussed.

The number 5, Camping concluded, equals “atonement.” Ten is “completeness.” Seventeen means “heaven.” Camping patiently explained how he reached his conclusion for May 21, 2011.

“Christ hung on the cross April 1, 33 A.D.,” he began. “Now go to April 1 of 2011 A.D., and that's 1,978 years.”

Camping then multiplied 1,978 by 365.2422 days — the number of days in each solar year, not to be confused with a calendar year.

Next, Camping noted that April 1 to May 21 encompasses 51 days. Add 51 to the sum of previous multiplication total, and it equals 722,500.

Camping realized that (5 x 10 x 17) x (5 x 10 x 17) = 722,500.

Or put into words: (Atonement x Completeness x Heaven), squared.

“Five times 10 times 17 is telling you a story,” Camping said. “It's the story from the time Christ made payment for your sins until you're completely saved.”

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Got all that? If, like most people, you’re dutifully challenged by math no more complicated than keeping the checkbook in positive numbers, Camping’s formula may remind you of the algebra you dozed through in high school and skipped altogether in college.

It could be unsettling if you let it be: Instead of being some halfwit quasi-Nostradamus howling in the public square at the top of his lungs; instead of being the Luddite jeremiah from central casting carrying a sandwich board that tells us THE END IS NEAR, Camping is a scholar who brings both impersonal math and utterly immovable religious conviction to what he’s saying. And like any good scholar when confronted with a failure of a theory, Camping went back to the drawing board — or the whiteboard — and (presumably) found out what he did wrong the first time.

The flaw with any doomsday forecasts is, paradoxically, their eventual accuracy. The proof of such forecasts is an eventual certainty, but that doesn’t endow the forecaster with having insights beyond a grasp of the law of averages. If you say “the end is near” long enough, eventually you’ll be right — when you die, long before the world does.

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We just got through the end of the year; most people aren’t ready for the end of the brilliant, glittering equation that is our world. For them — for us — maybe Camping’s just another version of the guy with the sandwich board. That kind of prognostication’s been a fact of life for generations. It’s based more on a personal interpretation of cosmic events — and one’s personal exhaustion with the state of the world — than on anything to be empirically proven to be true.

The first mossback to carry that THE END IS NEAR sign was just as certain he was right as Camping is today; he just didn’t have a calculator handy.

While Camping’s argument for the imminent arrival of the rapture may have earnest underpinnings in biblical scholarship, and even embrace the irrefutability of mathematics … it’s not science.

And thank God for that.

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Image credits: Harold Camping in 2008: tk.

The humbling

At the end of this annus horribilis magnus, you can find any number of yardsticks for malaise, the sad metrics of disappointments and disasters that have littered this year from almost its beginning. One event puts this year nearly over in real perspective.

Someone’s seen the face of Jesus in a Kit-Kat bar. That’s all you really need to know.

That, and how frequent these sightings have become. A woman in Tennessee discovers the face of Our Lord and Savior in an open-faced grilled cheese sandwich. Someone else sees Jesus in the lid of a jar of Marmite yeast spread.

(It’s happened before, too, of course. In 2006, in Fountain Valley, Calif., the Virgin Mary was detected in a hunk of chocolate at Martucci Angiano's gourmet chocolate company, Bodega Chocolates. AP reported that, “Angiano's employees have spent much of their time hovering over the tiny figure, praying and placing rose petals and candles around it.”)

These discoveries, theistic or nontheistic, depending on your point of view, have another dimension. This may be the undiscovered causal factor in the nation’s rising obesity levels. We’ve long thought of our religion as an abiding thing, yea, with us always — just like our other abiding everyday companion object: food.

More and more, we’re looking for divinity in a pan of divinity.

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What the hell. You had to start somewhere. And at some time. Back in January, many of us, most of us believed, to ourselves or out loud, that we were about to turn some major corner on the national experience. When Barack Obama won the election in November 2008, we had expressed the hope that, just maybe, the software of the American government could be re-engineered for populism instead of empire; that the governmental machinery could be retrofit from the inside.

In the closest thing to a truly national mandate any American president in modern times has ever enjoyed, Obama was swept into office by a nation of true believers (and their accidental enablers in the Republican Party).

Lotta water under the bridge since then. President Obama tried to close the political divide created in the contentious campaign. To celebrate the Super Bowl, our secular religion, Obama invited Republican members of Congress to a Super Bowl party, a spirited bid for Rah Rah Rah and Kum Ba Yah at the same time.

It pretty much went downhill from there. A congressional backbencher from South Carolina called the president a liar at a joint session of Congress. Arizona State University decided not to award Obama an honorary degree, essentially saying that his best and brightest days were yet to come. Chicago, Obama’s home city and political training ground, was rebuffed in its bid to host the Olympic Games — a rejection that the disloyal opposition in the GOP gleefully exploited to the fullest.

And then came the bigger ugly, the nastiness that seemed to define the year. The virulent right-wing tea party hate sessions, which emerged over the summer, put to rout any ideas that the Republicans (and their Blue Dog Democratic enablers) would offer any constructive contribution to the nation’s problems, especially the health-care reform debate.

The GOP leadership erected obstacle after obstacle, prolonging the process of making a change in health-care reform the country has needed for decades. While an average of 120 Americans die every day — more than 43,000 every year — for lack of health insurance.

That kind of insensitivity seemed to leach into everything for much of the year. Banks were indifferent to the crying needs of homeowners desperate for relief.

Credit card companies, eager to lock in their profit margins before credit-card reform goes into effect, jacked up interest rates even for their best customers. Millions of Americans just barely hanging on, torching their 401(k)s and IRAs to pay the mortgages, were tipped into financial oblivion.

The GOP’s heavy weather

The Republicans in the Senate got out of Washington fast after the health-care bill got passed without them last week. With some of the most treacherous blizzards to hit the eastern half of the United States lighting up the weather maps the day before Christmas Eve, they admitted defeat was theirs and headed for Reagan National or Dulles.

But as the year ends, the Republicans as a party are flying into potentially heavier weather than the rain and snow that pummeled half the country for the holidays.

In spite of President Obama’s declining approval ratings; uncertainty about two high burn-rate wars; a domestic economy still dependent on the trickle charger of inorganic financial stimulus; and the sudden prospect of terrorism on a new geographic front, the Republicans remain seriously fractured as a party, plagued with scandals, philosophically and generationally divided, with a dogged resistance to outreach to many millions of the Americans they need to win.

The GOP ends 2009 willfully entrenched in a fortress manned by true believers, dead-enders and no one else. They’ve hardened their ideological definition and gone out of their way to alienate anyone outside the frame of their core beliefs. For months now, the Republican Party has been about thinning the herd, seeming to isolate those with a more conciliatory approach to politics — those with a vested interest in being as much loyal as opposition.

The result likely means a Republican Party that’s smaller, older, and more monochromatic and ideologically rigid than it already is.

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Chairman Michael Steele is attempting to ride, or walk, to the rescue. Steele is the signatory of a mass-mailing letter dated “Monday morning” and mailed this week, in an apparent indiscriminate fashion (there’s no other way it could have been, nestled among the bills, in the mailbox of a rock-ribbed Democrat).

“Your immediate action is required,” Steele intones in the four-page letter, which includes a “Registered Survey.” “I am sending out this questionnaire to gauge where you and other grassroots Republicans stand on the critical issues facing our nation — I need to hear back from right away.”

The letter (a battle cry that conveys much the same exhortation we’ve heard at various venues for the Michael Steele Live show) essentially discredits “the Obama agenda” and claims that response to the survey is a linchpin in a new beginning for the GOP. “We have been on the defensive,” Steele says. “In 2010 that all changes.”

Maybe. It’s a given that the Republicans are hoping to duplicate the midterm congressional impact of Newt Gingrich’s Contract on America, when the GOP stormed back into control of Congress in 1994. The discontent the GOP is hoping to exploit this time is largely of its own creation.

The auto and bank bailouts Obama was forced to implement were the concluding step in a process begun or exacerbated in the Bush administration. And Obama inherited the crushing responsibility for the stewardship of two expensive, expansive wars, and the job of undoing the diplomatic damage wrought by eight years of cowboy swagger. All in all, a lot like playing poker when your hand is dealt before you even get to the table.

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Most well-meaning Americans understand this, at some deep intuitive level. They reject the automatic aspect of party identification, the easy ideological label. Especially Republicans. That would explain the results of a Nov. 30 Washington Post poll that found 69 percent of Republican and GOP-leaning independents thought that taking moderate positions on some issues was entirely acceptable.

Some 42 percent of Republicans and independents surveyed thought the Republican party leadership in taking the party in the wrong direction, compared to 23 percent in 2005.

“Republicans are faced with significant discord within their ranks,” wrote Jon Cohen and Dan Balz of The Post. “They are divided over how much to work with Obama on energy and climate-change legislation. There are generational differences on the role of religion in public life and how much emphasis the party should put on hot-button issues such as same-sex marriage. And the party's moderate and conservative wings have widely divergent views on a number of issues.”

The Republican leadership hopes the American people’s demand for results, its storied impatience will kick in next year, with an outraged populist rejection of the Obama administration and federal spending levels made necessary by the ruinous practices of the Bush League.

It’s a sad reflection of the vacancy of the current Republican message that once again the GOP is forced to return to defining itself by what it’s opposed to, rather than what it’s in favor of.

It’s a sad commentary that this strategy relies on the belief that the national recall of the origins of our current predicament is so brief, so attuned to the moment, that the American people won’t think back to when the decade really started, in 2001 … and reflect in sorrow and anger at how their lives changed and were changed in seven or eight brutal years, and who was governmentally responsible.

The year 2010 could be much like the year before for the GOP, and for the same reasons. Barack Obama has been president about three weeks short of a year. This nation’s memory of elephants in the White House goes back a hell of a lot further than that.

2009: JibJab weighs in

It’s gotten to where the year isn’t officially over until we’ve heard from the boys and girls at JibJab. The Venice, California-based digital entertainment studio and conclave of wiseasses, musicians and techies is back in fine form with their 2009 retrospective. “Never a Year Like ’09,” animatedly performed to the tune of Scott Joplin's "The Entertainer," surveys the year about to end in the classic over-the-top JibJab style.

In two minutes and change, it’s a recap of what was important this year, and much that wasn’t (which didn’t stop people from talking and tweeting about it).

JJ’s bottom line is much like everyone’s: for all kinds of reasons, this is one we’re glad to have in the rear-view mirror … laughing through the tears.

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Image credit: © 2009 JibJab Media Inc.

MJ thrills again

On Wednesday there was another proper sendoff for Michael Joseph Jackson; it was a gesture that told us what we already knew, that his was a singular and irreplaceable talent. But still. It was a welcome validation of his ubiquity in and impact on the culture. And it’s based on something you’ve seen a hundred times.

“Thriller,” the 14-minute video directed in 1983 by John Landis and choreographed, inspired and animated by Michael hisself, was named to be the first music video to join the National Film Registry at the Library of Congress. The video, which merged scripted dialogue common to longer features with the short-form dictates of the music video, joins 24 other films selected this year, bringing the total to 525 films selected since the registry was established in 1989.



Despite its brevity, “Thriller” was recognized by the Library of Congress for its cultural, aesthetic or historical significance. Its elevation makes it equal in historical heft to such full-length motion picture classics as “Ben-Hur,” “Casablanca,” “Annie Hall” and such woefully overlooked treasures as Julie Dash’s “Daughters of the Dust.”

“I'm thrilled,” Landis told The Washington Post from his home in Los Angeles. “And it's nice for Michael, because he was always striving to be bigger and better. ...”

“It was nobody's brilliant idea,” he says. “Nobody thought, Gee, why don't we do this? It's a genius business plan. Mike just wanted to turn into monster.”

It’s flashes of the imagination like that — a tapping of the wellspring of fears and nightmares, wishes and dreams — that summons genius from time to time. When we're lucky. Some have said that the addition of “Thriller” to the film registry makes it officially timeless. Watch it and recognize, all over again: Anyone saying that with a straight face is officially 25 years too late.

MSNBC: The place for making changes

MSNBC, that cable network whose propensity for making changes around the house emerges about as frequently as The New York Times raises its newsstand rates, is about to moult again. But this time, it may be change demanded by viewers who’ve for years put up with a half-on, half-off approach to covering the news — one that just won’t fly anymore.

The Associated Press reported Dec. 28 that “MSNBC is shuffling its daytime lineup early next year because its strategy of spreading personality-driven programming throughout the schedule isn't working. The new approach will emphasize a fast-paced review of the day's big stories as they break.”

The MSNBC strategy of peppering dayparts with spiky, opinionated personalities saw fruition early this year, when the network trotted out new shows hosting by Dr. Nancy Snyderman, former CNBC business blowhard Dylan Ratigan, and “Morning Joe” co-co-host Willie Geist. Now, there’s new thinking afoot.

It’s already claimed one casualty outright. “Dr. Nancy,” hosted by physician and Snyderman, NBC’s medical editor, was recently cancelled. Snyderman, whose on-air demeanor made you feel like you were in a doctor’s office, didn’t resonate with viewers. Its placement (at noon eastern) may be one reason why.

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Ratigan was another victim of the shuffle preceding the one to come. Ratigan, the beneficiary of an hourlong spot in the morning lineup, went off the rails more than once as the blustery, caffeinated host of “Morning Lineup,” bringing the swaggering style he once brandished on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange to a soundstage at 30 Rock.

It didn’t rock. Just last week, Ratigan apologized for being rude to Florida Democratic Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz during a Dec. 18 interview about health-care reform.



On Dec. 21, by transcript and Twitter, he apologized for the outburst. From his on-air mea culpa: “Our mission and my mission on this show is to shine the light on what is really happening ... the way I went about that on Friday was a disservice to our viewers. ... I have some work to do.”



Not as much of that “work” will be done on the air. AP reports that MSNBC is cutting his show in half and moving it to the 4 p.m. eastern time slot before “Hardball,” Chris Matthews’ political-news franchise.

MSNBC will also feature NBC News political director Chuck Todd and White House correspondent Savannah Guthrie for a 9 a.m. eastern program meant to survey the day's upcoming news. Much of the rest of the day, MSNBC will present general news anchored by David Shuster, Tamron Hall, Contessa Brewer and Andrea Mitchell (this from Phil Griffin, MSNBC CEO).

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Through these changes upon changes, you come away with a sense of MSNBC like some mad scientist in a laboratory, mixing potions and swirling solutions in glass beakers, desperately holding them up to the light from time to time, the better to glimpse the right formula.

The one thing that apparently won’t change at MSNBC is the stature of its two destination-viewing tentpoles — “Countdown With Keith Olbermann” and “The Rachel Maddow Show” — or “Morning Joe,” the early-morning opinionfest helmed by former Florida GOP Rep. Joe Scarborough. Early morning and early evening seem to be solid at the network; it’s the daytime mix that still eludes the cable arm of NBC News.

MSNBC must be doing something right. AP reported: “Even after the election, MSNBC's prime-time has run neck-and-neck with CNN for second place behind the dominant Fox News Channel. MSNBC will beat CNN among its target demographic of 25-to-54-year-olds in 2009 for the first year ever, according to the Nielsen Co.”