Science and technology. The Japanese surrendered one day before Grumpy's ninth birthday. The terminal event was the destruction of Hiroshima by the atomic bomb. The Cold War commenced soon thereafter, when the Soviet Union installed an ‘Iron Curtain', as Winston Churchill called it, from ‘Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic'. The Cold War was dominated by the threat of mutual annihilation by atomic warfare. As he came of age, Grumpy didn't assimilate American optimism about the promise of science to promote the human good. His scepticism was expressed by the Beat Generation of the Fifties, the counter-culture of the Sixties, and in much film, fiction, and popular music. He even wrote a novel, The Teacup War , to express his experience. But his closest affinity was with The Education of Henry Adams (1907) because of its thoughtful exploration of the complexity of the encounter between man and the machine.
Prevailing theories of progress told the story as an epic of moral improvement of the human species that pulled the benefits the industrial economy in its wake. Grumpy located the human basis of progress in polytechnic rationality, whose manipulation of natural processes ever expanded the appetite for acquisition and dominance.