What happened to Bert the Turtle?
New York’s Emergency Management Department caused a stir this week when they released an informational film on what New Yorkers are meant to do in a nuclear attack. It is difficult to imagine that any municipal government film in the last decade has gotten such media coverage. “It’s like they know something we don’t,” commented people on Twitter with a naïvely optimistic view of intergovernmental cooperation.
I am not of the opinion that the City of New York has any advance knowledge of something sinister. The film is probably a delayed reaction to people getting nervous about the — shall we say “international situation?” — of the late winter. I have a much easier time imagining a multimedia person being told to make a PSA in a reactive Monday staff call than I do imagining a meeting with municipal officials in a dark room somewhere under northern Virginia. This was, after all, the sort of thing that was on everyone’s minds around late February and early March, and it stands to reason that Emergency Management heard questions. Google reported that the term “nuclear” spiked tremendously in searches. (There was another small jump this week, owing to NYC’s new film.)
The Newsletter at the end of February alluded to the matter but otherwise concerned an afternoon at Carnegie Hall and the history of a park in Queens. To get any closer to the subject would have been too unpleasant for a Monday afternoon and too anxious for the events of the time. This week, though, with an innocuous event to introduce the matter, I am finally in a position to dust off an old favorite subject of mine — the subject of my college senior thesis — weird old nuclear civil defense films.
The college gave me two terms to write the sixty-page paper, most of which I squandered. In the fall, I went to the library twice and wrote three pages. After a period of recovery, I wrote four pages in a panic at Christmas. It is difficult to say what transpired in the months leading to the March deadline, but there is a picture of me lying on the floor of a computer lab on the afternoon of the due date, my eyes dark and drained of life.
The initial extent of the damage seemed to result from the stress of writing the paper, but these things come back to you in a time of international crisis when you find yourself filling extra vessels with water and considering the merits of cowering deep under Second Avenue versus facing a dignified incineration in Central Park.
When governments got into making civil defense films in the middle of the twentieth century, this was ultimately the choice: face vaporization or spend a long time in a very unpleasant place — a subway tunnel, basement, or a public fallout shelter with government-issued nutrition crackers — until it was “safe” to emerge into whatever world was left behind. The BBC advised its viewers (most of whom did not have a cellar to speak of) to take a door off the hinges, prop it up against the wall, and hide under it, likely for weeks.
Seventy-odd years later, little has changed. The key difference is that the government no longer spends money on nutrition crackers for fallout shelters (though the old signs pointing to the abandoned shelters are still up all over the country), and that somebody at FEMA has figured out that it is unwise to use hair conditioner in a shower after a nuclear strike because it causes radioactive particles to bind to hair. They have updated their guidance accordingly.
What are we to learn from this? The serious people — the people in Washington who work for think tanks and have charge accounts with their dry cleaner — will carry on about world peace and non-proliferation, which is all very nice. I am decidedly less ambitious and offer no such conclusion. Of course, I want to live in an era in which governments do not need to produce films about what to do in a nuclear attack. People in Hell want ice water. In any event, my point is singular: If my tax dollars are to be used for such a film, they ought to have some fun with it.
The City’s recent film is undeniably a bummer. With a run time of fewer than two minutes, the script is unimaginative, the soundtrack is generic, there is little character development to speak of, and the green-screen backgrounds of an apocalyptic streetscape are frankly unconvincing. All told, it is a tragic regression in civil defense filmmaking.
If we are to address the issue of nuclear annihilation for the American public, we ought to do so cheerfully. We are not the UK, with their spooky and matter-of-fact Protect and Survive series. We are a nation of optimists — of Sousa and of regular people who see the estate tax as a threat. Our planning for a fiery holocaust must reflect this.
For decades, this was a national specialty. Take, for example, Bert the Turtle. Bert, who now enjoys national fame, was a creation of New York’s school system. “Sundays, holidays, vacation time — we must be ready all the time to do the right thing if the atomic bomb explodes!” exclaimed the narrator to schoolchildren over footage of a family cowering under a picnic blanket. A cartoon turtle — complete with a pleasant theme song — took off the edge as he hid in his shell from a dynamite-bearing monkey.
Cities everywhere got in on the action. A few miles north of town, the Motorola Television Hour ran a full-hour dramatization of survival under atomic attack in Westchester. In Detroit, the Civil Defense Administration and WJR ran their own fifteen-minute program, “No Second Chance,” on the role of radio should the fateful day ever arrive. In Austin, Texas, the local CBS affiliate produced a program in which Austin came under attack, highlighting the terrible fate of those who dared disobey the good and righteous civil defense authorities. CBS also aired “A Day Called ‘X’,” a celebration of the good people of Portland, Oregon, their financial investments in civil defense, and their ability (which they actually tested) to evacuate the city in well under an hour.
This being mid-century America, private industry had their own share of the fun. The National Concrete Masonry Association was happy to provide their advice in “Walt Builds a Family Fallout Shelter: A How-To-Do-It Project." “When those grandchildren come, it’s a great place to put them!” declares Walt of the reinforced cinderblock room in his basement. (Admittedly, the excitement wears off after twenty minutes of detailed instructions, despite the best efforts of the cheerful string music.) “Do you think bombs are going to stop us?” asked Joe and Slim, fictional big rig drivers in a production of the nation’s trucking industry. Even the manufacturers of microfilm made their own feature, selling to businesses.
The world of early civil defense films gave the American public the spectacle and excitement that they had every right to expect. Even the dreariest of them gave way to something interesting once the man in a suit in a civil defense office got out of the way. This was for the best. If we are all to be vaporized or doomed to wander an unrecognizable, irradiated world, is it so much to ask that we should enjoy the films preparing us for it?
In the early 1950s, New York held a series of annual air raid drills. Taxis pulled to the curb. Times Square went silent. A few protesters drew the attention of the police at City Hall, but most New Yorkers went obediently indoors to practice cowering in their brittle dwellings, offices, subways, and department stores.
A few years earlier, E. B. White had written that “The city, for the first time in its long history, is destructible. A single flight of planes no bigger than a wedge of geese can quickly end the island fantasy, burn the towers, crumble the bridges, turn the underground passages into lethal chambers, cremate the millions.”
How fortunate that he never found his way into film!
During the 1952 drill, the Times reported that a group of 40,000 civil defense volunteers “[shrugged] off the lethargy and apathy that had characterized previous drills” as they carried out their duties.” That year, Canada had dispatched their Minister of Health to bear witness to the affair. It was, he told the papers in what they took as a compliment, “really a tremendous show,” which is — if we cannot be saved from this age of terrible anxiety — the next best thing.
Distractions
Things I have been reading, watching, and listening to this week.
My affection for New York’s ferry system is already documented in the Newsletter, and anyone who knows me well knows that I love a good, old-fashioned audit. What could be finer, then, than an audit of the city’s ferry operation? Well, a lot of things, really. This particular audit, which was recently released by the City’s Comptroller has been described by the media as “blistering,” and reports on the matter have included allegations of “book cooking,” “huge losses,” or “underreporting,” depending on the outlet. The report made such a splash that the Mayor held a rare press conference to announce a fare hike (news that is usually not celebrated) within days of its release.
This was, for the fiscal watchdogs of New York, very concerning news. Fortunately, I am not a fiscal watchdog, but I do ride the ferry to work most days. For just $2.75, I enjoy what is perhaps the lordliest commute in all the world: a morning boat ride (from a dock five minutes from my living room) under the Brooklyn Bridge and into Lower Manhattan. On the way home, there is bar service. This would be wonderful if the journey was any longer than nine minutes.
The most spectacular figure from the report was that the average cost per ferry rider last year was $15.63, meaning that each time I paid my $2.75, Father Knickerbocker kicked in $12.88 from the City’s coffers. This is horrible news for joyless fun killers. For my part, I was thrilled to learn that I get perhaps the best value for my money of any commuter in America. Long live the ferry!
I salute the methodology and commitment of this, “the most comprehensive bagel survey of New York City ever attempted.” From its ten bagel axioms (#2: “Toasting raises the floor of a bagel but lowers the ceiling.”) to its rankings of 202 bagel shops, it is excellent. Most important of all, it agrees with my assessments of rival neighborhood bagel shops, much to the dismay of my roommates.
In the end, it tells us something of which we ultimately need no reminder: I have impeccable taste.