Boom Goes London, Boom Paris...

I've seen some movies this summer about the end of the world. "Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer" and "Transfomers" were great big comic books that went boom and when the smoke cleared, the world was safe again, and the good guys won. In "Live Free Or Die Hard," it wasn't the world that needed saving as much as our infrastructure, but John McClane (not to be confused with John McCain, who reminds us that "defeat is not an option") gets beat up and battered around just long enough to come back and do away with the bad guys who want to disrupt your cell phone service.
They were fun rides, but it left me thinking of a movie from my video store days: "Def-Con 4". It tells the story of what happens to the survivors of the Third World War. No matter that Defense Condition 1 is actually the maximum level of readiness, and is reserved for imminent or ongoing attack on U.S. military forces or U.S. territory by a foreign military power and Def-Con 4 refers "to normal, increased intelligence and strengthened security measures". Def-Con just sounds scary. Back when Matthew Broderick was playing global thermonuclear war with the defense department's "W.O.P.R." central processor, we all lived on the edge of annihilation. That movie prepared us for the daily virtual Armageddons that take place in our living rooms every day. There is a video game called "Defcon" in which players are invited to blow up as much of the world as possible, the ultimate goal being to incur as many "megadeaths" as possible. Doctor Strangelove would be so proud (so would Dave Mustaine, for that matter).
I guess it's just nostalgia for the good old days, when it didn't take a bunch of giant robots or "planet eaters" to doom us all. Back then it just took one crazy guy with access to the button. Come to think of it, maybe things haven't changed that much after all.