Duck and Cover
Duck and Cover
I’m old enough to remember the Cuban Missile Crisis and old enough to remember nuclear drills where us 3rd graders in Georgia would crawl under our desks and close our eyes, you know, so the blast wouldn’t blind us. My neighbor built a bomb shelter and kept a gun by the door so those of us whose dads were too lazy to do the same could be shooed away when the radiation was bearing down. When I told my father about the gun, he muttered something obscene and said our neighbor was a horse’s ass.
I don’t know how much our generation was affected by the nuclear jitters of the time. Maybe not as much as some psychiatrists think. But there is something about the idea of annihilation that probably seeps into the cellular level. Nuclear winter, mushroom clouds, flesh burned off bodies, cancers, giant ants in the desert mutating, all the horrors of cheezy sci-fi movies and yeah, the real thing.
So when I hear the Senator from Idaho talking about how a war with Russia would be over PDQ, I wonder where he was back in the days of Assured Mutual Destruction. If he thinks maybe the Russkies forgot the code to their nuclear arsenal. And then Sen. Graham joins in with the additional commentary that if Putin ordered an all-out nuclear strike, the general next to him would put a bullet in his head. Ah, magical thinking from the boyz in charge. Calling Dr. Strangelove, calling Dr. Strangelove!
I don’t plan to build a bomb shelter. Just yet. But a few more saber rattling comments from the peanut brain gallery, I may reconsider.
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Tags: Dr. Strangelove Returns, Learning to Lover the Bomb (again), Nuclear Jitters