My Psychic Powers at Work

I don’t think i have actual psychic powers. But I must have some sort of extrasensory perception, because my prediction columns for the past two years have been freakishly on target: For 2010, I accurately predicted both a Sarah Palin reality show and the name of my unborn child–and it wasn’t even a common name. For 2011, I predicted the further destabilization of Pakistan and a pimento-cheese craze. Eerie, huh?

This year, though, predictions are easy. That’s because they don’t have to last very long. The ancient Mayans have a calendar that predicts the end of the world on Dec. 21, 2012. Sure, that’s plenty of time for something like pimento cheese to get going, but there’s no point in making predictions if there’s no following year in which to brag about them.

Still, it would be pretty cool to see people being eaten alive by locusts and drowning in a flood of cow’s blood while screaming, “Dude, this is exactly how Joel Stein said it would happen!” So to get the exact details on the apocalypse, I contacted David Stuart, the Mayan scholar who in 1984, at the age of 18, was the youngest recipient ever of a MacArthur “genius” grant. Unfortunately, Stuart was in the Guatemalan jungle. This wasn’t unfortunate for me–he got all my e-mails–but I figure it wasn’t so great for him. Stuart had a slightly different take on the 2012 apocalypse thing. “The end of the calendar is completely made up by people who don’t know anything about the ancient Maya,” he wrote. Not only did the Mayans not predict the end of the world in 2012, but more shocking, they are called Maya, not Mayans. That guy totally deserved his genius grant.

If the Maya didn’t predict the end of the world, there was a huge opportunity for me to break news by finding out what they do predict. I’d call some actual Maya, ask them who will win the U.S. presidential election and American Idol and what time the Nobel committee will call me. Unfortunately, the Maya are not all about Facebook. So I called Robert Sitler, a professor of modern languages and literature at Stetson University, who has been traveling to the Maya regions of Guatemala and Mexico for more than 35 years. He’s asked nearly 200 Maya about what will happen Dec. 21, which indeed is the last day of the 13th Bak’tun, the end of a 5,125-year cycle, though there are bigger deals in the ancient Maya calendar, like dates that come up every octillion years. The Maya, it turns out, are math nerds.

None of the Maya whom Sitler spoke with had heard of their calendar, which hasn’t been used for centuries. But in the past two years, they have seen awful American movies and TV shows about it, so some of them now believe in their nonexistent apocalyptic predictions, just as we do. I think this is the stuff the antiglobalization people are afraid of.

Some of the Maya were freaking out so much over the incorrect American take on the Maya prediction that Maya elders in Chiapas invited Sitler to tell them about their own calendar and calm everybody down. Part of Sitler’s speech involves a set of hieroglyphics that predict the arrival of the deity Bolon Yokte’, who is linked to warfare, famine and social strife. If this is Sitler’s calming-down speech, an NFL team should hire him to give locker-room speeches, pronto.

Sitler visited Tulum, Mexico, three times because it’s the home of a traditional Maya culture. I visited Tulum in July with my wife and son for exactly the same reason, assuming that traditional Maya culture is all about hanging out at the beach and going to an enormous water park. Though the Maya there didn’t know about the ancient calendar, they happened to be really into predictions anyway. “They actually talk about the end of the world,” Sitler said. “They were at war for a long time with the Mexican government. They said that some sort of war is on the horizon, that this time they will win.” No offense to the very nice Maya who were serving me margaritas, but my money is on the Mexican army.

Wanting more specifics, I e-mailed Alessandro Carozzino, the guy who ran the hotel I stayed in, Posada Margherita. Though technically Italian, he’s lived in Tulum for a really long time, so he probably knows something about the future. I remember talking with Carozzino over gelato as he made some bold predictions for 2012, including that he would open a second branch of his Italian restaurant in Los Angeles. “I spoke with all the Mayan guys working here,” Carozzino e-mailed me. “All of them told me the same thing: It will be not the end of the world; it is the end of a period. Another time will start, and new things are going to happen.” I am not going to argue with actual Maya about 2012, so I’m going with their prediction: This year, new things are going to happen. I feel almost as sure about this as I did about pimento cheese.