Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair
I came of age in a simpler time. The Maine mill town of my youth produced textiles, shoes, and lumber. There were dozens of dairy farms, vegetable/ fruit growers, and a poultry operation or two. The union movement, in the aftermath of World War Two had finally penetrated the steely resistance of the local mill owners. Generally one wage earner could support a family. Dairy farmers could afford paint on the barn, new tractors, and sent their kids to college “on the milk check.”
I know, I know…..this is pointless: a distractive nostalgia-thon–the hallucinatory meanderings of a demyelinating mind. Even if true, what could possibly be the point of dredging up such fantastical/ “so-yesterday” notions. And while that’s a valid point, perhaps this aging clod-hopper could be granted some charitable slack.
Antonio Gramsci famously observed in a similarly turbulent time last century, “The old world is dying, and a new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.”
I was pushed out insensible into the world mere weeks after the United States loosed “Little Boy” and “Fat Man” on the civilian populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki— August 6th, (and 9th) 1945. President Truman, in deciding to use the nukes was strategically motivated by preparing for a Cold War with the Soviet Union. “ ‘If it explodes as I think it will I’ll certainly have a hammer on those boys,’ Truman is reported to have said before the bomb was tested, apparently referring to the leaders in the Kremlin.” (“Christian Science Monitor,” July 31, 1995) (See also “The Decision to use the Atomic Bomb,” Gar Alperovitz, 1995)
When, in 1995, the Smithsonoian National Air and Space Museum proposed an exhibit featuring Little Boy’s delivery system, the refurbished B-29 Enola Gay, a “controversy” ensued. Elements from the historical record, some of which having been unearthed by Alperovitz’s research, were to have been included. But the Air Force and the American Legion were staunchly opposed. Bringing “national attention” to such “long-standing academic and political issues” proved to be institutionally impossible, and the exhibit was cancelled with museum director Martin O. Harwitt forced to resign.
Harwitt later observed, “The dispute was not simply about the atomic bomb. Rather the dispute was sometimes a symbolic issue in a ‘culture war’ in which many Americans lumped together the seeming decline in American power (sic), the difficulties of the domestic economy, the threats in world trade and especially Japan’s successes, the loss domestic jobs, and even changes in American gender roles and shifts in the American family…. The bomb, representing the end of World War II and suggesting the height of American power was to be celebrated….. Those who in any way questioned the bomb’s use were, in this emotional framework, the enemies of America.”
This “culture war” has been endlessly replayed in the ongoing, desperate pursuit of a reanimation of our tragically down-slope empire. The reclamation of “greatness” apparently demands unquestioning resort to lethal force preferably using weaponry made-in-the-USA. If today’s Boeing Corporation has quality-control issues with its passenger planes, its GBU-39 precision-guided glide bomb has performed flawlessly in Gaza. (See “New York Times,” 6/6/24) No school complex or tent city is immune to its considerable charms, its “blast radius” in “servicing the target” and “force-projection.”
Bloodless terms, these——used by clinicians in the theater of mayhem and murder called “statecraft.”
The population of the United States, hemmed in by its unalterable pre-modern/ minority-rule constitution (see: anything by Dan Lazare) is left to gape at the cruel spectacle inflicted domestically and abroad—— distracted by the quadrennial extravaganza of presidential campaign media advertising hawking the current Tweedle Dee, Tweedle Dum (and Tweedle Dummer).
When I was a boy there was a political party— what William Greider categorized as one of several “mediating institutions” that, however imperfectly, sometimes represented the economic interests of the working class, farmers, and the other “little people.” Slick Willie Clinton, Al Gore, Joe Lieberman, Joe Biden and other members of the so-called Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) passed NAFTA, a “crime bill,” and began the dark work of dismembering the 20th century Democratic Party, the union movement (and the “Middle East”).
Whatever was good in the world I faintly remember was the product of a rascal public’s tireless struggle against oligarchy— the Knights of Labor, the Anti-Imperialist League, the Grange, the Populists/Socialists and many other outfits’ work now long forgotten. That old world is all but dead. The one that struggles to be born makes a virtue of lethality and greed.
And despite the cloying smiles and glitzy distractive hype, we live in a time of monsters.
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