Thank God for the Atom Bomb and Other Essays

...Even though the aphoristic and allusive Fussell has something wise to say on nearly every page ("It's amazing the way a bikini, even if both top and bottom are present, looks grossly obscene in a nude context, nastily coy and flirtatious"), Thank God for the Atom Bomb is probably not as varied and stimulating as his previous gathering of essays, The Boy Scout Handbook and Other Observations...

...he refuses to pretend he isn't grateful for something that probably saved his life...

...For Fussell, one's values as man and writer are not to be separated...

...Lest the idea of a naturist beach seem too jolting to the conventional, naturists have come up with free beach, or clothing-orswimsuit-optional beach...

...In addition fat people look far less offensive naked than clothed . . . the eye is repulsed much less than in normal vacation life by those hideous 'resort' clothes...

...Then maybe both would be negotiated away...

...I like to think I would have voted against them in a referendum—but I suspect I wouldn't have...

...Of course, if we'd gotten a freeze then, what we'd have now is a Europe with Soviet missiles, as opposed to the far more missile-less Europe we're about to see...

...Naturist has by now virtually ousted nudist, which itself could be supposed a sort of euphemism for nakedist...

...Those weeks mean the world if you're one of those thousands or related to one of them...

...You remember: build up to build down...

...How well I remember discussions with my liberal academic colleagues several years ago about intermediate-range nuclear missiles...

...They did not care to acquaint themselves with the names of these missiles, their particular destructive capacities, their location, and the like—boning up on such stuff was, remember, grotesque...

...each just twitches...

...shouldn't look for it in literature...

...The enemy was still the host, the battle the tumult, and actions deeds, rendered variously as valiant, gallant, or noble...

...In fact, one could say the same for most instances of human behavior...

...The only word that made them smile, like children in from the rain, was "freeze...

...Even the Indianapolis 500 is "a language event" full of name-branded garb: "A person unable to read .. . would get very little out of Indy...

...Orwell, too, found those things forever joined: "As [Orwell] sees it, there are two moral defects which issue in bad writing: one is laziness, the other pretentiousness...

...That noted military tactician John Kenneth Galbraith is typical of appalled retro-moralists in thinking the bomb was unnecessary: The Japanese would have surrendered in "two or three weeks...

...The only thing morally relevant is that forty seconds ago you thought it was an F-14...

...But as Fussell points out: At the time with no indication that surrender was on the way, the kamikazes were sinking American vessels, the Indianapolis PERENNIAL LIBRARY HARPER RC)\A PUBLISHERS Russell Kirk, Milton Friedman, George F Will, Charles Murray, Thomas Sowell and Jeane Kirkpatrick are among the outstanding conservative thinkers whose essays are included in this stimulating new anthology...

...My colleagues' reaction to this argument was to label it grotesque, following that with all the usual sensitive stuff about "enough weapons to kill everyone fifty times over," etc., etc...

...In the book's most useful aphorism, he declares: "Understanding the past requires pretending that you don't know the present...

...They preferred the cultivation of their own finer feelings to such study, and retreated with their nonnuclear umbrellas further up the moral beach, where the sand is never wet...

...Like Orwell—in fact, as a nice subtle touch within his essay on Orwell—Fussell can make his discriminating language even more precise by numbering his points...

...That he looks closely enough to do the choosing is his true claim to be that much devalued thing, a critic...

...Essays that reflect the pluralism in conservative thought and at the same time challenge liberals to revivify and modernize their own ideas:" —James MacGregor Burns THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 1988 39 was sunk (880 men killed), and Allied casualties were running to over 7,000 per week...

...Two or three weeks," says Galbraith...

...On poetic diction a year after Gallipoli: "Even though the war had been going on for two years and three months, to sentimentalists and Tories one still did not carry a rifle, one bore arms...

...In the spring of 1945, Fussell "was a twenty-one-year-old second lieutenant of infantry leading a rifle platoon...

...I suspect that Paul Fussell would actually have been opposed to the position I took on these missiles, but I want, presumptuously, to claim him as a kind of ally because of his statement that war "requires choices among crazinesses...

...Paul Fussell's sensibleness (as opposed to "sensitivity," in its present corrupt usage) amounts to a sort of sensibility—shaped by his study of writers like Johnson and Orwell, his imaginative reconstruction of the First World War, and his direct experience of the Second...

...Nowhere in the essay does he lose sight of his own life-and-death self-interest in the matter...

...Foolish critics will describe Fussell as a "curmudgeon," which is all wrong, since curmudgeons just occupy the opposite end of the spectrum from those calling themselves "sensitive": neither group thinks...

...Having become famous for a book on the First World War, Fussell has lately been turning more and more of his attention to the Second—a war that was bad for literature, because it lacked the distinguishing thing of the First: irony...

...Being still "officially fit" meant that he could figure on being part of the imminent invasion of Japan, which was expected to last a full year and incur one million American casualties from the "universal national kamikaze" being prepared to meet it...

...THANK GOD FOR THE ATOM BOMB AND OTHER ESSAYS Paul Fussell/Summit Books/$17.95 Thomas Mallon aul Fussell's growing readership 1 looks to him for news of three territories he has made very much his own during the last dozen years: war, travel, and status...

...Although still officially fit for combat, in the German war [he] had already been wounded in the back and the leg badly enough to be adjudged, after the war, 40 percent disabled...

...The high-minded loquacity of all those poets of the Great War...

...From Vietnam, fought in a "postverbal age," one must expect even less: "how is it that we know (`for certain,' it's tempting to add) that no weighty, sustained poems, or even short poems of distinction, are going to come out of it...

...Touristees are the geeks of the contemporary world . . ." In any case, the postverbal age is also, he tells us, a post-touristic one: we no longer expect to acquire wisdom from travel, just as the deconstructionists tell us we Thomas Mallon is the author of A Book of One's Own: People and Their Diaries, and, most recently, Arts and Sciences, a novel...

...Whether writing about nudism, chivalry, or auto racing, Fussell finds that diction unlocks mindset: In their enthusiasm to forward a noble cause in a suspicious, nasty-minded world, naturists have been vigorous devisers of euphemism...

...the high proles, who watch standing or lolling in the infield, especially at the turns, "where the action is...

...I would also, as the recognized leader in American scholarship on the British poet Edmund Blunden (up to now a non-competitive sport), take issue with Fussell's description of Blunden's "unabashed patriotism...

...Language, however polluted, is the only river on which truth can ride, and honest men will face up, unselectively, to each definition and dependent clause—even the one the National Rifle Association leaves off its inscription of the Second Amendment on the facade of its offices on Rhode Island Avenue in Washington: "A well-regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free state . . ." Fussell sends the whole NRA a Swiftian draft notice...

...Sunbathing is popular as a disarming synonym for nudism, and among the cognoscenti no elbow nudge is needed to suggest how it differs from sunning, which is what you do with a bathing suit on...

...when it should, Fussell says, be asking, "Was It Effective...

...T he really superb essay in this volume is the title one, "Thank Godfor the Atom Bomb," which is finally not so much about the bomb, or even war, as it is about ambivalence—the honest ability to live uncomfortably in moral shades of gray...

...But what I most remember, and what's relevant here, is my colleagues' unwillingness to look at facts...

...and the uglies, the overadvertised, black-leathered, beer-sodden, pot-headed occupiers of that muddy stretch of ground in the infield at the first turn known as the Snake Pit...

...Unlike the atomic bomb, which can be debated strategically, draft deferments seem now, as we knew they were then, incontrovertibly immoral...

...No, let me change that word, since each side in any argument tends to use "facts" when it means "outlooks...

...Fussell can be proud of living up to the definition the word could be said to have had from Johnson's time through, roughly, Or-well's: Critic—an on-the-spot moral philosopher...

...Surely no one has offered George Or38 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 1988 well a higher compliment than this one from Fussell: "It's impossible to imagine him being interested in Wallace Stevens...

...Readers may find him straining a bit in ones like "On the Persistence of Pastoral": "It is curious that as a venue of pleasure and relaxation, a place from which you return 'refreshed,' the beach began to be popular only when the demise of formal literary pastoral had taken place...

...I would say such things as automobiles and Robert Moses are more to the point here...

...Turning his slightly embarrassed eye from highly formal cavorters on the Adriatic to spectators at the Indianapolis 500, he finds three social classes: the middles, who on race day, in homage to the checkered flag, tend to dress all in black and white and who sit in the reserved seats...

...At this point I have to thank God for the college draft deferments that let me sit out Vietnam reading Keats, and now let me spend this Sunday afternoon fifteen or twenty years later writing this essay before getting up to the fridge for a Rolling Rock...

...Surely they can close-read their own amendment if he, wounded veteran, can do that to his own decoration: "The American Purple Heart Medal still says Tor Military Merit' on its obverse, although one earns it not for any action or decision but for having one's body accidentally penetrated by foreign objects...

...Books like The Great War and Modern Memory, Abroad, and Class have displayed a happy regression in literary-career terms...

...The dropping of the bomb was, Fussell contends, "a vast historical tragedy," but not a disaster—since tragedies have two sides and disasters only one...

...W e all live on the moral seashore, the waterline of right and wrong shifting and disappearing with each new tide of events...

...The only way to keep any sort of responsible footing is to pay attention to the disagreeable details of the events themselves...

...Professor Fussell, respected scholar of eighteenth-century literature at Rutgers and, more recently, Penn, has become a cultural and moral commentator of considerable reach: he is more like Swift and Burke and Johnson now than when he was writing books about them...

...Like most good poems, most good essays usually end up being inquiries into the powers and limits of language itself...

...Fussell is talking about the remove of forty years, but the law applies equally to a remove of forty seconds, the time it may take to realize that what you thought was an F-14 was really an airbus...

...Our only light amidst the snares is language, and we must shine it constantly...

...Entirely a different scene from the style of the Second War, which is silence—silence ranging from the embarrassed to the sullen...

...Blunden was abashed about roughly everything, including national identities...

...Two weeks more means 14,000 more killed and wounded, three weeks more, 21,000...

...William F Buckley, Jr., and Charles Kesler have chosen 26 essays on issues that range from enduring philosophical questions to immediate policy challenges, reflecting the extraordinary breadth and depth of the conservative movement today...

...Is it perhaps that we secretly recognize that real poetry is, as Hazlitt called it, 'right royal,' aristocratic in essence, and thus unlikely to arise from the untutored or the merely street-smart...

...What they would not look at was information...

...I took the position that the only way we'd get rid of Soviet weapons of this kind (something that didn't preoccupy them much anyway) was for the Western countries resolutely to deploy their own intermediate-range weapons...

...But Fussell is absolutely right in reasoning that Blunden's chief disqualification as a "modernist" is a fondness for people...

...Fussell is fond of Linnaean classification, even when it comes to offering an anatomy, as it were, of nudism: "Nude, older people look younger, especially when very tan, and younger people look even younger—almost like infants, some of them...

...It's a mind-stretcher, yet pleasurably readable:" —Leonard Levy "The product of several decades of sowing and reaping by creative thinkers...

...Buckley and Kesler have given us a new Golden Treasury, one that should do for American politics what Palgrave's did for English poetry: inform and illuminate:' —Robert N. Nisbet $14.95 In paperback, wherever fine books are sold RIGHT THINKING "Surely the best anthology of modern conservative thought...

...Though in the foreword Fussell oversells the controversial nature of this collection, this essay is genuinely worthy of that adjective...

...The New York Review of Books asks, "Was the Hiroshima Bomb Necessary...

...These flays, at least in academic precincts, critic usually means hermeneutical snake-oil salesman...

...If some of what Fussell has to say about travel seems a little obvious this time out, he does offer the useful coinage touristees, for "South Sea islanders, the lifetime junk-dwellers of Hong Kong, the villagers of India, the young women of China who spend their lives making tiny stitches on horrible embroidered pictures to sell to tourists...

...Fussell belongs to that small intelligent group in the middle who be-lieve that the only real courtesy you can pay your fellow man is to use your brains...