Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb

I usually like Ron Rosenbaum's essays. His column at the New York Observer was called "The Edgy Enthusiast" for a good reason; I like his energy, and his willingness to pursue a subject into some rare and odd realms. He's able to do a piece on, say, Yale's Skull and Bones society, speculate on what its odd legend does to the members who eventually run a lot of the country, and avoid falling into conspiracy-theory bullshit. He seems to enjoy writing about _other_ enthusiasts, and two of his books, _Explaining Hitler_ and _The Shakespeare Wars_, are more about the history of scholarship about those men. (He's also been instrmental in getting Dimitri Nabokov to publish the index cards containing his father Vladimir's notes for his last novel.) 

He's got a piece at _Slate_ discussing what he sees as a new wave of "nuke porn," novels and stories about nuclear war and its aftermath. "The new nuke porn is hard-core, more graphic and full-frontal than the Cold War version of the genre. Instead of the anticipatory excitement (Fail-Safe, Strangelove) or the post-coital tristesse (On the Beach) of First Era nuke porn, we get real-time blast-burns and melting flesh. There was always an erotic component to apocalyptic literature—those end-of-the-world sects were notorious for their doom-fueled orgiastic behavior—but I always wondered why most nuke porn was about looking forward to the approaching act or looking back on its consummation but rarely about looking directly at it..."

Later on, ther's a comment about post-apock cannibalism, which Rosenbaum sees as a particular aspect of new nuke-porn, as in Cormac McCarthy's _The Road_ and William Fortschen's _One Second After:

"One of the things they come upon—and you know it's coming and dread its coming; there's almost a kind of pornographic buildup to this unbearable money shot—is an act of cannibalism so horrific I refuse to describe it further. [...] But then two years later, cannibalism showed up again in [One Second After], and it occurred to me that cannibalism may be a unifying theme of the new nuke porn. Like The Road, One Second After envisions the time after a blast, though by contrast it offers a "happy" ending. (Only 80 percent of the residents in the post-nuclear community he focuses on die.) [...] In this case, the crippled government's failure to secure the food supply in a post-EMP situation results in a descent into savagery by many across the ravaged countryside, and despite the attempts of ordinary folk to do the right thing for the sake of the whole, the peaceful home-folks are menaced by a rampaging mob that kills and eats all humans in its path. 

Why cannibalism here and in McCarthy? I think it has something to do with self-consumption: We did this to ourselves. Our appetite for power is what caused us to create the equations for the nuclear weapons that will consume us. We consumed ourselves."

I think Rosenbaum misses a few things in favor of continuing a "literary" association of fiery nuclear death, porn, "money shots," and the "poetic" interpretation of "we consumed ourselves." Not that these are wrong, or are misleading. It's just that I come away with other ideas. 

I've said this before, but I've always seen apocalypse and post-apocalypse stories as a kind of wish-fulfillment. Nobody reads these things and thinks that they're going to be one of the people who _die_; we read them because we want to see a lot of our everyday bullshit swept away, so we can have lives of adventure while still getting to use all the stuff we have right now: cars, buildings, weapons, and all the rest. Every decision we make will be _important_ in the way that our current everyday decisions _aren't_, and of course, we want to think of ourselves as competent, capable, intelligent, skilled campers. Or in post-Rapture religious novels, as participants in the biggest morality play of all time. Or in survivalist fiction, as ultraviolent badasses who don't struggle with that "morality" stuff. 

You could probably create a revealing psychological taxonomy with apocalypse fiction. _On the Beach_ seemed to appeal to Puritans who felt that self-flagellation over collective guilt was only right and just. Stephen King once said that _The Stand_ was like _Lord of the Rings_ in an American setting, and he's right, but he had to wipe out 99.9% of the world to create that particular crusade. The Zombie Apocalypse is pretty self-aware of itself; George Romero's _Dawn of the Dead_ played the thirst for adventure for laughs, and it was pretty overt in showing how its characters got off on _owning a mall_. 

Okay, cannibalism. It's been a marker of primitiveness (all those cartoons of boiled missionaries, the scummy rednecks of _The Texas Chainsaw Massacre_) and of extreme deprivation under horrible circumstances (the Donner Party and the Franklin Expedition in Dan Simmons' _The Terror_), or as an easy satire on conquest, or power, savagery under a facade, or just not being a vegetarian (_Ravenous_, _Parents_). The pseudo-cleverness of "consuming ourselves" is nice, but really, it's mainly the marker for how much civilization has been wiped away, and how desperate people are to survive. That's pretty much how McCarthy uses it in _The Road_, which can be read as a "cautionary tale," as a bleak existentialist tragedy, or as an adventure novel. 

On the other hand, Fortschen (who's collaborated with Newt Gingrich on a novel or two) comes out of the Jerry Pournelle/Tom Clancy school, which are "cautionary tales" only in the sense that they're encouraging us to want it all to happen. So he's going to be focused not only on the nuts and bolts, but the prestressed concrete, the cell-phone scramble algorithms, the technological capabilities of particular terrorist groups, their internal structures, interrogation techniques, the phenomenal training of elite military units, tough guys joking about rag-heads and how liberals can't run civilization... and this is where we get those interesting mixes of technological expertise mixed with fantasy xenophobia. Yes, Tom Clancy really did name a character "Ali bin Sheik," and Pournelle's _Lucifer's Hammer_ has black soldiers embracing cannibalism within a few months of a few comet strikes. Maybe ethnology's a tougher subject than engineering for some people. 

(And being _eaten_ is one of those fears that hits certain unique buttons about one's ego. It's not just a fear of dying or even if violent death: being reduced to food negates everything _else_ about you. I mean, here you are, an intelligent, educated person, you care about your family, you've got this neat skill-set and a career and you want to _matter_ to people... isn't it more than bleak to wind up as, basically, _food_ for something else? If we're going to imagine someone who treats us like cattle, who consumes us literally or metaphorically, we don't want to think it'll be grubby inbred rural fuckwits, or grubby vulgar rich people of the Leona Helmsley sort. If we're going to be consumed, it had better be by someone with all the "superior" signifiers, like glamour and court intrigue and supernatural intelligence and refinement and nobility and good taste in wines. Like vampires, a guild of lycanthropes, or Hannibal Lecter-- you know, verifiably superior Apex Predators. So we don't look like _easy_ prey.)

So while Rosenbaum sees these themes as something new, I really don't; they've always been there, and maybe they're getting more emphasis these days.