Last night, I started to write a long, drawn out something about Cindy Sheehan and about the vigils being held across the country tonight. Well, without going the long, drawn-out route: Go out to one of the vigils. Sure it’s political. But regardless of what you think about the war, it’s a pretty direct and visible way of expressing concern about its human cost (easy for me to say — it looks like Berkeley will be full of vigils this evening). And not that this is of any practical value, really, at this late moment: If you want to find a vigil near you, check the directory on MoveOn.org.
Dustbin
Listening to the A’s game tonight (they lost, and having lost three out of four they’re close to officially cooled off from their long, long run). Sammy Sosa was up for the Orioles, and announcer Ken Korach observed that with the Cubs last year, he was 2 for 9 against the A’s. Then he said to Bill King, who’s been doing the A’s games since 1981 (before that, he did Oakland Raiders and Golden State Warriors games, and was the best play-by-play announcer I’ve ever heard in both football and basketball; he started as a broadcaster in Pekin, Illinois, in the late ’40s, one-time home of the Chinks (the nickname of the Pekin High teams) and late Senator Everett McKinley Dirksen. …)
How easily I digress.
Then Korach said to King, speaking of the A’s interleague series against the Cubs last year, “But you wouldn’t remember that, Bill.” King hates interleague play, period. He said something like, “No, no I wouldn’t. They play those games and then they go into the dustbin of history.” Korach: “Dustbin of history — I like that.” I was thinking, how many baseball announcers out there are quoting — who? Marx? no, Trotsky — and how many people are making the connection? I’ll bet, but do nothing to back up my wager, which will involve neither doughnuts nor dollars that King knows just where the phrase comes from.
And that concludes this broadcasting day.
Miscellaneous Mundane Inquiry
I just found myself using the phrase “I’ll bet you dollars to donuts that. …” I wasn’t really betting anything. But eventually my brain said, “Dollars to donuts? Where’d that come from?”
The personal answer is, who knows? I don’t think anyone in the family had a habit of saying it, so it must be the product of my lifetime immersion in popular entertainments.
But in an “origin of the phrase” sense, it’s easy to find what purport to be answers: here (sort of official looking), here, and here among many others, though none really get beyond the obvious meaning of the phrase to tell you much about how it came into use.
(On the inevitable donuts vs. doughnuts debate: Google shows 21,800 hits for “dollars to donuts” and 11,300 for “dollars to doughnuts.”)
1945 Again
The little I’ve known about the atomic bombings and Japan’s surrender goes like this: We dropped a bomb on Hiroshima on August 6. Then when that didn’t immediately produce the desired result, we dropped another one on Nagasaki — a secondary target since there was bad weather over the primary — on August 9. That was all the Japanese could take, and they surrendered August 15. I’ve never thought much about what happened in the days between the second bombing and the surrender, and always figured the U.S. government stood by as Japan came to its inevitable decision.
Of course, it didn’t happen that way. There was a war on, and it didn’t stop. Conventional bombing continued. We had a third atomic bomb ready to go. Richard Rhodes, in “The Making of the Atomic Bomb,” says that when the Japanese failed to move fast enough to surrender, President Truman ordered the Air Force to resume incendiary attacks on Japanese cities. The air commander in the Pacific, Gen. Hap Arnold:
“…still hoped to prove that his Air Force could win the war; he called for an all-out attack with every available B -29 and any other bombers in the Pacific theater and mustered more than a thousand aircraft. Twelve million pounds of high-explosive and incendiary bombs destroyed more than half of Kumagaya and a sixth of Isezaki, killing several thousand more Japanese, even as word of the Japanese surrender passed through Switzerland to Washington.”
I’d guess that one of the most unknown aspects of World War II for most Americans is the scale and destructiveness of the U.S. attacks on Japan’s cities, of which the raid August 14 was the last. A project called the National Security Archive just published a collection of documents on the development and use of the bomb. Among the papers are notes taken at an April 27,1945, meeting of the committee of military officers and Manhattan Project scientists assigned to come up with a list of targets for the bomb (Hiroshima was at the top of the list; from that day on, the city and everyone in it were under a death sentence). The notes include a plain-spoken description of the nature of the ongoing bombing campaign:
“It should be remembered that in our selection of any target, the 20th Air Force is operating primarily to laying waste all the main Japanese cities, and that they do not propose to save some important primary target for us if it interferes with the operation of the war from their point of view. Their existing procedure has been to bomb the hell out of Tokyo, bomb the aircraft, manufacturing and assembly plants, engine plants and in general paralyse the aircraft industry so as to eliminate opposition to the 20th Air Force operations. The 20th Air Force is systematically bombing out the following cities with the prime purpose in mind of not leaving one stone lying on another:
Tokyo, Yokohama, Nagoya, Osaka, Kyoto, Kobe, Yawata & Nagasaki.
“Colonel Fisher also advised that the 20th Air Force existing operational plans pointed toward dropping 100,000 tons of bombs on Japan per month by the end of 1945.”
I got to know one of the cities on that list, Nagoya, as an exchange student in the ’70s. Conscious as I was of the war and what it had done, despite the fact the city was all virtually new, it didn’t sink in what happened there. Later, I found a U.S. Air Force damage survey of the city, which I think had been home to close to 2 million people. The map showed a few small splotches of yellow — to denote undamaged areas — in a sea of gray. Ninety-five percent of the city had been destroyed.
Evil Counsels
Tonight’s topic — what is it again? It’d be great to tee off on the National Abortion Rights Action League’s misguided and idiotic TV ad against John Roberts, Bush’s nominee for the Supreme Court. Politics aside, if you can’t beat someone with the real record of their deeds and opinions, your fallback position really shouldn’t be to lie and distort and fabricate. Leave that to the pros on the other side.
But no, that’s not the topic. I could hold forth on Schwarzenegger, our very own blockhead Führer; he provides lots and lots of bile ‘n’ outrage material. And then there’s Bush: Every soldier’s mom’s best friend.
I have something more abstract on my mind. Here it is: Whitney v. California, decided by the Supreme Court in 1927. The case concerned a young woman from Oakland, convicted under a state law that outlawed “criminal syndicalism”; in practice, that meant the Communist Party and similar organizations were simply illegal, and having anything to do with them could be a felony. Miss Whitney, as the court’s opinion refers to her, was found guilty for doing no more than attending a party convention; that’s because the party in question advocated the overthrow of the capitalist system. The Supreme Court upheld her conviction on technical grounds; the majority opinion also held that the law was an acceptable exercise of state power to address a public danger and did not restrain the rights of free speech, assembly, and association.
Justice Louis Brandeis wrote a concurring opinion. He acknowledged in passing his acceptance of the technical grounds for upholding Whitney’s conviction. But his real purpose was to attack the law and the intolerance of free speech it reflected. It’s a ringing articulation of the importance of unrestrained debate in a democracy, and it’s widely celebrated as such. Check Google for “Whitney v. California,” and you’ll come up with about 9,000 hits. The U.S. State Department includes the case background and the Brandeis concurrence in its list of “basic readings on democracy.” I wonder how many people in Bush’s cabinet or the Congress have read it.
The opinion might be hard to digest in an age where some consider even soundbites on serious subject a little too weighty for some audiences to handle, But, in the context of Supreme Court writing, Brandeis is succinct and crisp. In current parlance, the whole concurrence is a highlight reel. Just one passage:
“Those who won our independence believed that the final end of the State was to make men free to develop their faculties, and that, in its government, the deliberative forces should prevail over the arbitrary. They valued liberty both as an end, and as a means. They believed liberty to be the secret of happiness, and courage to be the secret of liberty. They believed that freedom to think as you will and to speak as you think are means indispensable to the discovery and spread of political truth; that, without free speech and assembly, discussion would be futile; that, with them, discussion affords ordinarily adequate protection against the dissemination of noxious doctrine; that the greatest menace to freedom is an inert people; that public discussion is a political duty, and that this should be a fundamental principle of the American government. They recognized the risks to which all human institutions are subject. But they knew that order cannot be secured merely through fear of punishment for its infraction; that it is hazardous to discourage thought, hope and imagination; that fear breeds repression; that repression breeds hate; that hate menaces stable government; that the path of safety lies in the opportunity to discuss freely supposed grievances and proposed remedies, and that the fitting remedy for evil counsels is good ones.”
I never intended to come back to John Roberts and that abortion-rights ad. But there it is: “The freedom to think as you will and speak as you think.” What that means today is blasting away at your foes without fine attention to details like how all the facts, if you have any, might fit together. There’s not enough respect for, or faith in, the other side of what Brandeis suggests: “The fitting remedy for evil counsels is good ones.”
The Third Bomb
I know I’ve been on the atomic bomb thing a little lately. Hear me out. Again.
I’m kind of surprised by what I don’t know about some aspects of the A-bomb attacks and their context. It’s part of popular lore that we had two atomic bombs in August 1945 — one named Little Boy, one named Fat Man — and that we dropped the former on Hiroshima and the latter on Nagasaki. For extra credit, you might know that the bombs were markedly different from each other. But how much more?
A few years ago, someone asked me whether there was a third bomb. Must have been. How soon did we have it? No idea.
Inspired partly by the recent atomic bomb blog and partly by a friend’s recommendation, I went out and picked up a used copy of Richard Rhodes’s “The Making of the Atomic Bomb.” I turned to the end of the book, because the part of the story I was immediately interested in is back there.
So what about that third bomb? Rhodes writes:
“[Gen. Leslie] Groves had reported to [Gen. George Marshall] that morning [the day after the Nagasaki attack that he had gained four days in manufacture and expected to ship a second Fat Man plutonium core and initiator from New Mexico to Tinian [the island base from which the attacks were launched] on August 12 or 13. ‘Provided there are no unforeseen difficulties in manufacture, in transportation to the theatre or after arrival in the theatre,’ he concluded cautiously, ‘the bomb should be ready for delivery on the first suitable weather following 17 or 18 August.’ Marshall told Groves the President wanted no further atomic bombing except by his express order and Groves decided to hold up the shipment, a decision in which Marshall concurred.”
So a third bomb was nearly ready. There was some discussion, among Air Force brass, anyway, about dropping the next bomb on Tokyo. Then Japan surrendered on August 15.
The pace of building more bombs after that was slow, largely because the raw materials were in such short supply. According to Rhodes: The United States had seven operational bombs a year after the war ended; a year after that, 13. Then the pace began to pick up: By late 1949, its stockpile reached 200. By that time, the United States was no longer the only nuclear power — the Soviet Union detonated its first A-bomb on September 23, 1949.
Scoring History
And speaking of the bomb: This will be interesting.
August 9
In observance of the 50th anniversary of the bombing of Nagasaki — 10 years ago, in other words — San Francisco’s Exploratorium museum created an online exhibit of pictures a Japanese photographer took the day after the attack. A little more than a dozen. That’s about all you’ll want to see.
Another commemoration: For the past few weeks, a writer has “blogged” the events of 1945 as they unfolded from mid-July through the bombing of Hiroshima. I haven’t read everything on the site, but the material is distilled from secondary sources (such as Richard Rhodes’s “The Making of the Atomic Bomb”). It’s actually effective — it’s still gripping to read about the mission/attack as it unfolded, both in the air and on the ground. (Thanks to Marie, who pointed out the site on her blog.)
One perhaps embarrassingly modest conclusion: Something good did come out of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. People still think about the bombings and are still exploring the experience. Mutually assured destruction and Bush’s magic missile shield aside, that compulsion to remember is our best defense against a sequel.
Anatomy of a Toot
As promised, photographic documentation of what’s called locally “a toot.”
But having spent two hours posting 11 pictures in that little photo album, I’m reminded why I don’t do it more often. I mean, it takes two hours. Part of the problem is the seeming inflexibility of the TypePad photo albums: The pictures appear on your working site in the reverse order you chose them; when you post them, they appear in reverse order again — or, to look at it another way, in the same order you orginally picked them. That always confuses me and I wind up writing absurdly prolix captions (also time consuming) that are supposed to have some sort of narrative order but come out rather jumbled. The current effort’s a case in point. Could be that later I’ll go back in and try to fix my fractured storytelling. But for now: Bed.
