Large Fierce Mammal

The concept of Armageddon isn’t an invention of nuclear armed modernity. For those of us whose formative years were incubated in the warmest parts of the Cold War, Armageddon in those days looked like a short, sharp, war not unlike the one so recently ended back then, but that played out not in the span of six long years but in hours. Here in Canada where no family was untouched by the horrors of World War 2, the man-made geography of bustling cities, limitless black ribbons of highway and railroad spanning the country coast to coast, pristine homes and gardens, had weathered the storm of the conflict unmolested by enemy action, even as the population swelled with returning soldiers, sailors, airmen, and assorted other Canadians called abroad who knew first hand what post-war Europe looked like. Sounded like. Smelled like. Felt like. Everybody knew what had happened twice in Japan. They also knew that the means to that end was in the sole possession of the Unites States of America.

Nobody in the game thought that imbalance of power would last forever, or even particularly long, and even after the Soviet Union got into the business, the general belief was that even a nuclear war would be winnable in the traditional sense of granting overarching supremacy to the victor.

“Dotted across the world, relics of the Cold War, are edifices deeply delved wherein would shelter members of governments whose mishandling of events had brought their nations to the brink, and thence across the threshold of nuclear Armageddon. Built in the belief that they and their failed leadership would still have value when the radioactive dust had finished settling upon the wasteland, and that bureaucracy would hold sway in the face of more immediate existential matters, I suppose it’s fortunate that the bunkers and their builders were never called to test.” ~ No Bunker for You

Human conflict has always been a motivator of artistic expression, and “post apocalyptic” fiction has been a popular genre for generations. What movie audience doesn’t enjoy watching the last people inhabiting a global wasteland expend limitless stocks of ammunition from atop smoke belching deafening battle wagons that run on fuck knowns what flammable filth fighting daily over the last liter of gasoline so they can go that extra mile to score the last can peaches. Mix in the last dicks standing locked in hand-in-crotch combat over the last viable womb on earth and you’ve got yourself a blockbuster.

And then there’s the fully autonomous war where no humans need apply because self-driving AI has taken the wheel.

Consider …

… and of course this progenitor of an entire franchise …

Tonight’s Dark Sentiment will draw from that particular well, in the spirit of The Duel which I wrote and placed here in the Dark Sentiments of 2011:

The Duel

(Excerpt)

By LFM

A flock of ravens marked the place
The hateful hate was ended,
And as they watched, some circled down,
Unharmed as they descended.

A church once stood where now there were
But smoking ruined walls,
Atop of which the ravens swarmed
With loud, excited calls.

The seconds came unto that place
That reeked of blood and death.
Into a hole amid the floor
They peered with bated breath.

In the earthen cellar’s gloom
Two corpses were revealed,
Of angry men possessed of hate
That neither would see healed.

Their sticks long smashed to tiny shards,
Their bodies near destroyed,
Neither man could find relief
From being sore annoyed.

And so as life’s blood drained away
They’d crawled across the ground,
And gasping in a sewage drain
Thumb wrestled ’til they drowned.

Now, let the band play on with Fortress The Last Day of War.