Aloha,
Ty Falk wrote:
> There was actually a little play I saw way back when called something
> like "Love Stories in the Armageddon of a Citrus Fruit" in which
> Ctuluhu was actually a character and had a dialogue with Oppenheimer
> debating who was the bigger monster.
I closed my earlier post referring to *The MAD Nuclear
Physicist Who Lives Down the Road.* I was thinking about
a particular person, and it wasn't Oppenheimer. Although
he was not literally my neighbor, he did reside in the San
Francisco Bay Area and was, for a long time, one of the
directors of the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, where
a great deal of nuclear weapons stuff went on, and a physics
professor at UC Berkeley, home of the other, first, Lawrence
National Lab. He was instrumental in the development and
planning for nuclear weapons from WWII well into the 1980s.
After his retirement from LLL, he moved across
the bay to the Hoover Institute at Stanford. He was a local
celebrity, and often appeared in Bay Area media. Informed
speculation is that he was a model for the memorable character
*Doctor Strangelove* from the movie about global thermonuclear
war of the same name.
I'm talking, of course, about Edward Teller.
In my teen aged eyes, Teller became a living symbol of the
crazy world view that proposed to preserve the world from
nuclear holocaust by doing everything possible to be able to
bring about, on less than an hour's notice, nuclear holocaust.
With me and my hometown at one of the first priority ground
zeros, hostage to Mutually Assured (thermonuclear) Destruction.
Compared to actual people like Teller, the fictional devastation
of Lovecraftian entities offered a kind of bleak, cheerless, ichorous
relief. I mean, I had to think about this stuff and somehow come
to terms with it. Lovecraft's horror stories offered a way to do that.
I've provided some details about my teen aged fandom and thinking
because for the post WWII generation, the prospect of actual nuclear
destruction provided a nudge or a push into occulture. I found stories
about destructive entities from alien dimensions a lot easier to deal
with than visualizing Soviet nuclear warheads exploding overhead.
And I did that plenty of times.
From horror stories to occulture was short step.
Musing Ambivalent About Mushrooms! Rose,
Pitch
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