Back to nuclear history ...

So. In comparing the book and the movie versions of Nevil Shute's On The Beach, I realized that I was making some pretty interesting implications about American culture in general and the way we deal with conflict. If we say that conflict results in several cultural symptoms like presentation of a united front and psychosocial standardization, then the American past becomes unbelievably checkered with mini-wars. The Cold War was only cold in the sense that it didn't involve smoking gun barrels. The distribution of propaganda, as we can see through the changes made to Shute's novel in the movie version, absolutely insisted on a closed cultural front presented to anyone watching from the outside. This mini-war, this cultural war, was just as damaging to healthy national growth as any hot war would have been, but in ways that are harder to pinpoint as bad. It would be an interesting line of research to see how these mini-wars have carried through our culture. I think we might find that we still act as though we're in one.