TriumphAnt

It’s probably as much a reflection of the simple fact of my age as it is of anything else, but when I sit, remote in hand, flipping mindlessly around the television dial (actually, calling the remote-directed channel run “flipping around a dial” is also a reflection of my age, but I digress), I will always be brought to an abrupt halt by anything about Hiroshima.

Given that the anniversary of the bombing has just passed, it’s no surprise that several related programs cropped up over the past few days, but one of the most compelling was a feature-length documentary that ran on CBC-TV’s “The Passionate Eye” the evening of August 7.

Here’s how its bumpf appears at one of the CBC’s websites:

“It was the defining moment of the 20th Century - the scientific, technological, military, and political gamble of the world's first atomic attack. This drama-documentary attempts to do what no other film has done before - to show what it is like to live through a nuclear explosion, millisecond by millisecond.

Set in the three weeks from the first test explosion in New Mexico to the eventual dropping of the bomb, the action takes viewers into the room where the crucial political decisions are made; on board the Enola Gay on her fateful voyage; inside the bomb as it explodes; and on the streets of Hiroshima when disaster strikes.

Parallel storylines interweave, unfolding the action from both US and Japanese perspectives, and revealing the tensions and conflicts in the actions and minds of people who were making history. Special effects recreate the reality of the mission - even going inside the workings of the bomb – and archive film replays the horrific aftermath.”

That description doesn’t do it justice. “Horrific”, for example, falls far short of describing the program’s dramatization of what followed the bomb’s detonation. I don’t know the word or words, in fact, but so [a word far beyond “horrific”] was it, I had to turn off after watching a scene where a young mother sat by helplessly after trying unsuccessfully to pull her children from the rubble of their shattered home. Badly injured herself, she could do nothing as an encroaching fire first approached, then consumed her unseen shrieking daughter, the mother all the while apologizing through her tears for being a “bad mother” because she couldn’t pull her children free. The scene was a dramatization of a real survivor’s recollection. No doubt there were thousands, if not tens of thousands of similar tragedies in the seconds and minutes following the blast. But personalizing it to the level of one small family is a powerful and effective way of trying to get you to relate to the impact of that unimaginably terrible day in Hiroshima.

An estimated 90,000 killed outright? A total of 200,000-plus estimated dead by the end of the year? Numbers. But one mother and the agony of her shrieking dying child? Numbing. Your mind has to anaesthetize the intensity of the pain you feel.

Before that heart-ripping sequence, I had been mesmerized by the process of putting into action the decision to use the bomb. The program combined dramatizations with actual documentary footage and many post-war interviews, including several segments with Paul Tibbets, who piloted the Enola Gay, the US Army Air Corps’ B-29 – he named it for his mother – that carried the bomb to Hiroshima. Watching from the perspective of a viewer in 2006, I was at first appalled by what seemed to be an ice-cold clinical analysis by Tibbets of how he felt when the white-hot light of the explosion filled the cockpit of his bomber. His principal emotion, he honestly reported, was one of enormous relief that his mission had been successful. Period.

He also told of how often after the war he was savaged by critics and activists for his role in the world’s first nuclear attack.

And yet the program is sympathetic to the airmen. Another of Tibbets’ crew members on that mission said in a separate interview that, at 30,000 feet, they had no way of seeing the total destruction they had caused, not least because of the smoke, but also because the moment the bomb was released from the aircraft, Tibbets put the Enola Gay into a steep, fast 180-degree turn in order to build the aircraft’s speed up to receive what he had been told would be an especially violent shockwave. But in the intervening years, he (the other crewman) admits he hasn’t been entirely successful at coming to terms with what he knows now of the blast he helped unleash.

And then there’s the finality of a simple statement from the crewman who actually armed the bomb before it was released from the aircraft. The program goes into some detail of not only the process he followed, but also the fact that he practised it for fully half the previous day, and refused to wear gloves at 30,000 feet because he thought he needed to feel the arming parts with his fingers to be sure they were inserted correctly. His statement: “Afterwards, I realized I was the last person to actually touch the bomb. I hadn’t thought of that at the time.” Obviously, he thinks of it now. A lot.

I have read several books detailing the battles fought during the Pacific campaign in World War II by US Marines and Japanese soldiers on the Japanese-held islands of Guadalcanal, Okinawa, Tarawa, Iwo Jima and dozens of others, battles in which the Japanese fight-to-the-death ferocity increased the closer the campaign came to their homeland.

I commend to you in particular a recent book entitled “Flags of Our Fathers”, a highly evocative group biography of the six men who were the accidental subjects of arguably the Second World War’s most famous American photograph – the raising of the stars and stripes atop Mt Suribachi early in the battle for Iwo Jima. The book takes you through pre-war America in a look at the childhood of six boys who almost seem to have been chosen by script, so widely and completely do they represent the backgrounds of the ordinary men who fought that war, then follows them through the battle for the Island and its aftermath.

Some of the American sextet, in fact, never left Iwo Jima. They were killed as the battle went on for weeks after the famous flag-raising. The book follows the post-war popularization, indeed near-deification, of the survivors and the widely varying degrees of success each had coming to terms (or not) with the process of becoming the idols that America would make of them. (The book’s author is the son of one of the flag-raisers.) If you’ve seen the William Wyler movie, “The Best Years of Our Lives”, you will recognize that this book walks a similar path in exploring the difficulty of returning to “ordinary” life after the brutality that these men had lived with as “ordinary” during much of the time since their enlistments. Not surprisingly, the image-laden “Flags of Our Fathers” is presently in production as a movie under the direction of Clint Eastwood. I expect it to be an especially wrenching film experience.

But my point? “Little Boy”, the innocuously nick-named Hiroshima bomb, left San Francisco aboard the USS Indianapolis just two hours (!) after the successful atomic bomb test at the Trinity test site. From the comfort of 2006, it is easy to castigate US President Harry Truman’s unseemly haste in setting in motion the chain of events that would lead, just days later, to the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But from the perspective of a war-weary US home front, where mothers and fathers and brothers and sisters had several times seen newsreel images of Pacific Island beaches awash in the blood and bodies of dead marines, it is also easy to understand why even today the twin detonations are – not dismissed – but certainly understood and accepted by many survivors as the price of ending that war without suffering the huge number of American casualties that were forecast had it proven necessary to invade Japan.

Several years ago, while visiting the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum in Washington DC, I stood in a silent, reverently lit but almost empty gallery and watched, discreetly, while an elderly Japanese man gingerly approached and then, ever so hesitantly, reached up to touch the nose of the Enola Gay. He displayed no emotion whatsoever.

An estimated 90,000 killed outright. A total of 200,000-plus estimated dead by the end of the year. Numbers. But to touch, to physically touch the messenger of God-only-knows what memories you now harbour. Numbing. Your mind surely has to anaesthetize the intensity of the pain you feel.

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When you live in Ontario and work in Quebec, probably the single most depressing day of the year – workwise – is the first Monday in August.

It’s a holiday in Ontario, and it is generally called by an only-in-Canada title for a celebration – the “Civic Holiday”. (Who else but a Canadian would celebrate civic-ness with its own holiday?)

But for me, it means that my better half is enjoying a day off while I have to rumble out of bed early on a beautiful temperate morning that promises a perfect summer’s day, and drag myself down streets that are almost painfully deserted en route to my bus stop. Just me and, for company, some frisky squirrels and loud early morning arguments among a few crows in the treetops.

Then, of course, I discover that OCTranspo is running on a holiday schedule, which means that instead of a bus coming along every ten minutes, one shows up every hour in the early morning. And also, of course, the bus I take is one that crosses the river into Québec so when it finally arrives it is chock full of people who, like me, have to work on Ontario’s Civic Holiday.

And we’re all surlier than hell for two reasons. First because, as already noted, we’re on our way to work and have all arrived at our bus stops by walking along early morning streets that are so quiet, we heard the snores through the open windows of our neighbours’ homes. And second, because the bus is so crowded with Québec-bound workers, the only people lucky enough to have grabbed a seat are those who boarded very early along the once-every-hour-or-so route.

(Now to be fair, my wife did offer to get up on this year’s Civic Holiday morning and drive me to work. So technically, I probably have abrogated my right to a full-throated whine about the commuting portion of my two-topic complaining. But I opted for bonus husband points by letting her sleep in instead.)

And to be equally fair, I get my own back every June 24th – St-Jean-Baptiste Day – when Quebec workers (and federal government workers like me whose cubicles are in the province) have a holiday that the rest of the country doesn’t. But that’s part of the end-of-June-early-July time when it feels like the whole country’s vacationing anyway, even people at work. A month later, it’s a lot lonelier to be among the few people in Ottawa who actually have to go to work because the statutory holiday where my house is doesn’t cross the river to where my office is. To make the knife cut even more deeply, all the sources I normally engage as part of my job are all based on the Ottawa side of the river, so there was zero material on hand even when OC Transpo finally did get me to work.

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Righting a wrong

Baby ducklings whose brains were not reduced to putty by my last entry will recall I whined about having to pay more at my local Thai take-out the day after the federal Goods and Services Tax (GST) had been reduced a solitary percent by the Harper government. But not only did I have to pay more, I was faced with an entire counter staff telling me that my recollection of what I had been paying every week for several months was wrong.

Well, someone’s ears must have been burning because the following week, after I’d muttered about it here in this little online place, I walked in and suddenly found myself the centre of attention at that same counter.

In very short order, I was told that the staff had met after the lunch rush died down that day – just because I had seemed so sure of the amount I had been paying. And sure enough, I had been overcharged for an item on my first post-GST reduction visit. Apologies were unanimous and vigorously expressed, and I was handed a refund personally, with yet another apology, by the cashier who had originally rung in the slightly higher amount and then joined in the “No, you must be mis-remembering” chorus. There seemed to be some genuine concern that I had been seriously offended by their 16-cent mistake.

We remain friends, you’ll be glad to know. And Thai Fridays will go on with no further wondering on my part about exactly where the disconnect had occurred.

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My family already knows the linguistic affection I harbour for the overuse of the word “virtually”, when it is virtually always “almost” that the user means.

They no doubt will be delighted to know that the snarly tone I use whenever it makes its oral or print appearance in something I am reading or listening to is slowly but surely being replaced by a new target: “on the ground”.

I’m sure it’s been around for longer than I have been noticing it, but it has only been in recent weeks that it has begun to trip my “What the hell do you mean?!!” wire. In many contexts, it is a phrase inserted so uselessly and so devoid of meaning that almost every sentence in which I’ve noted its use would suffer not a whit for its elimination, or its replacement with the single word, “there”. Consider these random citations from a quick search of Google News:

"As I was already on the ground in Lebanon, I decided to stay to put logistics in place, to make sure all of the aid is received by the people directly.” (The Vice President of the American University of Dubai, in al Jazeera online, July 24)

“Nir Rosen is one of a handful of extraordinary investigative reporters who offer English-literate readers the on-the-ground reality of the war in Iraq.” (book reviewer Michael Schwartz, Asia Times online, July 22)

"The intensity right now of the bombing is such that to send people there, even to send buses or armoured cars, we don't have that equipment on the ground." Then two sentences later: "Once they're on the boat there will be time to decide whether the flights have to take off right away, whether there might have to be an overnight. All of those logistical plans will be worked out by the teams on the ground.” (Canadian Foreign Affairs minister Peter MacKay, Winnipeg Free Press, July 18)

“It's called the fog of war and at this point it's better left to the experts on the ground to find the solutions.” (Editorial, Calgary Herald, July 20)

Try it. In MacKay’s quotes, “on the ground” can be replaced by “there”. In each of the others, when you delete it entirely, does the meaning change?

At least I can draw some consolation from the thought I am not alone. In the July 9 St John’s Telegram, columnist Jamie Baker rips the “sea of political bafflegab [and] well-worn clichés” used and overused by speakers of “official or professional jargon”. Of “on the ground”, he sarcastically notes: “As in, ‘We have people working on the ground to solve the problem.’ A great idea that works particularly well when dealing with soil-management issues.”

Now I will readily admit that it is an essential clarifying phrase in these sentences: (i) in a July 4 article in the Whitehorse Star describing the rescue of a pair of eagle nestlings: “A local resident saw the eaglets on the ground at around 5 p.m. and called the City of Whitehorse.” (ii) in a July 18 Globe and Mail preview of this year’s British Open golf tournament (I know, to purists, it’s “The Open”, period. But here in Canada, we’re on the verge of the 2006 Canadian Open and I offer “British” to avoid even an outside chance of someone’s mixing them up… but I digress): “There's going to be a lot of running the ball on the ground because you won't be able to stop the ball at the flag.” and (iii) here, in an article about Toronto rooftop gardens that appeared in the July 19 Halifax Chronicle-Herald: “Space on the ground is at a premium, and there are a lot of environmental benefits from green roofs."

But my family can take this as a heads-up. I am probably due to start yelling things like, “As opposed to ‘up in the air’???!!!” whenever this phrase shows up, as it increasingly seems to do so, in the utterly meaningless way of the above examples.

(But the consolation to them is that I’ve pretty well written off decrying the use of “virtually” when “almost” is meant. It’s virtually a lost cause.)

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Spare, if you will, a passing thought for Floyd Landis and elite sport in general. Floyd is a US cyclist and was first across the finish line at this year’s Tour de France. (I am deliberately avoiding the use of the word, “winner” because as everyone now knows, Floyd twice tested positive for artificially high levels of testosterone. In other words, all evidence at present points to his having crossed the finish line “juiced”.)

One thing all the coverage has since made clear is that Floyd’s sin is nothing unique at that level of competitive cycling. Nor is it, for that matter, unknown in other elite level sports.

And when the dreaded first test return is positive (which, ironically, in a drug test is anything but!), then you hear some truly astonishing excuses as the accused bends him/herself inside out to show that his or her star in the lofty firmament of elite sports will not fade away. In Floyd’s case, he claimed he’s always been capable of naturally producing levels of testosterone up to ten times what is considered “normal”. Several callers who voiced their opinions during one of several phone-in radio shows aired after the failed second test was reported swore their absolute fealty to the belief that Landis has been the victim of a European (and probably French)-led conspiracy, because they saw their coveted trophy heading off once more in the hands of a hated American, in the first year after seven successive wins by another American (may his pee remain forever clean), Lance Amstrong.

But they are the last vestiges of a dying bleat. More and more athletes and sports governing bodies, including a great many Americans, are now taking a position that essentially involves a head-shake and a mumbled, “Too bad, Floyd; busted!”

But whether it changes, or even begins to change the sports culture of win-at-any-cost remains to be seen.

One thing that seems to be happening though, is a growing number of reports that argue the sports-watching public is getting sick and tired of riding the emotional roller coaster that follows the “Thrill of Victory” with the “Agony of Defeat”.

And if it continues for not too very much longer, I am afraid that even when competitors pass the drug tests, this ever more jaded public will inevitably conclude that it was because they, or their attending physicians, had developed better performance-enhancer masks. And I find that sad. Because as more and more of such events’ wins turn out to be tainted, there will come a last straw, when the public says, “Enough!” And the public will treat such competitors the same way they treat World Wrestling Federation competitors now – bad actors and good showmen, for sure, but “sportsmen” or “athletes”? Hardly.

= = =

And finally, I am embarking on a sad little exercise for me – reminiscent of that scene in “Ghost” where Whoopi “Oda-May” Goldberg has to part with a cheque for several million dollars in ill-gotten gains (not hers) by passing it over to a pair of nuns collecting for charity. She holds the cheque in a grip of iron and only releases it after yielding to the combined forces of a nun’s tugging on one end and Oda-May’s omni-present conscience – the ghost of the Patrick Swayze character – telling her over and over, and over, that she can’t keep it.

In my case, it’s a modest but four-large-box chunk of a lifetime’s collection of military books that I have to release. At home, we have simply run out of storage space and the camel’s back-breaking straw came when we made the move to convert a room that was part store-room into a bedroom / computer workstation space. So after a little research, I spoke to someone at Ottawa’s Perley-Rideau Veterans Hospital / residence and was told that such a contribution would be much welcomed into their library. I just know I’ll offload them from the dolly with not a little reluctance but, at the same time, just how many illustrated accounts of the Battle of Britain does someone really need to own?

We’ll soon be culling other sections of the home library as well and I undoubtedly have still to experience a few more twinges. But as my wife drove pointedly home in a recent conversation on the subject, how often have I opened any of our many do-it-yourself books recently? (Um… not once in the last five years.) Even the instructions for building a loft bed turned up on a most informative DIY website that included a great how-to video clip!

Can the world of Fahrenheit 451* be very far off?

* 1. "Monday burn Millay, Wednesday Whitman, Friday Faulkner, burn 'em to ashes, then burn the ashes. That's our official slogan."

* 2. “Is it true that a long time ago, firemen used to put out fires and not burn books?”

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And finally (for real)…

On the subject of partings, recently my in-laws had to say good-bye to a much-loved family pet. Mac was a faithful-with-a-capital-F wheat-coloured little sort-of-terrier-looking dog who, when he finally left the family, was roughly 115 or thereabouts in comparable human years. To say he had a good long life is an understatement. In his final months, he simply started shutting down – sight, hearing, and what really brought his condition home: bladder control. Family vigilance went into high-alert-watch-you-don’t-step-on-Mac mode as Mac took to dropping and dozing usually smack in the middle of the most heavily travelled routes in whatever space he happened to be.

If he was suffering, he didn’t let on. (Unless you accidentally stepped on him, in which case he could still muster a pretty remarkable howl. Regrettably, I speak from experience.) But when the most elementary of tasks – a walk across the room, for example – finally became a study in lost brain-to-legs links, Mac’s family bowed to the inevitable truth of the signs.

In both our house and theirs, there are lots of photos of Mac, starting right from puppyhood when some days he was everywhere at once and possessed of a loud, razor-sharp single bark that would shatter glass – not to mention seriously startle everyone within earshot – to alert them that a visitor’s car had arrived in the driveway, or someone had just reached the front door. Spiritual grandfather to at least six cats with whom he shared his residence over the years, that’s the Mac everyone will remember.

Don’t believe everything you read. Some dogs do have souls.

Until next time.