James Hynes

I love the History Channel. It's not just my default viewing choice, the place I always end up when there's nothing particular on that I want to watch, but it's often my destination as well. Some of my faves redound to my credit--The Universe and the superb How the Earth Was Made—and some of them don't--UFO Hunters, Life After People—but suffice it to say the channel no longer deserves its old derisive nickname, the Hitler Channel. It also has a (sort of deserved) reputation as a politically conservative channel, and god knows, there are a lot of red-meat, guy-centric shows like Patton 360 or those 300-ish recreations of ancient battles or the Saturday afternnoon marathons of Band of Brothers. But there are also less chest-thumping shows like America Eats, where you can learn everything you ever wanted to know about potato chips, and The History of Sex, where you can hear that old leftie Peter Coyote narrate a lot of high-toned soft-core, complete with lubricious old Japanese paintings and racy carvings from Southeast Asia. So, in the interest of trying to nail down exactly what the History Channel is all about, I have compiled a rough list of the life lessons I've learned from my couch, often in the wee hours of the morning:

1. We're All Doomed

The History Channel is your one-stop shop for apocalypse porn. Mega Disasters features everything from coastal cities being wiped out by tsunamis to the instigation of a new ice age by supervolcanos to all of life on Earth being exterminated by a gamma ray burst, while the channel's various Nostradamus, Bible code, Mayan doomsday calendar, and Book of Revelation shows feature more or less the same, hyperkinetically edited clips of imminent social collapse and (I think) the same breathless narrator. All these disasters don't necessarily jibe with each other, but I think it's safe to say that a) it's a miracle we're here at all, and b) we all better have our affairs in order by December 21, 2012. Given the human propensity to universalize one's own particular situation—in this case, my 53-year-old guy's propensity to read the imminent collapse of civilization in my own fear of mortality—how could I not love this stuff?

2. Nothing We've Ever Made Will Survive Us

Or, everything rots. This I know from my latest guilty History Channel pleasure, Life After People, which presents more or less accurate science (as far as I can tell) based on a millenarian premise, to wit, that every human being on the planet is raptured at the same instant, leaving our pets, houses, and skyscrapers to fend for themselves against the wrath of Gaia. Or something like that. This show has a rather pornlike aspect as well, since no matter what the putative subject is, every episode is pretty much the same every week—the slow decay of a particular city followed at intervals of a day, a week, a year, a thousand years, etc.—and it always ends with the more or less the same money shot of a skyscraper—the Sears Tower in Chicago, the Space Needle in Seattle, those giant twin towers in Kuala Lumpur—crumbling slowly to the ground in all its pornographic CGI glory. Along the way, every other human accomplishment that I care about—mainly books and movies and music—will have crumbled to dust centuries before. But then, there'll be nobody left to read or watch or hear them except the feral descendants of my cats, so what difference does it make? Why get out of bed in the morning? I ask you.

3. People Will Believe Anything...

...no matter how little evidence there is. See #1 above, especially the Nostradamus, et al., programming. I'd bemoan the fact that How the Earth Was Made shares the same cable address as UFO Hunters, and wonder just what conceiveable demographic could possibly encompass people who watch both, if it weren't for the fact that I am that demographic. Le UFO Hunters, c'est moi. I still get a thrill out of this stuff, even as Rational, former Science Nerd Jim is screaming at the screen, "It's a fake, for chrissakes! That video doesn't prove anything!" I can only say in my defense that I get a deeper, more satisfying thrill from learning (from How the Earth Was Made) that the hills on the western shore of Loch Ness were once part of the Adirondacks. Or maybe I'm just getting the thrill off of the name "Loch Ness." Who knows?

4. Plumbing Is Civilization

There's a fair amount of snobbery involved in dismissing the History Channel, especially since it doesn't traffic (usually) in the sort of gender-race-and-class social history that is the staple of academic history these days. But I think lefties should cut them a little slack, because it's one of the few places that gives due credit to both engineering and the practical knowledge of working class people. I'm not talking about Ice Road Truckers or Ax Men, necessarily, but rather Modern Marvels, which, if I flip past, I'm immediately stuck to like a fly to fly paper. Watch a few of these, like the ones about the history of pavement, or about dredgers, or about making sausage, or about distilling, and you realize what the real basis of civilization is. Suddenly Life After People makes a lot more sense. Say, just for instance, that not everybody vanishes all at once, but only the novelists and filmmakers and musicians. Guys and gals like me, in other words. Life would be a lot less colorful and interesting, but everything would still work, and the Space Needle wouldn't fall down in a thousand years. But say it's the plumbers and electricians and civil engineers who are raptured (which is, let's face it, a lot more likely than the other way around), leaving just guys like me who can't do anything more technical than change a lightbulb. In that case, basically, let's face it, we're all fucked. Civilization would be over. We all could get by without midlist novelists, but we'd all die without plumbers. Hence, plumbing is civilization. QED.

5. Deep Down, We're All the Same

It turns out ice road truckers and lumberjacks are every bit as backbiting, manipulative, judgmental, and just plain bitchy as New Jersy housewives. Who knew?

6. The World Is a Complex, Strange, and Wonderful Place

Yes it is, in spite of all of the above. We're not in it for long, we're not very nice to each other when we're here, and none of anything we do will probably amount to much (is my midlife crisis showing?), but watch a few episodes of The Universe or How the Earth Was Made and you can't help but marvel at the sheer, strange beauty of the world we live in. I was joking above about the quality of the thrill I get from UFO Hunters versus the pleasure I get from How the Earth Was Made, but it's true: UFO Hunters is fun, but laughably credulous, whereas the History Channel's genuine science programming can really pry your mind open, in a good way. Or at least it will until the Mayan calendar runs out in 2012, and the gamma ray burst cooks the planet like a microwaved baked potato.