Dr. Strangelove's America
Appy, Christian
viewed as clinical efficiency the Hmong viewed as frosty arrogance." It is to this book's considerable credit that the dignity of the Hmong is not purchased at the expense of the American...
...a culture that was busy preparing with equal fervor for backyard barbecues and World War III...
...He adamantly refused...
...Henrikson's loaded footlocker of a book--full of clippings and plot summaries--addresses a truly fascinating question: How was American culture shaped by "the bomb" during the early years of the cold war...
...Henrikson's cultural analysis is most suggestive when she addresses the postwar preoccupation with madness, famfly breakdown, and violence...
...Despite her great catalogue of films and books about America's sorry "mental health," Henrikson too often pushes her materials through a kind of atomic strainer to separate out the radioactive isotopes...
...The horrible wail signaled residents to evacuate their homes and head for civil defense shelters...
...Margot Henrikson, a history professor at the University of Hawaii, establishes temporary headquarters in many fictional dimensions like Serling's...
...On September 29, 1961, in another American town, a radio report interrupted Doc Stockton's surprise party...
...Tempers flared and the neighbors procured a battering ram...
...Christian Appy teaches history at MtT and edits a book series on "Culture, Politics, and the Cold War" for the University of Massachusetts Press...
...That is what Anne Fadiman has managed to give us--lots of "cross-cultural perspective," as the phrase goes, lots of medical anthropology, but most compellingly and instructively, an account of certain lives as they quite improbably came together, with all the consequent and subsequent times of perplexity, confusion, misunderstanding...
...After all, as Henrikson indicates, Dr...
...Strangelove's America...
...Robert Coles is a child psychiatrist, and the author, most recently, of Doing Documentary Work...
...To her, the scene "recalled the terms and language of the civil defense warnings about being 'virtually naked' to enemy attack, about avoiding the 'deadly shower' of radioactive fallout...
...For instance, she claims that film noir, sci-fi, and writers like J.D...
...In any case, their inaction proved harmless--the rude awakening was a false alarm...
...novels (two dozen), and an assortment of television shows, plays, paintings, songs, and poems from the late 1940s to the early 1960s (with a final chapter venturing toCommonweal | 9 January 16,1998 ward the early 1970s...
...Norman Bates was scary enough...
...But elsewhere she concedes that these promptings had little effect, that the 1950s was a time of general complacency and prosperity, a time when most Americans were much like the sleepy people of Schenectady, apparently unconcerned about the threat of nuclear war...
...This dissent led Congress to slash the civil defense budget in 1962 (even after the Cuban missile crisis), and pushed Kennedy toward a nuclear test-ban treaty with the Soviets...
...For all the "limited wars" that were a continual product of the global conflict, along with the memory of 60 million dead in World War II, many Americans remained strikingly immune to the horror of war and secretly attracted to its real and imaged excitement...
...While she occasionally returns to actual places like Schenectady, Dr...
...It is to this book's considerable credit that the dignity of the Hmong is not purchased at the expense of the American doctors who earnestly worked with the Lees, and who constantly had to experience the behavioral consequences of their fears and suspicions...
...Strangelove is a subversive film in large part because it comes so close to the marrow of highminded nuclear strategy...
...But this concedes too much...
...The somnolent citizens were suffering from "atomic apathy...
...If we are to believe there was significant cultural dissent to the "atomic corruption of American power," we need to know more about both the nonfiction culture and the real "atomic system'--the construction, testing, deployment and use (real and threatCommonweal 2 0 January 16,1998 ened) of nuclear weapons...
...No wonder when I came to a chapter titled "Why Did They Pick Merced...
...Henrikson does not sufficiently explore the degree to which Americans found fanCommonweal ah I January 16,1998 tasies of nuclear war thrilling as well as scary...
...I thought of Raymond Carver's short stories: like his master and hero, Chekhov, he was always posing questions whose answers were less factual than fateful-the ultimate authority of chance and circumstance in all of our lives...
...GIMME SHELTERS Christian Appy C) n July 22, 1957, air-raid sirens pierced the early morning calm of Schenectady, New York...
...Only with the '60s do we get a fuller treatment of political dissent...
...Or they were just tired...
...A nuclear war might already have begun...
...Fortunately, before blood could spill, the radio announced an all-clear...
...Radar had detected UFOs that looked like missiles and everyone was urged to seek cover...
...Strangelove's America is mostly an analysis of Hollywood movies (some five dozen...
...Or they rejected the crazy idea that you could defend yourself against a nuclear bomb...
...Henrikson believes nuclear weapons were critical to the formation of a "culture of dissent" that posed fundamental challenges to cold war orthodoxy...
...One example of this method appears in her analysis of the famous murder in Hitchcock's Psycho...
...it is sufficient that the culture "matched" the violence and "split" nature of the bomb...
...But only one family responded...
...We are spared abstract categorization, theoretical insistence, in favor of the sidelong insights of storytelling...
...That, along with fear, anxiety, and apathy, is surely an important component of Dr...
...The evicted guests began to panic...
...When I first watched Psycho as a teenager, I was pretty sure Janet Leigh was completely naked and nuclear fallout was the last danger I had in mind...
...It is not very surprising to learn there was extensive cultural discourse about nuclear dangers long before Jonathan Schell's Fate of the Earth (1982...
...Here Henrikson's work complements a richer, more probing analysis of the cold war, Tom Engelhardt's The End of Victory Culture (Basic Books, 1995...
...Henrikson argues that public "apathy" toward civil defense, along with the "panic" dramatized by Rod Serling's drama, were galvanized into a political objection to shelters, nuclear brinksmanship, and atomic escalation...
...As Walker Percy put it in a line she quotes from The Moviegoer: "What people really fear is not that the bomb will fall but that the bomb will not fall...
...In perhaps the best chapter of the book we learn about the public rejection of the "bomb-shelter craze...
...Doc said a hurried goodbye to his friendly neighbors and hustled his wife and boy into their family bomb shelter...
...Ill-prepared for Armageddon, they begged the good doctor to share his bunker...
...Allow me to hazard an alternative interpretation...
...For a book so alert to the subversive potential of popular culture, it is surprisingly inattentive to the actual political dissent that preceded the 1960s...
...The public balked...
...In 1961, in the midst of the Berlin crisis, Kennedy called upon Americans to construct family fallout shelters...
...One further consideration should inform our efforts to interpret the meaning of nuclear weapons in cold war culture...
...Everyone else rolled over and went back to sleep...
...Well into this book one begins to take to each of its protagonists--as if absorbed in the magical momentum of a powerfully summoning fiction...
...Stated this way, the thesis strikes me as perfectly plausible, even banal...
...Here she is less determined to claim nuclear dissent...
...Needless to say, this tale offers no happy outcome unless it be what happens to the reader of a persuasively rendered moral fable: a recognition of the blind spots which, in their many versions, variations, afflict and threaten us all, and with such awareness, of course, a sense of gratitude to the giver of such a gift, in this instance a talented young American writer who knowingly takes us far afield in the course of her California medical inquiry...
...Worry not--we "just crossed over.., into the Twilight Zone...
...a culture in which Ike played 800 rounds of golf while his secretary of state threatened "massive retaliation...
...In a nuclear world, victors and vanquished were always threatening to merge...
...She locates countless representations of a schizoid America torn between anxiety and apathy, violence and passivity, rebellion and obedience...
...What makes the book less convincing than it might be is the limited way the author handles the fictional materials that dominate her conception of "culture...
...Doc Stockton was an episode from Rod Serling's land of "shadow and substance" that filled the television airwaves from 1959 to 1964...
...Engelhardt argues that nuclear weapons transformed American culture not only because they generated dissent, or fueled cultural madness, but because they made it impossible to tell convincing war stories about a wholly virtuous and victorious America...
...We aren't even told about those parents who sent their children's baby teeth to the dissident scientists at the Committee for Nuclear Information to help them document the presence of Strontium 90 in American milk (thus establishing additional grounds for opposition to nuclear testing...
...For Engelhardt, the cold war created a strangely "storyless" realm...
...Schizoid may not be too strong a ~Kord to describe a culture in which teachers taught schoolchildren that America was God's gift to humankind--Democracy Triumphant--and then ordered them to hide under their desks to prepare for nuclear war...
...The UFOs were merely satellites...
...However much Henrikson exposes herself to the charge of atomic reductionism, she is also rather, well, disarming...
...General "Buck Turgidson," the movie's bomb-happy warrior, quotes Herman Kahn's On Thermonuclear War (1960...
...The author almost miraculously sustains an empathy that embraces all the characters who, one by one, appear in what is, really, a documentary narrative, which offers descriptions of events, evocations of mood and feeling, forays into the history and culture of a people, accounts of myths, beliefs, ceremonial practices...
...Salinger and Allen Ginsberg urged people "to fight for their humanity and to feel the pain and panic appropriate to the nuclear age...
...There was only enough food for one family...
Vol. 125 • January 1998 • No. 1
