Lughnasa and the Herme Moon
Thursday gratefuls: Oppenheimer, the movie. Gabe. The last revision of The Trail to Cold Mountain. Acting. Cool night. Closed caption contraption. In and Out. Euphemisms. Driving. In rush hour. On I-70. With the express lanes functioning. God is Here, the book. Metaphors. For the sacred. Mussar. Leading mussar today. Getting back into the Mountains after having been in the city.
Sparks of Joy and Awe: Movies
One brief shining: Trinity on the White Sands of New Mexico, a tower alone, an old fashioned motor and chain lifted a ball with electrical wires coming off of it, like a head connected to a neural mapping device, only this was no head, rather it was the first atomic bomb moving slowly link by link to its moment of explosive truth.
Baby boomer? Yes. They’re talking about my generation. A massive number of births following a long and bloody war. Which, at its end, changed the world forever. The movie Oppenheimer gives us a glimpse into the work, the pragmatic scientific bloody-minded work, that made that change. It shows us, yes, the story of the Chief Executive Scientist behind the bomb’s completion, Robert Oppenheimer. A complex man filled with paradox and living a life always on the knife edge of tragedy. Yes, an American Prometheus chained ever after to the rock of fame and infamy, governmental vultures stopping by to pick at his liver, healing up and then starting over again.
What it does not show is the mushroom cloud hovering over us baby boomers, the first generation to grow up with the knowledge that humanity held the awful power to eliminate itself. An anti-evolutionary device, the A-bomb. Too easy but I’ll say it anyway. Our sword of Damocles. Mutually Assured Destruction. MAD. ness. What else can it be?
Under the mushroom cloud spies snuck here and there, covertly hunting for nuclear secrets. The US and the Soviet Union locked in a standoff made Velveteen Rabbit by the missile silos in Siberia and in the fields of Wyoming and South Dakota. That same mushroom cloud hovers still. Only now the so-called nuclear club has many members: China, Russia, India, Pakistan, Israel, the U.S, North Korea, France, the United Kingdom.
Ironic that in the early winter of the baby boomer generation the great threat to the world is no longer that mushroom cloud but an early industrial age blanket made of carbon. Not to say the nuclear threat does not remain. It does. Yet so far the MAD notion of self-destruction in an instant has held fingers away from the buttons.
All the while we drove our cars, buses, trucks and turned on our air-conditioners, joined the electric revolution.
Apocalypse now is not a movie anymore.
