From prime time to our own times, it’s a scary world

WHENEVER the country is in questionable shape, like now, we turn to supernatural creatures for help. Not the ones in Washington, D.C., but those that crawl from their graves and drop from the skies and come shuffling and drooling toward us from across the horizon. They can’t make things better, but they do take our minds off the fix we’re in at the moment.

Our entertainment world has been shoulder to shoulder over the years with space aliens, vampires, werewolves, zombies, mummies, sea monsters, bloodsuckers, nuclear-generated killer insects, savage seagulls, giant rabbits and even murderous cigar smoke.

The latter threat to human existence was contained in one of the new series called “Supernatural,” a Tuesday night effort intended to frighten children and demented uncles by creating mind-numbing special effects. In one episode, for instance, we come face to face with what appears to be an evil smudge that floats about like cigar smoke committing acts of an egregious nature.

It is but one of a bunch of shows that are available this season for those who lack more useful pursuits. Together with some of the older efforts, like a season or so ago, we now have “Invasion,” “Threshold,” “Surface,” “Ghost Whisperer” and “Night Stalker” to go along with the evasive creature in “Lost” that inhabits the jungles of Babe Island. Oh, and there’s “Medium” too among the more clueless attempts to attract audiences in the Red States.

While none of these shows are even vaguely comparable to “Frankenstein,” “Dracula” or any number of werewolf movies from my youth, they continue to serve a purpose, which, as I said earlier, is diverting our attention from the truly scary world we live in.

This has been true during my lifetime beginning with shows like Orson Welles’ radio presentation of “War of the Worlds,” in which a terrified audience believed we actually were being invaded by Martians but which also took our minds off the lingering burden of the Great Depression, which happened not to be all that great .

I was only 9, but I remember everyone in the neighborhood running outside to look skyward, hoping, or hoping not, to see the invaders, then ultimately deciding that they probably wouldn’t bother with East Oakland anyhow.

During World War II there was little need for make-believe monsters due to the unfortunate existence of so many real ones. But in the Cold War that followed, the dark prelude to the Atomic Age loosed Godzilla on us, accompanied by a creature from the Black Lagoon, the Mighty (but short-lived) Gorga and the strange and terrifying puppet people, among many other atom-generated anomalies.

My intention is not to visit every decade’s escape from reality through means of open graves and screaming hordes but to observe how often we use some form of entertainment to avoid confronting the more stultifying issues. Watching “Surface” the other night, my mind was locked on a boy and his baby sea monster (whose mama was out there smashing and killing for reasons not yet explained) and away from the surreal war in Iraq, where many are smashing and killing for reasons that were never truthfully explained.

But wait, as they say on late-night TV commercials when they throw in a free, all-purpose egg slicer if you order within the next 15 minutes -- there’s more to fear than war itself. There’s the new and exciting avian flu, for instance, in which Henny-Penny and her ilk are threatening to do to this generation what the Spanish strain did to the world in 1918.

The federal government has promised that it is working hard to come up with an effective vaccine, but recalling the government’s efficiency in getting help to victims of Hurricane Katrina, I wouldn’t count on salvation out of D.C. if I were you. I’d just avoid chickens as much as possible.

Other scary potentials from which our minds need diverting are contained in a website suggested by a writer friend, cheerful Ivan Goldman, that lists in a spirit of genial detachment the many ways in which the world can end. It is called “Exit Mundi” and offers a list of extinction-level events that can blink us out of existence even before Bush or Bin Laden get around to doing the job.

The site points out, “Sure, our planet could get hit by an asteroid. But that’s nothing. Did you know we could all be munched away by hungry molecules? Or that our physicists could unintentionally wipe us all out while tinkering with particles?”

It goes on to mention Earth tilt, moon smash, sun shift, air poison, temperature reversal, cosmic mastication, quantum energy blasts, simultaneous volcanic eruptions, global flooding, rampant insanity (we may already be in the first stages), killer storms and all sorts of sneaky little diseases that could almost instantaneously eat us from the inside out. This is not a happy website.

All things considered, I guess it’s better in the long run to dance with spooks than to sit around worrying about the Earth tilting or the sun burning out. Even floating cigar smoke is a lot less scary than the world beyond imagination where the real horror exists.