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[FONT="]The World is burning to the Ground[/FONT][FONT="]
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[FONT="]A Story of Life, Bureaucracy, and War after the end of the World
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[/FONT] [FONT="] “… the week before the end of the world she was reading the story of Job. [/FONT] [FONT="]You know the story right?
[/FONT] [FONT="]It goes like this: God and Satan make a wager. They want to see how much shit God’s most faithful servant will eat before he renounces his faith. The servant’s name is Job. So they make the wager, and God starts feeding Job Shit. Takes his riches, takes his cattle, takes his health. Deprives him of friends. On and on. Finally- and this is the part that always got Wyndham – God takes Job’s children. [/FONT][FONT="]Let me clarify: In this context “takes” should be read as “kills”. [/FONT][FONT="]You with me on this? .... Job’s kids. Dead…[/FONT] [FONT="][/FONT] [FONT="]As for Job? He keeps shoveling down the shit. He will not renounce God. He keeps the faith. And he’s rewarded: God gives him back his riches, his cattle. God restores his health, and sends him friends. God replaces his kids. Pay attention: Word choice is important in an end of the world story. I said “replaces not “restores”.[/FONT] [FONT="][/FONT] [FONT="] The other kids? They stay dead, gone non-functioning, erased forever from the Earth, just like the dinosaurs and the 12 million undesirables incinerated by the Nazis and the 500,000 slaughtered in Rwanda and the 1.7 million murdered in Cambodia and the 60 million immolated in the Middle Passage.[/FONT][FONT="]
[/FONT] [FONT="]That merry prankster God.[/FONT] [FONT="]That jokester.
[/FONT] [FONT="]That‘s what the end of the world is about… The rest is just details.” –The End of the World as We Know it By Dale Bailey[/FONT]
[FONT="]Prologue[/FONT] [FONT="]
[/FONT] [FONT="] When did the world end? The exact date depends on where you were then the bombs started dropping, what time zone you were in, and what hemisphere you lived it. But these are semantics that we need not trouble ourselves. You can be sure though that the world ended in October of 1962. Sure there are people who would disagree with me; they would say the Last War (every time I read that name in a text book I get a little bit sick) wasn’t the end of the world anymore than the Second World War was. They might say that in every Post-Apocalyptic story they have read (and most of us have read quite a few; can you say escapism?) feature a few survivors of a cataclysmic disaster rebuilding western civilization, except they are careful to avoid the old mistakes. To that all I have to say is that in most post-apocalyptic stories there are three archetypical characters. The rugged, self-reliant, gun totting bad ass with a good heart that by the end of the story is reestablishing western civilization, except without the bad old ways. Then there is the rugged bandit that accepts the new world and the bad parts of the old world in tandem and tries to stop the bad ass with the good heart from rebuilding civilization. The last is the world weary intellectual (usually a scientist or a lawyer who is very pessimistic about the rebuilding of civilization) he allies with the bad ass with the heart of gold against the bandit type and they work to rebuild civilization. The United States is the rugged survivor, the bad ass with a heart of gold (though this part is debatable). The US, just like our first archetype, worked to rebuild civilization after the end of the world and just like our first archetype it was sure to avoid the bad old ways of giving its enemies a fighting chance and of war in general. Post-apocalyptic stories are in essence the story of rebuilding after a great tragedy. History ever since the Last War has been about the pursuit of rebuilding what we lost in that war. We are like weary children clinging to the skin of the world as it burns around us, hoping that somehow we can make things better and make things just like they used to even though we know that it will never be possible. This isn’t the story of how the world ended, this is the story of the world after it ended and all the horrors that come along with living in that world.[/FONT]