The Scene and Herd

While watching Tropic Thunder the other night, I started thinking about how the Vietnam War was funny. More specifically, I thought about how Vietnam War vets were funny. Mostly, of course, I was thinking about Walter from the The Big Lebowski and how much I treasure the invention of that character. Like any good thing that results from a painful situation (especially if it’s not your painful situation), the thought crosses my mind that Walter makes the Vietnam War worthwhile. I’m immediately struck by the inappropriateness of the thought, but it occurs so swiftly, I haven’t the time or nature to curb it. For my generation, this kind of thinking is the most natural thing in the world.

On the same night that I watched Tropic Thunder, I had people over to my house for a potluck. Before the food had even been served, we were cracking jokes about the epidemic, deciding that one of my friends was missing from the festivities because he’d been afflicted. That was before I knew that swine flu was affecting healthy, young adults. I read in the paper the next day that my demographic was certainly at risk and had a brief moment of panic (which involved a lot of sudden flu-like symptoms, I’m sure you can imagine) but I quickly lost interest in my own vulnerabilities the second I read that the EU wanted to call it the novel flu. Is it not enough that Israel and some Muslims want to name it after the Mexicans? This is funny – this and the Vietnam War.

The thing is, we’re not laughing as a defense mechanism. My own panic was brief and I’m convinced that everything is going to be okay. We’re laughing at the novel flu because we don’t believe what we hear. There’s not really going to be an epidemic.

I blame my disbelief on the economy (which is bad but not that bad), SARS and terrorism. I blame Y2K! I especially blame the swine flu outbreaks of 1976 and 1988 respectively, in this case. I blame everything that’s happened in the past 20 that was supposed to be really awful, but turned out to be inconvenient. I blame the media for framing everything as an epidemic (literally and metaphorically). As a people, we’re desensitized, sure. But we’re not desensitized because we hear about bad things like AIDS, poverty and war every day. We’re desensitized because everything we hear about every day is told with a panic that should be reserved for discussing the war in Vietnam etc. People don’t read about Darfur and think, “I’m tired of this and I don’t care.” They read about Darfur and think, “Yeah right. This from the people that told me to keep out of Chinatown in the summer of 2003.”

I blame the media and SARS and the economy. But I also credit these…groups for enabling the creation of Walter and other comical war vet characters. Without all these false alarms, we might still be sensitive about bad things.