Category Archives: Cultural Cynicism

Apocalyptic Nostalgia

I guess our country hasn’t had a good panic for awhile, so it’s good to see the impeccable Wall Street Journal stepping up to the plate with "Load Up the Pantry", the ROI column from Brett Arrends.Dead Bees

These kinds of stories always make me feel nostalgic. It seems like only yesterday that we were all going to starve to death because all the bees in the world were vanishing, and the price of honey and everything else was going to skyrocket. And it wasn’t long before that, surely, that we were all going to die from HN51, the apocalyptic Chicken with Avian Flueavian flu which was going to mutate and become airborne ANY DAY NOW!

Of course, I grew up in the 80s, when the world trembled because the US and the Soviet Union were going to engage in nuclear Armageddon ANY DAY NOW. I remember books like War Day by Whitley Streiber and James Kunetka, one of a veritable river of post-nuclear holocaust stories. And the movies, of course, like Testament and Threads, and, of course, the immortal The Day AfterRed Dawn was also born from this ultimate fear as well. I missed the great Communist invasion scares of the fifties, though, which I truly regret. By the time I came of age, people weren’t building fallout shelters anymore; we all knew that a nuclear war would kill just about everyone and everything on the planet.

There was also the early part of the current millennium, of course. Just after the terrorist attacks on 9/11/2001, I seem to recall everyone being afraid of more imminent terrorist strikes. And who can forget the trippy white powder scare? Heck, a flight I was taking from Seattle to Sacramento was delayed several hours because someone found a little white powder in the galleyOMG Nuclear War! (turned out to be non-dairy powdered Anthrax-infected letter, the source of 2001creamer, if I remember correctly). That was a pretty good one, I think, because it got the Post Office sending out notices to everyone on how to properly treat their mail, just in case it had anthrax residue in it, and spurred an explosion in the antibiotics market. Never mind that there were what, a dozen incidents of anthrax attacks? Less? More?

But the imminent apocalypse I really look back on with fond memories is the Y2K scare. That was back in the heady days of the mid- to late-90s, of course, when all the computers in the world were going to reset to 1/1/00 instead of 1/1/2000, thus triggering disasters at all levels: nuclear missiles would go flying out of their silos in the Midwest, cores from nuclear power plants were going to melt straight through to the middle of the earth, and electronic devices everywhere, from automobiles to your toaster oven, were going to fail and possibly explode. Every electronic device carried a "Y2K Compliant" sticker. Heck, I even bought an electric toothbrush that was "Y2K Compliant". Who knows what would have happened if I had bought one that wasn’t? It might have grabbed on to my teeth and yanked them out by the roots.

To be fair, there were thousands of computer programmers and experts who pored over millions of lines of archaic code fixing the Y2K error wherever they found them, and these women and men very likely prevented some might horrific errors from happening. But nuclear missile launches? Exploding toasters? Essential reading in 1999Airplanes falling out of the sky? Not to mention people stockpiling rations because the nation’s infrastructure was going to collapse (freeways and highways not being any more Y2K-compliant than the long-haul trucks that drove on them). I think Y2K just appealed to a lot of people simply because of its resemblance to a relatively common horror movie scenario, that of the old friend who turns out to be a madman. We depend on computers so much, wouldn’t it be exciting to see what would happen if they turned on us? In terms of apocalyptic potential, nothing could beat Y2K.

At the time, I was also interested in conspiracy theories (as in, reading them for entertainment value, not believe in them), and I found a number that involved Y2K and the government planning on establishing martial law. According to one theory that made the rounds, Wal*Mart had been coopted by the US government to deliver signs that read "This area under Martial Law". My favorite of these theories involved George Bush (Sr., not Jr.) using his "New World Order" speech of the early 90s as justification to having the UN disarm every citizen of the US in preparation for an invasion either by the UN or the aliens.

That’s why I think that Y2K was the best apocalypse we’ve ever seen, and while I salute the Wall Street Journal for their efforts to revive that same sense of widespread panic, I don’t think they’re going to come close. And while I pray for the resolution of the food related violence in impoverished nations and I hope that the ethanol industry comes to a screeching halt sooner rather than later, I will take any stories about ordinary Americans starving to death in the streets with a grain of salt.

While there’s still grains of salt available for us, of course.

Personally, I’ve still got my money on a zombie apocalypse. If you were smart, you would too.

Harry Potter, Anarchist

As anyone who has grabbed a stick and shouted "Lumos!" knows, the Harry Potter books are infallible guides to casting magical spells and to Dark Magic, and are thus rightly feared by the Religious Right.  But in addition to the magic which kids learn from reading the books (and the more dangerous notions that kids should be thinking for themselves, learning loyalty and bravery, and so on), there lurks yet another theme which should be considered just as dangerous, but which I’ve yet to see addressed in any of the anti-Potter literature.

I’m speaking, naturally, of the revolutionary anti-government positions advocated by Harry Potter and his gang of anarchists.

More beneath the fold (just to avoid any potential spoilers).

Continue reading Harry Potter, Anarchist

Holiday Snarkiness

My wife pointed me at this site for a song called “The Cat Carol”. The lyrics of the song go, in part:

When Santa came by near the end of the night,
the reindeer started to cry.
They found the cat lying there in the snow,
and they could see that she had died.

Basically, the song is about a cat who, on a cold snowy night, cries to get into a family home for warmth and comfort. The human family, evil bastards that they are, don’t even hear the cat’s cries, and she’s left in the snow. But then a tiny mouse comes by and the cat, instead of catching and eating the mouse like any sensible predator would do, decides to protect the mouse and keep it warm. When Santa comes by, the cat has died, but the mouse is still alive. And Santa says to the mouse:

“On Christmas Eve she gave you her life,
the greatest gift of them all.”

The entire lyrics of the song can be found on the Cat Carol Website.

Personally, I don’t think the song goes far enough. With just a little tweaking, one could make this the Utterly Perfect Christmas Song, and no one would have to die. We can keep the mouse, but the cat gets to live because a puppy comes along to keep the cat warm.

But this doesn’t end our quest to turn this into the perfect Christmas song. Remembering the true “reason for the season”, we can have a tiny little child come along to keep the puppy warm, who keeps the cat warm, who keeps the mousie warm (and I think the mouse ought to be keeping someone else warm, too, just to keep the Circle of Life going). Can you guess the name of the tiny child who keeps the puppy warm? That’s right, it’s the Baby Jeebus!
And then maybe someone in the house sees the error of their ways and prays to God to keep the tiny baby warm (because in the world of this sort of smarmy glurge, people respond to tragedy not by helping out the unfortunates but rather by praying), and then angels descend to keep the Baby Jeebus warm.

Could be, though, that I’m just a bit more cynical than is healthy this time of year.