Monday, August 22, 2005

Night of the Long Knives

The end of the world will be a disappointment. It’ll be a frat party at a small Midwestern liberal arts college: damp walls and listless drunks, poor lighting and a thumping baseline, guests slowly dwindling through the night until nothing’s left but a half-finished keg of Miller Lite and a few shucked condoms writhing in the shag carpet.

We have lost the capability to obliterate life on this planet impressively. Mutual Assured Destruction is a cozy memory, the days when it was a reasonable possibility that all life on the planet would end in one flash of light are gone. Now the most we can hope for is a biological plague to wipe us out, but without any real panache. Just months and months of increasing body counts and fraying infrastructure until finally the wheels of civilization fall off and the survivors scatter to the winds. Or maybe it’ll be unchecked environmental degradation slowly but steadily choking us to death on our own waste. Either way, it’s Armageddon without the money shot.

What made the Cold War so charismatic was that whole Dr. Strangelove promise that if things went bad, they were going all the way bad, and quick. One second you’d be watering your lawn or pledging allegiance to the flag, the next, you’d be a permanent shadow on the wall behind you. The planet would be awash in the man-made majesty of blooming mushroom clouds and radiation winds. Every species of every plant and animal ever catalogued by man and the thousands we never even knew about would go with us. Nothing left but a fried crust and maybe the cockroaches. Every destructive urge ever harbored in the secret human heart would find a moment of exultant apotheosis. It was a nice thought, comforting in a way: if we did somehow succeed in destroying ourselves, we would take down the whole planet in the process. None of those inferior beings would get to graze on the grass of our graves. No hypothetical future civilization would be able to look back on our folly with bemused dismay. We would be spared one of the great agonies of every poor bastard who has died until this point in time; we wouldn’t have to worry about missing anything. We would have the last laugh.

Now, when the end comes, it’s pretty much sure not to be with a bang, but rather the damned, dispiriting whimper T.S. Eliot warned us about. Ebola, smog, AIDS, medical waste, maybe some creative application of smallpox bacilli, one way or the other, there will be no painless, momentary triumph of the collective death urge; just millions of terrified lonely ends to millions of terrified lonely lives, bodies piling up like cordwood before the dwindling numbers of glassy-eyed survivors. And worst of all, the planet will have the last laugh. Weeds shooting up through cracks in the asphalt of deserted cities, deer grazing in the produce isles of vacant suburban supermarkets, and maybe, somewhere in the distant future, a group of wiser beings smiling crookedly at our non-biodegradable residue. My guess is that they won’t judge the Hardees California Raisins commemorative figurines kindly.

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