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By the Bomb's Early Light by by Paul Boyer

A really interesting book, most likely not for the reasons the author intended. 

The subject of this book is the response of American culture and society to the use of nuclear weapons at the end of World War II. What was the response from media, from book writers, from church leaders, from intellectuals, from government leaders? The author explores it exhaustively. And I mean exhaustively.

But this isn't what's interesting about the book! In fact you can just read the epilogue and get 98% of the book's direct, intended value from the last 5% of the content.

What was interesting--fascinating actually--about this book was to see a blatant example of the entire collection of phenomena that happen around a culture and its media when something tremendously fear-inducing happens. We see a series of changing media narratives, followed by the arc of the battle for narrative control, usually fought between government and media (although in the postmodern era we more commonly see government and media in bed sculpting narratives together).

We see a range of highly confident commentary from that era's punditry: from hand-wringing worries about the declining morality of man to epistemically arrogant predictions of how life will be in the post-atomic era. We hear all about how cities are doomed (obviously, nobody will want to live in dense population centers anymore... at least, that's what they tried to tell us then). 

Worst of all, we see the elites of the era try to use these events, and our fears about them, to increase their power and control.

Does all this seem somehow familiar right now? During our current era of contested elections and COVID? It sure does to me. 

The parallels continue: after a few years of media saturation of images and "news" about nuclear annihilation, a type of general narcotizing dysfunction sets in, and the people arrive at a point where the entire thing becomes a type of cliche. Soon, nobody pays any attention at all to the very risk that seemed so terrifying just a few years ago. That is, until the next fear comes along, when we'll get to do it all over again. 

Thus this book did something incredibly valuable (if unintended): it deepened my understanding of reality.

There is alarmist existential fear in every era, and every era's media, government and elites will attempt to use a given crisis to their own ends. Crises (manufactured or real, it doesn't matter) are extremely valuable--to them. Needless to say, in every era, it always really, really seems like a real crisis. Otherwise the ruse wouldn't work. 

Of course, comparing the post-Hiroshima and Nagasaki era of the late 1940s to today's modren soypeople spilling their lattes while tweeting about how Trump is "terrifying, I'm literally shaking" we get some much needed perspective on what a real crisis actually might look like.

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