(The picture's just here because I needed a place to put it.)
Not that I ever hated the Bomb, you understand. After all it did end the War. (There may be lots of wars but there is only one War, just as there is only one Bomb.) So the thing was pretty popular where I lived. The only real concern it caused in the neighborhood was whether we'd be stuck with playing Cowboys and Indians or Cops and Robbers now that there was no Enemy. Some guy's dad said the Russians were the new enemy but that didn't make much sense. Just last week they were on our side.
Of course a few years later, in the 50s, I found out the Russians really were the enemy but the Bomb was still no big deal as long as we all sat in the hall with our backs to our lockers and covered our eyes. In fact it seemed almost a matter of civic pride that surely we were high on the list of places the Russians would want to drop it. In those days Duluth was the biggest fresh water port in the world and the third biggest port of any kind in the US, measured by tonnage, because of all the iron ore that was shipped from there, and who wouldn't want to drop the Bomb on a place like that? (Now the ore is something called taconite and it's shipped from a port farther up the lake shore, and I don't know any more about Duluth than you can see for yourself by clicking the webcam link in the sidebar column over there. I don't know if the place is still Bombworthy or not.)
(But while you're into clicking be sure to pick up your Barbie-doll IM client, whatever that is - I have no idea myself, but how can you have a media empire without ads? Or if the ad has changed by the time you read this click on it anyway, what the hell.)
That's the way things were in the 50s. Over the years I've read volumes of earnest pontifications on the 50s, mostly written by people who were not there. I was. I started high school in 1951 and graduated from college in 1959 and you can't get any more 50s than that. So you can believe me when I tell you the single word that best describes the 50s is this one: clueless.
Which brings me to the New York Times.
The place I went to college was a small Central Minnesota town isolated from the rest of the world by vast fields of waist-deep snow where the New York Times arrived by mail, always one day late. A professor of mine, a guy named Reginald Lang, who taught a course in world politics (one of the best courses I ever took if remembering anything about it counts) steadfastly refused to comment on any matter of current events until he had first read about it in the New York Times. Hence the only reason any of us read anything in any newspaper was so we could ask Reggie questions he couldn't answer yet. Which led to my acquiring at least a minimal smattering of knowledge about what was actually happening beyond the snowbanks that year and a sense of overwhelming awe at the majesty of the New York Times.
It wasn't until I went to work in New York City a few years later that I found out the New York Times, "newspaper of record" be damned, was really just a local paper - an establishment paper, to be sure, but still a local paper - and bartenders and cabbies knew as much about what Scotty Reston was saying as Reggie did. (Of course if you live in New York for any length of time all national media begins to seem local, but that's another subject for another time.) And I've been reading the New York Times more or less regularly ever since.
The Times has fallen upon bad days of late but then so has the Bomb. I'm pretty sure the Bomb's still there, in a missile pointed right at me (or wait! what's that in that guy's briefcase? ohmygod!) but I don't take it personally, and the Times is on the grid so there's no stumping Reggie anymore. Really it's all sort of dull, where the Bomb and the Times are concerned. What is it that people are getting so worked up about?
I wish the Times would give up its chuckleheaded idea of charging money to read its columnists but hey, if that's what it wants that's what it can have. The Times is just a newspaper. Newspapers are newspapers. And that's the story on that.
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