Heat: the end of everything

Visions of a Cold War Kid

When I was a kid, back in the 1960s, everything was The Future. I was constantly hearing about what life would be like "In The Year 2000".

It was a never-ending refrain: "By the year 2000, we'll" (all be walking around on the moon, have domed cities with climate control, zoom around in flying cars like on The Jetsons, have our living room rugs vacuumed by a robot).

And computers. Yes, computers were a definite menace. Every episode of The Twilight Zone had a computer in it, and man, they were EVIL. They always turned out to be the villain, the dark force behind every bad thing that had happened in that smudgy, surreal, black-and-white half-hour. 

It was almost as bad as Star Trek, where by the end of the show the evil computer would start to smoke and jibber as Captain Kirk managed to convince it to self-destruct in order to save the universe. Though why computers would have smoke coming out of them is anyone's guess. Call Bill Gates, something must've shorted out.

In this futuristic scenario, convenience and sterility meant everything. There was no food. Of course not! Food came in the form of pills. Green pill, vegetable. Red pill, meat. Etc. I used to brood in my morose child-way (for even then, as now, I was deeply depressive and fearful, though I told no one) about the demise of food. How food was, as my Dad used to say, "going out of style". No, actually, what he said was my brother Arthur was "eating like it was going out of style" when he attacked a giant stack of Aunt Jemimas. And I took it literally, that eating really WAS going out of style: something I could readily believe, with all that talk of pills. Soon one of my favorite activities, something I always thought I could depend on, would become obsolete.

I was a Cold War kid, though I had no idea there was ANY kind of war on, cold or otherwise. Walter Cronkite, who knew everything, often talked about something called The Iron Curtain, and I knew it was all the way over on the other side of the world, but I didn't know what it was.  I knew something about the Great Wall of China, and maybe even a little bit about the Berlin Wall, so all these things got conflated into a massive, completely solid, miles-thick curtain, a ramparts cutting across Russia and keeping all the Americans out, or the Russians in.

Communists were bad, but not as bad to us as they were to the Americans. We had a funny attitude towards the Americans then, though no funnier than it is now. We felt sorry for them, and we feared them slightly, though because Canadians always "stand on guard" (it's in our national anthem about 18 times), we held on to our values pretty securely. Americans were crazy: they were The Beverley Hillbillies, they were Dragnet, they were The Huntley-Brinkley Report. Though I knew a lot of people who cried when Kennedy got shot, at one point my mother told me quietly "he wasn't our President, you know," and it gave me a sense of perspective.

No one talked about this, but around the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis (which I knew absolutely nothing about: only that I woke up screaming every night for weeks), the TV stations from Detroit would frequently do A Test of the Emergency Broadcasting System. "This is only a test." A logo would flash on the screen: Civil Defense, a name I found inexplicably terrifying. Then came this bone-penetrating sound: BOOOOOOOOP. When I posted a slowed-down version of an old computer dial-up modem, every hair on my body stood up because it reminded me of This Is Only A Test. I would freeze in place, go numb. I don't remember another person ever being in the room with me when this happened, and I told no one about it. I was sure that the world was about to end.

Fast-forward to the early 1990s, when - I swear this is true - I heard a very loud air raid siren outside. Yes! Just like in the movies when the bombers are swooping down on London during the Blitz. Droaaaannnnnnnn - that doomy sound. (You know what I'm talking about.) I phoned up my friend and babbled. I heard it, I heard it, I heard the siren. What siren? It sounded like an air raid siren from an old World War II movie. Oh - maybe they were just testing it out.

Oh.

I wonder now: as with the Emergency Broadcasting System, the sirens are there to be used, not just "things" or abstract concepts. It made me wonder - still does - if every city has air raid sirens or some mysterious way of alerting its citizens of certain doom. For some reason, what comes to mind is what my scientist husband told me about NASA. Before every prolonged space flight, each astronaut is given a cyanide capsule in case they get stuck out there and can't get back.

Growing up doomy leaves marks on you, it does. My joy is always darkened. Recently I had to take down a post that literally sent my very modest readership scattering for cover. Four longtime readers bailed in just a few hours. No kidding, they left. The only reason I could think of was what I had just posted. It truly was a sort of vision of how Armageddon might unfold. And it might. Although I realize we all have to live as if it won't.

Climate change, terrorism, the nuclear weapons we all seem to have forgotten all about - and human evil - the collapse of the power grid - and the other thing no one mentions any more (though it was discussed incessantly in the 1960s), OVERPOPULATION - these things could converge on a fragile, already-overburdened world. And I don't want it to happen, folks. Don't ever think that. But back in the '60s we bickered and fumed and wrung our hands about the planet being choked with humanity at two billion people, and - strangely, very strangely to me - we virtually never think, talk or write about it now that it has exceeded seven. 

It's lonely putting your work out there, where there is this unpredictable response, or even non-response, along with wildly uneven exposure. Once in  a while I go back into old posts, unable to find something, and I see that a post has gotten something like 10,000 views (one on footbinding in China, for example, or Carrie Fisher and her electroconvulsive therapy). The next post will get, like, 15 views. I've tried to figure it out. Someone told me to use more intriguing search terms, but what if it's a video with a cat and a rabbit? 

But I find I can't write "popular" or go by a formula. I write because I have to, because I don't feel whole without it. It is what I have always done to survive and to try to make sense of the world. This matters more to me than format - or it must, because everyone else's blog is now solid white with huge lettering, and mine isn't. Though I changed the name of it at one point because someone told me Margaret Gunning's House of Dreams was "embarrassing" (hey! Not to me! It was satire. It's awful when someone doesn't "get" satire and says YOU'RE the dummy), I haven't substantially updated the site since I started it, it's still in the old brown-paper-bag format that I find easy to use and "not plastic" (as we used to say in the '60s). 

Recurrent themes run through personal blogs like this whether you want them to or not. Certain obsessions pop up again and again. Blogs are supposed to have a theme, and this one doesn't, but is nevertheless (in view of my obsessiveness) always in danger of becoming repetitive. One definitely-recurring theme is paranoia and the end of the world, as previewed by the Emergency Broadcasting System tests that broke into my Quick Draw McGraw cartoons. BOOOOOOOOP. And sirens going off that aren't supposed to. Or maybe they're just testing them out.

Food being replaced by pills never took off as a concept. Not even close. No one could have predicted the current truly astonishing levels of obesity back when 250 pounds was considered grotesque and horribly unhealthy. Computers are ubiquitous and run everything, but if they're as evil as we thought they would be, no one notices any more. They HAVE taken over our lives, just as Rod Serling/Gene Roddenberry tried to warn us, but now we aren't afraid of them any more. We like it just fine.

If George Orwell were alive today - but he wouldn't be. I think he would have committed suicide at the developments in surveillance that are now completely standard. Like frogs in hot water, we not only don't notice we're being boiled, we kind of like the sensation of the heat.

Visit Margaret's Amazon Author Page!

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Rob Ford displays violent temper during interview (1984)

This gave me the chills, if not the willies!

The Lost Penny: Shatner, pre-Trek

You don't have to watch all of this episode: in fact, you don't even have to watch all of the excerpt of this episode to get my point. Pre-Trek, Shatner was a good-lookin' dude by just about anyone's standards, though not particularly cocky about it. Not rugged, mind you: a little softer around the edges, a little androgynous, like Elvis or Tony Perkins. And he didn't overact, not here anyway. All the swaggering came later on.

My point is, if it hadn't been for Captain Kirk, Shatner might not have turned into the hulking ham-o-saurus he is today. But then again, he might have vanished, gone the way of Tony Franciosa and guys like that. Ah, the cost of fame! Something about Trek or Kirk or the '60s or SOMETHING made him explode into the kind of gut-busting histrionics which soon became his trademark.

Now he just plays on it endlessly, getting older and larger and showing up in ever more places, three or four series at a time it seems, plus ads. Every once in a while the nearly-reclusive Nimoy (who now makes a living taking pictures of fat women) shows up, shrivelled as an old matchstick, and I get the feeling that if you averaged the two of them, you might just have something like a normal human being. But still they dwell in their parallel universes: Obla-Di and Obla-Da.

Twilight drive

I don't know where to start with this. I can't write an essay. It just hit me in the stomach. I was watching my old Twilight Zone episodes: haven't seen most of them in 50 years, I mean the few I managed to see without my Mum knowing about it. They seemed creaky and quaint at first, but gradually the strange and disturbing vision of Rod Serling began to burn through: an alien dystopia, the world seen through the wrong end of the telescope, human darkness laid bare by the frightening advancement of a soulless technology.

Yes, overheated old cathode tubes and beeping big boxes that are supposed to be computers, and astronauts in clunky old suits left over from Diver Dan. An atomic blast that leaves one survivor, Burgess Meredith with his Coke-bottle glasses shattering into a million pieces. But along with laughably primitive versions of future innovation (and the weird sensation of trying to see 1970 as the future), there were other things.

A mournful folk song coming out of tape recorder, a song that was never recorded to begin with, accusing a man of murder. (This one I remember. I had bad dreams about it for weeks.) A doll that talks, yes, talks to Telly Savalas! A grandfather (Ed Wynn, who was on the show several times) whose clock ran out at the same time as his heart. And stuff like that.

Then today, I start watching on my PVR and: my God. It's Inger Stevens.

Inger Stevens, whom I first saw as the sweet but ditzy Swedish housekeeper for Congressman Morley on the '60s sitcom The Farmer's Daughter. (They finally had to get married when viewers complained that it looked like they were shacking up.)

It was a long time later that I learned what had happened to Inger Stevens. It must have been on the internet somewhere, or where? I heard that she had killed herself at age 35.

I thought back, thought of her fragility, the deerlike wariness in her lovely eyes. She was a sort of Nordic Audrey Hepburn, beautiful in a classy kind of way, but always with a look of barely-controlled anxiety.

This episode was called The Hitchhiker. It was in some ways reminiscent of Janet Leigh's famous drive in Psycho where, having just committed adultery and theft, she speeds away from danger and towards safe haven at. . . the Bates Motel. (And here we have a couple of degrees of separation, but let's not get distracted.)

Actually, The Hitchhiker predates Psycho slightly, shown in 1959 during Twilight Zone's first year, when the theme song was an eerie, dark, Poe-like dirge full of dissonant harp sounds rather than the doo-doo-doo-doo that came later. The legendary Bernard Hermann (who wrote the music for Psycho!) composed that first theme, although it was sadly forgotten after Season One.

So Inger Stevens is on a driving trip from California to New York, but we're never sure why. A blonde woman, a young blonde woman, an attractive young blonde woman in a car alone, driving away like mad, is automatically suspect, is she not? After all, the shower scene in Psycho has an undertone of punishment for female independence and its attendent rampant sexuality. Janet Leigh, a lady so bad she wears a black bra, is just enjoying that shower too damn much. (Norman. . . is that you?)

The whole premise of this episode is that Inger Stevens keeps seeing a mysterious hitchhiker, a rather grubby middle-aged man who appears, disappears, then appears again. She becomes increasingly unhinged as it becomes apparent that no one else sees him. She feels so desperately unsafe that she picks up a sailor on leave, another powerful metaphor for sluthood, and offers to drive him back to his ship. He becomes so freaked out by her escalating delusions that he jumps out of the car.

Knowing what we know, knowing what in fact Inger Stevens herself doesn't know, this drama is almost unbearably poignant: there are references to death all through it, and by the end, when it becomes horribly apparent that she is already dead and caught in some sort of awful no-man's-land, we see how lost she is, her eyes huge, desperate, haunted by God knows what sort of dark trauma buried deep in her subconscious.

Dead blondes. Hitchcock revelled in them. Show business eats 'em up and spits 'em out, just the nature of the game. Fame does that to people, doesn't it? Or do people pursue fame, desperately pursue it, to fill an agonizing vacuum within, a vacuum created by lack of love or the awful presence of unforgiveable abuse?

Or am I becoming fanciful once again? Doing a little digging, it turns out Inger Stevens was married to a black actor, and in that era it had to be kept secret. Kind of like being married to a homosexual. But this doesn't make a person swallow a handful of barbiturates and die.

Why do people kill themselves? I'm always shocked and sickened by news of a suicide, and yet, I do get it. Personally, I have always found life a bewildering mess, with odd patches of wonder and beauty that somehow keep you in there, keep you in the fight: and then there are my people, whom I couldn't abandon no matter what sad sort of mess I'm in.

Was Inger Stevens too fine-edged for reality, too thin-skinned, too moody, too bipolar, too drug-addicted, too unloved? Too blonde, too lovely, too famous, or not famous enough?

But she's dead. So we'll never know the answer to that one.