Okay, so before anyone accuses me of offering up an insufficient sympathy dosage to the countless numbers who are facing suffering beyond comprehension in Japan today, this has nothing to do with them. I’m as shocked, riveted and sympathetic to their plight as you are. This is about the people living on this side of the Pacific who are making a run on local health food stores for medication to save them from the cloud of zombificating radioactive fallout about to descend upon California at any moment.
Japan is 6000 miles away, people. That’s about a quarter way around the Earth. So just chill out. Any radiation that shows up on the West Coast is going to be very minimal, perhaps not even detectable. Sheesh.
For those reading this who aren’t familiar with Vault Boy, he’s sort of the mascot icon of the Fallout video game series. Think of VB as the famous “duck and cover” turtle, amped up to insanely ridiculous degree.
I’m a big fan of the Fallout series. In these role playing video games, you play the role of a lone traveler forced to come to terms with the hostile aftermath of a nuclear war. The world-as-we-knew-it, similar but also very different from ours, was one in which 1950’s-era sentiments, design and ideas went on to dominate American life through to the mid-21st century. Sort of Disney’s classic Tomorrowland run amok, complete with robot butlers, fusion-powered cars, ray guns and nuclear powered everything. In the story, everything was 1950’s perfect until 2077, when an America-China nuclear war turned everything, everywhere, to a crispy cinder with few survivors. The Fallout stories take place about 200 years later.
Which brings me to Vault Boy up there. He’s sort of a running joke. See, the only real survivors were those people fortunate enough to get privileged seats in Vaults, mighty sprawling underground bomb shelters built by the American government and a huge corporation called Vault-Tec. Vault Boy is their spokesicon, cheerfully reminding Vault dwellers not to do silly things like eat radioactive snow or stare directly into the sun.
But here’s the gag: turns out, the Vaults were cruel jokes, more social experiments than anything. Each one designed with some critical failing and the monitored to see how the Vault survivors would deal with it. In one, the main door wouldn’t close all the way. Another would come stocked with heavy firearms but not enough food and water. Every Vault with its intentional failing, each designed by the Powers To Be (a tale that clarifies with time) to test human responses. But the Vaults were never meant to save anyone, and if they happened to do so, it was purely coincidental – or due to a failing in the experiment that was meant to fail.
This is a big part of why I love this series. At the core of the story is an ongoing tale of cynicism and faith, panic and hope, and the evil of banality smiling from behind cheerful thumbs-up eyes. In each of these stories, the main character is required to pull back the curtain of delusion and deception and play a pivotal role in the post-Armageddon unrolling of history.
So again, I say. Just chill out, people. We’re far enough away. You really don’t need to panic. Seriously.
Go buy or rent either Fallout 3 or Fallout: New Vegas. You’ll enjoy it. And if you still need a good dose of crazed nuclear-mad paranoia, watch The Atomic Cafe. Since 1982 film is as powerful today as it was then – 85 minutes of spliced-together clips from 1950’s and 1960’s nuclear scare films, brilliantly edited together for grand effect. I was going to say to go rent it; you can do that too. But know what? Turns out someone has Atomic Cafe on YouTube. So enjoy.