1991 and Pushing the Button
Ren & Stimpy, Joker's Experiment, dystopia dreams, Russian Roulette, and more, in Two N-Words (Two N-Bombs), Part Eleven
[All chapters can be read independently, and the previous chapters are here: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9, Part 10]
Our leaders have held off on nuclear war now for nearly 80 years. How can they have resisted for so long?
I remember wondering that, as a kid in the ’90s, and I specifically remember wondering it during the two-hour bus ride to school one morning. Because those are the questions you eventually ask yourself when you have that much time, stuck on a bus you don’t want to be on, having such a big chunk of your day all but mandatorily wasted: Why don’t the people in charge just nuke everything? How can not one of them so far have succumbed to the urge to push the button? Sure, there are safeguards in place—but did anyone even try?
The very existence of a button means it must be pushed eventually. Right? Even if it’s a button that goes to nothing, with no wiring beneath it, still it would be fun to push, if only to find out just how gratifying the resultant click might be. Everyone, from a child to a scientist, knows this temptation, this curiosity.
•
The psychology at play was perfectly summarized in the “Space Madness” episode of The Ren & Stimpy Show. Toward the end of the cartoon, Ren the chihuahua charges Stimpy the cat with guarding a big red button that sits in the center of a circular table. “Don’t touch it!” Ren shrieks, slapping Stimpy’s gloved hand away. “That’s the History Eraser Button, you fool!”1
This animated short first aired in September 1991, only a few months before the dissolution of the Soviet Union was complete, and the content should be evaluated in that historical context. Later on, pop culture would for a time treat the prospect of nuclear bombs as a flippant joke (think of the Electric Six and Chemical Brothers songs mentioned in a previous chapter); but this little narrative from 1991, made and shown during the last days of the Cold War’s thaw, still regards the notion of a world-destroying button with extreme alarm. Of course, the cartoon storyline is a comedy too, but it is not a high-minded or a dark comedy, as Dr. Strangelove was. Positioned on the timeline as it is, long after the Cuban Missile Crisis but still a bit before the End of History euphoria2, Ren & Stimpy’s “Space Madness” exemplifies the moment when the very nature of the big button push could be examined most piercingly—without either the burden of sanctimony or the complacency of lotus-eater callowness.
Transitioning from childhood proper to adolescence at the time, I’m sure this cartoon influenced my fledgling geopolitical and philosophic outlooks. Ren had told Stimpy that actually “We don’t know” what pushing the button would do. That paralleled the global circumstances in 1991, when maybe nuclear war wasn’t inevitable anymore—not even if one bomb did happen to go off due to an accidental button-push. To my mind, the continued possibility of doom, without the guarantee of certain doom, made the experimental dynamic of the button-push very attractive. I liked thinking of the hypothetical situation and the risk involved. Taken by the existential wonderment of it all, I mentally replayed soundbites from the Nickelodeon production. Who could resist “the beeyootiful shiny button […] the jolly candy-like button” that the announcer described so well? It was just like the red plastic buttons on so many arcade machines: I knew exactly how it felt, smooth and concave, begging to be pushed. But no one knew what it would do, this theoretical button of all buttons. It could possibly end the world, or alter its course irrevocably. Or it could do nothing.
Meanwhile, outside my parochial purview, the world order was changing rapidly of its own accord. The inner logic of reality had finally processed and rejected Russian communism. The Soviet government teetered on collapse. In August 1991 a failed coup had been staged against General Secretary Gorbachev. President Yeltsin climbed on top of a tank, condemned the insurrectionists, and later declared himself leader of all military and intelligence services.
However much of that I heard about as it happened, I don’t know. Some of it must have been mentioned in our fourth-grade current events module, but it didn’t register with me. I was too busy playing Nintendo, trading baseball cards, and being a rabid Ren & Stimpy fan. Surely I watched “Space Madness” on its initial broadcast and on uncountable reruns that fall.
Then I turned 10 years old as the hammer and sickle flag was finally lowered, on December 25 (their time) or December 26 (our time), 1991.
•
In retrospect, the fall of the USSR was a pretty good birthday gift for me. The real Andy Warhol got the dropping of the first atomic bomb for his 17th birthday—a piece of trivia that seems worth including here. (If ChatGPT could transform this essay into an 800-page historical novel by an amalgam of Pynchon and DeLillo, chapter one would be about August 6, 1945, and chapter two would be about December 26, 1991. The story would be overly detailed and ultimately not very meaningful, but the New York Times Book Review would pretend to love it. The pull quote would be: “Encyclopedic and ominous, a stark but sometimes wistful rumination on the shifting fortunes of the American dream—and its Soviet shadow.” In another reality I wrote that book instead, clinked glasses with other terrible people at Manhattan parties, and never admitted that the weird little 10-year-old boy in chapter two didn’t just resemble me but was me exactly.)
What amazed me most, even then—riding the school bus at 6 AM, spacing out and looking out the window—was that no one with access to such a button had yet pushed it. This preoccupied me even as we entered a new, safer era. As 1991 ended, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moved the hands of the Doomsday Clock back to 17 minutes before midnight—a figure that still stands as the farthest, safest measurement since the metaphor was devised. Even then our leaders were not known for their self-control or restraint, and yet they had managed to guide us through the Cold War with a marked degree of patience. So tensions had eased. But even so, the continued restraint of the top-level operators still impressed me—or baffled me.
Who could ever be handed such a button—or really any button—and, for many decades, refrain from pushing it? The button was an item of power akin to Tolkien’s One Ring, was it not? Didn’t it beckon its caretakers with supernatural temptation? Didn’t it lure all those in its vicinity to come forward and become the guy who finally did it? We knew—we know—that the elites indulge in all other malignant impulses. How could their egos have remained staid and impassive around a potentiality of such immense corruption as the button? How? Unless—
This line of thought has caused some skeptical dissidents to call into question the very existence of nuclear bombs, and of nuclear power itself. The “nukes aren’t real” conspiracy theory alleges that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were simply firebombed really, really hard—like Dresden, only worse. The powers that be simply use the idea of atomic warheads to scare the population, just as they use the idea of nuclear power plants as a potential panacea—a stick and a carrot, neither of which really exist. “We had nukes in the 1940s. The rest of the world has caught up with and surpassed a 1940s level of technology otherwise, so therefore almost every nation should have nukes by now. But they don’t. So nuclear bombs are a fiction.” That’s the thinking. I don’t agree with it, but I understand where it comes from. It seems almost unbelievable that thus far—well into the post-WWII epoch—the leading military powers have still not yet turned one of their various smaller adversaries into a “glass parking lot” already, as they’ve sometimes threatened.
Have the men in charge just not wanted to press the button? That would make them wise in one very important way. But if this is the case—if they were or are immune to the allure of the button—couldn’t it also be said that they were or are in some sense less than human? And if technology has become too potentially destructive and seductive to human beings, wouldn’t that in fact be an argument for nonhuman entities (robots or mutants) to be placed in charge of our affairs? Sooner or later, real people—fools or sadists or risk-takers—would want to push the button. I’m sure of it.
One thing I knew for sure, as a ten-year-old boy, was that if I had the button, I would probably have pressed it already. I liked life; I liked the world; I liked the people around me—but I didn’t think I’d be able to hold back, if given the chance. So, if they ever needed someone to push it—and if they weren’t up to the task—I’d do it for them.
•
That’s what I thought then, and many years later it reminded me of a few moments in The Dark Knight, during the famous “social experiment” scene. The Joker has wired two ships with explosives and given each one the detonator to the other’s payload. On the ship full of prisoners, a large convict in an orange jumpsuit confronts the guard: “You don’t wanna die, but you don’t know how to take a life. Give it to me. […] Give it to me, and I’ll do what you should’ve did ten minutes ago.”
On the other ship, the normal Gothamites, good democrats that they are, vote to push their button and save themselves by blowing up the other boat. Of course, as usual in democracies, the caretakers ignore the wishes of the people, be they wicked or otherwise. The captain holding the detonator just stares down dumbly at it. “No one wants to get their hands dirty,” remarks one citizen who’s hit his limit. “Fine. I’ll do it.”
Ultimately, on the prisoner ship, the convict simply throws the detonator out the window, into the water below. Meanwhile, the bold citizen cannot bring himself to push the button either—he gives the device back and returns to his seat.
•
No one has the nerve. Whether it’s preemptively nuking Moscow and potentially setting off nuclear Armageddon . . . or blowing up a ship of fellow human beings before they can do the same to you, only to potentially get killed anyway by a Joker who doesn’t play fair. The contexts differ but the spirit of the decision remains the same at the base, limbic level. It’s a cruel experiment, a mean situation for people to be put in, but it uncovers the truth. It takes everything to the limit, exposes the heart of the matter, provokes a warped temptation. It forces us to face and acknowledge how we would react to the offer of unimaginable, superhuman power. Would we accept the weapon and wield it, or would we admit that this power is and should always be beyond us? Would it take courage to push the button, or would it take madness?
Basketball coach Bobby Knight called Harry Truman one of the greatest presidents simply “for having the guts to drop the bomb”.3 I thought Murray Futterman in Gremlins said something similar, but now I can’t find the reference—it must have been some other character in a different movie.
Regardless, especially in a nuclear-armed world, it would be an act of almost unimaginable, superhuman responsibility—or irresponsibility—to push the button. Too often we serve as mere passive subjects of systems beyond our understanding or control, but the situation here would present an individual with the opportunity to take not only his own fate but also the fate of everyone else in his hands. Perhaps the very ambition of it contains an evil, “diabolical urge” as the “Space Madness” announcer says. But what would it feel like to give in to that experience? First to be in a position to do it, and then to really push the button? And then how would it feel to live with it afterward, assuming you lived through it? My curiosity in these matters piqued by something as silly as Ren & Stimpy, I vicariously mulled it over.
There are differences between, on the one hand, a child in 1991 silently asking himself about these matters and, on the other hand, a geopolitical pundit in 2022 proposing a first-strike nuclear launch against Russia. There are similarities as well: This sort of questioning can easily come across as either flippant or pretentious. Serious as these themes are, their awkward expression doesn’t fit well into clear-thinking conversations. Few want to confront these themes in the first place, and if we did attempt an evaluation, it is not clear how exactly we could accurately foresee or assess the consequences. Who would even be qualified to speak with authority or understanding of just what would happen if nukes started to fly? When someone broaches this sort of discourse, people immediately respond with laughter or sanctimony, with eye-rolling or moralizing. How absurd for someone to say this!, or How dare someone say this!
In the face of these reactions, investigations into nuclear conflict and its potential outcomes remain beyond our collective capabilities. Some individual, self-described experts think they know what would happen. But do they? As a society we can never feel comfortable with the topic. The nuclear bomb, even as an object of ideation, does not sit harmlessly within our group psychology: its nature and possible ramifications always trouble us, disrupting our clarity while provoking our darkest imagination. Our minds cannot orient themselves adequately while in this uncertain, volatile setting. There can be no “cool-headed logicians” when this unpredictable, hyperbolic subject matter enters into the discussion. In this respect, before the bomb we all stand as children.
(In another timeline my ten-year-old self became the inspiration for a comedy movie called The Boy and the Button. A chance meeting with the president—and a series of unlikely events—puts a boy in charge of the nuclear codes right before a very big decision needs to be made. The movie would have formed a thematic trilogy with Man of the Year starring Robin Williams and Swing Vote starring Kevin Costner.)
•
I wasn’t a complete sociopath. I didn’t torture animals or light fires. Or pee the bed. I did suspect I might be the Antichrist for a time—but that’s normal (r-r-right?). I think pretty much every ’80s kid—or every kid with a healthy imagination—must go through a phase of secretly entertaining the notion that they might turn out to be the Antichrist. Without necessarily wanting the status, all of us heard about this long-prophesied child whose existence would end the world. It could be anyone, and— Wouldn’t it be my luck? Just a recurring thought I had. A passing fancy put into my head by scary movies, by classmates whose families attended church, and by a purloined copy of Nostradamus.
When America is at the height of its power [...] then the man of blood, the third Antichrist [...] will start a third war in this century [...] King and Reb will face an Antichrist so false, / That he will place them in the conflict all together [...] twenty-seven years his war will last.4
Of course it was me. The sinking suspicion made my otherwise atheistic childhood more meaningful. It was like what Josef K. says in The Trial—you know, that great Orson Welles film—when he’s talking about the paranoia he went through as a young boy:
[E]ven when I hadn’t been up to anything at all, I’d still feel guilty. You know that feeling? And the teacher at school making the announcement that something was missing from her desk. “Alright, who’s the guilty one?” It was me, of course. I’d feel just sick with guilt. And I didn’t even know what was missing.
If someone had to bring everything to a close—fine, I’d do it.
The Trial movie ends with a bomb as well. K.’s assigned murderers won’t slit his throat themselves, because they want to keep their hands clean, and he refuses to take the knife and do their job for them. So the men light a pack of dynamite, which K. voluntarily picks up, laughing maniacally as the men run away. We see a rapid-fire montage of explosions, and the camera pans up to show mushrooming smoke clouds—everything is ending—as the closing orchestral tones play.
Precociously, childishly, I wanted to experience the end of the world. In the last issue of Sandman, Neil Gaiman wrote that “good things have to end,” because that’s “what gives them meaning.” That stuck with me when I read it in 1996. On some level, I wanted to see the end of the civilizational cycle in order to appreciate it more and apprehend its full significance, as much as anyone could. I grew up reading dystopic fictions and developed a stupid, perverse desire to live in one.—Well, now we pretty much do live in one, and it’s very arguable that the proles in Nineteen Eighty-Four had better lives than we do now.
The Irish critic Christian Morris has explained this last point numerous times. What he says for his nation goes for all nations being subjected to the current array of regime propaganda (the state-enforced gas-lighting, mass shaming techniques, etc.):
The situation we’re dealing with here in Ireland is that the middle class are being terrorised and oppressed at literally every corner. [...] [T]hat was the key story of Nineteen Eighty-Four, that the Outer Party, the middle class, had an absolute shit life. They had really poor standards of living and they had no freedom; where[as] the proles had every freedom in the world, and a fairly poor standard of living, but they could make a fairly good life for themselves if they wanted to. This is the hidden part of Nineteen Eighty-Four; the state didn’t give a shite about the proles. It even had a slogan: Proles and animals are free.5
To hear the news—to engage with the modern world—is to be made susceptible to a level of awareness, worry-filled and restless, that suggests you might never know the sort of natural happiness and freedom that Orwell’s proles would have experienced daily.—I’m not saying be a prole, not necessarily, but this is a dynamic to keep in mind. It’s important to consider.
•
All through the second half of the 20th century, we were told that there was this scary button that could end modern civilization as we knew it. Long before the halfway point of the 21st century, we might well end up wishing that such a button existed, and that it worked.
The real horror, you know, is that there might not be a way to stop the hellride. If the emergency button actually does nothing or proves insufficient, then we’re stuck forever in this obnoxious, terminal decline. Frodo tosses The Ring into Mount Doom, but nothing happens—Sauron retains his power and keeps making everything worse.
We all want a sort of Great Reset button, one way or the other. The yearning for a clean slate appeals to elites and dissidents alike. In “Space Madness” the button is actually named the “History Eraser Button”. There’s a potential upside (“maaaaybe something good,” as Ren says) to our records getting wiped clean: this event could remove all past sins, and our existential guilt along with them. Fukuyama wanted an end of history. Stephen Dedalus said history was “a nightmare from which [he was] trying to awake.”6 Could we escape our current techno-society, in which machines have nearly seized control of human destiny, by bombing ourselves back to the Stone Age?
No.
Ultimately, these mental exercises hold value for what they tell us about ourselves, but we cannot actually put them into practice. There’s simply no way to eliminate enough technology to prevent a few despots from holding onto some of it and taking over everything after a nuclear winter or a global EMP burst. Unless all parts of the apparatus were destroyed—unless all of the know-how and service manuals were deleted—systems of control would soon be rebuilt, and history would resume.
History doesn’t end. History is a set of recordings—accurate or edited—and as time goes on we only develop more methods of documentation. But even if we stopped recording them, events would continue to unfold. Dedalusian delusions aside, one cannot “wake up” from a bad dream that is not a dream at all but rather a somewhat unfortunate—but very well-established—state of play into which we have been born.
•
How did I feel when I realized I probably wasn’t the Antichrist? Equal parts relief and disappointment.
I know I wouldn’t have really pushed the button, either, because of something that happened later. One time in college I was actually given a sort of button—a gun, a revolver—during a long group session of dissociative drug use. Two of my friends—twin practical jokers—gave it to me, and it was just a prop gun, not a real gun. But I didn’t know that. It looked and felt real enough, heavy and made of metal. Six or seven of us had gathered in a dim-lit room to enjoy a sort of logy, traumatic confusion for eight hours or so. Sometime during the course of the trip, the gun appeared before me. They expected me to try to shoot someone with it—maybe myself—and thereby reveal some hidden animus. But I didn’t. Instead, I dropped the gun behind the headboard of the bed we were lying on. Sort of like how the Dark Knight convict tosses the detonator out the window.
Yeah. Exactly like that.
Except the Joker really had rigged the boats with explosives. Whereas my friends had given me a fake gun. The only damage I could have done with it would have been to my reputation and self-conception. How could I have lived with myself if I found out that my true personality, unchained through drug use, wanted to kill someone?
If my friends wanted to fuck with me even more, they could have had us play Russian roulette instead, sort of like that issue of Frank Miller’s Daredevil7.
Klik. See? It’s a fake. The button does nothing. Tune in next time, for the conclu—
Francis Fukuyama’s famous book would not be published till the following year, 1992.
The Prophecies of Nostradamus. Trans., Ed. & Introduced by Erika Cheetham. London: Peerage, 1989. Quotes pulled from pages 124, 80, 378—a liberal remixed reading much like the ones I used to attempt as a child. Second-to-last snatch pulled from Charles M. Ward’s more recent, independently published translation, p. 178.
Taken from his 9 April 2023 podcast episode, titled “INDEPENDENT TIMES EPISODE 2”, about an hour in: https://odysee.com/@christianmorristv:e/INDEPENDENT-TIMES-EPISODE-2:d.
Joyce, James. Ulysses. Ed. Hans Walter Gabler, Wolfhard Steppe & Claus Melchior. London: The Bodley Head, 1993, chapter 2: line 377.
Daredevil #191 by Frank Miller and Klaus Janson. Image edited by me (some panels removed).