All for your delight today, I have decided to focus my diary on just one topic.
It was initially hard to pick, since everyone and their dog has written about this, but I've already written (a tiny bit) about the Constitution, and the Model T, despite all it represents, just isn't as big.
Bigger than the Model T? Bigger even than the Warren Commission's report? Bigger than the birth of latenight television?
Today's event, which is not celebrated so much as commemorated, blows the competition to smithereens.
For Johnny Pesky, beloved Red Sox veteran, who was born 89 years ago today and who finally got his World Series ring four years ago. Red Sox nation wept.
And for Dick Schaap, legendary sportswriter and thinker, who was born 77 years ago today and died late in 2001. As we wonder what Tim Russert would say of something, so we wonder what Dick Schaap would write of it.
I wrote about the Red Sox two days ago, and I've written many times before about sports and the figures surrounding it.
I wrote about the Edsel some weeks ago (time flies when you're Todaying in History -- and verbing). I have a diary planned regarding President Kennedy for an uneventful day in history.
But for all I have written about elements of World War II and science (and World War II science), one topic has thus far stayed out of my writing. It helps that I was writing diaries infrequently in August.
One hundred three years ago today, five characters changed history.
No, not five people. Five characters. Three letters (variables), a number (exponent) and a sign.
E=mc2
Here is what I think is the explanation; I don't have the patience to sift through it, but it looks right to this Calculus-trained brain. And here is a translation of the paper.
One hundred three years later, are we safer because of this discovery and its results?
Not even remotely. How can we be safer if we can be annihilated -- either immediately or in the moments, minutes and months to come -- by someone who need not so much as look us in the eye to consign us to history's list of fatalities?
But the destructive capacity of science has been known for centuries. The constructive capacity is often ignored in cases such as this. And while I have no intention of making the case for or against use of atomic weaponry (I'm a storyteller, not a doctor of history), the only equation Stephen Hawking used in A Brief History of Time (much of which I understood, and much of which is thoroughly accessible) is nobler than its uses.
Oh, sure, television changed society. The phone, the Internet for sure, refrigeration, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Social Security, women's suffrage, etc.
All those things made equalizers of a lot of people. I can call the president -- like I'll ever actually get to talk to him, but I can leave a message he'll never listen to.
I can e-mail him, and he'll never answer.
I can feed myself on refrigerated food and maintain the charade.
It's a lot harder to keep Americans from voting for or against him than it used to be.
It's a lot easier to keep older Americans in good health so they can vote for or against him.
And since the 1920s, we've had to at least pretend to be concerned about women's issues.
But if I have a nuke, everyone is listening to me. The Bush administration used the (now-disproven) threat of a nuclear attack by Saddam Huissein to bully Congress into letting him invade.
And then there was, er, the Cold War.
Back about a year ago, there was talk and news of an Asian country (North Korea?) testing a nuclear weapon. The status symbol for up-and-coming, "you'd better respect our authoritah" regimes is nuclear capacity and range.
Any science, and any thing, can be used for good or evil -- regardless of why or how it was developed. You can drown someone in a few inches of a bucket of water, smother them with a pillow or kill them with too much oxygen.
The scientific value of atomic theory is indisputible. Purely on an academic value, the pursuit of knowledge of the physical world helps us understand our world just as archaeological digs help us understand it, albeit on different planes of knowledge.
But the cultural and military implications are just so fucking depressing. To know that one person, or a small group of people, could end things tonight, however unlikely such a scenario is ...
I am not trying to scare you -- particularly since I am not running for public office on the "The other guy is bad!" platform we've all come to know and hate. I just think we have made something that is more important than we are.
I also think we have made something that comes with a problem with no solution. No viable one, anyway. Yes, people can sign treaties and pacts. We've seen what that does. Treaties get broken or ignored. And in most cases, life goes on for most of us.
But someone launches a nuclear weapon at another country, and
instantly
destruction.
Rubble.
The land poisoned, the survivors' mortality soon realized, the power of a very few distilled into something they have used to kill people who did them no harm.
A lot of countries that don't have nukes want them. I understand that desire completely. There's a certain level of political and military toughness, a certain swagger, that comes with having a nuke. And banning them doesn't work because nobody has any reason to trust that anyone else has gotten rid of all of theirs.
So what is the solution?
There is none. No solution that works, anyway. And while this is true for many problems, it is not true on the level -- on the finality level -- of the nuclear weapon.
Give every country a nuke and the capacity to use it and suddenly we have complete media censorship of the issue because you do not want to say anything about anyone who has a nuke because what if they use it? Suddenly, people who do not deserve my respect or your respect or the president's respect become international players, and they frankly have neither the wisdom nor the playbooks to deal with the situation responsibly.
Take nukes away and it becomes a question of how you accuse someone of having a nuke or the parts for one. And in addition to the race to figure out a way to have one without revealing it (I'm sure the U.S. would come up with something), you have to be constantly lying to the American people both about your "lack" of nukes and why this situation shouldn't concern them.
Or maybe there is a solution.
Maybe the solution is that people ought to be equal.
But for that to work, you have to get them young and keep them reasonable, logical and peaceful. And there are more than a few cultures in this world, massive portions of ours included, where that requires a complete departure from the local norms.
That departure is going to be fought by people who have invested a lot in the power they have over desperately poor people to whom freedom means not being shot as they work their parcel of land. And it is also going to be fought, on a more menacing level, by those who frankly don't want to have to respect the people they see as their lessers. They don't want to have to lose the international entitlement that comes with having a nuclear arsenal. They have grown up believing that you can stick it to people who can't blow you up, and they're right. It's as true in school as it is in government.
Any practical solution to this problem is a good 20 years (one generation of learning) away. In that 20 years, a number of international players will gain or come tantalizingly close to nuclear technology.
Three guesses which option they prefer.
I don't normally address specific current political issues in my diaries, but after last night, an anecdote to show just how much last night's debate meant, and for whom.
I was at work for last night's debate, and while I work at a news organization (good luck finding out which), we were busy putting out our product.
The debate was on fairly loud, and my blood pressure spiked. I actually felt sick. I don't like discussing politics in public, or even having political stuff out in public, because I am so far left that I make most Democrats look conservative, and even though the newsroom is at least left of moderate (funny what xenophobia will do among people with significant Hispanic heritage), I still don't like talking or hearing about politics from my co-workers.
It was so bad that I couldn't focus on my work. A task that normally takes 10 minutes took more than 15 because I was so distracted.
Before long, the volume was back down, presumably because I wasn't the only person who couldn't focus. And about 20 minutes (it seemed; that debate went by fast) later, it was done.
Then the post-debate "Let's see how long we can keep our ratings up" analysis came. And it was William Kristol, Chris Wallace and some token Democratic reality-based person.
One of them thought McCain had won, but that person also wasn't really impressed by the debate. The other two didn't think there was a clear winner.
A few minutes later, I walked past the TV (I hadn't looked at it much, on account of trying to make deadline, which we totally did not) and noticed it was tuned to
FOX News.
Now, maybe I missed some scathing anti-Obama remark someone made. Maybe the scrolling gotcha moments were dominated by pro-McCain stuff.
But FOX News wasn't (yet, at least) spinning it for McCain or against Obama. I didn't hear anyone say, "Tonight, Barack Obama showed why he is not ready to lead this country."
If FOX can't spin it for the bad guys, maybe it was that bad for them. And if they can't give their viewers the "McCain won!" lines those viewers are faithfully waiting for, on a subject McCain is supposed to have command of, demonstrably, over Obama, then I don't see things getting any better for McCain in the coming weeks.
First he's going to suffer massively when Sarah Palin can't get a talking point out without having Joe Biden telling the nation what's actually true.
Then he's going to have to address more domestic issues at a time when this administration, and his friends, and his financial ideology, are burying this country's financial flexibility.
Without jinxing things too much, I honestly think Obama loses this only if Democrats get fed tranquilizers the night before Election Day.
And that's why I'm voting early.