Going Out Of Shape

We have all been brought up to fear impending nuclear war. This threat has receded in recent years and nuclear bunkers have been sold off. But we have all understood that nuclear bombs will destroy civilization and Walsall as well without knowing too many of the details of how this will take place.

One side effect of nuclear war has however entered the public consciousness. We all know that an exploding nuclear bomb creates a mushroom-shaped cloud. There is a reason for this. In Britain and North America people have been brought up to fear mushrooms almost as much as nuclear war. We are told that many of the objects that look like mushrooms are in fact poisonous toadstools which could kill us with one bite. Such is the fear of death by toadstool that we never risk trying to learn which plant is a mushroom and which not and consequently have an innate fear of everything shaped like a mushroom. Nuclear bombs were designed to create mushroom clouds to demonstrate to the public that they are so dangerous that we should not investigate what they actually are.

The nuclear war was supposed to be a consequence of the Cold War between America and the Soviet Union. In those days everything East European was treated with the utmost suspicion. Now however the former Soviet Bloc countries have been brought into the Western fold. Their cultures and tastes are no longer threatening to us. Most East Europeans have a particular fondness for mushrooms and can distinguish the many edible from the few inedible ones. The mushroom is not a symbol of fear for them. Future weapons of mass destruction will have to be designed to produce other shapes of cloud if they are going to have the desired effect of cowing the population.

The most common fear nowadays is of running out of credit. The economies of Western countries have been built on imaginary money for centuries and now imaginary imaginary money is the normal currency of daily transactions. A bomb which produces a cloud in the shape of a pair of scissors cutting up a credit card might instil the right amount of fear in people. But we know a bit too much about the credit process. The same applies to road accidents. We are all taught to be careful crossing roads because cars might run us over. We would certainly be afraid of a bomb which produced a cloud shaped like a car hurtling towards us. But at the same time we all know what to do to avoid the onrushing cars should we wish to. No one would believe that a bomb producing a cloud like an onrushing car would destroy the whole world. It would simply kill the careless and ignorant. This brings us back to Walsall again but that is another column for another day.

Eternal Damnation and the Fires of Hell have lost their resonance for most people. Until our time comes that is. So can anything at all instil so much fear in all people that the very sight of it is enough to indicate that something is terrible? It is sad to report that there still is one such terror gripping the population. It comes in two stages. Women fear a world without chocolate. Men fear women who are crazed by a lack of chocolate. The next generation of weapons of mass destruction will therefore produce a cloud which looks like a bar of chocolate for a second and then vanishes. They will then emit uncontrollable screeching sounds which gather intensity by the minute. When we have the technology to do this it will be in the international interest to start another Cold War on some new ideological divide. Then we can return to the safety of the fear we always knew.

We are going to die anyway. We will always find comfort in finding more to fear than to hope for. We have lost our fear of mushrooms and a great void has developed in our psyches. Why wait for the bomb? Men should buy all the chocolates they can and then hide them. Every day. Then the natural order will be restored and we can bask in our glorious traditions once again.