Now it emerges that since the military took power in Thailand on May 22, banning public gatherings, protesters have been attempting to outwit authorities by holding silent "cultural" protests—such as groups sitting around in public places reading 1984! In more unintentional irony, the regime responded by banning the book—and at least one student protester from Bangkok University  has been arrested for sitting quietly reading the novel in defiance of the ban. More recently, the opening of The Hunger Games movie in Thailand has been similarly seized upon by protesters, with the film's three-fingered rebel salute becoming a symbol of dissent. It has now similarly been outlawed—leading to five arrests so far. (The Conversation, LAT, Nov. 21)

Strangely, McDonalds corporation is also decrying use of its corporate logo by Thai protesters. At a rally shortly after the May putsch, protesters gathered outside a McDonald's in Bangkok, carrying signs that read "democracy"—only with the M replaced by Mickey Dee's iconic gold arches. (Time, May 30) Is this to be read as an ironic appropriation, or a statement of how corporate rule has degraded Western democracy? Probably not, since they were earnestly calling for a restoration of democratic norms. Or a naive embrace of the golden arches as a symbol of globalization actually associated with democracy in their minds—which they have hopefully been disabused of by the corporation's own protestations?

We really aren't quite sure.

Ideas, anyone?

OK, now on to the somewhat more weighty question of the end of the world. Is there really going to be a planetary alignment on the December solstice, and does it really coincide with the end of the Maya calendar? We’ve been hearing an awful lot about this even before the Morales government got in on the act, so we decided to check it out. And the answer to both questions appears to be: Nope. NASA runs on its website a story on the hype by EC Krupp, director of Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles, reprinted from Sky & Telescope Magazine. Krupp states flatly: “There is no planet alignment on the winter solstice in 2012.” (Of course South America’s summer solstice is North America’s winter solstice.) He adds that even if there were a planetary alignment, it probably wouldn’t be a big deal. The last one was not 26,000 years ago, but on May 5, 2000. You might notice that the world did not end then, nor did a Utopian age of love and harmony open.

Now what about the Maya calendar? There is a grain of truth here, Krupp notes, but—no, the Maya calendar is not about to “end.”

What exactly is the Maya calendar about to do? On Dec. 21, 2012, it will display the equivalent of a string of zeros, like the odometer turning over on your car, with the close of something like a millennium. In Maya calendrics, however, it’s not the end of a thousand years. It’s the end of Baktun 13. The Maya calendar was based on multiple cycles of time, and the baktun was one of them. A baktun is 144,000 days: a little more than 394 years.

The Mayan Calendar website cites renowned Mayanist scholar Sir J. Eric Thompson to the effect that the baktuns do not end after a cycle of 13, but keep going—20 baktuns make a piktun; 20 piktuns make a kalabtun; 20 kalabtuns make a kinichiltun; 20 kinichiltuns make an alautun. (A tun, the Maya word for stone, was basically a year—360 days, so named for the ritual erecting of stones to mark the passing years. A baktun was 400 tuns: 144,000 divided by 360 = 400. A piktun is therefore 8,000 tuns, and so on.) So, obviously, the Mayan “Long Count” that began ticking in 3114 BCE will keep going for many, many centuries into the future.

For all the hype about Maya calendrics, we’d sure like to hear what some actual Mayas have to say about the question. Lake Titicaca is sacred to the Aymara and Quechua, peoples related to each other but not to the far distant Maya, who have a very different language and cosmology. The 2012 end-of-the-worldery was propagated (before Hollywood got in on the act) by the late New Age guru José Argüelles—who the 2012Hoax website tells us was neither a Maya nor a Mayanist scholar. Since his passing last year, the torch has been carried by his sidekick Hunbatz Men—who, unlike Argüelles, was born in Mexico and may actually be a Maya. We note that his name appears on the Nuage Tricksters Offenders List—apparently run by real Native Americans who are tired of seeing their traditions and spirituality appropriated by New Age capitalist enterprises. We make no claims for the bona fides of the Offenders List.

Finally, we note that dissident Aymara communities in Bolivia on the June 20 solstice celebrated their own new year with a ceremony in which they pledged to struggle to protect Mother Earth—and resist government-backed development plans. The Evo Morales government has certainly imposed greater restraints on foreign and private capital than Bolivia’s previous neoliberal regimes, but we are not convinced that it is moving “towards socialism” (as the name of Evo’s ruling Movement Towards Socialism proclaims). Bolivia is just one country, and even there, foreign resource industries still basically have a free hand. Are we on a five-month countdown to the end of global capitalism?

All we can say is, ojalá.

See our last posts on Bolivia, the crisis of capitalism and world gastronomic wars.

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