Читать книгу Apocalypse 2012: An optimist investigates the end of civilization - Lawrence Joseph E. - Страница 22

The great white shark’s breath was so bad I could smell it under water. Or maybe it was the divers on either side of me in the cage, puking their guts out. The scarred-up shark, a two-ton thirteen-footer with huge double rows of blood-stained steak-knife teeth, had the crazed look of a predator that hadn’t evolved during his 400 million years terrorizing the oceans. It bonked its hideous snout against the dented-up cage, then chomped down on the bars. The image of Ulysses, lashed to the mast, listening to the sirens’ insanely beautiful song, did not flash through my mind. But there was that kind of thrill, a moment stolen from the gods.

Good practice, I mused, for gazing into the maw of 2012.

I was off the southern coast of South Africa and was scheduled the next day to visit the Hermanus Magnetic Observatory, where geophysicists are examining the California-sized cracks that have been opening up in the Earth’s protective magnetic field. Next stop was Johannesburg, to meet with 123Alert, a group of psychics who have an impressive record of forecasting earthquakes, volcanoes, and the like. My little adventure on Shark Lady was just for larks, until I looked inside those great white jaws.

For the first time in the year or so since I had been researching the horrors of 2012, I stopped and gave thanks, in this case for the bars on the cage. My life had been so safe and healthy that I had been taking it entirely for granted that I would live to see 2012, when I would be fifty-eight, which happens to equal the average male’s lifespan in the former Soviet Union, meaning that about as many men won’t live that long as will. Back home in Beverly Hills, where everyone is young and lives forever, talk of death is tantamount to hate speech. But in South Africa, about one in five adults, skewed toward the young, will likely die by 2012 anyway, even if the year passes without an apocalyptic peep.

“Thank you, India. Thank you, Providence.”

Back safely aboard the Shark Lady, my mental boom box played Alanis Morissette’s edgy elegy to thankfulness. Her song challenges one to think of new things to be thankful for … metal cages, for one. The great white shark’s indignation at having a gourmet dinner, me, dangled unattainably in front of its nose, reminded me of one of my favorite questions: If God, or some other Higher Power in which you believed, offered to give you exactly what you deserve, no more, no less, for the rest of your life, would you take the deal?

That question goes straight to a person’s self-concept. Most people say they’d take the deal, some agreeing so emphatically that they think it’s a trick question. Of course! Wouldn’t anybody? Folks who pounce on this offer tend to believe that their life, or life in general, is a raw deal. They would welcome “justice” with open arms. Others get pedantic and argue that by definition we all are getting exactly what we deserve, because we deserve exactly what we’re getting. God is just, so however we are treated must therefore be just—that sort of circular reasoning.

Personally I’d turn down the deal in a heartbeat. I know I’ve got it good. Maybe better than I should.

What if this proposition were offered to humanity as a whole? What if the heavens opened up and God/Higher Power/Mighty Space Alien offered our civilization exactly what it collectively deserved? No more, no less. How would you vote? Does humanity deserve all the stress and heartache? All the violence, disease, and degradation?

“24 Children Are Killed in Baghdad Car Blast: U.S. Soldiers Are Said to Be Giving Out Candy, Toys.” According to the report from the New York Times News Service, the soldiers, one killed and three injured, had entered the Baghdad neighborhood to warn residents that there was an explosive device in the area.

On the other hand, do we, the same species that sets off those car bombs, deserve all the wonders of romance, the beauty of Nature, the sweet love of little children? Couldn’t really say who deserves what. But I’d bet heavily that, in a straight-up global vote, the Almighty’s proposition to give humanity exactly what it deserved, no more, no less, would pass overwhelmingly. Why wouldn’t the teeming Third World billions give a thumb’s up to economic justice? Let’s see, people in the West make, say, ten to a hundred times as much money, live 50 percent longer, get to travel, educate their kids, and even get to obsess, as comedian Chris Rock reminds us, about things like lactose intolerance.

Something else new to be thankful for—that I find the prospect of Apocalypse 2012, that bloody-toothed doom crashing its snout against the fragile cage of human existence, bone-terrifying. In Capetown, where I had stayed several nights in a converted prison, I couldn’t help but wonder who might in fact welcome the final cataclysm? No one in his right mind, of course. But then, lots of people aren’t in their right mind, some through no fault of their own. It was easy, sitting in that cell of a hotel room, to imagine a political prisoner so angry and afraid that he or she would welcome destruction, as long as it included the jailers, would welcome perhaps a moment of freedom as the prison walls tumbled down and the very ground beneath them split apart.

As the great white swam off in search of baby dolphins and tasty seals, I recalled having read that there’s a small concentration of iron magnetite in the shark’s brain that enables it to navigate the Earth’s magnetic field. If those cracks get any bigger or the magnetic poles flip, that shark will never find me or any other prey. It won’t know where it’s going.

The Earth’s magnetic field—yet another thing for sharks, and humans, to be thankful for.