assessment of how much less of “the people’s business” is likely to be done in a more divided Congress, in which the Republicans control the House.
After the election, whatever the results, we already knew that Obama would move even more toward “the center,” even if for decades the so-called center has been drifting rightward without ever settling on a home; that he would try to “work with” the Republicans; that this would prove the usual jokes; and that the election, however breathlessly reported as a Republican triumph or Tea Party miracle (or anything else), would essentially be a gum- it-up-more event. Though none of the voluble prognosticators and interpreters you’ll listen to or read are likely to say so, those right-wing fundraisers and outside interest groups pouring money into Tea Party candidates, angry maniacs, dopes, and whoever else is on the landscape undoubtedly could care less. Yes, a Congress that gave them everything they wanted on a proverbial silver platter would be a wonder, but gum-it-up works pretty darn well, too. For most Americans, a Washington in gridlock in a moment of roiling national crisis may be nothing to write home about, but for those fundraisers and outside interest groups, it only guarantees more manna from heaven.
And the good news, as far as they are concerned, is that the state that matters, the national security, war-making one, hardly needs Congress at all, or rather knows that no Congress will ever vote “no” to moneys for such matters. Meanwhile, the media will begin cranking up for an even more expensive Election 2012. Long before this election season came to a close, my hometown paper was already sporting its first pieces with headlines like “Looking Ahead to the 2012 Race” and beginning to handicap the presidential run to come. (“Although [President Obama] will not say so, there is at least a plausible argument that he might be better off if [the Democrats] lose… [I]f Republicans capture Congress, Mr. Obama will finally have a foil heading toward his own re-election battle in 2012.”)
Whether the country I once wanted to represent was ever there in the form I imagined is a question I’ll leave to the historians. What I can say is that it’s sure not there now.
The Nuclear Story That Refuses to Go Away
Even though we promptly dubbed the site of the 9/11 attacks in New York City “Ground Zero”—once a term reserved for an atomic blast—Americans have never really come to grips either with the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki or with the nuclear age that they ushered in. There can be no question that, as the big bang that might end it all, the atomic bomb haunted Cold War America. In those years, while the young (myself included) watched endless versions of nuclear disaster transmuted into B-horror films, the grown-ups who ran our world went on a vast shopping spree for world-ending weaponry, building nuclear arsenals that came to number in the tens of thousands.
When the Cold War finally ended with the Soviet Union’s quite peaceful collapse, however, a nuclear “peace dividend” never quite arrived. The arsenals of the former superpower adversaries remained quietly in place, drawn down but strangely untouched, awaiting a new mission, while just beyond sight, the knowledge of the making of such weapons spread to other countries ready to launch their own threatening mini–Cold Wars.
Even fifty years after that first bomb went off over the Aioi Bridge in Hiroshima, it still proved impossible in the United States to agree upon a nuclear creation tale. Was August 6, 1945, the heroic ending to a global war or the horrific beginning of a new age? The
Still, for people of a certain age like me, Hiroshima is where it all began. So I would like to try, once again, to lay out the pieces of a nuclear story that none of us, it seems, can yet quite tell.
In my story, there are three characters and no dialogue. There is my father, who volunteered at age thirty- five for the Army Air Corps, immediately after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. He fought in Burma, was painfully silent on his wartime experiences, and died on Pearl Harbor Day in 1983. Then there’s me, growing up in a world in which my father’s war was glorified everywhere, in which my play fantasies in any park included mowing down Japanese soldiers—but whose nightmares were of nuclear destruction. Finally, there is a Japanese boy whose name and fate are unknown to me.
This is a story of multiple silences. The first of those, the silence of my father, was once no barrier to the stories I told myself. If anything, his silence enhanced them, since in the 1950s male silence seemed a heroic attribute (and perhaps it was, though hardly in the way I imagined at the time). Sitting in the dark with him then at any World War II movie was enough for me.
As it turned out though, the only part of his war I possessed was its final act, and around this too, there grew a puzzling silence. The very idea of nuclear destruction seemed not to touch him. Like other schoolchildren, I went through nuclear-attack drills with sirens howling outside, while—I had no doubt—he continued to work unfazed in his office. It was I who watched the irradiated ants and nuclearized monsters of our teen-screen life stomp the Earth. It was I who went to the French film
On his erstwhile enemies, however, my father was not silent. He hated the Japanese with a war-bred passion. They had, he told me, “done things” that could not be discussed to “boys” he had known. Subsequent history—the amicable American occupation of Japan or the emergence of that defeated land as an ally—did not seem to touch him. His hatred of all things Japanese was not a ruling passion of my childhood only because Japan was so absent from our lives. There was nothing Japanese in our house (one did not buy their products), we avoided the only Japanese restaurant in our part of town, and no Japanese ever came to visit. Even the evil Japanese I saw in war movies, who might sneeringly hiss, “I was educated in your University of Southern California” before they met their suicidal fates were, I now know, regularly played by non-Japanese actors.
In the end, I followed my own path to Hiroshima, drawn perhaps to the world my father so vehemently rejected. In 1979, as an editor, I published
To make a story thus far would seem relatively simple. Two generations face each other across the chasm of a war and an act that divided them. It is the story we all know. And yet, there is my third character and third silence—the Japanese boy who drifted into my consciousness after an absence of almost four decades only a few years ago. I no longer remember how he and I were put in contact sometime in the mid-1950s. Like me, my Japanese pen pal must have been eleven or twelve years old. If we exchanged photos, I have no memory of his face, nor does a name come to mind. If I can remember half-jokingly writing my own address at that age (“New York City, New York, USA, Planet Earth, the Solar System, the Galaxy, the Universe”), I can’t remember writing his. I already knew by then that a place called Albany was the capital of New York State, but New York City still seemed to me the center of the world. In many ways, I wasn’t wrong.
Even if he lived in Tokyo, my Japanese pen pal could have had no such illusions. Like me, he had undoubtedly been born during World War II. Perhaps in his first year of life he had been evacuated from one of Japan’s charred cities. For him, that disastrous war would not have been a memory. If he had gone to the movies with his father in the 1950s, he might have seen
I have a faint memory of the feel of his letters; a crinkly thinness undoubtedly meant to save infinitesimal amounts of weight (and so, money). We wrote, of course, in English, for much of the planet, if not the solar- system-galaxy-universe, was beginning to operate in that universal language that seemed to radiate from my home city to the world like the rays of the sun. But what I most remember are the exotic-looking stamps that arrived on (or in) his letters. For I was, with my father, an avid stamp collector. On Sunday afternoons, my father and I prepared and mounted our stamps, consulted our
