Ontological Atoms

[jporter]

>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

Ah, no.

"Technological inevitabilities"

"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!"

"It burned its way into the collective unconsciousand changed it forever.
In one instant...the species was no longer the same."

The literary references cited above notwithstanding,this demonization is
not supported by common sense. The banality of the average Shuman the Human
(and that set includes us all: I'm sure Einstein had dingleberries, just
like you) being what it is, in combination with "the way things have gone"
are explanation enough for all that has transpired. There is no need to
invoke "inevitabilities" or the Oedipal anxieties of "Ontogeny telling
phylogeny"...to provide an explanation. Randomness is tough to deal with.

Was it Maxwell who said: "In the absense of a demon, man will invent one-
usually in his own image...?" Or was that Norbert Weiner.

Cheers, jp