WAR FEAR

Reporter: "Do you think there will be nuclear war in your lifetime?"

A Punk: "Yeah, it's inevitable innit"

Quite why what happened to me happened I don't know - maybe because it was the first time I'd seen a punk on TV but that's hard to believe - but this was a finger-in-socket shock to my brain, and this spotty kid's words became Gospel Truth to me. I believed that we were all going to die not through a pessimistic but reasoned assessment of the facts but because a punk had said so on Nationwide. And so began a good six or seven years of fear.

(The source of my *continued* terror I think was the barely subconscious Adrian Mole-ish dread that I was going to perish in atomic fire without ever having had sex.)

when sting ended the cold war by singing "russians" we foolishly thought that they would get rid of all the nuclear weapons as a result, but i guess they forgot.

now that george w is in charge and tearing up treaties perhaps its time to get afraid again.

My greatest fear was actually a bout of environmental collapse phobia in early 1992 -- the nukes issue was more something I vaguely acknowledged but never really was paralyzed by to my remembrance.

I wonder if anyone saw the US TV movie called IIRC "Special Bulletin", which was abt nuclear terrorists in seattle(?) At thee end, they set off THE BOMB. That was a scary one too, and rather more likely in this day & age, I think....

xoxo

Erm, but kids, you do know that having a fear of nuclear war, down to having actual fantasies about where you'd be when the bomb went off is SO MUCH a part of our generation that it's actually enshrined right in the margins of the marginalia of our generation, Generation X?

(Did anyone else understand that sentance? No? Good.)

I stopped having a horrible fear of nuclear war after two events- 1) no more Republicans in the White House and 2) The Fall of Russia.

Without Russia, there was no scary evil empire to start the war. Without Republicans in the White House, there were no scary evil empire mongerers to shoot the damned things off in the first place.

I suppose I should go back to starting to feel afraid now that Babybush has returned... he was on the news last night, blethering on about Star Wars... bloody hell, WHO are we protecting ourselves against? *THAT* starts to make me have nuclear war paranoia again. It's like... people like Babybush grew up so heavily with the threat of Nuclear War, that they just don't want to let go of the idea... the idea of Nuclear War is as much a safety blanket to them as anything else.

Besides, everyone knows that WWIII won't be started by either the Russians or us, but by some silly hacker kid trying to impress some girl... I mean, didn't you see Wargames?

When I was younger there were nights when I just couldn't sleep at all through fear of nuclear armaggeddon. I still worry, sometimes, but in the same way as you worry about your own mortality I suppose.

George W. Bush terrifies me too. The thought of him facing off against someone equally incompetent or mad is a worrying one, because they might actually push the proverbial button.

God, why do we have to create such instruments of mass destruction, anyway? We effectively constucted something that has the power to decimate us all. I know it's backwards-thinking, but sometimes science really scares me.

One of my friends charmingly told me that I was like a cockroach and likely to survive a nuclear war, on the grounds that I eat quickly and therefore must have a strong survival instinct.

Assuming everyone *is* wiped out, then I would want enough signs of civilisation to be left behind to prevent some smart arse aliens finally turning up and being able to say "these people were so primitive they hadn't even invented trading card games."

I believed that when Skylab fell down it was going to land on my house. I went to bed at five o'clock to face the inevitable and my Mum woke me up for tea. It had landed in Australia - phew.

I mean, think about it. One moment we're all here, the next we're all dead. Think of the time we wasted at work, sleeping, doing mundane things because we didn't know time was running out so rapidly.

I think I'm giving myself the fear...!

2. Seeing the inside of an unbelievably squalid family nuclear shelter, complete with endless shelves of tinned food and a board game called "the golden days". Thanks, Imperial War Museum.

3. watching a mock-up of a nuclear strike on TV. A couple stroll merrily across a london road with winking belisha beacons: a white flash and they are shadows imprinted on a plateau of melted stone. Thanks, Panorama, c 1986.

As a result I went to bed in terror every night with dreams of a missile flying across the urals towards me. At the time this intense fear was matched for me by an equally intense class-consciousness, curiously enough.

I think the same vibe is captured brilliantly by the artists Jane and Louise Wilson, who've done videos in strange places like the Stasi HQ and Greenham Common, playing with the abandoned buildings' ghostly vibe and suchlike. Always got the feeling they were passing a copy of Fate Of The Earth between themselves with a flashlight after bedtime as teens. Anyone see their Turner Prize/Serpentine stuff last year?

Does anyone remember the '80s film Night Of The Comet? Kids break into shopping mall to mess around on the beds, etc. one night, then the comet goes over and NOBODY IS LEFT but them. Ooooer...

Wasn't Mary Woronov (sp?) in Night of the Comet? She's one sexy thing.

The whole thing was brutal and ugly, but somehow in the back of my mind I romanticized it to the point where I Was leading a group of my friends as part of a roving gang that foraged for food and beat the snot out of others. It was like "Peter Pan" gone horribly, violently right.

If an H-Bomb detonated five miles above London, the cross on top of St Pauls would vaporise. When I was small, my father told me that the Breiddens (=distant welsh hills) had once been volcanoes. Every time we topped the last rise on the way home, I would gaze at them and wonder if today was the day they started being volcanoes (he said five million years ago: it thus seemed to me all the more likely that they were itching to get started again), and did we live far enough away... ?

I remember when I was young, I developped utterly irrational yet terrifying fears of both volcanoes (I would make plans whereby I would run down into the basement and put a thermal blanket over my head if one errupted near us... in London...) and later of tidal waves. (We lived 4 miles from the nearest beach. Which happened to be Lon Guyland Sound.)

Looking back on it, I wonder if it was because the omnipresent nuclear threat was just *too* scary for my pre-teen mind.

Bijlmer is the poorest, predominantly non-white, area of the city - plane was circling low above A'dam before it went down- then there were the mysterious diseases that followed, tales of men in white suits, stonewalling Israeli response and widely believed allegations of cover-ups. Was eventually a parliamentary enquiry in '98 that didn't resolve much to anyones satisfaction.

On fear of Nuclear Armageddon, as mentioned elsewhere was once a christian, but when lost faith the world suddenly seemed a v. cold and vulnerable place likely to be blown to pieces at any given moment (this whilst cold war was actually fading). No delirious apocalyptic visions of how beautiful it was gonna look, more nightmares, cold sweat and real raw fear. Threat has temporarily eased but we're still dancing between the flames.

Mark, has this became a famous quote or something? (Sudden thought: perhaps it made its way into the England's Dreaming, which I've yet to read.)

Anyway, here's the quote in context, and anyone other than me and mark s who can identify the author gets automatic admission into the inner circle of the ILE in crowd:

I would like to know too the source of the deep rage that runs through this story like a razor-edged wire. It wasn't, precisely, class-hatred; it certainly wasn't political; it went too deep to be accepting of the possibility of change. The [Electric] Eels, perhaps, came closest to embodying it fully; but it was there in everyone else. It was a desperate, stubborn refusal of the world, a total rejection; the kind of thing that once drove men into the desert, but our desert was the Flats. It should be remembered that we had all grown up with Civil Defense drills and air-raid shelters and dreams of the Bomb at night; we had been promised the end of the world as children, and we weren't getting it. But there must have been more to it than that.

Or possibly The Snow Queen, a story I found SEXY aged six for goodness sake...

(writer, singer, widow of Peter Laughner, Pere Ubu associate)

*I* am Hoaxtradamus!
No, *I* am Hoaxtradamus!
No, *I* [etc]

Long ago I wrote a piece for Spin on Pere Ubu; on Charlotte's recommendation I asked Allen Ravenstine (Ubu's original synth player) to comment on Charlotte's ideas, since she said he'd probably contradict them, and he gave a real interesting response - but then a whole hunk of the piece got cut at the last minute, including Allen's reply. So here it is, for the record (the Flats by the way were an industrial/warehouse area of Cleveland down by the Cuyahoga (sp?) River where some rock/punk clubs were open on and off in the late '60s early '70s - or that's what I've been told; maybe it was a good location for rehearsal space, too):

FRANK: Charlotte said that there was this "really oppressive shutting out of everything that wasn't pretty," that the Cleveland musicians were reacting against this. The metaphor she came up with was almost religious, monastic, the people going into the desert or down to the Flats - the Flats had this ugliness. You were confronting yourself with something that was different, and you were embracing it. "A messy raw kids passage of anger."

ALLEN: I would reject that there was an ugliness there. I was a big fan of Edward Hopper, those WPA murals in the '30s. I have a real fascination for the machine.... The kind of thing they did when everything was oversize. The Flats are from that time, big nuts and bolts, big rivets. I grew up in the suburbs; we didn't have it.

Allen also said, "I'm much more of visual person than an audio person. I was never interested in music until it had color... I see what I do as abstract sound that evokes a feeling."

I grew incredibly worried.

Someone, please disabuse me of this now, the paranoia isn't healthy (or probably correct). What genuinely terrifies me is how insightful, intellectual and clear this dude was with his thinking on all other matters we discussed (and there were many).

C'mon, I want an irrefutable 'Why London won't be nuked' argument, preferably from as many of you as possible, all declaring me a silly, naive little twit who should grow up and just get on with life. As I should.

:(

(He also predicted that there would be either an assassination attempt on the Pope within the next two weeks, or a suicide bomb amidst the packed masses in St. Peter's Square. This I'd say is a more sensible call.)

As a special 'leaving gift' to ILX ("we've been through bad times, we've been through worse times" etc), on this, the day of my passing (back up to university), I give you...

http://photos-230.ak.facebook.com/ip002/v13/26/111/36907581/n36907581_30399230_8032.jpg

It worked out mostly OK in the end.

...and Spooks has a track record in predicting actual events!

xpost and BOO HISS to Steve.

Just as well it worked out mostly OK in the end then, eh? As long as you're not intending to be the girlfriend of one of the cell, who gets stabbed towards the end and dies.

This is precisely why I was drummed out of the secret services.

i.e. a semi-pro liar!

Look, I'm tellin' ya, his voice was bona fide New York, and his knowledge phenomenal. He didn't try to convince me to do anything.

And he also talked about Spanish prisons. And judo. A lot.

Ha, he's on 'This Week' at the moment discussing the very thing. Plus ca change.