Kirk & the SnowZombieCarPocalypse

With the recent release of The Crazies, another zombie-esque movie hits the theaters. I admit I’m a complete junkie for post-apocalyptic, dystopian zombie movies, but I’m starting to wonder if the rest of society and I might be developing an unhealthy obsession with end times.

Let’s just consider how many times in the last year or so that news or non-news events have been equated with trumpets in heaven calling forth the wrath of God.

First thing to come to mind is, of course, the panicked coverage of the economy’s “death spiral,” which made it acceptable even for Louis Vuitton-sporting trophy wives to throw around the term financial Armageddon and acronyms such as TEOTWAWKI (The End Of The World As We Know It)  while they bought bags of rice at Costco and considered loading up on guns and ammo.

The financial Armageddon-induced reduction of Americans’ spending brought about the Carpocalypse. As if the bankruptcies of GM and Chrysler are somehow equivalent to the four horsemen galloping around the world sowing Conquest, War, Famine, and Death! Too many people seem to forget that bankruptcy is a necessary way to sort out the wheat from the chaff in business.

Through it all, how could we forget global warming? We all would have lost our minds waiting for the tides to rise up to our mountain hideaways, had not the kind folks over at the Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia failed to destroy their e-mails. It turns out that the global warming activists had been purposefully lying to us about the  imminent possibility of end times as a result of man-made global warming. Thankfully, we don't have to take videos like this one quite so seriously anymore:    

Shortly after Climategate falls into the lap of global warming skeptics, gobs of snow start falling, too. Depending on where you lived, it was the “snowpocalypse” or “snowmageddon.” But let’s be honest: It’s just snow. And it’s certainly not the end of the world because the very technological developments that supposedly threaten to bring about the global warming apocalypse ensured our survival. 

Considering everything above, maybe we secretly want end times or at least a radical shakeup of the status quo. What else explains the popularity of apocalyptic imagery in movies, popular culture, and many news stories? Have we become bored with life, purposeless, numb to the world, and are now lustful for some sensation to remind us we’re alive? More to the point, maybe Armageddon doesn’t come with a bright flash and a mushroom cloud, but rather the slow decline of our culture and civilization; deep down maybe we know we’re living it.

Time was when nearly all men and women, believing in some transcendent religion, had taken it that their little lives were bound up with some divine design, which they could not hope to comprehend wholly, but which gave meaning to their existence as persons. Such, at any rate, had been the doctrine imparted to them, and most of them had tried to conform their lives to that eternal purpose.

…

But the attenuated tradition that had sustained them was perilously weakened by the middle of the twentieth century. Performance of duties was giving way to eagerness for sensations. And that way lay decadence.

…

Livy, at the time the Roman republic collapsed, wrote that the Romans of his era seemed to have fallen in love with death. Such a death-urge, interestingly similar to the Roman phenomenon, was at work in America during Kirk’s lifetime… From the Second World War onward, the civilization of Europe and the Americas had stumbled into; the moral order seemed to be dissolving. Subconsciously or half consciously, a great many people came to assume that really life was not worth living; the death-urge enticed them, as in Livy’s time. – Russell Kirk, “The Sword of Imagination”, Pg. 472-3

History indicates, sadly, that societies rarely reverse such trends. As clichéd as it sounds, the only hope for turning things around is to change the attitude of parents and others towards children and their education. If you want a bright future with freedom and prosperity, the best way forward comes by passing on the principles and values hinted at by Kirk.

In the meantime, let's reserve the apocalypse talk for times like these: