Americans are obsessed with their own destruction.

This thought occurred to me as Maria and I were walking to the theater to see War of the Worlds Tuesday night. It was the day after the Fourth of July - the holiday we celebrate by reenacting war. Loud fireworks explode in the sky representing the rockets red glare and the bombs bursting in air (setting off car alarms and scaring away animals). When the fireworks started on Monday night, I began thinking about the people who live in war torn countries. If there was a loud explosion going off in their neighborhood it probably means that people just died. In my neighborhood, it means that people are eating hot dogs and cooing, “Ooooooh.”

Americans re-stage the Civil War every year and litter the fields of Gettysburg with reenactors’ bodies. People pony up $20/day to sit in bleachers on the sidelines as spectators, soaking in one of the bloodiest wars on this country’s soil.

Whether we pay to see the reenactment of historic destruction or CGI fictional destruction, the fascination is the same. Off the top of my head, I can come up with over a dozen movies and TV shows from the last 25 years, that are about the sweeping destruction, or threatened destruction, of America (the world may go down with the US of A, but the focus is on America): Independence Day, The Day After Tomorrow, War of the Worlds, Armageddon, Deep Impact, the Terminator series, Land of the Dead, Godzilla (borrowed from Japan’s self-destruction neurosis), 24, the Grid, Planet of the Apes (the awful remake), the Core, War Games, the Day After, etc. There was a very short period of time after September 11, when destruction movies were put on hold and not to be shown until the country was though mourning. It didn’t take long before we got back to being entertained by people being vaporized, buildings crumpling like paper bags, and fiery meteors plummeting to the earth.

Why do we like to watch ourselves be destroyed? Looking back on the Revolutionary or Civil Wars, we may be searching for a moral to avoid that kind of killing in the future. But watching War of the Worlds, a fictional play, was just an exercise in how long it takes us to go from mourning to eating popcorn while watching tattered clothes fall from the sky and bodies float down the river like a corpse barge.

After coming to work this morning and reading about the bombings in London, I felt a little ashamed that earlier this week we were staging mock bombings for fun and entertainment. I doubt that in London, years from now, they will set off smoke bombs in the Underground and light buses aflame to remember a day when people died.