Realizing Steve Schmidt is 7 years younger than Rick Wilson (who is just at the cusp between Boomers and Gen X), and that generalizations based on year of birth are as reasonable as astrological signs (not at all), one can still make generalizations about “generations” based on history.
Mr. Wilson, for example, was 26 when the Berlin Wall came down. I was 34. The difference of 8 years is a major difference in this case (Mr. Schmidt was 19). I saw a “Twilight Zone” re-run last night, from 1963. The story concerned people trying to live after the nuclear holocaust. This, in itself, was not remarkable in 1963. I haven’t done a study of it, but nuclear holocaust provided the backdrop for apocalypse movies for decades, until zombies and pandemics in general, took over. The TZ story, then, was a familiar trope in 1963. It was, of course, set in the future; the future many people feared (Serling used this trope several times in the run of the series). In this case, the future was 1974. Not important to us 47 years after that, whose worst crime against humanity was the rise of disco; but the story was set 10 years after the war to end all wars (and civilization itself).
I can think of four or five such stories across the series; stories set after the holocaust, the complete destruction of civilization, or just the unholy terror of what everyone was sure was bound to happen. It was the droning background noise of the '60's. We all heard it, we all thought about it, we all feared it.
Neither date in the story itself is significant, except that the war being 10 years in the past in the story, and the story being set in 1974, meant the war had come in 1964. Only one year in the future from the year of first broadcast. It wouldn't be plausible today, unless it was something as implausible as a zombie apocalypse. Nuclear war was all too plausible in 1963.
Someone might set a zombie apocalypse story a few years in the future today. Devious things happen in a large secretive corporation, evil virus/AI/what have you escapes, apocalypse follows. The focus is mostly on the evil corporation. The proximity in time (The Day After Tomorrow, which was actually the title of a nuclear war scenario film, IIRC) of course just makes it scarier, if not more plausible. But in 1963 nuclear holocaust was all too real, all too expected. Twenty years later, that expectation very nearly became reality:
Fear of nuclear holocaust had considerably abated by 1983, which is one reason that story is not more widely known, that Stanislav Petrov’s name isn’t more widely recognized. In 1983, Rick Wilson was 20; Steve Schmidt was 13; and your humble host was 28 and had been married for 6 years.
Why am I hammering on our respective ages? Because when you grew up in post-war (WWII, I mean) America marks what you remember, how you grew up. I remember “duck ‘n’ cover.” I remember air raid sirens and
CONELRAD, AM car radios with the CONELRAD logo to indicate where to tune when the radios all suddenly left the air. I remember public bomb shelters and PSA's about locating one in your daily routine so you could rush to it when the air raid sirens went off. They had convenient signs and logos, too. We were expected to know them. I remember going home to my mother one day in elementary school and asking why we didn’t build a fallout shelter just in case. She told me she didn’t want to be alive in the post-war world popular fiction and TV and movies described. That’s not the answer a young child expects; or forgets, ever.
And that’s where my thesis begins: that Gen Xer’s and even tail-end Boomers who missed the paranoia (Red Scare was around for a long time) and anxiety of the years when The Bomb could fall without warning, missed what made life significant for the rest of the Boomer generation, the event that scarred and scared us all. Those who missed it, but grew up in our shadow, seem to have a sort of envy for an event that crossed all concerns, that every other event was measured against, the ground that set the tone for the tune of the age.
It gave the age its central significance. It should be the civil rights movement, which paved the way for the women’s liberation movement, the gay rights movement, basically the social world we live in today. But what marked us, what imprinted all of us, was the fear of nuclear annihilation, and the fact we survived it. I remember fallout shelters as a real thing. Panic rooms and tornado shelters are a faint echo of the original. Storm cellars at least served more than one purpose, and could be used regularly, especially in tornado alley. But fallout shelters ostensibly knew no region and no season, and had only one purpose: to ride out the final war and emerge alive into a different, and certainly deadly, world. Every movie where a disaster ends life as we know it is based on, or at least inspired by, the expectations of a nuclear war.
The shadow is long. The threat is long since over; but it inspired other anticipations of disaster. I had a songbook from the ‘70’s with a cover illustration of a polluted, lifeless world overcome with the consequences of industrialization. Long before we feared global warming (and with good reason do we do so), we feared air and water pollution killing all life on our planet. Nuclear annihilation was replaced with chemical earth death.
And now it’s Trump and the end of democracy.
We have to put this in context in order to understand it. A common threat is a generationally binding thing; it gives purpose. Maybe that’s the lesson the WWII generation bequeathed us. After Pearl Harbor we became one nation under arms. Watch “Them,” the giant ant movie, made in the ‘50’s and based on the idea nuclear bomb radiation would create giant mutant ants. The army is the only force sufficient to defeat the ants (of course; giant cans of Raid are never considered; although IIRC they do use DDT, but don't get all the ants with it), and there are scenes of army vehicles racing through the streets of Los Angeles, as ordinary people look on quietly. The scene is not one of martial law or government usurpation of liberty or the assertion of tyranny or even the collapse of social order. It shows what the government would be expected to do, just as it had done after Pearl Harbor. Today? That scene would bring us all to a halt. In the ‘50’s, it was a unifying idea, another example of the nation coming together to meet a common threat. A threat that wasn’t “savages” (“Injuns!”) or bad guys or foreign powers, but simply the by-product of our scientific success. And that science (military weapons) provided the means to destroy the giant mutant ants. Together we are stronger.
Today, what are we together on? Even under the bomb scare, we were unified in our fear. So the lesson is to be afraid? It seems to be. We can’t recreate the anger of Pearl Harbor (9/11 didn’t do it). So maybe we can recreate the fear of the Bomb? It’s impossible to do that on an international stage, but perhaps a national one?
Which is not to say fear of Trump is a false flag effort by frustrated political consultants eager to make their lives important, part of something more significant than party politics. Fear of Trump is real; but how reasonable is it? Is Trump truly going to destroy the American Republic? Is he Hitler, leading us to nightmare? Or should we remember he’s in his 70’s, will be nearer 80 in 2024 than he is today, and not as charismatic as Joe Biden, nor as determined to build a movement as even Ron DeSantis is (and how’s that working out for DeSantis?), and seriously not in good health? Is Trump really going to lead a revolution? It hardly seems likely.
So why the determination to make him so much more than he is? Shock and awe left over from 2016? Fear of another Trump Administration, a whole lot louder and a whole lot worse? But is that reasonable? Is there grounds for so much fear? Or is the fear itself the reason? Does it provide the opportunity for the kind of event that shaped the Boomers? Because the fear of those years is the only thing we can hope (or fear) to reproduce today.
Is it merely rhetorical to call theses events “monumental”? Or is it desirable? The desire for historical significance, for another generation-binding event?
Beware people selling you fear. They don't have your best interests at heart.
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