Godzilla

History shows again and again how nature points up the folly of men.

"Godzilla" - Blue Oyster Cult, 1977

What's amazing to me is that we keep coming back to this. No matter how spiffy we bow tied primates think we are, we still run right up against the intractability of time, tide and nature.

Godzilla was created in the mid '50s not as a response to Hiroshima, but to the furtherance of nuclear weaponry, the testing of which was occurring in the South Pacific. In 1954, the United States was testing on the infamous Bikini Atoll, in Operation Castle Bravo. The Lucky Dragon 7, a Japanese fishing boat within fallout distance of the atoll, had the misfortune of being close enough to the 15 megaton bomb to endure radioactive fallout. The Eisenhower-era Atomic Energy Commission and military operations attempted to cover up what had happened to the fishermen (one died, many others sickened) but that genie was out of the bottle. In the country with the only collective memory of radiation sickness, fallout and the long-term affects, the story became a cultural "meme," if you will, and eight months later, the film "Godzilla" hit the theatres.

Much of the kaiju eiga phenomenon was, in fact, a response to the nuclear threat and cold war activities of the era. As a child of the cold war, I have a very visceral and affectionate memory of the movies. Watching them on Saturday afternoons diffused fears I couldn't explain at 10, 11 and 12 years of age.

I remember Duck and Cover, the preposterous, red-scare propaganda film we watched as children. I remember watching news of the escalation of nuclear armaments on TV. I remember preachers using it as fodder for their millenialist predictions from the pulpit, but more importantly, over coffee in the cool of the afternoon later around curious teenagers. People discussing nuclear war and armaments and technology as if it were not only winnable, but a viable alternative, a by-God-they're-not-gonna-get-me thought process that would keep us Americans strong. Cuz if we didn't win, we'd go down trying.

But at 14 I discovered the effects of nuclear explosions on architecture, people and the environment. I found a book that a teacher had. I babysat for him and he let me peruse his library, thinking I'd latch onto one of his numerous history texts. I began to read with interest, then with horror, about just what would happen during and after a blast. Very explicit descriptions of the effects at the Nevada test site, on the ships and such at Bikini Atoll, on the populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki--they were all spelled out in cold, dry but very clear text. The simple medical descriptions of the effects of radiation, mostly all ending in death, chilled me to the bone.

I told my teacher when he got home that night I had read it (I'm a confessor) and how disturbed I was. He reassured me that the book existed for just that reason--to preclude anything that drastic from happening. There were people, he told me, who thought about these things and were working with all their might to see that it wouldn't happen. Of the arms race between the Soviet Union and the US, he said in an almost cavalier manner, "one side's scared and the other's damn glad of it." Note I said "almost." I could sense a tiny quiver of fear even in him, my intellectual hero. He took me home, reassuring me all the way. He stayed on me, too, to his credit. It was an ongoing conversation throughout my high school years. But I still had nightmares about it for years.

The next time I babysat for him and his wife, the book was gone.

I've long been anti-nuclear anything. I'm even dubious about the 100% safety of nuclear medicine (after a story from my radiologist cousin about an X-ray machine left in a dump in Central America, only to be disemboweled and played with by children who thought the pretty blue powder was face paint. I wish that were an urban myth). A friend was issuing a salvo of responses on Facebook to a rather persistent debate partner who kept trying to extoll the virtues of Private Enterprise in its ability to manage things on its own, specifically, nuclear waste. The Market Will Prevail sort of rhetoric. But what he consistently (the opponent) would not answer was this:

1. How do we justify the usage of something like nuclear power for short term gain when we won't be around to clean it up?
2. How do expect something called "the free market" to manage something for 10,000 years (the half-life of nuclear waste) when they can't even manage bad debt without passing it on the taxpayer or the next generation (see Savings and Loan disaster, home mortgage derivatives.....need I go on?)

The interlocutor had no response. Since we always get to this point, and since we are facing one of three of the worst nuclear disasters in our history, isn't it time we started having discussions about nature?

Not just nature, Mother Nature, the natural world, the thing that will go on long after we've evolved back into some protoplasmic spume that dots the oceans. Not just the nature that somehow manages to adapt, with the slings and arrows (!) of asteroids, sun spot flares, evolved apes that treat the Earth like an ATM with no limits and a public toilet simultaneously.

No, I'm talking about human nature. What we humans do. We don't finish things. We don't clean things up. We don't think it through, we don't end it, we don't complete it....we don't, we don't, we don't. Name one "accomplishment" and I'll show you how it isn't finished.

The Pyramids. Great. Example not only of human ingenuity, but of planning and cooperation. Recent research shows that funding and managing slavery on that scale wasn't sustainable; consequently, it must have been a collective and cooperative endeavor. Great! Except that wasn't all they wanted....there were supposed to be several more. It has lasted, yes, but where is the religion and administration that was supposed to supervise and protect it through....well, just how long is eternity?

The Church. Yep, gotta bring it up, loathsome though it may be to some of you to pick on it. Great long term effort for what was originally intended for short term gain. Short term? SHORT TERM? Isn't eternity long enough for you, Mr. Holden? Well, no, I'm talking about Constantine realizing that there was this new faith where people were willing to sacrifice everything for an outcome they couldn't see, as opposed to Roman religion where everybody wanted something--*results* of all things. Yes, I'm that cynical, because he was. Has it outstripped it's original purpose and developed into a thing of love and light? Of course, but only in the hands of a small number. The rest of the history of this "church" is littered with dual purposes, manipulation of the populace and avarice in statecraft of the highest degree...not to mention child sexual molestation, absconded funds, personality cults and emotional and spiritual abuse of untold millions.

What about the Space Program? Or Democracy in America?

Please. You really want me to go there? See, we can't do anything for a long period of time because we lose interest. Our forebears hung out in trees and ate fruit. We ate the fruit of the tree. Then this really inconvenient thing happened. The climate changed. We got thrown OUT of the garden and had to wander to find food. Damned annoying, if you ask me. I like my food next to my bed. And here we are a million years later, looking for something (what was that again...??) and not knowing why we are. And we, with the attention span of a "what's our next meal" are to be expected to be the custodians of NUCLEAR WASTE FOR 10,000 YEARS?

And now there are three reactors in Japan that were put in the unthinkable (rhymes with "unsinkable".....look that up) position of losing all their electrical power after going through a 9.0 earthquake and not having any backup systems to engage that combination of problems.

The irony that this is happening in Japan is horrible. The fact that this technology was developed by the United States ought to escape no one right now. The responsibility for this, to paraphrase Viktor Frankl not too liberally, is all of ours. He said that Auschwitz showed us what man is capable of and Hiroshima showed us what's at stake. Now it appears that what's at stake and what we're capable of are the same. We are the authors of our entire destiny and need to own up to our simplest but most fatal flaws.

We can't do some of this stuff, so we should stop. We can't get blood out of a turnip, we can't make a dollar worth $1.01 and we can't 100% guarantee that nuclear energy will ever be safe.

And it took "nature" in the form of an earthquake to point it out. Aren't all storms perfect storms?

/rant