Weekend Update: Tulsa Turndown and Covid News

"Rarely has a single campaign rally drawn as much hype as the one President Donald Trump held Saturday night at the BOK Center in Tulsa, Oklahoma—a relaunch of his reelection bid that, according to the president himself, more than 1 million people had requested tickets to attend" writes Russell Berman in the Atlantic.  "Rarely has a presidential event endangered the public health of the community it was held in. And rarely has a spotty crowd made such a statement. It turns out Oklahomans might care more about their own health than the president does."

Gee, did anyone suggest this might happen?  Let's see...In my Weekend Update of June 13 I wrote: "There are still the AlwaysTrumpers, the reliable one-third, but it's not clear how reliable they are anymore. We will see if they are really insane enough to crowd into covid pits to shout and spit in Tulsa, where infections are rising fast, or even in Jacksonville. What if the tickets aren't actually going like hotcakes in Tulsa, and what if Trump suddenly realizes that for an hour or more he'll be facing thousands of possibly infected people screaming at him?"

Now we know the answer to those questions.  In the battle between the Germaphobe-in-Chief vs. the Narcissist-in-Chief, the Narcissist won.  But the AlwaysTrumpers didn't show in the usual numbers-- estimates have the arena anywhere from a third to a half from the capacity of 19,000 [Update: Tulsa Fire Marshal estimates the crowd at 6,200, which is a third of capacity, or two-thirds empty.  The Trump campaign says it was 12,000.], and the overflow outdoor venue had so few attendees that speeches by Trump and Pence were cancelled.  Of course we don't know how many of those who might have attended changed their minds because of the covid crisis.  But normally people don't miss a chance to see a President, and a lot of people took a pass on this one. (The actual attendance has really nothing to do with any fake reservations made online which may have affected only the campaign's prior estimates.)

Those who did show bunched together and though some wore masks, others immediately threw away the ones they were dutifully given.  Which suggests another explanation: that the true number of diehard AlwaysTrumpers is fewer than assumed.

That business of the outdoor arena being the overflow venue is very telling. If they had that venue available, why didn't they hold the main event there?  It would have mitigated somewhat against the risk of spreading the virus.  People can make nearly as much noise outdoors as in an echoing indoor arena.  That is, if they show up, which apparently the Trump campaign believed they would.

The reason has to be that the indoor arena was an in-your-face statement that the virus and people who could contract it don't matter. Virus, what virus? Trump made fun of it in his remarks.  But the very selection of the indoor venue was a vicious statement. It is the superspreader of denial.

A lot more happened this week that added up to administration racism, corruption and the ongoing attempt to hollow out and destroy the federal government, and the states besides. Each week gets more grotesque than the last.  But in this update I'm sticking to virus news.

Global infections are at record highs, and in the US they are climbing to the highest previous point of spring.  No one doubts they will exceed prior levels. Not long ago the headline was that half the states were "re-opening." Now the headline is that at least half the states are seeing big increases in infections.

It is now generally concluded that reopening and group activities on Memorial Day weekend and after have accelerated infections and hospitalizations. It's also widely concluded that at least so far, the protests after George Floyd's murder did not contribute to greatly increasing infections, possibly because they were outdoors and the majority of protesters wore masks.

It's also clear that hot weather has done little or nothing to slow down the virus, since prominent among the virus hot spots are the hot states of Florida, Arizona, Texas, southern California and Oklahoma.

There's more consensus on risk factors.  The virus most easily transmits, current thinking goes, when people are together for hours indoors without masks and without physical distancing, especially if they are breathing harder--shouting, singing, dancing, etc.  So apart from nursing homes, crowded factory floors, and overcrowded migrant housing, as well as repeated exposure to an infected member of the household, infections have been traced back to large social activities in homes and other rooms (birthdays, funerals, weddings), and to bars and nightclubs (30 members of the national champion LSU football team were infected as a result of an evening at a nighclub.)

The new clusters of infections seem to be taking place among young people, possibly linked to those social settings, and not boding real well for reopening colleges.

Wearing a mask, a face covering, is becoming the most recommended deterrent to infection, along with physical distancing.  Catching the virus from surfaces is thought to be less likely.

Naturally people are interested in any scientific study but it's best to get beyond the headlines.  There were lots of stories last week about a study showing that blood types are a factor in severity.  But the difference turns out to be negligible.  Other factors are more important.  And while more is being learned, most of the mysteries of this mysterious virus are still, you know, mysterious.

And there is this disquieting column in the Washington Post by Erin Blakemore     about the claims made by a gerontologist and a public health expert at the CDC claiming "that ageist perceptions of seniors as helpless and expendable affect how they’re cared for, and how many of them die of covid-19, the disease caused by the new coronavirus."

 This brief column links to the article by these doctors that outlines the problems and the possible solutions.  But I find myself staring at the two words I highlighted: helpless and expendable.  And how, consciously or not, they may go together.  As well as the assumption that seniors are both.

Nationally some 80% of covid deaths are of Americans over 65.  Here in Humboldt County it's been 100%--although I believe at least 2 if not all 4 were in their 90s.  Our numbers are too small to mean anything, but I can't help  noticing anyway that my age group--the 70s--has by far the fewest cases of known infection, only 3.  Yet the 60s had the most cases until recently, and now comes a close second to the age group with the largest number, the 30s.  With only 110 cases total since the pandemic was identified, the age group numbers vary little really--they just look different on a bar graph.  Still, if there is a reason for the 70s being the lowest I can't think what it is.  But of course I'll take it.

Juneteenth

It's Kamala

Update 6/18: Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota has withdrawn her name from consideration for Dem v.p.  She reportedly told presidential candidate Biden that he should choose a woman of color as his running mate. Senator Klobuchar repeated all this in a TV interview Thursday evening.  With Juneteenth tomorrow, it will be interesting to see if Senator Warren feels the need to do the same.  Meanwhile, a new poll finds "59% of Democratic primary voters believe having a woman of color as Joe Biden’s running mate would increase the ticket’s chances of victory."

The din of pointless stories on presidential candidate Joe Biden's choice of a vice-presidential running mate is getting louder but no more informative. Because nobody knows anything.

But if you actually listen to what Biden has said on the subject, there is at this point still only one likely choice: Senator Kamala Harris.  And I will be beyond surprised if, barring some problem in the vetting, it isn't her.

Biden has said three relevant things.  In direct response to questions about his v.p. he's said that his choice has to be ready to assume presidential responsibilities immediately, and that the person has to be "simpatico."

Biden's third relevant statement is that he hopes to be the transition to a new generation of leaders.

Senator Harris ran for President and participated in presidential debates, showing her grasp of the issues a President will face.  Since the murder of George Floyd, pundits suggest a black woman is the most likely choice.  Other black women mentioned have different and relevant experience, and only Susan Rice has actually been involved in presidential decision-making.  But experience with national issues as a senator, familiarity with the ways of the national media, visibility as a presidential candidate and the competency Senator Harris displayed in the debates all count heavily in her favor.   Someone thrust into the Presidency must have the immediate confidence of the public.  Senator Harris has a national presence, without being overexposed.

And unlike several if not all of the black women on everybody's short list, Joe Biden already knows her.  They share deep bonds through Biden's beloved son Bo.  Unless there is some massively hidden antipathy and mistrust, on this criterion alone, Senator Harris is the clear choice.

And Kamala Harris is a member of that next generation.  She looks it, she speaks it.  She is both familiar and "new," especially since she's been keeping a low profile lately.  Her choice can bring excitement to the ticket, and so can she as a campaigner.

I wrote previously that Senator Elizabeth Warren or Senator Harris were the most likely choices at this point.  Despite Senator Warren's recent visibility--and a spate of stories suggesting she is the frontrunner for v.p.--I doubt that it will be her.  She is a more divisive choice, with strong adherents who claim Biden would win easily with her, and strong detractors who say Biden would lose with her on the ticket.  If she is selected I would support that---she clearly has the skills to assume the presidency, she has a lot of minority support as well as progressive cred, and she can be a formidable campaigner.  If Biden chooses her, then he must feel that "simpatico" that has not been evident before.

But I don't think she will be the choice.  The optics seem inappropriate for 2020--two white candidates who look old.  She may come across as a partner to Biden, but she may also take too much attention away from him in the campaign.

As for other contenders, there are political consideration.  Atlanta Mayor Bottoms is also on the media's shortlist, but recent events in her city show the political dangers of picking a mayor or governor now in office, who may be embroiled in crises in the middle of a campaign.  That won't happen with the Senator from California.  (And more than incidentally, her Senate seat will remain Democratic in the short term, and very likely in the next election.  To keep Senator Warren's seat will require state legislative action and an uncertain election.)

Kamala Harris is an immediate asset.  She is young, energetic, highly articulate, and by now has actual and sometimes painful experience in a national campaign, as Biden did when he was Obama's v.p. running mate.  And they look really good together.  They've got chemistry.

Senator Harris can be tough and incisive in her words.  But she also has a winning smile--not quite Obama wattage but close--and her vocal timbre is in that range most appealing to the ear. That may seem a bit off the wall but I think it's really important.

She's not the progressive alternative that Senator Warren might be, but given Warren's movement towards the party's center as the rest of the party moves in the progressive direction, there's not much daylight between them anymore.  Given the racial realities of the moment, her nomination is itself progressive.

No one can know what she and Biden have talked about, and if there is any disagreement on policy and procedure that is serious enough to short-circuit this candidacy.  But that's highly unlikely. 2021 is going to be really new territory for everybody, in almost every way.  Biden has shown his ability to respond.  He will need to know she can, too.

There's still more than a month before Biden's deadline for announcing, so things can still change. It's not a foregone conclusion exactly, but at least in my mind, it's Kamala.

Poetry Monday: Just A Little More

Just A Little More

Just a little more
And we shall see the almond trees in blossom
The marbles shining in the sun
The sea, the curling waves.
Just a little more
Let us rise just a little higher.

--George Seferis

Giorgos (or George) Seferis was a 20th century Greek poet.  His real-world name was Georgios Seferiades, and his real world job was as a diplomat.  He represented Greece in the UK both in the 1930s and again as Ambassador from 1957 to 1962.   In 1936, he translated Eliot's The Waste Land into Greek.  As a poet he was considered both a European modernist and a continuation of Greek tradition.   He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1963.  He died in Athens in 1971.

I've come across him recently as a real-life character in Henry Miller's luminous The Colossus of Maroussi, a book-length account of Miller's months in Greece in 1939 just as World War II was beginning. It was Miller's own favorite of all the books he wrote.  Another Greek poet, George Katsimbalis is more prominently featured, but Miller is rhapsodic about Seferis as well.

Weekend Update: The Foreshortened Future

First, a public service announcement: if you don't stay home, wear the damn mask.

The future as we conceive of it is normally this vast time ahead, centuries or even eons, or at least generations or decades.

 The climate crisis that threatens the decades and centuries ahead, contracts that expanse.  Now we in the US at this moment are looking at an even more foreshortened future.

 For the unknown future of consequence is first and foremost the next 5 to 7 months.  And the question of how well and even if (as the same nation) we survive to the November election and past it, and somehow to Inauguration Day in late January takes up just about all the speculative space there is.

There are lots of individual questions, the answers to which will shape that future. Politically, the outcome of November becomes more and more likely, which is a Democratic landslide.  At this point it seems that not even the Republican effort to suppress votes will stop it.  They did their best with a scandalous and deliberate chaos in Georgia, and the nearly final results just announced show that Democrats tripled their number of votes in a primary.

Meanwhile the current administration is doing everything in its power to motivate every voting group likely to vote for Democrats to vote for their own survival in record numbers.  The administration is also making life much harder for most of the people that vote Republican.

There are still the AlwaysTrumpers, the reliable one-third, but it's not clear how reliable they are anymore.  We will see if they are really insane enough to crowd into covid pits to shout and spit in Tulsa, where infections are rising fast, or even in Jacksonville.  What if the tickets aren't actually going like hotcakes in Tulsa, and what if Trump suddenly realizes that for an hour or more he'll be facing thousands of possibly infected people screaming at him?

It seems that all that needs to happen for this electoral change is for Joe Biden to stay healthy, and the country to be intact enough to have a good enough election. And Biden's health aside,  that second condition is the real question.

Because with infections and hospitalizations rising in a growing number of places, and with the realization that the federal government is failing even more profoundly that it did a few months ago, and has never, ever organized and produced and delivered the proper equipment to medical facilities, and has never done what was necessary to make the nursing homes safe that it regulates and oversees, we are in grave danger.

Epidemics move fast, with rapid consequences.  A huge national tragedy well beyond what we've seen so far was averted this spring because the major outbreaks began in states with strong governors who recognized what had to be done, and led the shutdowns and the organization of the public health systems in their states.  But the outbreaks so far this summer are largely in states without that kind of governor.

Now even those stalwart governors are under systematic attack by Republicans, mobilizing the anger of the panicked and thoughtless.  Armed thugs outside her home shouting anti-Jewish slurs led the heroic health secretary of Ohio to resign.

Republicans are engaged in a war on reality, and we cannot afford to let them win. The virus does not care that you are sick of it, that it's had its social media moment.  It may not be viral in cyberspace, but it's still viral in real space.

Disease does not respect wishes or psychological needs, convenience or expectations or rhetoric or spin, and what may come into focus is that it does not respect state borders.  There are resulting scenarios that could threaten to disunite these United States this fall.

This is a big country with lots of moving parts, and we have a lot of excess in the economy. So there are no predictions, other than the assumption that everything holds together somehow isn't the only possible scenario.  There is reasonable doubt about this foreshortened future.

Because it is now possible--if not likely--that the US will have officially registered close to a quarter million deaths from covid by the end of the year, perhaps by election day.  By then, the national economy could be worse, maybe much worse that it is now, and the consequences growing.  And so that patch of future is blank.  That's what this week told me.

Soul of the Future: Atomic Cinema Gets Real

"In the Trump era, there is no past and no future, no history and no vision, only the anxious present."
Masha Gessen Surviving Autocracy

In my ongoing Soul of the Future series,
this is the last of several installments on stories about the Bomb, this time mostly in the 1960s through the 80s.

I'm posting it just as the US and Russia are about to enter nuclear talks, and the Trump administration is threatening to start exploding nuclear bombs again.

It is also a time in which apocalyptic problems of pandemic and economic hardships are the background to a long overdue reckoning on racism, particularly involving police and deadly force.  Nevertheless, the truly apocalyptic problem of our time--the climate crisis--has not gone away.  Each year and each month is getting hotter, carbon continues to pollute the atmosphere in record amounts, as forests burn in Brazil even faster, the poles melt and the atmospheric and oceanic conductors that govern our regional weather and climate show more signs of deforming.

So this post ends with a few observations on why similar stories aren't being told about this new apocalyptic challenge of the climate crisis. The present includes the future as it includes the past. Remember the future; anticipate the past.

While American movies dealt with the Bomb mostly through atomic monster and space invasion flicks in the first decade after Hiroshima, there were fictional stories that the public could read and see that tried to dramatize the realities and likely consequences.

Most of these were stories published in the science fiction pulp magazines, beginning in the 1940s, even before the first actual atomic bomb test in 1945.
 Such stories began to appear as early as 1941, months before the U.S. got into World War II and years before the Manhattan Project that developed the Bomb had started.  Military secrecy did not end the appearance of these stories, though reputedly the FBI visited the author of one  published in Astounding magazine in 1944, interested in how he knew so much.  (These 1940s and 50s were the years, by the way, that many prominent s/f writers had degrees and practical experience in sciences and engineering.)

Many of these stories dramatized the destruction and ultimate doom of humanity caused by atomic warfare, which was widely forecast by scientists and military experts.  Just a year or two after World War II ended, nuclear doomsday became such a persistent pulp magazine theme that (according to James Gunn in his history of sci-fi pulps, Alternate Worlds) stories about the post-atomic horror were “almost impossible to place in a science-fiction magazine” because there were so many.  But, he added, such stories were also becoming impossible to avoid in mainstream magazines.

Major science fiction writers like Robert Heinlein, Theodore Sturgeon and especially Poul Anderson contributed such stories.  Anderson in particular wrote one apocalyptic fiction after another, with titles like Un-Man, Cold Victory and After Doomsday.  As he emphasized in his non-fiction book, Thermonuclear War (1961), these times were “the most dangerous in the history of mankind.”  At least, to that point.

“Astounding after the war was a very black magazine,”science fiction chronicler Brian Aldiss writes of the premier sci-fi pulp. “Many stories were of Earth destroyed, culture doomed, humanity dying, and of the horrific effects of radiation, which brought mutation or insidious death.” He cites titles like "There Is No Defence," "And Then There Were None" and  “Dawn of Nothing.” “So pervasive were these themes over the next decades that even in a science fiction novel for juvenile readers (Return From Luna by D.S. Halacy), a teenager’s adventures with an expedition on the moon turned suddenly somber when nuclear war erupts on Earth.

Even early television occasionally aired Bomb-themed stories, though they were often Civil Defense-approved sanitized versions of thoroughly survivable atomic attacks.  An episode of the popular series "Medic" (starring Richard Boone), in 1955 was somewhat more realistic about the medical consequences (I remember watching this at age 9.)  

But with a few low-budget exceptions, movies stayed away from depicting effects of the Bomb.  In his book Apocalypse Movies, Kim Newman makes the valuable point that the B movie divisions of major studios tended to glorify the military in their Bomb-theme movies, while independent films revealed more of the real horror.  So it isn't surprising that when the first major Hollywood movie about effects of a global nuclear war was made in the late 1950s, it got none of the cooperation from the US military that Hollywood films usually received.

The movie was the 1959 release On the Beach, starring Gregory Peck, Ava Gardner, Anthony Perkins and Fred Astaire (in his first dramatic role.)  Produced and directed by Stanley Kramer (known throughout his career for socially conscious films like Judgment at Nuremberg, Inherit the Wind and Guess Who's Coming To Dinner), the movie was based on the 1957 best-selling novel of the same title, by British/Australian novelist Nevil Shute.

The premise of both novel and movie is that a nuclear war has killed everyone in the northern hemisphere. US Navy Captain Dwight Towers (Peck) sails into the harbor of Melbourne, Australia, in the atomic submarine Swordfish which has been submerged and escaped the lethal radiation.  He arrives at an Australian Navy base, where the Australian characters all know that air currents are slowly carrying the deadly fallout to them. They have five months to come to terms with the fact that death is inescapable, that they are among the last living humans because humanity has destroyed itself. 

There is some talk about the war, though no one for sure seems to know what happened or even who started it.  They occasionally wonder how humanity could create the conditions for its own extinction.  But the characters mostly just adapt to their circumstance in their normal lives (they have little oil, for instance, and rely on bicycles, horses and electric trams.)  Towers and the Australian military maintain discipline and chain of command to such an absurd extent that towards the end Towers is officially appointed head of the US Navy everywhere, as he is the highest ranking officer left alive, once his commander elsewhere in Australia is about to succumb to the radiation.

Gregory Peck, Anthony Perkins, Fred Astaire

About halfway through the movie, The Swordfish goes on one last mission to the Arctic and down the US West Coast, to test a theory that the radiation might be dissipating (it isn't) and to locate the source of radio signals coming from San Diego, beeps from a telegraph key but in no discernible pattern. 

 The ship pauses briefly in San Francisco Bay, with indelible scenes of the periscope focusing on empty streets and undamaged buildings, and where a seaman jumps ship to spend his last few days in his hometown.  In San Diego they find the signals are being keyed by a cola bottle tangled with a window sash, randomly striking the key as the wind blows.  

There is more detail in the book about the war, and the use of what Shute calls cobalt bombs, hydrogen bombs that kill with huge amounts of long-lasting radiation.  In the movie there appears to be little damage to buildings and infrastructure in San Francisco, which could mean it was not itself hit by bombs, or that these fictional bombs had the reputed (if unproven) characteristic of neutron bombs, of killing people but not destroying things with short-lived radiation.   

 In the book it is even clearer how most of the characters act with calm and heartbreaking grace.  The movie as well tells the story of ordinary people--like those watching in the movie theater-- facing certain doom, but without gruesome scenes (even bodies are never seen) that might alienate viewers, or pulse-pounding action to distract them. 

This depiction of the characters' behavior seems to reflect the more Stoic culture of Australia and the kind of diffidence that Shute usually presented in his novels but also (according to Shute) to make the point that nuclear war can happen to good ordinary people living their lives, through no fault of their own.  However, it also models behavior in crisis, as well as showing the human race at its best, as it ends.



As the radiation approaches, there are drunken revelers and religious revivals in the city, as well as people calmly registering for their suicide pills, to avoid the lingering radiation sickness. The movie ends with the Swordfish returning to the sea, and shots of the now empty Melbourne streets, and the abandoned revival banner now meant for us: "There is Still Time...Brother."

Even towards the end, characters can't keep themselves from planting gardens and planning for a cancelled future.  Each character has an arc of coming to terms in their own way. But it is this constant evocation of ordinary life coming to an end that gives this film such power.  

Though Kramer's lyrical powers as a filmmaker were not quite up to Shute's writing, he hit exactly the right notes with the musical score, particularly the repeated theme with the melody of the Australian tune, "Waltzing Matilda."  An orchestral version was released as a record, and made it to #47 on the Billboard charts.

The film was not a box office hit but eventually reached a large audience on television. It was more influential among opinion-makers. In a sense it was an ice-breaker, making the subject more acceptable for the movies, and making it generally more acceptable to question and even oppose nuclear weapons.  Nobel Laureate and anti-Bomb activist Linus Pauling said, “It may be that some years from now we can look back and say that On the Beach is the movie that saved the world.”

A full Hollywood production with major stars, On the Beach was filmed almost entirely in and around Melbourne, Australia, partly because the US military refused its cooperation, specifically any Navy ships. So even at least one of the scenes set in the U.S. was shot in Australia.  The submarine used in the movie belonged to Australia, refitted slightly to look like an atomic sub.  Its interior was a set designed from photographs of the real thing.  

The Pentagon had objected, not to the portrayal of the American military characters (their behavior is exemplary), but to the film's premise that nuclear war could end human civilization.  Official policy was still that war involving nuclear weapons was "survivable."  That conclusion was not shared by many scientists and others.  On the Beach became the first major nuclear-themed movie to dramatize nuclear war as apocalyptic. It would not be the last.  

If On the Beach changed the dialogue with empathy, the next important nuclear war-themed movie changed it with ridicule.  In the early 1960s, director Stanley Kubrick became obsessed with the subject of thermonuclear war.  He is said to have read Herman Kahn's 1960's book On Thermonuclear War which (unlike Poul Anderson's book of a similar title) provided rationales for nuclear wars. 

Kubrick bought the rights to a suspense novel about an accidental nuclear war and began preliminary work on a script, but soon the absurdities inherent in the realistic events convinced him to transform it into a satirical comedy.  So he began a new script with the novel's author Peter George and writer Terry Southern, that became the 1964 release Dr. Strangelove. 

Sterling Hayden as General Jack D. Ripper

The story becomes no more absurd--or less plausible--in summary: officials in Washington learn that a strategic bomber group has gone past its fail-safe point and is on course to douse targets in Russia with nuclear bombs.  They have been sent using a plan that allows lower level commanders to issue bombing orders, by a deranged officer who alone knows the recall code.  

Slim Pickens, last actor to be cast in a scene Kubrick
dreamed up at the last minute, now the film's most iconic
image.

The US President calls the Soviet Premier and explains the situation, as the Soviet ambassador is invited into the War Room.  The US cooperates with the Soviets to shoot down all the bombers but one.  The recall code is finally sent but the bomber doesn't get it.  It heads for its target.

Meanwhile the Soviets reveal they have implanted a "doomsday device" that will plunge the world into nuclear holocaust if they are attacked (this device, which also used cobalt-wrapped hydrogen bombs, was a thought experiment by Kahn.) 

 Arguments ensue, the US people discuss surviving destruction by retreating to mine shafts and the Soviet ambassador engages the doomsday device.  When the US bomber gets through and drops its bomb, it essentially blows up the planet, to the tune of a 1940s song, "We'll meet again." 

"Satire" or even "black comedy" are weak words to describe what Dr. Strangelove is.  It describes not only nuclear war as insane, but the people who cause it as, in various ways, insane.  It implies as well as the entire society that allows them to be leaders is itself insane. 

This in itself was not a new thought. That society was insane became a notion at least as far back as between the world wars, as evidenced by Dadaism.  But the Bomb seemed to seal the deal, and made the notion more mainstream,

For example, three books published in the mid-1950s (by psychologists Rollo May and Erich Fromm, and social commentator and historian Lewis Mumford) made the same analysis: the system of nuclear weapons was evidence and expression of an insane society, as well as a major contributor to driving it mad.  By the mid-1960s (which also happened to be the golden age for popular satire), this was a widely held view.  

Peter Sellers as Dr. Strangelove

But it had never been so thoroughly presented in a Hollywood film.  Sterling Hayden's General Jack D. Ripper, whose delusions about the enemy messing with his "precious bodily fluids" begins the nuclear bomber attack on the Soviet Union, is the most obvious and best-remembered portrait of insanity.  

But no less insane is Peter Seller's hyper-rational Dr. Strangelove himself, based on a combination of Herman Kahn and the future Secretary of State Henry Kissinger.  (His pedigree as a German scientist with residual fealty to "my Fuhrer"--Seller's most brilliant character note--also suggests the German scientists in the American rocket program, like Wernher von Braun.) 

George C. Scott as Gen. Buck Turgidsen

Equally crazy as well is George C. Scott's infantile commanding Air Force General Buck Turgidson, a figure based on several actual top military leaders, especially General Curtis LeMay.  Accounts of White House deliberations during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 confirm Scott's portrayal as representing the attitude of these Generals that a first strike on the Soviet Union would amount to (as Turgidson says in the movie) "getting our hair mussed" with millions of dead (what Kahn had dubbed "megadeaths.")  Their attitude was expressed sincerely by an American General who said that if after a nuclear war there are two Americans left and just one Soviet, then we win.

But no less insane are the overgrown cowboy who rides the Bomb like a bronco, Major Kong (played by the actor whose name sounds like the fictional ones: Slim Pickens) and one of the most minor characters, Colonel Bat Guano (Keenan Wynn) who won't enable a crucial phone call to be made to stop a thermonuclear war because it would involve damaging "private property"--a soft drink machine.  

Insane circumstances also made the rote mechanistic behavior and cool, precise astronaut diction of the bomber crewmen (played by James Earl Jones and Frank Berry) seem functionally insane.  Meanwhile the only sensible characters (President Muffley and Group Captain Mandrake, both played by Peter Sellers) became straight men and enablers. (Apparently a crazy President was too scary a thought.)  Some are clearly exaggerations—and yet, none is truly unreal.  

Dr. S. opens with US gov footage of plane refueled
in mid-air to suggest sexual subtext

Some of the insanity is prompted by the characters' comic lack of awareness about sexual anxieties, which adds to the movie's hilarity and popularity.  The movie brilliantly mixes cerebral satirical and "low" comedy (though the classic slapstick ending of a huge pie fight in the War Room didn't make the cut.)

The performances, which Kubrick encouraged to be over the top, contrast the emotionally childish and mentally wounded humans with their sober and deadly technology.  It can be argued that the film's ending--the destruction of the world to an at best ironic old tune ("We'll meet again/ don't know where, don't know when") leaves the viewer off the hook, even if it is in the same spirit as the rest of the movie. 

 It was quickly followed by another Hollywood film, this time a drama with a similar if not completely apocalyptic plot, Fail-Safe (1964), directed by Sidney Lumet and starring Henry Fonda. This time humanity is taken to the brink by a technological accident. 

Fail-Safe did not have the same impact, possibly because Dr. Strangelove came first, but probably also because the novel by Eugene Burdick and Harvey Wheeler it dramatized was a thoroughly-discussed best seller two years before, especially when it was serialized in the Saturday Evening Post during the Cuban Missile Crisis.  

So it was Dr. Strangelove that at the very least encapsulated if not defined attitudes about the insanity of the Bomb and the nuclear arms race.  The nuclear mystique was ridiculed away.  A hit when it was released,  Dr. Strangelove remains high on lists of classic films and film comedies.

Needless to say, the Pentagon did not cooperate in the making of Dr. Strangelove either. The interior of the U.S. bomber was designed by extrapolating from a magazine photo.  Stock footage (for the opening montage) and background landscapes filmed for this movie plus airplane models comprise the external flight scenes.  And the War Room was entirely invented, although its absence in reality reportedly surprised and disappointed Ronald Reagan when he became President.  There is a much smaller War Room in the White House now.

I saw Dr. Strangelove at a moviehouse when it came out, at least once.  But I also saw it several years later in San Francisco, paired with The War Game, arguably the first film to confront the likely realities of atomic warfare as experienced by civilians where they live.  

The War Game was commissioned by the BBC for television in the UK in 1965.  It was written and directed by Peter Watkins, a feature film cinematographer and documentary filmmaker.  It depicted events in the UK immediately before, during and after a thermonuclear exchange, using both an impressionistic and a documentary style.  The aftermath is particularly brutal, with radiation sicknesses and deaths, looting, food riots and eventually a complete breakdown of society. The music it ends with is a version of "Silent Night."

The BBC refused to air it.  It was released as a film in 1966, playing mostly at film festivals and in a few moviehouses, like the one where I happened to see it in 1967.  It nevertheless won the 1967 Academy Award for Best Documentary, and a similar award in the UK.  Roger Ebert called it "one of the most skillful documentaries ever made." 

 (Director Peter Watkins was just previously the cinematographer for the 1965 Beatles film Help!  He urged John Lennon to use his influence on behalf of world peace, which led Lennon and Yoko Ono to their 1969 peace campaign, and the song "Give Peace A Chance.") 

The War Game was the first to dramatize the effects of thermonuclear war on ordinary people, not as the easily survivable and limited tragedy as depicted for example in the 1954 US television production, "Atomic Attack" broadcast on the Motorola Television Hour.  But it would be some twenty years before it had a widely seen successor.

The Vietnam War blunted attention to the Bomb, but the US and Soviet nuclear arms buildup in the early 1980s returned focus to nuclear threats.  The theory of "nuclear winter" was proposed by Carl Sagan and other scientists that asserted that even a relatively small number of nuclear explosions would block enough sunlight to lead to planetary-wide death of huge proportions. The Nuclear Freeze movement (which referred to freezing the number of nuclear weapons) further emphasized the issue.

After The China Syndrome (a feature about a nuclear plant meltdown starring Jane Fonda) was a box-office hit (partly because shortly after it hit theatres, the meltdown at Three Mile Island happened), the ABC television network started developing a television movie about the effects of a nuclear war on a midwestern US city.  

The Day After, directed by Nicholas Meyer and starring Jason Robards, aired on Sunday November 20, 1983. The movie followed a cast of characters in Lawrence, Kansas, before, during and after a nuclear attack.  There were battles over censored scenes and cuts made to the film before airing.  Nevertheless it was the most graphic representation of nuclear war to reach a wide audience, almost 40 years after Hiroshima.

As the main character, Jason Robards was a confident and wealthy doctor, husband and father.  His family in Kansas City obliterated by the Bomb, he remained in the Lawrence hospital dealing with the medical effects (similar to the 1955 Medic episode), especially radiation.  When he becomes a victim himself, he revisits his demolished home, tries to drive away a family squatting there but he is offered food.  The final shot of his character, white hair falling out, embracing another old and dying man among the ruins, is this film's most indelible image.

The movie was castigated from the right as disloyal, and the New York Post branded director Meyer a traitor.  It was criticized from the left for not depicting nuclear war as hellish enough, though the movie ended with a printed declaration that an actual nuclear attack would be far worse than the one depicted, which only added to its impact.

The US military refused assistance in making the film because it left open the question of which side had launched missiles at the other first.

The Day After holds the record for the largest audience for a movie in television history.  One of its fans was President Ronald Reagan, and it reportedly led him to accelerate talks with the Soviet Union that led to a nuclear missile treaty.  The movie was shown around the world, including in the Soviet Union.

Threads

There were two more notable dramatizations of nuclear war effects in the 1980s. The BBC produced Threads in 1984, which followed the consequences into the next generation of an ordinary UK town of Sheffield.  It was notable also as the first depiction of nuclear winter.  

It ends with survivors struggling in a burnt-out world, and a 12 year old giving birth screams at the sight of her stillborn baby.  It was a harrowing ending to a truly horrifying film.  The Guardian review called it "the most terrifying and honest portrayal of nuclear war ever filmed."

This time the BBC did air it, and a few years later paired a re-broadcast of Threads with the first UK broadcast of  The War Games in 1986, 20 years after it was made. Threads also played in the US a few months after its UK airing.  It was reputedly the most watched basic cable movie in history.  That may be where I first saw it. 

Jane Alexander in Testament

Another such film was Testament, made for PBS in 1983 but not broadcast immediately.  It was released to theaters first, and aired in 1984.  It starred Jane Alexander, and depicts the slow dissolution of a small town in northern California, just outside the blast area of San Francisco, as its residents succumb to radiation and societal breakdown.  But it is mostly centered on one family, the poignancy of their emotions and actions, a much more realistic counterpoint to the family in the 1954 TV episode "Atomic Attack."  

Each of these films builds in one way or another on the previous ones.  Testament has the bravery of ordinary people of On The Beach. The characters decide on suicide, but can't go through with it.  The ending--a melancholy birthday paired with a birthday party in the innocent past--suggest the same message to viewers: It is not too late.

President Kennedy with Curtis LeMay and other generals
during Cuban Missile Crisis.  He defied them and proposed
the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, the first step away from the brink.

And so far, it has turned out not to be.  President Kennedy broke through with the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty in 1963, which had wide public support that surprised political and military leaders in the US and USSR.  It's likely these films contributed to this consciousness.

Meaningful arms reductions accelerated in the 1980s, continuing after the dissolution of the Soviet Union.  The issue has receded in current times, though there are still enough nuclear missile to destroy the world, many of them ready to launch.  That receding has some bad effects, particularly the minimizing of what nuclear bombs really are.  How the nature of the Bomb is different from other explosives and weapons is the implied or dramatized message of these films, including the atomic monster movies.   

But if the perceived threat of instant nuclear Armageddon that hung over every minute of the 1950s through the 1980s has all but ended, one contributing factor is the perception of nuclear war as insane and suicidal that these stories--in print and on film--reflected, articulated and spread. 

So comes the question of how all this applies to our future, and to the phenomena that most threatens it: the climate crisis, and effects (including pandemics) of an overweening human world dependent on a deeply wounded and distressed natural world.

Where are our climate crisis stories?  Nicholas Barber and David Wallace-Wells are among the recent writers asking that question.  They both list examples of the plethora of pop culture Armageddons and dystopias, especially in film and TV, caused by everything except a deformed climate.  Wallace-Wells calls this an "incredible failure of imagination."  But is that what it is?

Both Barber and Wallace-Wells mention the one counter-example: The Day After Tomorrow, released in 2004--and a box office hit.  It was the first and so far seemingly the only climate crisis-themed feature film.

One could argue that the pattern of stories confronting the climate crisis is the opposite of the Bomb stories pattern, in that a fairly literal Hollywood movie happened early (if you can consider 2004 as early for an oncoming crisis known since at least the 1950s.)

  Made by the same team that created the hit Independence Day, this film dramatized a set of possible and extreme effects of sudden climate cataclysm, providing or at least referring to the actual science of climate change as it was known in 2004.

  Though made and marketed as another future fantasy disaster adventure movie (the team went on to make 2012 and a version of Godzilla), its very title--obviously playing off the nuclear apocalypse of The Day After-- signaled a serious intent as a cautionary tale.  There is still time, brother.

At the time The Day After Tomorrow was both hailed and criticized by climate scientists.  It took liberties with scientific theories at the time, particularly in the time frame of its major disaster--the sudden deep-freeze of much of North America.

  Today, scientists are much more worried about other phenomena than the possible movement of the Atlantic currents that precipitate the movie's crisis, but they've learned not to rule very much out, as the climate is deforming far faster than most models predicted.   On the other hand, the opening scenes of climate effects--splitting glaciers, monster hail and sudden huge tornadoes--have been since seen on television news.  What was fantasy is now documentary.

But though there have been nonfiction stories and documentaries, plus some fiction (notably Kim Stanley Robinson's 2017 novel, New York 2140, and his Science in the Capital trilogy of novels in the 1990s, which he edited and combined into Green Earth in 2015), Hollywood and all the new and old television entities have arguably not followed up on The Day After Tomorrow. 

Barber suggests there haven't been other climate themed films because they don't fit into the Hollywood film form.  Could it be, he asks, that climate crisis effects are so immense in extent--global, in fact-- that "it’s just too big and overwhelming for a two-hour adventure" and "it can’t be fixed by a hero defeating a villain?"

Maybe, but probably not.  There weren't heroes defeating villains in the later Bomb movies (though that was a reassuring feature of the atomic monster flicks.) And it's hard to define "failure of imagination" in this context.

The atomic era movies can suggest some of the reasons why there haven't been climate crisis films.  Let's start with two.

 The first is politics, and all the money and power expended to form public opinion.  The US government went to great lengths to make questioning nuclear weapons seem disloyal and stupid.  Though Republicans went farther in its demonizations, there was so much at stake and so much of US industry, science and universities were invested, that the mainstream of both political parties--much less polarized than today--maintained the fortress of enforced silence, along with the necessary lying.

Climate seemed a bipartisan issue for awhile, but the flashpoint might have been the 2006 book and film An Inconvenient Truth by the Democratic presidential candidate who won the popular vote in the 2000 election, Al Gore.  Soon after that, no Republican could recognize the reality of the climate crisis any more than they could admit that trickle down economics never works.  The influence of big money from the fossil fuel industry, working behind the scenes as well as overtly, cannot be underestimated.  Hollywood studios today are no longer independently owned.

As noted above, the US military withheld its assistance to movies that questioned nuclear doctrine, and the right wing--and even moderates--questioned the patriotism of those who questioned the sanity of nuclear weapons.  That's one reason that, during or soon after the Blacklist, the undermining of the official view was done by giant ants and fire-breathing and irradiated creatures from prehistory and, not incidentally, from mythology.

The second reason is psychology, principally the denial that is both the villain and (in different contexts) the heroic quality of atomic war films.  Wallace-Wells suggests an interesting twist: ecopsychology. The climate crisis and related deformations of the natural world that sustains us and all present life challenge our psychological relationship to nature, as it has solidified in the industrial age.  In 1930 Ortega y Gasset wrote that a defining feature of modernity was the inability of the mass of humanity to distinguish between the natural and the artificial.  That's only the beginning of our warped relationship with the natural world.

Climate crisis denial appropriates the psychological term as well as the simple meaning. Denial in its most complete sense--denying that something exists or is threatening, etc.--is partly a product of helplessness.  People felt helpless about nuclear weapons, because they are beyond the power of an individual to stop, the weapons are in themselves so overwhelmingly powerful, and because the politics and paradox of deterrence forced them to accept nuclear weapons.   People feel helpless about the climate crisis because it is beyond the power of individuals to stop it, it is so enormous and complex, and because it seems that addressing it will have a steep cost in the present, for an uncertain future benefit.  

However, as we are learning in connection with the intractable problems of racism, once the feeling of powerlessness goes, the denial goes with it.  Perhaps a sign of the sense of powerlessness abating is when a realistic (as opposed to metaphorical) story on film or TV is made and is as influential and popular as On the Beach, Dr. Strangelove or The Day After.     

In any case, while I share the frustration and am also puzzled by the avoidance of climate themes, it seems some of these apocalyptic films can be regarded as the equivalent of the atomic monster movies--symbolically and metaphorically about climate crisis effects, particularly the breakdown of society and the stark division of rich and poor.

This is obvious in The Hunger Games series and similar stories but also in the once-fashionable vampire genre and the still prevalent zombie genre.  Together they form the same picture: the blood-sucking vampire rich and the mass of blood-drained undead zombies.  (Apparently Kim Stanley Robinson noticed this at about the same time I did, but he has a bigger platform.  As well as the patent on Zombies v. Vampires.)

The similarity to atomic monster movies breaks down however in terms of cause: the monsters were awakened and augmented or caused by the Bomb, these movies said; but in contemporary apocalyptic and dystopic stories, the failure to mention a deformed climate as a cause significantly weakens their function as cautionary tales, the There's Still Time, Brother effect.  

However, just as Bomb themes in print preceded them on film, science fiction writers are publishing climate themed stories, already pigeonholed as "ecofictions" and "cli/fi."  Perhaps one of these will inspire the next climate crisis feature.  As was the case with nuclear weapons in the 1980s (if not before), there is a vast public ready for the right stories.

Wallace-Wells argues that it may already be too late--that the realities of the climate crisis are becoming too obvious, and will soon be all-consuming, for anyone to be interested in cautionary tales and climate fiction.  Maybe, but maybe not. While it is true that one might not want to watch a movie about nuclear war while living in or after one, climate crisis effects are so various, so local and so long in time, that the appetite for these stories may in fact increase.

The ultimate question is: can climate-themed stories make a difference to the real future?  A few months ago it would have seemed very unlikely, even as it still seems it might be too late.  But as we've learned recently, things can change radically very fast... And Kim Stanley Robinson has a new near-future novel coming out later this year that deals in part with climate themes, called The Ministry of the Future.  Who knows--maybe there will be an actual Secretary of the Future in 2025. 

At this point you may be wondering whether any of this applies to pandemic-themed stories.  The short answer is that the taboos that barred the way to nuclear and climate themed stories don't appear to be in force, at least not yet. 

 Besides, there should be no problem for Hollywood to fit pandemic stories into existing genres, or combinations of them: from the medical procedural and the race for a cure to the scary extreme, which would be the zombie apocalypse stories. There have already been successful pandemic films, like The Andromeda Strain and Contagion.  Our current reality may make new fictions of this kind too scary.  But Hollywood is very likely to try a few.  If they can get back to making movies anytime soon.

Poetry Monday: Once Later

Once Later

It is not until later
that you have to be young

it is one of those things
you meant to do later

but by then there is
someone else living there

with the shades rolled down
how could you have been young there

at that time
with all that was expected

then what happened to
the expectations

there is no sign of them there
a shadow passes across the window shade

what do they know in there
whoever they are

W.S. Merwin

The top image is a recent real estate photo taken in the back of the house where I grew up just outside Greensburg, PA.  The window to the left is to the room that had been my bedroom.  While I was in college, my parents took this window out, installed a door, and turned the room into a den.  At some point--probably not long ago-- a new owner took out the door and replaced the window, returning the room to being a bedroom.  You can see how the bricks are newer under the window.  So in this way, it is more as it was when I grew up there than it has been since.

The wood deck is new as well--it had been a brick patio-- and judging from the wood and bricks piled in the photo, all this was done recently when the photo was taken several years ago.

The real estate photos of the inside are interesting.  They show what has survived and what hasn't.  They also suggest that no children have lived here recently.  I don't think it has been a family home anymore.