“Good God! The long-haired boys have lost control,” exclaimed an unnamed army officer at Alamogordo New Mexico, in response to the first atomic bomb blast in July 1945. The atomic bomb, this infernal invention of Man, for it requires the splitting of the atom—the essence of existence, the building block of all that is—the division of creation to let loose the ultimate destruction. But for a time, this Bomb—this raw expression of Man’s hubristic desire to tame Helios—had another name: cosmic bomb. Cosmic—cosmos, the stuff of stars. Mankind waging war with itself and current and future generations by draping the globe with glittering, toxic stardust–“chips of plutonium twinkling in every lung.” And if you believe in such notions of quantum physics and reverse entropy, this cosmic bomb represents an assault on the past as well, each bomb blast a minute, yet acute, blip in spacetime, perceptible to the past if they possessed the instruments to perceive. The cosmic bomb is an orgasmic bomb too—an immense and terrible “little death” that precedes total death, Helios blasting a mushroom-cloud load of irradiated semen onto the face of Mother Nature. So then, these long-haired boys. The hippie as Faustian being, the embodiment of the Apollonian-Dionysian duality, hedonism vs reaction, machine vs spirit, modern vs primordial, not standing athwart the Apocalypse, but its harbinger, its judgment-free safe-space drum circle, levitating the Pentagon not to smash it, but to let it see all the more clearly. Because what is the Apocalypse? It is the disclosure of great knowledge, the revelation of the method, the making manifest all that which was hidden. These are the mantras of alchemy, and the hippies were the low priests of the new state religion—BOMB POWER, the COSMIC OMMMM—foot soldiers of the alchemist-sorcerer-warriors of the Manhattan Project. Let us join hands and pray as the bald mutants beneath the Planet of the Apes prayed:
“Glory be to the Bomb, and to the Holy Fallout.
As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be.
World without end.
Amen.”
— J Everett is the editor and publisher of APOCALYPSE CONFIDENTIAL
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