The News From Armageddon

I caught the tail-end of A Boy And His Dog a few nights ago. The movie and the novella are set in the year 2024, not that far away now. The movie was made in 1975, takes place after WWIV, which took place almost immediately after WWIII, so I suppose they figured there was enough time for intelligent, telepathic dogs to mutate into existence.

The thing about the movie is, it's not really a movie of later 1980s post-apocalyptic genre, like Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome  - a cautionary tale of how the violence just keeps on going after the Big One, which everyone assumed would be the aha! moment in human history to forsake war. Why even civilization uses the same tools as the bestial enemies of same to get their way, so it

Instead, ABAHD is really more a adolescent masturbatory fantasy movie, where teenagers are released of all inhibitions, and can (if they can find them) fuck girls, and break shit, and steal things, and, when villains show up, hunt them down and shoot them like beasts. Survivors help themselves to abandoned cars, and food, empty houses - everything is free for the taking.

Kind of like some of our fantasies about caveman life, and it's interesting how similar in visual style and lifestyle this movie is to One Million Years BC. But the whole hunter/gatherer mystique that we've developed, the Rousseau's bullshit about the Noble Savage and Arcadian splendor is about as real as it would be in, well, post-apocalyptic movies after the dust settles.

This also reminds me a (paraphrased) quote of Neal Stephenson, who said "At some point, every young man feels that, with the proper physical workout regimen and martial training, he could be a badass motherfucker, and maybe the baddest badass motherfucker on the planet. Fortunately, most of us do not find out that... that position has already been filled".

But it's true, and all you have to do is to listen to some these arrogant dough-heads, especially if they happen make reference to any facility with the coward's weapon, that  they actually believe they can be a badass motherfucker.

I figured out a while back that I am no badass motherfucker.

I'm quite soft actually, and that's saying something, considering I'm actually quite fit for someone in my age/lifestyle bracket (soft white older man). Not just by modern standards. Compare my modern gracile Homo domesticus frame and musculature to my n-times-great grandpas and grandmas of, say, 10,000 years ago... Let's face it. They would consider me a wimp, a weakling, a scrawny, underdeveloped, creampuff. Why, they would be werewolves, monsters, vampires in physical performance comparison.

Which makes me wonder how, given that the lifestyle of agriculturalists produces such frail, stunted, weak little people, the powers that ever managed to convince such a proud and commanding people to eat leaves and dirt food.

Oh, yeah, well, a full belly every day, versus starving every few days between meals, I suppose that would do it.

I'm a little hungry. Maybe it's time for a snack cake.