"It is only a statement of the power of what comes after": Atomic Nostalgia and the Ends of Postmodernism

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Don't underestimate our capacity for complex longings. The moral question for the United States is whether, during the Cold War, we so accustomed ourselves to threatening nuclear annihilation that it became second nature to us. Early in Don DeLillo's Underworld (1997), Brian Glassic goes in search of the Bobby Thomson home-run baseball that acts as the material trace of the public culture that the Cold War supposedly eroded. He ends up in the home of baseball memorabiliast Marvin Lundy, where their talk quickly turns to the more serious matter of the coming end of the Cold War, because Marvin imagines Brian's desire for the ball as a combination of personal and global anxiety. “You think you're missing something and you don't know what it is,” Marvin tells him: “You have a job and a family and a fully executed will, already, at your age, because the whole point is to die prepared, die legal, with all the papers signed” (170). While Marvin's claim that what motivates nostalgia is a mid-life sense that your life is already effectively over might sound banal, more telling and surprising is the global scale he gives his theorizing. After claiming of Brian that “You see the cold war winding down. This makes it hard for you to breathe,” Marvin goes on to specify why the end of an epoch might be such a problem for Brian: “You need the leaders of both sides to keep the cold war going. It's the one constant thing. It's honest, it's dependable. Because when the tension and rivalry come to an end, that's when your worst nightmares begin. All the power and intimidation of the state will seep out of your personal bloodstream. You will no longer be the main—what do I want to say?” “I'm not sure.” “Point of reference.” (170)