Originally published 25 September 1995
No, I haven’t seen the new big-budget Stallone movie, Judge Dredd. But when my youngest son was living abroad he acquired a voluminous collection of the British comic 2000 A.D., in which the film’s eponymous hero held violent sway.
And a really, really nasty character he was, Judge Dredd, in a strip of such extreme scuzziness as to make the Batman and Captain Marvel comics of my youth look like Disney concoctions.
Dredd is the law, so to speak: judge, jury and executioner rolled into one. He lives in a place called Mega-City One, a sprawling metropolis on the eastern seaboard of the former United States, where people are housed in skyscraping City Blocks by the tens of thousands. Beyond the city limits is the Cursed Earth, a wasteland inhabited by assorted slimeballs and technomutants who move about in ghastly punk-tech machines.
I occasionally perused those comics, if only because of a sense of dread that the Cursed Earth might be just around the corner.
I was right. It is here.
It used to be that we could escape from the noise and congestion of the city into the tranquility of unspoiled countryside. A day at the beach. A walk in the woods. A bicycle spin down peaceable lanes.
No more. The ghastly punk-tech machines are everywhere.
Highest on the list of offenders are the jet-skis, ear-splitting Dreddnoughts of coastal waters and inland lakes. This summer I watched buzzing swarms of these wretched things drive terrified young swimmers onto the sand. “See me! see me!” the machine’s infernal engine shrieks, “I’m young, I’m male, I’m Judge Dredd and I don’t give a drokk whose afternoon at the beach I ruin.”
Almost as bad are the snowmobiles. Fresh soft snow. Pine boughs dipping under pristine burdens. Blessed silence. Then — VROOOOM! VRRMMMMM! Fleets of gasoline-powered peace shatterers, judge, jury, and executioner, dystopian violators of the winter woods.
Two‑, three- and four-wheeled ATVs, all-terrain vehicles, and we do mean all. Mountains, deserts, dunes, forests, meadows — no place safe from these earth-gouging robo-toys for boys of all ages. A beautiful walking trail in my town has been turned into an eroded gully by recreational vehicles.
Have you noticed how these high-decibel play machines increasingly look like time-traveled imports from Mega-City One? For most of our century, vehicle designers hid the technology — engines, gears, pipes, etc. — under a pseudo-organic skin. Now, Dredd-like, the tech is worn on the sleeve, accentuated in shouting colors, glitzed with chrome.
The Great Outdoors has become a mega-industry: ATVs, snowmobiles, jet-skis, personal hovercraft, four-by-fours. Nature is no longer a place for repose or spiritual fulfillment; it’s a venue for frenzied mechanical fun.
OK, I’m being crotchety, but the battle lines are drawn between Thoreauvian conservationists and 2000 A.D. recreationists. It’s a fight for the last remnants of organic wildness. The wind in the willows vs. the infernal combustion engine. Walden Pond vs. the Cursed Earth.
Writing in London’s Sunday Times, Jonathan Leake has described the zany conflict raging in Britain over the loud colors of recreational clothing. No kidding, the Brits are having it on about the colors of clothes.
Lurid Lycra and skin-clinging synthetics in Judge Dredd colors. Aerodynamic helmets and high-tech gloves in garish hues. No more wetsuits or biking shorts in basic black; now it’s lime green, fluorescent lilac, Day-Glo orange. Zip it, creep. Krak! Whok! The Judge is here.
So gaudy is the garb of hikers, bikers, canoeists, etc. that farmers complain the clothing startles sheep and causes ewes to miscarry. Exaggeration perhaps, but the National Trust, Britain’s largest conservation group, and the Council for National Parks have taken a stand against bright colors that destroy “the sense of isolation that most people seek in the countryside.”
In a similar vein, the National Trust has banned windsurfers from Wast Water in the Lake District, which Leake calls “one of the finest inland venues for the sport,” on the grounds that the lurid sails and wetsuits spoiled the view.
The president of the Ramblers’ Association of Britain has appealed for recreational clothing manufacturers to tone down their designs so that they don’t clash with the landscape.
Are these protests about clothing elitist? Anti-safety? Sublimely silly? Probably all three. But one memorably bright day this past summer I looked back down the trail from the shoulder of Carrauntuohil, Ireland’s highest mountain. The valley below was littered with outlandish color where neon-clad hikers made their way uphill. I tried to imagine John Muir ranging the high Sierras in fluorescent lilac and magenta.
At least that particular valley has not yet been polluted with the offending decibels of ATVs, nor have its fragile heathery bogs yet been reduced to a muddy crisscross of tire tracks. But that can only be a matter of time. The Cursed-Earth technomutants and their Dreddful machines are on the way.
