In a theater it happened that a fire started offstage. The clown came
out to tell the audience. They thought it was a joke and applauded. He told
them again, and they became still more hilarious. This is the way, I
suppose, that the world will be destroyed - amid the universal hilarity of
wits and wags who think it is all a joke. - Soren Kierkegaard
I'd never read any Kierkegaard before. I still haven't, actually. This
just happened to be the random quote that fell out of a javascript fortune cookie generator.
This one sounded familiar to me, though. It seems like worse the disaster,
the more wildly inappropriate my initial response. I remember when the
Challenger exploded. I was sick, and had stayed home from school
that day. My parents were out at their respective jobs. (This isn't a bad
thing. As I remember, I had a minor cold or flu type thing, not a major
disease that required constant parental supervision. Still, they called
home frequently to check on me.) Anyway, I was watching TV. If I remember
correctly, it was the Beverly Hillbillies. My initial reaction was
annoyance that they preempted it to show some obscure shuttle launch. This
lasted for several minutes, while I tried to wrap my mind around what the
little spiraling trails of smoke meant.
Then, of course, there was September 11, 2001. Like Arthur Dent in the
Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, I don't think I ever seriously
believed New York existed. At least, not in a personal sense. So,
initially, I reacted about the same way I would have if someone told me
terrorists had just crashed a plane into Atlantis. Or Oz. It just didn't
parse for me. I walked into the office that morning, and saw several of my
fellow workers gathered around the TV in the conference room. I asked what
was going on, and someone told me: "Gerble garble, plane, walla fwibble,
Center, foo." I didn't try to answer, beyond nodding and laughing. Seems
like a safe bet. Most office gossip is appropriately answered by nodding
and laughing, right? Then I wandered back to my desk, and overheard a phone
call from an adjacent cube. "Yeah, someone just crashed an airplane into
the World Trade Center." Walla fwibble, Center, foo. It took an absurdly
long time, and several iterations of overheard conversational snippets,
before I managed to actually understand what I heard.
But, tracing this trend, I expect my responses to be even more dramatically
and wildly inappropriate as the disasters get worse. I fully expect that I
will fall head-over-heels in love, or collapse in hysterical laughter, or
something else completely non sequiter, if I ever heard them announce
nuclear war (or something of that scale) on the news.
But, at least I wouldn't have to worry about being embarrassed about it
afterward.
Posted at 1:22 PM
