On Modernity

E.L. Doctorow:

"Everything, from the young writers impatient of a long
creative life to the deconstruction of our critics; every
variety of intellectual retreat, of conformism, every small
loss of moral acuity, I see collectively as the secret story
of American life under the bomb. We have had the bomb
on our minds since 1945. It was first weaponry and then
our diplomacy, and now it's our economy. How can we
suppose that something so monstrously powerful would
not, after forty years, compose our identity?"