PARTISAN REVIEW
211
III.
Daddy, Mommy, and The Bomb
The Bomb: like God, a central presence, hefty as in the Herb–
lock cartoons. With the ever escalating arms race and military
budgets, the chances of the world blowing up today are at least as
great, but nobody talks of it. It's boring. At least we were obsessed
with the probability. But it blocked political thinking. It made us
afraid of Them who presumably would drop their bomb on us
rather than afraid of Us, who were our business to control and
who policed us into complicity.
I used to dream eschatologically, New York Harbor choked
with charred corpses, the blackened pit that had been Detroit.
During my freshman year we spent time, the three of us room–
mates, fantasizing about what we would do when the bomb fell on
Detroit. We had a feeble scheme of stealing horses from a nearby
riding stable and heading north to the woods to live off the land
--something we had as much idea how to do as construct an
atomic pile. That was a big time for lists of necessary supplies to
keep in the basement.
I suspect one of the grand sexual fantasies of the fifties was
survival with a few choice members of the opposite sex--or same
if you were gay. Miraculously saved in Mammoth Cave where you
happened to be visiting at the time with a party composed only of
you and whomever you wanted. It would be the end of anxiety.
The worst would have come true and all the rules gone out the
window. Back to the simple life to try it all again. Or wait for the
end with fun and games. In any event it too was an outlet, a
source of change in a static world. A persistent and obsessive
fantasy I found in at least half the men I was involved with in
those years.
I think people generally expect less of sex now and that
works out better.
If
a woman obeyed Freud and togetherness and
gave up everything for her femininity, she expected the earth to
move and the sky to fall in bed. Men who conformed to the
corporate image on the job expected to go home to warmth,
intimacy, and a personal geisha.
Living was personalized, privatized. You had problems.
Everything seemed to go on in small boxes. It was a time domi–
nated by a Freudian theology of biology and childhood as fate. I
