Meanwhile: Sorry, it's not the end of the world. It's L.A.
Alex Beam The Boston GlobePublished: February 21, 2007
LOS ANGELES: The silliest recent book written by a smart author is Amy Wilentz's "I Feel Earthquakes More Often Than They Happen," her Alice-in-Schwarzenegger- land account of moving to Los Angeles from New York.
Wilentz is a self-professed "catastrophist," who bought a small rubber raft after Sept. 11 to evacuate Manhattan in the event of another attack.
So she came to the right place, the omphalos of fear, real and imagined. Wilentz is hardly the first Easterner to rattle on about L.A.'s ruinous wildfires and mudslides, or to pucker up every time the San Andreas Fault gives a shake. To say nothing of the city's race riots, gang warfare, and lurid crimes tailor-made for the silver screen. "Noir" is practically the city's middle name.
I've spent well over two years here at various times, and I always feel completely relaxed. I've never met an Angeleno who doesn't feel the same way.
Maybe my friends and I are all taking the same meds. I've missed the big quakes, and I give the wildfires, Compton and Watts wide berths. I stay off the freeways, and I even use the buses now and then.
Gosh knows, I feel more secure here than in Boston. Now there's a dangerous town!
Catastrophism, as experienced by Wilentz and many others, is a state of mind, not a state west of the Rockies. It is a state with an ever-expanding population.
Just last month, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists magazine reset its silly "Doomsday Clock" to 5 minutes to midnight, signaling that we are as close as we have ever been to world annihilation.
Each clock resetting presents a compelling teaching moment for third- graders across the land. When things get hairy, the atomic scientists get all wobbly.
As if by coincidence, the clock creeps closest to midnight when a Republican is in the White House: 1953, 1981, and of course 1984, the latter two years the heyday of the great California Catastrophist himself, Ronald Reagan.
The original Doomsday Clock purported to gauge the likelihood of nuclear war, but now the atomic joyboys have mixed environmental catastrophe into the witches' brew.
Eco-hysteria is the order of the day. Earlier this month, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released its long-awaited report on global warming, asserting that it is "very likely" that fossil-fuel emissions are trashing the planet.
Even before the report was released, many scientists criticized its conclusions for not being dire enough. We want our catastrophe, and we want it now!
Suppose, for the sake of argument, that sea levels rose 7 inches or more by the end of this century, as the panel said they might. Sea levels rose between 6 and 9 inches during the last century, and no one noticed.
Change won't kill us, but anxiety might.
Still, doom abounds. Also this month, we learned that the Norwegians, who used to enjoy a reputation for level-headedness, are constructing a massive "doomsday vault" "that will house seeds from all known varieties of food crops," according to the BBC.
The Svalbard International Seed Vault will be built 130 yards deep inside a mountain on the island of Spitsbergen, near the North Pole. Thank heavens Wilentz has that rubber raft; she can go fetch the morning glory seeds for us.
Catastrophe, thy name is Al Gore's presidential hopes. But let's not forget our Christian evangelical friends, who have been trading quite heavily on various End of Time scenarios. (Yes, I know that Governor Schwarzenegger played Jericho Cane — J.C.; d'ya get it? — in the 1999 apocalyptic allegory "End of Days.")
Not far from where I am sitting, Pastor John Hinkle predicted that the world would end on June 9, 1994. Was that the day my car wouldn't start? That explains everything.
You need to check out the Web site raptureready.com for up-to-the minute coverage of End of Time-related events, e.g., "German paraglider sucked into killer storm, survives." These loons have all the common sense of the hysterical atomic scientists, minus the white lab coats.
There is an alluring vanity to believing that we will be the last humans to inhabit the Earth. But we won't be. It's not ending here, and it's not ending now. Get over it.
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