Sing a Song of Armageddon

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.