WASHINGTON

MY college roommates and I used to grocery shop and cook together. The only food we seemed to agree on was corn, so we ate a lot of corn.

My mom would periodically call to warn me in a dire tone, “Do you know why the Incas are extinct?”

Her maize hazing left me with a deeply ingrained fear of being part of a civilization that was obliviously engaging in behavior that would lead to its extinction.

Too bad the Republican Party didn’t have my mom to keep it on its toes. Then it might not have gone all Apocalypto on us — becoming the first civilization in modern history to spiral the way of the Incas, Aztecs and Mayans.

The Mayans were right, as it turns out, when they predicted the world would end in 2012. It was just a select world: the G.O.P. universe of arrogant, uptight, entitled, bossy, retrogressive white guys.