| Tuesday, October 10, 2006 |
01:56 - Ah, the past, when people were stupid
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Courtesy of Vintage Tooncast, I just saw "Duck and Cover" for what might in fact be the first time.
I've grown up amidst constant mockery of this ten-minute film, in everything from South Park to The Powerpuff Girls. It's never been anything to me but an object of ridicule. And—well, now that I've seen it, I find myself wondering what advanced stage of human intelligence we're in now, when we've got ourselves so perfectly trained as to unfailingly miss the bigger point if there's a cheap laugh to be had.
Watch this video, and then please explain to me what facts in it are inaccurate.
I'm not talking about errors of omission. Keep in mind that this thing was aimed at kids. The goal was to present a realistic way that kids might escape death or serious injury in a nuclear explosion—not so that all lives would be saved, but so that at least some would. Shouldn't that be obvious? They're not going to tell a bunch of fourth-graders that "Well, if you're within the blast radius, sorry, you're pretty much toast." No, what they're trying to do is instill in people an instinctive defensive reaction that might save their skin if they are sufficiently far away from the blast epicenter that it might do some good, where the risks are from burns and flying glass rather than from being turned into the fine paste lining the edges of a crater. There's potentially a lot more people in the former category than the latter.
Yes, you can stave off burns to a certain degree by covering your exposed skin. You can protect yourself against flying debris by ducking against a sturdy wall. The fact that a few stitches of cloth won't deter gamma particles if there are enough of them around, or that a wall won't protect you if you duck against one that's pointing the wrong way, is not something they're going to put into the movie—not because they're trying to sugar-coat the reality of nuclear annihilation, but because if they can train people to have these reactions by reflex, then maybe—just maybe—if the conditions are right, their lives might be saved when otherwise they wouldn't have been.
The goal of the people making this thing was to save lives. They knew they'd save more lives by telling people to "duck and cover" than by throwing up their hands and saying, "Well, shoot, it's too complicated and counterproductive trying to get people to orient themselves opposite a wall from wherever they saw the blast in the sky, or to tell them not to bother doing anything if they're too close to where the bomb hits, so we might as well just not tell anybody anything." Right? Or should they have just rejected the contract, knowing that people in the future would just laugh at them from the safe distance of five decades of non-nuked history?
How would you like for your job to be making an educational film explaining to fourth-grade kids how to survive a nuclear attack? I don't envy these guys their task at all. For what it's worth, I think they did a fine job; and if such an attack had ever come, I think their efforts would have paid off.
But with some generations you just can't win.
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Brian Tiemann
