Remember, remember the 8th of August. The day between Hiroshima and Nagasaiki. Like a lot of American families, my family is defined by the unique sequence of events in history and our collective memories of those days in August. The time after Trinity, when it was clear that Atomic Weapons, Nuclear Weapons, or Radiological Weapons worked. They were not just theoretical physics and chemistry. They were operationalized, industrialized, manufactured reality. They arrived too late for their intended use: stopping the Germans (at least before the Soviet Army did) on behalf of America and its Allies in the United Nations of that war. They were weapons to end weapons in a War to end Wars sparked by the brutal legacies of settler colonialisms, imperialisms, orientalisms, and centuries of deadly conflict in Europe and the Mediterranean that enveloped the world. There were no "perfect" sides of those wars, especially after the rapid industrialization of warfare in the 19th Century. People died, all kinds of people. Not just soldiers, not just nurses, not just civilians, but millions of people that history, for better and worse, has often forgotten.
I am the child of two families united by their loves of the sciences and the arts, their love of beauty and art writ in stone cathedrals and metal domes. My mother and my father met in churches, fell in love with each other under the shelter of sturdy eaves, and did so on public lands and public colleges that are the legacy of how both sides of my families fished, farmed, and lived on the coasts of Europe and the Americas. Like most Americans, this is a mixed legacy; I have a grandparent who never talked about her role in The War, just obliquely mentioned that her graduation from a prestigious school made her a special liaison to the United States Navy in Washington DC. Her husband, crippled by polio as a child, studied Electrical Engineering during the war and learned to build dams and bridges in Colombia and New England before working with the finest American Minds (many formerly German, Greek, Hungarian, French, German, Chinese, Japanese, Mexican, or Spanish of many races and ethnic origins) on rocketry and space in pursuit of the MOL and Skylab projects. On the other side our naval tradition goes back to the founding of Louisiana and Texas, via the Azores and Iberia, as sailors and slaves and captives and freed peoples.
My father studied Chemistry. Then Chemical Engineering. Then landed the ideal job for someone of his age in the Cold War: designing something called "sanitation systems" in Wilmington, Delaware for DuPont Chemicals. His work was classified then, but brought him to work in North Augusta, South Carolina at a site (then quite secretive) called the Savannah River Plant on "special Naval fuels". He held clearance. The family did not. But we knew the drill, even before Chernobyl in Ukraine became infamous world-wide. After all, he had lived in Baltimore and Paoli, down wind of Three Mile Island at times, and I (along with my brother) was born downstream of his "sanitation engineering". This, to me, is both the legacy of peace and war inherent in being from coastal people, the children of fisher-folk and mill-hands and wainwrights and carvers. Of shavers of wood, of casters of nets, of being people of bayou and brook, of streams and seas.
And as a writer, it made my legacy clear too: my childhood was lit by the shadow of three bombs. It was defined by the accidents at the chemical plants and refineries my father designed and built to fuel the planes, trains, automobiles, and nuclear submarines that kept us safe as children. It was an honorable job for honorable men, as Marc Antony once said. They built their refineries to honor peace, not to bury it. They forged steel and build cores and tickled the dragon's tail to see the end to war, to say no more, to say that in America, at least, people like us, the mixed-up, the underfed, the fleeing refugees and shipwrecked could be at home and at peace.
But we built the infrastructure and society for nuclear war and global warming. There is no sense in assigning blame. I grew up panicked, scared, fleeing from hurricanes and stormy seas lit by chemical plants flaring their last methane before the seas rose and washed over all of our walls. We built peace at the cost of lives unseen: lives downwind, lives further ashore, lives of future generations whose names and faces we might never see.
For all that people like my parents and grandparents did, in the military and as civilians, we built three bombs. We detonated one as a test, one in anger, and one to prove our capability to do it again. Historians litigate the sequences of these events. As a writer, an artist and a game developer: I just read, draw, and try to listen.
I knew before I read Camus and Ionesco in French that I loved their mode of the absurd. I loved their wrestling with the inanity of death, of conflict, of violence. I read Oe for fun. I read Soseki to relax. I was a queer kind of existentialist, an absurd ironist in a family of Logical Positivists and intellectual descendants of Popper and Quine. A reading child who struggled to speak correct English, a precocious thing that never struggled with logic or math but never seemed to stand up quite right for themselves. I avoided the plague that crippled my Grandpa thanks to American Science. But as a writer and an ironic critic? It left me with an incredible debt. A debt to the world, not to apologize for American technology or industry, but to justify the crimes we committed by using terrible weapons in the name of peace, of leveling cities across the world in firebombings before we targeted Hiroshima or Nagasaki. A kind of genocide that dare not speak its name, as it was "legitimate" targeting given the technology of the day.
But the first time I set foot in Hiroshima-shi, I wept. Before I went to the Memorial Museum, I knew what I would see. I had read the comics, I had seen some films. I cried, and mourned, but I managed not to lose my way as an artist or a writer. I found a path out of that legacy not by imagining that these things never happened, but by struggling to see them from the eyes of Soseki's Cat. Of trying to imagine how it felt that day in Hiroshima, trapped in a camp or forced by an imperious government to toil in the August heat at a furnace or plant. I never had to imagine, really, how it might have felt to see the flash: if you did, you were far enough to live to see again. But as an artist or writer: how do we imagine world peace without imagining ourselves in those shoes? Imagining ourselves in the places with only shadows left in negative?
I have no answer to anyone who wants one about how to reconcile these feelings as an American or a writer, especially in the shadows of the many wars but most especially the conflicts around nuclear reactors in Ukraine. I can only hope that the legacy of my writing and code can help cast a shadow of doubt in the next person who thinks: there will be no one else down wind. There will be no one else harmed. There will be no victims but our intended target.
War never changes, perhaps. But our imaginations of peace can and must. Il faut imaginer? We must dream that button will never be pushed again.
