After a lot of tinkering and persistence, I managed to get my old copy of Fallout running successfully on my computer. As I paid another visit to Vault 13 and the surrounding environs, I thought about the prevalence of post-apocalyptic memes in popular culture. It’s a trope that has inhabited my imagination since I was a kid (thanks, Ronald Reagan!). That cheesy TV movie The Day After both enthralled and terrified me back then and I remember thinking that maybe my hometown of Green Bay was too small to be worth the Soviets’ attention (I later learned that Green Bay was indeed a target for the Russians).
For more of that mid-Eighties-we’re-all-gonna-die vibe, there’s the uber-bleak BBC docudrama Threads (which you can watch here at Google Video). I watched this a few months ago when I was home with a cold. Not recommended viewing if you’re already feeling nauseous.
The whole nuclear holocaust thing seems a little retro now, although the publication of books like The Atomic Market makes me wonder how much longer our dumb luck can hold out. Of course, we now know that there are any number of interesting and creative ways we as a species can do ourselves in. Maybe these stories we tell ourselves serve as some sort of pressure valve; a way for us to indulge our dark fantasies so that we don’t feel compelled to fire off a few missiles just to see what happens. And maybe they also encompass our ardent hope that, should everything turn to shit, that some remnant of what we once were will survive and endure.
