Every political columnist’s deep-harbored fantasy: Standing athwart a barren, burned field, arms akimbo, Dingo booted-feet sunken in squelch, the sky orange-hazy and charged, contrails casting a net overhead following asymptotic ICBMs. Explosions so loud and conflagrant that they warp and muffle their own diffused sound waves. Somewhere, an angel’s bugle sounds: hail, fire, and blood rain to the earth. Revelations come to life. And amidst the planetary destruction, our brave, foresighted columnist whispers to no soul but his own “Yep! I called it” before being vaporized to dust.
Ah, the gloriously millenarian mise-en-scène of vindication! Too bad all the doubters have been radiated into a taupe goo to repent!
That’s the chiliastic landscape my mind paints when reading the latest polemic about imminent worldwide megadeath. The cottage industry for nuclear-winter fanfiction masking as sober analysis exists—less so than Cuban Missile Crisis times, but it’s around, plying its spine-shivering craft at such outré outlets as AntiWar.com, The American Conservative, and the bleached-brained ravings of Marjorie Taylor Greene.
Don’t feel bad if you’ve missed, overlooked, bypassed, or even ignored all the stern warnings that global atomization is imminent. Give yourself a break: it’s an election year! Our national fate is on the ballot, and will ultimately be decided by the wine moms of Waukesha, Wis. Everyone not within that county limit is too busy trying to decide if “migrants are eating pets” or “I grew up in a middle-class family” is a salient sell for Karens to drop their half-full stem glass of Barefoot Moscato and gun the minivan three blocks to the library to cast a ballot, ticking off “R” or “D” while scribbling stars in the sections reserved for local comptroller. The only apocalyptic idea American suburbanites entertain is the notion that their coddled, pampered, primped, and wiped children don’t gain acceptance to a brag-worthy university.
The suggestion that we’re somnambulantly waltzing into a mushroom-clouded future sounds preposterous, a shrieking overwarning, a spastic, swivel-eyed, spleen-splutered Sibylcast, a subset of the slithering salesmanship sounded by right-wing shock jocks. Planetwide conflagration over… what? A couple of disputed districts along the Russian-Ukrainian border? The binding commitments of the Budapest Memorandum—an international agreement most Americans think is a Crosby, Stills, Nash, & Young b-side?
Do we really want to risk our finely integrated, hyperconnected, nation-hopping, Amazon-dominated, logistical miracle of a globalized economy over such anachronistic arrangements like the wiggle-room worded Article Five of the North Atlantic Treaty? And so close to the Christmas shopping season? This year’s Amazon toy catalog just landed in my mailbox last week for Blitzen’s sake! And Mattel isn’t even offering a Barbie fallout shelter!?
Taking the blue pill and resuming with checking off your regularly scheduled Yuletide shopping list is assuredly the wise thing to do. The prudent, circumspect, safe, American thing to do. I was in eighth grade on September 11, 2001—smack-bored in Mr. Little’s history class just as the attack unfolded behind a tiny Panasonic screen. We were dismissed home around lunchtime, hours after the towers plummeted like the Disney ride into the terrified Manhattan streets. But how many appalled people across the country, after witnessing such a wanton slaughter, bravely carried on with the task of everyday living, picking up groceries that afternoon, getting their oil changed, springing for a new refrigerator, mowing the lawn, all while every corner mounted TV was frozen on CNN’s feed? How many low-waged jobbers had to finish their shifts while periodically catching the rising death toll? (All while secretly wishing their respective managers were on Flight 175?) The Brits have the stiff-upper-lipped “Keep Calm and Carry On.” But we industrial Yanks have our own variation: “Keep Calm and Commercialize On.” It’s also how we endured a once-in-a-generation Chinese-manufactured lung virus—by hunkering down and one-tap ordering takeout, Netflix subscriptions, and more Chinese-manufactured plastic.
Two-day-shipping may not save us from Nagasaki on a massive scale though. Irish journalist Ciarán O’Regan recently penned—or, more like, prophesied—our unconscious traipse into welt-wide meltdown. Writing at international analyst Thomas Fazi’s Substack, O’Regan warns of western pols preaching might-and-right militation to Russia’s incursion into Ukraine, including President Biden’s hollow insistence that “Ukraine will win this war.” The casualty specs say otherwise. As do the artillery numbers. After over two years of brutal fighting, the Ukrainian military is all but spent. Manpower is dwindling—a gap that can’t be made up with more bullets. Three things lash out when cornered: wild animals, kids losing Candy Land, and losing armies. NATO, which has treated the AFU as its proxy against Russia since the beginning, is now baring its fangs and pumping its haunches, prepping for a furious kickback. Early in the war’s onset, with little fanfare, Biden reversed his No First Use campaign vow, leaving open the possibility of launching nuclearized warheads not strictly in retaliation for nuclear strikes, but any manner of attack—the escalate-to-de-escalate doctrine. Good thing nobody ever slips up when playing chicken!
Last May, Biden, on the q.t. once again, gave his blessing for Ukrainian forces to actually deploy America-provided munitions inside Russia territory, upping the battle ante. So the remaining Ukrainian infantrymen, scarred both physically and mentally after years of drawn out trench warfare, now have the go-ahead to take potshots in Rusky land? And NATO reserves the right to pop off some H-bombs over any perceived threat from an enemy it isn’t even officially fighting?
What could possibly go wrong? O’Regan has one theory: “An escalation toward nuclear war between the US and Russia would mean that pretty much everyone in both countries, and probably most people in the Northern hemisphere, would either be smoldered or starved to death in famine under skies blackened by particulate matter which will block out the sun for a decade.”
(That doesn’t sound spandy bad. At least the Kansas City Cheatin’ Chiefs would be denied their thrice straight Super Bowl ring.)
Soberly speaking, how worried should the workaday American be about a split-atom Armageddon? Hasn’t some native kook or another manically waved a red flag about impending eschaton in one form or another going back two hundred years? Can’t we all keep staring dimly at the unfolding circus before us and ask, what, me worry?
Normally, I’d concur. Let the war machine do its thing, producing ammonium nitrate by the industrial barrel for some poor suckers to blow each other into bloody tendrils. But libertarian doomsayers have the pesky habit of being coretto once every five or so years. The last time those aspie pills rang the right bell was during the Covid mask frenzy, when they equated chin-diaper mandates and non-association rules with Bolshevikian tyranny. Who among us could have guessed that slovenly handing authority over to power-mad pols would have adverse consequences? Randolph Bourne readers, that’s who!
Libertarians only taste the sweet drippings of affirmation after immense human suffering. When a Kh-55 turns Eastern Europe into a puddle of radioactive mud, which Ron Pauler will have the courage to shout “told you so!” over mounds of molten flesh?
Trick question: All of them will. The Doomsday Clock only needs to be once in a lifetime to count.
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