Andrea Dworkin - The Political Memoir of a Feminist Militant

None of us knew life without Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In

K-3 we hid under our school desks, elbows covering our ears.

From grades four or five through graduation, we were lined

up three- or four- or five-thick against wal s without windows,

elbows over our ears. We were supposed to believe that these

poses would save us from the bomb the Soviets were going to

drop on us sometime after the warning bel rang. In the later

grades, our teachers herded us, then stood around and talked.

They didn’t seem to think that they were going to die, let

alone melt, any minute. They seemed more as if they were

going to chat until the bel rang and the next class began. In

the earlier grades the teachers would walk up and down the

aisles and tel us an elbow was outside the boundary of a desk

or we should stop giggling. Any child too big to get under the

desk wholly and ful y might wish the Soviets would nuke us;

after al , who wanted to be in school, in rotten school with

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The Bomb

rot en teachers and rot en classmates? By the time I was being

herded in the seventh or eighth grade, I simply refused to go.

Not one teacher could explain the logic of elbows over ears in

the face of a nuclear onslaught. Not one teacher could explain

why they themselves had not flung their bodies up against a

wall or why their ears were bare naked and their elbows calmly

down by their sides. More to the point as far as I was concerned, not one teacher could explain why, if these were our last few minutes, we should spend them in such an idiotic

way. “I'd rather take a walk,” I would say, “if I'm about to die

now. ” My father was called in, a scene he described to me

shortly before he died at eighty-five: “I asked them what the

hell they expected me to do. ” The real question was, What

was one to do with these grown-ups, these liars, these thieves

of time and life - my teachers, not the Soviets? Did they

expect us to be so dim and dull?

They were helped by the saturation propaganda about both

the Soviets and the bomb. On the Beach was a really scary

novel by Nevil Shute about the last survivors down in

Australia. I remember just computing that it wasn’t going to

be me and maintaining an at itude of anger and disgust at the

adults. There were endless television discussions and debates

about whether or not one should build a bomb shelter and

fil it with canned food and water. The moral question was

whether or not one should let the neighbors in, had they

been obtuse enough not to build a shelter. Everything was

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Heartbreak

calculated to make one afraid enough to conform. I can

remember times wanting my father to build a bomb shelter

for the family. Of course that’s hard to do in the cement of the

city, and by the time we had soil in the suburbs I had decided

it was al a scam. Maybe al the students except me and a few

others rested wearily against wal s and kept quiet, but most of

us knew we were being lied to, being scared on purpose, and

being treated like chumps, just stupid children. Those boys

who didn’t know ended up in Vietnam.

I’d read in newspapers and magazines about the people in

cities like New York who would not take shelter when the

alarms were sounded. Following on the model of the London

blitz, sirens would scream and everyone was expected to find

hiding in an underground shelter. But some people refused,

and they were arrested. I remember writing to Judith Malina

of the Living Theatre when she was in the Women’s House of

Detention in New York City for refusing to take shelter and I

was a junior in high school. The thrilling thing was that she

wrote me back. This letter back from her was absolute proof

that there was a different world and in it were different people

than the ones around me. Her let er was a lot of different

colors, and she drew some of the nouns so that her sentences

were delightful and fil ed with imagination. Since I had already

made myself into a resister, she affirmed for me that resistance

was real outside the bounds of my tiny real world. Her letter

was mailed from a boat. She was crossing the ocean to

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The Bomb

Europe. She wouldn’t stay in the United States, where she

was expected to hide underground from a nuke. She was part

of what she called “the beautiful anarchist nonviolent revolution, ” and I was going to be part of it, too. I'd follow her to the Women’s House of Detention, though my protest was

against the Vietnam War, and then to Europe, because I could

not stay in the United States any more than she could. She

probably didn’t have my relatives, who were so ashamed that

I went to jail; and she probably didn’t have my mother, who

said I needed to be caged up like an animal - bad politics twice

over. I would not meet Judith for another fifteen years, but

she remained an icon to me, the opposite of the loathsome Miss

Fox, and I knew whose side I was on, where my bread was

but ered, and which one I would rather be. I did not care what

it cost: I liked the beautiful anarchist nonviolent revolution,

and so did most of my generation - even if “anarchist” was a

hard word and “nonviolent” was an even harder discipline.

There was another kind of bomb scare. Someone would

phone the school and claim to have hidden a bomb in it. The

students would be evacuated and, when the teachers got tired

of keeping us in lines, left to roam on the grass. There never

was a bomb, and there was no context of terrorism, and the

threats seemed only to come in nice weather - otherwise we

might al have got en cranky. We discussed whether or not the

grass under our feet felt pain, which teachers had infatuations

with each other, how we were going to thrive on poetry and

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Heartbreak

revolution. These were the good bomb scares, after which

we’d be remilitarized into study hal s and classes and time

would pass slowly and then more slowly. There was never anything good about the nuclear-bomb scares, and even the conformists with elbows over ears did not like them. I was appalled that the United States had used nuclear weapons and