The Enda the world is nigh for us and Kenny
The internet was flooded with comments such as: “I bet God killed Osama Bin Laden as a reward for America’s increasing tolerance of homosexuality”
YOU’VE only got seven days left to live — and I’m afraid you’re not just going to die next Saturday, but you’re also going straight to Hell.
Well, apart from the 2% of us who will receive instant rapture and ascend to the Kingdom of Heaven when God finally pulls the plug on this sorry old world on May 21 at just after 6pm.
You will never get to see Barack Obama return to his Irish roots, and the sight of Britain’s Queen Elizabeth saying: “Oh, how lovely...” as she is shown the fish slab at the English Market in Cork will be one of your last memories on this Earth.
Well, that’s if you believe the prophesy of US evangelist Harold Camping, and as he’s got a broadcasting network with assets of $120 million behind him — an awful lot of Americans do.
Indeed, he’s booked out more than 2,000 billboards across the US emblazoned with such slogans as “Blow the trumpet, warn the people!” to ram his Doomsday message home.
Mr Camping, 89, put it all into perspective with: “We’re not talking about a ball game, we’re talking about the end of the world, a matter of being eternally dead, or being eternally alive, and it’s all coming to a head right now.” Blimey.
Camping’s Family Radio Network has sent “ambassadors” swarming out across the US to foretell the impending apocalypse. One such believer is Adam Larsen, 32, from Kansas. He told CNN: “My favourite pastime is racoon hunting. I’ve had to give that up — but this task is far more important.”
Obviously, just like 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina, the impending end of the world is largely the fault of gay people.
Camping believes that as well as earthquakes and tsunamis, one of the harbingers of doom God has given us is civil partnerships.
“The gay pride movement was sent by God as a sign of the end,” he says.
Which in its intrigue is right up there with the time fellow evangelist Pat Robertson blamed Hurricane Katrina hitting the US in September 2005 on Ellen Degeneres being chosen to host the Emmys that year.
Say what you like about God turning a blind eye to 40,000 children dying every day from preventable, poverty-related diseases, but when he gets annoyed about a rather bland lesbian comedian fronting a TV awards show he really pulls his finger out and gets involved down here — as the wicked people of New Orleans will testify.
But unfortunately for Camping, two can play the game of viewing world events through the prism of gay equality issues. After the US Navy Seals stormed the Bin Laden compound in Abbottabad, the internet was flooded with comments such as: “I bet God killed Osama bin Laden as a reward for America’s increasing tolerance of homosexuality.”
Camping bases his alarming theory on a unique system of mathematics he has developed to show hidden prophecies in the Bible. The world is going to end at tea time on May 21, 2011, because that will be exactly 722,500 days from the date on which Camping believes the Crucifixion took place — April 1, AD33.
He regards the figure of 722,500 as sacrosanct because you get it by multiplying three “holy numbers” — five, 10 and 17. And who could argue with such vigorous numerical expertise, which certainly shows Einstein’s theory of relativity up for the back-of-an-envelope job we’ve always suspected it to be?
“When I found this out, I tell you, it blew my mind,” Camping recounts.
But then people are always looking for hidden signs, as was the case in Italy this week when many Romans were in fear of the 1915 forecast of seismologist Raffaele Bendani, who predicted that a “big one” would hit the earthquake-prone Eternal City last Wednesday.
Newspapers printed survival guides, and one-in-five workers demanded the day off so they could flee the city.
In the face of all scientific evidence to the contrary, Bendani believed movement of tectonic plates leading to earthquakes were the result of the combined shifts of the planets, the moon and the sun, and thus perfectly predictable.
He struck lucky when he was two days out predicting a major earthquake in central Italy in January 1924, and was rewarded with a knighthood from fascist dictator Benito Mussolini.
He was then warned he’d be exiled if he dared make any more predictions due to the public panic his forecasts were creating.
But the power of his prophesy was such that many Roman parents kept their children off school last Wednesday just in case.
Believers will no doubt point to the fact that a major earthquake did strike the next day — in Spain, which is sort of very close to Italy, and so those who want to cling to these things will insist maybe Bendani was not that wrong after all.
And so, our fascination with wonders and numbers brings us to our own political deity Enda Kenny.
The Taoiseach rather carelessly left quite a number of hostages to fortune during the election campaign, one of which being his building up of the level of change that would ensue during his first 100 days in office.
Indeed, God may have been a bit wimpy and needed to rest on the seventh day, but Enda and his team would fire on all cylinders for three months solid, with ministers banned from even thinking about constituency matters in that period so they could concentrate on transforming the nation, he told us.
But apart from rather a lot a U-turns, a bit of a ding-dong with Nicholas Sarkozy, a jobs initiative that seemed a tad light on jobs, a pretty unfair pensions raid, an embarrassing set-back on our much fabled bail-out loan rate cut hopes, and a post-dated promise to reverse the minimum wage, there is not really that much to show.
Like Camping and Bendani before him, Enda has boxed himself into something of a corner with his calendar specific predictions of awe-inspiring change.
Indeed, Camping may not be the great prophesier we imagine as he has been up to this sort of thing before — insisting the Apocalypse and Second Coming would occur on September 6, 1994. He now brushes this earlier error aside as irrelevant because he was a mere slip of a thing in his early 70s at the time and had not studied the Bible for long enough.
So, given Camping’s chequered history, the rest of us may yet survive next Saturday after all — but Enda knows his Judgement Day is still looming.
Kenny hits his 100th day in office on June 17 — then it shall be revealed how many of us remain in his electoral rapture.
CONNECT WITH US TODAY
Be the first to know the latest news and updates
