Many of us seem to think the apocalypse is something that will happen to other people, writes DONALD CLARKE
HELP, HELP, help! We’re all going to die. Pack your things in the car and head for the nearest elevated point. If the looters don’t get you then the rising sea levels will. Forget about taking any money. By Wednesday week – according to a report I’ve made up – currency will have lost all value and you’ll have to trade daughters and sheep for that last gallon of petrol. Where are all the deranged apocalyptic messiahs when we need them?
These are the things almost nobody is saying.
Last week, this writer journeyed to the burning husk that used to be London. I was there to interview personnel involved with the latest film in the Planet of the Apes cycle. That surprisingly decent picture, Rise of the Planet of the Apes, ends with San Francisco under attack by furious, maltreated primates. The police become increasingly ragged as a phalanx of chimpanzees – assisted by the odd grumpy gorilla – hammer cable cars and blockade the Golden Gate.
Well, you can see where this slightly overloaded analogy is headed. While the movie professionals gathered in Claridge's Hotel, massed bands of brigands hacked ragged lumps from innocent stretches of the British capital. With characteristic restraint, the Evening Standarddeclared that these were the worst scenes "since the Blitz". (Has there been any serious competition in the intervening years?)
It was an awful business for those directly affected by the riots. Homes have been destroyed. Businesses have been annihilated. But few Londoners seemed to believe that the disturbances heralded any imminent descent into anarchy. The Orang-utans will not – do I have my Planet of the Apes mythology correct? – be taking over the judiciary any time soon.
Consider the real sense of dread that spread throughout the UK and Ireland during the 1970s. Retired British army officers formed informal militia to combat unofficial strikes. The delicious cultural explosion that was punk fuelled itself on tales of a diseased society drifting inexorably towards anarchy. JG Ballard, the great genius of post-war pessimism, imagined, in his novels, a veritable kaleidoscope of contrasting apocalypses. Even nice, middle-class culture gave in to the prevailing angst. The Good Life, among the most popular sitcoms of the era, concerned a suburban couple who, tired with soulless conformity, turned their home into a class of pocket commune. The end times had come to leafy Surbiton.
You could argue that today’s goat entrails offer even more gloomy tidings. Having been snubbed by that ratings agency, the US is taking on the persona of an embarrassed spendthrift tapping his heels at the cash register while the shop assistant carries out a sombre, whispered conversation with the credit card authorisation service. The sick, angry climate, bullied by polluters for too long, continues to behave with Ballardian strangeness. Fires rage in many of the world’s great cities. Seemingly endless wars continue in such famously unconquerable parts of the world as Mesopotamia and Afghanistan. Nuclear weapons haven’t gone away.
Well, at least the aliens are leaving us alone. What’s this? Nasa has just decided that traces of DNA components found on meteoroids have their origins in outer space. This almost certainly means that the Lizard Men from Gwarf will be among us soon. (Then again, given the state of the planet, you wonder if they’ll bother.)
So, where is the collective panic? In medieval times it took little more than a numerical quirk of the calendar – the arrival of the first millennium, for instance – for hitherto contented labourers to flog their few worldly goods and form themselves into hessian-clad suicide cults. Those youths robbing trainers from the shopping centres of south London are not quite in the same category. The text messages announcing “supermarket sweep” suggest that we are looking at the militant wing of the consumer society.
Meanwhile, popular culture continues to wallow in drab complacency. With the TV talent shows still spreading their malign influence, with agreeable, but empty, talents such as Adele conquering the planet, with granny-pleasing boy bands extending their careers into middle-age, mainstream music has never – not even in the crisp early 1950s – seemed so suffocatingly bland. The biggest film of the year will, almost certainly, be the backward-looking combination of escapism and nostalgia that is Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2. How did the Irish public react to the collapse of the economy and the annihilation of the sputtering New Jerusalem? By handing a landslide to those radical, loom-wrecking revolutionaries in the Fine Gael party.
The problem (if there is a problem) relates to the fact that too many of us have had it too good for too long. Those earlier citizens who lived through wars, plagues, climatic catastrophes and extended periods of societal breakdown always understood that disaster was never too far from their elbow. The cosseted baby-boomer generation and their immediate descendants – happily ensconced in comforting social networks – have come to believe the apocalypse is something that happens to other people. Let’s hope they’re right.