A militarist on a Marxist commune, with a shovel and a civil defense manual
This is Jonathan Hare's account, with its provenance shown. The person or organization named has not yet claimed or corrected it.
Between eighth and tenth grade the family lived in Petaluma. Jonathan Hare mapped the military bases of Northern California, studied prevailing weather, and calculated likely fallout trajectories for a nuclear exchange — concluding that Petaluma sat in a relatively survivable zone.
Then he built an emergency fallout shelter in the yard, using designs from a 1950s civil defense manual, with a shovel, plywood and dirt. It was what he could afford. The targets he had identified were McClellan Air Force Base, Alameda Naval Air Station, and the manufacturing base around Stanford.
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A child raised by pacifists and Marxists concluded independently that the Soviets were the principal threat to global freedom, and argued it with the commune. While the adults sang along to Back in the U.S.S.R., he thought: have any of you been there?
His reading was Sea Power, the US Naval Institute Proceedings, and every page of every edition of Jane's Fighting Ships and Fighting Aircraft. At Berkeley, the epicentre of American counterculture, he carried a leather briefcase rather than a backpack and wore a suit to class.
His own framing: missions move like a sine wave, skipping generations and rising in opposition to what came before. He had sided with his grandfathers. Beneath the military strategy he remained a pacifist — and that contradiction is the thing this architecture is an attempt to resolve.
After a class complained about a surprise quiz, his ninth-grade English teacher set homework: go home, ask your parents for your birth certificate, and read the fine print. The next day he asked where it said life was fair.
Hare never complained about a surprise quiz again. He was always prepared.
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A clothing-discouraged commune, and an education in what people do when nobody makes them
Open →the same periodYoungest member ever, at twelve. The cabin boy.
Open →whose side he had taken without knowing the detailsNuclear physicist, Titan II, ARPA — and a two-hundred-word obituary
Open →This entry is deliberately incomplete. The gaps below are the things only certain people can settle — and settling one is a contribution like any other: recorded, timestamped and attributed to whoever made it.
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