I thought I was hallucinating the headline: “Russians get naked on
TV.”
Apparently, Russia is catching up to America in the public stupidity
department. I know, I know, some of you think they are already there,
what with President Vladimir Putin, the power-mad former KGB spy whose
lavishly cinematic tastes include — horrors! — mobile phones
and bodyguards and fleets of private jets, set to spend
mega-million-dollars on restoring a beautiful but decrepit seaside
Czarist
palace built near the former imperial capital, St. Petersburg, for Peter the Great.
But now, Russian TV threatens to surpass the United States in the moronic media department, with “Naked Truth,” an all-female newscast which boasts a stripping anchorwoman, reporters who go topless covering parliament, and a bare-breasted weathercaster whose vulgar gestures accompanying predictions of light rain fortunately cannot be described in a family newspaper.
Lately, the news in Russia, of course, is not so good, and not just the Kursk submarine tragedy — particularly when you consider that a large number of Russian men die drunk, after binge weekends, in acute alcoholic intoxication. Perhaps with good reason. In Russia, the death rate has become twice as high as the birth rate, so their population decreases 2,500 daily. This ultimately means Russia faces worsening economic and security conditions, with a graying populace, fewer young, productive workers available and a huge, chaotic territory to govern.
For me, the thought of Russia’s nude news covering current world events seems, er, fitting somehow.
Worried about a possible disastrous outcome of:
- The Presidential election?
- The Mid East peace initiative?
- Global terrorism?
In America, we don’t have newscasts named “Naked Truth,” but we do have disaster movies. Disaster movies are great distractions to deflect you from petty personal problems, or larger political ones. Everything else on your own emotional plate pales in comparison to, say, the dramatic prospect of the White House being obliterated in the next 20 seconds on Election Eve by Alien Spacecraft. The last disaster movie I ever saw was “Volcano.” Though I also sat through John Houston’s sodden epic, “Under the Volcano” — which was merely disastrous — and cringe at the thought of Albert Finney, who I always confuse with Peter Finch, as Malcolm Lowry’s suicidal alcoholic consul in Mexico on the eve of World War II. For once, how thankful I am not to be Jacqueline Bisset, who plays the consul’s wife — what an odd coupling, that. As far as actual volcanoes go, despite a brief, anti-climactic tour of Pompeii, I never particularly fixated or obsessed on them ending life as we know it.
Until lately.
Now some catastrophe-obsessed British scientist stirring up global hysteria via the
BBC warns that a collapsing volcano in the Atlantic Ocean could unleash a gigantic wall of water obliterating much of the Eastern Seaboard of the United States, including my humble Jersey-shore beginnings, and swamp the hedonistic island paradises of the Caribbean. This so-called mega-tsunami, claims Dr. Simon Day, would begin its deadly surge 2,130 feet high, then devolve to 160 feet by the time it crashes on land, destructive enough to wreak havoc 12 miles inland. I can’t wait. I’m starting my cat on Civil Defense drills, much against his will. He haaaaates getting wet and simply refuses to wear his Feline Life Jacket, or even Kitty Water Wings. Oh, well.
Volcanoes,
volcanoes. I’m searching my mental Rolodex for references. What comes up for me is this really creative local poet I used to know, Joel C—-, who went camping in his VW to Washington state at the base of Mt. St. Helens just before that volcano blew, making an ash of himself, to become another sanctified Poetry Holy Card, doubly ironic since Joel’s creative specialty had been aphorisms.
And I’ll never forget watching that screening of “Volcano,” that lavishly unreal footage of a geologically-deranged La Brea Tarpit nuking Wilshire Boulevard with exploding fireballs. My friend Jennifer’s eyes blazing and she cackled maniacally as she catalogued in encyclopedic detail the tabloid-like demises of East Krakatowa, Java, and the final days of Pompeii, how the al fresco table settings just sat there while all this molten
lava swirled around, laying waste to everything in its path.
If you want to work up a literary sweat, read
“The Wasteland,”
T.S. Eliot’s 1922 visionary narrative poetry masterpiece about our crumbling civilization, “Fear death by water” is what Madame Sosostris the seer warns Phlebas the Phoenician who dies later in the poem by drowning at sea:
- Madame Sosostris, famous clairvoyante,
Had a bad cold, nevertheless
Is known to be the wisest woman in Europe,
With a wicked pack of cards. Here, said she,
Is your card, the drowned Phoenician Sailor,
(Those are pearls that were his eyes. Look!)
Fear death by water. …
My errant mind inexorably, guiltily shifts back to that movie “Volcano,” so I will have something vaguely intelligent to contribute at the next cocktail party I attend. You can’t help but notice, it’s such a highly photogenic catastrophe. When the volcano blows, the sight is almost pretty, like a bizarre, over-the-top sound-and-light show. All that’s missing in the spectacular chaos is cinema-ditz Bette Midler rushing into one of the rubbled department stores on useless Rollerblades to borrow a low-cut gown for a big date. The lava is like a thick stream of bubbling Italian meat sauce, Bolognese, perhaps. And wasn’t that lava well directed? Like some gurgling gargantuan glutton, it eats everything in its path, incinerates or melts even the most durable elements as it flows along, belches, glug-glug, and glows in the dark, so you don’t even need a nightlight.
Death by water. Such a primal fear. Didn’t TV’s Mister Rogers sing a song comforting little kids terrified they’ll be flushed down the toilet or sucked down the
drain? Sadly, that can and does actually happen with sewers, a horrifyingly premature truncation of young lives. Anyway, I’m not sure what the world really needs most is a good end-times flood right now — poor Florida! — although, secretly, I’ve always wanted to play Mrs. Noah, two by two into the ark. SOS for one of my fondest friends, that guy who dwells on a trendy barrier island down south: Swim, honey, swim!
