Tuesday, July 25, 2023
In bed at 10, up at 5:53. 66℉, high 83℉, mostly sunny, AQI=114, UFSG, wind WSW at 5 mph, 3-9/16. Sun rose at 5:35, sets at 8:21, 14+46.
'Suffusive emergencies,' I got out of bed this morning after the sun had risen above the Lake Michigan horizon but before it had risen above the treetops across the street. It rose at 62 degrees NE, 6 degrees south of its northernmost position on the solstice. I looked out my window at about 7 after filling Lilly's water bowl and saw the sun as a fuzzy glowing globe of light perhaps 35 degrees above the eastern horizon. What struck me was its fuzziness, its lack of definition, and I realized that what I was seeing was sunlight filtered through wildfire smoke from Western Canada. It reminded me of driving out to visit Kitty one year, perhaps to pick up my Dad for the drive back to Wisconsin. Rather than driving south from Flagstaff, I approached from the East through the Apache Reservation. When I reached Globe, AZ, I was looking down on the Valley of the Sun and what I saw was a pall of pollution, a cloud of chemicals and tiny particulates floating over the entire Phoenix metropolis. Once I was in the valley and under the pollution I could not see it but I was breathing it, living in it, like a tiny fish in a toxic ocean.
In this morning's edition of The New Yorker online, there is an article about the cover art on the upcoming print edition, July 31, 2023. It's titled "Christoph Niemann's Recipe for Disaster," and refers to global climate change. I was struck by the author's use of the term 'suffusive emergencies' in the opening sentences: "News cycles, by nature, tend to document crises as discrete events. Suffusive emergencies—like the climate crisis—are captured mostly in the accelerating pace and frequency of such coverage. The increasing regularity of droughts, heat waves, wildfires, and deadly floods can remind us that our planet is rapidly warming and that disaster, in many ways, is already upon us—but also, not entirely." (Italics added by me.)
Has our world not become a panoply of "suffusive emergencies," a world in which "disaster, in many ways, is already upon us - but also, not entirely?" Not only climate change but also right-wing authoritarianism (fascism) led in the U.S. by Evangelicals and Catholic zealots, American gun violence, senseless mass shootings, triumphant capitalism, nationalism, and individual and structural racism. Or am I just an old, whining, sniveling, Lefty Chicken Little, pissing and moaning about the sky falling, a chronic cynic and pessimist? Am I falling for gaslighting by the liberal elites, left-wing politicians, scientists, academics, and the news media? Or maybe I'm just experiencing geriatric depression, a common enough mental illness in old coots thinking things were a lot better in the old days. Depression could account for the belief that disaster 'is already upon us'; anxiety for the belief 'but also not entirely.' And that ineradicable sense of complicity, guilt, shame, responsibility, stupidity, vanality.
I did not elevate my mood by watching two programs on Oppenheimer and the Manhattan Project this afternoon and evening. The first was on the streaming service OVID, a 2023 discussion sponsored b the Museum of Jewish Heritage between Kai Bird, one of the authors of American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer and Joseph Kanon, author of the novel Los Alamos. The second was a 1980 documentary on the Criterion Channel titled The Day After Trinity. The documentary reminded me of my Uncle Bud Healy and Aunt Mary living and working at Los Alamos and of the possibility that my father might be called upon to be a part of an invasion force on the Japanese home islands after Okinawa was secured. It reminded me too that the bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were less destructive by a factor of thousands than the hydrogen bombs that are available today and the fission bombs possessed by the United States, Russia, China, the UK, France, Israel, India, Pakistan, and North Korea. And probably soon Iran. How confident can any rational human being be that none of these weapons will be deployed, accidentally or on purpose? How confident can we be that Russia will not deploy one or more of its 'tactical' nuclear weapons in Ukraine? It has been 78 years since Hiroshima and Nagasaki. How long will the world's luck hold?
Both the documentary and the discussion also reminded me of the tremendous power of the military-industrial complex that Dwight Eisenhower warned against in his 1961 Farewell Address to the nation, and of the ever-present right-wing interests within the U.S. Oppenheimer was crucified for striving to get international controls over nuclear weapons, i.e., urging a diminishment of American unfettered sovereignty in favor of what was feared as "one world government," perhaps now as "globalism." And all that I have read and watched since last Friday's viewing of Oppenheimer reminds me that Oppenheimer was a Jew and many of his friends, colleagues (and family members, of course) were Jews and communists, or socialists, 'pink if not Red.' It's hard not to believe that anti-Semitism played a role in his downfall even in a perverse way since Lewis Strauss who engineered his downfall was an observant Jew offended by Oppenheimer's secularism and disdain for Jewish religiosity.
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