Disaster Mania

America loves disasters. Perhaps it’s because we are a large nation geographically or maybe it’s because America is the most religiously conservative country in the Western World, but there is no doubt that we Americans love big disasters. It’s inevitable that with a land mass as large as North America, disaster will strike somewhere at frequent intervals. Since we Americans are by far the most self-absorbed nation since the demise of the British Empire, it should be expected that we would dwell on all things American, including our many disasters. The media after all, can only tell so many feel good stories and remain in business. The affecting impact of the terrorist attack on New York and Washington has unleashed a stampede of predictions of woe the like of which we haven’t heard since Jeremiah.

A quick survey of cable channels, including the religious rantings of televangelists to networks purporting to be educational or science based, will reveal just how hooked we are on the idea of our own cataclysmic demise. For five years or more we, as a nation, have wallowed in a self-involved orgy of doom. The scenarios appear on the left (although I am not exactly sure where that is any more) and, as usual, on the far out fringes of the radical right. It would be comforting to assume that this glut of apocalyptic horror shows is only the purview of the low-brow pop culture types or of the biblically bamboozled. Even a cursory survey of the bookshelves shows something quite different. Today’s frenzy of End-time scenarios spans everything from the pure fantasy of the “Left Behind” novels of Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins to the blockbusting Will Smith mega movie “I Am Legend”. Both commercially successful, but perhaps not culturally refined enough to be taken seriously. Recently however, writers of some eminence have also put their oar in. Alan Weisman’s "The World Without Us,” while not exactly about a particular cataclysm, dispenses with the actual disaster and settles for a scientific dissection of its aftermath. And now a towering figure of modern literature, Cormac McCarthy, wades in with an un-named post-apocolyptic disaster scenario titled “The Road”. This latter entry into the field should convince any skeptic that “The End” is near and dear to all Americans.

Admittedly, Americans have toyed with disaster for more than fifty years. The Second World War was, after all, a disaster of biblical proportions. It was ended with what can only be described as a doomsday device. Not surprisingly just about everybody in the Fifties assumed we would all go up in a mushroom cloud of radioactive smoke. This all too plausible scenario was red meat for the entertainment industry and some would argue, the military industrial complex. By the Eighties, however, Americans were jaded by the fireball and brimstone morality plays and began to explore something called Nuclear Winter. Draped in scientific legitimacy, this tale of gloom posited a slow, cold demise of the planet as gruesome as any that befell the dinosaurs and as chaotic as a monster truck rally on meth. The warming of the Cold War and the breakup of the Soviet Bloc created a lull in these musings. We turned our attention to fretting over the possibility of gray-goo nanobots smeared over the planet, global mind control of internet vampires, and the hugely disappointing and now nearly forgotten disaster of “Y2K”.

The last half decade has more than made up for whatever let-down we may have experienced on New Year’s Eve 1999. The new disaster movement is as diverse as American culture and as varied as our cable channels. I am reminded of Cyrano de Bergerac’s famous duel in which he enumerates the possible insults that might have been hurled his way regarding his large nose. Rather than merely accepting the fact that we’re all going to die, we Americans have now embarked on an encyclopedic examination of “..let me count the ways.”

At this point I’m not sure whether to begin at the micro-level and work my way towards Divine Retribution, or start there and end with the Revenge of the Nanobots. Perhaps some other form of categorization is in order. We could line up the entries in degrees of probability from the highly unlikely, say, an attack by the Borg, to the far more inevitable “Asphalt Parking Lots Finally Cover the Entire Planet.” Since almost all of the disaster scenarios are in the realm of million-to-one shots, this methodology would become a tedious form of hair splitting. A more obvious choice is a simple threesome: Natural, Manmade and Divine.

I have watched at least twenty hours of programming devoted to the theme of a natural cataclysmic destruction of the Earth. The most common version of this theme, and represented in various formats on a number of networks and not a few film offerings, is the asteroid collision with our home planet. This theme has a real advantage over its rivals. It has dinosaurs in it. Any theories, facts or fables that have dinosaurs in them are at a statistical advantage to their competitors. Of course for a disaster scenario to be credible it has to be in the “future”. Since we have obviously survived up to this point, why bother with old news. However, any discussion of asteroids colliding with Earth automatically gets to include the demise of the Big Guys. Computer animations of gigantic beast crashing around in primordial jungles then getting wiped out by a flaming ball of destruction, is plain hard to beat. This genre is so tried and true that there are variations on the theme. It wasn’t an asteroid, it was a comet or a hail of meteors. Competing theories have done their best to insinuate that their world-ending scenarios could also account for the end of the dinosaurs, in part I imagine, just so they could use CGI dino-images in their programs. These include the Super Volcano scenario. This version of the apocalypse renders the world a smoke covered hell hole without any help from above. A gigantic volcano, which you have to admit, is an attention grabber, somewhere around Yellowstone, sure, right here in the good old US of A, blows its top and suddenly there are no more shopping days until Christmas. Since such things have happened in the distant past, this script can also avail itself of a T-Rex crashing to earth, teeth bared, as a wall of superheated pyroclastic ash races towards it, or us.

In other natural world-ending disasters, the planet is subjected to methane bubbles, solar flares, gamma ray burst and supernovas. Since all of these are occasionally occurring phenomena which may have affected earth in the past, they also get to use the Jurassic Park approach in presenting their ideas. But this disaster lacks real spectacle. The agency of doom in this case is more or less invisible so the creatures just sort of keel over without any pyrotechnics; not much of a show, however likely.

Manmade disasters show the most long-term promise for the attention of a dim-witted public; the reason being that there as many possible manmade threats to the planet as there are stars in the sky. Technology has reached a point that the general populous will believe just about any scenario involving high-tech stuff running amuck: microbes, robots, mutants, clones, nanites, satellites, chemical poisons and various pollutants of one kind or another to name a few. We mustn’t forget our old friend and really one of the most likely scenarios, nuclear annihilation. Besides the fact that we are just board to death with this particular apocalypse, it has the legs for the long term. There are thousands of H-bombs laying around and plenty of deranged megalomaniacs supported by their adoring cult followers to provide fodder for this venerable old standby. The main problem is that despite the predictions of Nuclear Winter, without an all out exchange of our atomic arsenals, the world would somehow survive and muddle along. For a disaster to be really exciting it must mean the end of life as we know it or, at least, the end of all humankind.

For a real classic disaster we have to look to the Divine. However ironic we may find it, God seems to be the expert in total destruction. Most of the world’s major religions believe that their particular God has destroyed the world at least once and in some cases, frequently. It’s safe to speculate that the reason these scenarios are so popular is that they simultaneously present the disaster while providing the means of escape. Nothing is more enjoyable to Americans in particular, than seeing other people suffer while they get off scot free. The Christian version of The Apocalypse is just such a script. The happy Saved go to heaven while all of those foreigners, fags and flag-burners get their comeuppance. The blissful outcome of all of this is a thousand years of peace that would probably prove to be among the most relentlessly boring periods in the history of the Universe. The Bible types have the advantage of already having The Flood on their side. There are also the plagues of Egypt; disasters to be sure, but small potatoes these days. There are however, other angles on the Divine Intervention theme. The most current involves the Mayan calendar which predicts the end of the world in 2012. While there isn’t much in the way of blood-red moons or creatures gnawing our flesh, there is plenty to suppose that we will all be unhappy enough for it to qualify as a major disaster if not the complete end of the world as we know it.

One disaster comes to mind that doesn’t quite fit into any of these categories - the arrival of alien beings on our planet. Sure we’ve had the War of the Worlds and some other scary rides with little green men, but the actual implications of encountering another civilization and dealing with the consequences, is perhaps just one disaster too far for the self-absorbed American public to really contemplate. It is strange to consider that the odds of this event occurring are perhaps no greater than any of the others discussed here.

We as Americans are obviously in love with disaster. If we can’t get a total destruction of mankind, then we will happily settle for California sliding into the sea, (you can’t help but think that this is a favorite among Southern Baptists,) New York awash in the Atlantic, or Florida totally blown away. This leaves us with the question, “Why all the interests in End of the World” scenarios right now? The range of speculation on this question is almost as varied as the kinds of doomsdays so far imagined. The insecurity now manifest in many Americans, who were until 9/11, happily cocooned inside their middle-American bubble, is one answer. This rude awakening has required a re-examination of the current world political order. This is a subject so alien to the average American that even recognizing its existence is disorienting. Because of America’s unique history and its native brand of Protestantism, it is most likely preferable for us to imagine a total destruction of the planet than to admit that they have no idea what makes the rest of the world tic; or worse still, actually doing something about it.

If Apocalypse is a metaphor for punishment, then some might argue that Doomsday is a subconscious admission of our collective guilt. It is not hard to find reasons for the American public to feel guilty. Americans have redefined the word “excess” on almost every front. From the individual Americans consumption of massive amounts of food to the excessive use of energy and raw materials, we as a nation, are now the unparalleled gluttons in all of history. There is also nothing like an unjustified war to prick the subconscious. If that wasn’t enough, the concern about the world’s deteriorating environment might now just be starting to sink into the zeitgeist of even the most happily dumb American. Since the religious Right has pitched its tent on an anti-environmentalism platform for the last ten years, the return of Jesus might turn out to be the best short-term outcome they could hope for. The obvious demise of the petroleum economy and the rise of corporate globalism are trends so disorienting that most of us can’t bare to live with the idea of it let alone the thought living through it. We would rather be extinct than admit just how wrong we have been about so many things for so long.

My favorite explanation for our self-destructive impulse is that it’s a sort of Jungian manifestation of all of humankinds collective will. So fed up are we with the entrenched lack of progress for the last forty years on just about every front, that we might as well give up and all go out with a bang. What’s really worrying is the possibility of it all becoming a gigantic self-fulfilling prophecy where the obsession with the end simply justifies the madness that could lead us there.

Of course it would be remiss to neglect Americas favorite scapegoat in examining such an important question. Since almost all of the worlds ills have been blamed on them, it seems only logical to accuse the sixties generation and baby boomers in general, of manifesting their own mortality issues as a big budget, special effects disaster epic. If not the greatest generation, then at least the biggest, we boomers are the most self-aware, self-obsessed, polarized generation since they started keeping records. It only stands to reason that if we can’t teach the world how to sing our song, then nothing less than the total annihilation of the planet will suffice as our epitaph.

walworth