Paul K. Saint-Amour
AIR WAR PROPHECY AND INTERWAR MODERNISM Paul K. Saint-Amour The sirens sound. Schoolchildren, factory hands, housewives, office workers, one and all don their gas masks. Whirring planes overhead lay down a blanket of protective smoke. Cellars open to receive their refugees. Red Cross stations to succor the stricken and the wounded are opened at improvised shelters: underground vaults yawn to receive the gold and securities of the banks: masked men in asbestos suits attempt to gather up the fallen incendiary bombs. Presently the anti-aircraft guns sputter. Fear vomits: poison crawls through the pores. Whether the attack is arranged or real, it produces similar psychological effects. Plainly, terrors more devastating and demoralizing than any known in the an- cient jungle or cave have been re-introduced into modern urban existence. Panting, choking, spluttering, cringing, hating, the dweller in Megalopolis dies, by anticipation, a thousand deaths. Fear is thus fixed into routine: the constant anxiety over war produces by itself a collective psychosis comparable to that which active warfare might develop. Waves of fear and hatred rise in the metropolis and spread by means of the newspaper and the newsreel and the radio program to the most distant provinces.1 The above passage, from Lewis Mumford’s The Culture of Cities (1938), describes a sequence of events in what Mumford calls the “war capital” or “war metropolis.” The events constitute an emergency, clearly, but for Mumford they are more importantly a routine: the metropolis, in this ac- count, is a space where the civil defense crisis has become ritualized, quotidien, a general rather than an exceptional case: the city, in other words, COMPARATIVE LITERATURE STUDIES, Vol.
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