Chaos Never Dies Day
I love this day because it takes me back to one of my favorite TV shows of the 1960s: Get Smart. Maxwell Smart, Agent 86 of the secret US spy service CONTROL, had to counter the machinations of the nefarious KAOS, always out to take over the world. At least I think that’s what they were trying to do. Fortunately, the agents of KAOS, Siegfried and Starker, were as incompetent as Maxwell Smart and they always failed. Only Agent 99, and possibly Chief, seemed to have it together as professionals in the world of espionage.
The series was created by Mel Brooks and Buck Henry, according to Brooks, because they wanted to do a sitcom that broke the mold: one that didn’t focus on family, and one that starred, in Brooks’s words, “an idiot.” Maxwell Smart was a kind of mashup of James Bond and Inspector Clouseau. The silliness of the series was a perfect counterpoint to the over-the-top masculinity of the James Bond franchise, and even though Brooks’s primary intent was to make us laugh, he also managed to puncture some of the overweening pretentiousness of the 1960s macho persona.
But KAOS never dies. There was always some diabolical force out to “rule the world” or sometimes “destroy the world.” And still, in superhero movies of today the villains have not progressed much in their ambitions. From SPECTRE in the Bond films, to Thrush in the Man from U.N.C.L.E. TV series, to all the Batman villains, Marvel villains, and even to Voldemort, who aims to conquer both the worlds of Muggles and wizards, ultimate control of the world, or worlds, is all the baddies seem to desire. What they plan to do with such control is not ever very clear. What is clear is that even if they managed to do away with the British Secret Service, CONTROL, U.N.C.L.E., and Hogwarts, to name a few, they will have nothing but KAOS to show for it.
Chaos means the unpredictable, nonlinear, essentially unrulable aspects of our universe. And those aspects are surely unconquerable, right? You say you want to rule the world? Yeah, good luck with that. The rest of us will settle for a good laugh.