“All my bags are packed I’m ready to go, I’m standin’ here outside your door…~I’m Leaving on a Jet Plane by John Denver
According to Harold Camping, the world was predicted to end last Saturday, May 21st at 6pm.
Someone wise once said to me, “Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice…I’ll still give you another shot, but fool me three times, and it’s time to find another octogenarian soothsayer who’s more proficient in math!”
I just know I’ve been on this same Camping trip before…and before. Oh wait…it’s coming back to me now. It was in 1988 and again in 1994 when family radio network founder and self taught bible interpreter Harold Camping announced once, no twice, that the End of the World was coming to a theatre near you. As I waited for the curtain to open and reveal the Rapture, the show was canceled due to technical difficulties, or a mathematical miscalculation, as Harold Camping sees it.
“It’s so hard to nail down the bible,” he says. Perhaps he should have borrowed Thor’s hammer, I say.
Still, he gave it all he had, as did so many others who spent their entire life savings on what he labeled his failed “advertising campaign.” After 1994’s prediction went sour, Camping brushed the cobwebs off his abacus, made some new mathematical computations and determined that May 21, 2011 was absolutely The End!
So, once again I bought my tickets, sat myself down in the front row with the other 2 million or so deserving souls last Saturday, and listened to the orchestra play a rousing Stairway to Heaven on harp and violin. And at 6 o’clock, the end of the world…didn’t happen. It was once again postponed due to technical difficulties. Starting to sound a bit like Broadway’s Spiderman debacle, and, just as costly too!
Camping’s long running show to market his end of the world prediction carried with it an estimated price tag of $100 million in advertising costs—yes advertising! He hung 1,200 billboards and spent millions on ads. Seems that no one will buy The End of the World nowadays unless it’s effectively packaged like a Viva Viagra or Cialis moment.
Listen, Rev. Camping, I don’t mean to be critical, but perhaps math simply isn’t your thing! Instead of forecasting the apocalypse, why not simply stick your finger out the window and report on all the tumultuous earth events that are going on right under your nose? With all the deadly tornadoes, floods and nuclear meltdowns, there’s plenty to keep you busy on your family radio network. Why limit yourself to a single all-encompassing earthquake on a date that the bible stubbornly refuses to cough up for you?
The bible even plainly states in Matthew 24:36, “…but about that day or hour no one knows” except God. Or it’s more popular sandbox translation: it’s for Me to know and you to find out!
So, how about you save yourself a ton of money that could be better used on a Mayan calendar, a working calculator, a thinner bible that CAN be nailed down, or on a more positive attitude that might involve raising group consciousness, instead of raising collective blood pressures. Just a little sumpin’ you might want to think about to get you off this crazy apocalyptic conveyer belt you’re on.
Still, you’ve got yourself a loyal following who have committed such acts that I thought only frat boys or Sacha Bara Cohen were brave enough to try.
“I’ve been mocked and scoffed and cursed at and I’ve been through a lot,” said Jeff Hopkins, 52, a former television producer who drove for days with a lighted sign proclaiming the end of the world on top of his car.
With such great talent to influence so many, Rev Camping, I propose you wield your power to predict the end of Snookie’s writing career, 2 ½ Men, or something equally inconsequential that mankind will truly thank you for!
And now time to confess my own sins. After a heavily catered End of the World party I held last week that ended badly with the actual continuation of the world, I realize it’s time to pull up stakes, fold up my tent, and hop back aboard the magical mystery tour RV for another Rev. Harold Camping trip. Next stop: Rapture on October 21, 2011. If I don’t see you there, I’ll just catch you the next time!