Apocalyptic Food Stuffs

A scene from The Day After (1983)

During reruns of Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In on the Decades channel, there were incessant commercials for food supplies to be consumed in case of national emergency. You've seen them. It starts with blazing images of man-made or natural disaster. North Korea...Isis...Hurricanes...Earthquakes. Homes wrecked, cities destroyed. A shot of a father comforting his little boy in a landscapes of debris. Then the announcer intones "Protect your family for up to 25 years with this amazing survival food system." These scenes of tragedy and disaster are followed by a shot of a white, suburban family calmly sitting around the dining room table passing huge casseroles and spooning out its heaping contents while it's totally dark outside. So the message is that if the North Koreans nuke us, we'll be OK as long as we buy this rip-off company's freeze-dried macaroni and cheese. It's airing during Laugh-In reruns, for God's sake, who do they think is gonna buy this crap? I was tempted to call for a free sample and their "free survival guide" just so I could read what weird shit they would be peddling to scared people who are genuinely worried about avoiding the apocalypse.


This reminds me of the 1980s and early 1990s when the nuclear threat from the Soviet Union was at an all-time high and every TV show from Lou Grant to the Golden Girls had an episode dealing with it (remember the one where Rose wrote a letter to Gorbachev?) There were two horrifying TV movies on a possible atomic war: The Day After with Jason Robards, John Lithgow and John Cullum filmed in Lawrence, Kansas, and the much more frightening and realistic Threads from the BBC. Will there be more film versions of an apocalyptic confrontation or will the real thing be headed our way?

This was all brought frighteningly close to me recently when I was vacationing in Hawaii just a few weeks ago. We had just gotten off the plane in Maui from Honolulu and we waiting in line for our rental car. A TV monitor was showing a local news broadcast with a story about "Hawaii Residents Prepare for Possible Attack from N. Korea." Kim Jung Un had just threatened to bomb Guam and Hawaii was also within striking range. Of course, no one was panicking in the streets, but I felt a little edgy.

This dangerous brinkmanship had been brought about by Trump and Kim's recklessness. Yes, Kim is a maniac, but Trump is so erratic and untrustworthy that Kim feels he can push him further than any other previous President. He sees Trump as a big bag of wind, a school boy who sends prank tweets of himself pounding figures with a CNN logo instead of a head and hitting Hillary Clinton with a golf ball. If Trump were one of my students, I'd have to send him to the dean's office. How can you take a guy like that seriously? I recently said to a pro-Trump friend, "I don't like Nikki Halley, but I'd rather have her as President than your boy because at least she's not a buffoon."

Trump supporters have made a Faustian bargain. Anything he does is OK. "I will put up with his racism, his brinkmanship, his recklessness as long as I get a job," they say to themselves if they don't genuinely believe his crazy rants.

There was a brief, positive second when he acted like an adult and reached out to Chuck and Nancy for positive legislation and a compromise of DACA. But it quickly vanished. His latest ravings about NFL players are clearly a distraction and a tossing of red meat to his base. Trumpy's going to lose again on repealing Obamacare because John McCain is facing brain cancer and realizes he has do what's right for the country above what's right for his party--as are Collins, Murkowski, and hopefully Rand Paul.

On ABC This Week this morning, the latest poll says 66 percent of Americans do not trust Trump to deal with North Korea responsibly. I wonder how many of those voted for him and are now sorry.