The Enola Gay
Captain Paul W. Tibbets Jr. is one of the greatest poets of the 20th Century. His work is stunning and amazing and most original, and utterly, transcendent. He is the author of the "the vilest act ever committed by a soldier is actually the purest, most noble, and kindest act ever performed by a soldier".
Paul W. Tibbets was the captain of the Enola Gay. His mission, on August 6, 1945, was to drop the most powerful bomb ever made on the Japanese soldiers hiding in Hiroshima.
As you might think... there were also 450,000 mothers and grandmothers and children in the area of Hiroshima that ended up being under the bomb that Paul Tibbets dropped.
People who love Tibbet's poetry, become enraged when you suggest that there was something tragic about the bomb. That's because they can't tell the difference between poetry and a limerick. Paul Tibbets thinks he has written a limerick. But he should learn to be a man and accept that what he has written is a poem, and a real man can use naughty words in a poem. You can forgive a great poet for his filthy language because a great poet cares more about the truth than anything else.
The only thing is... Paul Tibbets still believes he has written a limerick...
It is one thing to say the filthy language is okay, because it's the truth. The filthy language is unpleasant and frightening and regrettable, but we are adults who live in an imperfect world and sometimes the imbalance of good and evil is so great that we need to use powerful, harsh words to put our feelings about this imbalance into a poem.
It is quite another to say, as many Americans seem to, that there is no filthy language there at all. Not a word.
And then there is the possibility that this poem was never written for the Japanese, who only wanted to keep their emperor. It was an atomic love letter to the Russians, to let them know that our radioactive hearts were overwhelmed with desire for their own filthy words.
The Polite Commerce of Cold Blooded Murder and Mayhem
"The
Izhevsk
Machine Tool Factory acquired a patent in 1999, illegalising (sic) manufacture of
the Kalashnikov rifle system by anyone other than themselves."
From Wikipedia
That's so quaint-- the Izhevsk Machine Tool company-- 50 years after it first started manufacturing the AK-47-- suddenly decides to patent it, and demand that everyone else stop copying their design. Those design pirates, you see, who make these weapons so they can sell them to governments and guerrilla movements, which then use them to murder people (call it "war" if you like), are doing something illegal.
This equation, this syllogism, this logic, this reasoning, this state of affairs--- this calculation of the commerce of human depravity: my patent of this machine used to kill people, to over-throw governments, to kill protestors and organizers and nuns, to stop the enraged population from storming the palace, is worth money. Pay me for the right to do evil.
The Izhevks Machine Tool Factory could never have dared to make such an assertion if we did not live in a world of raging hypocrisy. They should have denied that they had anything to do with this weapon. They should have sued for libel anyone who said, "the design of this gun is obviously stolen from the work of Mikhail Kalashnikov...". How dare you! How dare you assert that we would have created or built such a device, or -- even worse-- made a profit by selling it to people who obviously can only have one purpose in mind...."
Copyright © 2007 Bill Van Dyk All rights reserved.
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