by Gouda » Tue May 30, 2006 6:31 am
A note on precedents, presidents, end times, The Duke and DU, taken from:<br><br>"Out of Order: A Few Thoughts Concerning Dangerous Precedents and Irreversibility" <br><br>by James (not william) Blum:<br><br><!--EZCODE QUOTE START--><blockquote><strong><em>Quote:</em></strong><hr>...The wars upon which today’s Republican Raw Dealers have embarked will not—of this I am sure—bring Jesus back to Jerusalem. They may however bring The End: “when the fire rains down from heaven and the blood shall fill the sea” in the chilling chiliasm of the Appalachian hymn; the metaphor is altogether too thinly transparent. <br><br><!--EZCODE BOLD START--><strong>Nuclear war has been waged, consistently if not quite constantly, upon the entire planet since 1945</strong><!--EZCODE BOLD END--> (or before, choose your Manhattan Project date—in Chicago or Allamogordo—as you like). This is a New Deal legacy of far greater import than HUAC. <!--EZCODE BOLD START--><strong>A most dangerous precedent, upon which the Democrats—Truman, Kennedy, Carter, Clinton—were only too happy to build.</strong><!--EZCODE BOLD END--> As were French Socialists, the Soviet inheritors of Bolshevism and so on through the geopolitical spectrum of nuclear proliferators. “Those who sharpen the tooth of the Dog, meaning Death.” (3) The 1990-1 CNN Media Event, known also as Gulf War One (4) sharpened the tooth of the atomic dog in a new way, putting radioactive heavy metal in its bullets and bombs—uranium depleted not in radioactivity but only in fissionablility. This of course resulted in “Gulf War Syndrome” among American vets and cancer epidemics among Iraqis far surpassing those attendant upon the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atrocities. <!--EZCODE BOLD START--><strong>So far beyond, in fact, that the combined effects of the DU of 1991 and of 2003-4 has been said to equal a quarter million Hiroshimas. This syndrome and these epidemics have no prospect of an end, save that of humanity itself. </strong><!--EZCODE BOLD END--> For the pulverized dust of the DU ordnance will enter the lungs of every Mesopotamian as long as there are Mesopotamian lungs—and the lungs of those unfortunate enough to live wherever the wind may blow this dust. Mountains and high tableland predominate to the east of Mesopotamia, thus the dust may alight momentarily in places sparsely populated by humans, but, with a four-and-a-half billion year half-life, even this dust will have another chance at carcinogenesis. <br><br>The Clinton Administration did not view this dirtiest of its predecessor’s deeds as the abomination it so obviously is. Instead, its personnel champed at the bit to do as the predecessor had done. The chance came in the former Yugoslavia—and came often, in 1994, 1995 and in 1999, in Bosnia, in Croatia—the traditionally Serb areas of the two Kraijinas—and in the war ostensibly over Kosovo. Now these regions share the radioactivity given unto Iraq—as do those downwind and downstream. This means the entirety of the lower Danube watershed.<br><br>Dr. Helen McWhinnie, MD, PhD. of DePaul University told this writer and several dozen of his summer-term fellows back in the year of Stormin’ Norman that the graph showing the relationship between exposure to supravisible radiation and mutation within the human (animal) body is a straight forty-five degree angle—one for one. This means X-rays, this means tanning booths, this means the obviously unavoidable exposure to the sun and other natural sources (granite, anyone?) and the now equally unavoidable exposure to all the radiation for Uncle Sam’s bombs, including all those “tests” out in the Southwest and including all the DU and the radioactive waste seeping into the Columbia and Lake Michigan and wherever else radioactive waste is stored in rusting old drums. <!--EZCODE BOLD START--><strong> It also includes all the tests conducted by the likes of the Soviets, French, British, Chinese, Indians, Pakistanis and the rest of the proliferating crowd following the American leader.</strong><!--EZCODE BOLD END--> And it includes all the accidents we know of and all of those we don’t. (5) <br><br>Radioactivity and its effects are irreversible; our leaders appear to be unwilling to face this irreversibility just as they are unwilling to face other irreversibilities. One might have thought that it was the business of intellectuals to remind them. Some, to their credit, have—the Federation of American Scientists, for instance. <!--EZCODE BOLD START--><strong>Others have chosen to learn that intellectuals who attend to this business of telling those in power what they manifestly do not want to hear gets one unheard. Thus the scum among intellectuals rise to the top—thus Paul Wolfowitz.</strong><!--EZCODE BOLD END--> <!--EZCODE BOLD START--><strong>But other intellectuals cannot be dismissed so easily as opportunists and sycophants. Some believe heartily in urging the powerful on in their insanities. </strong><!--EZCODE BOLD END--> Such a one was the “fusionist conservative” Frank S. Meyer, whose prose filled the early years of <!--EZCODE ITALIC START--><em>National Review</em><!--EZCODE ITALIC END-->. In a psychotic twist on “give me liberty or give me death,” Meyer actually advocated nuclear annihilation—better everything dead than some increased portion of humanity Red. Meyer considered it Our Duty to wipe out vertebrate and deciduous life (at least) rather than succumb to Communism, which I might, only slightly uncharitably, describe as anything not named Ayn Rand or James Burnham of which Mr. Meyer—an ex-commie himself—did not approve. Meyer, then, was a dangerous precedent to today’s warriors on terrorism in his own right.<br><br>He may have gotten his wish. Now the psychedelic visions of John of Patmos...are unlikely to come to pass in a literal fashion, but such things never impede the always allegorically inclined Biblical literalist. Among the musics of the American vernacular, two outstanding groups covered atomic annihilation in distinctly different ways. The Golden Gate Quartet, the superlative swing-gospel singing group performed a song entitled “Atom and Evil,” implicitly and obviously comparing nuclear warfare to original sin. None of that for your godfearin’ Appalachian white folk, no sir. The Louvin Brothers, a singing duo outstanding in their own right, look forward to nuclear megadeath as being the moment of The Rapture, of which we’ve all heard so much lately.<br><br>The GGQ is altogether too charitable to atomics in their “Atoms for Peace” aspect:<br> <br> <!--EZCODE ITALIC START--><em>Now Atom was an honest, hard-working man<br> He wanted to help out the human clan.<br> But Miss Evil got him drunk on prejudice and hate<br> Lord, she taught him how to gamble with humanity’s fate.</em><!--EZCODE ITALIC END--><br><br>So true. Not until Clinton’s orgies of DU destruction what white Christians be nuked in anger. (6) It was hardly lost on America’s black folks that The Bomb was only dropped on non-whites. The GGQ see nuclear war as something to be strenuously avoided—“If we don’t break up that romance soon, they all fall down and go boom, boom.”<br><br>The Louvins, speaking for a great number of evangelical Protestants, look forward to nuclear war:<br><br> <!--EZCODE ITALIC START--><em>Are you ready for that great atomic power?<br> Will you rise and meet your savior in the air?<br> WIll you shout or will you cry when the fire rains from on high<br> Are you ready for that great atomic power?</em><!--EZCODE ITALIC END--><br><br>The Biblical image of the fire from heaven is here specifically linked to the new mode of warfare. Thus it updates an older eschatological Appalachain hymn:<br><!--EZCODE ITALIC START--><em><br> When the fire rains down from heaven<br> And the blood shall fill the sea<br> I’ll be carried home by Jesus<br> And forever with him be</em><!--EZCODE ITALIC END--><br><br>Crimson tides have, of course, long been associated with the Louvins’ (nee Loudermilk) home state of Alabama. Hollywood and Denzel Washington have connected this image with nuclear annihilation. Charlie Louvin implies that fearing atomic death means either you are unshriven or not sufficiently up on your Scripture to find the prospect less than appealing. <br><br>I am reasonably up on my Scripture, but remain unshriven—and I find the prospect less than appealing. The Great Atomic Power comes like a thief in the night on a breeze over the Hindu Kush from Afganistan, or from Dresden Island near Joliet, in a wave of Great Lakes water from the Fermi reactor in Monroe, Michigan or from a leaking drum in the Indiana Harbor landfill. The fallout patterns from the tests in Nevada in the 1950s ruined film in Terre Haute and Rochester and lives in Albany and St. George. Those who advocate the hypothesis that the harm governments do is largely a function of stupidity and incompetence have their cases bolstered by the strange death of Marion Morrison, the Duke, John Wayne. In 1953, while filming in the Utah desert an awful movie for Howard Hughes in which he played the thinly mustachioed Genghis Khan, Marion and all those involved in the filming were subjected to a hydrogen bomb test which happened to be scheduled over the next ridge. Morrison would die twenty-seven years later of an aggressively metastatic melange of cancers against which the latest and greatest monoclonal antibodies at the UCLA Medical Center could do nothing. The US Government, under a Republican administration, killed the star of Test Pilot and the auteur of The Green Berets. Gallows humor. What is whirling is not right, but all wrong, at once old (uranium is an old old rock) and new (plutonium required human assistance to come into being). And our dancing days may prove few in breathing this noxious dust. <!--EZCODE BOLD START--><strong>Any measure that restrains the powerful from even formulating atomic “solutions” to questions of either war or peace is a measure well taken. </strong><!--EZCODE BOLD END--> The combined effects of nuclear insanity, climate change of a catastrophic nature and the toxic bath we are all taking due to over two centuries of industrialism does indeed point to the world sinking with the weight of the human race—and of the latter drowning as a result, like yeast in your hootch, in its own waste.<br><br>NOTES: <br>...<br><br>3. Eliot, “Marina.” So many things mean Death, Eliot’s list (or litany) is hardly exhaustive, or even definitive.<br><br>4. Historians of a saner age, should there be one, will perhaps see Desert Shield and Norman’s Storm as only the first battle in the Iraqi-American War, whose ending date none now can foresee.<br><br>5. One fine late winter Sunday in 1987, the present writer and his namesake were travelling from Crystal Lake, Illinois to Rock Island, Illinois, to deposit the present writer back at his dorm at Augustana College. As soon as we turned west onto State Highway 176, we noticed ahead of us an oddly-shaped cloud, which only grew as we travelled on. It was still visible when we reached the northeastern outskirts of the metropolitan Quad Cities. It was steam, rising from the cooling towers of the Byron nuker plant. Unlike the steam which rises daily from the cooling tower which dominates one’s view from the outlet mall in Michigan City, this was not a normal occurrence. Inquiries were met—this was the Age of Ronnie, y’know—with polite dismissal. I be dog, though if there weren’t something in a steamcloud clearly visible—and huge at that—in a hundred-mile radius.<br><br>6. The key words are “in anger.” The white Christians (yes, including the LDS) of Utah, Nevada and New Mexico were nuked out of a combination of curiosity and indifference.<hr></blockquote><!--EZCODE QUOTE END--> <br><!--EZCODE ITALIC START--><em>The Calumet Review</em><!--EZCODE ITALIC END-->, volume two, number two, Spring, 2005 <p></p><i>Edited by: <A HREF=http://p216.ezboard.com/brigorousintuition.showUserPublicProfile?gid=gouda@rigorousintuition>Gouda</A> at: 5/30/06 4:42 am<br></i>