Gen X Is Back to the Future

It is nothing but terrible that the track, “World Destruction,” that best captured the key anxiety of the 80s, nuclear war, was produced and performed by two men who are now identified as creeps, John Lyndon (aka the Sex Pistols’ Johnny Rotten, now a loud member of UK’s MAGA) and Afrika Bambaataa (the hiphop pioneer was “accused of child sexual abuse multiple times”). But the 1984 track got it right. The drums exploding like extinction-level detonations; the hard rock guitar stabs; the stressed and strained synthesized chorus. The whole maddening idea that the Soviet Union and the United States had, combined, enough nuclear warheads to destroy the world not once but hundreds of times. This was “World Destruction,” a track that resurfaced in my thoughts because of Operation Epic War, the US’s current and unprovoked war with Iran. It too could go nuclear at any moment. 

Now is a good time to talk about my generation, Gen X. We were the first age group to experience the decline of live music and the ascendency of music generated by machines (samplers, synthesizers, beat boxes). We also experienced the first domestic-grade personal computers, whose word processors replaced the electric typewriter; and the first to use cordless phones. We were also introduced not only to the internet but also its influence on the cinema and literature of science fiction (cyberpunk).

Many of these monumental transformations in consumer products are described by music and culture critic Roy Christopher in his new book Post-Self. So considerable and novel were the new receivers, distributors, and processors of data that cyberpunk, a movement at the heart of Post-Self, imagined a future where we could download our self-awareness into the electronic ether of cyberspace and live for as long as no one in the real world pulled the plug. 

My generation was also the last to live, as young adults, within a social reality described as the Cold War. We saw the bomb shelters, and were taught in school to “duck and cover” if a nuclear weapon, launched by the Soviets or its allies, hit our city. 

Indeed, In Post-Self, Roy Christopher recalls watching an episode of the The Twilight Zone called “Time Enough at Last,” which was about a bespectacled and bibliophilic bank teller who survives the detonation of an H-bomb because he happened to be in the bank’s vault. He then roams the ruins of a world that has no other people, but lots of books to read.The bank teller, however, accidently breaks his glasses and is left practically blind. “The trepidation of that tragic moment,” writes Christopher, “recombinant with worries of the apocalypse, was a seed planted in my head. And more than any other Cold War-era image of imminent destruction splashed on the television during my childhood…”

All American Gen Xers have similar stories. For me, it was the “Daisy” ad. Produced in 1964 as a campaign commercial for Lyndon B. Johnson’s presidential run, it shows a girl pulling the petals from a daisy as she imperfectly counts. Right after pulling the final petal, we hear a loud robotic voice begin a countdown to the launching of nuclear weapons. The girl looks up, her face is frozen, and we zoom into her right eye’s iris, which reflects the mushroom cloud of a nuclear explosion. This is the last thing she will ever see. The end of the world brought to you by Johnson’s opponent, a trigger-happy Cold War warrior Barry Goldwater.

The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 brought the Cold War to an unexpected end, and with it the expectation that we were only a button away from a nuclear apocalypse. We placed that fear into the background and turned our attention to another anthropogenic crisis that, though achieving mainstream status in the 1960s with books such as Silent Spring, obtained an eschatological register in the 1980s, global warming: the rise of greenhouse gases, the depletion of the ozone layer, and so on. 

That movement, however, never produced anything that matched the cultural impact of the “Daisy” ad, or The Day After, a TV show watched by over 100 million people when first aired by ABC on November 20, 1983. Later, President Ronald Reagan would write in his diary that he was seriously spooked by the show’s realism. In fact, he credited his decision to sign a treaty with the Soviets that banned short- and medium-range missiles to the TV show. 

Nothing of this kind has happened with the crisis of climate change. We are still burning fossil fuels with an abandon that’s nothing short of astonishing. No matter how bad or extreme our weather gets, we still demand, above all, cheap gas. And it’s likely that Donald Trump’s party might, during the midterm elections, lose both the House of Representatives and the Senate because of “pain at the pump.”

CNBC reports that the “Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee shared with CNBC first its new ad campaigned  targeting closely-watched districts across the country and lashing out at the GOP for high gas prices.” So, the Dems are promising to liberate even more carbon into the atmosphere. No reforms. No concern about the environment. Just the usual cheap, but socially costly, consumption of fossil fuels.

But will the world as we know it even reach this year’s midterm elections? This question, which might sound a bit alarmist, now has to be taken seriously because the stage for World War III has been set in the Middle East. At any moment, one might open their phone and read that nuclear missiles have obliterated Tehran and killed millions. This catastrophe, which could have been avoided if Trump had not tossed Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran to the dogs, and is exacerbated by the war in the Ukraine, would soon be followed by others because the key (but unofficial) belligerents in this crisis are the world’s top nuclear superpowers: Russia and China vs the USA and (a reluctant) Europe. It would take only a few weeks to kill billions of humans and leave the rest, the survivors, facing extinction by way of cancers caused by radiation exposure or a long and cold nuclear winter. 

Let’s look at the movie Oppenheimer for a minute. A little short of three years ago, we watched this summer blockbuster about the inauguration of the Cold War and the amassing of extinction-level weapons from what appeared to be the safe distance of the third decade of the 21st century. Oppenheimer wasn’t about our present situation, but about something that happened many years ago (July 16, 1945); happened long before the collapse of the Soviet Union, which also happened long ago. All we had to deal with between then and today—a span of 35 years—were pesky missiles fired over Japan by an anachronism called North Korea. Imagine showing Oppenheimer this summer. How things have changed in such a short space of time. Thanks to the US’s current war with Iran, a war instigated by Trump for reasons that remain very much in the dark, the corpse of that first blast in New Mexico has been reanimated. And Gen X has found itself back in the future.

This time around, however, things might actually be worse because the military is turning more and more of its decision making powers over to AI, which, as Jacobin reports in “Thermonuclear Slop and the Return of the Bomb,” recommends “nuclear strikes in 95 percent” of simulated cases. What can we do about this very dangerous situation? Jacobin recommends reviving the anti-nuclear movement. It had some success in the past; it might have some success—or at least more success than the environmental movement—today. (By the way, some environmentalists have promoted nuclear power as an exit from our current dependency on fossil fuels.) 

But what a true Gen Xer will also recommend is that one come to terms with their maker—in the secular sense. Why? For one, getting an anti-nuclear movement started takes time (which Operation Epic Fury obliterated on day one); and, two, an existential threat of this scale, a global scale, demands a very personal existential resolve that, in itself, is instructive and even spiritual. What the Cold War taught many of us was the fragility of the only world we will ever know and call home.