Bowie: A Biography - JFK247

in a profound and enduring way. Russia grew vast
and wealthy in the postwar years, and by August of
1949, it too was a nuclear superpower. No longer a
necessary ally of the Americans, Russia, under the
paranoid and xenophobic Joseph Stalin,
disengaged. Stalin was no fan of Frank Sinatra,
Mickey Mouse or Coca-Cola, which were
considered corruptive. Victory and quieted munitions
only seemed to illuminate the differences between
America and Russia. The arms race between these
rivals would, for all their cooperative war efforts, now
end in mutually assured destruction if one or both
giants pushed the conflict to the brink. Nearly a
quarter of a million people were killed in the
Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings. The stalemate
between the former allies promised to vaporize
millions more in the same amount of time. The
uncertainty of any future at all coupled with tales of
horror and cruelty brought back by surviving soldiers
elevated pop pleasures to a greater level of
importance than they’d ever been. Cheap, fast
pleasures became, for many, especially the young,
the only pleasures that made sense during the Cold
War years. This was the atmosphere that every child
of David Jones’s age in England and America would
grow up in. Sensory overload seemed newly
practical. For his generation, pop was a powerful
salve. Pop was everything.