I want my armageddon!

I Want My Armageddon!

“Disappointed the threat is gone/ Get nostalgic for bombing runs/
But don’t you think it’s true/ We’ll be afraid again soon?”
(From “Atomic Kid” by Versus)

Wake Up Atomic Kid

Growing up in the ’80s was strange in many respects. The same could probably be said about any decade. What the hell were kids thinking during the Holocaust or the Black Plague? A special anxiety underscored everything in the ‘80s, borne out of regular reminders that our life expectancy was in question, and a few world leaders bent on control might decide its length. We were told that our very existence could be cut short at any time.

We lived with the very real fear that civilization, as we knew it, could easily be wiped out, and we might all die under mushroom clouds. As improbable as an all-out nuclear confrontation was, the looming prospect was scary enough. From cheesy, jingoistic pap like Red Dawn and Rocky IV, to hopeful, cautionary tales like War Games, and the television mini-series The Day After that attempted to incorporate some realism, conflict with the “evil Soviet empire” and nuclear doomsday scenarios were endlessly presented in movies. Cold War propaganda saturated every aspect of popular culture.

I was raised in a Roman Catholic household. My parents aren’t ridiculously religious, although the words ridiculous and religious are pretty much synonymous in my mind. My folks insisted me and my siblings go to church every weekend, but religion wasn’t a big part of our home life. Still, I was frightened enough by the idea of atomic annihilation to pray, yes pray, it didn’t happen. It’s all I ever prayed for.

Now I understand that I am predisposed to expect the worst, it’s an unflattering but real part of my personality. That being acknowledged, I don’t think I was the only kid terrified by the nuclear arms race with all of its sensational trappings. I’m no psychologist - in fact I could probably be a case study for one - but I wonder if the idea that our future was tenuous at best had more of a long term effect on my generation’s way of thinking than anyone ever imagined. Once the possibility that we stood on the brink of nuclear destruction burrowed deep within our subconscious, did it breed a nihilism that gave rise to the so-called “slacker generation?”

I hate it when people play hot potato with blame. It’s especially infuriating when they try to duck and dodge their own responsibility by spewing ludicrous mumbo-jumbo about deep seeded psychological trauma. Therefore I would never pin my lack of direction, initiative, and accomplishments on lingering fear planted by Cold War prognostications of imminent destruction. I’ll own up to my own lazy and indecisive nature, but I’m still at a loss to explain how I developed such a bleak view of the world and the future.

I once had a college professor who suggested to me that I had unresolved abandonment issues. She wasn’t a psychology or even a religion professor; she taught acting classes. But since Method Acting was the preferred approach of the faculty at my school, some professors assumed their years of study and experience with “The Method” afforded them special insight into the minds, hearts, and motives of others. She was a very nice lady, and I have no doubt that she was trying to coax me to a “breakthrough” for my own good. At the time I was still smarting over the betrayal of a high school sweetheart, and suggested that as the cause of this pervasive fear that everything would end, and end badly at that, but she said she believed it went much deeper and farther back.

I didn’t think much more about it at the time. Later, with the help of an actual therapist, I started to consider the possibility that the great uncertainty and fear I associated with the future might be due to the fear I had growing up that my parents would divorce, and I would have to choose between the two, or maybe even be abandoned by one of them. I don’t have many memories of my maternal grandmother. Before I was too old, the dementia of Alzheimer’s disease forced her into a nursing home. But, one of my earliest memories is of her asking me whether I would choose to go with my mother or father if they ever split up.

Maybe all of my childhood fears fed each other, creating an overwhelming snowball of doubt, defeatism, and futility that eventually swallowed me like The Blob. Maybe all these questions about the future predisposed me to think of it as a dark, forbidding place. What difference does it make anyway? Some would argue that the state of the world is enough of a reason to feel like giving up.

I Want Out

Teenage Nazis walking into gay bars with hatchets to chop up “them faggots,” Muslims holding aloft signs that read, “Butcher those who mock Islam,” then decrying those who associate their religion with violence, increasingly younger mothers spiking their babies’ skulls off the sidewalk, it’s fucked up times we live in. But it’s not just the Muslims or Nazis causing problems. There’s plenty of blame to spread around, even here in “the land of the free and the home of the brave.” Scrapping the whole thing in favor of starting from scratch might not be the worst idea.

But that could start a whole other treatise I’m not going to get involved with right now. Besides, claiming that the world is an irredeemable cesspool because of what we see on the front page of the paper, or on cable news networks is a weak argument at best. It’s too easy to dismiss that sort of attitude as a lazy cop out. And the gray areas make it a slippery slope to stand on. For example, Christians would cite the movement to legalize gay marriage or to protect a woman’s right to an abortion as an example of society’s rapid deterioration, and I would sharply disagree.

We’ve been told that there is ample fire power in the world’s nuclear arsenal to blow the earth up many times over, but it’s hard to believe that it would ever come to that. I recently read the book Hiroshima by John Hersey, written in 1946. That detailed chronicle of the only use of atomic weapons on a population presents a picture that is much more difficult to handle than the idea of the whole globe blowing up at once, a picture of a world that survives and has to deal with the aftermath of a nuclear attack. Which is worse, being blown to ashes in a split-second explosion, or dying slowly from atomic fallout, and watching skin slip off of people’s hands and arms as you try to help them up?

The Lessons of Hiroshima

The nuclear threat still exists, but in a form that is perhaps even more terrifying. Politicians leverage the fear we have of rogue states or individual terrorists obtaining nuclear weapons to push agendas that make no sense, like the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Even if Saddam Hussein had any nuclear weapons, which was pure speculation, we knew for a fact that North Korea already developed missiles that could reach California. Still, we didn’t invade North Korea.

Iran has elected a president who is taking the role of Hitler of the 21st century. He’s already stated that he wants to wipe Israel off the map. So, if Iran gets its hands on nuclear weapons, it’s anybody’s guess what magnitude of devastation could be left in the wake of a chain reaction it sets off. Even in the improbable case that nuclear weapons were deployed, the earth wouldn’t explode in one massive, blinding blast. But it might be better if it did.

Imagine for a moment nuclear weapons in the hands of a terrorist. Not too long ago I read Perfect Soldiers, a book that profiled the 19 9/11 hijackers, but also examined in depth the rise of radical Islam and the cult of Bin Laden. One section details the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993. It paints the man in charge of that operation, Ramsi Youssef, as an inept, at times bumbling, character.

Youssef’s plan, if you can call it that, was so haphazard that he didn’t even pick someone to drive the rental van loaded with explosives into the Trade Center until the night before. The main reason he executed the bombing when he did was because he ran out of money. Lacking funds, it came down to do something now, or consider the time and money invested in the plot to that point a loss. So, he got someone to drive the van, and then he fled the country.

If someone like that can do the damage he did, what chance do we stand of winning “the war on terror? If somebody wants to do something badly enough, and losing their own life, as well as the lives of others, in the process is not a deterrent, it’s going to be pretty hard to stop them. They will find a way. The rise of terrorism puts a very real, very human, and unpredictable face on death and destruction that makes the cartoonish portrayal of the Soviets during the ‘80s seem oddly comforting.

At least with the Russians we knew where the threat was coming from. Now, the quiet, mild-mannered guy in khakis you see at the office every day could deliver Armageddon. Remember Sting singing; “Believe me when I say to you I hope the Russians love their children too?” Well, terrorists love their children, but think they’d be much better off as martyrs than to live with Jews.

It’s questionable whether any of the hard lessons of Hiroshima have stuck, or if the right people learned them at all. Likewise it’s difficult to swallow the popular opinion that the West won the Cold War when an undetermined number of Russian nukes might be unaccounted for. Then there’s North Korea and Iran. Maybe it’s understandable that some people would consider a meteor colliding with the earth, and taking the whole damn thing out in one fell swoop, desirable when contrasted with the protracted war on terror.

“…maybe we have to break everything to make something better out of ourselves.”

We were promised Armageddon. But people regularly confuse Armageddon with the Apocalypse. The Apocalypse refers to a cataclysm that destroys evil forces, and raises the righteous, whoever they may be, into power. It implies a rebirth, a rebuilding, a fresh start. Armageddon is simply a decisive battle between good and evil forces, and correctly or not, is often associated with end game.

A rebirth doesn’t sound too bad, until you get into that sticky stuff about good and evil, and who or what makes the judgments. As you may have already gathered, I’ve been doing a lot of reading lately, and my impressionable mind has been buzzing. I bought some books about Zen Buddhism. It has been brought to my attention by several people that I have a real problem living in the present moment, and my fixations on the past and fears about the future cause me a lot of distress.

I’ve been trying to read the material with an open mind, but so far it seems like hooey to me. Maybe it should worry me more than it does that I find it easier to identify with Chuck Palahniuk’s novel Fight Club than with Zen Buddhist texts. I won’t say that the book version of Fight Club is better than the movie adaptation. Both are excellent and just different enough to stand on their own merits. It might be too much for high school kids to handle, but I firmly believe Fight Club should be taught in college literature classes.

“What Tyler says about being the crap and the slaves of history, that’s how I felt. I wanted to destroy everything beautiful I’d never have. Burn the Amazon rain forests. Pump chlorofluorocarbons straight up to gobble the ozone. Open the dump valves on supertankers and uncap offshore oil wells. I wanted to kill the fish I couldn’t afford to eat, and smother the French beaches I’d never see.
“I wanted the whole world to hit bottom.
“For thousands of years, human beings had screwed up and trashed and crapped on this planet, and now history expected me to clean up after everyone.”

That quotation, as well as the one that heads this section, are from Fight Club. Would it be better to bulldoze the whole damn world to rebuild it than to piss the planet’s resources away little by little over a long period of time? That depends on your perspective, whether you see the glass half empty or half full, whether you prefer a long, slow death or a quick snuff. Is it better to burn out than to fade away? At the very least it’s interesting to think about.

And anyone who thinks we aren’t trashing and crapping on this planet, killing it slowly, is either stupid or in denial. All of those who naysay the effects of Global Warming should come to Buffalo for a while. The seasons are clearly shifting; weather patterns are changing. A city that has been known for its snow and cold has had precious little of either this year. It’s snowing today, but we had our warmest January in 50 years.

The Buffalo area has had days in January 2006 when the mercury reached past 50 degrees. A few weeks ago I was out running around in jeans and a sweatshirt. I’m no historian or meteorologist, but it seems to me that Buffalo winters have been arriving later and with considerably less fury of late. That’s just the tip of the iceberg – which is melting by the way – as far as evidence that Global Warming is a very real phenomenon goes.

Does any of this, as frightening as the possible consequences are, mean that we should tear everything down and start from a clean slate? Do current events suggest that quick and decisive obliteration of the human race is preferable to any likely scenarios of the future? Probably not, but it’s interesting to think about where nihilistic views come from. Did the anxiety of the nuclear arms race in the ‘80s convince a generation they had no future, so there was no point in doing anything? How the hell do I know?

I probably just have too much time on my hands and a hyperactive imagination. But, that’s the beauty of a blog. I don’t have to provide any answers. I don’t have to back anything up with too many facts or research. I can just throw the ideas out there for you to think about, if you want to.