America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It

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Do you worry? You look like you do. Worrying is the way the responsible citizen of an advanced society demonstrates his virtue: he feels good about feeling bad. But what to worry about? Iranian nukes? Nah, that’s just some racket cooked up by the Christian fundamentalist Bush and his Zionist buddies to give Halliburton a pretext to take over the Persian carpet industry. Worrying about nukes is so eighties. “They make me want to throw up…. They make me feel sick to my stomach,” wrote the British novelist Martin Amis, who couldn’t stop thinking about them during the Thatcher Terror. In the introduction to a collection of short stories, he worried about the Big One and outlined his own plan for coping with a nuclear winter wonderland:

But the Big One never fell. And instead of killing his wife Martin Amis had to make do with divorcing her. Back then it was just crazies like Reagan and Thatcher who had nukes, so you can understand why everyone was terrified. But now Kim Jong-il and the ayatollahs have them, so we’re all sophisticated and relaxed about it, like the French hearing that their president’s acquired a couple more mistresses. Martin Amis hasn’t thrown up a word about the subject in years. To the best of my knowledge, he has no plans to kill the present Mrs. Amis.

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