Personal & Human Rights & Strategizing & WAAGNFNP Posted by The Constructivist, 03 Apr 2007 05:00 am

With Onechan and Imoto at the Nagasaki Hypocenter; or, A Modest Proposal

Imotttoooooo--

This is a shot I took last month of my older and younger daughters outside the Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum. I blog about them here and there every so often. This is one of those times.

Imoto’s stroller is almost exactly at the hypocenter — what Americans are more accustomed to calling Ground Zero. With my caption, I’m trying to capture something of the effect that the museum’s opening exhibit had on me. It was a small, dimly-lighted room filled with photos of everyday life in Nagasaki the morning before the blast and items large and small that testify to its force, including beams from a school water tower, remains from a church, and a clock stopped at 11:02 am, all staying still to the beat of an ominously ticking clock.

It wasn’t only that this simple exhibit made me replay the all-too-typical “imagine you and everyone you love disappearing in an instant” nuclear disaster fantasy scenario anyone who, like me, grew up near a U.S. military base during the Cold War has probably run through their heads a million times by now: it wasn’t quite the imaginative empathy of identifying with the victims or putting myself and my family in their place. It wasn’t only that standing at the second place in human history where this fantasy became reality confronted me with its limits: it wasn’t quite the ethical recognition of the impassable gulf between witnesses-thrice-removed and victims. And it wasn’t only that I was nevertheless forced to reflect on my tangled ties to Nagasaki, as an American citizen married to a Japanese citizen whose two daughters are dual citizens (until they turn 21, under current laws, at least).

The something more has to do with the origins of the We Are All Giant Nuclear Fireball Now Party. So please forgive a brief blog-historical digression. Back on 4 October 2006, in a post on the ethical and legal and emotional complexities of living wills, then-not-yet-Party Chairman-For-Life Michael Berube wrote the fateful words, “So it occurs to me that one of the more pleasant aspects of a giant nuclear fireball that consumes all life on earth is that it would render all these difficult decisions moot. I have therefore decided to abandon my commitments to procedural liberalism and political left-progressivism, and to begin working for the We Are All Giant Nuclear Fireball Now party. What’s in it for me, you ask? Peace of mind, mainly. ” The response in the comments (see especially #48) led to the Party’s first recruiting drive a few days later, and the rest is, as they say, history.

So what does this have to do with the something more I was trying to get at in my photo’s caption? Let’s just say that the part about rendering difficult decisions moot — death as a solution to life’s problems; nuclear extinction as a solution to the problem of humanity — really resonated with me as onechan asked me question after question inside the museum before we made it outside to the hypocenter. Because there’s nothing like a three-year-old who’s just fallen in love with “why?” to make you doubt every mental and emotional reflex you tend to rely on in everyday life.

Onechan [loudly, in English, more puzzled than horrified at the looping video of full body burns of survivors of the initial blast]: Daddy, what’s that?

Constructivist [much quieter, in English, more embarrassed at being the only visitors speaking — and loudly, in English (did I mention that already?) — than hesitant to engage the delicate sensibilities of a young ‘un, but wondering where the hell tsuma and the sleeping imoto had taken off to]: Those are pictures of people who were hurt by a big bomb. Remember the dark room we came from? [Onechan nods.] Well, the same bomb that destroyed those buildings hurt those people. They got burned very badly.

Onechan [still loudly, still in English]: Why?

Constructivist [short pause to consider the pros and cons of several possible ways of answering this question, then, even quieter]: No good reason, honey.

Onechan: But why?

Constructivist [remembering back to his Representing Japan in American Culture course the previous fall in which one of his best students, who had studied for several years in the United States, told the class her feelings at the jingoistic way in which Hiroshima and Nagasaki had been taught in her American classes and her outrage that people in the U.S. would even debate the pros and cons of the atomic bombings; wondering how to convey even a hint of this to a three-year-old; and deciding to dodge through literality]: The bomb made a big explosion. It was atsui [hot]. That’s why the people got burned.

After some reminders about why we warn her when something is atsui and comparisons with the kinds of explosions she’s seen in kids’ anime like Pretty Cure here in Japan, I tried to shuffle her away from the looping video. Which of course led to more questions. I’ll spare you the blow-by-blow account — she focused particularly on the to-scale-model of the bomb itself, the torn-up and bloody clothes on display, the photographs of improvised treatment centers and of the children treated in them, and especially the art made by survivors — but suffice to say that the forty-five minutes inside the museum were tougher than my Master’s orals and Ph.D. dissertation defense and highest-tension job interviews combined. Which is to say I don’t think I handled the challenge of going beyond the liberal guilt/conservative paranoia dialectic in American political culture particularly well. Had I the authority, I would require such an experience of everyone in the Department of Defense, every candidate for every national office in the U.S., everyone in ROTC and military academies, and everyone who teaches them … for a start.

But since I don’t, the most I can do here is a mash-up of Jonathan Swift and Adam Smith that may contribute to the drafting of a WAAGNFN Party Platform. Fans of The Wealth of Nations will no doubt already have annotated the section entitled “Meanwhile the Old World Has Been Transformed by the Emergence of the New” until the text itself is barely legible, but for those who haven’t, I’ll point out that in the course of criticizing England’s imperialist system (for its mercantilism, of course), Smith pointed out that the Europeans’ “superiority of force” since 1492/1498 enabled them to “commit with impunity every sort of injustice in those remote countries” they had colonized and looked forward to a day when “the inhabitants of all the different quarters of the world may arrive at that equality of courage and force which, by inspiring mutual fear, can alone overawe the injustice of independent nations into some sort of respect for the rights of one another.” It sure sounds to me like Smith is both anticipating the Cold War’s Mutually Assured Destruction doctrine and endorsing free trade (which in his view leads inevitably to the “mutual communication of knowledge and of all sorts of improvements”) as the best way to reach it. Which, when you add some Swift to the mix, starts to sound like “the royal road to world peace is a balance of terror” or “no terror, no justice, no peace.” Or better, in the style of a Party platform plank draft:

A Nuke in Every Pot and a Silo in Every Garage. To peel away the Bush base from the Republican Party and bring disgruntled conservative libertarians into our Big Tent of the Giant Nuclear Fireball, the WAAGNFNP needs, on the one hand, to show the Second-Amendment-Lovers and End-Times-Awaiters how the Right to Bear Arms, properly interpreted, can lead to the fulfillment of the Book of Revelations, and, on the other, demonstrate to the Extremism-in-Defense-of-Corporate-Liberty-Is-No-Crime crowd that the free market is the best solution to the problem of nuclear proliferation. Auctioning off the U.S.’s aging nuclear arsenal to the highest bidders would both reduce the U.S.’s current-accounts-deficit and set a better example for the rest of the world than appointing Jonathan Schell Non-Proliferation Czar or threatening to invade any nation-state that looks like it might — some day, somehow — manufacture working nuclear weapons whose fallout would not do more damage to its own citizens and ecosystems than those of its enemies. This will appeal to both the free-trading, budget-balancing and the fair-trading, justice-seeking wings of the Democratic Party (not to mention the “We Are All Hezbollah Now” leftists), as well as independents looking for practical solutions to real problems but disgusted at what passes for centrism in the U.S. today. Thus the WAAGNFNP positions itself where it should be — to the right of the Republican Party, to the left of the Democratic Party, and to the middle of the centrists — on this, the most important issue of our times.

Ah, but Party strategizing is so dry and wonky. Let me end instead with the (barely changed) words of the advertising geniuses who have brought us Chevron’s latest contribution to the energy security debate:

True global nuclear security will be a result of cooperation and engagement, not isolationism. When investment and expertise are allowed to flow freely across borders, the engine of innovation is ignited, prosperty is fueled, and the destructive energy available to everyone increases.

Succeeding in securing nuclear weapons for everyone doesn’t have to come at the expense of anyone. Once we all start thinking differently about the Giant Nuclear Fireball, then we can truly make this promise a reality.

Trackbacks

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Responses to “With Onechan and Imoto at the Nagasaki Hypocenter; or, A Modest Proposal”

  1. on 03 Apr 2007 at 8:41 am 1. spyder said …

    aaahh Total Nuclear Proliferation… i like that. Reminds me of a John Perry Barlow libretto that could be an anthem of this section of the GNF platform.

    Picture a bright blue ball, just spinning, spinnin free,
    Dizzy with eternity.
    Paint it with a skin of sky,
    Brush in some clouds and sea,
    Call it home for you and me.
    A peaceful place or so it looks from space,
    A closer look reveals the human race.
    Full of hope, full of grace
    Is the human face,
    But afraid we may lay our home to waste.

    There’s a fear down here we can’t forget.
    Hasn’t got a name just yet.
    Always awake, always around,
    Singing ashes, ashes, all fall down.
    Ashes, ashes, all fall down.

    Now watch as the ball revolves
    And the nighttime falls.
    Again the hunt begins,
    Again the bloodwind calls.
    By and by, the morning sun will rise,
    But the darkness never goes
    From some men’s eyes.
    It strolls the sidewalks and it rolls the streets,
    Staking turf, dividing up meat.
    Nightmare spook, piece of heat,
    It’s you and me.
    You and me.

    Click flash blade in ghetto night,
    Rudies looking for a fight.
    Rat cat alley, roll them bones.
    Need that cash to feed that jones.
    And the politicians throwin’ stones,
    Singing ashes, ashes, all fall down.
    Ashes, ashes, all fall down.

    Commissars and pin-stripe bosses
    Roll the dice.
    Any way they fall,
    Guess who gets to pay the price.
    Money green or proletarian gray,
    Selling guns ’stead of food today.

    So the kids they dance
    And shake their bones,
    And the politicians throwin’ stones,
    Singing ashes, ashes, all fall down.
    Ashes, ashes, all fall down.

    Heartless powers try to tell us
    What to think.
    If the spirit’s sleeping,
    Then the flesh is ink
    History’s page will thus be carved in stone.
    And we are here, and we are on our own
    On our own.
    On our own.
    On our own.

    If the game is lost,
    Then we’re all the same.
    No one left to place or take the blame.
    We can leave this place an empty stone
    that shinin’ ball we used to call our home.

    So the kids they dance
    And shake their bones,
    And the politicians throwin’ stones,
    Singing ashes, ashes, all fall down.
    Ashes, ashes, all fall down.

    Shipping powders back and forth
    Singing black goes south and white comes north.
    In a whole world full of petty wars
    Singing I got mine and you got yours.
    And the current fashion sets the pace,
    Lose your step, fall out of grace.
    And the radical, he rant and rage,
    Singing someone’s got to turn (eat?) the page.
    And the rich man in his summer home,
    Singing just leave well enough alone.
    But his pants are down, his cover’s blown…

    And the politicians throwin’ stones,
    So the kids they dance
    And shake their bones,
    And it’s all too clear we’re on our own.
    Singing ashes, ashes, all fall down.
    Ashes, ashes, all fall down.

    Picture a bright blue ball,
    Just spinnin’, spinnin, free.
    Dizzy with the possibilities.
    Ashes, ashes, all fall down.
    Ashes, ashes, all fall down.
    Ashes, ashes, all fall down.
    Ashes, ashes, all fall down.
    Ashes, ashes, all fall down.

    {if interested i can ask John if we can use it for this important work}

  2. on 03 Apr 2007 at 8:57 am 2. Dr. Free-Ride said …

    During the summer of 1980, I regularly dreamed of nuclear bombs dropping (and of trying to swim away from them in time). My kids, so far, have no awareness of the possibility of nuclear annihilation, but they are remarkably aware of “grown ups” in the government lying. My own experience is that parenthood can render one simultaneously overwhelmed by the enormity of how very badly screwed up a lot of stuff is and convinced of the urgency to do SOMETHING to move things in the right direction.

    Since I don’t yet have a good grasp of what that SOMETHING is, I don’t get to write planks for the party platform.

  3. on 03 Apr 2007 at 8:57 am 3. christian h. said …

    TC, aren’t kids great? Since we don’t have court jesters anymore who are allowed to ask why? without being looked at weirdly, we need children to do it. And I hope you get better soon!

  4. on 03 Apr 2007 at 9:39 am 4. Oaktown Girl said …

    (Quickie note while the boss isn’t looking…)

    Since I don’t yet have a good grasp of what that SOMETHING is, I don’t get to write planks for the party platform.

    Maybe, but you DO get to write proposals for planks. Granted, if I don’t LIKE your proposal, then it gets added to the list of charges against you in the Inevitable Show Trial of Dr. Free Ride (ISTODFR), but please don’t worry about that or anything. So, you know, go ahead and proposal away!

    Oaktown Girl
    Minister of Justice
    WAAGNFNP

  5. on 03 Apr 2007 at 12:34 pm 5. The Constructivist said …

    Feeling better now, thanks, folks. Before I couldn’t sleep because of the pain; now the hot bath I took got rid of the pain but woke me up more. Can’t win for losing.

    If Roxanne is lurking, maybe she can tune her digital jukebox to the JPB (he of the Electronic Freedom Foundation, right?) song…. And Doc FR, the MOJ has ever-so-sweetly invited you to a catch-22–as fun an experience as that Andrew Sullivan link?

    BTW, there’s a map of Japan we can look at while taking a bath, and onechan knows how to find Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and Tokyo (in hiragana, natch) and can be counted on to ask me about the Bomb every other night. Explaining the difference between atomic bombing and firebombing to a 3-year-old is great fun. Especially as she had already become aware of bombing from our earlier visits to Nagoya and Sendai castles (both of which were bombed during WW II).

    Overall, though, I’m struck by how less scared she was during the museum experience than, say, during a typical Pretty Cure episode. (And btw, although the franchise is cute and all, each series ends up with the bad guys destroying the earth before being defeated by the girls. I think you could argue that a lot of kids’ anime [the Dragonball franchise comes to mind] aims to preemptively raise and dispel fears of the Bomb, as kids regularly watch worlds being destroyed and then magically restored with the defeat of the destroyers well before they take their first elementary school field trip to Hiroshima or Nagasaki or have their first hibakusha visit their class.) Onechan was most disturbed by the entry exhibit and the art–asking me, “what are they doing?” when it was human figures depicted or “what is that?” when not–but besides asking me to confirm that most burns are not nearly as bad as the ones she saw in the video, she either didn’t have or isn’t sharing much of a dramatic emotional impact from the museum experience.

    Perhaps Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah owes something to that 3-year-old perspective….

  6. on 03 Apr 2007 at 1:07 pm 6. James Killus said …

    To be read (if at all possible) over “Foreign Accents” by Robert Wyatt, playing in the background.

    http://www.strongcomet.com/wyatt/lyrics/lyrics4.htm#Foreign%20Accents

    It is dreadfully easy for those who insist that life is filled with “difficult moral decisions” to then turn around and behave as if those decisions are in fact easy, with a clear moral equation that may be balanced, then solved. (Please note that I am in no way condemning the person who I’m quoting here as one who succumbs to this; I point no fingers, just gesticulate wildly).

    War is, if not actually hell, then certainly an abandonment of civilized behavior; it brings with it the certainty of atrocity, of the death of innocents and innocence, of the transformation of good men into evil, and the elevation of vengeance into conventional wisdom. That is its nature. There are those who believe that war conveys some higher purpose, and there are those who believe that they may profit from it in some fashion. This last group, at least, may be correct.

    Lastly there are those who go to war in hopes of stopping the ascendance of those who glory in it or profit from it, and I can find no fault with that principle; I only hope that those citizens achieve their goals and do not lose sight of them in the heat of it.

    The two nuclear attrocities that came at the end of one war can obscure the other attrocities that came at other times, and which, in total, killed far more people. I worry sometimes that the real difference is that the nature of nuclear attack is such that it makes ourselves as vulnerable as the rest of the world was already vulnerable; that our own cities were suddenly seen as easily destroyed as Dresden, say, or Tokyo, or Berlin.

    I once had an on-line exchange with a young Japanese student, who railed against the perfidity of the American nuclear attacks. Others attacked him for hypocrasy, demanding that his country admit its own attrocities (we all know at least a partial list) before any American should raise even an eybrow of concern. I suggested that, in fact, the nuclear attacks were our admission of respect for the Japanese warrior spirit. They had said that they would fight to the death and we believed them (as indeed, we had some evidence in support of that conjecture). So we called upon the fury of the death throes of ancient stars and fashioned a weapon such as had perhaps never before existed in the history of the universe. We attacked them with the fire of God.

    He didn’t buy it, of course. Grudges are far too easy to nurse, and I have an aunt who to this day refuses to buy Japanese automobiles, because she “Remembers Pearl Harbor.” Contrariwise, I know a woman whose first memories are of being in a “Japanese relocation center” in California, while her father, an American naval officer who had been on a ship stationed at Pearl harbor, tried desperately to get his wife and child released to relatives in Georgia. I’m not sure, is that irony, or something much darker, and more confusing?

    But the men who made the decision to use The Bombs were first and foremost charged with protecting American lives, and I have relatives who were scheduled to be in the first assault wave on Japan. I’ve long heard arguments that it would never have come to that, and they all have the ring of special pleading to my ears. And I think that arguments over actions taken when the nation was in a declared war (and we have not been in such a war since) and the total world stockpile of fission bombs was two, is a shadow show distraction from the situation where the number of nuclear bombs numbers in the tens of thousands, each with 20-50 times the power of those first two.

    Would saying that the original events were wrong, somehow make something else right? Would the men now in possession of the Bombs become of greater morality? Or are these just more anti-drug ads that remind the addicts of their desires? What exactly is the whiff of a nuclear fireball to someone who thirsts for a biblical appocalypse?

  7. on 03 Apr 2007 at 1:18 pm 7. Oaktown Girl said …

    (Lunch break at The Office)

    Thanks for sharing this experience with us, TC. Not everyone is going to get to go to Japan to see this for themselves.

    …remembering back to his Representing Japan in American Culture course the previous fall in which one of his best students, who had studied for several years in the United States, told the class her feelings at the jingoistic way in which Hiroshima and Nagasaki had been taught in her American classes and her outrage that people in the U.S. would even debate the pros and cons of the atomic bombings;

    TC, it’s amazing your student was able to contain herself and not run out of the classroom screaming and pulling the hair from her head.

    Just last week I was outraged to hear a radio show host espousing the idea that the U.S. had no choice but to bomb Japan in WWII. Granted, it was Ed Schultz, and he’s still very new in his recovery from a lifetime in Wingnutistan (and therefore has a long way to go in his education), but still.

    And Dr. Free Ride is quite correct. I (and most other young folks) had major fears around world nuclear destruction growing up. I was even active in “Nuclear Free” organizing in high school. That fear seems not to exist anymore. Maybe it’s because our great enemy, the Soviet Union, is gone, so that particular fear propaganda machine is not churning daily. It’s been replaced by the “world jihad” fear propaganda machine, of course. But I guess most folks just believe they (”Islamofacists”) can’t nuke us out of existence, so no worries there. Plus, we CAN nuke THEM with no harm to ourselves. So everything’s good, and the kids can sleep well at night.

  8. on 03 Apr 2007 at 1:35 pm 8. Oaktown Girl said …

    Clarification to my comment:

    My rant is not about whether we should or should not have bombed Japan. My rant refers to the “We had no choice” argument. We clearly did have a choice. To say we did not, I believe, is a huge moral cop-out.

  9. on 03 Apr 2007 at 2:42 pm 9. The Constructivist said …

    On the post facto armchair historical quarterbacking, I’m a newcomer to the debates among historians, having come to all this more through an unsystematic lifelong engagement with Japanese pop culture than any kind of systematic scholarly study. But for what it’s worth I rely on John Dower’s and Christina Jarvis’s analyses of U.S. war propaganda (in War Without Mercy and Japan in War and Peace, and The Male Body at War, respectively) and tend to focus more on the way the decision is remembered and debated than whether it was right or wrong at the time (under the influence of works like Hiroshima in History and Memory, Perilous Memories: The Asia/Pacific Wars, and Cultural Differences, Media Memories in particular). So I’m skeptical of the invasion casualty projections that grow over time, the bomb/invade dichotomy (as if there were no other choices), the propaganda/intelligence interweavings (at the time and after), and other elements you can find in the Paul Fussell “Thank God for the Bomb” mode of historicizing the decision.

    If I could clarify and expand the conclusion to the serious part of the post, I’d argue that everyone who could conceivably play a role in future nuclear deployments by the U.S. should be required to visit the Hiroshima and Nagasaki museums and take a historical tour of Okinawa accompanied by a Japanese 3-year-old (preferably a family member and/or an English speaker, but ok if not) precisely because of its disorientations and incalculable effects. And really that any such people in the entire “nuclear club” should have to do the same.

    I’m curious what people think of the turn to satire/parody afterwards–does it work for you? was it funny? thought-provoking? both? something else?

  10. on 03 Apr 2007 at 2:58 pm 10. Seattle said …

    You took a 3 year old to the Nagasaki Museum?
    Let me get this straight-you took a 3 year old to the Nagasaki Museum? Blink, blink. Good God.

  11. on 03 Apr 2007 at 4:06 pm 11. James Killus said …

    I believe that Buffy the Vampire Slayer said it best:

    “There are always choices. They may not be good choices; but there are always choices.”

    What I was trying to say is that difficult choices remain difficult, and indeed, should really be seen as growing more difficult over time, but instead the opposite tends to happen. What was uncertain knowledge becomes certain ignorance; people believe that they know better now, because we know how it all turned out, and that gives a false sense of being able to advance theories that there were other, better choices available, when, in fact, we probably know less about the alternatives now than was known at the time, because the time span is greater, and we somehow hope to solve today’s problems by changing our opinions of past decisions.

    “Forgiveness is the release of all hope for a better past.” - Alexa Young

    Constructivist, I think that satire/parody aren’t sharp enough tools for the task at hand. Truly, the only invention of man that is up to the task is Dada.

    “So he wrote his name in the snow with his own urine and said, ‘I think I’ll call it The Alps.’” — Tristan Tzara

  12. on 03 Apr 2007 at 4:47 pm 12. Amanda French said …

    Wonderful post, wonderful discussion. And good for you for taking a three-year-old to the Nagasaki museum.

    It’s so nice to hear more about the diverse lives of Berube commenters. Nice to meetcha!

  13. on 03 Apr 2007 at 5:27 pm 13. spyder said …

    Well we don’t have to take kids to Japan to get the nefarious impressions. I can think of a more than a few reservations in the US upon which (or very very near which) the uranium that made those bombs (and all the others) was mined; leaving behind massive and tragic tailings, leech fields, and residues. Amazing how many tribes had, are, having to pay the price for our nuclear arsenal and energy generation. The rest of the world thought that was such a good idea that similar mining operations are located in tribal lands all over the damn place. And the bombs were just the baby steps, what with the several thousand tons of DU we have intentionally spread across Kosovo, Iraq, Afghanistan, Gaza (we have certainly sold a great amount of DU weapons to Israel), Lebanon, and and and …..

    I do see something that James is saying that rings all too true for me. One of the real problems with Nagasaki and Hiroshima, and with Chernobyl (and those other sites that no one wants to admit that anything bad happened), is that we can go visit them, walk around them, meet people that survived them. That certitude of ignorance, given the tacit US population acceptance that having a large stockpile of nukes and using them, rests on the folly of thinking that one knows that such events are not only survivable, but endurable.

    So what if a bunch of citizens in the US were toxified by the early years of atmospheric testing? The rest of us made it, so it can’t be all that bad?

  14. on 03 Apr 2007 at 5:48 pm 14. The Constructivist said …

    Seattle, I’ve never claimed to be a candidate for father of the year. Well, once. I don’t know, leaving tsuma to wander through a city she didn’t know alone with a three-year-old and a 10-month-old just so I could salve my liberal guilt seemed kinda assholish at the time. And still does. I’m not exaggerating when I say that onechan shows more fear during the scene in the third clip here where the cat is about to bite the girl trying to pet it than at any moment in or after the museum.

    James and spyder, I see what you mean–it’s the problem with all memorials, isn’t it? There have certainly been the kinds of debates over the Nagasaki and Hiroshima museums, inside and outside Japan, as over the various Holocaust and fewer slavery museums around the world. (It’s all too easy for those who wish to remain ignorant of history in Japan to construct their identity as a “victim nation,” for instance, and block out anything that doesn’t fit.) James, if you check out that liberal guilt/conservative paranoia post I link to here, you’ll certainly find more to engage/criticize, as spyder already has.

    But as my post was more about the difficulty of getting history right than an attempt to get it right, I’m more interested in your reaction to the satirical closing. I agree that it isn’t sharp enough: more suggestions for rewrites would be much appreciated. You’ll see that I try to switch to the present and future in order to attempt to take on the very complacency and ignorant certitude you both rightly criticize. Perhaps if I paint scenes of the bin Laden family competing with Soros and Gates on the first bid? Or raise the prospect of a future where multinational corporations own the majority of the world’s nukes? Make a more explicit and extended Snow Crash allusion? What?

  15. on 03 Apr 2007 at 6:14 pm 15. christian h. said …

    I point out that selling off the US arsenal will also undercut the lucrative black market in nuclear technology, thereby eliminating the criminal element from the equation and increasing transparency.

    Of course, one can never go wrong with Snow Crash allusions. Or quotes - maybe the “right to own nukes” is fucking unalienable (that expression, and its context early on in the book, seem to me to encapsulate the absurdity of the liberal (in the classical sense) notion of “rights” perfectly.)

  16. on 03 Apr 2007 at 6:52 pm 16. The Constructivist said …

    Yeah, the whole first chapter is one of the best parodies of “comparative advantage” economic orthodoxy I’ve ever read. First time I taught it at the school I’m at now, I didn’t buy a smart senior’s argument that the novel as a whole was anti-Japanese, but after reading Cryptonomicon I can see better where she was coming from. To go back to our exchanges on Heraclitus’s post, christian, this is part of why I would rather see Almanac of the Dead than Snow Crash be the bible of net libertarians.

  17. on 03 Apr 2007 at 11:49 pm 17. JP Stormcrow said …

    Very thought-provoking post TC. I have a more detailed response to this, which this comment box (and my tiredness) is too small to contain. It also includes expansion into some family history - elaborating on my comment to TC’s Liberal Guilt and Conservative Paranoia post over at Mostly Harmless - starting with my father fresh from a Holiday in Hell on Okinawa, waiting to see if he would be bobbing towards the coast of Japan in his amphibious tank - as well as touching upon some other groups and individuals we encounter along the way. I will put it up as a post somewhere, when I get the time.

    My thoughts on this are somewhat in line with what James Killus says above. I feel it very important to look at the tangled skein of truth, lies, chance, malice, privilege, etc., etc. that lead to the all parties involved being confronted with such a momentous decision (and it truly was a “world” decision - whether you were directly in on it, or directly affected by it, or not.) And though I am not saying that once you are in a war “all bets are off”, it is clear to me that most of the threads lead back to whatever led to the initial breach. There is a reason that Shakespeare’s phrase Cry ‘Havoc,’ and let slip the dogs of war is such trenchant one. They are truly the “dogs of war”, deep, dark aspects of passion, fear, doubt and uncertainty which haunt humanity. The words surrounding the quote amplify the image:

    A curse shall light upon the limbs of men;
    Domestic fury and fierce civil strife
    Shall cumber all the parts of Italy;
    Blood and destruction shall be so in use
    And dreadful objects so familiar
    That mothers shall but smile when they behold
    Their infants quarter’d with the hands of war;
    All pity choked with custom of fell deeds:
    And Caesar’s spirit, ranging for revenge,
    With Ate by his side come hot from hell,
    Shall in these confines with a monarch’s voice
    Cry ‘Havoc,’ and let slip the dogs of war;
    That this foul deed shall smell above the earth
    With carrion men, groaning for burial.

    And yes, it certainly impacts your view if you think you risk your infants being quarter’d with the hands of war or not. And which does probably inform some of the “special” view of atomic weapons. (And if you feel immune AND lack any capacity for emptahy with humanity at large, you can advocate, like the repugnant Michael Ledeen, Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business, without understanding what kind of specific hell you are unleashing on that specific piece of earth and what even more widespread hell you are flirting with in the process.)

    Anyway, more to follow - soon I hope. (And I do take TC’s point that the mythology and post hoc analysis of the decision as viewed in the US was deeply flawed and were not more informed by any careful analysis of the facts, but rather the early 1960s schoolyard “truths” that the US was always the good guys and never lost or “started” a war, which I took on faith as a youngster. [At some point this will be explored in a post: “Watching the 1968 Democratic Convention on TV as Young Teen: Where are the Adults? and Gosh, Maybe the Body Counts aren’t the Whole Story in Vietnam.])

  18. on 04 Apr 2007 at 6:09 am 18. JP Stormcrow said …

    Just to be clear, I don’t think that the fact that someone was slated to be part of the potential invasion force, (or that they lived, or live, in a particular country, Japan or the US in particular), necessarily gives them any kind of privileged or disadvantaged position in regards to the discussion. What it can do is to provide them an interesting perspective which helps illuminate the personal and practical consequences.

  19. on 04 Apr 2007 at 7:40 am 19. black dog barking said …

    I’m satisfied with the Explanation for Three Year Olds:

    Onechan [still loudly, still in English]: Why?

    Constructivist [short pause to consider the pros and cons of several possible ways of answering this question, then, even quieter]: No good reason, honey.

    (Thanks, James, for the link to Foreign Accents.)

  20. on 04 Apr 2007 at 8:12 am 20. spyder said …

    I don’t think that the fact that someone was slated to be part of the potential invasion force,

    At least your Dad was coming out of Okinawa, and not part of the large fleet movement that was caught in the large early season typhoon (what today would be classified as a Cat 3). It is the little things too that matter in the processes of decision making. The loss of so many men, and essential logistical supplies (and three large ships), increased pressure on the US Department of War to make something happen sooner rather than later.

  21. on 04 Apr 2007 at 8:34 am 21. Seattle said …

    I have hope. I’m thinking there’s a market out there for torture and torment flashcards for kids. Here honey, this is a cattle prod burn to the testicles…here honey, here’s a rape victim up close and personal…here honey, here’s a political prisoner after 5 years in a (pick a country) prison. For parents who want their children to be exposed to the worst humanity can do at the earliest age possible. Let no child live in ignorance, or experience any period of innocence! I’ll get started on that business plan… : ) After all, it’s my duty as an American citizen to make money off of this phenomenon… LOL I’ve got a 15 year old and a 7 year old. I think the 15 year old MIGHT be ready for that museum. Somebody take away my liberal card…

  22. on 04 Apr 2007 at 9:36 am 22. spyder said …

    I’m thinking there’s a market out there for torture and torment flashcards for kids.

    Well the home version of “24″ would be a dandy. Gather the kids in the basement and share in the inquisitional fun of finding out just what that 15 year old was really doing at 3AM. Sleeping?? I don’t think so. Confess or else?

  23. on 04 Apr 2007 at 10:23 am 23. Seattle said …

    LOL Have you seen “House M.D.” Needles everywhere in the name of the medical cure…and the 15 year old loves it while I’m hiding in the kitchen going “EWWWWW!” Actually, I think he’s saying “EWWWW” too but I can’t hear him over my own voice…

  24. on 05 Apr 2007 at 2:37 am 24. The Constructivist said …

    black dog barking, thanks much. it was probably the best I could come up with at the time, but keep in mind the dramatic context I tried to set up: I was embarrassed by the fact that we were the only ones talking–loudly, in English–and quite conscious that any response I made was not just for her but for any English-speaking Japanese people in our vicinity. In that context, and recalling my not-at-all anti-American student’s reaction to her experience in school in the States in the late ’90s and her reading about the Enola Gay controversy from the mid-’90s, I took the option that expressed some of my personal feelings and offended the smallest amount of people.

    Which shows I’m capable of learning. Back when onechan and imoto didn’t exist, my first trip to Japan with my tsuma-to-be included a trip to Okinawa, where we took a historical bus tour of the main island. Someday I’ll blog about it. But the moment that sticks out in my mind was past the half-way point of the tour, when we were inside a temple with the biggest Buddha I had ever seen (at least 50-ft. high, and gold-plated, it looked). The temple was designed so you could walk all the way around it–the passage around the back was quite narrow but still passable. As we went through it, I looked up and said, “That’s one big-ass Buddha” to her.

    Let’s just say onechan and imoto are lucky their mom’s the forgiving sort. And that I learned my love for the inappropriate joke intended both to acknowledge and deflate solemnity–think of Faulkner’s narrator’s comment on the Shreve-Quentin conversation toward the end of Absalom, Absalom! for one definition (I’d quote it but it’s in the office)–does not always go over well with people other than Americans of my generation, who would likely agree with me that the only thing that’s funny about the comment is that it was made at all.

    Which makes me realize that this post follows the same general pattern. I guess I haven’t learned, after all. But if you can’t joke about the worst, is life really worth living?

    Yeesh, now the spyder-Seattle exchange is making me think of the South Park “Chinpokomon” episode (and wondering whether I can get my hands on a copy to show my next Representing Japan class). And the part of Silko’s Almanac of the Dead where the torturers are taping and photographing their victims and circulating the videotapes/photos among each other for entertainment.

    Which is just to say that I’ve got a storehouse of associations in my head that just about anything can trigger, so you could say I’ve lost my innocence. But the thing is, even at age 3, onechan has a fairly good-sized one in her head, too. And most of them have to do with relationships and things most of us would agree are pretty innocent–her family, her favorite color (pink–where did I go wrong?!), her favorite cartoon characters (Dora, the Japanese PowerPuff Girls [we didn’t let her watch the American original because she was too young, but we did let her get a coloring book–ironic, eh, Seattle?], My Melody, and especially three generations of Pretty Cure characters), her friends in Dunkirk, Chiba, and Fukuoka, her hair (she wants pony tails down to the ground–I blame Pretty Cure!), drawing, games, etc., etc. So that 45 minutes in Nagasaki was a quite different experience for her than me. Trouble is, we’ll never know what it was, because she doesn’t have the words to articulate it now and by the time she does she’ll most likely have forgotten it. (My only memory from that far back is watching my little brother stand for what I thought was the first time, running to tell my mom, and not realizing until much later that she must have seen him do it earlier because I was shocked at how nonchalant she was about the whole thing. And I’m not sure that’s even a real memory–it may be I just remember the story and not the experience.)

    What I can say is that I see no difference between the onechan who entered the museum and the one who came out–and I’ve been looking hard for one since then. In the photos we took at the hypocenter, she was running around and in a great mood (in fact, for the last fifteen minutes in the museum, she was hanging out in the anti-nuclear final exhibit, asking me to explain some of the videos profiling activists and victims of nuclear testing, and trying to hurry me out of the museum so she could go play in the park she saw on our way in.

    Ah, imoto’s crying. Gotta run.

  25. on 05 Apr 2007 at 3:11 am 25. The Constructivist said …

    OK, imoto didn’t need a nap after all. Just have time for a quick response to christian h’s #3 (the rest is going to need a post of its own): I didn’t notice your link, so consider this a belated reassurance that although Bill Benzon’s get-well-card caused me to take a turn for the worse, my attempted exorcism was largely successful. Thanks for sending me health vibes and for visiting Mostly Harmless!

  26. on 05 Apr 2007 at 5:37 am 26. christian h. said …

    she wants pony tails down to the ground–I blame Pretty Cure!

    As well you should. This is why my parent didn’t allow me to watch cartoons. Or read comics. Of course, I turned out a communist, so there you have it - all parenting decisions will catch up with you.

    As for the serious questions, my conviction is that there is a qualitative distinction between conventional bombing and the use of a nuclear weapon - a distinction the decision makers were very well aware of since the first nuclear tests - that makes the “in war, bad things happen” argument very unconvincing to me.

  27. on 05 Apr 2007 at 8:58 am 27. JP Stormcrow said …

    my conviction is that there is a qualitative distinction between conventional bombing and the use of a nuclear weapon

    This was indeed my position for most of my life, but I have been questioning it more and more lately, and TC’s original On Liberal Guilt and Conservative Paranoia post over at MH triggered a chain of thought that has led me even further away from it. Certainly there are some aspects of Nuclear Weapons that differentiate them from others - especially in that at the end one small “triggering event” can lead to such massive death and destruction. This aspect has of course impressed itself mightily upon human minds and imaginations, as reflected in the whole Cold War culture (do check out this Conelrad site as a great resource.), the iconic button, Strangelove, Failsafe etc. and why more recently, the We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud line was so effective (and why the iniquity of the lies behind it are so monumental.)

    However, I am no longer seeing it as a difference of kind. It is a giant leap forward in the aspect of modern warfare of potentially (ignoring oppositional deterrence) “sparing” the perpetrators of an act of warfare from direct experience of the consequences of their actions. But that trend had/has been running at good pace independently of nuclear developments. Think of the “progress” from the horror of Guernica, to the casual “acceptance” of the use of airborne bombs and missiles in support of, or independently of, military actions in modern “interventions”. [Ask Bill Maher about this one.]

    So I think that although it is true that mankind from Einstein to Oppenheimer to Truman to all of us, has struggled to come to grips with the power and drastic impact of nuclear weapons on the “military equation”, the difference is one of degree and not of kind. Left to its own devices I am confident that the current administration would have already used tactical nuclear weapons; and thus has it always been for mankind. I’ll go Kubrick on this one, name the technology that we have not ultimately normalized into its use as a weapon. The root causes need to be addressed at … well the root - a conclusion that does not lead me to any happy confidence that we will not in the future see semi-routine use of chemical, biological and nuclear weapons… Hey, but Happy Easter everyone!

  28. on 05 Apr 2007 at 12:22 pm 28. spyder said …

    “sparing” the perpetrators of an act of warfare from direct experience of the consequences of their actions.

    Indeed, a leap forward not unlike that of the gun, or the long bow, or the crossbow, or the wetted steel, and so forth. And we are moving further and further away from the intimacy of acts of killing, with superweapons that are completely roboticized, operated from another continent, or indeed from space. Brings me back to the Golden Hordes, riding across all of Asia and nearly all of Europe, calmly (in only the sense of ever moving forward) slaughtering every living human being (and most animals) in their path. Humans as the living incarnation of the ants in the genus Dorylus, killers without remorse or hestitation. Are we really so evolved that we can suggest that we are more merciful; when we assign the task of pushing a launch button to one of our fellow citizens who sits in a large cylinder of metal 100 meters below the surface of the ocean???

  29. on 05 Apr 2007 at 1:29 pm 29. JP Stormcrow said …

    And we are moving further and further away from the intimacy of acts of killing, with superweapons that are completely roboticized

    [I am remembering some science fiction story premised on an advanced civilization, losing to the guerilla tactics of their opponent because they were only capable of “action at a distance” - pretty farfetched, huh?]

    In the 1980’s, computer scientist Clifford Johnson, supported by Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility (CPSR) launched a series of lawsuits that claimed that various launch-on-warning systems employed by the US were unconstitutional. See Could computers launch a nuclear attack? here and Nuclear hair-trigger still set (Johnson v. Chain) here.

    Under a cautious assumption that launch-on-warning is in continuous use only
    during crisis situations, a number of studies have predicted that an
    accidental nuclear war is statistically likely within the next 30 years.

    This was from mid-80s, so we are some 20 years in and not yet - do not know if this will be like those Club of Rome population estimates of not.

    And I will admit that the whole topic erodes my nuclear is not a difference in kind argument, given the capacity for just one to trigger events which mess up your whole civilization (though that was obvioulsy not the case in WWII). I saw something like that at the end of a blog once.

  30. on 05 Apr 2007 at 1:43 pm 30. christian h. said …

    Don’t forget Stanislaw Lem’s various fact/fiction stories on future weapons systems and mutually assured destruction - like Peace on Earth, for example.

    And yes, I think nukes are different because they can destroy humanity (it’s not the “We are all global conventional fireball now party” for a reason).

  31. on 05 Apr 2007 at 1:56 pm 31. Oaktown Girl said …

    This long-distance, push-button warfare has been a concern of mine for a very long time. Ever since I was a kid, I believed that if there were going to be wars, the “Leaders” of the countries wanting war had to not only fight in it themselves, but be on the front lines. And combat would have to be all hand-to-hand (swords, etc). Maybe arrows would be OK as long as they were launched by hand and not by modern machinery.

    As an adult, what I’d add to this is that the Leaders’ children would have to fight too - if the Leaders were forcing other peoples’ children to fight.

  32. on 05 Apr 2007 at 2:20 pm 32. The Constructivist said …

    Got four pop culture references for y’all that are strangely relevant here–Stephenson’s The Diamond Age (on nanotech arms races in near-future China and elsewhere); Independence Day (in which the invading aliens could stand in for the European invasion of the Americas or capitalist hyperconsumption, among many other things); Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game (which has spawned so many debates in Left Blogistan given its author’s recent tributes to the 101st Keyboard Kommandos but which still to me is relevant as an exploration of the ethics of committing xenocide in what the protagonist believes to be a simulation; and War Games (which I got into as a teenager in a big way–tic tac toe saves the world, whee!). No time to explain, because the Masters is airing even now–and hat tip to spyder for the Augusta-related link in my satirical platform proposal (click on “aging”).

    On a more serious note, the Tokyo Fire Raids have received some attention from Lawyers, Guns, and Money here and here. In partial response to christian’s question in #26.

  33. on 05 Apr 2007 at 2:41 pm 33. The Constructivist said …

    Wait, the Masters can wait. Last night onechan made me realize I overstated my case that there’s no difference between her pre- and post-museum selves. In the bathtub, she grabbed her toothbrush, turned it around, and used it as a pointer to the map of Japan on the wall as she said to me, “Let me teach you. There was a bomb here. And a bomb here. And one here. Where’s Tokyo?…” (She was hitting fairly random spots, but for all I know, she could have been on target each time.) This was apropos of nothing that happened all day, although reminiscent of earlier bathtub discussions we’ve had about the locations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

    Just to reassure Seattle, a few minutes later she turned it into the longest. bath. time. ever. by demonstrating her mad skillz at tying her Hello Kitty body scrubber thingie into many different styles of bows (”First you pull it tight. Then the little end goes here. And the big end goes here….). I was pretty sure she couldn’t have come up with that on her own, and it took a while, but I finally got her to admit she learned it from her two best friends at yochien, a pair of yonsai onnanoko.

    A Japanese colleague was hanging with the family at a playground a week or so ago and when no one else was listening, he told me, “These might be the happiest days of your life.” He’s a father of two teenage boys. I dread the future.

  34. on 05 Apr 2007 at 2:56 pm 34. christian h. said …

    I dread the future.
    So this is why you signed up with the WAAGNFNP…

    I like Diamond Age and Ender’s Game (it’s the text, right - who cares if the author was/is batshit crazy?). I hated Independence Day - that speech by the President, yuck - I much preferred Mars Attacks. I’d also bring Starship Troopers (the movie) into the conversation - in Germany, most of us understood it to be a grim parody of a fascist society. I’d be interested to hear if it was taken more at face value in the US?

  35. on 05 Apr 2007 at 3:14 pm 35. JP Stormcrow said …

    Got to run, but the L,G & M stuff on Tokyo reminded me that a man who haunts this conversation is bomb them into the Stone Age Curtis LeMay (also VP candidate with Wallace in 1968 and an Ohio State product…)

    Much can be said debated about LeMay and his British counterpart Bomber Harris. No time, but you may wish to browse some of his most famous quotes here and here.

  36. on 05 Apr 2007 at 5:55 pm 36. The Constructivist said …

    christian, MH co-author alter ego is sure the Starship Troopers movie is a parody, but I haven’t seen it so I can’t agree or disagree, and I haven’t followed reactions to it. A big Marv Albert “Yes!” on Mars Attacks–and if you like that you should check out all of Alan Moore’s comic series (not the movie!) The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, which redoes War of the Worlds in its second year, I believe. MH co-author sloucho hates Independence Day for all the usual reasons plus its racism (the brainy Jew and athletic Black Guy, under the wise leadership of the heroic WASP, show how American diversity management can save the world, so long as the redneck PTSD dude and Hillary Clinton die in the process)….

    Wasn’t LeMay satirized in Dr. Strangelove?

  37. on 05 Apr 2007 at 8:18 pm 37. christian h. said …

    Yeah, the racism in Independence Day is almost hilarious in its unintentional self-parody of off-the-shelf diversity (I like your term diversity management. Captures it perfectly.)

  38. on 05 Apr 2007 at 8:28 pm 38. Oaktown Girl said …

    I second what christian just said about what TC just said!

    Independence Day - and you just know how much I loved it that Will Smith’s girlfriend was a stripper and that Jeff Goldblum’s girlfriend was a high level White House official.

  39. on 05 Apr 2007 at 9:43 pm 39. JP Stormcrow said …

    Wasn’t LeMay satirized in Dr. Strangelove?

    I have seen the claim that he was either Gen. Jack Ripper (at the base - precious bodily fluids) or Buck Turdgison (George C. Scott character back at the war room) - or “part” of both of them. Both do fit parts of his persona.

    Dr. Strangelove himself probably combines Herman Kahn (RAND strategist), Edward Teller and maybe von Neumann, and some von Braun/generic German rocket scientist.

  40. on 06 Apr 2007 at 8:53 am 40. The Constructivist said …

    christian, I can’t take credit for the “diversity management” phrase–it’s actually a corporate term of the art, which Christopher Newfield did some pioneering work examining and which many of the contributors of the book he co-edited with Avery Gordon, Mapping Multiculturalism, critique.

    Oaktown Girl, both the stripper and the press secretary got their men in the end! What more could any American movie watcher ask for, especially in the Age of Family Values?

    BTW, the fact that ID4 is chock full of just about every single American cultural and political cliche and stereotype is no accident, which is why I try to teach the movie as often as I can in my Intro to American Studies courses. Not only is it fun for me to watch 18-year-olds try to make sense of now-ancient allusions and references and debate the movie’s politics but doing so might even teach them something about the complexity and ambiguity of even so-terrible-it-doesn’t-hurt culture industry dreck and its capacity to participate in as well as provide material for American cultural studies, as well.

    Don’t get me started on commercials as our version of English lyric poetry in the days of patrons and circulating manuscripts. And don’t tell the Squirrel Lady! If you do, be sure to add that either Will Ferrell or Colin Farrell can be made to rhyme with squirrel, depending on your dialect.

  41. on 06 Apr 2007 at 10:35 am 41. spyder said …

    and another view of the central topic, whilst discoursing on pop/pomo references concerning the demise of our next seven generations. I am busy at the moment crafting a BAT (as in batshit crazy) post reflecting the latest issuance from the IPCC; it is incredibly despairing.

    It’s Official: Terrorism Doesn’t Mean Anything Anymore
    by Cenk Uygur | Apr 6 2007 - 10:50am

    Today, Tony Blair called the attack that killed four British soldiers yesterday an act of terrorism. You didn’t see that wrong. Yes, now attacking soldiers is also an act of terrorism. So, that’s it. It’s official. The word “terrorism” no longer means anything.

    The whole point of labeling something a terrorist act was that it targeted civilians, and hence, was particularly heinous. Of course, this is a relatively recent definition since the fire bombing of Dresden and Tokyo targeted civilians, to say the least. And to say that the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki also targeted civilians is a dramatic understatement.

    I’m not saying we shouldn’t have used the weapons we did in World War II. And I’m definitely not saying that attacking the British troops was acceptable. The loss of those four young lives is a tragedy. But if you call it terrorism to attack our troops now, there is no conceivable definition of terrorism that makes sense anymore.

    Unless, of course, we just wanted to confirm what has unofficially been true for some time now. We pretty much call our enemies terrorists. And if our allies do the same exact thing we call them militants or soldiers or even freedom fighters. Does there get to be a point when the hypocrisy is a little too much to bear? And if it does, can anyone really argue we’re not at that point?

  42. on 06 Apr 2007 at 10:52 am 42. christian h. said …

    Well, attacks on Western military forces are routinely called “terrorist”, certainly by Western governments. This is by no means new; and while it is clearly motivated by a desire to label official enemies, that particular propaganda instrument is also supported by a distinction that is made in liberal thought between state violence (can be bad, but not “terrorist”) and violence by non-state actors (considered illegitimate under almost all circumstances). One could cite numerous examples (to name but a few, IRA violence vs. violence by security forces in NI, Palestinian violence vs. IDF violence, state violence against the US population vs. violence aimed at state organs, state violence vs. ANC “terror” in apartheid South Africa etc.)
    Also, while I don’t hope for anybody to die, I have to say that an attack on military forces occupying your country is acceptable, and should be acceptable to anybody but a pacifist.

  43. on 06 Apr 2007 at 12:56 pm 43. The Constructivist said …

    “Shock and Awe” was all about the sublimity, christian–no terror here, move it right along, nobody here but us Burkeans….

  44. on 06 Apr 2007 at 11:02 pm 44. The Constructivist said …

    Looks like I’m not the only South Park appreciator among the friends of the WAAGNFNP.

  45. on 12 Apr 2007 at 2:26 am 45. The Constructivist said …

    On the qualitative difference question, here’s Sadly, No!’s HTML Mencken on Hiroshima, back when he was blogging at elementropy as Retardo Montalban. Their subtitle was “constructive nihilism,” so I thought christian h. would appreciate it.

  46. on 12 Apr 2007 at 5:29 am 46. christian h. said …

    Thanks, TC!