What they left out of the Titan Missile Museum was in plain sight in Hiroshima. Not a sound track with a politically balanced point of view. Just the rest of the facts, those that lie beyond suspension systems and fuel capacity. A missile museum, it seems to me, ought to be horrifying. It had better shake us, if only for a day, out of the illusion of predictability and control that cradles the whole of our quotidian lives. Most of us--nearly all, I would say--live by this illusion. We walk through our days with our minds on schedule--work, kids, getting the roof patched before the rainy season. We do not live as though literally everything we have, including a history and a future, could be erased by two keys turning simultaneously in a lock.
How could we? How even to pay our monthly bills, if we held in mind the fact that we are camped on top of a technological powder keg? Or to use Carl Sagan's more eloquent analogy: we are all locked together in a room filled with gasoline vapors, insisting that because they have two hundred matches, we won't be safe until we have three hundred.
The Cold War is widely supposed to have ended. But preparations for nuclear war have not ended. The Titan museum's orientation film is still telling the story we have heard so many times that it sounds, like all ultra-familiar stories, true. The story is that they would gladly drop bombs on us, if they weren't so scared by the sheer toughness of our big missiles. They are the aggressors. We are practicing "a commitment to deterrence."
Imagine you have never heard that story before. Look it in the eye and see what it is. How do strategic-games trophies and Titan-missile golf shirts stack up against a charred eyelet petticoat and handfuls of hair? The United States is the only nation that has ever used an atomic bomb. Dropped it, on men and women and schoolchildren and gardens and pets and museums, two whole cities of quotidian life. We did it, the story goes, to hasten the end of the war and bring our soldiers home. Not such an obvious choice for Oshita-chan. "To protect the rights and freedoms we enjoy" is a grotesque euphemism. Every nuclear weapon ever constructed was built for the purpose of ending life, in a manner so horrific it is nearly impossible to contemplate. And U.S. nuclear science has moved steadily and firmly, from the moment of its birth, toward first-strike capacity.
If the Titan in Green Valley had ever been allowed to do the job for which it was designed, the fire storm wouldn't have ended a world away. Surely all of us, even missile docent Dave, understand that. Why, then, were we all so polite about avoiding the obvious questions? How is it that a waving flag can create an electromagnetic no-back-talk zone? In 1994, half a century after the bombing of Hiroshima, we spent $150 billion on the business and technology of war--nearly a tenth of it specifically on nuclear-weapons systems. Any talk of closing down a military base raises defensive and reverent ire, no matter how wasteful an installment it might be. And yet, public debate dickers and rages over our obligation to fund the welfare system--a contribution of about $25 a year from each taxpayer on average, for keeping the poorest among us alive. How can we haggle over the size of this meager life preserver, while shiploads of money for death sail by unchallenged? What religion of humankind could bless the travesty that is the U.S. federal budget?
Why did I not scream at the top of my lungs down in that hole?
I didn't, so I'll have to do it now, to anyone with the power to legislate or listen: one match in a gasoline-filled room is too many. I don't care a fig who is holding it.
I donned the hard hat and entered the belly of the beast, and I came away with the feeling of something poisonous on my skin. The specter of that beast could paralyze a person with despair. But only if you accept it as inevitable. And it's only inevitable if you are too paralyzed with despair to talk back. If a missile museum can do no more than stop up our mouths, with either patriotic silence or desperation, it's a monument the living can't afford. I say slam its doors for good. Tip a cement truck to the silo's gullet and seal in the evil pharaoh. If humanity survives long enough to understand what he really was, they can dig him up and put on display the grandiose depravity of the twentieth century.
I left, drove down into the innocent palm-shaded condominiums of Green Valley, and then, unexpectedly, headed up the other side of the valley into the mountains. When I reached the plateau of junipers and oaks I pulled off the road, hiked into the woods, and sat for a long time on a boulder in the middle of a creek. Water flowed away from me on either side. A canopy of sycamore leaves whispered above my head, while they waited for night, the close of one more day in which the world did not end.
In a poem called "Trinity," Sy Margaret Baldwin explained why she would never go down to the site of the first atomic-bomb explosion, which is opened to the public every year:
...I would come face to face with my sorrow, I
would feel hope slipping from me and be afraid
the changed earth would turn over and speak
the truth to the thin black ribbons of my ribs.
JABBERWOCKY
Once upon a time, a passing stranger sent me into exile. I was downtown in front of the Federal Building with a small crowd assembled to protest war in the Persian Gulf; he was in a black Ford pickup. As the truck roared by he leaned most of his upper body out the window to give me a better view of his finger, and he screamed, "Hey, bitch, love it or leave it!"
So I left.
He wasn't the first to give me that instruction; I've heard it since I was a nineteen-year-old in a scary barbershop haircut. Now I was thirty-four, mother of a child, with a decent reputation and pretty good hair. Why start listening now? I can only say he was finally one too many. I was on the verge of having a special kind of nervous breakdown, in which a person stalks through a Kmart parking lot ripping yellow ribbons off car antennas.
I realize that would have been abridging other people's right to free expression. What was driving me crazy was that very term "right to free expression," and how it was being applied in a nation at war. We were supposed to behave as though we had refrigerators for brains. Open, shove in a slab of baloney, close, stay cool. No questions. Our leaders told us this was a surgical war. Very clean. The language of the event was a perfect construct of nonmeaning. "Delivering the ordnance," they called it on the nightly news, which sounds nearly friendly..."Why, here is your ordnance, friends, just sign on the line." "Deliver the ordnance" means "Drop the bomb."
But we bought the goods, or we kept our mouths shut. If we felt disturbed by the idea of pulverizing civilizations as the best way to settle our differences--or had trouble explaining that to our kids as adult behavior--we weren't talking about it. Typically, if I raised the debate, I was advised that if I liked Saddam so much I could go live in Iraq. As a matter of fact I didn't like Saddam, or the government of Kuwait. The two countries appeared practically indistinguishable; I doubt if many Americans could have guessed, a few years earlier (as we flooded Iraq with military aid), which one would turn out to be the Evil Empire, and which would require us to rush to its defense in the name of democracy. If democracy were really an issue we considered when going into that war, Iraq might have come out a nose ahead, Kuwait being a monarchy in which women held rights approximately equal to those of livestock. (Since the war, women's status in Kuwait has actually declined.) But the level of discourse allowed on this subject was "We're gonna kick butt." A shadow of doubt was viewed as treason.
I'm lucky enough to have a job that will follow me anywhere, so I left. I could contemplate from a distance these words on patriotism, written by the wise Garry Wills: "Love of one's country should be like love of one's spouse--a give-and-take criticism and affection. Although it is hoped one prefers one's spouse to other people...one does not prove that one loves one's wife by battering other women."
Give-and-take criticism and affection, out the window. And the battery was severe. Upon moving to Spain I read in the papers what was common knowledge, apparently, everywhere but in the U.S.: from the first night onward we bombed Iraqis relentlessly in their homes, killing thousands of civilians every d
ay. Within months, more than 250,000 would be dead--most of them children--because of bombed-out water and sewer systems, hospitals with no antibiotics, hospitals with no roofs. To my horror I read that infections of hands and feet were rampant among Iraqi children, because of bombing debris, and the only available treatment was amputation. It had been an air war on civilians. The Commission of Inquiry for the International War Crimes Tribunal is still compiling the gruesome list of what the United States bombed in Iraq: all the country's major dams and most of its drinking water facilities; enough sewage treatment facilities to contaminate the Tigris River with waterborne killers; virtually all communications systems, leaving civilians unwarned of danger and unable to get help; civilian cars, buses, and taxis; 139 auto and railway bridges; food-processing, storage, and distribution systems; 100 percent of irrigation systems; wheat and grain fields (with incendiary bombs); 28 civilian hospitals and 52 community health centers; clothing factories; a cosmetics factory; an infant formula factory; 56 mosques; more than 600 schools. This was our surgical war.
Soon after the bombing ended, Ramsey Clark wrote a book called The Fire This Time, a meticulously researched account of the many ways the U.S. violated the Geneva Convention and perpetrated crimes against civilians in the Persian Gulf War. Clark, as a former U.S. Attorney General, had once been appointed trustee of the nation's conscience. Now he asked us to reckon with some awful responsibilities. But he encountered a truly American form of censorship: free enterprise in the hands of a monkey called See No Evil. His manuscript was rejected by eleven publishers--every major New York house. The editors did not turn it down for lack of merit, they said, but on grounds that it wouldn't be popular. (At length it was released by a small publisher called Thunder's Mouth; hurray for the alternative presses.)
No such hard luck for the memoirs of generals or celebrities, or O. J. Simpson's thoughts from jail while awaiting his verdict. The publisher of the latter (Little, Brown) claimed no moral qualms about providing a forum for Simpson at a time when he already commanded more media attention than has ever been held, probably, by any human being on the planet. The first printing was half a million copies.
This is a spooky proposition: an information industry that narrows down what we'll get to read and know about, mainly on the basis of how eagerly we'll lap it up. Producers and publishers who make these choices seem inclined, if confronted, to throw up their hands and exclaim, "I can't help it if that's what the people want!" A mother could say the same while feeding her baby nothing but jelly beans day after day; so could a physician who administers morphine for head colds. Both would be convicted of criminal neglect. Why is there no Hippocratic Oath for the professionals who service our intellects? Why is it that I knew, without wanting to, every possible thing about a figure skater who got whacked on the leg with a pipe--a melodrama that in the long run, let's face it, is utterly without consequence to anyone but the whackers and the whackee--but I had to go far out of my way to dig up the recent historical events that led to anarchy in Somalia and Haiti? (I learned, it's worth noting, that the U.S. did embarrassing things in both places.) News stations will move heaven and earth to get their own reporters into the likes of California vs. O. J. Simpson, or backstage with Tonya Harding, but not into hearings on the Clean Air Act. Producers will blame consumers, but blame is hardly the point if we are merrily dying of ignorance, and killing others with our apathy. Few U.S. citizens are aware, for example, that our government has routinely engineered assassinations of democratically elected heads of state in places like Chile and Guatemala, and replaced them with such monstrous confederates as Augusto Pinochet and Castillo Armas. Why do those dictators' names fail even to ring a bell in most red-blooded American heads? Possibly because our heads are too crowded with names like O. J. and Tonya. The guilt for that may not rest entirely with the producers or the consumers, but the crime has nevertheless occurred. To buy or to sell information as nothing more than a consumer product, like soda pop, is surely wrong. Marketed in that way, information's principal attribute must be universal palatability.
This is not to say we only get to tune in to happy news--there are wrecks and murders galore. But it's information that corroborates a certain narrow view of the world and our place in it. Exhaustive reports of rare, bizarre behaviors among the wealthy support the myth that violent crime is a random, unpreventable disaster, and obscure the blunt truth that most crime is caused by poverty. There's not much in the news to remind us, either, that poverty is a problem we could decently address, as all other industrialized countries have done. The safest marketing technique is to dispense with historical analysis, accountability, and even--apparently--critical thought.
When the Smithsonian deferred to what it called "public pressure" and canceled an exhibit on the historical use of the atomic bomb in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Smithsonian Secretary I. Michael Heyman explained, "Veterans and their families were expecting, and rightly so, that the nation would honor and commemorate their valor and sacrifice. They were not looking for analysis, and, frankly, we did not give enough thought to the intense feeling that such analysis would evoke." Analysis in that case meant the most elementary connection between cause and effect: what happens when the Ordnance gets Delivered.
As a member of that all-important public, I'd like to state for the record that I'm offended. Give me the chance and I'll spend my consumer dollar on the story that relates to what kind of shape the world will be in fifty years from now. I'll choose analysis, every time, over placebo news and empty salve for my patriotic ego. I'm offended by the presumption that my honor as a citizen will crumple unless I'm protected from knowledge of my country's mistakes. I'm made of sturdier stuff than that, and I imagine, if he really thought about it, so is that guy who leaned out of a truck to give me the finger. What kind of love is patriotism, if it evaporates in the face of uncomfortable truths? What kind of honor sits quietly by while a nation's conscience flies south for a long, long winter?
Artists are as guilty as anyone in the conspiracy of self-censorship, if they succumb to the lure of producing only what's sure to sell. The good ones don't, and might still sell anyway, for humans have long accepted subconsciously that good art won't always, so to speak, match the sofa. "Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the race," Percy Shelley said. They are also its margin of safety, like the canaries that used to be carried into mines because of their sensitivity to toxic gases; their silence can be taken as a sign of imminent danger.
The artist's maverick responsibility is sometimes to sugarcoat the bitter pill and slip it down our gullet, telling us what we didn't think we wanted to know. But in the U.S. we're establishing a modern tradition of tarpapering our messengers. The one who delivers the bitter pill, whether the vehicle is a war-crime documentary or a love story, is apt to be dismissed as a "political artist."
It's a Jabberwockish sort of label, both dreaded and perplexing. Technically the term "political" refers to campaigns, governments, and public institutions. But Police Academy was not called political. Barry Lopez is called political, and he writes about dying ecosystems and great blue herons and wolves, for heaven's sake. It took me years to work out what it is that earns this scalding label for an artist or an act.
Now I know, and this is how I know: during the Gulf War some young friends of mine wanted to set up a table in the shopping mall and hand out information about the less cheerful aspects of the war. The administrators of the mall refused permission. My friends contended, "But you let people hand out yellow ribbons and flags and 'We kick butt' bumper stickers!" The mall administrators explained their charter forbids anything political. "Handing out yellow ribbons is public service," they said, "but what you want to do is political."
Now you know. This subterfuge use of the word "political," which doesn't show up in my Random House Unabridged, means only that a thing runs counter to prevailing assumptions. If 60 percent of us support the war, then the expressions of the other 40 percent are political--and c
an be disallowed in some contexts for that reason alone. The really bad news is that the charter of the shopping mall seems to be standing in as a national artistic standard. Cultural workers in the U.S. are prone to be bound and gagged by a dread of being called political, for that word implies the art is not quite pure. Real art, the story goes, does not endorse a point of view. This is utter nonsense, of course (try to imagine a story or a painting with no point of view), and also the most thorough and invisible form of censorship I've ever encountered. When I'm interviewed about writing, I spend a good deal of time defending the possibility that such things as environmental ruin, child abuse, or the hypocrisy of U.S. immigration policy are appropriate subjects for a novel. I keep waiting for the interviewer to bring up art things, like voice and metaphor; usually I'm still waiting for that when the cows come home.
In rural Greece some people believe that if you drink very cold water on a very hot day, you will die; here, we have that kind of superstition about mixing art with conscience. It's a quaintly provincial belief that fades out fast at our borders. Most of the rest of the world considers social criticism to be, absolutely, the most legitimate domain of art. If you think I'm overstating this, look who's been winning Nobel Prizes in literature for the last ninety years:
Nadine Gordimer, who has spent her life writing against racism and apartheid in South Africa. Joseph Brodsky, who spent some years in Siberia because of his criticism of Soviet society. Wole Soyinka, who has also logged time in jail because of his criticisms of colonialism in Africa. Gabriel Garcia Marquez, who is possibly the most gifted social critic in a whole continent of social-critic-writers. Czeslaw Milosz, who was active in the anti-Nazi underground and whose poetry is thoroughly ideological. Pablo Neruda, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Miguel Asturias, Thomas Mann, George Bernard Shaw.