The Last Word
Walsh, Lawrence
THE LAST WORD Hates Corners Has a Bomb In It Lawrence Walsh Our man rides the nuclear range on Fat Man, destroyer of Nagasaki. What the subject needed, the man said, was "a touch of objective...
...High up on Fat Man, a sharp sense that I was no better than this, no bigger or wiser, cut like a saddle sore...
...So, in search of some objective reality, we went one midsummer's day to the Milwaukee suburb of Hales Corners, and there confronted Fat Man...
...Again, consult the Japanese...
...Objective reality, as it now attaches to strategic weapons, is no longer objective or real...
...There have been other bombs in my life, other sterile and mortifying lunges after objective reality...
...What the subject needed, the man said, was "a touch of objective reality...
...Come on, you remember the Nagasaki bomb...
...What is real now, what counts, is mytli—the lunatic beliefs, especially, that bombs and missiles are forever more a part of the human order...
...Seven lugubriously faithful copies were made in 1945...
...It seemed then and now, in the A Shau Valley and the Biafran bush, and in Hales Corners, Wisconsin, an act of grave discourtesy to the dismembered dead, those actually seen in bunkers and open-air markets, and those too easily imagined in Nagasaki streetcars, to register such a workaday blankness toward the bombs, the bombers, the bombed...
...Shopping-mall music oozed out of ceiling speakers...
...All that rubble, all those burned and brayed bodies from this...
...that Fat Man and his progeny are natural furnishings in the house of politics...
...And really, he's a little bitty thing anyway: If your aesthetics includes extreme form-function economy under the Beautiful, Fat Man is a Faberge egg of physics...
...It seemed, at first, just impossibly heavy, heavy beyond simile, too much for any 1945-vintage bomber to get aloft...
...five feet in diameter—gross enough to split my corduroys...
...I also kept an eye peeled for the museum guard...
...In the voluptuous jungle heat of Indochina and Nigeria, I've watched bombs fall, and have gone off with camera and notepad to inspect their work moments later, but to what lasting personal or professional effect I am at a complete loss to say...
...Connect, connect for me, I urged my steed to no avail...
...I should like to report that I shivered with disgust in its presence, but that is not what I did...
...Flynn and I were the first customers at the ticket window, and we had to ourselves the hangar-sized exhibit of Messerschmitts, Waldo Pepper stunt planes, antique gliders, and Lindbergh memorabilia—"the world's largest private collection of aircraft and aviation artifacts...
...We passed all this by, however, and made straight for Fat Man, who reposed in a far corner amid some cases of scale-model fighters that schoolboys with Duco cement might have made...
...A nasty parlor trick...
...Frankly, the bomb that might make Hales Corners famous was making a fool out of a journalist with a split seam in his trousers...
...ten feet, eight inches long...
...I vaulted up on the gutted olive-drab casing, and sat Slim Pickens-style, waiting for a rush of objective reality...
...It's foolish, though, to dwell on Fat Man's physique and not the physics, the apLawrence Walsh is an associate editor of The Progressive...
...I should probably add that I did all of this without the benefit of any mood modifiers save those said to lace an overly processed fast-food breakfast...
...Beauty...
...that it makes all the sense in the world that an inert A-bomb should figure as just another museum piece...
...A theorem, an ankle, a phrase, a chord, a syllogism, Ava Gardner's dimple, a highway cloverleaf—and, as I say, maybe even Fat Man, never mind Herblock's cartoons...
...My uneventful ride wore on...
...Up on my eviscerated mount, I remembered William Blake, and saw that he was right, bang right: The tigers of wrath are worth more than horses of instruction...
...The arms race, our magazine's meat-and-drink issue, sometimes didn't burst off the page the way it ought to, he said—the goods got lost in a maw of megatons and extinction, in the tedium of insanity...
...plied physics...
...What I did was, first, stand back some ways and consider the bomb's ridiculous, bulbous aspect...
...That's our working reality from here on out, and we are in a fix for it...
...three are still around, neutered and on museum display in New Mexico, Ohio, and at the Experimental Aviation Foundation in Hales Corners, adults $2.25...
...The Japanese know better, of course...
...Then I...
...Astride the ultimate bucking bronco, I tried to get the heft of the thing as it once was—10,000 pounds in weight (Yield: 20,000 tons of TNT...
...But the meditation wasn't going anywhere...
Vol. 46 • September 1982 • No. 9
