Aquaphobia: Apocalypse, or Age of Aquarius?

From "Evan Almighty"

 A widely passed-around New York Times article appropriately titled for 2012/apocalyptic flair, "Is This The End?", postulates that sometime in the future -- as close as 50 years from now -- all of New York City will sink into the water, a modern-day version of Atlantis. While couched in a plea for New York's government to recognize the seriousness of climate change, the piece evokes a larger, rather wistful eschatological feeling, almost seeing the eventual demise of my home city as part of an overall civilizations-destroying circle of life.

From The New York Times article, "Is This The End?"

Is that NYT post simply another symptom of the current End-Of-The-World Romanticism that has always infused our popular culture -- through Hiroshima, through the Cold War and the Atomic Age, through the ashes of idealism in the paranoid 1970s, through Y2K, 9/11, and barreling straight down into the end of this sort of "fated" year?

Sync Alert: Steve Carell in the Noah-themed "Evan Almighty"; Carell has also most recently starred in:

 No; I believe that within 50 years or so, maybe earlier, the islands of New York City will experience, at the very least, significant damage due to water. I know what you're probably thinking next, the most important of factors to consider here: where do we put all the important works of art? How do we preserve the punk scene monuments and the Apple Stores?

About 6 years ago, a boyfriend who lived in the Lower East Side, right at the edge of Alphabet City, told me of a dream he had about looking out the window of his co-op and seeing nothing but water. After Hurricane Sandy, I'm sure a portion of that dream might have become a reality. Or maybe it was foretelling an even more distant time in the future. At any rate, the dream bothered him quite a bit, and he mulled selling his place and moving.

I dream a lot about such things as well. I often look out at the NYC skyline from my subway train and think: "one day, this will all be gone," most likely due to the very conditions outlined in another article that ran in NYT the same day as "Is This The End?", "Rising Seas, Vanishing Coastlines." Maybe they'll know in advance and start moving everything to a "New New York City" somewhere more inland; maybe they can lease out Detroit. I have dreams of water decimating cities all the time.

But perhaps such flood dreams are simply primal, part of our DNA; certainly, they pre-date the Bible and the story of Noah. And they are seeded into our pop-culture in countless movies, such as "The Last Wave":

"The Day After Tomorrow":

 

"The Abyss":

 

"Deep Impact":

and, of course, "2012":

The catch-phrase for "2012," by the way, was "We Were Warned" -- which is basically the "message" of both NYT articles cited here. While I do believe in climate change and global warming as contributing factors to the "crazy" weather we have had as of late, I only think this is part of the story -- the other part being, the Earth, much like humanity (we'd like to think, anyway,), is a dynamic system that is constantly changing.

Yes, "We Were Warned" but there is only so much we can do -- and that goes beyond recycling our cans. We need to be smart and start moving our cities off coastlines now -- and pour more money into space exploration so we can eventually get off this rock.

Being a Pisces, I love comic books and stories about underwater superheroes like Aquaman, The Submariner, and the Man From Atlantis. In an "Aquaman" storyline called "American Tidal," San Diego was flooded, and thus dubbed "Sub Diego":

The current storyline in "Aquaman" is called "Throne of Atlantis," in which the underwater denizens of Aquaman's hometown invade the surface-world -- a perfect metaphor for our primal flood-fears:

"The Throne of Atlantis" also mixes in some Lovecraftian "horrors under the sea," a trope that often gets paired with these water-based disaster movies, as in the case with "Cloverfield":

You'll notice that in many of these movies and stories, the mangled Statue of Liberty is showcased in some fashion:

This repeated symbolism of the "Goddess" being torn down is an interesting one, used in all variety of apocalyptic entertainment -- that deserves a post all in itself.

But that brings up the question: does the flood imagery + the eschatological elements = some sort of actual Age Of Aquarius? Or, connected, an Aeon Of Horus?

Again: that's fodder for a future post. In the meantime: try to stay dry.