It's Fear and Smoking, in: The Twilight Zone

I was thinking back to that famous episode of The Twilight Zone, with Burgess Meredith’s mousy little hen-pecked man whose only pleasure in life is to read during his lunchbreak in the vault of the bank where he works. One day [spoiler alert, although I think this is just Cultural Literacy 101 at this point] a nuclear bomb goes off, leaving only him alive—ensconced as he was in the vault, with his book. He stumbles around for a bit, taken aback but realizing he wasn’t going to miss most of what was gone. But the library! It survived! And he finally has time to read all these books without his shrew of a wife or soulless co-workers berating him for being a bookish little dweeb.

And as he’s sitting down on the stairs of the library to read, as happy as a nerd at the apocalypse, his glasses, without which he can’t see his own dick*, much less read, fall off his face and shatter. He breaks down, a man, alone, without even his books to see him through. Rod Serling walks by, smoking a cigarette while intoning somberly about irony, and you’ve got a damn fine half-hour of classic American television. I love it: it’s a clever story, well-told, that plays beautifully on the issues of its time, and it’s awesome for all the reasons that Twilight Zone episodes often are.

It’s also interesting as a guide to a different mindset, one both more hysterical than our current attitude toward terrorism and more grounded in reality. I’m putting aside nit-picky points like,

a) He’d be dying of radiation sickness by now anyway—forget books, this guy’s going to be keeled over vomiting his balls out within a day anyway.

b) Where did Rod Serling come from anyways, if everyone is dead?

and

c) Is Rod Serling immune to the radiation because he smokes so many cigarettes? Probably.

No, what’s interesting is that for this to actually be tragic, you have to to assume that the whole damn world was destroyed, or at least the whole United States. If just one bomb went off, there would be rescue crews there within days—unless they were busy judging Arabian horses, or whatever FEMA did during the Bush administration, in which case maybe it would be more like a month, but still.

No, for this to register you have to believe that basically everything is gone, and that’s not a mentality that we have anymore. We think our airplanes and malls might blow up, and maybe in 200 years everyone will have to learn to swim, but really, despite the Bush Administration’s best efforts, the net amount of fear in the world, as measured by

        (number of people afraid of some catastrophic thing) x (severity of that thing)

is actually lower than it was for a good chunk of the twentieth century. Fear is as politically useful as ever, of course, but the stakes keep shifting around. So, ether, what’s the next big thing that we’re going to be asked to be afraid of, after they’ve wrung all the juice out of terrorists**? What’s the next thing we should actually be afraid of?

---

*I’m pretty sure that’s the example they used
**Which they actually did at Guantanamo.