Mar 12, 2010 | Our Nuclear Age
Today’s thoughts on memory and narrative have found a home on the Huffington Post. You can read it here.
A sample:
“On September 11th, 2001, however, my keitai denwa (my little Japanese cellphone) rang, and a friend told me that a plane had just smashed into the World Trade Center. In the aftermath of those terrorist attacks, the survivors’ stories changed radically. The shock of war, hostility, lives lost so tragically, opened them up. Their stories no longer began with the time (8:15 am), the blue sky, the faraway dot of the B-29 bomber. They told me about cremating their children, scraping maggots out of the raw swathes of skin on their spouses’ bodies. How a child’s lips came off on the spout of the water container when he tried to drink.”
Feb 17, 2010 | Our Nuclear Age
I’ve been rendered speechless by the idiocy in the conversation about Obama’s plan to build more nuclear power plants.
Is it the counter-argument about regulation? (Nuclear power plants are problematic because regulations are so restrictive…so let’s just ease those regulations, eh? Where have we heard that brilliant solution before?)
No, it’s this quote, from The Atlantic, which offers arguments against the arguments against the idea (already I am dizzy):
“Then there’s the worry of a terrorist threat. What if someone flies a plane into a nuclear reactor? Thousands could die. Well, what if someone flies a plane into a giant building? Thousands could die. Should we not build them either?”
Feb 9, 2010 | Our Nuclear Age, Random Thoughts
“This wasn’t a game or an exercise or a movie; these were real soldiers with real blood and real families waiting back home. What had I done wrong?”
(Craig M. Mullaney, The Unforgiving Minute)
When war is not felt, it cannot be avoided. If I learned anything from the survivors of Hiroshima, it is this. After the atomic bomb was dropped, the world was treated to visions of power (the mushroom cloud) and might (the devastated landscape). Pictures and video of what happened to the people – of what a living creature looks like without a face – these were confiscated because of their potentially incendiary nature. In other words, if we could see them, then we might feel them. And if we had to grapple with, and even take responsibility for, such suffering, we might lose our taste for war.
This is why the narratives from the “well-written war” are so important (New York Times, 2/7/10). If our veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan are willing to speak from their nightmares and publicly wrestle their ghosts, we should be listening. These men and women risked their lives; they risked limbs, senses, “ability.” If they no longer believe in a war they would have died for, we need to know what they thought war was, and what turned out not to be true. We owe it to them to understand this. We owe it to our children to feel it.
It seems to me the answer is in the word: absurd.
“The civil affairs officer, Lt Jackson, stares
at his missing hands, which make
no sense to him, no sense at all, to wave
these absurd stumps held in the air
where just a moment before he’d blown bubbles
out the Humvee window…”
(Brian Turner, Here, Bullet)
