Bring Back Nuclear Terror!
by modern living editor Jason Capodimonte
Did we really need to hear Céline Dion sing "At Last"? Of course by recording this song Mme Dion demonstrated exemplary courage. Not every singer is willing to enter into a comparison with Etta James. But Mme Dion's version pales beside Ms James' definitive one. Why bother?
Popular culture is always addicted to the derivative, but contemporary popular culture has taken this addiction to an extreme. Movies are based on old television shows, old movies are remade, old songs are covered.
High culture has become derivative, too. Painting has become a collection of pointless variations on Andy Warhol (pointless because Andy made the point already).
Architecture is derivative. Twenty-first century buildings are tricked out with nineteenth century details and architects think that's cool. Modernist architecture had its shortcomings, but at least it was a response to changing conditions in the building trade. Post-modernist architecture is simply a substitution of déjà vu for novelty.
Politics is derivative – of freaking wrestling. In the homeland of NEW IMPROVED HEAD the current political highlight is a slanging match between Jean "The Boss" Chrétien and...and nobody, actually. But then the slanging matches on wrestling broadcasts tend to be one-sided. As we go to press we are waiting to see if anyone will take up The Boss's challenge to a Shawinigan Death Match in the House of Commons. In the United States politics has been reduced to a ritual slanging match between The Big Conservative and The Big Liberal.
How did all this happen?
A couple of years ago Tempura Catchpole wrote in these pages:
Canadian young people are in trouble. Who among us baby boomers has not been shocked by how thoroughly they have rejected the sound principles of the past and instead chase after wills-of-the-wisp peddled by billionaire hucksters?Yes, the old values of sex, drugs, and rock and roll had their drawbacks. Nevertheless, other baby boomer values promoted self-improvement and the acceptance of diversity. The society in which the first baby boomers came of age was a lot less tolerant than the one in which we live now, and a lot less interesting, and baby boomers and pre-boomers did something about that.
But what do young people value these days? They value money, ladies and gentlemen. They want to invest. And, horror of horrors, they want to save for their retirement!
Of course we are shocked by youth's abdication of its traditional role in society and its adoption of the middle-aged one. However, this abdication also explains why originality and creativity have disappeared.
When you value money and security above all else, originality and creativity go begging. Why come up with new ideas when you can make money by selling old tested ones to a public whose education has been directed not to the development of critical or comparative thought which might lead them to question the value of your undertaking, but rather to the acquisition of strings of initials which, they think, will help them get a job?
Tempura attributed the decline in values to the unprecedented success of the stock market in the 1990s. In the baby boomers' youth the stock market was stagnant, and they had trouble finding jobs. We forget that youth unemployment was far higher in the baby boomers' youth than it is today. The baby boomers could not be seduced by the cult of success. The people born after the baby boom, though, have until recently been living in a financial dreamland.
The world, young people think, is benign. Another reason they hold this belief is that unlike older people they didn't grow up with the threat of nuclear war hanging over their heads.
In the old days you didn't worry as much about your career because there was a good chance the place you worked at or did business in might have disappeared by lunch hour, along with most of the business establishments and homes around it for miles. If by chance you escaped death in the initial attack you then faced the prospect of death by radiation sickness. There were also a lot of pre-boomers around who had seen what a large-scale conventional war can do, and who were even less likely to embrace the idea of a stable world which would shower favours on them.
In a world characterized by economic stagnation and fear of horrible death people were more likely to focus on making their life more bearable. They weren't willing to sacrifice the present for the sake of an unlikely future. As another article here points out, to the popular mind the Fifties were trite, respectable, and boring. People have forgotten the many serious changes in society which occurred then, such as the battles against censorship and against racial discrimination. The Sixties are looked on as a comical time when people wore funny clothes and smoked a lot of dope while contriving cockeyed plans to save the world, but in fact the things people fought for in the 1960s – equality of the sexes, for example, or the right to vote even if you weren't a respectable white person – are today considered indispensable attributes of society.
In the Fifties and Sixties, people weren't fooling around. They didn't say they had issues with something, they went out and tried to knock it down. This attitude spilled over into the arts, too, which flourished in those two decades as artists also overthrew restrictions which limited their art.
Of course, we have to misrepresent these periods because our own obsession with security. We still, despite our own inability to do so, admire people who sacrifice themselves for the common good or battle against the might of entrenched authority. The idea that there were recent periods in which ordinary people just like us were prepared to do those things would be troubling to our self-respect.
Well, the stock market is doing its part. No one's planning to double his money every three years any more. Now all we have to do is to bring back nuclear terror.
I urge all of you to write to your Members of Parliament, Congressmen, députés, and so on to demand the resumption of nuclear testing and the rebuilding of our invaluable nuclear arsenals. Forget this arms reduction rubbish. For one thing, no one observes those treaties, anyway. We're still waiting for the United States and Russia to get round to honouring the SALT treaty signed back in the reign of Bush the Elder.
We need a return to the arms race. We need the daily example of the United States and Russia testing 50 and 60-megaton bombs in a mad rush to blow up the biggest bomb. We need nuclear brinksmanship.
I mean, why do you think John F. Kennedy is so revered today? It's because of a little stratagem of his called bringing the world to the brink of nuclear war over Cuba. After he pulled that one off we had to believe he was brilliant, because if he wasn't then the existence of the human race had just been threatened by the criminal acts of a madman.
A valuable side effect of nuclear terror will be an increase in employment. The fallout shelter trade will experience a rebirth, only this time with infomercials. Civil defence will be hiring, too, as will the siren manufacturers.
So write today. Do it for yourselves, do it for your children, do it for your country, but above all do it to restore originality and creativity to their rightful places on the theatre and television screens of our great nations.
Bring Back Nuclear Terror! © Coolth, 2002
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