Western man and Chernobyl

 

There’s a complex, a Western man’s complex: it happens when Western M. touches the Soviet Union.

In that moment, the Soviet Union becomes evil. And, on the rebound, the West becomes good.

That moment is a royal intellectual screwing that has a number of effects. For instance, it screwed up the tv series, Chernobyl.

I did not see this series when it came out. For one thing, Masha Gessen’s scathing review made it clear that many of the choices of the director, or scriptwriter, were wrong. Although Gessen concedes that the people who put together the choreography, the look of the scenery, were astonishingly good. Russians who saw the show and had lived in the Soviet Union in the 1980s recognized the wall paper, the dresses, the haircuts, the halls – everything. Still, she was scathing about what the producers did not know about homo sovieticus in the 1980s, the children of the Soviet Baby boomers or the Soviet greatest generation.

Finally I decided to watch it. And I found it quite horrifying – a horror docudrama. I have been converted, by my son, into a horror film fan, and rode that dimension through the true stitching together of jumpscares, and even spotted a final girl – the pregnant wife of one of the firefighters. This I loved.

However, the series loops the horror show around the Soviet Union, as though the one unique experience of horrendous design and execution of nuclear power and its materials were a Soviet matter.

At the same time that the series was first aired, the Virginia Quarterly Review, not the kind of print press one expects journalism from, published an excellent article, Cold War Hot Mess, by Lois Parshly, about the “cleanup” so called of the Hanford Plutonium plant. One finds, there, the same combination of secrecy, cover-up, stupidity and the refusal to inform victims of radiation that they have been laced with a carcinogenic destiny.

The Chernobyl accident, as Kate Brown has shown in Manuel for the Future: a Chernobyl guide for the future, had wideranging results that were covered up not just by the Soviets, but by the “West” and the UN, which had many vital interests in keeping the lid on the casualty count. For instance, France, the UK and the US, for twenty years, sponsored above the ground nuke tests that put 30 times more curies into the atmosphere than Chernobyl did. This in itself is a measure of how bad Chernobyl was – but it is also a measure of how unmeasured the effect of those tests remain.

In David Thompson’s book, “In Nevada: The Land, The People, God, and Chance," there’s a movie anecdote – which you would expect, since Thompson is a movie critic and the one man author of a movie encyclopedia – about The Conqueror, a John Wayne flick financed by Howard Hughes and shot in St. George, Utah in 1955. St. George happened to be in the alley through which mucho radioactivity from those above ground tests passed. Hughes had soil dug up form the site to be used later for in studio productionAnd the crew, cast, director and others were thus exposed to the substances unleashed by the department of War and blessed by the scientists hired by the department of war, who have, since the dropping of Big Boy, spent seventy years downplaying the dangers of radiation. Thompson points out that, out of the 221 people working on the film, 91 got cancer. This isn’t that surprising. In St. George, deformed babies became known as sacrifice babies – sacrificed to national defense. The leukemia rate was 2.5 times higher than the national average – but cancers were only one of the kind of low grade, life sucking maladies that afflicted the community, and that atomic energy scientists are quick to label psychosomatic – as in the notoriously sloppy WHO/AEIC report on Chernobyl.

To read Kate Brown on the WHO's method for deciding on the biological casualty rate at Chernobyl is to see a falsehood gain traction. The era of "post-truth" is rooted in the era of Cold War truthiness - an incremental approach to the truth, under the TOP SECRET label. If you continue to lie to a population about things that affect them vitally, at a certain point people will begin to disbelieve the authorities about other vital things - hence, the COVID vaciine phenomenon.

During a period from the late 40s to the late 70s, the War Department’s scientific community was both experimenting with weapons designed to kill millions and denying that the weapons produced anything that would harm Americans living around the places where those weapons were exploded. Sometimes, just to check, populations were exposed to radiation on purpose – the Defense Department in 1991 admitted that it had done about 4,000 experiments exposing humans to radioactivity between 1944 to 1974, according to Eduardo Goncalves article on the ‘secret nuclear war’ in the Ecologist in 2001. Carole Gallagher, in her photo book about the victims of the bomb tests, quotes a great AEC memo about communities in the path of fallout – they were labeled the “low use segment of the population.” The Conqueror was the more unfortunate in that it mixed low use people with valuable people, including John Wayne – who of course died of cancer. As any scientist would be quick to point out, John Wayne smoked. In any population in the fifties, there are going to be people who die of cancer anyway, statistically. It isn’t science to hide behind that fact, it is politics. But the War Department’s scientists hid behind that fact for fifty years. In Goncalves article, he quotes an Army medic, Van Brandon, who said that the army routinely kept two sets of records of radioactive readings in the fallout paths, one set to show that nobody received an elevated level of radiation, the other set to show how high that elevated level actually was. “That set was brought in a locked briefcase every morning.”

In the 50s, to be fair, not a lot was known about chronic illness. It certainly wasn’t known that one could be infected with a disease that would only appear thirty years later. Now it is fifty years later, and there is a lot of information that is not going to be showing up in any newspaper headlines any time soon – after all, the congressional investigations about the nuclear testing ‘accidents’ were concluded in the 80s. News and disease have a different time frame. So we haven’t seen a lot of publicity given to this report by Steven L. Simon, Andre Bouville and Charles E. Land in this January’s American Scientist, "Fallout from Nuclear Weapons Tests and Cancer Risks." Yet there should be, not only for what it says but for what it doesn't say. The report goes the partial hang-out route, to quote Nixon, diminishing by segregating -- for instance, by concentrating on cancer, the authors can ignore the immune system breakdowns associated with radioactivity, and never ask if there is any meshing between these two results of radiation poisoning. It bases its statistics on reports of radioactive readings after the tests without even a note to say that some of those readings are, to say the least, disputed – and that we know the Department of War has changed its story about certain of the most notorious tests -- for instance the one on July 5, 1957, in which, in the immediate aftermath of the test, some 2,000 soldiers were ordered into ground zero – while the becqueral count was off the Geiger counter - and this was after these soldiers were exposed, as was standard practice, by being put in trenches some mile from the explosion. Afterwards, soldiers reported that they could do things you only see in horror movies – like pull their teeth from their mouth. All of which reports would get them trundled into the psych wards are VA hospitals. And none of which is reflected in the notes in the American Scientist, which are enlivened by some maps I'd like to figure out how to post.

This is from the article:

"The cancer risks are, of course, the most publicized of the spectrum of ills resulting from scientific carelessness about exploding big dangerous toys to see what would happen. The less publicized of those ills is immune deficiencies of various kinds.

“In 1997, NCI conducted a detailed evaluation of dose to the thyroid glands of U,S, residents from 1-131 in fallout from tests in Nevada. In a related activity, we evaluated the risks of thyroid cancer from that exposure and estimated that about 49,000 fallout-related cases might occur in the United States,

almost all of them among persons who were under age 20 at some time during the period 1951-57, with 95-percent uncertainty limits of 11,300 and 212,000. The estimated risk may be compared with some 400,000 lifetime thyroid cancers expected in the same population in the absence of any fallout exposure.

Accounting for thyroid exposure from global fallout, which was distributed fairly uniformly over the entire United States, might increase the estimated excess by 10 percent, from 49,000 to 54,000. Fallout-related risks for thyroid cancer are likely to exceed those for any other cancer simply because those risks are predominantly ascribable to the thyroid dose from internal radiatition, which is unmatched in other organs.”

Congress authorized the study of the iodine isotope – but limited it to the iodine isotope. Strontium-90, another fallout factor, has never been studied.

Western man – give up your delusion that in facing evil, you are good! And look at the x-rays in your hand, dude. They tell a tale.

elegy for the record: on the nature of things

 

Elegy for the record: on the nature of things

“Look”, he would say, drawing an imaginary line with his finger., “it’s like this. I start here with the intention of reaching here – in an experiment, say, to increase the speed of the Atlantic cable; but when I have arrived part way in my straight line, I meet with a phenomenon and it leads me off in another direction and develops into a phonograph.” -Edison

 

Was there song before there was song

in the universal throat,

all unwrought dark intensity

all systems ungo,

ungo

ungo?

 

“The very thing of itself declares”

in the needle’s track left on

the deaf man’s thumb.

Hearing is touching is scratching

 

hums in the ear unheard

or unheard light crackling sounds

sinking away in the retired depth

of the abandoned laboratory dark.

 

Lucrèce writes, in his native French:

“Les formes d'un seul choc seraient anéanties.

Mais, de ses éléments variant les accords,

La matière demeure éternelle, et les corps

Durent, cohésions rebelles au divorce,

Jusqu'à ce que l'attaque ait dépassé leur force.

Ainsi, rien ne retourne au néant;

While the headline sez:

 

“A talking machine made by Professor Edison”.

Song before song, throb before throb

Where in the universal throat a single shock

Sings the unsung folded around a needle

 

 Lifting angelic choirs out of available material.

“I took the night job which most oprs

didn’t like, but which I preferred

as it gave me more time to experiment.”

 

I saw it all end, Thomas Edison.

Prophets wearing earpods.

«Oprs» listening to satellite radio

Driving to the night shift on the I-5.

 

But end? End only in this spoonful

Of the universal time-space.

Song there will be unsung and sung

At the end, as at the beginning. Song.

Surrounded!

 

There is an attitude that is at the base of great English comedy that has no common name or phrase. I call it dis-identification.  It is the moment when judgment – moral or aesthetic – shifts to the register of competition. To judge that a thing is bad is a philosophical task, but in the novel of real life, we more often judge that a person is bad. We more often think, that is, about how we don’t want to be or function like X, and create a negative figure out of that moment of negative choice. Those are the figures, in essence, that we compete with, even if it is not clear what the contest is all about or what the rules are. And often, the badness of the figure becomes stronger than the reasons we hold an act or a function to be bad. Out of this comes snobbery and wounded dignity. The latter emerges from the moment in which we are squeezed between the figure that represents ‘how we don’t want to be’ and something that upsets our judgment about how we don’t want to be. I don’t want to be a liberal academic, or a poser, or a fan of country music, or a supporter of Donald Trump,  etc., etc. translates into a satisfying comparison with liberal academics, posers, fans of country music, supporters of Donald Trump, etc. At least I am not X: This is the moral stance of the contemporary hero.

Sketching out this aspect of moral life, it points to a problem in the way sociologists mapping out our positive identifications as primary. That’s an idealistic stance. Dis-identification is just as important.

It might seem like the logical endpoint of “how we don’t want to be” is enmity. But the origin of the enemy is in combat,  which is the contest absolutely realized; there is always something mortal about enemies. You wish your enemies dead. Your enemies wish you dead. Whereas dis-identification is more about edging away from people, and the horror that it wishes to avoid most is: being surrounded by. Being surrounded by Republicans. Being surrounded by liberal types. Being surrounded by lefties, righties, pinkos, rednecks, yahoos, jerkoffs, feminazis, centrist reactionaries. Whatever. To be surrounded by cuts off the ability to edge away. Terrifyingly, to an outsider, one can be identified with the crowd of ‘how we don’t want to be.’

This is where English comic writers come in. In French literature, the thousand meannesses of everyday life are treated as though they have a certain grandeur – think of Lisbeth’s revenge in Cousine Bette – which is on account of the fact that the French have a genius for enmity. In English writers, those meannesses are filtered through the comedy of wounded dignity or snobbery, since the English genius is for edging away. Dickens, of course, is the first writer who comes to mind.

But Dickens rather ends a certain line of humor than opens up the kind of humor, the kind of odd frivolity, that imbued English comic writing in the 20^th century. Evelyn Waugh, whose character Tony Last is, famously, captured by a maniac and forced to read Dickens to him, is not only dis-identifying with Dickens but mocking, snobbishly, Dickens appeal to the vulgar masses -even as those masses include jungle explorers. Frivolity, as Fintan O’Toole pointed out in his book on Brexit, Heroic Failure, is the mask assumed by English nationalism.  While celebrating loudly the struggle of good and evil, the battle of civilizations, and English yeoman values, the celebrants are all such scoundrels and trust fund brats that it is hard not to suspect they are on to themselves – that they too have been dosed with English comic writing, from Wodehouse to Amis.

I’d like to make generalizations about the American version of dis-identification, but this subject requires way too much coffee for me to make it this morning. This will have to do.

 

On Careers

What do you do?

I’ve been asked that a lot in my life. As I child and teen, I was asked, what do you want to do? But that question dies on the tongue of the speaker after you reach a certain age. What do you want to do becomes a more localized question – to be asked, say, on vacation. It is not a request for a mission statement. Because, presumably, at some point in the twenties, your mission was set.

This presumption indicates a whole anthropology. The anthropology of the career.

In the Oxford English dictionary, published in 1913, the word “career” for the course of a professional life is a “modern usage”. Career, up until the early nineteenth century, was more normally used for horses – horses careering, or galloping. The late latin root, here, is a word for cart. Or a word designating the road a cart takes. A way, in other words. A way and a race. The Occidental variant on the Dao.

In fact, the Hollywoodish way of talking about a career at the moment is a “journey”. My journey. And not, say, my rat race – we don’t even want to smell a rat race when we talk of our journey. But careers, in as much as they are races, are defined by rivalries. This sets the career apart from, say, Being in as it is figured in an ancient Greek poem, where a man tells this tale: in a chariot balanced on bronze eight spoked wheels, with an iron axle, pulled by wise horses and led by celestial maidens, he comes to the portal of night and day and is there greeted by a goddess who cries out to him that he has left the beaten track of men.

The goddess then proceeds to tell him a cosmic secret. There are two ‘routes’ of inquiry: that of what is, and that of what is not.

The two choices in Parmenides are pretty stark, and they do seem to subtend the question: what do you do? If you leave the beaten track of men, if this is your “search”, you might look back on your path, the race you raced, and wonder: where is everybody?

I wonder that all the time.

ordinary sense and democratic culture

 

When Whitman came to fight his great opposite and fate, These States, like some happier Ahab taking on the Whale, in Democratic Vistas, he issued a caution:

 

“Bear in mind, too, that they [these pages] are not the result of studying up in political economy, but of the ordinary sense, observing, wandering among men, These States, these stirring years of war and peace. I will not gloss over the appalling dangers of universal suffrage in the United States. In fact, it is to admit and face these dangers I am writing. To him or her within whose thought rages the battle, advancing, retreating, between Democracy's convictions, aspirations, and the People's crudeness, vice, caprices, I mainly write this book.”

The ordinary sense is your most democratic organ. A transparent eyeball for some, for others a nose for tabloidery, but always wandering – that is, refusing to settle in one circle or clique. And this is why, for Whitman, democracy is not a constitution, or an election, or a set of politicians – it is based on the ordinary sense writ large and small: literature. In “feudalism” – Whitman’s name for all that is past and undemocratic – literature is ultimately the reflection of a system of patronage and elevated and elegant subservience. It turns away from the ordinary sense.  Whitman sums up his credo in a one of those wonderful outbreathings that no other poet can do:

“It is curious to me that while so many voices, pens, minds, in the press, lecture-rooms, in our Congress, &c., are discussing intellectual topics, pecuniary dangers, legislative problems, the suffrage, tariff and labor questions, and the various business and benevolent needs of America, with propositions, remedies, often worth deep attention, there is one need, a hiatus, and the profoundest, that no eye seems to perceive, no voice to state. Our fundamental want to-day in the United States, with closest, amplest reference to present conditions, and to the future, is of a  class, and the clear idea of a class, of native Authors, Literatuses, far different, far higher in grade than any yet known, sacerdotal, modern, fit to cope with our occasions, lands, permeating the whole- mass of American mentality, taste, belief, breathing into it a new breath of life, giving it decision, affecting politics far more than the popular superficial suffrage, with results inside and underneath the elections of Presidents or Congresses, radiating, begetting appropriate teachers and schools, manners, costumes, and, as its grandest result, accomplishing, (what neither the schools nor the churches and their clergy have hitherto accomplished, and without which this nation will no more stand, permanently, soundly, than a house will stand without a substratum,) a religious and moral character beneath the political and productive and intellectual bases of The States.”

I’m moved by this declaration of faith. It is to what is inside and underneath elections that, I think, democracy goes on. The allergy to “wokeness” seems to me an allergy to the ferment within and underneath, the ferment that has opened the doors in this Bluebeard’s castle of a civilization and seen the bloodshed and the butchery, and is trying to cope with it as it can. The first impulse, trained in us, is to throw down rules. But Moses went up to the mountain a long time ago, and came back with rules, and the democratic terror consists of the suspecting and more than suspecting, acting upon the perception that rules must be subordinate to sympathy, and that sympathy does not exist without a wandering with ordinary sense. It doesn’t get to fly, to unfold its wings, in coiled up rooms and relations.

And maybe we don’t want democratic flights all of the time, and want our rooms and relations.

But don’t want them too much. This, it seems to me, is where Whitman’s Democratic Vistas come in.

 

Southern California Death Trip

 

 

“He was kind but he changed and I killed him,”

reads the caption of the photo of a woman

in an old tabloid. She was headed to

the deathhouse, I suppose.

 

The American poem comes through the prose.

The grapple with the facts in the fur coat store.

“Somehow, she said, she felt as though

he had a spell over her.”

Don’t we know it, sister.

 

Under the night’s minus we register our discontents:

item: the silver fox stole;

item, a pack of Luckies; item, a silver lighter;

item, the .22 Ruger pistol

bought in Tijuana.

“How about it, honey, he asked.

“Sure, I’ll give you some loving, she said.

They found five slugs in the body

“where they would do the most good, she said.”

“The liquor store clerk said

the woman bought a bottle of 27 cent wine.

I just bought this coat across the street, she said

and I’m going to celebrate.”

Later, she made her escape with two others

Climbed the 12 foot high chain link fence.

Exit, stage right.

The ‘petite fugitive’ is a crack shot, the cops said.

Beyond the all points, she’s still out there

considering her options.

-Karen Chamisso

 

The Pure products of America

 

William Carlos Williams knew a few things about America. He knew the pure products of America went crazy, and he knew of the American lovemaking out there in the fields:

succumbing without
emotion
save numbed terror

under some hedge of choke-cherry
or viburnum—
which they cannot express—

William was torn between admiration and horror, fight or flight.

And listen to American balladeers. They are never so wrought to a pitch as when the song is about killing women. Leadbelly via Nirvana, Jimi Hendrix via Patti Smith. Joe is going to shoot his old lady. And that, that is terror unnumbed. That is terror that comes out in buckets, and that entertains us all, one slasher audience under God, with liberty and justice for all.

Patti Smith is the interesting transitional figure here. Her way of collaging Hey Joe and Patti Hearsts kidnapping – or Patti Hearst’s joining the Symbionese Liberation Army, an Army dedicated to the liberation of nothing – has to be a nodal point, a cultural political nodal point, of the seventies.

But I don’t understand it. I sing along, but I don’t understand it.

Joe won’t have a noose around his neck – a symbol, an event, that is linked by every vein in our American bodies to lynching. And Patti Hearst – Patti Smith’s secret sharer of the name – won’t wear that name around her neck, the name her father and mother gave her. Her father’s pathetic speech to the press that she was a good girl – grind that back into his face.

But whose bodies litter the path to this liberation? And why is it, why, a “freeing”? Why this ecstasy in the face of such violence? On the down low side of an inheritance from the darkest Child ballads.

Williams came to no conclusions in the 1920s, when he wrote his poem. Although he was writing In the American Grain, he was never going to give you the word on high, like his Enemy-Double, T.S. Eliot. Categorical judgments put a noose around all our necks. But the game, that patriarchy speaks for “women”, is crooked, a matter of House rules when the House is an All Male Pimp show.  Which might be what Patti Smith, inveterate trans-performer, was moving towards.