Editor’s note: Miles, as a good Roman soldier, doesn’t take time off for Labor Day. The same cannot be said for his editor. We apologize for the delay in posting Miles’ musings for this week.
It took three days for civilization to break down in New Orleans. There’s hardly anything worthwhile and permanent and lasting that can be done by human beings in 72 hours, but 300 years of civilization can be undone in three tiny days.
| How long would it take in Henderson? How much rule of law do we have to begin with? One filling station has a late delivery and people start rumor-mongering and hoarding gas as if 2 extra gallons in milk jugs or coffee cups could prevent their Ford Expeditions from becoming $30,000 flowerpots. (By the way, MENSA candidates, gasoline dissolves Styrofoam.) Better to load up on milk, eggs, bread and toilet paper. Especially toilet paper. There’s something we’ll all really miss when it’s gone.
I should have seen it coming, this final stripping off of the last veneer of civil society. It was all there in Steven Spielberg’s remake of “War of the Worlds.” The quasi-hero, played with brilliant understatement but perhaps too much youthful vigor by Tom Cruise, saves his family during the initial attack by stealing a car and leaving a man to die. Later, he beats a man to death for making too much noise while hiding in a cellar. Granted, it was all done in the name of survival. |
 |
| Granted, there was no pleasure had from these acts. There may have even been regret. Throughout the film, the theme “it’s us or them” is hammered home again and again. Survival, then, has a price tag: your soul.
When I left “War of the Worlds,” I heard someone call it “realistic” (I presume he meant the portrayal of characters in the film, not the alien invasion part). Call it realism if you like. I call it cynicism of the worst kind. It is not the higher cynicism of the literate. Higher cynicism delights in the foibles of humankind and gives an occasional, heavy-handed shove in the right direction. No, this cynicism is the blinding, crushing cynicism of hopelessness and intransigence, the kind I believe my friend-in-spirit the Rev. Todd Hester finds unacceptable because it is fundamentally amoral. You see, I want to believe that civilized human beings would cooperate to survive. I want to believe that my fellow survivor is my friend and ally, not an obstacle to be eliminated or a resource to be harvested. Thanks to Katrina, I’m over that now. My problem is that I was suckled on the disaster films of the 1970s. One of my first movie memories is the ceiling of the dining room in “The Poseidon Adventure” as the ship turns over. I remember as a child the big flood when the dam collapses in “Earthquake.” For years I thought that movie was called “Tidal Wave.” Another thing I now know from disaster movies of that era is that they had a unifying spirit of cooperation. People from all walks of life are brought together by disaster in a cooperative struggle for survival. Social, ethnic and class distinctions grow increasingly meaningless as characters in such films risk their lives to save one another. The bad apples, the liars, the cheats and scoundrels, once discovered, are dealt with by other people or a screenwriter’s convenience of cosmic justice. Villains earn their just deserts. Even in the chaos we are comforted by the affirmation of what is noblest in our species. At the end of “Earthquake,” Charlton Heston’s character has a choice: He can try to rescue his wife, who is drowning in the sewer, or do nothing, freeing himself to shack up with his mistress. He hesitates, but in the end he plunges into what the audience knows is almost certain death. He does it because it is the right thing to do. I worry that those who make the other choice, the self-centered, “me first,” survival-at-any-cost choice, in New Orleans or Henderson or anywhere, will not be able to return to the fold. I worry that the line between the rule of law and anarchy is not carved in stone but lightly sketched on the sidewalk with chalk on a rainy day. I worry that once the line is crossed, it becomes blurred and indistinct. I find myself wondering if the person standing in front of me in the Food Lion would shoot me to eat my dog, or worse, if he went three days without a meal. Or vice versa. |
|