"Things have been so scary lately with Russia," states TikTok user @MojoX with dead earnestness in a post from early March, "that I went out and got myself a Gen X bomb shelter."
Cut to a photograph of a school desk — an image that evokes, for generations of Americans through Gen Xers (of which I am one), memories of those farcical drills in which we prepared for inevitable nuclear annihilation at the hands of the Soviets by stuffing ourselves under our desks.
With Russia's invasion of Ukraine into its second month, and as reports emerge that Russia's nuclear forces have been placed on high alert, the culture of the late Cold War has made a swinging comeback. Think of it as Cultural Cold War 2.0, with Russia as stand-in for the former Soviet Union.
