Example provided:
QED, bitches1.
1 – Post not actually about fluffy kittens. Void where prohibited.
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Author: Alex
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Time to sharpen some pencils
Well, school kind of started this week.
I say kind of, because classes don’t actually start until next week. But Wednesday was the grad student orientation, and now I’m in training to learn how to be a TA.
I feel rusty on the whole being a student thing after eight months off. I’m a little worried about my organizational skills having fallen apart. I went and bought my dayplanner for the semester, though I don’t really have anything to put in it yet. I’m taking three classes (technically four, but the last is a seminar that’s just an hour a week with no work outside of class); since my research project doesn’t really get started until next year, I’m trying to get as many classes as I can out of the way. So we’ll see how that goes.
What I’m more worried about is the two sections of Mineralogy Lab that I’m going to teach. I haven’t really taught before, and Mineralogy was not one of my best classes. It was also a class I took in my first undergrad semester at CU, so I’m pretty rusty on it to begin with. I’m supposed to meet with Joe and the other TA tomorrow, so hopefully that will help allay some of my worries.
It’s definitely going to be very different as a semester.
And while I got myself into a routine of posting every weekday recently, I don’t think I’ll be able to keep that up. Obviously, I haven’t managed anything since Tuesday. Oh well. Grad students don’t have free time, I’ve been told.
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Building a Straw Mosque
I know the bizarre controversy about the Islamic community center planned in New York City a few blocks from the site once occupied by the World Trade Center has been going on for a while, but I haven’t said anything before now because I’ve been so utterly baffled about the whole thing that words have simply escaped me. Imagine me reading article after article, staring open-mouthed at my computer screen (possibly with a little dangling string of drool depending on how late the hour is) and that’s about right. I’m basically stunned, confused, and filled with the need to plant my face in my palm, repeatedly.
I would like to note one thing. I don’t personally know anyone who was even injured on 9/11/2001. I’ve never even been to New York City. So I can’t really imagine the pain or anguish that is felt by someone every day when they get up and touch a hole that will permanently be in their life, or look at a scar that still sits in the middle of their city. I don’t want to insult or belittle that.
But I also think that grief and tragedy, personal or otherwise, should not dictate what rights someone is allowed to have, or how the law should be applied.
Go back to the first paragraph I wrote. Note that I said “Islamic community center” rather than “mosque.” Note that I said “the site once occupied by the World Trade Center” rather than “Ground Zero.” The words I used aren’t very emotionally charged, at least not unless you have a knee-jerk hate for all things Muslim, in which case I feel sorry for you. And particularly in the case of using “Islamic community center” instead of “mosque,” the less emotionally charged phrase is more accurate. If there is a mosque (and I’ve seen some disagreement on if it’s a mosque or if it’s “worship space,” whatever that means), it’s just a part of a community center that also includes basketball courts.
Word choice can have a lot of meaning. Some of this word choice might be shorthand to save time. But I kind of doubt that. I think there’s been a very deliberate decision to use the most inflammatory, emotional language possible. So “Islamic community center a few blocks away from the WTC site” has been replaced with “Ground Zero Mosque.” And I hope we all know what it’s called when you misrepresent something to weaken it, then argue against the misrepresentation.
It doesn’t necessarily bother me in principle that people are talking about this. There are a lot of times when the rights guaranteed in the Constitution end up resulting in things that make us personally squirm or feel angry – I’m thinking Fred Phelps and his gang, here, or the KKK having a rally on Martin Luther King Jr’s birthday – there are plenty of things to take your pick from. Most of the time it ends up at “Well, I don’t like it, but I’ve got to defend the right to do it.”
What does bother me, however, is that this debate is being built on top of a straw man – or a straw mosque as the case may be. And what bothers me even more is that this straw mosque is being used as a kind of dog whistle to call up resentment against American (and non-American) Muslims in general.
I haven’t had much nice to say about President George W. Bush in a long time. But I will compliment him on one thing at least – after 9/11, the man did his level best to strongly separate the terrorists from regular Muslims, both at home and abroad. And people from his administration are trying to defend the Islamic community center now. Too bad it doesn’t seem to be working any longer.
Maybe it’s because it’s an election year, and some of the politics have gone past the point of disturbing and pear-shaped to just horrifying. (I’m looking at you, Sharron Angle.) I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised that American Muslims and their community center are being used as a political football. But I sure am disgusted, and more than a little worried that this could get escalated to a truly awful level.
Since it isn’t just the community center in New York:
In Murfreesboro, Tenn., Republican candidates have denounced plans for a large Muslim center proposed near a subdivision, and hundreds of protesters have turned out for a march and a county meeting.
In late June, in Temecula, Calif., members of a local Tea Party group took dogs and picket signs to Friday prayers at a mosque that is seeking to build a new worship center on a vacant lot nearby.
How lovely.
“A mosque is not just a place for worship,” Ms. Darwish said in an interview. “It’s a place where war is started, where commandments to do jihad start, where incitements against non-Muslims occur. It’s a place where ammunition was stored.”
So we should trample one of the most important rights, the right to freedom of religion, because in the past, in other places, mosques have been used to commission violence and incite hatred. I wonder if this means that we ought to be protesting proposed Catholic churches, because they’re hotbeds of pedophilia. Or protesting proposed Southern Baptist churches because they encourage the murder of doctors and incite hatred against homosexuals.
Of course we wouldn’t. Because this is America, damnit. Because Americans are Catholic and Southern Baptist and Lutheran and Jewish and Atheist and Buddhist, and we have rights and freedoms, one of which is the ability to continue to believe or not as we see fit even if there was once a giant, murderous space bastard with facial hair you could hide a cute mammal in who claimed to have the same belief system as us.
Oh yeah. And Americans are Muslim, too.
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Fan Number One
This is the funny thing about the story I just had published, particularly that it ended up being my proverbial toe-dip into the deep end of writing for profit: I really hated The Book of Autumn when I first wrote it. I quite literally wrote it because it was stuck in my head, like a ping pong ball lodged in a water pipe, and the only way for me to be able to write a story that I actually wanted to write was to get TBoA out on paper first. It started out as about 5K words of rushed, shitty prose with no story arc to speak of, which I stuck in my backpack and did my best to ignore for the next year while I spent my limited undergrad free time on stories that I actually, you know, liked. But the story refused to go away, and I eventually gave in and typed it up, adding and correcting and smoothing along the way. At which point I read it over and decided that I still hated that story, because it just wouldn’t cooperate with me.
I ended up sending the story off to my dear friend Isaac (who was my Bridesman at my wedding, incidentally) and whined at him, “I hate this story, it doesn’t work, what the hell is wrong with it.” And Isaac, superhero that he is, figured out a lot of the fixes I needed to make to transform TBoA into something readable and interesting that I actually started liking, just a little. Isaac also, it should be noted, came up with the title for the story. Because once it was cleaned up and ready to be sent out into the big, scary world of the slush pile, I realized that “Story I Hate” was probably not a suitable title.
At the time I sent TBoA to Beneath Ceaseless Skies, it was still the something of the unloved child out of the three stories I was attempting to find homes for. (It should be noted that the other two are, at this time, still homeless.) Scott e-mailed me and asked me if I could fix up the story’s ending, because it didn’t quite work for him. I gave it my best shot, and in the process, it was like something snapped into focus. I made some little tweak, and BAM. I didn’t hate the story any more, or resent it for being difficult. In fact, I really, really loved it.
Which I think really goes to show the sort of super powers a good editor has.
I think one of my biggest failings as a writer right now is that when something in one of my stories doesn’t quite work, I can’t figure out why – if I notice at all. I’ve gotten a lot of rejections in the recent past that read something like, “This is a great story, but something just doesn’t quite work for me.” While I take the compliment for what it is, it also makes me a little crazy, because if someone could just tell me why something doesn’t work, I could fix it. I understand that most editors are way too busy to spend time on a story that’s got even a little something broken in it, and I certainly don’t expect one to when he or she is wading through a pile of unsolicited stories. But that’s why I’m starting to sound just a little fangirlish about Scott – he took the time, he gave me a chance, and he used his magical editor powers to point out the last element that needed to be tweaked into place to turn my story into something I could truly love.
Oh, and then he gave me money for it.
If there is a Scott Andrews fan club, I would like to join it. If not, maybe I should just start one myself.
I’m super excited today, for a couple reasons. One is that it looks like I might have landed a little freelance writing work to supplement my income going in to grad school, so I’m all wound up and nervous about that. But even more so, I’ve published my first ever short story in a pro market! WOO!
So pretty please, go to Beneath Ceaseless Skies and check out my story, The Book of Autumn. Go now. It’s okay, I’ll wait.
If you liked it (and I hope you did!) please consider supporting Beneath Ceaseless Skies, since the editor (Scott) is an incredible human being who gives sad little newbs like me a chance. Actually, please consider supporting BCS even if you think my story was total crap and you’re now about to flounce off in a huff. Because then Scott could presumably use the funds to find stories less lame than mine. So either way, we all win, right?
I’ve been pretty much exploding into random bouts of joyful squealing since I signed the contract for the story at the end of June. I just didn’t talk about it all that much (on the internets at least) because I wasn’t entirely sure when it would be published. And the last time I sold a story, which was to a token payment market, I ran around and told the world how gleeful I was, and then everybody wanted to know when my story would be published so they could join in the celebration. And it got kind of embarrassing after a while to admit that, well, I didn’t actually know, but I totally swear I wasn’t hallucinating it or anything.
And this morning, as soon as I saw that it was online and all official-like, I went and bought my affiliate membership in the SFWA, because (1) it let me check off one of the smaller ticky boxes on “nerdy shit I want to accomplish before I die” and (2) I just can’t resist the fun of being able to claim that John Scalzi is my professional overlord, and least kind of sort of. Though of course the real reason is that the SFWA is an incredibly important organization that hauls a lot of water for its members, and it’s a good place to go if you’re interested in writing science fiction and/or fantasy, and maybe some day making a career of it.
Of course, there is no such thing as perfection, particularly not in connection with something as messy as life. Just to keep me from floating off like a little glee-filled balloon, this morning Loki (the cute but stupid cat) decided to eat an enormous rubber band. So I’ve been following him around the house all day in anticipation of him gracing the carpet with rubber-band-filled kitty vomit. I did talk to my vet and he said for now, that’s all I can really do… hope that it comes out of one end or the other and doesn’t get stuck in between. So please keep your fingers crossed for me on this one. I’d really rather Loki not hoover up my new earnings with a vet bill, but what can I say. He’s a helper like that.
Just in case yesterday was the one day of the summer where you unhooked your internet umbilical cord and were consequently far enough away from the general population that you couldn’t hear either the shrieks of outrage from the liberals or the squeals of schadenfreude-laden glee from the conservatives, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said some really dicky stuff:
“I hear these people saying he’s like George Bush. Those people ought to be drug tested,” Gibbs said. “I mean, it’s crazy.”
The press secretary dismissed the “professional left” in terms very similar to those used by their opponents on the ideological right, saying, “They will be satisfied when we have Canadian healthcare and we’ve eliminated the Pentagon. That’s not reality.”
I have no doubt that I am not part of the “professional left.” From what Gibbs said in his total non-apology today, the “professional left” is apparently people on cable TV. So… I guess Rachel Maddow, Keith Olbermann, and a couple of other wonks over at MSNBC, and… uh… Michael Moore? I have a hard time buying that Gibbs took time out of his busy day to direct some spittle-flecked invective at people who can probably be counted on one person’s fingers and toes.
Be that as it may, considering I’m not one of the “liberal elite” (ooh, scary), that statement still really pissed me off. Because you’re damn right I’m not going to be satisfied until we get a reasonable health care system. (Though, really, the Pentagon is just fine where it is.)
There are a lot of specific points in what he said that I could address, like the whole thing with comparing Obama to Bush – which is not something I would personally do, though every time Obama continues a Bush era policy that widdles all over privacy and freedom, I cry a little – but I’m not going to. Instead, I’d like to go to the root cause of why exactly I still want to knock Mr. Gibbs one, right in the kisser.
It’s simple. Mr. Gibbs, you don’t own me. And, come to that, neither does your boss. I may have donated money to the campaign (and I did), and I may have proudly voted for Obama (which I also did), but that in no way obligates me to keep my mouth shut when he does something I don’t like. Particularly not when he’s specifically said on several occasions that the left ought to hold him accountable – or does that only apply if the left has nice things to say?
Coincidentally, I am far more invested in my relationship with my husband than I am in my relationship with the President of the United States, and you know what? I’m not obligated to keep my mouth shut when he does something dumb either.
And neither of those simple facts would change, even if I were Rachel Maddow or Keith Olbermann or whoever Mr. Gibbs claims he was having his tantrum at. They aren’t owned by the guy they voted for either. And, coincidentally, I also think both of them spend a lot more time saying nice things about Obama (and his various accomplishments) than I ever have.
When Bush was President, I think there was this idea in everyone’s mind that he had monolithic, unquestioning support from the right. I don’t know how much of that was reality and how much of it was a news narrative, though it’s pretty easy to make arguments that the Republicans are more disciplined than the Democrats in general (but let’s be honest here… slime mold is more disciplined than the Democratic party in general), that they have Fox News, and that there was quite a bit of equating criticizing the President with being un-American. So perhaps President Obama – or at the very least his press secretary – thinks that he ought to be on the receiving end of a similar sort of support. That he deserves it, even. That’s certainly the vibe that I’m getting from this.
No one in this world deserves that sort of dogmatic support from me, or from anyone else. Not even my husband, my best friend, or my parents. And certainly not a politician. If someone does something I don’t like, or something that I think is a bad idea, I am well within my rights to say so. And in fact, I actually start getting worried if I feel like I’m agreeing with someone too close to 100% of the time, because that’s just not natural.
That’s why, even a day later, I’m still angry at Mr. Gibbs, because I think his real position is that we shouldn’t be allowed to criticize the President if we voted for him, that we owe him some kind of special allegiance, and that we should just shut up and like what we’re given. No, I don’t think so.
And if you just take his comments on their face and not read into them, they don’t make much sense either. There really aren’t that many people (I’m not going to say none, since it’s not like I know everyone in the world) saying the words that Gibbs stuffed into his lefty meaniehead straw man’s mouth. A lot of lefties (and not-so-lefties) are bitching about the President compromising, or starting negotiations too much toward the center, or who knows what else. But I don’t think too many of them are claiming that (a) the President has accomplished absolutely nothing, and if they are, shame on them, and (b) that they wish they’d never voted for him, because the alternative was so great.
Aside: Often when someone coming from the left bitches about the President, a smug conservative pops out of the woodwork and snidely asks something like, “How’s that hopey changey working out for ya?” Well, here’s the thing. If we’re sitting on our blogs and whinging about how Obama’s not being liberal enough, what sort of brain tumor does it take to think that somehow means we’ve got buyer’s remorse and wish we voted for McCain and the lipstick-wearing IQ black hole that he wanted as his Vice President? Yes, because if someone’s upset that Obama’s talking about offshore drilling, the people who were chanting, “Drill, baby, drill” at their convention are the option we wish we’d gone for. So even if I’m wasting hundreds of words bitching about Obama (or as the case may be, his press secretary), the hopey changey is still working out just fine, thanks.
Frankly, Mr. Gibbs should be happy that the lefties are spending so much time kvetching about the current politics. Because that means we’re still paying attention. The alternative would be an absence of commentary, and an electorate that would rather play Madden on the Xbox than volunteer, donate, and vote.
This very well could be an all-new, exciting evolution in the Democratic strategy of taking careful aim and shooting itself in the foot, right before an election.
“I don’t think they will [stay home], because I think what’s at stake in November is too important to do that,” he said.
Pinning your strategy on the Republicans being so chock full of the crazy that the progressives you shit all over won’t dare not vote just seems like a really bad move to me. But what do I know? I’m not supposed to be talking because I don’t have anything nice to say.
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The great geological fart
Yes, I know, this is why you read my blog, because I’m informative AND classy.
I’ve finally started doing my initial readings for my grad school project, which I really should have gotten moving on months ago. I don’t know if being out of school for eight months has just destroyed my ability to manage my time, or maybe I lack the sense of urgency that actually being in school and having solid due dates provides. Either way, I’m trying to read a couple per day.
What I’ll be working on in grad school is a project examining the local change in climate in the Bighorn Basin during the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum. Here’s something of a broad summary at io9 of the PETM and why it’s significant, but if you’re too lazy to read even that extremely conversational post, the one sentence summary is: Temperature went up, a lot of species died, and there are many suspected parallels between those events and the climate change we are facing today. So the PETM is an area of current interest in a lot of fields, because it may further our understanding of current environmental events.
In the io9 article, the emphasis is on the catastrophic event that might have thrown the environment out of whack, either massive volcanic activity or a meteor impact. I think that tends to give the events of the PETM a little less urgency on the surface, since today we’re not facing world-altering volcanic activity OR a meteor strike. Instead, we’re facing whatever threat our own fossil-fuel burning activities might cause. Whatever the ultimate carbon contribution to the atmosphere, billions of humans tooling around in cars is certainly less… well, dramatic than seas of basalt flooding large swathes of the continents.
The articles I’ve read so far have been interesting because the focus hasn’t been on a big, sexy, catastrophic kick-off for all of the carbon that caused the rapid (4-8 degrees C ocean surface temperature rise in a few thousand years) temperature increase, but rather a sort of positive feedback loop from degassing of methane hydrates in continental shelf and deep ocean sediments. This is supported by examining carbon isotope ratios, which show distinct, rapid (geologically speaking) shifts in the ratios that might show multiple pulses of carbon input (Bains et al 1999). This sort of geologically instantaneous is pretty much consistent with either an impact or methane hydrate dissociation. And since we’re looking at possibly several discrete events it’s unlikely that every one of them was an impact.
The most interesting paper I’ve read so far is from 2002; it only looks at a single site, but the isotope data there indicates that there was a brief period of ocean surface warming prior to the massive methane release – the great geological fart, so to speak (Thomas et al). Of course another of the papers suggests that methane hydrate dissociation doesn’t necessarily have to be thermally triggered; a significant amount of methane could be released because of submarine seismic or volcanic activity, or even gravitational slumping (Bains et al).
So the scenario that these papers build up is that something triggered the release of a large amount of methane into the atmosphere. It did what greenhouse gases tend to do, and this might have caused a reinforcing effect that could have lead to more methane getting put into the atmosphere. And then things got hot and uncomfortable. Of course, the initial cause of the methane hydrate dissociation is still a matter of question. Maybe it was seismic activity, or an impact that started this chain reaction, so to speak, and the methane release just added insult to injury. The Thomas et al paper suggests that the dissociation was thermally caused (as indicated by the brief period of surface warming prior to carbon being dumped into the the atmosphere), and that’s really the most worrying scenario. Because if we’re looking at temperature driven methane dissociation, the ultimate source of that temperature change at the end of the Permian wouldn’t be relevant in today’s world – it would be the temperature change happening at all, and driving further warming.
Sea surface temperature already is increasing. At the site in the Thomas paper, they’re estimating about a 2 degree C surface temperature increase before the methane hydrates dissociated and made a beeline for the atmosphere. We’re not really that far off from that sort of increase in some areas of the ocean right now. (Of course, what the surface temperature was at the time is not stated and may not be something we know for certain.) The real take home is that it very well could be a positive feedback situation: you get a little warming, it sets off a big geological fart, that adds up to more greenhouse effect and more warming, and pretty soon the Earth starts sounding like it had the baked bean special at the Chuckwagon last night.
Now, these are of course only a few papers, and this is a complicated subject. The mechanisms for warming in the PETM are still a subject of great debate, and new data is coming in constantly. But it’s certainly something to think about. There very well may be lot more carbon waiting out there than just what we’re burning to run our cars and power our cities, and it could be waiting for a thermal cue to bubble up to the surface and make things quite unpleasant for thousands of years to come.
Silent but deadly, indeed.
ETA: A very nice anonymous commenter pointed me toward a summary of the current research (as of 2008) on the methane hydrate issue. It’s still a very viable hypothesis and the challenge remains figuring out exactly how a massive methane burp would relate to the ocean warming, and exactly how much carbon we’re talking about, here. Also:
…no study has uniquely demonstrated that oxidized CH4 (or another compound) was the source of the carbon addition. There are also issues regarding the mass of carbon injected during the PETM, and whether gas hydrates at this time could furnish such a quantity.
So there are still questions that need to be answered. But I’d say the three papers I read here are still pretty much in line with the main body of the research, including the questions still remaining to be answered.
Articles:
Warming the fuel for the fire: Evidence for the thermal dissociation of methane hydrate during the Paleocene-Eocene thermal maximum. Deborah Thomas, et al. Geology; December 2002.
A Transient Rise in Tropical Sea Surface Temperature During the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum. James C. Zachos, et al. Science 302 (2003). DOI: 10.1126/science.1090110
Mechanisms of Climate Warming at the End of the Paleocene. Santo Bains, et al. Science 285 (1999). DOI: 10.1126/science.285.5428.724
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Poppin’ Fresh
Since quitting my job in preparation for grad school, I’ve been trying to fill some of the time in my days by writing, by looking for short term or part time freelance work, and by riding my bicycle around a lot. This means I’m going to the grocery store almost every day, just to pick things up for dinner that night since it’s a good excuse to put in five to seven miles, depending on the route I use.
Today, I picked up a couple tubes of croissant dough for something I’m going to make later this week. I pitched them in my bike’s basket with a few other things, then started the slow, quad-destroying ride back uphill to my house.
After maybe fifteen minutes, one of the tubes exploded. The pop was loud enough that I could hear it around my earbuds. I’m pleased to say that even though it really startled me, I managed to not swerve into the nearest fence. The half gallon of milk that was sharing the basket may never mentally recover, though, after being on the receiving end of a long smear of flaky, buttery dough. Or maybe it liked that. I don’t know about milk cartons these days.
I just let the ruptured tube sit, dough dangling obscenely over one side of my basket, and really put my back into getting myself home before the other tube could go up. Which it didn’t, thankfully. I just cut up the dough that was still in the tube and baked it into some really sad looking biscuits.
This whole thing just struck me as kind of strange, since I remember the Mythbusters episode where they looked at biscuits quite well. And it took those cans almost an hour in a 100+ degree car to go, not fifteen minutes in a breezy bicycle basket in barely 80 degree weather.
Who knows, maybe the croissant tube sense its proximity to Rachel Maddow on my iPod and just couldn’t contain itself any longer. So I’m guessing it’s either lesbian croissant dough, or a devoted fan of Bill O’Reilly. Considering that croissant is a French word, I’m thinking the former is far more likely than the latter.
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Learning from the LGBT movement
Friendly Atheist has posted the speech that Greta Christina gave at the Secular Student Alliance conference. It’s an hour long, but it’s definitely an hour well spent.
While her focus is on the atheist movement taking lessons from the LGBT movement, I think a lot of what she says is extremely applicable to the skeptic movement as well. She spends some time talking about the importance of not bickering over communication method (fire brands vs. diplomats) which is of course very relevant after Phil Plait’s (in)famous “Don’t be a dick” speech at TAM this year.
What I found particularly relevant, however, is from about 25 to 40 minutes or so when she talks about gender and racial diversity, and the importance of correcting that problem now rather than later, and of acknowledging that there is a problem. The skeptic movement is still very much a white dudes movement, and we’re having that very same growing pain. Women and people of color within the skeptic movement (often with the Skepchicks leading the charge) are starting to agitate about the lack of diversity, and we may very well be at a crossroads when it comes to how the movement as a whole handles it. Greta Christina makes some very good points about how to get more minority involvement, and about making sure that when women or people of color speak, they don’t just get pigeonholed into talking about being a woman or being a person of color.
Good stuff.
65 years ago today, the United States of America dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, directly killing 80,000 civilians and indirectly killing up to 60,000 more of the following years. It’s a moment that’s left an indelible scar on the psyche of the world, with the image of a mushroom cloud as a symbol of the utter destruction a single bomb is capable of wreaking. The bombing of Nagasaki three days later feels almost like an afterthought, a coda of death and destruction, while the firebombing of Tokyo achieved a similar amount of casualties, but over a longer period of time and is often largely forgotten by anyone outside of Japan.
It is easy to argue that in World War II, we were among the “good guys.” Hitler was undeniably a Very Bad Guy. The Japanese committed atrocities throughout Asia, the most heinous of which – Unit 731, the rape of Nanking, its use of “comfort” women – the government has yet to truly acknowledge, let alone specifically apologize for.
But this is not about the burdens that Japan still bears, or what Germany has done to wear its sackcloth and ashes publicly. This is not about the general slaughter of civilians that characterized World War II on all sides. Rather, this is about America, and our own atrocities.
We were one of the good guys. We fought back the Nazis. We were attacked by the Japanese at Pearl Harbor. We did not strike the first blow against them in this simplified view of history. But good people can sometimes do terrible things, and the good guys in a story can often commit acts just as bloody as the bad guys. And it is important to acknowledge that these bad things did happen, and that they were bad.
There can be endless debate about the justification for dropping the bomb, whether it ultimately saved lives or didn’t, whether it’s more justifiable because the Japanese were committing atrocities in Asia. All of these points are open for endless debate; the bomb dropped in the past, and we quite literally have no way of knowing for certain what might have happened if it hadn’t been dropped. The history is what the history is. The question is how we look at that history and understand it now, what lessons we gain from it.
In Japanese, I have heard the atomic bomb called pikadon (ピカドン), which is an onomatopoeia. Pika is the flash. Don is the explosion follows. As an expression, it’s fun to say, and it sounds almost innocent. I’ve seen it, and heard it spoken in Japanese anime and manga, and for a long time I didn’t know what it meant, until I took a modern Japanese literature class. My teacher gave us pages from Barefoot Gen to read, and showed us a clip from one of the animated movies. In the manga, Gen’s father doesn’t buy into the military propaganda saturating the country, and there’s a strong anti-government and anti-war theme. The depiction of Japanese civilians as not a monolithic group that unthinkingly supported the war and military hit me and many of my classmates hard.
Not long after, I got in an argument with someone on Amazon, over a review for the book Black Rain by Ibuse Masuji. The person I argued with had accused the book of being anti-American. Black Rain is a beautiful book, and a heartbreaking one; it is a gut-wrenching story about the survivors of Hiroshima and how the bomb continued to kill them, years and decades after it had been dropped. It takes no strong political positions and focuses on the simple fact that having an atomic bomb dropped on one’s city is horrible.
That the destruction and suffering caused by the bombs was horrible is a fact. Facts do not exist to make us feel good about our country and the decisions we’ve made in the past. They are what they are. To attack a fact because it makes one feel uncomfortable changes nothing. To scramble for justification, to try to diminish that fact smells a little too like cognitive dissonance for my liking.
I think it may be time to spend fewer words on debating if dropping the bomb can be considered the right decision, because that is a debate that will never find a satisfactory conclusion. It is instead rather time to admit that whatever the intended result, whatever the justification, the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima killed a lot of people and caused a lot of suffering. That civilians in Hiroshima suffered and died from the atomic bomb in no way diminishes the suffering of the civilians of Nanking as they were raped and murdered by Japanese soldiers, while likewise the pain and horror in Nanking in no way lessens the suffering felt in Hiroshima. These things all happened, and all of the suffering was real.
We can still count ourselves among the “good guys” in WWII and admit that the atomic bomb killed a lot of people and caused a lot of suffering, and that it would be better if it never happens again. And I think that it is, in fact, healthier for us to admit that not everything we’ve done in the past deserves a tickertape parade, that maybe we do have some things we should apologize for.
The idea that one’s country can do no wrong is a dangerous one indeed, and the very reason that I think it’s important to consider the destruction at Hiroshima, in Nagasaki, in Tokyo. Maybe we’re the good guy, though that point is sometimes open to debate. But we are no super hero.
