Freezing in the Dark

Sorry I haven't been posting lately--we went to a wedding in the mountains last weekend, and I've been too busy since then to get back downstairs.

A topic I've wanted to explore on this blog ever since I started it--even before, in fact--is the idea that we lefties like to anticipate an apocalyptic future. The thought I've been developing in my mind for the past several months is that now that we've been under a Republican administration for nearly five years we've started to feel so powerless that the only way we can see the future is through the opposite of rose-colored glasses (blood-colored glasses?). You see this not so much as the left-wing media--magazines like The Nation, etc.--but in the mainstream media of cable television.

What sparked this idea was a show we watched on National Geographic Channel called End Day. This hour-long disaster-fest was co-produced with the BBC, and was based partly on the Bill Murray film Groundhog Day. You remember that one--Murray plays a weatherman whose life is in disarray, and finds himself repeatedly living the same day (February 2). In End Day, the protagonist is an American physicist living in London. He gets a phone call early in the morning and has to jump on a plane to New York to be there when they turn on a sophisticated particle accelerator for the first time. The accelerator has generated a lot of public protest, because people fear that it could create a black hole (sound like the plot for Spiderman 2?).

In the first 15-minute segment, he gets to Heathrow, gets on a plane, but the plane never takes off. A massive landslide in the Azores has caused a mega-tsunami that wipes out New York (sound like part of the plot of The Day After Tomorrow?). Wonderful special effects--equal to any big-budget disaster film--show the watery end of Manhattan.

The second 15-minute segment starts the same way--alarm clock, phone call, BBC news on in the background talking about the particle accelerator. But suddenly the news changes--there's a newly-discovered comet that astronomers have calculated will be colliding with Berlin in a few hours. The action shifts to Germany, where a mother hears the news and panics; a father puts a small child onto an evacuation train; etc. Our hero is still planning to fly to New York, however--who cares if Berlin gets destroyed?--and we follow him again onto the British Air flight. On the seat-back TV, we see the American nuclear missle that blasts into the comet (we see it from a camera attached to the international space station). The missle fragments the comet (destroying the space station), and small bits still crash into Berlin, largely destroying it.

Part three: influenza! Viruses can mutate rapidly, although perhaps not as quickly as this show depicts. By the time our hero is at Heathrow (having passed by, on the way, a cinema showing Groundhog Day), viruses have swarmed all over the world, and the military has taken over running the UK--and the flight is prohibited from taking off for the US.

In the last few minutes of this harrowing hour, our man finally takes off and makes it to New York. He gets to the particle accelerator, he and his team switch it on, and voila!--the world is destroyed, just as the doomsayers predicted.

I'm not going to say this is the work of "liberal doomsayers"--let ABC's John Stossel do that. What I will say is that this kind of show is tapping into an anxiety a lot of us westerners--liberal or not--are feeling (although of course the right wingers are more in denial about it, and the evangelicals are eagerly anticipating Armageddon).

The original point I had developed in my mind several weeks or months ago (who can say when? I was walking Charlie, and that's when these ideas come) was that people on the left want the Bush "administration" to fail. He stole the White House (twice), and the hubris and stupidity with which he and his people have been running the country deserves, in our minds, harsh punishment in the form of chickens coming home to roost (to borrow a phrase from Mr. Churchill).

But now I'm not so sure that's what's happening.

I've been reading the most pessimistic book ever written, The Long Emergency by James Howard Kuntsler. The thesis can be boiled down very simply: the end of the oil age is upon us, and we can expect our current "lifestyles" to be radically altered within the next few years. This is a work of popular non-fiction--Kunstler doesn't originate this idea, he merely borrows and synthesizes what geologists have been saying for some time. But he goes beyond geology, and brings in history, economics, politics, foreign affairs, religion, urban planning (the subject of his past three books) and everything else that has been in the news for the past few decades. The picture he paints is downright scary: the potential, very real, for irreversible worldwide social, political, and economic breakdown. Not a return to the nineteenth century, but a return to the ninth. No "hydrogen economy," no alternative fuel scenario can save us.

He could be painting a picture that is too dark, of course, but I am with him when he says we're in for a very bumpy ride, and we Americans are living as though we've just won World War II and the world is our oyster (my paraphrase).

Shows like End Day are entertainment, but look at what we find amusing. Discovery Channel abounds with shows about tornadoes and earthquakes, and the Yellowstone volcano (a few months ago they aired a very cheesy disaster film of what would happen if the 600,000-year eruption were to happen right now--yes, I watched the whole thing). Every night on the Weather Channel you can watch Storm Stories--reinactments (sometimes augmented with actual footage) of ordinary people who find themselves in the middle of a flash flood, a tornado, or a mudslide. National Geographic Channel has a show (also co-produced with the BBC) about commercial airline disasters. They put it on just before bedtime.

All of this is a symptom of a huge sense of un-ease. And what we're uneasy about isn't just "is Al Qaida going to strike again?" but something much larger, deeper, and more dangerous: that our way of life is going to end. I haven't finished The Long Emergency yet, but I already know that the second half of my life (assuming I live into my 80s at least) won't be as easy as the first.

Would anyone care to post a comment? I'd be forever grateful. This blog has had just one comment posted to date.