On a Roll

Spring has arrived and so have the season-openers for an iconic American-born sport. No, not baseball. Women’s roller derby.

The original mixed-gender big league roller derby teams, despite enthusiastic and loyal audiences, folded more than 30 years ago. For a variety of reasons the teams simply stopped making money. (See Wheel Appeal for more on the history of the sport: http://richardbellush.blogspot.com/2011/04/wheel-appeal.html.) The revival of roller derby in the 21^st century as an all-female sport, however, has been swift and dramatic. There now are hundreds of leagues in the US and hundreds more around the world.

So far, there has not been a major recentralization of derby. For now, organizationally, derby is pleasantly anarchic with new leagues (and new teams within leagues) springing up in odd places every year. They most commonly skate in fairly small venues with ad hoc bout schedules. (There are national associations and an all star Team USA, it should be noted, who won the world championship last December in Toronto.)

The nearest roller derby venue to my door is in Morristown. The home rink for the Jerzey Derby Brigade league is there, and the two established teams of the Brigade, the Corporal Punishers and the Major Pains, originally were scheduled to open the season last night with a bout against each other. More about that in a moment.

The Jerzey Derby Brigade no longer is alone in Morristown. The new league in town, New Jersey Roller Derby held a fundraiser Friday night at The Famished Frog sidebar. I attended. The lottery ticket I obtained from Desiree Rinker, aka Rink E Dink, was off by one digit, so I didn’t win the Wii, but I did catch up with a friend at the bar and chatted with a couple of the skaters. The new league is the brainchild of Kristy Maloney (aka Pixie Bust) formerly one of the Corporal Punishers’  strongest (and photogenic) skaters. I asked Pixie why she started the NJRD. Aside from the desire to do something on her own, she said she was hoping to create an especially feisty league. “Derby is supposed to be intense,” she said. She added that the 19 members include neophytes (“fresh meat” is the preferred term) as well as experienced skaters. The first formal bout will be April 21 against the Jersey Shore Roller Girls Beat Down. I’ve seen the Beat Down girls skate before; they will be very tough competition for the new NJRD. We’ll see if intensity is enough to prevail against them.

Meanwhile, back at the Jerzey Derby Brigade, last night’s intra-league bout was modified from the initial plan of a face-off of the two formal teams. Instead, skaters from the league were divided into two divisions sporting seasonally appropriate Easter-egg shades of Purple and Green. The two were well matched (see lineup below), and the score, accordingly, remained close until well past halftime. Heinz Catchup, Ginger-Ail, and Voldeloxx stood out for the Greens, and Baked Beanz, Maggie Kyllanfall, and ASSault Shaker for the Purples. Even a small edge can build up a lead over on hour of playing time, however; Maggie and Assault largely accounted for extra power on the Purple side. The final scoreboard read 133-81, advantage Purple. Other skaters on each team (Dorothy Punker and Raven Rage among others) also displayed energy and competence. The Brigade looks to be in shape for upcoming interleague bouts.

Kids from the Peter Smith School of Irish Dance provided the half-time show. The performance was a little unexpected for the venue, but then the side events at derby bouts often are. The kids certainly had learned their steps.

Anyone who hasn’t seen a local derby team skate (there is likely to be one near you) is advised to try it. You may find it addictive, as I have, but at least it’s an addiction that comes without a hangover.

 Jerzey Derby Brigade

NJRD (Pixie on Left)

On Dust and Disks

There is a problem with DVDs – with view-on-demand, too, but more especially with DVDs. Perhaps you’ve noticed it. Typically, we buy a particular DVD (or, at least, I do) only when we expect to view it more than once. At anywhere between 2 and 6 times the price of a typical pay-per-view cable movie (depending on the film’s age, popularity, format, and copyright status), a DVD is just a little too pricey for view-once-and-discard. Yet, once we put it on a shelf, the DVD tends to stay there. Why? Precisely because it is readily available.

There was a time when if, say, The Philadelphia Story (1940) or Midnight (1939) appeared on TCM or some other channel, I’d be sure to tune in. Now I don’t bother because both are in my collection and can be viewed anytime. Yet, it’s been more than a year since I’ve watched either. Toward the end of March, I at last decided either to put them all on eBay or play them. So, for the past couple weeks (skipping only a few days) I’ve been working methodically through them, starting at the bottom shelf, and have watched one per night before bed. Oh, I’ve cheated a little: some of the DVDs are multipacks containing mostly dreadful fare along with a few gems. I watch only one movie from each multipack. If I really can’t force myself to watch a DVD (or at least one from a pack), I figured, it shouldn’t be taking up space in my house at all. So far, even though I often wasn’t quite “in the mood” at the start of a film, I soon got into the mood and haven’t regretted a single one. It turns out that there was a reason I bought the DVDs after all. These are the forced views to date.

Murder, My Sweet (1944) – Simply marvelous. The character Ann Grayle, after saying she hates men, adds, “I hate their women, too - especially the ‘big league blondes.’ Beautiful, expensive babes who know what they've got... all bubble bath, and dewy morning, and moonlight. And inside: blue steel, cold - cold like that... only not that clean.” Come on, what’s not to love about dialogue like that?

The Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954) – Fun in the old monster-meets-girl tradition. Regrettably, my version is not 3D. The original theatrical release was.

Assault of the Killer Bimbos (1988) – OK, I regretted this one a little, but just a little.

The Big Sleep (1946) – Bogie and Bacall in one of the best noirs ever made. It’s easy to lose track of the plot the first time you see it (it makes sense the second time), but it doesn’t matter. It’s fun to watch regardless.

Girl Shy (1924) – Harold Lloyd at his best. This is the silent movie I recommend to people who think they don’t like silent movies. Harold, terrified of women, writes a book on how to seduce them. Very very funny.

Mr. Moto’s Last Warning (1939) – Interesting film simply because of the time frame. Released on the eve of World War 2, the movie sports an Imperial Japanese secret agent as hero. He thwarts a plot against the Suez Canal and a world war. (If only.)

Faster Pussycat, Kill! Kill! (1965) – Sublime trash. I blogged about this last year when actress Tura Satana died. http://richardbellush.blogspot.com/2011/02/transcendent-trash.html

World Without End (1956) – Surprisingly good post-apocalyptic science fiction. An accident with velocity and time dilation lands astronauts in the distant future where they find effete humans hiding underground while the surface is dominated by dangerous mutants.

It (1927) – The other silent film I recommend to people who think they don’t like silents. Clara Bow at her most charming.

The Palm Beach Story (1942) – Sophisticated comedy in which a woman (Claudette Colbert) unapologetically leaves her husband (Joel McCrea) to find someone wealthier, which she does. The ending is contrived, though it makes sense out of the very beginning which, until then, is baffling. But this is 1942. I detect sour irony: a nod to the audience in that dark year that contrived happy endings are the only kind of happy endings there are. (The last words on the screen are “And they lived happily ever after…or did they?”)

Last night, though, I gave myself a break. What with? A DVD, but a new one which proved to be at least as good as the average of the ones above. Dirty Girl, with Milla Jovavich and Juno Temple, flew almost completely under the radar in theaters last year. Critics noticed it though, and with good reason. Juno’s character, raised by a single mom, thinks the father she never met might save her from her unhappy life, not wanting to ask why he hadn’t been in her life previously; her gay friend meanwhile needs to escape from his dad altogether. The trailer to this film is misleading; it creates the expectation that this is just another low-brow high school movie, though set for some strange reason in 1987 Oklahoma. The opening scenes reinforce that expectation. The film, however, takes a very different and very sentimental turn. Sentiment in teen movies doesn’t always work well, but this time it does.

So, my recommendation: skip the reality TV shows. Dust off those DVDs on your shelf and play them; let them earn their keep.

Second recommendation: skip the DVDs some nights, too, for the real world. Tomorrow is a meet and greet of Morristown’s newest roller derby team (New Jersey Roller Derby) and Saturday is an intra-league bout of the two established teams. I’m going to both.

Trailer (double-click for full screen)

A Room with a Queue

I drove a friend to the NJMVC (which most folks still stubbornly call the DMV though it’s been years since the name change) the other day for her driving test. She passed. Home free? No, nothing is so simple anymore. Her ID documents (birth certificate, passport, transcript, etc) were declared inadequate because a bank statement she had brought as proof of her current address was more than 60 days old. So, we were off to the closest Bank of America for a current stamped and signed statement and then back again to the long lines at the NJMVC. By the end of a long day she had her license.

This sort of thing is not confined to the NJMVC. All of the persnicketiness about identity at the state and federal level in the US arrived after 9/11, supposedly for security reasons. It doesn’t help much. There are an estimated 11 million illegal aliens in the US who apparently are untroubled by the precautions. In truth, though assembling the documents is a major nuisance for honest citizens, there is not a single required document that can’t be counterfeited adequately on Photoshop. Dishonest folks (presumably the intended targets of security) aren’t much deterred. Nonetheless, there is no sign of any scaling back of such dubiously effective but definitely irritating measures.

Younger people, though as annoyed at queues and bureaucracy as the rest of us, are unaware of just how different this is from years past. I often marvel at the lack of security and surveillance with which I grew up. When I was in college the USA was not a tranquil place. The nation was at war in Vietnam. At the same time it was in a Cold War. There were racial, political, and anti-war riots. There were homegrown terrorist groups (e.g. the Symbionese Liberation Army and the Weather Underground) who robbed banks, planted bombs, and considered themselves insurrectionists. Yet, everyday security was so relaxed that I could and did walk into the Capitol Building in DC and wander around alone, including into the basement where there are paintings, getting no more in the way of a challenge than a smile from one aging security guard I passed. I sometimes took Shuttle flights between DC and Newark, for which there were no advance tickets. Completely anonymously, and with no preliminary metal detector or pat-down, any passenger just walked on the plane (either a DC9 or a 727) and bought a ticket from the flight attendant, just as on a commuter train; if a plane filled up, another one was added to the flight list. No names asked. At the local county courthouse, where nowadays everyone funnels through detectors and past guards at only two entrances, there were a dozen unlocked and unguarded entrances. Surveillance cameras were almost nonexistent outside of businesses at high risk for conventional crime, such as liquor stores and banks.

This changed over the course of the 70s thanks mostly to a series of airliner highjacks to Cuba and the Middle East. The Weather Underground also contributed by setting off a small bomb in a men’s bathroom in the Capitol. As we know too well, stricter measures didn’t stop politically motivated attacks.

Nowadays, we expect to be surveilled pretty much everywhere. Even when a traffic light changes to red while we’re still in an intersection, we’re likely to get a ticket in the mail accompanied by a photograph. We carefully empty our pockets of as much as a penknife if we have to enter any public building. We wear shoes we can remove and put on easily when we travel so they can be scanned. We need documents and more documents – and sometimes fingerprints.

It’s not at all clear we have made ourselves any safer as a result. I suspect we frustrate ourselves far more than we frustrate the plans of those who mean us harm: they’re very unlikely to be standing in line at the DMV.

For all the popular cheering of the “Don’t touch my junk!” guy a couple years ago, I doubt there is any chance of the rules easing anytime soon, if ever. In fact, now there is a firmly established security industry (including the government employees) to lobby against any changes. If an 80s scifi movie was prescient, though, those employees still face the possibility of redundancy through automation.

Robot Security Goes Haywire When Lightning Jolts the Mainframe. Don’t You Hate When That Happens?

When It’s Not Robots with Kelli, It’s Zombies

School as a Contact Sport

I recently watched a DVD of Diablo Cody’s wickedly and eccentrically funny Young Adult (2011). Charlize Theron stars as a 37 y.o. writer of a series of young adult novels that has just been canceled. A former high school queen, she feels she has lost her way and so returns to her home town to rekindle a romance with her former (now married) high school flame. She accidentally encounters another former classmate “Matt” (Patton Oswalt). Matt had a brief moment of fame in school for having been mercilessly beaten by homophobes; however, as soon as the media discovered he was not, in fact, gay, they lost interest because the assault no longer was news as a hate crime.

Few of us, fortunately, encounter school bullying as brutal as that faced by Patton’s character, but nearly all of us face some degree of it – and more people than ever will admit to it must have been the bullies, at least on occasion. In my old prep school of 120 students (grades 7-12), before I was a junior, by which time I had outgrown being handled easily, I was stuffed into a locker, pummeled on buses, hung over a porch rail by my feet (it was an 8 foot drop to asphalt), and sprayed by a fire extinguisher, among many other things. It wasn’t even especially personal. I was just handy. Other underclassmen would have served as well, and just as often did. My experience was pretty typical, and I didn’t think that much about it. (I actually liked my school on balance.)

The psychology of the time was very different from today when it came to official responses to these incidents. No one ever considered calling the police. There were no lawsuits. To be sure, bullying was never “OK”; if a faculty member spotted it, there was punishment. Yet, never in my six years there was there an expulsion or suspension for it; all punishments were of the in-school kind such as Saturday detentions and work details. This was part of a broader instinct to keep the law out of campus issues; kids caught with marijuana, for instance, were turned over not to the police, as they likely would be today, but to their parents.

Today, we are all about Zero Tolerance. This term is a misnomer, because school administrations in my benighted schooldays did not “tolerate” bullying any more than administrations do today – they intervened whenever it came to their attention – but they responded in a measured way. By Zero Tolerance we really mean more extreme punishment; we “set an example for others” with more punitive responses. Though this has led to more minors being charged with criminal offenses, it is not at all evident there has been any reduction in bullying as a result. If anything, the opposite seems to be the case.

Some anti-bullying experts take an alternate approach. Izzy Kalman, for example, argues that we lose sight of the victims when we focus on severe punishment. Greater success can be had teaching kids how to deal with bullies – on how not to be victims. This also is a valuable life skill, since bullying hardly ends with a high school diploma. (He doesn’t say schools should overlook bullying, of course; he simply says that increasing the severity of punishments is an ineffective way to try to reduce it.) He points out that the most horrific events such as suicides and school shootings are not carried out by bullies but by the kids who see themselves as victims. Helping them not to see themselves that way is the most constructive thing to do. He may well have a point.

The handful of students who don’t face school bullies in any serious way – the bright stars of the campus such as the one portrayed by Charlize Theron – most certainly will encounter them where we all do: at work, in various relationships, and with petty officialdom. It’s bound to be a shock.

One of Izzy’s Workshop Videos

 

Promising the Moon

It is impossible for any human being to describe an event (“Just the facts, ma’am”) completely devoid of “spin.” However much we try to be neutral, we inevitably bring our own presuppositions and values into the story, omitting this and emphasizing that according to what we consider to be important, what to be unimportant, and what already should be understood by the listener. There is always an element of advocacy, however unintended, in whatever we say. This is true (in a more constrained way than elsewhere) even in scientific literature; the actual collected data may be value-free, but the choice of what information to collect in the first place is not – nor, often, is what to conclude from it.

Most of us are aware of this and allow for it when we listen to others speak. In an election year such as this one, however, the airwaves (and optical fibers) are filled not just with spin but out-and-out propaganda. Arguably, the utter lack of pretense of objectivity in campaign ads is a kind of honesty, but the half-truths and glaring omissions typically found in them are so close to lies as to be indistinguishable from them. It’s always easiest to gasp at the nonsense in the ads of the opposing party, of course, while we dismiss the dubious rhetoric of our own favored candidate as inconsequential exaggerations born of campaign enthusiasm. Meantime we worry that those “still undecideds” who so often determine the outcome of elections will be so gullible as to be swayed by the other side’s misrepresentations rather than by our own.

This raises the question of just how gullible we are. Here is an old rough-and-ready test. Answer this question: Do you consider yourself to be a gullible person? If you answered “no” you probably are. We all get taken in by nonsense every day, falling more easily for lies than for spin – for, while we expect a person to have a distinct perspective, we don’t always expect him to be untruthful by his own lights. The less we acknowledge our own capacity to be fooled, the more readily we will be.

Kids, as psychologists have shown repeatedly, believe just about anything they are told. Skepticism is something we learn the hard way; it is not the philosophy with which we start out. Adult gullibility is more circumscribed: adults generally believe new information if it does not conflict with what they already believe – they just have more pre-existing beliefs than kids and so appear less gullible. Furthermore, once having adopted some new belief, adults will tend to maintain it in the face of contrary evidence (“belief perseverance”).

For years there has been an internet prank about dihydrogen monoxide, a deadly chemical that can kill you if you breathe it. (See http://www.dhmo.org/facts.html.) Dihydrogen monoxide is, of course, water, but it is easy to get people to sign a petition to ban it. The presentation seems credible to them.

Tabloid newspapers thrive on readers’ willingness to believe the most amazing (sometimes libelous) things. The name, by the way, was borrowed from condensed pills, once called tabloids rather than tablets; the tabloid papers initially were condensed news. In the US, the rise of the tabloid is usually traced to The Great Moon Hoax of 1835. (The tabloid newspapers in the UK have a different provenance.) In 1835, The New York Sun announced that astronomer Sir John Herschel "by means of a telescope of vast dimensions and an entirely new principle" had discovered intelligent life on the moon and observed it in great detail. In a series of six illustrated articles, supposedly written by Herschel’s assistant “Dr. Andrew Grant,” the Sun described strange animals such as biped beavers and, most shockingly, winged moon people who pursued rather hedonistic lifestyles. Unlike the savage earth, the moon displayed a "universal state of amity among all classes of lunar creatures." The author added verisimilitude by describing an observatory accident when the powerful telescope’s lens caught the sun’s rays and started a fire.

The New York Sun scored a huge hit. All the NY papers reprinted the series, which soon went international. The story was not only wildly popular but widely believed. The real Sir John was in South Africa at the time and didn’t learn of the hoax until afterward. If he was upset by it, he didn’t say so.

Lest we think we think that we are less easily fooled today, consider all the varied conspiracy theory advocates out there – I mean advocates for the silly theories: the ones we ourselves buy are obviously true. I guarantee that if a major media outlet ran a hoax story, presented as a “leak,” that SETI was in contact with aliens but was sitting on the information, the story would have no shortage of believers even after the hoax was revealed. “That’s just part of the cover-up!”

So, how do we fool those independents into voting our way? Apparently, the propagandists will have to tune their message to lie in a way that doesn’t conflict with those voters’ pre-existing beliefs. The side that does this the best should win.

1835 Lithograph of Life on the Moon

When We Were Gullible Enough to Believe that Full Scale Development of the Moon Was Only a Few Years Away: Intro to Groovy Movie Moon Zero 2 (1969)

 

Dionysus Shrugged

This morning a neighbor, who is a freshman at nearby community college, found herself wheelless and asked if I could give her a ride to the campus – she’d hitch a ride with a classmate for the return trip, she said. I rarely decline doing simple favors for pretty young women, even though these days I neither ask, nor expect, nor receive anything other than a cursory wave of thanks in return, so she got the ride. She wore a Nirvana tee shirt which she values for its vintage/nostalgia aspects.

Nirvana was founded 25 years ago in 1987; “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” the band’s signature hit from the Nevermind album, was released in 1991. Both of those events were before my neighbor was born. Last September I blogged that nostalgia fads typically peak at +- 25 years, specifically mentioning Nirvana as ripe for revival (see http://richardbellush.blogspot.com/2011/09/when-classy-tomatoes-had-gams.html); if only my stock market picks had been as good.

Unlike my neighbor, I do remember 25 years ago. In 1987, I was reasonably young and trouble-free. My immediate family was alive and well. I had a satisfyingly close-enough/far-enough relationship with a young lady on Long Island. (She ceased to find the close/far balance satisfactory in 1989.) Yes, 1987 was a fine year in my book. It was a fine year for lots of people until the stock market and housing market melted down in a spectacular fashion unseen since 1929; on October 19, the Dow dropped over 22% in a single trading session and, in the days afterward, went on to lose 36.7% overall before hitting bottom. A similar crash wasn’t seen again until 2008 when the market lost 18% over five days and 44% overall, though the Dow then recovered enough to end 2008 with a 34% loss off the year’s high. In 1987, however, I didn’t own any stocks and didn’t plan to sell my house, so I escaped all but a little personal damage from the economic events. Had I been asked on December 31, 1987 if anything substantive had changed in my lifestyle since January 1 of that year, I’d have said no.

Yet, something had changed, and it is brought to mind by my DVD selection last night, Song of the Thin Man (1947), a movie which preceded my birth about as much as Nirvana’s foundation preceded my neighbor’s T-shirt, and which (along with the other 5 movies in the series) I sometimes watch for the vintage/nostalgia aspects. The movie features the bibulous husband-wife investigative team Nick and Nora Charles (William Powell and Myrna Loy); this was the last film of the series, so Nick and Nora never again overindulged in dry martinis on screen.

As it happens, 1987 almost surely was the last time my own blood alcohol level ever exceeded the legal definition of intoxication. Oh, I might have skirted close once or twice; I’m not a complete teetotaler, and the limit is lower than most people imagine. By US standards, “one drink” is 1.5 ounces (44.36 ml) of 80-proof (40%) liquor, which is equal to a 5-oz. glass of wine or a 12 oz. bottle of beer at the usual alcohol concentrations; two drinks for a 200-pound (91 kg) person or only one for a 100-pounder will be enough to exceed the limit, and drinks wear off at a rate of only one per hour. Still, I very much doubt I’ve passed it since then; a dedicated binge drinker would have little trouble exceeding my usual annual intake in a single night.

This tilt to sobriety was not some big choice; it simply followed of its own accord from a lot of little choices made without any sense of a plan. I had been fond of spirits for more than a decade previously (Southern Comfort was my brand of choice), and still liked the flavor and initial kick; I wasn’t ever fond of the aftereffects, however. By the mid 80s the morning-after often loomed as too much to pay for a night-before. I don’t just refer to an out-and-out hangover, but also to the sensation of being off – of not being altogether sharp – that always lingered into the next evening after even only relatively modest amounts of alcohol. (I concede that my constitutional robustness with regard to booze might not be as great as that of many – perhaps most – other people.) So, increasingly I ordered club soda, and soon grew to enjoy being the sober (and undrugged) guy at rock concerts, raves, and afterparties – these have grown less frequent for me, too, actually, but for rather different reasons. The un-stoned un-buzzed condition at such events provides a different perspective – almost a unique one in the 80s – and ever since 1987 it’s the perspective I’ve maintained.

If that sounds like advocacy, it isn’t meant to. Drunkenness is a bad habit (as is any artificial high), but it actually is of value in some contexts, and I’d never go all Eliot Ness and argue against it per se. Some people find alcohol clinically addictive, of course, and these should handle the stuff gingerly if at all, but the ancient Persians were onto something when, according to Herodotus, they considered important questions both sober and drunk to see if they reached the same conclusions both ways. The Greeks were onto something, too, with their revelries in honor of Dionysus. Nietzsche argued that the greatest art arises from a tension between the primally ecstatic Dionysian in human nature and the rational ordered Apollonian. More recently, Camille Paglia (Sexual Personae) went further by saying that civilization itself is built on the tension, and that there is a biological basis for the division: the higher cortex that overlies the more primitive limbic brain. We need to be in touch with both to be complete people, and a few substances (alcohol the oldest and most venerable among them) can help to break the barrier between them – even without full-blown ancient style Bacchanalia to attend.

I broke down those barriers quite enough earlier in my life by that method, so I don’t feel a nostalgic need to do so again. I’ll attend that Bacchanalian festival though, if anyone cares to throw one, and I bet I still could get in touch with my Dionysian side even with serum level below 0.08.

Tickling the Limbic Brain: Dragnet (1987) 

“Guns Aren't Lawful; Nooses Give; Gas Smells Awful; You Might As Well Live” – Dorothy Parker

Suffering the fate of so many near-future scifi novels, Gore Vidal’s 1978 Kalki has been overtaken by the actual future. The darkly funny apocalyptic tale is still an enjoyable read, however – nowadays as an alternative history. The central character Teddy Ottinger is an aviatrix (despite Teddy’s feminist principles, she likes the word too much to give it up) who narrates the novel in first person. The character is heavily influenced by Amelia Earhart, who in fact was a Vidal family friend. The plot: James K. Kelly, a former soldier at a secret U.S. bio-weapons facility in Saigon, declares himself to be Kalki, the final incarnation of Vishnu. He starts a cult and announces the end of the world. He pulls it off, killing every human on the planet except for five whom he inoculated: himself, his wife Lakshmi, and three “Perfect Masters” (including Ottinger), whom he has chosen partly for their useful skills and partly for their sterility. He and Lakshmi intend to repopulate the world themselves. The 1978 hardcover is still on my shelf, and is due for a dust-off and re-read.

This is a special year for apocalyptic tales, what with the world ending on December 21 and all. (Mine, by the way, is titled Slog and is posted at my Richard’s Novel Ideas blogsite.) Such stories are popular in any year though. It is an old and persistent genre. The oldest stories tend to be religious, and plenty of this type still crop up, but fictional doomsdays appeal to secularists, too, e.g. Terminator, The Road, Dr. Strangelove, War of the Worlds, etc.

Why is the genre so enduringly popular? Perhaps in part it is because so many of our everyday interactions with other people are quite frankly unpleasant. Auto drivers cut us off, sellers demand payment, customers complain, bosses yell, co-workers gossip, governments harass us with taxes and petty regulations, kids scream, lovers cheat, neighbors are rude, and so forth. It’s no wonder we sometimes fantasize about making them all go away and leave us alone. Well, nearly all of them: in most of these fantasies we allow ourselves a companion or two, often of a romantic nature.

Some folks don’t stop at the fantasy. They eagerly anticipate the end. Harold Camping and his followers, who predicted the end of the world in 1988, 1994, and 2011, are among the latest. History is full of such cults. A few cults actively try to jumpstart the end, such as Aum Shinrikyo, members of which carried out sarin gas attacks on the Tokyo subway in 1995. Still others are suicidal, such as the Heaven’s Gate sect members in their sneakers (what was with the Nikes?). The Shakers didn’t kill themselves, but their belief in lifelong celibacy nevertheless doomed the cult for obvious reasons.

One of the most idiosyncratic doomsday cults is the strongly pro-environment Church of Euthanasia. The founder, Reverend Chris Korda explains that “the four pillars of the Church of Euthanasia are suicide, abortion, cannibalism and sodomy. The Church only has one commandment: Thou Shall Not Procreate. All four pillars help reduce the population.” Korda adds, “We're only tangentially interested in the fate of the human species, but we're most interested in the fate of the planet we happen to inhabit and dominate... so our support of those pillars is both symbolic and actual.” The church’s website used to list painless methods of suicide, but, because of civil litigation concerns, these have been removed.

When asked why the church members don’t follow their own advice and commit suicide, Korda answers with some logic that somebody has to stick around to spread the word.

I frequently sympathize with the “leave me alone” feeling, but I don’t really wish for the end of civilization. As it happens, I do think global population is too high, but lower birthrates are the best way to deal with that. I don’t begrudge anyone already here. As for that “leave me alone” sensation, a weekend of solitude is usually enough to dispel it. If one day that’s not enough, I’m thinking beachside in Panama. According to US News and World Report, a comfortable home in Las Tablas rents for under $300 per month. That should be a pleasant and affordable place to be a hermit. The Church of Euthanasia will have to do without me.

Church of Euthanasia Rally

Rude but Funny SNL faux Commercial for Keds Sneakers after the Heaven's Gate Event