The Blue Moon is Roman Propaganda

a rant

Hey everyone!

Today, your (least) favorite Grinch wants to make an impassioned argument that so-called blue moons are nothing but trashy Roman propaganda, kept alive long past obsolescence!

But first, a lil trivia quiz:

What century was only 99 years long, because the cultural authorities of the day weren’t math literate?

Scroll down past this appropriate little picture of Janus for the answer…

The 20^th century! That’s right, the beginning of the 21^st century (and thus, the end of the 20^th) was celebrated in the year 2000, which obviously is the last year of the 20^th century of the current era (aka AD, after Jebus, whatevs).

The reason this is obvious, or should have been, is that years are counted in natural numbers. Natural numbers are whole numbers from 1 to infinity (think of your fingers, give ‘em a wiggle!) (also, I would not wish infinite fingers on anyone, at least not permanently).

In other words, there is no Year 0, and I’m not sure that concept even existed until some hardcore Maoists came along and wanted to impress everybody with how they were breaking with the past (as well as, apparently, any pretensions of a historical dialectic, revolutionary lineages, et cetera et cetera). Even empires around the world, and we’ll get back to them in a moment, would presume to Restart the Cosmic Clock every time one emperor died and a new one assumed the throne by resetting it at the year 1. That’s because, in natural speak, you can’t have 0 of something.

(That’s called not having it, mathematicians! Ya optimistic, my-glass-is-zero-full bastards!)

So, when you’re saying Year 1 what you’re saying (or at least, what everyone was saying until the mass delusion of Y2K) is that it’s the First Year of something. No Zeroeth Year. So, the year 100 is the 100^th year, and the completion of a century. The year 101 is the first year of the 2^nd century.

Unfortunately, way back in the savage wilds of 1999, when people had to communicate memes face-to-face (usually one-liners from The Simpsons, Seinfeld, Ally McBeal), the cultural authorities in the anglosphere, who also exercised undue influence as cultural authorities the world wide, were so mesmerized by their commercial culture, so enthralled by their shadow play of images, so absorbed in their dogma of branding (an act of physical violence once inflicted on cows being fed into the circuits of industrial accumulation that linked settler paramilitaries in far off colonies like Texas and Kansas to the slaughterhouse hub of Chicago, turned into metaphor and from there into an even more global system of psychological violence inflicted on the entire human species), that the simple spectacle of the numbers 1-9-9-9 changing over to the numbers 2-0-0-0 titillated them immensely. So immensely that they immediately shredded the thought of remembering their history (they had the same contempt for history as leftist revolutionaries from Akhenaten to Robespierre to Stalin, perhaps even more of it, given that in the dogma of the Branders every year is Year 0). And so immensely that they obviated basic mathematical activities like counting (mathematics, for the capitalists, only being real when it can be used to accumulate money or build weapons).

So, they asked us all to numb our brains, to throw up tinsel, to watch their big ole ball drop, and they declared, ex cathedra and a year early, that the millennium was upon us. Which is perhaps appropriate, given that in the numerical theories of Christianity, the completion of a cycle of ten was viewed as the end of an era. And this is why “millennium” was synonymous with the apocalypse, and why “decadence,” which is directly related to the time-word “decade,” does not refer to the moment when you’re riding high on the hog, but to the moment when the rot and decline are already apparent, a usage still preferred in languages that do a better job than the anglosphere of remembering their own history (e.g. “decadencia” in Spanish, though possibly Spanishes that have been too neighborly with American English have taken on the connotation used in the latter; please let me know, pertinent polyglots, if this is the case!). Isn’t it evident that this society has an impulse towards catastrophic self-destruction? Its impatience for the apocalypse is palpable.