Here Comes the Big One (Again)
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Here Comes the Big One (Again) |
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When I was a child, I had three major fears that haunted
me every day and caused me countless hours of impassioned worry:
I grew during the dangerous and rather paranoid era known as the Cold War. The threat of The Big One was what kept the cold war going and our childhood dreams scary. I am old enough to remember air raid drills in school. At random moments, we would be ordered to "Assume The Position", which meant we had to get under our desks and bury our heads between our knees, fetal style. The idea (I think) was that perhaps we might be able to protect our little bodies and survive if the school building fell down on us. Of course, after we got older and wiser, we realized that the only real value to Assuming The Position when The Big One came was that it made it easier for us to kiss our asses goodbye.
I also remember fallout shelters, which were small rooms people would build in their homes where the whole family would go to live for some time period after The Big One exploded. Fallout shelters were usually underground and would be filled with enough food, water, flashlights, decks of cards and Ouija boards to last throughout a nuclear winter. There were probably secret stashes of alcohol and condoms in them, too, but that stuff was a little advanced for me to wonder about at the time.
One day I went over to my friend Paul's house and he showed me the fallout shelter his father had built in the basement. It was stacked to the rafters with cases and cases of canned tuna. No bread and no mayonnaise, just tuna. He'd even remembered to include a can opener. I ran home, panicked that we had no similar hiding place in our house and our whole family would have nowhere to Assume The Position when The Big One made its inevitable appearance. Sobbing hysterically, I cried out, "Dad, Dad! Paul's father built a fallout shelter full of canned tuna and if we don't have one we're all gonna die!" Dad's response was brief and to the point: "Paul's father is nuts!"
As the years went by, the atomic bomb became the hydrogen bomb and then we just called them nuclear weapons. You didn't have to understand anything about physics to know that each succeeding bomb was bigger and could kill more people than the one before it. Pretty soon, we had to start keeping track of which nations had nuclear capability. It was an ever-expanding list.
But once that nuclear list became bigger, an interesting thing happened. The world didn't become more dangerous, it became safer. Why? The concept was called nuclear deterrence (also known by the very ominous phrase "Mutually Assured Destruction" or MAD.) If you and your enemy both have the ability to wipe each other out, says the MAD theory, no one will want to be the first to press the button that would lead to the elimination of all life on earth.
After a while, we didn't hear as much about The Big One. Wars came and went, but The Big One didn't make an appearance. Nobody used The Big One in Korea, Vietnam or the Gulf War, even when (as in the case of Vietnam) the objectives of one or both sides weren't met. The only guy still talking about The Big One was Redd Foxx playing Fred Sanford on "Sanford and Son" when he used to stagger around, holding his chest and screaming, "This is it! Here comes The Big One! Elizabeth, I'm coming to see you!"
But there's a fallacy with the MAD theory. It only works if you assume that everybody wants to stay alive. If your enemy doesn't mind killing himself, Mutually Assured Destruction becomes assured. Kiss your ass goodbye.
We received a nasty reminder of that on 9/11, didn't we? It wasn't the Big One but it's as close to it as we've seen in my lifetime. Throw in the still-unsolved anthrax attacks and we're talking about some serious damage. You can kill thousands of people by flying jets into buildings but you can kill millions with anthrax if you do it right.
And The Big One hasn't disappeared. Pakistan and India, both armed with nuclear weapons, are currently in the midst of a testosterone-soaked pissing contest over the city of Kashmir. The "experts" say that a nuclear war there would kill 17 million people in the area. All I know about Kashmir is what I learned from listening to the Led Zeppelin song of the same name. Let's hum a few bars and see if it sheds any light on the Kashmir conflict:
DaDaDa DaDaDa BOOM DaDaDa DaDaDa BOOM
DaDaDa DaDaDa BOOM
De De De De De De De DAAAAAAAAA!
Great music, but I don't hear anything there worth killing 17 million people over. "And so what," you might ask, "Why not let those crazy, curry-eating, towel-headed brown bastards kill each other until the last one bites it? Who cares?" Did you forget that residual fallout, numb nuts? It's going to hit the jet stream and head right for Los Angeles.
So what's going to happen? VP Dick Cheney and his pals in the administration are telling us The Big One is coming. That warning sounds suspiciously similar to the ones we heard in elementary school. It's going to drop down right in our own back yards any day now. Millions dead! Mass chaos! Assume The Position! No more chocolate ice cream!
Now if we are to believe Big Dick (and keep in mind that he has the ethics and credibility of a swamp rat) we need to take some preventative action. But how do you protect yourself against a guy with a nuclear weapon who doesn't care if he lives or dies? Big Dick says it has something to do with reorganizing the government. Sound like more dick from Big Dick. But don't expect any answers from me. I don't have any better ideas than air raid drills and fallout shelters with canned tuna. That's what they taught me in school.
So what'll we do when The Big One is finally on its way? Get under our desks and Assume The Position. At least you can stop worrying about how you're going to pay the rent next month. As for me, when the mushroom cloud rises, I'll be kissing my ass goodbye and dreaming of what might have been with white-haired Santa and red-haired Martha.