ishmael n. daro

What ever happened to the Discovery Channel? It used to be an ocean of sanity among the madness of cable television. But after years of cultivating an image as a science and education based channel, Discovery is abusing the trust people have invested in the brand by promoting the most vile, unscientific, ridiculous programming imaginable: conspiracy theories.

Recently I saw a so-called documentary about the 2012 doomsday air on Discovery that didn’t even conform to the most basic scholarly practices of, say, citing your sources or having some sort of evidence. Throughout the one-hour program, the narrator and the various “experts” make such ludicrous assertions that it could have passed for satire.

“Many people say” and “some researchers think” that unless you have some credentials, you don’t get to say the magnetic poles are suddenly going to shift or that the planet will be struck by an asteroid on December 21, 2012. And no, that ponytail does not count as credentials.

This sort of trash must be incredibly easy to make. All you need is to get a dozen of the hundreds of hucksters trying to profit off 2012 stupidity to speak about the various ways the world will end. Splice that in with scenes of bad actors playing oracles and seers writing feverishly onto some parchment, apply credits, and presto! Discovery makes a million. But the feedback loop doesn’t end there; websites that sell 2012 merchandise then upload the “documentary” onto YouTube and make more money off the whole thing. The full video is on YouTube.

The actual program is so absurd that it makes you wonder how Discovery ever managed to make serious programming at all. For example, after stating clearly that Merlin the wizard was not a historical figure in any sense, the narrator doesn’t miss a beat as he speaks about the various doomsday prophesies Merlin put forward and how they are all coming to fruition. How can both these things be true?

Or take the prophesies of “Mother Shipton.”

After saying that a real Mother Shipton did not exist, that she was entirely fabricated by a writer to make a buck by selling bullshit prophesies, the narrator says simply goes on to describe the prophesies and why they were true:

“Mother Shipton may have been invented by the London writer Richard Head in 1684, whose faltering writing career was saved when he began to publish these prophesies. Richard Head claimed Mother Shipton accurately predicted the Spanish Armada, the Great Plague, and the London Fire of 1666 because he was writing about these events years after the fact.”

Okay, so he wrote all the predictions after they had happened and they weren’t predictions at all. The whole thing is bullshit. Good, let’s move on. But the plot thickens:

“Even if Richard Head made up the predictions of Mother Shipton in the 1600s, many of his future predictions eventually came true.”

For proof, an old woman’s voiceover crows, “In the air men shall be seen. Around the world thoughts will fly in the twinkling of an eye. Women dress like men and trousers wear, and cut off all their locks of hair.” As proof that these vague things came true, images of airplanes, emails, and women with short hair wearing jeans are played. Boom, oracular spectacular. But the narrator continues:

“Did the hoaxer Richard Head somehow tap into some kind of oracular vision himself while writing the prophesies or was he working from an actual prophetic book which has been lost to history?”

Hmm, good question Discovery Channel. But there is a distinct possibility that the hoaxer was just that — a hoaxer! His prophesies only “came true” because he made things sufficiently vague so “thoughts flying around the world” could be anything. Sure, it could be the Internet, or it could be telephones, or the postal service too.

From such halfhearted attempts at creating a historical basis for the 2012 theory, the program tries to assert that if 2012 isn’t absolutely 100% real (which it is, dammit!) then there is at least enough plausible information or enough doubt about the subject that we cannot reach a conclusion. Except that we can. If the various prophesies and hucksters on the program were subjected to close examination without weasel words, “many believe that” the whole thing would collapse under the weight of its own stupidity.

But that wouldn’t help Discovery Channel’s bottom line, would it?