A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about Kurt Vonnegut and of his thoughts on the upcoming war. Several news items I’ve heard recently have kept him in my mind, so this morning I decided a new entry was in order. It turns out, it was an appropriate day to write about Mr. Vonnegut.
We’ve been hearing, over the past couple of weeks, about the Bush Administration’s plans to use a military technique known as “Shock and Awe” to frighten and demoralize the Iraqi people and Saddam’s army to such an extent that they lay down their arms and pick up their white flags. In the first day of an attack on Iraq, our forces would fire 400 missiles at Iraqi military targets, command-and-control sites, at communications and infrastructure. The second day would see a repeat performance. With communications, utilities and chain of command destroyed, the Iraqi army would see the hopelessness of their situation and the war would be over with little loss of life.
Beautiful, except… where will those bombs be going? Haven’t we heard that Saddam keeps his missiles and other targets in civilian areas to confound the humanitarian impulses of his enemies? And 400 missiles a day? What we will be doing is creating a firestorm like the one we unleashed on Dresden, Germany in 1945. The firestorm which Kurt Vonnegut, a POW, survived on February 13, 1945… 58 years ago today. There are no coincidences.
Vonnegut said that, on that day, the British Royal Air Force “burned the place down, turned it into a single column of flame. More people died there in the firestorm in that one big flame, because there was nothing to breathe, than died in Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined.” Shock and Awe. Anywhere from 135,000 to 250,000 people died in 48 hours of bombing. Bush and his unholy cabal, so enamored of their high-tech weapons, are leaving us with the impression that Gulf War II will be a “clean war”. Ain’t no such thing.
From his experiences cleaning up Dresden, burying the thousands of bodies, wading through pools of melted flesh, Vonnegut created a masterpiece of modern fiction. Slaughterhouse Five tells the story of Billy Pilgrim, a survivor of the Dresden firebombing who becomes “unstuck in time” and finds himself living his life in random order. The book was made into a movie, which left out one of the most visual scenes in the novel: the scene where Billy is watching a war documentary, only… being unstuck in time, he sees the movie in reverse. Explosions collapse inwards, reassembling themselves into bombs which leap from the ground to be accepted into the waiting, open hatches of airplanes, which fly backwards to the airbase, where bombs are unloaded and shipped back to America to be dissassembled in huge factories, with the raw materials finally buried in remote mountainsides. (I’m paraphrasing, since I don’t have the book in front of me. Read the book and see why he’s Kurt Vonnegut and I’m not.)
On NPR the other day, John Nielsen filed a report on the high tech efforts used in discovering what went wrong with Space Shuttle Columbia. He interviews Gordon Wells, a mapping specialist at University of Texas at Austin’s Center for Space Research. Wells says that by precisely identifying the exact spot where each fragment of debris landed, by carefully evaluating films, telemetry and all other data, NASA will be able to create a computer model which will describe the trajectory of each tiny little fragment. They’ll run the simulation thousands of times, if necessary, until they come across the fiction which recreates reality.
The model will be like Billy Pilgrim’s movie: the tiny pieces leaping upwards from where they rested in swamps and brush and rivers and fields, defying gravity, flying through the pellucid skies, until they assemble into a whole shuttle and seven whole lives.
Art resonates. Hi-ho. So it goes.
