Boom Boom Ker-Boom
September 14, 2006

The adage "No news is good news" has never seemed so true. You can't scan a newspaper, upload a home page or channel-surf the TV without running smack into wars of aggression, murder, terrorist attacks (real and imagined), car bombings, torture, and fatal upheavals in climate (no doubt Mother Nature's revenge for all of the above).

Remember that brilliant pantomime bit in Roxanne? Steve Martin strolls down a peaceful suburban street past a newspaper vending machine. He stops, plugs in a coin, takes out a paper, and strolls on, reading the front page. Suddenly, his entire body spasms in horror; two steps down the road, he feeds another coin into another machine and hastily stuffs the newspaper back in. That's how I feel these days.

The world has always been a perilous place, from the time the first Cro-Magnon stumbled into the first tar pit, through eras of plague, fire, and famine, cholera, flu and fever epidemics, and non-stop warfare (the one epidemic we've never been able to eradicate). Only now that we're all wired into the global village, one false move can have immediate global consequences. Never has our hell-bent species seemed to teeter so close to the abyss.

Or has it? Maybe every generation goes through this psychotic episode of doomsaying fatalism, as I realized the other day watching an episode of the old TV sitcom, The Many Loves Of Dobie Gillis.

Our friends Michael and Donna had a hankering to watch an old Dobie Gillis episode from our video vault. We were glad to oblige, since it remains my favorite TV show from my misspent childhood. The protagonist is earnest, likable, entirely unexceptional Dobie (Charlie Brown in high school, on his way to becoming Mike Doonesbury), forever perched in front of his mentor, Rodin's The Thinker, trying to work out his latest romantic entanglements.

Dobie Gillis never pretended to be an innocent slice of real-life Americana like Leave It To Beaver. It's a witty satire of American attitudes carried to their zaniest extremes: Dobie's hopeless romanticism, luscious bombshell Thalia Menninger's unvarnished avarice, the idle-class arrogance of rich kid Chatsworth Osborne Jr., and the eternal parental frustration of Dobie's working-class grocer dad, always leaning wearily on his broom, muttering, "I gotta kill that boy. I just gotta."

Then there's Dobie's devoted "good buddy," lovable nutball Maynard G. Krebs, played by a pre-Gilligan Bob Denver. A beatnik in torn sweatshirt and scruffy chin whiskers, Maynard is the holy fool of the show: frightened of girls, a friend to all dumb animals, and the despair of his off-camera parents. Mention the word "work" in his presence, and his response is a startled Pavlovian shriek, "WORK!?!?" His idea of nirvana is playing the bongos and listening to Dizzy Gillespie. TV heartthrobs come and go—your Kookies, your Fonzies, your Cassidys—but Maynard G. Krebs has always been my idol.

So the episode Art Boy happened to pull out of the archive, broadcast in 1961, is called "Eat Drink and Be Merry, For Tomorrow, Ker-Boom!" In it, the students bring objects to class to be buried in a time capsule for future generations to find. Only Maynard doesn't think there are going to be any future generations, according to all those "big black scary headlines" in the newspaper. Mention the subject, and Maynard launches into the same apocalyptic riff: "Boom! Boom! Ker-boom!" he cries, punctuated on the soundtrack by portentous bass drumbeats.

1961 was the year of the bloody Bay of Pigs Invasion in Cuba. The Cold War was on the boil, and A-bomb paranoia was rampant. Neighborhood air raid sirens were tested every Friday morning, and we schoolkids were taught to duck and cover under our flimsy Formica desks as an antidote to nuclear holocaust. No wonder poor Maynard was freaked.

The TV episode is resolved when the class unearths a time capsule buried in 1911, containing a newspaper full of scary stories of wars, violence and crime. See, they all persuade Maynard, 50 years ago the news was just as bad, but we're all still here. As long as there are pretty girls, chocolate malts, and jazz, they conclude sunnily, life goes on.

It's hard to embrace such cockeyed optimism at the moment, five years after 9-11 (and the subsequent creation of the international terror cell that is now Iraq). Only five years from now that time capsule Dobie's TV class planted will be due for excavation, and it's scary to think how we might (or might not) have progressed by then.

But the "Boom! Boom! Ker-Boom!" philosophy makes it too easy to give up. I can't tell you how many teenage diets I bailed on, rationalizing that the world could blow up tomorrow, so I might as well have that dish of coffee ice cream. But my bluff was always called; the world continued stubbornly on and I stayed fat.

If you mainline NPR all day, sucking up calamity, cowering in despair, you risk losing that vital part of yourself that separates you from the sheep they want us to be. It's important to stay informed, to stay outraged, but disconnect from the fear machine before it paralyzes you. Otherwise we'll be a culture of zombies too spooked to protest while the scoundrels run amok—in which case, the next Ker-Boom you hear may indeed be the last.