I For One Welcome Our New Masters

I made a perhaps too subtle reference to the anniversary of our glorious triumph over man and nature. This post may be in the same vein but in another direction. I suppose making the metaphor and its carried meaning deadly- (I mean a vein's flowing in reverse can't be a good thing).

Anyway, back when we were becoming death, the various science type persons on the Manhattan Project were given a survey asking how they thought the subsequently created device should be used. At one point, a demonstration that privately showed the power of the weapon to Japanese mucky-mucks, a demonstration that did not include use on a civilian population, was a viable option. That action was one of the survey options.

Of course we know now that it was only possible to get reliable data on the long term human consequences of the bombs by actually using them on actual humans. Anything else would have been purely academic. Plus there was the added bonus of scaring the shit out of the Soviets and letting the whole world know we were the one's in charge of this new order of new maps, stabilized currencies, world banking, and neo-colonialism. (Oh right, I use the word "shit" in this post. Language warning and all that. You know in case your nuclear era delicacies make you sensitive to that word.)

It was necessary to commit a very public act of power that showed the whole world just how great, if not wonderful, we were. We were revealing just what kind of benevolent world dictator we would be. How fitting that today's dubious commemorations should come so closely to yesterday's accomplishments.


It's not quite full circle. I mean to go from Berlin 1936 to Beijing 2008 may be a circuit, but we can't leave out August 1945 for its world stage performative relevance. What is that? An ellipse?