Competing Apocalypses

This morning, I wrote this tweet:  "An autocrat in Moscow, troops on the border of countries that once would have been called satellites, NATO pondering. Modern politics or the script of "The Day After"? Jason Robards, comforting his wife, sure everyone will back down. Me, writing a blog post. #5amwritersclub"

I thought of that scene last night as I drove home from work, hearing that there is still no diplomatic solution to the issue of Russian troops on the border of Ukraine.  This morning I looked up the plots for both The Day After and Threads--both feature nuclear wars that start over standoffs at distant borders, East/West Germany for The Day After and Iran in Threads.  In Testament, that other great 80's nuclear war plot movie, we never know what happened to make the bombs fall on big cities nearby.

The plot line of not knowing seems more plausible.  If there is a nuclear exchange, I imagine that most of us will look up from our phones, wondering what just happened while we were solving today's Wordle or watching the shenanigans of the rich and famous.

This morning I thought of Testament as a metaphor for our pandemic times.  Testament is a movie that I can't watch the way I watch the other 2 nuclear war movies.  I watch Threads and The Day After the way that some people watch horror, with the comfort of knowing that it's a highly unlikely plot.  Watching the characters deal with demands of daily life (what to cook for dinner, when to give up on missing family members) in Testament makes the movie almost unbearable, as I suspect it is designed to do. 

I have always been an apocalyptic gal, although the plotlines I gravitate to have changed as my life has changed.  As a child, I loved the child surviving in the wild after disaster strikes plotline.  As a preteen, I couldn't get enough of Holocaust survival stories.  In late adolescence, I shifted to nuclear war scenarios, expecting to be living them in any moment.  As I started teaching British Lit survey classes, I explored what diseases had done to societies in the past, but until recently, I didn't see much of that in contemporary fiction.  

Our fictional (so far) apocalyptic stories tend to imagine mass death all at once, with a band of hardy survivors figuring out how to move forward.  They don't often describe the slow grind of an apocalypse.

And it's rare to see characters who have to deal with a competing apocalypses.  I hope it's not something we're all about to experience.