Image used under a Creative Commons license courtesy of annamatic3000.
I was flipping through my bookshelves yesterday evening, thinking that at some point I really need to take them off, and dust the shelves, and settle on an organizational system that will last me a while this time, when I discovered, wedged up against the side of one shelf and hidden in the shadows, David Macaulay's Motel of the Mysteries. It was a great way to rediscover a classic, and strange, children's book about archaeologists of the future attempting to explain the strange, lost society of Usa. As misinterpretations of our society go, this one isn't incredibly unusual, though a motel makes sense as a potential burial site (the grocery list in A Canticle for Leibowitz is probably wittier). I think a lot of what I like about Motel of the Mysteries is that, unlike most books about the apocalyptic end of contemporary society, it doesn't rely on nuclear war as the device by which everything stopped. Instead, the culprit is both corporations and the mails. The book begins:
In 1985, a cataclysmic coincidence of previously unknown proportion extinguished virtually all forms of life on the North American continent. On the morning of November 29, an accidental reduction in postal rates on a substance called third- and fourth-class mail literally buried the North Americans under tons of brochures, fliers, and small containers called FREE. That afternoon, impurities that had apparently hung unnoticed in the air for centuries finally succumbed to the force of gravity and collapsed on what was left of an already stunned population.
There are children's books that deal wonderfully with the threat of nuclear apocalypse, James Lawson's unimpeachable The Fabulous Flight (published in 1949, and now, truly tragically, out of print). That story follows a boy named Peter who, after a pituitary gland injury, shrinks to a miniscule size. His father happens to work for the federal government, and after learning that a madman on the other side of the world has developed a tiny weapon of dreadful power, Peter and his seagull friend Gus are deployed on a secret mission to steal it. It sounds preposterous, and it is, but the book has deft diplomatic sketches (something Lawson did equally well in his other books about animals and famous figures, including Ben & Me, and I Discover Columbus), a terrific scene at a baseball game, and an anti-Cold War solution to the problem of who gets to keep the weapon once it's been smuggled out of the tiny kingdom that possesses it.
I think what I ultimately like about Museum of the Mysteries, though, is its core pessimism. Who cares about nuclear war, the book seems to say? We'll do ourselves in by other, creeping means.