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Residents sleeps in the streets in Valparaiso, Chile - Source: Reuters -
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For a moment on Sunday, it felt like The Big One. A 8.8 magnitude earthquake in Chile, prompting tsunami warnings in Hawaii and all about the Pacific Basin, including New Zealand, the place we call, only half-jokingly, The Shaky Isles.
You now know the ending, thankfully; but the commencement touched off all kinds of emotions, including the fear (and in perhaps some cases gleeful anticipation) of global apocalypse.
Disaster movies have implanted in us vivid expectations of how the world will finish. The sky will burn; the oceans will rear up; the Earth's crust will become as Weetbix; Nicolas Cage may or may not be available to save our asses.
Sunday's events initially conformed to that mode, with images pouring in from Chile of burning buildings, flattened apartments, and highway overpasses crushed like potato chips. Add the screech of sirens in Hawaii and civil defence alerts around the Pacific, and something was clearly starting up.
Reverse T.S. Eliot's formula. This is how the world goes, not with a whimper, but a bang.
It's a popular enough notion in the US, one shared by 50 million evangelicals who believe in the doctrines of the Rapture (in which true believers are taken up to heaven) and Armageddon (the final battle between Good and Evil). Some of these people are survivalists, a group who have always been part of American culture, but the growing trend is survivalism-lite, as the Guardian newspaper found earlier this month .
Given that such currents are swirling around here, as much heavy telly ordnance as was available on a Saturday afternoon was assembled to meet the crisis. CNN anchor Rick Sanchez did a good job translating the Spanish reports as they came from radio stations in Chile, but later he worked himself into a lather worrying about the magnitude of the quake (larger than Haiti's), and the absence of information from coastal areas. "This could be so much worse than we thought."
Weatherman Chad Myers then took some time to explain why this wasn't possible.
The desire for things to be "much worse than we thought" is a temperamental twist you must fight in news, but perhaps it's generational too.
In recent times the idea that we might perish in a cosmic-sized conflagration was given its best validation, I think, from the Cold War. The pervasive neurosis was that the world would terminate in an ideologically-fuelled nuclear cataclysm. I remember magazine articles from the time that relied on scary statistics about the number of times the globe could be turned into an atomic pyre. This was the late '70s, and everything was elemental.
Or, as someone much younger recently teased me, "Did you really think you'd die in a nuclear war?"
I did; I still might, dear; you'll be sorry.
The Cold War waddled off to History's rubbish bin, but the apocalypse hasn't, it's just assumed different forms: Environmental apocalypse, moral apocalypse, natural apocalypse. All of these dangers may well be prophetic, but how we greet them more likely reflects the banality of contemporary urban life, the dreariness of the supermarket aisle/traffic light/mortgage payments. A desire for something beyond ourselves, in other words: The more spectacular, the better.
Read more of Tim Wilson's blogs.
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