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A little girl, playing outside, counts down from five. When she reaches one, she looks for her brother and sees him standing on the roof of the house. “No fair, Woody, you have to hide better,” she says. Woody, though, is looking off into the distance and doesn’t respond. The camera pans upward, and we see a mushroom cloud gently bubbling up from the horizon.

So begins the first episode of “Jericho,” CBS’s new hit series about the aftermath of a nuclear apocalypse. Oh yes – atomic bombs, radioactive fallout, general collapse of civilization. But it’s not just CBS hyping up the threat of nuclear bombs; NBC’s “Heroes,” about a group of random people who inexplicably get the powers of superheroes, centers on a nuclear detonation in New York City just weeks after the show’s present day. And it’s not just fictional dramas that TV channels use to warn us of the upcoming end of the world. This past summer, SciFi channel ran a presentation titled “Countdown to Doomsday,” detailing “the top ten ways the world can end tomorrow.” (And just so we all could understand the magnitude of the issue, the NBC-chosen host was the epitome of gravitas himself, Matt Lauer). Jon Stewart said it best: “Lauer’s two-hour investigation into your pants, and why you should crap them, is hardly an isolated case of fear mongering.”

Not isolated at all: in August, ABC took the fear mongering to network primetime, running a heavily-promoted two-hour special titled “Last Days on Earth,” counting down seven different ways that life on Earth – or at least human civilization – could come to a quick and sudden end. Each threat was lovingly depicted using the newest CGI imagery, and the program was hosted by Elizabeth Vargas. (As we’ve known since hearing Mother in Alien, the voice most enticing for narrating death and destruction belongs to a robotically sexy female – the modern day Siren.) Threat number seven to life on Earth: a tie between a nearby gamma ray burst and a rogue, nomadic black hole. Six: the revolt of the machines. The fifth threat was super volcanoes, such as the one steaming under Yellowstone National Park, which erupts every 600,000 years or so, suffocating the continent under eight feet of ash and toxic gas and plunging the world into the equivalent of a nuclear winter. The last eruption was about 640,000 years ago: the next is due any day now. Threat four: asteroids, a la Armageddon. Three: Nuclear explosions, either by terrorists or by accident. Two: Biological pandemics, either by terrorists or by nature. And the number one threat to human civilization and life on earth: global warming.

But the doom-saying doesn’t just come out in serial dramas and flashy special presentations. Even – no, especially –news networks hype up any and all step toward the apparently inevitable end. This summer, when the regular tit-for-tat skirmishes across the Israel-Lebanon border escalated into a small invasion and larger bombing campaign against Hezbollah, the 24-hour news cycle gloated over the latest blip in that perpetual war zone. This was like the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the talking heads crowed, exulting in the juiciest of news: war, death, and destruction.

Immediately after Hezbollah’s capture of two soldiers precipitated the Israeli attack, journalist Yossi Klein Halevi, writing for the New Republic, declared that “The next Middle East war – Israel against genocidal Islamism – has begun.” According to Halevi, Hezbollah was the least of Israel’s problems, though. Haveli’s source noted that If Iran gained nuclear capability, Israel would “act unilaterally” if the

refused.

As the war in Lebanon ground on, the sensationalism that should have been tempered by reflection on the true scope of the battle instead gave way to greater rhetoric. Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich declared in the most liberal of English newspapers, The Guardian, that “the Third World War has begun.” Civilization itself was on the brink, Gingrich declared. Echoing Bernard Lewis, he said:

The civilized world stands balanced between victory and defeat… An Iran-Syrian-Hezbollah-Hamas terrorist alliance is waging war against Israel; seven bombings in Mumbai, India, killed more than 200 people; North Korea launched seven missiles, including an intercontinental ballistic missile capable of hitting the West coast of the continental United States; seven Americans pledging allegiance to Al-Qaida on video tape; a plot to bomb New York City subways and tunnels; 18 Canadians arrested with twice the explosive force used in the Oklahoma City bombing. Now add all the cities where previous events have occurred and a global campaign of terror is no longer deniable.

Never mind that North Korea’s intercontinental missile fizzled, that the suspects in the New York and Canadian plots had been monitored for months and years, respectively, that Israel has waged wars against its allied neighbors half a dozen times over its short history, that the threat to the “civilized world” from Islamic terrorism is nothing compared to the Cold War’s constant threat of nuclear war that could have easily been triggered by a technical glitch or a misinterpreted action.

And we’ve been that way for a long time. In 1898, H.G. Wells wrote “The War of the Worlds,” detailing a calamitous Martian invasion of Earth. In 1938, when Orson Welles broadcast an adaptation of the novel on the radio, millions of people deliriously believed in the fiction. A decade later, when an Ecuador radio station broadcast a translated version of the same story, mass panic similarly ensued; when the station frantically clarified to its audience that the alien invasion was fictional, mobs set fire to the station and the offices of the leading newspaper, killing 20 people. Steven Spielberg’s 2005 adaptation earned almost $600 million at the global box office, despite star Tom Cruise’s couch-jumping.

Alien invasion isn’t the only apocalyptic scenario we flock to. From Mary Shelley’s 1826 follow-up to Frankenstein, The Last Man, to Danny Boyle’s 2002 horror film 28 Days Later, pandemics have repeatedly been used in fiction to kill off civilization. The machines come to rule us in works as varied as Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville to the Wachowski brothers’ Matrix trilogy. Ecological catastrophe causes a near-apocalypse in everything from Cat’s Cradle to The Day After Tomorrow. The Bible itself ends with the juiciest of apocalypses, the Book of Revelation; today, the Left Behind series dumbs it down for the masses.

After every failed media scare – killer bees in the 80s, Y2K in 90s – we refuse to learn our lesson. The next one is real, we say; this one sounds plausible. As the saying goes, every prediction of the end of the world is always wrong, except for the last one. The media hypes potential catastrophes only because we already love them – we’ve read the books, seen the movies, believed the radio broadcasts, and now we want to see it come to life. It is the end of the world as we know it, to use the most obvious pop culture reference, and we do feel fine. The question is, why?

Kurt Anderson recently wrote in New York magazine about this very topic. He notes that Harvard historian Niall Ferguson compares America in 2006 to ancient Rome just before its collapse, Cormac McCarthy’s newest novel, The Road, leaves the old West behind for a post-nuclear-war wasteland, and Mel Gibson, who made his name as Mad Max, is set to release the film Apocalypto, about the fall of the Mayan civilization. “Apocalypse is on our minds,” Anderson writes. “Apocalypse is … hot.” Indeed it is, but again, why?

Ultimately, I think, we love apocalyptic destruction because we hate society. Truthfully. Only a little bit, of course, because most of us aren’t traveling to Iraq to set off IEDs, or smuggling dirty bombs over the Canadian border. It is, at its base, escapism: we are sick of our sleazy politicians, our socioeconomic imbalances, our societal constrictions. We yearn to tear society down and live anew, in the ultra-libertarian wasteland of the post-apocalypse, where we can loot stores and kill strangers and have no consequence for our actions.

But then we come back from the emotional high of bloodlust and we recognize intellectually that in chaos, we are more likely to be the stranger killed than the killer of strangers. Society’s constructs lift us up more than they hold us down. And, most of all, for that post-apocalyptic situation to come about, almost all of us have to die – and by statistical probability, we are almost surely to be among the “almost all of us.” Better to live today than to die tomorrow.

Remember the opening of “Jericho,” with the little girl counting down to zero just as a nuclear bomb goes off? It’s a hint back to the 1964 LBJ-Barry Goldwater presidential campaign, when a famous ad showed a little girl counting the petals on a daisy before picking them off – and then, as the camera zooms at her pupil, a nuclear bomb explodes. “These are the stakes,” the narrator says. “To make a world in which all of God’s children can live, or to go into the dark. We must either love each other, or we must die. Vote for President Johnson on November 3.”

This is the ultimate attack ad, sleaziness beyond boundary. Johnson essentially accuses Goldwater of being the cause of future nuclear war and the killer of cute, innocent children. We are repulsed – the ad only ran once because of protests, but the point sticks. Only an actual apocalypse could bring down the vileness of the type of people who would create, film, and run such an advertisement.

Such an apocalypse is displayed in 28 Days Later, perhaps the best post-apocalyptic movie made in decades. Cillian Murphy wanders empty London streets after a pandemic turns most of the population into zombie-like raging killers. To escape the infected, Murphy’s character and a few of the people he meets flee north. In the most spontaneously joyful scene of the movie, our heroes enter an empty supermarket and fill countless shopping carts with all the supplies they need, while upbeat electro-pop plays on the soundtrack. Then, at the checkout counter, they mockingly leave a credit card to pay for their loot. The scene portrays exactly the wanton joy an apocalypse provides. But the movie takes a dark turn; the characters head north to a lone military outpost that turns out to be anything but the refuge they had hoped for. Society’s destruction turns humans into savages, and director Danny Boyle uses the military outpost as a wicked and horrifying satire on human nature and social constructs. I won’t give away the ending, but suffice to say, the apocalypse in all its glory is not very enticing.

And this is the common theme: for all the reckless, joyful abandon of the fictional apocalypse, the negative aspects of destruction – in the end – always outweigh the positive. Every movie or book always ends either with a return to civilization (the sudden alien deaths in War of the Worlds and the plane flying in 28 Days Later, for example) or, alternately – and more rarely – a bleak, barren wasteland (the end of Cat’s Cradle, for example) that puts to rest any idle fantasies about the joys of destruction. For all the ultra-libertarian longing for chaos, the lust for the apocalypse ultimately arises from the most conservative of instincts – a desire for reassurance that life is good, chaos will not arise, and everything will be okay in the end.

I, however, can never be so sure, so I’ll leave you with this: On September 26, 1983, alarms went off as the computers in a bunker near Moscow said that US missiles were headed to the Soviet Union. Stanislav Petrov, the Russian officer on duty, had two options: do nothing, and risk letting the five missiles hit Russian cities and kill – for all he knew – perhaps hundreds of millions; or, report a US missile strike and order a return of fire, risking hundreds of millions of lives for what could be merely a false alarm.

It must have taken balls of plutonium, but Petrov held his ground, trusted that the US wouldn’t start a nuclear war, and didn’t report the missiles. It was a false alarm, of course, and Petrov had, more or less, saved the world. Still, the incident revealed flaws in the Soviet military structure, and Petrov was turned into a scapegoat; his promising military career quickly ended. We came very, very close to a nuclear holocaust – and, of all people, the hero was blamed. So sit back and relax, heroes and villains: if the world ends, c’est la vie; if we’re still here and you work for the Russian government, do think twice before pushing the wrong button.