Bunker Busters
This week, New York City Department of Transportation workers unearthed a sad reminder of America’s last great fear craze: Cold War nuclear annihilation. The spectre was haunting the Brooklyn Bridge, Manhattan side, in the form of a fallout shelter no doubt built for city brass and dated to the months just after Sputnik shot into orbit. CNN reports that the bunker contained the requisite drums of distilled water, sealed tins and high calorie crackers marked with the instructions “To be opened after attack by the enemy”.
The appurtenances of wartime panic are unmistakable: from Nike missile platforms in the Olympic peninsula (where this editor spent his childhood) to the Fallout Shelter signs placed outside buildings throughout Manhattan. This subterranean life of security and risk aversion has always driven a wedge between individuals, at times a driving force in the political construction of American individualism itself.
Yet in his retelling of the mythic founding of American superpower in Eisenhower’s prime, David Halberstam spells out the gritty reality of 50s culture as a time of incredible expansion, risk and exploration—a cultural scene as daring as any, leading into a new political period of insurrection (a.k.a. the ‘60’s). Despite the top-down anti-communism of those years, which included all the sorts of fear-mongering that we see leveraged in the public sphere today, the total social output of American life was not subsumed as it is in the present day ‘think-not’. Even in its most sinister moments (Star Wars, Scientific Manpower Initiative) the Cold years had some noticeable leftovers that prove it was really there. But if the Cold War gave us the interstate highway systems, the suburbs and big basements, Velcro and microwaves, what do we get at the end of the War on Terror? If our country, and the “Coalition of the Willing” ever wake from this stupor, what leftovers will be there to prove that we weren’t just dreaming?
The appurtenances of wartime panic are unmistakable: from Nike missile platforms in the Olympic peninsula (where this editor spent his childhood) to the Fallout Shelter signs placed outside buildings throughout Manhattan. This subterranean life of security and risk aversion has always driven a wedge between individuals, at times a driving force in the political construction of American individualism itself.
Yet in his retelling of the mythic founding of American superpower in Eisenhower’s prime, David Halberstam spells out the gritty reality of 50s culture as a time of incredible expansion, risk and exploration—a cultural scene as daring as any, leading into a new political period of insurrection (a.k.a. the ‘60’s). Despite the top-down anti-communism of those years, which included all the sorts of fear-mongering that we see leveraged in the public sphere today, the total social output of American life was not subsumed as it is in the present day ‘think-not’. Even in its most sinister moments (Star Wars, Scientific Manpower Initiative) the Cold years had some noticeable leftovers that prove it was really there. But if the Cold War gave us the interstate highway systems, the suburbs and big basements, Velcro and microwaves, what do we get at the end of the War on Terror? If our country, and the “Coalition of the Willing” ever wake from this stupor, what leftovers will be there to prove that we weren’t just dreaming?
4 Comments:
Are you suggesting that it was irrational to fear nuclear annihilation during the Cold War? Are you equating the threat the USSR posed to us to the threat posed by Al Qaeda? If so, you're undermining the very premise of what I had thought was your case against the war on terror, namely, that the Islamicists do not pose that sort of a threat. If, however, that is not your view -- if you mean that we should not take security seroiusly even in the face of a serious threat -- well, you're entitled to your views. But count me out.
Of course nuclear war was a threat--but more like what Sidney Lumet portrays in "Failsafe": pure accident or mechanical failure. Kubric's "Dr. Strangelove" picks up on the other side with human error in the madness of a rogue general. In some sense "global terrorism" really is more of a threat, since we know that if the terrorists had their hands on these same weapons that they would actually use them, not keep them underground to legitimize conventional wars like Vietnam. Recall the scene from "Apocalypse Now" where Martin Sheen finds Brando's notebook and realizes that he really had "lost it"-- what made Kurtz crazy (among other things) was his willingness to collapse the rationality of a "limited" jungle war in favor of nukes.
Perhaps the point is this: if nuclear weapons have two purposes, to explode and to threaten to explode, then there is an overlap between the War on Terror and the Cold War in terms of fear-mongering, authoritarian measures, and social atomization (one family = one bunker). There is legitimate room for fear in the weapon's first purpose (to explode), but there are lessons to learned in how society organized itself around that second purpose (the threat)-- and here the "real threat" of the USSR is debatable. This editor thinks that the weapons were probably never meant to be used in hot war, but I have a soft position on this and want you to convince me otherwise.
I would suggest two salient differences between the Cold War and the WOT. First, in the Cold War the fear exploited by the state was not only of external attack but also of internal subversion. The ideology that defined the "ideological enemy" had exerted a considerable attraction on a substantial proportion of the homeland population, and within the elite, not just minority groups. (Curiously, internal subversion by Islamism is of greater concern in Europe today than in the United States, and this may partly explain Europe's preference for police measures over blunderbuss military excursions).
Second, the Cold War lasted for a long time, and the exploitation of popular fears of nuclear war eventually produced a generational backlash. The fallout shelters and "duck-and-cover" rehearsals in classrooms had become risible by the '60s, and the resulting gestalt shift in perception led to a political reaction against the extension of Cold War political categories to the Third World. The WOT will likely initiate a similar dialectic.
One final point: in retrospect we can see that the generational revolt against Cold War pieties led the antiwar movement to concentrate its fire on the home government while devoting less attention to nascent anti-Soviet movements in the Eastern bloc. Protests against the Vietnam War far outweighed, in numbers of participants and intensity of intellectual attention, efforts to assist the rebels in Prague, Solidarnosc in Poland, etc. In retrospect, this was a mistake, despite the very real need to attack the Cold War mindset by denouncing the follies of anti-Communist excess at home.
Opponents of the WOT should be on their guard against a similar obsessive concern with one aspect of a multifaceted struggle.
I enjoyed the Editors' poetical cultcrit, but we oughtn't to forget that the number of phantom duck-and-cover players is even greater than the phantom Woodstock attendees. [Ever notice how there's only one duck-and-cover film strip which is brought out of the film can, regularly?]
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