-Lucifer Falters, Falls in the Sea

Flush with indignation and anger, I sulked in my room, surreptitiously defying a parental ban on solitary viewing. I watched on a small black and white television, so perhaps some of the brilliance of the explosions was lost on me, but after all of the hype , I was only disappointed. I am fairly certain I turned the movie off before all the threads of the story were chased down and tied off. The commentary that followed the movie I missed entirely.

I was a junior in high school when The Day After first aired, and ripe with the anger of my years. A movie that sought to make real the horror, the threat, of nuclear war, seemed only gratuitous to me; The culture, at least as I remember it, was awash in the imagery and awareness of the atomic black cloud under which we all lived. Why all of a sudden did I have to share this with everyone?

From Dr. Strangelove, to the Police to the Port Huron Statement that I found somewhere in my reading (history class?), the reality was rather hard to escape. The Berlin Wall, M*A*S*H* re-runs, Marc David Chapman and Ronald Reagan--you remember, the eighties.

From some time in the seventies, I have memories of discussing the Strategic Arms Limitations Talks at Assumption School. I think it was sixth grade with Miss Murray. All I took away was that to say "SALT Talks" was a redundancy. You can see why I majored in English rather than political science.

On reading the Port Huron Statement as a teenager, I felt a sense of wonder--here was a document that acknowledges the " . . .awareness that we ourselves, and our friends, and millions of abstract "others" we knew more directly because of our common peril, might die at any time", [italics mine] and mentions the single-issue stance of many peace activists of the time: "Ban the Bomb".

It was fabulous, unreal. No one says this stuff, out loud! People who thought the world could change in that way, and that they would help make it happen! I went to one practice for Confirmation with a borrowed jacket that had a "Ban the Bomb" button pinned to it. I think I was practicing an ironic stance.

Of course, I saw those undergraduate SDS ideas through the filter of time. How easy it is for me to find naivete and hope and foolishness in it even now--Liberal wasn't even a bad word yet! That same sense of hope, both foolish and naive, informed the pre-movie approach of the pundits, politicians and guidance counselors, I think. "The Day After" was a televsion event not to be missed! The idea was that families would watch the mushroom clouds together, would lament the fall-out and roasting skin of radiation burns, the deaths and desolation. They'd talk. You know, the day after, really get to the bottom of things.

Hence my anger: Talk. TALK! About what, exactly? The best home treatment for radiation sickness, creative uses for fallout, what kind of canned foods to keep in the basement, about my feelings concerning imminent death from above? Feelings? There was no talk, no words for this. There are not.

So I hid in my room, saw in silence the black and white possibilities of my teenage world. I fumed. Buttons, banners and letters to congress seem(ed) about as full of promise as talking about my feelings for annihilation. Not much has changed. Quick, which sounds better: balance of terror, or balance of fear? Tick, tick, tick,

I just finished reading Walter M. Miller's A Canticle for Liebowitz. If you seek the unlikely intersection of science fiction and Catholicism, you may wish to visit. The story begins with a novice monk's discovery of a fallout shelter, and crosses eighteen centuries of recovery from nuclear holocaust, with much credit to the Order of Liebowitz. This group of monks collects and maintains those pages and notes of knowledge that surived the war, and the bonfires and anti-intellectual mob violence that followed.

The story is bookended by a second nuclear confrontation, the seemingly inevitable result of our cleverness and conflict. From a monastery in what was the desert of America's southwest of eighteen centuries before, the Abbott learns of an unnamed Asian nation's launch of missiles. LUCIFER IS FALLEN, the headlines shout. In a rather hopeful attempt at the continuation of the Church and its people, New Rome launches a pod of pilgrims into space to seed the universe. This bit is the most "science fiction-y" aspect of the story, and it at least leaves me feeling some hope for our troubled and troublesome race.

The book made me think of no other so quickly as Russell Hoban's Riddley Walker. It's an easy comparison--scroll down from the purchase page behind the link and you'll find both works named on the lists of several fans of E.O.W. stories (End of World--it seems this is a distinct sub-genre). Published in 1959 and 1980, respectively, both books are informed by the Cold War climate in which they were conceived. In Canticle, our renewed mastery of and willingness to use destructive technology happens somewhat peripherally to the story of the monks preserving what knowledge they can dig from the rubble.

With a much tighter focus, both in terms of time period and characters, Hoban also examines our possible recovery from E.O.W. For Riddley and the other diggers-of-mud in Iron Age conditions, the actions revolve around the race of several factions to regain the knowledge and use of gunpowder. They pull pieces of metal from the ground and wonder at their uses. They puzzle at scraps of oral and written know-how from times long passed. Ultimately, the quest for explosive power is successful, almost despite the intrigue and ignorance of the warring groups. A new and more efficiently murderous age begins.

All of the anti-intellectual fervor, mob violence and hard-won knowledge of Canticle shows in Riddley, with a bit of cannibalism thrown in as well. The fractured English of the characters is believable and hypnotic, and while the small hope Riddley creates in walking his own path lacks the drama of a space launch, he paves the way to a future, our future. (If you pick just one of these to read, pick Riddley Walker.)

I finished Canticle on the fourth of July. A day later, North Korea fizzled missiles into the Sea of Japan, after much tough talk and failed diplomacy. Rocket scientists tell us that, since they flew at all, the soundness of the design is essentially proven. Now it is just a matter of tweaking to get it right (Sunday 7/9/06 NYT, "Week in Review" section--you can look it up--folks from Los Alamos). It will take some time, but they'll launch again. And again.

On that same day, July 5, 2006, I am unclear what specific ominous, sinful and nasty things also happened in Gaza, Lebanon, Afghanistan, Iraq or Iran, Darfur, the Congo, etc, etc. We can trust there was lots of talk and technology, much diligence, that people died screaming. Speeches were made and fists shaken. I could catalog more, lists and lists, but we'd tire of it.

Considering the lilies, perhaps we could all do with more idle hands--we're so clever and busy.

The Port Huron Statement ends in this way: "If we appear to seek the unattainable, it has been said, then let it be known that we do so to avoid the unimaginable."

Clearly unattainable, but all too imaginable. Quick, who'll tell the children, or shall we let it be a surprise? I'm tired.

Tick, tick, tick,