The Many Deaths of America

This is the end, beautiful friend
This is the end, my only friend
The end of our elaborate plans
The end of ev'rything that stands
The end

--- Jim Morrison, "The End" (excerpt)

My first experience with the total destruction of America was back in grade school, with "air raid drills", rumblings on TV and radio about the "nuclear arms race", and -- best of all -- fall-out shelters. Fall-out shelters were for the early Fifties what home spas are now -- everyone had to have one, and there was stiff competition as to whoever had the biggest, strongest, deepest... the one with the best ventilation and filter system... the most dried and canned food... etc. It was a real status thing. (I wonder what people are doing with all those old fall-out shelters now. Raising artisanal mushrooms, perhaps? If you know, please share.)

In any case, what I'm trying to say is that there is nothing new about "terror" -- we lived with it every day, and I suspect that had a lot to do with the 1960s. People who had grown up with "duck and cover" decided, the hell with the system that had exposed us to such delights -- to hell with their world view, their priorities, their politics, their uptightness, and what not. And to hell with their "reality" -- hence the rising tide of "drug abuse" and alternative lifestyles.

But that wasn't the end of "the end", oh no. The next thing-after-which-nothing-will-ever-again-be-the-same was Vietnam. And sure enough, Vietnam, along with everything that went with it, certainly "morphed" American society into something other than what it had been before -- but the point is, it still existed. It survived in a new, modified form. What was the next "end of everything"? Well, AIDS certainly merits mention, especially since it was supposed to spread into the general population like the Black Death, and render vast stretches of the U.S. depopulated, with hapless cows wandering about, mooing to be milked. Well, that never happened either. It was discovered (read: admitted) that, in order to get AIDS, you had to do some very specific things of your own volition, and unless you did those things -- with rare exceptions -- you weren't going to get AIDS. And this was even after the definition of what constituted "AIDS" had been broadened to include a case of the sniffles, and hangnails.

Ah, but let us not forget that, at about the same time, we were blessed with a sort of mini-Dark Ages in the form of the Carter administration, and _that_ was supposed to be the end of everything -- militarily, diplomatically, economy-wise, and so on. But fortunately a dude named Reagan showed up and put Carter and all his brain-damaged cronies on a sealed train back to Georgia, and we all started to feel much better almost immediately. This was the same Reagan who also managed to defuse one of the other major "this is the end" factors, namely Soviet communism and its associated militaristic belligerence. This, in turn -- with a few minor glitches like the S&L crisis, another economic "end of everything" that turned out not to be -- led to our brief respite from history in the form of the Clinton administration, which was America's spring break in Fort Lauderdale.

But, as fate would have it, the rest of the world wasn't content to let us just chill out. Along came 9-11, with its own claim to be "the end of everything", and yes, for a few hours it seemed like it just might be -- until we realized that the terrorists had run out of planes, and of terrorists able to fly them. But the damage was done, and we are now forced to live under an oppressive police state, that tracks our every move and monitors all of our phone calls, e-mails, and bubble gum purchases, all for our own good. Or are we? I mean, honestly, how much does the average schmuck feel that his "civil rights" have been "eroded" by the post-9-11 constraints? For that matter, how often did he use his civil rights to the full extent _before_ 9-11? Seems to me that if you don't travel by plane, you basically wouldn't notice a thing. As as for "Internet privacy" -- pardon my indulgent chuckle -- it never existed, does not now exist, and never will. You put your mess out there on the Net, and it's public property, baby. Just accept that, live with it, and keep on truckin'. Oh, certainly, the "post-9-11" world is different -- but not in the ways most people seem to believe. The main impact, in my opinion, was that it solidified political, social, and economic alignments that were already in place. In that sense, it provided a new setting for our foreign policy which could very well last for generations -- and will, if John McCain has anything to do with it.

And that brings us up to the present day, with its plethora of world-ending events and trends. "But this time it's different!" This time it's a "perfect storm". Never before have we had to deal with terrorism _and_ the declining dollar, _and_ the subprime mortgage meltdown, and the Social Security crisis, and the health care crisis, and the autism epidemic, and global warming, and catastrophic declines in fisheries, beehives, tortillas... expensive oil... "frankenfoods"... exotic ailments imported from the Third World on airplanes and tramp steamers... the list goes on and on and on, like the drumbeat that always seems to accompany the trip to the guillotine in the tumbrel. And yet I ask -- does it really "feel" like things are that much worse now than they've been at any number of times in the past? Are people now panicking and putting everything they have into krugerrands and freeze-dried survival foods, and moving to the Northern Rockies, the way they actually _were_ doing during the Carter years? Or are we just too fond of griping? It is, after all, the national pastime -- never so much as right now, during an election year. Are the cities burning? Well, they were back in the late 60s. Are our politicians getting knocked off on a regular basis? Well, they were back then. I'm not saying we don't have plenty of challenges these days -- and I'm not saying that our society doesn't suffer from some ailments that may well turn out to be fatal. But it has shown remarkable -- yea, miraculous -- durability in the past, and might well continue to do so. We know our weaknesses all too well -- but do we really know our strengths? I consider that a basically unexplored area.

And as someone said -- "Always assume you'll survive. You'll only be wrong once."