Happy Birthday, Saint Barack of Hiroshima

Since Tropical Storm Isaias knocked me off the grid for the past three days, I'd missed the national corporate media's fawning frenzy over Barack Obama's 59th birthday as well as its much more subdued coverage of the 75th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima by the United States.

Therefore, submitted for your approval (just like the old Twilight Zone DVDs I've been watching all week to ease my Internet withdrawal symptoms) is a piece I wrote called "Saint Barack of Hiroshima." (Original air date May 28, 2016):

Not only is Barack Obama one of the most ironic Nobel Peace laureates in history, he also takes the prize for being the most cynically arrogant. Nobody with even a fraction of his obvious intelligence, nobody with even the mere rotting vestige of a moral compass, would have dared to set foot in Hiroshima otherwise.

Grotesquely parading down a hideously symbolic red carpet, Obama proceeded to plant himself comfortably behind yet another global bully pulpit, announcing once again, in case we forgot, that the United States will continue to reign as the concern-trolling bully and moral arbiter of the planet.

How easily we learn to justify violence in the name of some higher cause.  Every great religion promises a pathway to love and peace and righteousness, and yet no religion has been spared from believers who have claimed their faith as a license to kill.  Nations arise, telling a story that binds people together in sacrifice and cooperation, allowing for remarkable feats, but those same stories have so often been used to oppress and dehumanize those who are different.

Obama himself has conveniently used religion as his own license to kill. Four years ago, concerned about his own reelection prospects and deeming himself in dire need of some bellicose propaganda to counter the GOP's silly accusations of deficient virility, he planted a story in the New York Times about his Terror Tuesday Kill List.  The tortured narrative of the article sought to portray him as a thoughtful Archangel of Death, a Saint Michael in heaven with a halo, as opposed to stupid Lucifer with a Bushy face burning in the hellish flames of merely mortal ignorance.

Not being a particularly religious man himself, Obama relied on the Roman Catholic faith of his national security mentor and future CIA director to justify his assassination program, which to date has resulted in the deaths of thousands of people.

Beside the president at every step is his counterterrorism adviser, John O. Brennan, who is variously compared by colleagues to a dogged police detective, tracking terrorists from his cavelike office in the White House basement, or a priest whose blessing has become indispensable to Mr. Obama, echoing the president’s attempt to apply the “just war” theories of Christian philosophers to a brutal modern conflict.

 (snip)

The nominations go to the White House, where by his own insistence and guided by Mr. Brennan, Mr. Obama must approve any name. He signs off on every strike in Yemen and Somalia and also on the more complex and risky strikes in Pakistan — about a third of the total.

Aides say Mr. Obama has several reasons for becoming so immersed in lethal counterterrorism operations. A student of writings on war by Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, he believes that he should take moral responsibility for such actions. And he knows that bad strikes can tarnish America’s image and derail diplomacy.

 How easily Saint Barack learned to justify his violence to the name of some higher cause. Transcending the mindless fundamentalism of the bloodthirsty despots of wars past, our intellectual president uses the New York Times as his own enhanced propaganda Bible, even getting the scribes to elevate his chamber of death to a Platonic man cave of advanced ideas.  After all, were it not for the pragmatic Greek philosophers, there never would have been any Christian intellectuals to justify the whole gamut of depravity, from misogyny, to imperialism and plunder, to inquisitorial torture and death, to pedophilia.

Since many of the thousands of Obama's drone victims have been residents of "tribal" areas, how much easier for him to justify their deaths. They are stateless people, belonging to no nation. Since they have no protection from any formal government, they are thus dehumanized, rendered into nameless "bug-splat" by American Predator and Reaper drones. 

But Obama apparently succeeded PR-wise in Hiroshima, adding his own glib chapter to what he only pretends to decry: "Nations arise, telling a story that binds people together in sacrifice and cooperation, allowing for remarkable feats, but those same stories have so often been used to oppress and dehumanize those who are different."

While he has been rightly castigated by scientists and independent critics for presuming to lecture the world on nuclear weapons after appropriating an obscene trillion dollars to upgrade America's own arsenal, his speech itself got relatively glowing reviews from the liberal press, anxious to defend him against silly GOP accusations that he went to Hiroshima to apologize for America's dropping the atomic bombs. That is so patently unfair.  Obama not only didn't apologize, he deliberately thumbed his nose at Nagasaki, an even more depraved war crime given that the war was over by the time Truman committed his two-fer.

Obama even bent over backward to avoid directly mentioning that the United States actually dropped the bombs. His opening salvo in the alleged U.S. rapprochement with Japanese survivors was, in fact, stunningly maudlin and insulting to the victims:

Seventy-one years ago, on a bright, cloudless morning, death fell from the sky and the world was changed.  A flash of light and a wall of fire destroyed a city and demonstrated that mankind possessed the means to destroy itself.  

Why do we come to this place, to Hiroshima?  We come to ponder a terrible force unleashed in a not so distant past.  We come to mourn the dead, including over 100,000 in Japanese men, women and children; thousands of Koreans; a dozen Americans held prisoner.  Their souls speak to us. They ask us to look inward, to take stock of who we are and what we might become.

To hear Obama tell it, death just sort of fell down from the sky like an act of an Old Testament God, in burning little radioactive isotopes instead of raindrops. No input needed from Harry Truman or even from the unrepentant pilot of the Enola Gay, who named his bomb "Little Boy." See, Obama just could not bring himself to admit that the United States destroyed Hiroshima. Rather, a Biblical wall of fire and a flash of light did the trick, in order to demonstrate that "mankind" still possesses the means to go all retro Adam and Eve, and destroy itself.

 The victims of the war crimes should ask for nothing more than for Saint Barack to examine the consciences of both the warmongers and the innocent bystanders. Then he will order up some absolution and even co-opt Bernie Sanders in calling for a "moral" (not an anti-capitalist) revolution. Why else is his name Barack, which literally means Blessed?  All of us must have some skin in this depraved game, utter our acts of contrition even as the Church of Capitalism itself is exempt. He wants the world congregation to believe that all wars are started by popular referendum rather than by plutocratic priests lounging in a corner sacristy, guarded by men with guns and shielded by their billions of dollars in excess, tax-free profits.

And lest we forget, Obama's Hiroshima bucket list of a visit was a mere sidelight to the real purpose of his Asia trip: a sales junket to cement support for the corporate coup known as the Trans-Pacific Partnership. It's been called NAFTA on steroids. Maybe we should also call it the A-Bomb of all treaties, given that it blows up democracy in favor of a global oligarchy. 

But the New York Times cloyingly and dutifully described the prime photo-op ("Hiroshima Survivor Cries, and Obama Gives Him a Hug") And then it was on to the stoic panoramic spectacle of the official kiss and makeup session between just two elite guys:

 Mr. Obama’s visit to Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park had all the pomp, ceremony and planned choreography of a state visit or a leader’s funeral. With thousands in attendance and much of Japan watching on TV, Mr. Obama walked forward alone at the park and laid a wreath on a white pyramid. He paused before the memorial’s cenotaph, his head bowed.

 A moment later, Mr. Abe approached with his own wreath, which he laid beside Mr. Obama’s on another pyramid. After a moment’s reflection, the two leaders shook hands — a clear signal of the extraordinary alliance their two nations had forged out of the ashes of war.

It's a pyramid scheme, all right. Substitute "wealth" for "wreath" for what goes on the tippy-top, and you can almost envision a veritable TPP Ballet, maybe staged as a hawkish update of the Firebird. Out of the smoldering ashes of war comes the renewed conflagration of capitalism on crack.

Saint Barack of Hiroshima

Not only is Barack Obama one of the most ironic Nobel Peace laureates in history, he also takes the prize for being the most cynically arrogant. Nobody with even a fraction of his obvious intelligence, nobody with even the mere rotting vestige of a moral compass, would have dared to set foot in Hiroshima otherwise.

Grotesquely parading down a hideously symbolic red carpet, Obama proceeded to plant himself comfortably behind yet another global bully pulpit, announcing once again, in case we forgot, that the United States will continue to reign as the concern-trolling bully and moral arbiter of the planet.

How easily we learn to justify violence in the name of some higher cause.  Every great religion promises a pathway to love and peace and righteousness, and yet no religion has been spared from believers who have claimed their faith as a license to kill.  Nations arise, telling a story that binds people together in sacrifice and cooperation, allowing for remarkable feats, but those same stories have so often been used to oppress and dehumanize those who are different.

Obama himself has conveniently used religion as his own license to kill. Four years ago, concerned about his own reelection prospects and deeming himself in dire need of some bellicose propaganda to counter the GOP's silly accusations of deficient virility, he planted a story in the New York Times about his Terror Tuesday Kill List.  The tortured narrative of the article sought to portray him as a thoughtful Archangel of Death, a Saint Michael in heaven with a halo, as opposed to stupid Lucifer with a Bushy face burning in the hellish flames of merely mortal ignorance.

Not being a particularly religious man himself, Obama relied on the Roman Catholic faith of his national security mentor and future CIA director to justify his assassination program, which to date has resulted in the deaths of thousands of people.

Beside the president at every step is his counterterrorism adviser, John O. Brennan, who is variously compared by colleagues to a dogged police detective, tracking terrorists from his cavelike office in the White House basement, or a priest whose blessing has become indispensable to Mr. Obama, echoing the president’s attempt to apply the “just war” theories of Christian philosophers to a brutal modern conflict.

 (snip)

The nominations go to the White House, where by his own insistence and guided by Mr. Brennan, Mr. Obama must approve any name. He signs off on every strike in Yemen and Somalia and also on the more complex and risky strikes in Pakistan — about a third of the total.

Aides say Mr. Obama has several reasons for becoming so immersed in lethal counterterrorism operations. A student of writings on war by Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, he believes that he should take moral responsibility for such actions. And he knows that bad strikes can tarnish America’s image and derail diplomacy.

 How easily Saint Barack learned to justify his violence to the name of some higher cause. Transcending the mindless fundamentalism of the bloodthirsty despots of wars past, our intellectual president uses the New York Times as his own enhanced propaganda Bible, even getting the scribes to elevate his chamber of death to a Platonic man cave of advanced ideas.  After all, were it not for the pragmatic Greek philosophers, there never would have been any Christian intellectuals to justify the whole gamut of depravity, from misogyny, to imperialism and plunder, to inquisitorial torture and death, to pedophilia.

Since many of the thousands of Obama's drone victims have been residents of "tribal" areas, how much easier for him to justify their deaths. They are stateless people, belonging to no nation. Since they have no protection from any formal government, they are thus dehumanized, rendered into nameless "bug-splat" by American Predator and Reaper drones. 

But Obama apparently succeeded PR-wise in Hiroshima, adding his own glib chapter to what he only pretends to decry: "Nations arise, telling a story that binds people together in sacrifice and cooperation, allowing for remarkable feats, but those same stories have so often been used to oppress and dehumanize those who are different."

While he has been rightly castigated by scientists and independent critics for presuming to lecture the world on nuclear weapons after appropriating an obscene trillion dollars to upgrade America's own arsenal, his speech itself got relatively glowing reviews from the liberal press, anxious to defend him against silly GOP accusations that he went to Hiroshima to apologize for America's dropping the atomic bombs. That is so patently unfair.  Obama not only didn't apologize, he deliberately thumbed his nose at Nagasaki, an even more depraved war crime given that the war was over by the time Truman committed his two-fer.

Obama even bent over backward to avoid directly mentioning that the United States actually dropped the bombs. His opening salvo in the alleged U.S. rapprochement with Japanese survivors was, in fact, stunningly maudlin and insulting to the victims:

Seventy-one years ago, on a bright, cloudless morning, death fell from the sky and the world was changed.  A flash of light and a wall of fire destroyed a city and demonstrated that mankind possessed the means to destroy itself.  

Why do we come to this place, to Hiroshima?  We come to ponder a terrible force unleashed in a not so distant past.  We come to mourn the dead, including over 100,000 in Japanese men, women and children; thousands of Koreans; a dozen Americans held prisoner.  Their souls speak to us. They ask us to look inward, to take stock of who we are and what we might become.

To hear Obama tell it, death just sort of fell down from the sky like an act of an Old Testament God, in burning little radioactive isotopes instead of raindrops. No input needed from Harry Truman or even from the unrepentant pilot of the Enola Gay, who named his bomb "Little Boy." See, Obama just could not bring himself to admit that the United States destroyed Hiroshima. Rather, a Biblical wall of fire and a flash of light did the trick, in order to demonstrate that "mankind" still possesses the means to go all retro Adam and Eve, and destroy itself.

 The victims of the war crimes should ask for nothing more than for Saint Barack to examine the consciences of both the warmongers and the innocent bystanders. Then he will order up some absolution and even co-opt Bernie Sanders in calling for a "moral" (not an anti-capitalist) revolution. Why else is his name Barack, which literally means Blessed?  All of us must have some skin in this depraved game, utter our acts of contrition even as the Church of Capitalism itself is exempt. He wants the world congregation to believe that all wars are started by popular referendum rather than by plutocratic priests lounging in a corner sacristy, guarded by men with guns and shielded by their billions of dollars in excess, tax-free profits.

And lest we forget, Obama's Hiroshima bucket list of a visit was a mere sidelight to the real purpose of his Asia trip: a sales junket to cement support for the corporate coup known as the Trans-Pacific Partnership. It's been called NAFTA on steroids. Maybe we should also call it the A-Bomb of all treaties, given that it blows up democracy in favor of a global oligarchy. 

But the New York Times cloyingly and dutifully described the prime photo-op ("Hiroshima Survivor Cries, and Obama Gives Him a Hug") And then it was on to the stoic panoramic spectacle of the official kiss and makeup session between just two elite guys:

 Mr. Obama’s visit to Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park had all the pomp, ceremony and planned choreography of a state visit or a leader’s funeral. With thousands in attendance and much of Japan watching on TV, Mr. Obama walked forward alone at the park and laid a wreath on a white pyramid. He paused before the memorial’s cenotaph, his head bowed.

 A moment later, Mr. Abe approached with his own wreath, which he laid beside Mr. Obama’s on another pyramid. After a moment’s reflection, the two leaders shook hands — a clear signal of the extraordinary alliance their two nations had forged out of the ashes of war.

It's a pyramid scheme, all right. Substitute "wealth" for "wreath" for what goes on the tippy-top, and you can almost envision a veritable TPP Ballet, maybe staged as a hawkish update of the Firebird. Out of the smoldering ashes of war comes the renewed conflagration of capitalism on crack.  

Hiroshima: Seventy Years And Counting

I owe my life to Harry S. Truman.

Or so my father told me at the dinner table one night in the 1960s when, having just read John Hersey's Hiroshima, I was expressing my shock, sadness and indignation that a US president could kill 80,000 people in one fell atomic swoop. What did innocent Japanese people have to do with the war, I'd asked. Children did not deserve to die, or survive that horrific day only to develop leukemia and other cancers decades later. 

That's when Dad told me that as a soldier stationed on the island of Okinawa in 1945, he was to be part of Operation Olympic, the first stage of the invasion of Japan. Since the Japanese were fully aware of the planned attack, it was believed at the time to be essentially a suicide mission. American casualties were forecast to be in the millions, what with the Japanese heavily fortifying the southern island of Kyushu, where my father's unit was scheduled to land.  

I had always known that my father was in the war, but like so many World War II vets, he never talked about it much. Those were the days before PTSD became a diagnosis, those were the days when men had to be macho. One story he loved to tell revolved around some exquisite watercolors which a Japanese P.O.W. he'd been guarding painted for him in exchange for a carton of Lucky Strikes. Those paintings were among his most prized possessions, along with some autograph and photo memorabilia of star-studded welcome-home parties and studio tours thrown for him and other GI's in Hollywood. He also loved to tell the story of how he'd accidentally barged into Lucille Ball's dressing room, and how warm and gracious she was in her semi-nudity. Diehard "I Love Lucy" fans that we kids were, we were suitably impressed. (My mother, not so much.)

As he rather gruffly pointed out to me that night at the kitchen table, were it not for the atomic bomb I might never have been born. When Truman dropped the bomb, the war ended, Dad got to go home, party, get a good job, get married, and procreate.

 I stared at him in stunned silence, my appetite gone right along with my indignant words.To be told that you are alive because of the mass deaths of others is quite the revelation, instilling not a little of ye olde survivor guilt.

Since that long-ago conversation, recently declassified documents reveal that if Truman hadn't dropped the bomb and Operation Olympic had proceeded as planned, my father might have encountered more weaponized civilian draftees (teens and old people) on the island of Kyushu than seasoned Japanese soldiers, who were busy elsewhere. If he'd gotten killed, it likely would have been from an aerial bomb instead of from a bayonet.

If existential gratitude is indeed in order, I should also probably thank Albert Einstein and J. Robert Oppenheimer. Because if anybody went on a guilt trip after the bombing of Hiroshima, and later of Nagasaki, it was those two guys.

As for Truman, he had some regrets over the loss of human life, but apparently suffered no guilt. From his diary:

“It was a decision to loose the most terrible of all destructive forces for the wholesale slaughter of human beings. The Secretary of War Mr. Stimson and I weighed that decision most prayerfully. The President had to decide. It occurred to me that a quarter of a million of the flower of our young manhood was worth a couple of Japanese cities and I still think they were and are.

“But I couldn’t help but think of the necessity of blotting out women, children and more combatants. We picked a couple of cities where war work was the principle industry and dropped the bombs. Russia hurried in and that war ended.”

  Give Em Hell Harry's statement that he dropped the bomb to save flowering masculine lives had some truth in it, if I do say so my selfish self. But as his critics point out, he also might have been ignoring Japanese overtures for peace. The estimates of millions of American casualties might have been overblown in order to justify the ultimate reality of a quarter-million Japanese casualties. And Truman's atomic attack on Nagasaki was most assuredly done as a warning to the Soviets, who had their own goal of taking over post-war Asia. The bombing of Nagasaki was an act of monumental brutality and pure, chest-thumping hegemony.

What is also brutally clear is that in the 70 years since Hiroshima, not one country has attacked the United States. And yet American leaders have used the same Trumanesque rationale of "saving American lives" to justify every invasion, every bombing, every drone strike, every construction of every one of its  thousand military bases around the world. The dropping of the atomic bomb set the stage for American dominance, with the Soviet Union the scapegoat until its collapse in 1991.

By then, of course, it was too late to rein in what Dwight Eisenhower had warned about: the Military Industrial Complex (MIC). Since the end of the Cold War, the US has unleashed its military might against the Balkans, northern Africa and the Middle East. In just the past year, the Obama administration has staged a coup in Ukraine and sent troops to Russian border countries, and begun what is euphemized as "a pivot to Asia."

In yesterday's Faux-Peace In Our Time speech to his Iran deal critics, President Obama manfully boasted,

As commander-in-chief, I have not shied away from using force when necessary. I have ordered tens of thousands of young Americans into combat. I have sat by their bedside sometimes when they come home.
I've ordered military action in seven countries. There are times when force is necessary, and if Iran does not abide by this deal, it's possible that we don't have an alternative.

 And while the US chickenhawks in both parties wring their hegemonic hands and thump their imperialistic chests over the proposed de-nuking deal with Iran, the MIC continues to build up its own nuclear arsenal with a vengeance.The Obama administration last fall announced plans to invest another trillion dollars in a renewed nuclear arms race. The first phase was the building of a sprawling plant twice the size of the Pentagon in America's heartland. One thousand people have been hired to build new warheads in Kansas City, MO. From the New York Times: 

  This expansion comes under a president who campaigned for “a nuclear-free world” and made disarmament a main goal of American defense policy. The original idea was that modest rebuilding of the nation’s crumbling nuclear complex would speed arms refurbishment, raising confidence in the arsenal’s reliability and paving the way for new treaties that would significantly cut the number of warheads.

 Instead, because of political deals and geopolitical crises, the Obama administration is engaging in extensive atomic rebuilding while getting only modest arms reductions in return.

 Supporters of arms control, as well as some of President Obama’s closest advisers, say their hopes for the president’s vision have turned to baffled disappointment as the modernization of nuclear capabilities has become an end unto itself.

Meanwhile, the Nobel Peace Prize president sanctimoniously scolds critics of his Iran "peace" deal. Without the ability to peacefully threaten Iran over its own nonexistent-to-modest nuclear program, he boomed yesterday, war will become inevitable. He is kindly giving Iran a chance to behave before bombing it to smithereens.

Meanwhile, over at New Mexico's Los Alamos National Laboratory, they just completed a massive renovation of their plutonium processing plant.

Meanwhile, over at the Y-12 Security Complex in Tennessee, they just completed a $550 million Highly Enriched Uranium Materials Facility. 

Meanwhile, over at the 3,000-worker Pantex Plant in Amarillo, they're building a "high explosives pressing facility" at a cost (so far) of $145 million.

Meanwhile, over at the Savannah River Site, more than 5,000 gainfully employed Americans are enjoying the brand new Tritium Engineering Building. Tritium is a highly radioactive form of hydrogen gas.

And that's just the tip of the iceberg. For more information about what they're building and improving, be sure to visit the National Nuclear Security Administration website. Look at all the happy employees. Read all about how weapons of mass destruction keep you safe and secure.  Read all about how thousands and thousands of lucky workers with good-paying jobs are "giving back" to their communities as they build, refurbish, maintain and stockpile the American nuclear arsenal. Whoever said Americans don't manufacture stuff any more is nuts.

Their faces are literally glowing. They are grateful, and they want you to be grateful too.

Nuke University, Class of 2014