Ragnarök

Predator Press

[LOBO]

I don’t really watch much prime time television –in fact I’ll wager 85-90% of what I watch is documentaries.

My favorite show, I guess, would be “The Universe” on the History channel.

At first blush this series appears to be a modern incarnation of Carl Sagan’s “Cosmos,” but it has one huge noteworthy difference: ‘The Universe’ is utterly devoid of the trademark feelgood optimism Sagan seemed to insist on. ‘The Universe,’ in contrast, makes it a point to scare the hell out of you: many a night I’ve found myself involuntarily rocking in an upright fetal position on the couch, making peace with Jesus while waiting for a rouge pulsar or quasar to incinerate the our atmosphere. Or perhaps an undetected black hole, swinging by at seven zillion miles per hour, pulling our solar system out of orbits around the sun. Or maybe just a good ‘ol fashioned colossal meteor strike that’ll bake the bones of the lucky to ash, and leave everyone else to slowly die in the subsequent nuclear winter.

Thusly rendered unable to sleep, over the next few hours I’ll try and relax myself with more uplifting material such as Forensic Files -a show often about solving unbelievably ruthless murders. This show typically runs back-to-back until about 5:00 am -at which point the rising sun will find me hiding under the coffee table, swinging the table lamp at anything vaguely resembling moving ankles with deadly precision. Everyone in the house –from Terri down to my cat Phil- now walks with a limp, but a few bruises are a very small price to pay for my personal safety. And if you think about it, what am I supposed to do? True, the house is probably oozing serial killers with ankles distinct in appearance ... but the last thing I would need is a bunch of selfish family members oozing nuclear fallout under the coffee table with me: if I get radioactive poisoning, who will be left to ensure the serial killers aren’t the only ones left to repopulate the Earth?

SO last night -with a 2-hour gap between intergalactic apocalypses and sociopathic killing sprees- I found myself deeply engrossed in a show highlighting the National Transportation Safety Bureau’s efforts to solve mysterious plane crashes. This was followed by another program dissecting the space shuttle Challenger’s final, fatal voyage.

And behind my bloodshot, riveted eyes, my brain started quietly working over the question Why am I doing this to myself?

I’m too young to remember Evil Knieval’s career when it was in it’s heyday, for instance. But I remember having the toy motorcycle [pictured], the Snake River Lunchbox, and a vague sense of hope that -whoever this lunatic was- he would somehow survive failing to jump something insane this week. Let’s face it: Knieval’s daredevil skills and stunts were in inverse proportion … the more his jumping skills seemed to diminish, the crazier his stunts became.

But at that age, I was out of the “media loop” and operating off of schoolyard legends. In retrospect, Evil Knieval’s daredevil career was already over … and this was probably good for Knieval: over a long enough timeline, him smashing headlong into the Sears Tower filled with half-starved piranhas, rabid ocelots and flame-spewing sulfuric acid in a futile attempt to jump it was inevitable. Imagine how many lunchboxes he would have sold after that!

Anyway. My point is I wasn’t hoping he would crash. In contrast, I was rooting for the guy to survive himself somehow. Was that just youthful naivety, or did I change? Or did we change as a culture collectively? Following my implied trend from Knieval, we see the dramatic rise of NASCAR –a sport enthusiasm for which I cynically suspect comes largely from the inevitable spectacular crashes. “America’s Funniest Home Videos” soon thereafter broke ground with the idea that watching a guy snap his femur in a bizarre trampoline accident would make we, the viewers, laugh and laugh and laugh. Add to the list the “Faces of Death” series and [admittedly poorly juxtaposed, but bearing mention] John Walsh vehicles. Today, we have websites and entire cable television networks wholly devoted to cataloging car crashes, tragedy, disasters, and general human boobery.

Don’t get me wrong ... I’m aware the Roman Coliseum was built for explicitly these same purposes. But haven't we evolved at all since then? Judging from the materialization of a lucrative schadenfreude-based, ShamWow-fueled economy, as a species we seem to love this stuff now just as much as we ever did -if not more.

But why?