Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 1996. [Vol. 3.] Eger Journal of American Studies. (Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 23)
STUDIES - Zsolt K. Virágos: The American Brand of the Myth of Apocalypse
doomsday mentality, is especially conspicuous, is popular culture. As A. M. Greeley has recently observed, "the SF imagination no longer constructs scientific Utopias but either partial or total apocalypses in which the bad we know is wiped out and replaced by something every bit as bad" (Greeley 282). Recent end-oriented science fiction frequently envisions the disappearance of the human race; numerous television programs and disaster movies suggest a veritable "boom in doom"; there has been a recent rash in the mass media of subjects like the ends of cities, empires, other worlds and galaxies; similarly characteristic thematic stereotypes are, for instance, the depredations of an unbridled technology, computers turning into doomsday machines, nuclear mistakes, manmade or extraterrestially induced holocausts, the blind working of astronomical fate, comet collision, exploding stars, species extermination, total pogroms, mankind terrorized by animals —apes, rats, wasps, ants —enlarged to monsters by atomic radiation, the spectacular destruction of some colossal human creation, etc. "Reading widely in the cataclysmic tradition is a rather numbing experience," J. Dewey testifies, "like watching a succession of brakeless automobiles slowly heading up a long incline" (Dewey 13). The relevance of the current preoccupation with the annihilistic vision in popular culture is clearly shown by the revealing titles of some novels published since 1970: The Late Great Planet Earth (1970), The Lost Continent (1970), The Day After Judgment (1971), Satan is Alive and Well on Planet Earth (1972), The Terminal Generation (1976), Nuclear Nightmares (1979), etc. I might add that the first of these novels —read also by Ronald Reagan 7 —has sold over 10 million copies since 1970 and the other books have been reprinted more than ten times. The large number of popular fictions of nuclear disaster, an increasing number of recent disaster films, some of them familiar to 7 The political thinking of the fortieth president of the U.S. seems to have been imbued with apocalyptic religious ideas and he made repeated statements about the imminence of an Armageddon. Consider also the Reagan administration's "end-times" mentality. Cf. Jones 59—70. 129
