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End of the World: Tabloid Watch |
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Site Contents
Recurring Themes It's the Pope, stupidAntichrist / 666 Mother Teresa Revealed! Exact Dates Nostradamus Edgar Cayce Weird weather Archeology |
One of the memorable scenes in Men in Black is when Tommy Lee Jones purchases newstand tabloids to track the movements of his alien charges, pronouncing that these papers are the "sharpest investigators" on the planet, with an exclusive sense of truth. What? The "truth" is to be found in the Weekly World News, the Sun or the Enquirer? Pretty funny, because everybody knows that these rags are just making it all up, with those sensational headlines and cheesy monster photos that are obviously spliced together. Someone told me that once when he was at Mardi Gras in New Orleans, a tabloid photographer unashamedly asked him to pose in a fake set-up. Celebrities have won court cases by proving that the outrageous tabloid coverage was total fiction, indeed, libel. Can anybody really take these papers seriously? |
| General Pages Gallery of Covers The Sun Weekly World News SiteMap Internet Links Bibliography |
The approach of the year 2000 is exciting the doomsayers to a fever pitch, and the tabloids are definitely contributing to the level of noise. You might assume that headlines that scream Armageddon Approaching! and are just more "fiction" piled pretty high. But tabloids aren't totally fabricating the material when they report on endtime prophecies. In many cases, editors are really only embroidering variations on a piece of cloth that is already hemmed and whole. Predictions of the end of the world are part of our religious heritage, from the Jewish apocalyptic of the 1st century bce right up until the present moment. For the past several thousand years, there have always been some people with an "apocalyptic mentality," who are sure that the end is nigh. |
This site is designed to provide a commentary on some of the endtime predictions that appear in the tabloids and in everyday culture. Endtime predictions are found primarily in tabloid publications of the Weekly World News and the Sun (not to be confused with Rupert Murdoch's British publication of the same name), and some site pages are devoted to these individual articles. Other pages on the site discuss recurring themes of endtime writing, listed in the index up above. Finally, I provide some speculation about how endtime prophecy functions in the tabloid press generally. Explore these pages to get some perspective on what you're reading in checkout lines or seeing on TV shows.
Philip Roth: Do you think the destruction of the world is coming soon?
Milan Kundera: That depends on what you mean by the word "soon".
Roth: Tomorrow or the day after.
Kundera: The feeling that the world is rushing to ruin is an ancient one.
Roth: So then we have nothing to worry about.
Kundera: On the contrary. If a fear has been present in the human mind for ages there must be something to it.Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter & Forgetting.
Reproductions of portions of various publications are provided in the spirit of academic fair use. I do not claim to be complete in my survey of end-of-the-world headlines, for my small-town grocery store doesn't carry every tabloid, nor have I always been able to find what's available.
A few other sites are also keeping an eye on the tabloids:
My personal interest in the topic dates back many years, to my first discovery of the book of Revelation in the text of a choral work by John Ness Beck. I pursued my interest in medieval apocalyptic in my dissertation Religious and Symbolic Imagery in the Twelfth-Century Tegernsee Play of Antichrist (Northwestern University, 1984). Some of the work connected with this site has been carried out in connection with classes I teach at Allegheny College, including a writing course LSW 200.
Questions? Comments? A revelation you'd like to share with me? E-Mail to acarr@alleg.edu 
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Dr. Amelia Carr Box 111 Allegheny College 520 N. Main St. Meadville, PA 16335 U.S.A. |