By way of farewell:
Powers, Thomas
Of several minds: Thomas Powers BY WAY OF FAREWELL AFTER EIGHT YEARS, THE TIME HAS COME I OFTEN WONDER, not idly, who reads Commonweal? Some magazines spend a fortune finding out. The answer is...
...it tugs us back...
...If you stint yourself, or grow weary or crabbed, the effect is soon apparent...
...THOMAS POWERS...
...This topical harping excited Johnson's impatience...
...The same is of course true for 100,000 tons, or a million tons, or the ten billion tons which the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment once estimated would be detonated during a major nuclear war...
...But it was people he cared about...
...Of course I am in favor of arms control, etc., etc., but am not much encouraged its time has come...
...His sense of completeness seemed to require it...
...The MX, if it is ever built, will be able to carry twelve...
...For reasons which seemed like a good idea at the time, the United States and the Soviet Union have built many thousands of such warheads, and the planes and missiles to deliver them...
...It is diffidence in company which limits the conversation of so many people to things - the issues of the day - as if they could think of nothing to say of themselves...
...The flavor goes out of it as soon as you begin to suspect you're talking to a wall, or to yourself...
...It is their numbers, their versatility, and their accuracy...
...I once stood next to a re-entry vehicle for a Minuteman missile, a sleek grey cone about waist high...
...A column ought to have a bit of range, whereas I have fallen into a rut...
...That is the first part of the problem...
...But there is no limit to human genius...
...When I was a kid a firecracker once went off in my hand...
...Sometimes I even forget to vote...
...When Op-penheimer saw some early plans for a thermonuclear weapon, he scornfully asked how they planned to get it to the target - by oxcart...
...They are fiercely particular...
...Each one is highly particular...
...Something has gone seriously wrong...
...It is impossible not to wonder what they have to do with us...
...Johnson was a man of extraordinary breadth of human feeling...
...The latest version of the Minuteman carries three re-entry vehicles of this sort...
...Vietnam has almost disappeared...
...He had an acute sense of what mattered in life...
...The problem may be Johnson's frequent brutality in conversation, or his infamous political convictions, which held no brief for the idea that men might elevate or ameliorate their condition through collective public action...
...Here is no invasion coming, and you know there is none...
...The first concerns the weapons themselves...
...They feel safe with them...
...I can only conclude these readers have got discretionary feeling to spare...
...and shall I never hear again a sentence without the French in it...
...But of course it's not discretionary income I wonder about...
...Chewing over the morning's newspaper bored him...
...The problem we have created for ourselves is so deeply rooted, and so complacently accepted within the institutions running the show, that I sometimes find myself wondering if God really does intervene in history...
...This is what Commonweal readers have in common - an uneasy sense of public failure...
...A couple of years ago I began to look into the problems posed by nuclear weapons...
...What I have learned is easily outlined...
...From time to time names are dropped, or added...
...I don't know anyone who lives there...
...The problem isn't war, poverty, injustice, or callous disregard of the redwoods and the blue whales, but what these and other ills suggest about the way we are conducting ourselves...
...With his friend Hester Thrale he once burst out, "Alas, alas, how this unmeaning stuff spoils all my comfort in my friends' conversation...
...The answer is generally someone in middle age, with a spouse and 1.8 children and maybe $12,000 a year in discretionary income...
...In the late 1930s Einstein, himself, once suggested that a nuclear weapon would be so big it would have to be delivered by ship...
...I have tried to think of ways we might get out of this awful jam and I haven't come up with one which even qualifies as farfetched...
...THE TIME has come for me to quit writing this column...
...It's a very interesting rut, but a rut all the same...
...I have only the sketchiest sense of their history...
...He - or she: the breakdown seems to follow nature - has been around awhile, used to smoke (or plans to quit), likes Graham Greene's spy stories better than his serious novels, reads (or at least buys) a couple of difficult books a year, votes in local elections, grows uneasy from prolonged gazing at the sea, and, with very few exceptions, fails to grasp the charm of Samuel Johnson...
...I myself harp on topics with the worst of them, but deep down I'm with Johnson...
...With the exception of Lebanon, I myself have never been to any of these places...
...Will the people never have done with it...
...What interests me is the reader's emotional temper and capacity to respond...
...But it is not just the destrucive capacity of nuclear weapons which poses a problem...
...The reasons are apparently still compelling, although not to me, because the two sides are now planning to build thousands more...
...Ruts are good for books, not for columns...
...It has no single focus...
...I have walked around this problem many times in columns over the last two years, but the time has come to quit...
...The second part of the problem is the belief of the people in charge of these two great arsenals that we not only can, but must, live with them from now on...
...Someone at a party, or on a plane, or waiting in a line for the ski lift, will confess to a subscription to Commonweal...
...Oh, pray, let us hear no more of it...
...We might call it discretionary feeling - what the reader has left over when he or she has met the demands of daily life...
...Readership surveys never include an estimate of our discretionary feeling, but it's there, something the reader has, along with his four-year-old car, his term life insurance, his burden of consumer debt, and his 1.6 television sets...
...It is far from having a scientific basis...
...I wish the talk of things could be pushed away forever, and we might safely stick to art, literature, philosophy, and the characters of our friends...
...Nothing in fact...
...Another felt I had been unfair to Napoleon...
...The writers fall into no obvious pattern...
...If so, now's his chance...
...We don't see Bangladesh, Biafra, or Watts any more...
...The flash, the bang, and the pain all came from a gram or two of black powder...
...The fact is I have forgotten how to go about it right...
...My chief regret is my failure to bring the reader around on the subject of Samuel Johnson...
...In spite of our genius and our blessings we are failing in what we make of the world...
...None of them is fun to read about...
...A thousand tons of the stuff is simply beyond imagining...
...In the years since 1975, when I began writing this column - then thinly disguised as comment on the press - a picture of the Commonweal reader has slowly emerged in my mind...
...For the most part I have few ideas how they might solve their problems, and in any event no one's asking...
...The tips of my fingers were blackened...
...But the world has its claims too, even - perhaps especially - when it's hard to see what we can do about it...
...It hurt like the devil...
...I find it hard to pin down this troubled feeling precisely...
...It has two parts...
...From odds and ends, then - offhand remarks, kind words, protests, and innocent questions - I have gradually pieced together a kind of composite portrait of the Commonweal reader...
...I should like to live in such a world...
...Lebanon has recently joined the list...
...So why do the readers of Commonweal dutifully renew their subscriptions to this biweekly gathering of thoughtful comment so heavily weighted toward human misery, failure, hardheartedness, and gloom...
...They are not planning to negotiate them away...
...If we were all more like Johnson, the combat would take place only in drawing rooms...
...And even then the world's arsenals would not be exhausted...
...I have been leery of fireworks ever since...
...The writer needs the reader...
...They have always been destructive on a scale hard to imagine, or even to memorize...
...When this happens I grow intensely interested, and commence a whirlwind interrogation, not from idle curiosity but because writing is a lot like conversation...
...Its destructive power is equivalent to 350,000 tons of TNT...
...Indeed, its approach reminds me of a doctor's remark that, faced with certain cancers, he could find nothing to do but treat the symptoms...
...I find this puzzling...
...But all of my correspondents have had one thing, at least, in common: they were prompted to write by something which had nothing - in the usual narrow sense of the phrase - to do with them...
...Who can grasp the idea of a thousand tons of TNT...
...It is quite detailed...
...One hoped I would send him a postcard before moving to New Zealand...
...Occasionally I get a letter, maybe seven or eight a year...
...I wish there were time for one more go at it...
...Another important series of clues have come from chance encounters...
...First we figured out how to make the bomb, and then we figured out how to make it small...
...They are not even dreaming of negotiating them away...
...Even when it seems possible their troubles might spill over onto us, there's little I can do about it...
...These names all suggest ghastly breakdowns of fellow feeling...
...The magazine offers no systematic program for the solution of these problems...
...But the world won't release us for long...
...I concede his position goes against the grain, but would argue it doesn't much matter...
...A surprising number simpty can't understand why I persist in thinking that Lee Harvey Oswald shot John F. Kennedy...
...Some Russian missiles are big enough to carry forty...
...I am giving it to you straight...
...Think of the subjects which appear in Commonweal week after week, so many of them captured in the names of places - Belfast, El Salvador, Afghanistan, Poland, South Africa, Cambodia...
...They don't have children in fractions...
...Since he had opinions on everything he had opinions on politics...
...Raising a family, holding a job, and doing one's bit locally all take a lot out of you...
...Doubtless this keeps us sensitive and alert...
Vol. 110 • March 1983 • No. 5
