Christmayapocalypse

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The Syfy Channel (I hate that name!) has been showing winter-themed disaster movies this month: “Ice Quakes,” “Ice Twisters,” “Snowmageddon,” and most notably, “The Twelve Disasters of Christmas.” This last one was best of all: a filmization of the Mayan apocalypse that’s scheduled for tomorrow, Friday, December 21, 2012.

 

 

Perfect!

 

 

We’ve all been joking for some time about the world coming to an end on December 21. And won’t we be all giggly if it turns out to be true!

 

 

But I think the end of the calendar year, and the darkness of the season, always makes us gloomy and fatalistic.

 

 

I noticed the other day that the asteroid Toutatis passed close to the Earth. Partner told me recently that a new asteroid just buzzed past Earth – closer to Earth than the Moon, in fact. The asteroid was approximately 120 yards wide – about the size of the asteroid that caused the Tunguska disaster in Russia in the early 1900s.

 

 

So many little perils! So many things that might happen to ruin our day!

 

 

So, while you’re waiting for the end of the world, a little traveling music from Elvis Costello:

 

 

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This crazy weather we've been having

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It's late November. And there are rhododendrons and magnolias, and lilies, and roses, blooming in our neighborhood. In New England.

I really didn't notice until about a week ago, when I noticed a few rhododendron blossoms here and there. Then I noticed the magnolia trees on the Brown campus were budding out, just the way they usually do in March and April, with those huge obscene buds. And what do you know? They popped.

It's colder and rainy today, and it will probably freeze tonight. So the trees have wasted a lot of energy for nothing.

This isn't really new. Two years or so ago, I was in downtown Providence around this time of year, and the cherry trees by Kennedy Plaza were in bloom.

In New England!

I first arrived in Rhode Island in 1978, six months after the big blizzard of that year. The winter of 1978/9 was snowy and bitterly cold; I got frostbite on my knuckles from carrying a suitcase down the street for twenty minutes without gloves on. Two years later, there was another bitterly cold winter, with wind chills down around twenty below.

Those days are past, however. We still get cold winters, but the timings are all off. The plants are confused. They're blooming in the wrong seasons, at the wrong times. Cold weather is followed by unexpected warm spells, and the plants go into panic mode, I think.

I'm no botanist, and I'm obviously no climate scientist. But things are changing, becoming more volatile. More than volatile: unpredictable.

And there's nothing to be done about it. Whether (as seems obvious to me) it's human interference, or whether it's simply part of some larger ice-age / pluvial-age / sunspot cycle, it's already begun, and nothing can stop it.

This is the grim thing about writing a blog called “FutureWorld.” I don't think the future is going to be a very nice place for the people who come after us. I don't think they'll have much to thank us for. I suspect they'll think of us pretty nastily; they'll know we did exactly what we felt like doing, and we left the place in a mess.

I'm so sorry, and I wish I could tell them so. I'm doing the stupid little bits and pieces than I can, to keep my footprint small and light. But I know that my contribution probably won't make a hell of a lot of difference.

I hope they forgive us.

This is Ursula LeGuin, in a poem written from the point of view of our descendants:

In your ending when the words were forgotten,

in your ending when the fires burned out,

in your ending when the walls fell down,

we were among you:

the children,

your children,

dying your dying to come closer,

to come into our world, to be born.

We were the sands of your sea-coasts,

the stones of your hearths. You did not know us.

We were the words you had no language for.

O our fathers and mothers!

We were always your children.

From the beginning, from the beginning,

we are your children.

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Three futures

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It is deadly to write about the future.  It's just so easy to be wrong about it.

Most of the Biblical “prophets” didn't write about the future at all; they just commented on their own times, with lots of moralizing. When they did go out on a limb and talk about the future, they dressed it up with multiheaded monsters and glowing cities and horses' bells with HOLINESS UNTO THE LORD on them. They threw in an occasional invasion or overthrow, but those are pretty safe; sooner or later, someone's bound to invade and/overthrow someone else. Voila! Prediction fulfilled.

The best futurologist I know, Alexis de Tocqueville, didn't set out write about the future; he looked at the present, unflinchingly, with great precision and insight, and wrote about it. Reading “Democracy in America,” written over 150 years ago, is like reading today's newspaper.

I can think of three main ways in which the future can unfold:

The Happy Future. This is the idea that things will get better and better as time passes. People will get smarter, and also wiser. Bad things will happen less often.

Variations:

• The neverending road upward. Things just get better and better and better without end. Think of the end of the Narnia books. Also Teilhard de Chardin, though (speaking as a backslidden Catholic) I have a hard time with him.
• The apocalyptic eucatastrophe. The ultimate happy ending, usually preceded by an Armageddon-type disaster. Also usually preceded and accompanied by lots of religious foofaraw. Usually also accompanied with the final destruction of your enemies and the salvation of your friends / co-religionists.
• The mellow nirvana. Everything just sort of fades into a groovy fog. (I like this one myself.)

The Sad Future. Things get worse and worse. Stuff blows up. Stars go out. Things die.

Variations:

• The technological dystopia. We did it to ourselves. Think of the end of the first Planet of the Apes movie, or Soylent Green.
• The entropic catastrophe. The universe started with a bang, and it's been running out of steam ever since. The mainspring is winding down. One by one, the protons decay. Goodbye, protons!
• The whiz-bang hellfire catastrophe. Asteroid collisions. Black holes. Crash! Bang! Boom! Urk!

The Steady State Future. Nothing really changes. There are ups and downs, but no real progress, either upward or downward. There's no end. The universe just keeps going on and on and on.

Variations:

• The non-recurrent steady state. Best defined as “stuff happens.” A little of this, and a little of that, but none of it makes any real difference. Yawn.
• The recurrent steady state. A sort of variation of the Steady State Future, except that everything just happens over and over again. Think “Groundhog Day.” This one seems okay, until you really think about it. Then it gets screamingly awful. You know how the Buddhists talk about getting off the Wheel of Life? This is what they're talking about. You really don't want to get caught in this future. It's pretty dreadful.

I think I know which future I'd prefer.

But I'm just afraid that's not how it works.

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Yabba dabba d'oh!

 

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I hear they’ve deciphered another Mayan inscription.  This one says: WHEN FRED FLINTSTONE TURNS FIFTY, THE WORLD WILL END.

 

Seriously, Fred Flintstone just had his fiftieth birthday.  Dear God, I am older than Fred Flintstone.  And he’s a caveman.

 

I watched “The Flintstones” when it was brand-new.  I remember Fred and Barney smoking Winston cigarettes and talking about how smooth they were.  Pebbles loved her Welch's Grape Juice. I was there for Pebbles’s birth, and the night Barney and Betty found Bamm-Bamm on their doorstep.   I’m practically a member of their modern Stone Age family.

 

Partner, who is a little older than me (I won't be specific, but I do believe he rode a real dinosaur to school), remembers not liking “The Flintstones.”  They looked simple and underdrawn to him.  And, to be fair, they were. 

 

Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera were young animators working at the MGM studio back in the 1940s.  You may have heard of their first great creation: Tom & Jerry.  In the Fifties, they struck out on their own.  TV was going strong, and they recognized that TV had a great appetite for programming; cartoons were a natural. 

 

The problem with studio cartoons was that they took a long time to create.  Every cel needs to be hand-drawn and hand-painted.   If they wanted to create cartoons for TV, they had to speed the process up somehow.

 

So they did.  They simplified the characters and the animation.  They did away with delicate Disney-style drawing, and the rich backgrounds of the MGM cartoons, and the sly cultural references of the Warner Brothers cartoons.  They used stock backgrounds and minimal character movement.  They even streamlined the music.   MGM and Warner Brothers had rich musical catalogs to choose from; Warner Brothers had an extremely talented musical director/arranger named Carl Stalling, who created some of the most brilliant scene-painting music and some of the best musical pastiches in the history of the movies, period. Hanna-Barbera, on the other hand, created an all-purpose soundtrack, short snippets of action-enhancing music full of funny bassoons and trombones and piccolos, and used that music in just about every episode.

 

And ideas: well, cartoons always parodied movies and radio anyway.  Foghorn Leghorn, to take just one example, is just a cartoonization of Senator Claghorn from Fred Allen’s radio show.  So Hanna and Barbera parodied (or stole) TV characters and situations.  They took a look at “The Honeymooners” and came up with “The Flintstones.”   Huckleberry Hound is the early aw-shucks Andy Griffith.  Hokey Wolf (anyone remember him?) is Phil Silvers as Sergeant Bilko.  Yogi Bear is Art Carney as Ed Norton.

 

Joe and Bill recognized that early TV was a simple medium.  Most people were watching on small black-and-white screens.  It was much better to use easy-to-recognize characters, broad gestures, simple situations. 

 

And Joe and Bill delivered.

 

And it wasn’t bad.  There’s a wonderful clunky charm in those early HB cartoons that I still find very endearing.  But then other studios – UPA, DePatie-Freleng – broke into the market.  TVs got better, and bigger; people bought color sets.  Bad animation started looking, well, bad.   By the time you hit the late 1960s/early 1970s, the stiffness of the HB cartoons isn’t clunky and charming anymore; it’s stiff and silly-looking.

 

Fred and the rest of the Bedrock gang stayed iconic for a long time, however.  When I moved to Providence in ’78, I chose to open an account at the Old Stone Bank, which used Guess Who as a logo, and which used “Yabba Dabba Doo, Love That Bank!” as a slogan. 

 

They’ve faded over the years, as have we all.  Now we have another prime-time animated family, the Simpsons, who owe a real debt to Fred and Wilma (it’s probably no accident that the kids watch an ultra-violent cat and mouse cartoon a la Tom and Jerry on the show). 

 

But now Fred’s fifty years old.

 

The cycle is complete.

 

Grab your pterodactyl and head for the nearest exit: the end of the world is here.

 

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