“Fear in a handful of dust”

“I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust” — T. S. Eliot “The Waste Land”

Satire often uses the absurd to make us think of “what might be”. That was certainly the case as I walked home after seeing Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove. It was 1964, the Cold War was hot and fifty-five years later I still remember the shaking feeling I had during that walk.

I was in eighth grade and had not yet read T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” so neither had I read his apocalyptic words “I will show you fear in a handful of dust”. If I had those words would have rung true to me the way I felt seeing Slim Pickens “riding the bomb”.

Regardless of the joy my Irish Catholic teachers got making us behave by reminding us the end of the world might be near, for the first time, Blade Runner made me understand “what it might be like” to experience the end of the world, at least the world we always knew.

In “Blade Runner 2049” Hampton Fancher makes us feel much like Stanley Kubrick did in Dr. Strangelove. By 2049 large chunks of Los…