One of the more surprising
career resurgences of 2014 has been that of song parodist Weird Al Yankovic,
who’s roughly my age and was last big news decades ago. Well, a parody has been
running through my head recently, but I won’t share it with Weird Al because I’ve
only gotten as far as the title and, more problematically, it doesn’t lend
itself to the upbeat humor for which Weird Al is so well known and celebrated.
There’s a scene in the
Woody Allen film Annie Hall—which coincidentally
dates back to 1977, even before Weird Al’s heyday—in which Allen’s character,
Alvy, comes to a third-rate nightclub to hear Annie make her singing debut. She
battles the bad sound system and noisy and inattentive crowd through a tentative
rendering of the classic song “Seems Like Old Times,” which had been a big
radio hit in the 1940s. It’s a sweet scene in the film, coming at an early
moment in a young woman’s quest for identity and a fledgling couple’s hope for intimacy.
Afterward, Alvy addresses Annie’s self-criticism with a first kiss on a New York
City sidewalk.
The thing is,
though, my parodic song title is “Seems Like End Times.” It’s a recognition of the
sorry and worsening state of world affairs. And the only thing funny about that
is that it’s the one point on which fundamentalist Christians and I agree in
principle, if not in context or details. Which isn’t funny ha-ha, anyway, but,
rather, funny-odd, in that I otherwise have very little in common with a
demographic that thinks things like gay marriage and legal abortion are hastening
the Final Judgment.
It’s not same-sex
matrimony, the right to abort a zygote, or Middle Eastern tumult that's been given a wacky
biblical spin that I worry about. And I’ll be among the more surprised guys on
the planet if Armageddon plays out in exactly the way the fundamentalists
expect, with a climactic battle between the Messiah and the Antichrist, the
righteous being lifted up to Heaven while the rest of us wail and gnash our
teeth, and I don’t know what else. I’ll go directly to Hell, maybe, without
passing “Go” or collecting $200. I’m so not
a biblical scholar that I had to Google even the preceding recap, which probably
leaves out many juicy details.
Anyway. What I
worry about are little things like the fact that wars are being waged all over
the globe, millions of people are dispossessed, overpopulation continues
unabated (while we in America celebrate loony incubators like the Duggar family),
the climate’s done for, entire categories of jobs are gone for good, political
will and public tolerance for hard decisions are nonexistent, and oh, yeah, enough
nuclear weapons still exist to annihilate humankind many times over. Sorry if I
left out a thousand or three reasons for near-suicidal despair, but you can be
sure they’re on some level further swelling the worry-tumor in my brain.
Given the enormity
of that clusterfuck (a vulgarity that nevertheless seems abundantly apt here), you
wouldn’t think that I’d still have the time and energy to get outraged about
things like America’s gun-nut culture or the fact that most US citizens polled
think it’s fine to call a football team the Redskins when you’d never call a
Native American such a degrading thing to his or her face. But those quibbles are
peripheral to the end times discussion, because paranoia and racial insensitivity,
as bad as they are, are way less lethal than are jihadists and other murderous
bullies, the ravages of climate change and the exponential growth of the world’s
population.
My take, in a nutshell, is, if you
don’t think we’re screwed, you’re not paying the slightest bit of attention. I’m
not sure when the tipping point was reached, but I don’t think it’s even within
sight anymore. There’s a deadly Catch-22 in play: It’s easiest for people to
think rationally and charitably—to look beyond their own needs and wants, and toward
the greater good—when things are calm and they don't feel threatened. In the world
of 2014, everyone feels threatened in some way. Calm is illusory, and temporary
at best. It’s not an environment that’s friendly to altruism, or even to enlightened self-interest. The Enlightment, such as it was, was so 18th
century.
Speaking of days of
yore, I’ve written before about how I love going to the Maryland Renaissance
Festival. Part of it surely is the giddy mix of alcohol, skin and Elizabethan
vaudeville. But it’s alarmingly easy, in this day and age, to romanticize and even luxuriate in
an era in which life was short and brutish, true, and deodorant was unknown,
but also in which so much that’s frighteningly out of control in the contemporary
world hadn’t even started yet. The Earth then was under-populated. The
Industrial Revolution was centuries off, so the ozone layer was happily intact.
There were dukes in the palaces, not nukes in the silos.
Walking through
Revel Grove—as the Renaissance Festival’s woodsy grounds are cheesily dubbed—a
couple of Saturday or Sundays each fall is a dependably delightful distraction
from the world as it is, and, I believe, ever shall be. Until the world, for
all recognizable intents and purposes, simply isn’t anymore. Which will happen,
I fear, much sooner than later. I’ll be surprised, in fact, if something akin to
anarchy doesn’t reach even the DC suburbs in my lifetime.
Cheery thought,
that! If it sounds as if I’ve given up hope, it’s because I have. But does that
mean I’ve given up on living? Hardly. There’s a lot of beauty in the world. I’m
blessed with an amazing family and friends. I’m gainfully employed. Roof over
my head, AC in summer and heat in winter, food in my gut? Check, check and
check. I’ve got the time and means to escape to the Renaissance, to movies, to
music that moves me to in-car harmonies no one should ever have to hear. When I
feel like it, I post to this blog, and a few people even read it.
I’m not saying I
haven’t had a good time. But all time is borrowed now. I truly believe that.
Technology won’t save us from ourselves, although it will provide more
distractions as the ship continues sinking. By the 2060s, even insolated
America may well look more like Mad Max than the Mad Men of a century before. Good
luck getting WiFi when there’s no more electrical grid.
No, I can’t see even
a clever artist like Weird Al taking my premise and song title and turning it
into comic gold. On the other hand, though, maybe fundamentalist Christians could
play the song straight, supplying their own suitably dire lyrics about man’s
folly and God’s wrath.
Except that the
word “seems” in "Seems Like End Times" sounds too tentative. For both the fundamentalists and for me, now
that I really think about it.
