Ontological Atoms

[Steelhead]

It being a sunny day in Seattle, Cal, having nowhere to go in his Gore-tex
suit, ponders the questions of our time:

>What is it about
>Hiroshima (let's face it, you hear very little about Nagasaki) that is so
>horrible? Don't get me wrong: when I read about or see the pictures of
>people stumbling blindly from the flames, strips of flesh hanging from
>their bodies, I shudder with a deep fear & revulsion that must be horror.

Well, you heard about Nagasaki from me, didn't cha, Cal? My line of thought
on this is I guess traditional, if not archaic, which is strange because I
almost invariably gravitate toward the unconventional. Speaking of
unconvential....

Dresden is an old story, a revenge play: horrid, bloody, and evil. It is
something each generation seems to act out with increasing ferocity.  Read
Marlowe's Tamberlane, or Thucydides and Herodotus, or Diaz's on the
Conquest of the New World or Black Elk's account of Wounded Knee or
journals from the Carcasonne. Dresden was the old Depravity written on a
majestic scale.

Hiroshima was something new. In a flash, in a microsecond, everything had
changed.   All our old fears were morphed and new titanic ones raised in
their place. Shadow gods, the size of mushroom clouds, towering over the
planet, infecting our dreams and our waking selves.

The difference between Dresden and Hiroshima resides in the psychic powers
unleashed from the Bomb. It burned its way into the collective unconscious
and changed it forever. In one instant...the species was no longer the
same.

And what about Nagasaki? Nagasaki was history repeating itself, quickly,
establishing a pattern, Death come back in a flash, come back to make a
point...the point being: I will not go away, Ever. A-and ever since that
flash haunts us, the distinct shape of the cloud, the infinite
reverberations.

Add to that the concept of the Two Deaths, as sketched out in Jonathon
Schell's otherwise silly book:  The Fate of the Earth.  The idea being:
Atomic weapons have the power not only to kill individuals, but to
anihilate the species...incenerate the genetic link between the past and
the future. Remember the concept of the King's Two Bodies? One temporal,
one eternal or mythic? Well, Hiroshima was the final nail in that idea.
The A-Bomb was ontogeny telling phylogeny: Fuck you: I don't have to
recapituate any more...I can crush you in an instant. Just-like-that!

>But why pick Hiroshima as "the most horriblke act of war?" I'm curious.
>Let's toss this one around a bit, folks: I know of no brighter group of
>people on the Internet that the pynchon-l crowd, so let's get to the meat
>(tofu, for any vegetarians out there) of this one.
>
Hiroshima was not the most horrible act of war. Hiroshima was a
technological inevitability brought to you by well-meaning and guilt-ridden
individuals.

The most horrible act of war? How about Treblinka, Bergen-Belsen, Dachau,
Auschwitz...How about the use of Docktors to perfect a killing machine, a
system of genocide, precisely geared for the extinction of a life force, of
a language, of a culture. If we're voting on these things, they'd get mine.

Numbly,


Steelhead