Massacre National Park, USA
In what looks like the establishment of a state religion, federal- and state-funded monuments to nuclear weapons are popping up all over the country.
Hoping perhaps to enshrine the myth that the god of the underworld, after which Plutonium was named, can be transformed from a vengeful, bloodthirsty self-destructive nightmare demon, into a benign peace-loving fairytale prince, government propagandists are establishing nuclear war theme parks — but without the uncomfortable taint of mass murder or Cold War hatreds.
Tours recently began being offered at the “B Reactor” on the Hanford Reservation in Washington State where for decades plutonium for the nuclear arsenal was extracted in a way that permanently threatens the Columbia River. At Rocky Flats, Colo., where the machining of plutonium poisoned tens of square miles, a National Wildlife Refuge has been established. Near Fargo, N.D., the State Historical Society now owns a deactivated intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) launch control center, has dubbed it “Ronald Reagan Minuteman Missile Site” and opened it to tourism. In South Dakota, a disarmed ICBM launch center run by the National Park Service is called the Minuteman Missile National Historic Site and you can go underground to personally simulate at attack that could murder multiple millions of people.
This summer, just in time for the 66th anniversary of the U.S. atomic attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, Aug. 6 and 9, 1945, Interior Department Secretary Ken Salazar recommended to Congress that a national historic park be established to honor the Manhattan Project — the secret World War II program that built the bombs that massacred 140,000 people at Hiroshima and another 70,000 at Nagasaki.
National Park Director Jonathan Jarvis said in a July 17 Park Service press release, “Once a tightly guarded secret, the story of the atomic bomb’s creation needs to be shared with this and future generations.” Jarvis feigns ignorance of the vast literature on the Manhattan Project available from any good library, and his acting the dunce insults both the conscience of the living and the memory of the dead.
Richard Rhodes’s 1986 Pulitzer Prize winning “The Making of the Atomic Bomb” and his 1995 sequel to it, “Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb,” Robert Lifton’s “Hiroshima in America: Fifty Years of Denial” (1995) or his 1982 study “Indefensible Weapons,” and Gar Alperovitz’s definitive 1995 history, “The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb”— the product of 30 years of research into the subject — are all gripping and devastating in their treatment of the Bomb’s development, its terroristic uses and its billion-year environmental consequences.
But the state wants us to forget this downside, and at least two agendas are at work. First, treating nuclear weapons nostalgically teaches the sham lesson that H-bombs are a thing of the past and not still in need of abolishing. South Dakota’s doomsday tour website says, “At Minuteman Missile NHS, it is possible to learn how the threat of nuclear war came to haunt the world” — as if 450 Minuteman ICBMs weren’t still set to launch on “alert” status and prepared to kill millions on 31 seconds notice.
Secondly, official memorials devoted to nuclear weapons self-consciously deny or rewrite the horrifying and persistent results of having brought the Nuclear Age upon the world. This “Columbus Day” style of American history — lionizing heroic efforts while ignoring the butchery and mass murder committed by the hero — is the sort that is being carved into stone at these government circuses.
Nobody will learn at these idol-worshiping places that the Bomb was borne of a will to death, used unnecessarily against Japanese civilians without warning, and tested in the atmosphere over 100 times in ways that caused at least 75,000 thyroid cancers among U.S. residents, according to the National Cancer Institute.
Students will have to look elsewhere to learn that the Bomb has been condemned by every major religion on earth and that in 1996 the International Court of Justice declared that the mere threat to use it in a sneak attack (like keeping Minuteman and submarine missiles on “alert” status) is a violation of International Humanitarian Law forbidding the planning and preparation of massacres.
Today’s string of H-bomb monuments never acknowledge the weapon’s legacy of uncontrollable and persistent radiation poisoning and nuclear industry’s resulting plague of radiation-induced genetic damage and cancers the world over. Nor will the memorials note that in the annals of war and war crimes, the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are more controversial than any other.
Official U.S. histories and wartime propaganda claim that the atomic attacks “ended the war” by preventing a land invasion, and this is repeated endlessly at these Bomb-loving churches. Yet historical facts unearthed since then show that in August 1945 Japan was already defeated, no invasion would ever have occurred even without the use of the Bomb, and, indeed, the mass murder at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was not just unnecessary but “known in advance not to be necessary” ¾ as Alperovitz has found.
President Dwight Eisenhower wrote, “First, the Japanese were ready to surrender and it wasn’t necessary to hit them with that awful thing.”
And Admiral William Leahy, wartime Chief of Staff to Presidents Roosevelt and Truman, wrote in his book “I Was There,” that “I was not taught to make war in that fashion and wars cannot be won by destroying women and children.”
With the Obama Administration working now to build three giant new Bomb-building facilities, we should confront official myth-making and take a lesson from arch-Cold Warrior and former right-wing Reagan administration national security advisor Paul Nitze.
Writing Oct. 28, 1999, in the New York Times, Nitze said, “I see no compelling reason why we should not unilaterally get rid of our nuclear weapons. To maintain them … adds nothing to our security. I can think of no circumstances under which it would be wise for the United States to use nuclear weapons, even in retaliation for their prior use against us ….”
Such are the words to carve into an atom bomb theme park.
John LaForge works for Nukewatch, the nuclear watchdog group in Wisconsin and edits its quarterly newsletter.
Are Politicians’ Brains Superior?
A man visited an organ bank, looking for a brain for his brother-in-law who was to undergo a transplant. He noticed a brain that had a $5,000 an ounce price tag on it and inquired about it.
“That’s just an ordinary blue-collar brain,” he was told.
“How about that one?” he asked, pointing to another with a $10,000 per ounce tag on it.
“Oh, that one is an accountant’s brain.”
Suddenly, the man scanned the row of increasingly expensive brains and spotted one that cost $50,000 per ounce.
“Tell me, what kind of brain is that one?”
“That’s a politician’s brain,” the answer came.
“A politician’s brain!” he exclaimed. “Why in the world would a politician’s brain be worth $50,000 an ounce?”
“Well,” the other fellow replied. “Just stop and think how many politicians it took to get an ounce of brains!”
Our Past vs. Our Future…
When Reality Swims Upstream
http://jpstillwater.blogspot.com/2011/08/our-past-vs.html
Collectively, most of us Americans seem to be experiencing the same common thread running through our lives right now — we used to have a whole lot of stuff but are now facing a future with not so much. And almost each of us has a story to tell about his or her own personal loss of stuff. And almost all of us also have stories to tell about our childhoods, our expectations for when we would become grownups, our reality today and what we think will happen to us in the future.
This week I too went on a quest for my past. My first stop? Brad Pitt’s latest movie, “The Tree of Life”. Pitt’s film could have been based on my own childhood experiences too, back in the 1950s, when we all had a whole lot of stuff (Somalian famine victims would have LOVED to be you and me back in 1953) — but somehow, back then, a lot of us were miserably unhappy as well.
My mother used to sit on a fancy leatherette couch in our spiffy new tract house front room and cry her heart out. She cried every day for a whole year. My sister tried to run away from home. My father lived for the moment when he could walk out our door and go back to his job the next morning. I was an outcast loner who had no friends at school, even in kindergarten. And in the midst of all this 1950s prosperity, we all suffered in silence and tormented each other — just like in “The Tree of Life”.
For the next stop on my journey back into the past, I actually went off to visit my old childhood home. My strict old elementary school had gone all Montessori. My former neighbors had mostly moved out or died. All the new residents have remodeled. No one is a McCarthy Republican any more. The bowling alley is gone but the ice cream shop is still there (only with new owners and a new name). I couldn’t see any signs of foreclosures, however, because my former home town is still sort of posh in its own small suburban way.
Next I stopped by the big house across the street from where I was raised, met its new owner and told her some of the history of her house. “This whole housing tract was built for veterans returning from World War II,” I said, “but before that, your big old home used to be the only one for miles around, built by some wealthy gambler in order to live next to Green Hills Country Club so that he could play golf. Then he died of a heart attack while hitting his ball onto the first green.” I also heard that the gambler was from Texas, drove a new yellow Cadillac convertible and had ten slot machines installed in his front room.
“Then Col C.W. Jones and his wife Rita moved in. She used to be an FBI secret agent.” How exciting that seemed to me, just a bored, awkward and lonely little suburban kid. “The colonel and his wife served as a haven for all us kids in the neighborhood who had no place else to go.”
After that, I went off to visit my parents’ graves. Much as I hated my mom growing up, I always visited her grave first. “Hi, Mom. How are things going wit’ you up in Heaven?”
Next to my mother’s grave, workers had dug out a large pit and lined it with copper in preparation for a funeral later that afternoon. What? They think that if they line their grave site with copper, it will keep out the worms? Not.
And like we all have our own individual pasts, every single one of us Americans also has a future. What will that be? Of course we’ll all die in the end, but before that happens, over 300 million different American stories will be lived out.
What will the rest of my story be like? And what will the rest of your story be like too?
What I am hoping will happen is that whether it turns out that we are to be well-off and surrounded with stuff in the future or poor and surrounded with little more than cardboard boxes and shopping carts, that on the inside, deep down in our souls, that we will all be living a meaningful life and be relatively content with what we have — just the oppose to what happened to Brad Pitt’s family in “The Tree of Life”. And also the opposite of what happened to me back in the 1950s.
PS: I just finished watching “Citizen Kane” as well. Charles Foster Kane’s story fits right in here nicely. Material stuff isn’t the end-all and be-all in that movie either.
PPS: The moral of this story? Americans might consider the benefits of ceasing to live in denial about the future and then actually start preparing to not only survive but to thrive in a future that contains a lot less stuff. We all seem to be still living in the fantasyland that our whole happy future depends solely on the accumulation of things. However. If we continue to think that our entire happiness rests on how much stuff we have, what will happen to us if we start to have less stuff? We’re screwed.
And another big fantasy that we have is that America’s future happiness is based solely on getting its annual gross national product to grow. If we think that this fantasy is ever gonna be true in the future — when it was hardly ever even true in the past, then our reality is definitely swimming upstream for sure.
And another moral here might be that Americans need to start becoming much nicer people if we are ever going to survive these coming hard times ahead gracefully. My country’s current “I’ll do anything for money” attitude has gone on for far too long. “Lie for money? Steal for money? Kill for money? Sure!” Are we sick of that yet? Obviously not.
And the most important moral of all? We need to start getting rid of the corporatists and oligarchs who got us into our current economic mess and our slavish dependence on stuff in the first place. Let’s start taking away their “stuff” too. I personally would love to see how gracefully they can live their lives like the rest of us do — without a billion extra dollars to prop them up.
Their greed has gotten us into our current economic folly — but their greed ain’t gonna get us out.
‘Cannabinomics’ – The Marijuana Policy Tipping Point
The gutting of our economic democracy has been occurring for years and can be found in reams of books and volumes of eyewitness testimony, but nowhere has the case for the theft of American health by their supposed corporate protectors been laid out as brilliantly as when Dr. Christopher Glenn Fichtner clears all the smoke and mirrors with his new book, Cannabinomics: The Marijuana Policy Tipping Point (Well Mind Books, 2010).
A firestorm of controversy has erupted over Dr. Fichtner’s new book Cannabinomics that proves, beyond a shadow of a doubt, what happens behind the iron medical curtain when Americans are shown how to take ownership of this homegrown commodity and facilitate system-learning that could help solve larger global drug war problems.
Marijuana use is illegal throughout many countries of the world for reasons that are not clear. This book is important because it provides a scientific critique of the medical benefits of marijuana in light of the social, political, and legal hysteria that have been attached to it.
Cannabinomics, as Phillip Smith of the Drug War Chronicle puts it, is “Chris Fichtner’s eye-grabbing term for managing our relationship with cannabis,” in order to move from pot prohibition to regulation. Jettison the “M” word, acknowledge that cannabis is a highly valued homegrown American commodity, and get on with the task of managing its commercial integration into the economy! Why not generate new tax revenue, and create opportunities for American entrepreneurs to enter the global medicinal cannabis market?
Cannabinomics is not a medical handbook, a drug war treatise, or an economic model, so much as a work of patient and public policy advocacy. It looks at real-world medical cases, recent trends in successful policy reform, drug war costs, and the potential economic benefits of cannabis change. Brilliantly, Dr. Fichtner examines—then debunks—many of the common misconceptions about marijuana. From medical renaissance to revolution, from drug war prohibition to public health, from economic reefer madness to recovery—trajectories in public policy are converging toward regulation and economic integration of the herbal cannabis trade.
Dr. Christopher Glenn Fichtner
The incongruity of our political policies that legally prohibit individuals from gaining access to natural plant material they find indispensable for relieving debilitating systems borders on the absurd. This conversation is going on in state legislatures, like New York’s, where the draconian Rockefeller drug laws are up for review; in other states, from California to Massachusetts, various forms of marijuana decriminalization are being enacted.
The state-level medical cannabis movement is growing rapidly, but California was the only state to allow for mental health applications—until New Mexico specifically included post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) on its list of acceptable indications for medicinal use of herbal cannabis. Among the many interesting ideas in Cannabinomics, Fichtner—who began his career treating combat veterans with PTSD in the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA)—suggests that PTSD may be a disorder for which herbal cannabis can provide broad-spectrum symptom relief. And he makes this suggestion after a very thorough discussion of how, even with FDA-approved medications like Zoloft and Paxil, it is rare to see the full spectrum of PTSD symptoms respond to treatment with just one medication. Fichtner’s extended discussion of evidence-based practice in this context is just one example of the kind of rigorous analysis—cutting across medicine, science, ethics and philosophy—that establishes this work as a unique book for our time.
There are also more puckish signs of a zeitgeist shift. All polls conducted on behalf of Cannabis usage show a public obsessed with the legalization of marijuana and its medical use. Moreover, there is an enormous potential windfall in the taxation of marijuana. It is estimated that pot is America’s largest cash crop, and potential annual revenue estimates range from $14 to $40 billion. A 10% pot tax would yield $1.5 billion in California alone. And that’s probably a fraction of the revenues that would become available — and of the economic impact, with an estimated 36,000 to 58,000 new jobs in California in agriculture, packaging, marketing, and advertising.
But there are still bigger issues of economy and simple justice, especially on the sentencing side. It’s increasingly clear that the criminalization of marijuana creates more problems than it solves. Cannabis prohibition deprives needy individuals of medicinal benefits, unnecessarily creates crimes and criminals, fuels the black market, and deprives the mainstream economy of important taxable revenue, the book points out. The U.S. is, by far, the most “criminal” country in the world, with 5% of the world’s population and 25% of its prisoners. “We spend $68 billion per year on corrections, and one-third of those being corrected are serving time for nonviolent drug crimes. We spend about $150 billion on policing and courts, and 47.5% of all drug arrests are marijuana-related. That is an awful lot of money, most of it nonfederal, that could be spent on better schools or infrastructure — or simply returned to the public,” it was noted.
Inhaled, eaten, taken sublingually, vaporized, or patched onto the skin, individuals experiencing nausea, pain or muscle spasms often find immediate relief. In particular, herbal cannabis has been reported to be beneficial in cases of migraine, multiple sclerosis, chronic cancer pain, epilepsy, arthritis, AIDS, and post-traumatic stress disorder. Unlike tobacco, which exacerbates cancer, use of marijuana is associated with significantly decreased risk of some types of head and neck cancers.
Criminalization related to cannabis has proved to be unsustainable. The criminalization of marijuana did not prevent marijuana from becoming the most widely used illegal substance in the United States and many other countries. But it did result in extensive costs and negative consequences. Law enforcement agencies today spend many billions of taxpayer dollars annually trying to enforce this unenforceable prohibition.
Dr. Fichtner weeds out all the negatives regarding drug criminalization and concludes: “Cannabis change is the low-hanging fruit of drug policy reform, and medical marijuana is so ripe it’s falling off the trees in front of us.”
Last year – the city of Philadelphia changed its law enforcement approach to marijuana – and stopped jailing people for having less than 30 grams of marijuana. Now – the Philadelphia District Attorney’s office admits this new approach has saved the city over $2 million. A lot of savings can be found when a city doesn’t need to pay for defense attorney’s prosecutors, and lab tests just to bust someone for having some pot on them. Police also admit that more relaxed marijuana laws have had no effect on the city’s quality of life. “We need to take a lesson from Philadelphia – and end Richard Nixon’s Drug War,” notes Fichtner.
The author’s background: University of California, Riverside (B.S., psychobiology, 1977); University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine (M.D., 1987); psychiatry residency at the University of Illinois Medical Center in Chicago; Certificate in Medical Management awarded jointly by the University of Southern California and the American College of Physician Executives; and board-certification in psychiatry. Between college and medical school, he attended Columbia University in the City of New York (M.A., psychology, 1979) and Princeton Theological Seminary (M.Div., 1982), and completed a year of doctoral level work in religion and psychological studies at the University of Chicago. Dr. Fichtner has served on the faculty of several medical schools, including the University of Chicago, and currently holds an appointment as Clinical Professor in the Department of Psychiatry at the Southern Illinois University School of Medicine. Since 2008, he has worked as a staff psychiatrist for the Riverside County Department of Mental Health in southern California.
