Reflections

---

I’ll begin with a confession, namely, as a child of the eighties who can still conjure the consequences of not being able to Play Safe, and who was indelibly marked by the sight of bloodied rabbits in Watership Down, I have been guilty of teaching texts I knew were potentially troubling and anxiety inducing in their nature, despite knowing how inherent themes can resonate unpleasantly with the cultural and social context of my pupils’ worlds. 

If you too lived through the eighties, you may have gone through something similar: the television, a rare and wonderful sight in our primary classroom – always met by sounds of anticipatory glee – wheeled in one rainy afternoon. Our teacher, a mild and caring young woman, not hitherto given to frightening the bejeebers out of her class, gleefully tells us we will be watching a film – about rabbits. And not just a film, but a cartoon. Now the world of cinema could indeed be a dark place for children at that time, but I was lulled by the manner of the introduction into thinking that this would be a pleasant experience. Perhaps it was a kindness that I was quickly disabused of this notion with Fiver’s early vision acting as a hellish trailer for the rest – the tone for the afternoon was quickly set and dying rabbits entered my dreams. The deliberate introduction of myxomatosis to the bunny population in the countryside local to my home, causing the eyes of the rabbits of my youth to bulge in grotesque plague-like poxes, did nothing to mitigate the film’s responsibility for cementing in me – and in my dreams – the notion that the adult world was a terrifying place. 

Perhaps it was this and similar experiences punctuating my childhood that made me more immune to the terrors of literary content. I could more easily separate out the worlds of imagination and reality when presented with words on a page than I could when faced with depictions in film or public information broadcasts. I could be traumatised by the sight of pit ponies attempting to Escape from the Dark but would lap up stories of wolves kidnapping little sisters, despite being a youngest sibling, without a murmur. I was ten years old when Where the Wind Blows inveigled our consciousness and our playground pursuits turned from kiss chase to conversations of nuclear war but I continued to write stories with murder and fighting at their heart, despite conflict haunting my dreams. 

Fast-forward twenty years and I was ever careful as an English practitioner not to subject my secondary students to needless visual terror, scrutinising department choices of film extracts selected to complement our teaching of the gothic or dystopian genres, seeking to avoid gratuitous content that may engage some and terrorise others. In: clips from Nosferatu.  Out: the 2012 film version of Susan Hill’s brilliant The Woman in Black that did no favours to her haunting, suspenseful prose. Was I wrong, then, to not seek more of the same censorship over the texts I taught, with their pervasive themes of war, loss and diaspora? A recent move to Initial Teacher Education, and access to the thoughts of the next generation of English teachers, has made me think more about this of late. And, on reflection, I would still tentatively argue no, for the following reasons.  

Firstly, the world is a scary place and it is apposite that literature reflects that. My formative and teenage years were lived against the backdrop of Thatcher’s policies which permeated my youth. Conflict was ever present – Northern Ireland, the Falklands, the Cold War, the Gulf War and so on and so forth. War dominated the texts I studied at secondary school (Across the Barricades, Lord of the Flies, Dulce et Decorum Est, and so many more) and this pattern was repeated in those I taught as an adult (The Kite Runner, Private Peaceful, War Horse, Macbeth, to name but a few). Dystopian fiction was a popular genre – perhaps enriched by it serving as a haunting reminder of the rise of dictatorship throughout the twentieth century – and remains so now.  

As English practitioners, the very nature of troubling and anxiety inducing texts mean that they are a rich and valuable source of learning, acting as stimulus for analytical discussion, a springboard to creative endeavour, an insight into the interplay of human actions and emotions or a window onto the wider world. But for our pupils, handled well, they can also offer an opportunity to share their fears, to learn about the mistakes and traps of adulthood, to come up against the very worst that people can be – from the relative safety of the classroom. A study of dystopian literature, with its obvious reflection of the rise of authoritarian and totalitarian states, brings up fascinating questions about the potency of free speech, the role of language in oppression, and so much more that is relevant to their lives today. Many, if not most, access the news in some form, news that is full of real atrocity, real tragedy and real threat, and plenty of fabrication to boot. They need to be able to consider this critically.  

Our world needs more kindness and some would argue that writers and teachers of writing should propagate this through our creative and pedagogical choices. I would respond that to enable more kindness, we need empathetic young people. Taught well, the study of literature encourages young people to engage with characters, to, as To Kill a Mockingbird’s Scout so aptly puts it ‘climb into their skin and walk around in it’ until they understand them.  In English lessons, potent texts encourage our pupils to feel emotions, to explore characters motivations and idiosyncrasies, so that we empathise and sympathise with them. When (spoilers) Charlie Peaceful faces death by firing squad, when George kills Lennie, or when Boxer is sent to the knacker’s yard, our pupils react, with empathy and kindness, alongside recognising events for what they are – be that an abuse of power, an act of friendship, or an allegory for the commodification of the working classes.  

It’s also logistically difficult to protect our young people from threat. War literature is taught against the background of refugee experience. Dystopia is taught to pupils who have fled oppressive regimes. I have experience of pupils who had escaped from Syria and Ukraine – some with, some without their families – arriving half way through the year to lessons about war from AQA’s Power and Conflict anthology and Golding’s Lord of the Flies. My choice: to include them in lessons or offer them alternative learning that excluded them from their peers and our curriculum. I opted for the former, and decided to support them through what might be a difficult navigation. 

As English teachers, we have some autonomy over content but at other times choices are made by others (heads of department, exam board, the DfE).  We inherit decisions and, now more often than not, curriculum plans are provided with stipulated text choices. We are privy to some, but by no means all, of the life experiences that impact our pupils – we hear of bereavements and friendship problems, or the pupil that has been to five schools within as many months – but policies, well meant, mean we may not know all that would be helpful and therefore walk unwittingly – day in day out – into discussions that affect and resonate with our pupils on a level we cannot always anticipate. And our job – frantic, busy, wonderful but pressured, means we do not always have time to pause and reflect on how the context of the world we live in today may shape how our individual pupils respond to all the literature we teach.  

We become, then, adept at working with complex material, implementing ideas from our repertoire of strategies to help them navigate ideas and concepts with as little trauma as possible. This is perhaps why texts endure.  We can predict threat within Lord of the Flies or the canon of war poetry.  Other texts, which appear, superficially at least, safe, can induce a strength of reaction we did not anticipate – so planning to play safe, is not necessarily viable. Instead, English practitioners manage the material, and establish it within its fictional boundaries.  

Any decent text, if taught well, can reach out to young people without leaving them emotionally scarred. An understanding of context and purpose can allow students to see the humanity that lies behind all great literature. A focus on the craft of the writer and the ideas and messages within help establish the text as a construct.  They can pick apart and examine forensically why a writer might create a character in a particular way and send them on a particular arc. They can find learning in literature. Why did Golding/ Orwell/ Huxley/ McCarthy/ Atwood et al write if not to warn us, to appeal to our better nature, to implore us, perhaps young people especially: do not let this happen, for see where it leads us. Fear and anxiety inducing texts, then, clearly have an important role in teaching children about the world as it really is, with all its existential threat and suffering, and how we might navigate it with both resilience and compassion. 

All that said, there are days, for example only recently when I reflected on the diet of literature my son devoured for his GCSE Literature exam, that I wonder whether we, as educators, have become overly fixated on the darker aspects of literature. Are we leaving too little space for joy and comedy and romance? These too reflect the real world, the real hopes and experiences of ordinary and extraordinary people. And they can inspire a love of literature in their own way, through the pleasure of seeing characters succeed, achieve happiness, fall in love and stay in love or through appreciation of an inspired choice of language or a perfectly-turned, Wodehousian phrase.

There is of course an answer: balance and execution. Like Rembrandt and the other Old Masters, English Literature curricula should counterpoise dark and light, introspection and expansiveness, microcosm and macrocosm. Some of this may be found within a single text, such as Romeo & Juliet (teenagers in love/death and suicide), whereas something more relentlessly dark (The Road) may benefit from a tonic of Jane Austen, so that children are not left thinking English teachers are the doomsayers of their classes, and just a little threat-obsessed.

---

Growing up in the 1970s and 1980s, in a house with no books, and only three, and eventually four, television channels, the world was an unfathomable mystery. Entertainment was dominated by men and staple television watching was programmes such as Starsky and Hutch, Morecambe and Wise and The Benny Hill Show. News readers were generally male and usually middle aged and middle class. It wasn’t uncommon to have the television screen full of men discussing ‘important’ things, or even engaged in inane, eccentric antics – Monty Python’s Flying Circus and The Goodies are the first such phenomena to come to mind. I didn’t find them funny.

The news was an extra mystery, not only because of the male dominance, but also because it was the domain of the father, who shouldn’t be disturbed whilst watching it. It was full of disturbing images of war, conflict, riots and famine and it ended with an incessant insistence on promoting the importance of male sport. Groups of shouting and chanting, overly excited or angry men were often plastered across cathode ray driven, square, convex screens, which were surrounded by fake wood veneers. When women were included in the world of ‘entertainment’, it was generally from the perspective of the male gaze: over sexualised‌ and objectified, with their only value in terms of their usefulness to men. We may have had the first female prime minister, but the world was incredibly white, male, middle class, grey and beige.

In the background, there was much theorising about and activism toward women’s liberation, which did not reach the popular consciousness as I remember it. At the age of seven I had an annual full of romance comic strips, fashion tips and posters of adult males such as Mick Jagger and David Essex, which I think I was supposed to drool over, which is tantamount, in retrospect, to grooming. Such grooming presented one view of how to live a life, and of course LGBTQ+ representation and promotion was absent. I am reminded of a sentence from the historian and feminist Sheila Rowbotham, who said: “The world simply was and we were in it” when I think of my experience of those times. It was with this background and the resulting mentality that I experienced the Cold War.

To say I experienced the Cold War is itself a misnomer because I never knew the term Cold War back when it was happening. What I was aware of was creative endeavours and entertainments such as Threads, When the Wind Blows, Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s Two Tribes, Z for Zachariah, apocalyptic scenes from movies such as The Terminator, and fleeting images on newsreels of powerful world leaders doing their thing, as well as exposure to the ‘Protect and Survive’ project. Even though some of this was presented at school, I do not recall it ever being framed in context. The threat of nuclear attack was just a given: know about it so you might just survive it when it happens.

I was aware of the horrors of nuclear war, and its imagery is branded on my consciousness and unconscious, to the point I had and still have dreams related to it, but I did not know its context or the probability of it happening. The effects of imbibing Cold War imagery and ideas led to a morphing together of entertainment and public service information for me. Seeing Threads and similar media was the same to me as watching disaster movies, such as The Towering Inferno and The Poseidon Adventure, which I was greatly traumatised by rather than enthralled. None of these were entertainment to me. It was all trauma, and not just the trauma of the events, but the trauma of being in an alien phallocentric world, driven by unattainable progression at any cost, power and aggression. To a traumatised me, films about nuclear war, air and sea disasters, mingled with ‘Protect and Survive’, and were preparations for things that could and would affect everyone at some point in a lifetime. They were not entertainment, they were information giving and survival planning, and that was why they were shown at school. We were being prepared for a desolate, frightening and hostile world, in which I was insignificant and had no power to affect or change anything.

I do have one positive memory of the nuclear threat that came out of that unfathomable time and context – again, this was acquired by my consciousness being hit from sideways fleeting, flickering images – and that was the Greenham Common Women’s peace protest. Once more, I didn’t fully understand what was happening then, and there were images of women being dragged around and treated roughly. I was interested and intrigued, but I had no outlet to research, discuss or ask questions about this.

I know now that the Greenham Common Women were part of a series of camps protesting against the decision of the British government to allow cruise missiles to be stored at RAF Greenham Common, that’s because we now have the internet and I can find this information out and reflect upon it, with context. In a world where the majority of world leaders are still male, where war and conflict and aggression dominate the news, and the nuclear powers of the world are engaged in conflict, and are unflinching about casually engaging in more, I think we need, particularly in education, to think really carefully about how we present information to young people and how we help them navigate the good and bad aspects of the internet and all the trauma and conflict contained within. We also need to make sure they are aware of alternative ways to view the world and live a full and fruitful life. 

In my role running a secondary school library I am witness to young people’s interest in military themes. My predecessor encouraged “boys’” reading by introducing a wide range of books on military topics and these continue to be popular. Over the years, I have witnessed different groups of young people playing variations on ‘Nuke’ games, using maps and planning targets and imagining complete nuclear destruction, and I find myself wondering, what is it that makes destruction so appealing, and specifically, why is the idea of total destruction so enthralling, when for other people like myself, it is a complete anathema? With films, and almost whole TV channels devoted to war, and war still dominating the news and history, I think it is presented as inevitable: a given, in the past, present and future.

As much as I hate to stereotype by binary gender, a quick look at the loans on military books, and some have never been taken out by girls. We have fiction books such as How I Live Now and Z for Zachariah, which have female protagonists, and bits of romance, which have a greater possibility of appealing to girls, but they have hardly been loaned. Young people do not seek them out and I wouldn’t feel comfortable recommending them without the borrowers having prior interest and knowledge of the themes.

I do not judge or comment on the military interests of students, as I do not wish to censor or dampen their enthusiasm, and I am also reluctant to recommend books with difficult topics. This could be part of me still feeling insignificant, with little impact on the world, but it is also a bit of resignation to the fact that it would take a bit more power than a middle-aged librarian’s ideas and opinions to change the direction of the world’s focus. The world I would like to see young people grow up in is one where war, fear and domination are not inevitable. Where war, fear and domination are not the only way, and not the default human stance. We could work with, expose and promote other aspects of our nature, and work with nature itself – rather than dominating and destroying the natural world – to live less competitive, calmer, more peaceful and less trauma-driven lives.Sheila Rowbotham (1973), Woman’s Consciousness, Man’s World, Harmondsworth: Penguin

---

How can I sum up my experiences of the Cold War? I had no hand in the geopolitical decisions that shaped my world, I had no knowledge of the backroom negotiations and hidden tensions that motivated key players on the world stage so, in every way that mattered, I was just a passenger along for the ride.

It was not a comfortable ride.

My Cold War anxieties were a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach, that queasy feeling you get on the day of an important exam. Except it was the entire world taking the exam and the only proof that it had passed was being able to go to bed that night and wake the next morning to begin the cycle again.

There was no getting away from it, pop culture had embraced the terror. Singers were telling us about the two tribes, comedy shows encouraged us to wear our mushrooms with pride, and comics showed us a Mega-City reduced to radioactive dust by a Sov attack. 

So, given that the Cold War was everywhere and was the troubling background noise of my everyday existence, how best to illustrate the insanity that once ruled over us all? I’ve gone with mildly amusing anecdotes.

It’s 1980 and the world is still coming to terms with the Russian invasion of Afghanistan the previous Christmas. I went to W.H. Smiths one Saturday and there, on the bottom shelf next to “The Friendship Book of Francis Gay” were copies of Protect and Survive, the Government’s booklet on the steps you could take to survive a nuclear attack. 

I bought it, I still don’t know why since the advice in the booklet ranged from mildly unhelpful to totally ridiculous. In the event of the end of the world (it said) you should whitewash your windows, build an inner refuge by leaning your doors against the wall and covering them with sandbags, and, if you’re outdoors when the bomb goes off,  be sure to lie down in a ditch. 

Even as a teenager, I was already starting to ask questions: how are we supposed to make these preparations? Are we supposed to look at the world situation and decide events are grim enough to warrant a visit to Do It All for the whitewash and screwdriver? Do we then sit in an overly-dark house with no doors for weeks waiting to find out if our preparations were necessary? What if there isn’t a ditch?

My biggest reaction to Protect and Survive was confusion since one of its pieces of advice was simultaneously terrifying and ludicrous. Imagine, if you will, being in your shelter and by some strange alchemy the whole flimsy construction has survived a one-megaton nuclear blast a mile down the road. Tragically, a family member suddenly dies – what should you do now? The book gives instructions on how to wrap up the body and tag it with the name and includes a helpful diagram in case you can’t imagine what a granny in a bin bag would look like. That’s a scary thought, I’d never seen a dead body at that point in my life and the idea that I‘d suddenly be dealing with the recently deceased corpse of a loved one was an awful thought. 

But then it struck me, why tag the body? It seemed utterly ridiculous to me that, after the total devastation of a nuclear war, an official would come round with a clipboard taking note of all the dead. Everything else I was seeing, the thoughts I was having, were telling me that there was no recognisable after. Civilisation would be gone, and minor officialdom and clipboard factories wouldn’t survive. Nobody would be coming to count the dead. Ever.

Local industry didn’t help with my anxieties either. I lived a 5-minute drive away from Port Sunlight. It’s a model village, mock-tudor housing and green spaces, built for the workers of the soap factory at its heart – Levers. Every morning, at 8:45 am, the factory would announce the start of the working day with a siren, an actual air raid siren that droned out low, wavering, doom-laden tones to both workers ready to start their day and to a terrified teen a full 5-minutes drive away.

“Here is a reminder of what the air attack warning sounds like. This is the sound.” I have the 7” remix of Frankie Goes To Hollywood’s Two Tribes to thank for introducing me to Patrick Allen as one of the last voices I’d ever hear. More than once, at a quarter to nine, I’d be reminded of his voice and begin the 4-minute countdown to see if Patrick had finally had the last word or whether it was just another working day. 

It might seem ridiculous to still be scared of the same sound after so many days. Surely you’d look at the time and realise that it was just the factory? Surely you’d normalise the experience? I think that’s the point, during the Cold War it seemed like the world was lurching out of control like a spinning top at the end of its spin, wobbling its last few moments before the inevitable fall. When every day teetered precariously on the edge of an abyss it was hard to normalise anything.

Nowhere was safe from the influence of world events, not even school. There was a teacher at my school who could speak twenty languages, all the Western European languages, Russian fluently, and he was in the process of learning Chinese. For the younger pupils, he was their language teacher, guiding young minds as they struggled through declensions and word genders, but for the sixth formers doing General Studies, the school gave him a free hand to teach what he wanted. What he wanted was to scare the crap out of them.

The lesson I remember to this day began with him asking us to open our exercise books to a blank, double-page. My old school was, erm, “old school” and we didn’t have fancy modern inventions like photocopied maps. Any maps put into our books were done with a huge, book-sized ink roller and our teacher marched solemnly around, rolling a map of our area onto our open books. We sat silently while the ink dried and he handed out pairs of compasses to each of us from the lost property box. 

The nearest city to us was Liverpool and, with measurements read out from a piece of paper on his desk, the teacher had us draw concentric circles radiating out from the location of Liverpool docks. You can see where this is going, can’t you? The circles, he announced, represented levels of destruction if a one-megaton nuclear weapon detonated over the Liver Building. I didn’t know it then (but I do now) that this was exactly the scenario studied by Civil Defence, under Home Office supervision, in 1959. Operation Torquemada looked at the effect of a bomb dropped on central Liverpool and how emergency services could respond. It’s almost certainly not a breach of the Official Secrets Act to mention that they almost certainly couldn’t.

That was certainly the impression that twenty or so quite pale-faced sixth-formers got that day. You couldn’t help but look for your own house on the map to find out if you were instantly vaporised, burnt to death, or simply crushed by falling buildings. Within 0.3 miles of ground zero there would be 100% fatalities, within 4.37 miles 100% injuries, and within 12.75 miles “extensive injuries”, I lived less than 4 miles from the target so this lesson didn’t reassure me in any way. That sick, exam-day nervy feeling was stronger that night.

That’s what the Cold War was for me, low-level terror accelerating to full-blown horror on days which reminded you of the fragility of your existence. It was knowing the acronyms and initialisms of Armageddon, MAD, MIRV and ICBM. It was having a keen ear for news of unrest, whether that be in the poppy fields of Afghanistan, the shipyards of Gdansk, or at the Olympics.

It was a fear I’ve not experienced since.

---

“Was he on drugs?” asks Claire. 

“Just coffee. Nine cups by the sound of it. Intense little guy.”

“I think he thinks about getting blown up too much. I think he really needs to fall in love. If he doesn’t fall in love soon, he’s really going to lose it.” 

(Coupland 81)

This exchange takes place in Douglas Coupland’s, Generation X, a novel published in 1991 and widely considered to have captured the spirit of the age. Offering a snapshot of the lives of three early millennials—each in their late twenties or early thirties—who have embraced “slacker culture” as an alternative to the hyper-competitive, hyper-consumerism of the early 1990s, Coupland’s novel has come to be regarded as a seminar work of satire and an alarmingly prescient harbinger for the decades of neo-liberalism that were to follow. Our narrator, Andy, and his platonic companions, Dag and Claire, live together on the outskirts of hyper-real L.A, paying the bills with “McJobs” whilst seeking enlightenment through reading, talking and telling elaborate stories, some surreal and absurd, others allegorically autobiographical. Dag—the character described above—is, it transpires, quietly terrified of nuclear Armageddon; a trait that Coupland frequently mines for comic effect. Dag, Andy and Claire are of course living through the later years of the Cold War and its immediate aftermath. The entire novel is set within five years of the first GCSE curriculum which has provided the centrepiece for the Cold Warnings project, and as we’ve seen in countless interviews, the very real threat of the nuclear obliteration was for many no laughing matter. Even so, as this post will explore, Coupland was far from alone in mining the satirical potential of a situation in which a whole generation had been primed since nursery school to anticipate an extinction level event. 

 Another instance of such satire presents itself in a sketch featured in the first ever episode of Not the Nine O’clock News, originally broadcast in 1981 (three years after Protect and Survive and four years before Threads). The sketch, a parody of BBC’s perennial (and, based on this sketch, completely unchanging) programme Question Time, sees a range of politicians mobilize the news that a nuclear warhead has been fired at Britain to clunkily grind their own predictable partisan axes, even though the bomb is on its way and they and their constituents have mere minutes left to live.  

This is a particularly useful example when thinking about how nuclear satire works. Dustin Griffin defies satire as a work “designed to attack vice or folly” using “wit and ridicule” (1). Satire “engages in exaggeration”, he explains, “to persuade an audience that something is reprehensible or ridiculous” (Griffin 1). In the case of this sketch, it is the way that politicians behave on question time, their dogged insistence on falling back on tired party lines, and their refusal to acknowledge the contexts of questions they are being asked, that we are encouraged to find reprehensible and ridiculous, not the prospect of nuclear obliteration. The rapidly approaching warhead is not the target of the satire but the exaggeration used to attack the politicians. The joke is in the way each speaker is able to twist their alarming predicament to fit their familiar and unrelated partisan pose whilst at the same time refusing to actually acknowledge the fatal physical reality of this very alarming predicament. 

There are instances where the nuclear threat is mobilised to similar effect in Generation X. In one of Dag’s dark fantasies of annihilation, he imagines the bomb striking whilst he is in a supermarket and being pelted with the ‘gum and magazines’; the gaudy quotidian relics of a shallow capitalist society being the last thing he sees before ‘The Flash’ (71). In this instance, as is often the case in Coupland’s novel, it is the tackiness of our commercial society and the ways we let it swamp our lives and colonise imagination that is the target of the satire: is this really how we want to die, let alone how we want to live, drowning in tawdry celebrity magazines and packets of Wrigley’s Spearmint? Earlier in the scene Coupland heavily mines this scenario—in which the moment of obliteration occurs mid-way through the weekly shop—for darkly comic value, juxtaposing the apocalyptic with the mundane to tremendous bathetic effect. As the sirens go off, Dag imagines himself standing in a queue behind a “fat man” at the checkout. Speaking in a voice “so normal” the man says to the clerk “I always promised myself that when the moment came, I would behave with some dignity in whatever time remains and so, Miss… let me pay for my purchases” (71). Moments later Dag watches as “the fat man is lifted off his feet, hung in suspended animation and bursts into flames whilst the liquified ceiling lifts and drips upward” (71). 

The flip from comedy to horror is jarring and nihilistic. If everything we have agreed upon as a society—shopping, politeness, dignity—can be liquified in a moment, does any of it really matter? Some satire—perhaps the most famous example being Dr Strangelove—addresses itself to the dangerous and ridiculous fact that it is not the bomb that will destroy human society, but human society itself. The world will end because of geopolitical tensions, because of the hubris of the politicians who have either engineered or failed to mitigate against a situation where, with the push of a button, the world will end. There are occasional moments of this in Generation X, but generally the nuclear satire in Coupland’s novel serve a third function. 

Though Andy and Claire sometimes make fun of Dag for his anxieties over nuclear Armageddon, the novel itself tends to treat them with a sincerity largely absent from the rest of the text’s ironic, post-modern musings. For example, consider the opening of Dag’s apocalyptic fantasy:

That’s when the sirens begin, the worst sound in the world, and the sound you’ve dreaded all your life. It’s here: the soundtrack to hell—wailing, flaring, warbling, and unreal—collapsing and confusing time and space the way an ex-smoker collapses time and space at night when they dream in horror that they find themselves smoking. But here the ex-smoker wakes up to find a lit cigarette in his hand and the horror is complete. (p. 70).

This is as graphic and uncompromising as anything found in the pages of Robert C. O’Brien’s Z for Zacharia (1974) or Robert E. Swindells’ Brother in the Land (1984). For Dag, and perhaps also we might speculate for Coupland, the horror of nuclear war is not funny. We gradually learn that what Dag refers to as his “bomb anxiety” (p. 78) is not a recent development for him, but that he has been plagued by “small whispering nuclear voices […] speaking continually in his subconscious since kindergarten” (p. 79). We also learn that he is not alone in this. 

A famous feature of Generation X is that each chapter includes multiple glossary entries for neologisms that Andy, Dag and Claire have invented to explain the hyper-real world they are trying to escape (some of which successfully entered the lexicon of our world, including the one used in the novel’s title). One such term is “Yuppie Wannabe”, which they define as: 

An X generation subgroup that believes the myth of a yuppie life-style being both satisfying and viable. Tend to be highly in debt, involved in some form of substance abuse, and show a willingness to talk about nuclear Armageddon after three drinks. (p. 104)

When Coupland talks about “bomb anxiety”, his target isn’t Dag but the political authority to which he is subject who have used ideological state apparatus—like kindergarten—to drill this fear into him and the rest of his generation. Again, Coupland is not unique in going after this target. In recent years, Richard Littler’s Scarfolk Council project has done much to draw attention to similar apparatus at work in the UK during the 1970s and 1980s—items like the Protect and Survive pamphlet and accompanying film. Again, it is not the threat of nuclear holocaust that is the target here, but the perversity of all state messaging which is brought grotesquely into focus when utilized to explain to primary school children how they should dispose of the radiated corpses of their own family members should they be fortunate enough to survive “The Flash” by hiding under a table. 

Indeed, just as the extremity of nuclear annihilation can foreground the true nature of the relationship between citizens and the state, Coupland also demonstrates how it can cast a light on human nature itself. In the end, Dag concludes that his fear of death by nuclear obliteration is not dissimilar from his fear of life in general. Satire’s central interests in skewering vice and folly so often lead it to meditations on the human condition. Satire, it is often claimed, holds up a mirror to its readers and nudges them—either gently or violently—towards reform. Nuclear satire is no different and, as Dag ultimately reflects, it isn’t about the bomb, it’s about us: 

‘And that’s that. In the silent rush of hot wind, like the opening of a trillion oven door that you’ve been imagining since you were six, it’s all over: kind of scary, kind of sexy, and tainted with regret. A lot like life, wouldn’t you say?’ (p. 71).

References 

Coupland, Douglas. Generation-X: Tales for an Acceleration Generation. Abacus, 1991.

Griffin, Dustin. Satire: A Critical Reintroduction. University Press of Kentucky, 1995.​

O’Brien, Robert C. Z for Zacharia. Puffin, 1972.

Swindells, Robert E. Brother in the Land. Puffin, 1984.

---