The best argument against nuclear weapons (and warfare)

Read these passages from John Hersey's seminal Hiroshima – which chronicles the hardships of six Hiroshima residents following the US' dropping of the atomic bomb – and tell me that a justifiable reason for using nuclear weapons exists. For clarification, the first passage centers on the efforts of Mr. Tanimoto, a pastor, to help the countless wounded by ferrying them to a safety zone:

"Mr. Tanimoto found about twenty men and women on the sandspit. He drove the boat onto the bank and urged them to get aboard. They did not move and he realized that they were too weak to lift themselves. He reached down and took a woman by the hands, but her skin slipped off in huge, glovelike pieces. He was so sickened by this that he had to sit down for a moment."

"By nightfall, ten thousand victims of the explosion had invaded the Red Cross Hospital, and Dr. Sasaki, worn out, was moving aimlessly and dully up and down the stinking corridors ... Dr. Sasaki had not looked outside the hospital all day; the scene inside was so terrible and so compelling that it had not occurred to him to ask any questions about what had happened beyond the windows and doors. Ceilings and partitions had fallen; plaster, dust, blood, and vomit were everywhere. Patients were dying by the hundreds, but there was nobody to carry away the corpses."

I always find two interesting nuances in our usage of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The first is its relationship with the War in which it was deployed. World War II was, for all intents and purposes the last "good" war the US ever fought, a war with cleanly delineated lines of good and evil and little ambiguity regarding who was on the right side of the battlefront. For World War II, there was no question of our goodness, no question of the purity of the mission, no draft boards, no widespread protests, no PTSD. Only absolute commitment to the cause: stopping Hitler and the Axis powers.

Yet, it was within that war, that good, clean war of honor and privilege, and the US committed the ultimate war crime. More than 100,000 people died in the bombing of Hiroshima, and approximately 80,000 died in Nagasaki. Their skin was burned horribly, beyond imagination. Faces were melted. Women's breasts were seared off their bodies. Clothing disintegrated, and thousands of people, weak and helpless from radiation sickness, were left in the open air to die, their bodies blotched in sickening rainbows of red and yellow. Thousands more were indoors when the bombs dropped, and they too died slowly, painfully, crushed under the weight of their homes, desperately crying for help that never arrived.

Which brings me to nuance number two, which is the relative ease in which so many of us support the notions of war and absolute force.

It's always stupendously easier to support those actions when the empirical, micro details of such decisions are ignored, isn't it? When we remain ignorant of the pain and suffering they cause, pain and suffering that reaches levels of such acuity that they approach wondrous light? As long as we can delude ourselves with the propaganda of the mission, and effectively block the horrors that journalists such as Hersey chronicle, we're peachy creamy.

If, however, we were to actually consider the consequences of our country's actions – to legitimately THINK about the indefatigable amount of lives that are demolished by the politically and ideological decisions of one power hungry, supremely delusional superpower – we may actually achieve an ounce of skepticism the next time the powers that be attempt to convince us of a new military conflict.

Not that it would matter, in the end, but at least we'd have a sense of empathy. And THAT is why journalism – great, effective journalism that is rife with passion and devoid of soulless objectivity – will always provide the finest argument against warfare and absolute force. Journalism exposes, whether we like it or not, the results of such actions, and renders obsolete the perverted worldview that so many of us use to justify military conflicts.

(Flickr design courtesy of Simon Strandgaard)

Dinah Sings

I saw my brother's superlative jazz band play tonight, and, like the last time I watched their joyous exultation of spontaneous combustion, I left thinking of this number by the great Dinah Washington. It could simply be the fact that two of the band's numbers featured a singer, a cute pixie type with a voice of peppermint that somewhat resembled the vicious assault of Dinah. But regardless of the reason, that jazz concert, like every other concert I've attended, was a vital, surging experience, as it reminded me of the vigor and brilliance of musical performance.


But anyway, back to Dinah. There's much to be said about the woman, who seemed to deliberately embody the mass wave of contradictions that encompassed American jazz in its '50s heyday. Here was a woman who could sing the blues better than Bessie Smith, draw you in with her infectious swing phrasing, and effortlessly pull off even the most wretched of pop affairs – and at the same time, here was a woman who was married a whopping eight times (divorced seven times), whose swagger and attitude nearly overshadowed her considerable talents, and whose death at the age of 39, due to an insane combination of secobarbital and amobarbital, only seemed proper, given the ramshackle approach Dinah seemed to take with everything.


But god could the woman sing, and maybe it was precisely because of her erratic nature that her performances had such a brilliant immediacy. Sure, Dinah could be sweet and sincere, her tone edging on playfulness, but her true brilliance lied in her blues and ballads, where her CUTCO voice slashed and burned the material in ways the composer never imagined – and made the song all the more brilliant as a result. The woman simply smoldered, delivering her lines with a depth and passion that I don't think we'll ever see again, given the overwhelming perfectionism of digital recording technology.


The blues must be messy; it must be ugly; it must be tarnished, in some way or another, by the central fact that it highlights the absolute base level of human suffering. How is that essence remotely possible, given the advances of recording technology? How can something be raw and immaculately recorded at the same time? It's a perversion of nature, a reversal of truth, a bastardization of an art form born out of decades of pain and anguish. To digitally record the blues with modern technology is to cage a Siberian Tiger.


So listen to Dinah; pending the crash of financial derivatives and the resulting implosion of the American empire, we may never hear another like her.

(Flickr photo by marysecasol.com)

Topsy Turvidom

On Tuesday, after nearly a decade out of print, "Topsy Turvy" got the Criterion treatment, with the noted Collection releasing a superlative two-disc issue of the film.

It would seem like a match made in purgatory – Mike Leigh, the infinitely brilliant director of such grisly portraits of modernity as "Naked" and "High Hopes," directing a film about light opera titans W.S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan, chronicling the creative and personal conflicts of the men with a touch worthy of Fosse and a lushness indicative of Ophuls, as they struggle to reconcile their considerable talents (and egos) in the creation of "The Mikado," their most famous and lasting work.

What's missing from that rather glib comparison, though, is Leigh's true intentions in making "Topsy Turvy" — "I'm not given to making films about filmmakers or artists," Leigh says in an essay accompanying the Criterion DVD, "But I decided that it would be good to make a film about what we do, what we all go through" – and "Topsy Turvy" is, if anything, a love letter to artistic creation, a detailed examination of genius and the fickle, schizophrenic bitch that is creativity.

And indeed, Leigh may have very well created the ultimate document of the creative process, keenly showing its joys, sorrows, and humility ("There's something inherently disappointing about success," Jim Broadbent's Gilbert remarks, after the premiere of "The Mikado" at the film's close). "Topsy Turvy," in fact, is one of the main reasons for my rather devastating dislike for "Black Swan." Sure, "Black Swan" featured many admirable qualities, paramount among them a tortured performance from Natalie Portman and the graceful, meticulously choreographed cinematography during the dancing sequences. However, the actual creative process, or, the exhaustive series of events in which performing genius resides, is all but ignored in Aronofsky's film, which would rather focus on backstage drama bordering on exploitation.

By contrast, EVERYTHING is examined in "Topsy Turvy": the creation of the words and music; the costumes and sets; the exhaustive rehearsals of the actors and singers; and the dry test runs of the show, as every last detail is ironed out. Hell, Leigh is so committed to his purpose that he'll devote a full six minutes of screen time to showing how the famed "Three Little Maids" sequence came to accurately reflect the "Japanese" style – that's six minutes for what amounts to a roughly 90-second song. Where is that patience in "Black Swan"? Hell, where is that patience in ANY American film?

I suppose my true reason for loving "Topsy Turvy" as I do – aside from the gorgeous camerawork of Dick Pope, the exquisite sets, unbelievably compelling performances (Broadbent threatens the swallow the movie whole, such is his charisma), or the film's script, which borders on supernatural with its delectable wit and impeccable composition – is how decidedly un-American a film it truly is. Not un-American in its attitudes or rhetoric, of course, but un-American in how just about every nuance of the film is removed from everything we Yanks seem to expect out of a modern motion picture. And that sense of discovery, the realization that there is a world outside of the American cinema, is breathtaking.