The impact of masking on the national psyche reminded me of the subtle contribution of the “duck and cover drills” of my youth, drills that sustained and cemented the militaristic ideology of the Cold War. Those futile exercises reinforced what my uncle John F. Kennedy’s Defense Secretary, Robert McNamara, called “National Mass Psychosis.” By suggesting to Americans that full-scale nuclear war was possible, but also survivable, ruinous investments in that project were justified. For the government and mandarins of the Military Industrial Complex, this absurd narrative yielded trillions in
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