aisles and tel us an elbow was outside the boundary of a desk
or we should stop giggling. Any child too big to get under the
desk wholly and ful y might wish the Soviets would nuke us;
after al , who wanted to be in school, in rotten school with
rot en teachers and rot en classmates? By the time I was being
herded in the seventh or eighth grade, I simply refused to go.
Not one teacher could explain the logic of elbows over ears in
the face of a nuclear onslaught. Not one teacher could explain
why they themselves had not flung their bodies up against a
wall or why their ears were bare naked and their elbows calmly
down by their sides. More to the point as far as I was concerned, not one teacher could explain why, if these were our last few minutes, we should spend them in such an idiotic
way. “I'd rather take a walk,” I would say, “if I'm about to die
now. ” My father was called in, a scene he described to me
shortly before he died at eighty-five: “I asked them what the
hell they expected me to do. ” The real question was, What
was one to do with these grown-ups, these liars, these thieves
of time and life - my teachers, not the Soviets? Did they
expect us to be so dim and dull?
They were helped by the saturation propaganda about both
the Soviets and the bomb.
novel by Nevil Shute about the last survivors down in
Australia. I remember just computing that it wasn’t going to
be me and maintaining an at itude of anger and disgust at the
adults. There were endless television discussions and debates
about whether or not one should build a bomb shelter and
fil it with canned food and water. The moral question was
whether or not one should let the neighbors in, had they
been obtuse enough not to build a shelter. Everything was
calculated to make one afraid enough to conform. I can
remember times wanting my father to build a bomb shelter
for the family. Of course that’s hard to do in the cement of the
city, and by the time we had soil in the suburbs I had decided
it was al a scam. Maybe al the students except me and a few
others rested wearily against wal s and kept quiet, but most of
us knew we were being lied to, being scared on purpose, and
being treated like chumps, just stupid children. Those boys
who didn’t know ended up in Vietnam.
I’d read in newspapers and magazines about the people in
cities like New York who would not take shelter when the
alarms were sounded. Following on the model of the London
blitz, sirens would scream and everyone was expected to find
