Monsters

Yesterday three workers at the Fukushima Dai-Chi Nuclear Power Plant were burned by radioactive water. Brave men, heroic men, to wade through Godzilla's irradiated spittle like that. Dr. Daisuke Serizawa would have approved. Fifty-seven years after the night attack on Tokyo the insidious monster snorts in its sleep, breathing steam and smoke - the nuclear stuff of Godzilla's breath.

Like a prophet in-breathed with the word of the God(s) comes Tokyo Governor Shintaro Ishihara calling the earthquake and tsunami that awoke the monster tembatsu (divine punishment) for Japanese egoism. It is endearing that the Governor of the largest city in Japan should be so naive - imagine Mayor Michael Bloomberg being outraged that General Electric would avoid paying taxes and cleaning up the Hudson River. These are Western Industrialized Societies after all, and the works of Ayn Rand are widely available to all. It only took two days for Ishihara to tone down his act and exchange his outside prophetic voice for a sotto voce apology - he wants to run for Governor again. Politesse trumps Prophethood and the lesson that reflexivity extinguishes the political star is not lost on Ishihara.

Yet I understand Ishihara's pain. That a country with the Buddhist tradition of Japan should find itself steeped in Egoism(according to Ishihara) is no small contradiction in the national psyche. It is in that chasm that monsters are born. If Godzilla is the avatar of Little Boy and Fat Man, rising from the sea and slouching towards Tokyo, he is also a sleeping giant that was best not nudged towards wakefullness. Japan and America huddle around the campfire warming themselves over the flames of modernity, the agreed upon 'myth' of the monster's origins, wherein the former deserved the latter's nuclear rage. It's the only way they can go back to their respective tents and get a decent night's sleep undisturbed by conscience. And so all is right with a world in which Ishihara says Japan deserved tembatsu and an army of not-particularly-bright anonymous American xenophobes pepper the Newsvine with anti-Japanese rants in agreement. The triumvirate disaster of tsunami, earthquake, and possible reactor meltdown is cheered on a being payback for Japanese behavior in China, Japanese aggression during World War Two, Japanese having the nerve to build a better car, and declining Pokeman card values. The American idiot bears witness while watching his Sony, surfing the net with his Toshiba, and heading over to Applebee's in his Honda Accord to trade populist inanities over dinner- all done with no sense of the irony involved (Ishihara also mentions a degenerate populism in addition to egoism).

The monster sown in the radioactive dust of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, courtesy of the US of A and its phallically named Little Boy and Fat Man, is accepted as necessary and right. If not the tembatsu of the Japanese, then the wrath of THE God and his agent on earth, America. The essential argument is made from Utilitarian principles. If Truman had not dropped the bomb, then multiples of X amount of US armed forces and Japanese soldiers and civilians might have died. In the speculative utilitarian argument, it is best to massage the numbers a bit - as indeed the Generals and Admirals did, and make appeals to God. Yet the smell of this argument has always made my eyes water. To want to incinerate people is one thing, but don't drag God into it lest you discover the moral equivalency that was lost over that dinner at Applebees.

You've just ordered several entrees from the Jack Daniels Grill (yes, even the kids...hey they give their kids wine in France goddamnit) and you're trying to watch Cabrera torch yet another top-notch reliever on the one of the big screens to tie the game. The truck driver sitting one table over sees the ticker at the bottom of the screen and sighs that yet another terrorist has tried to blow up himself and others with explosive material in his Hanes or Nike's or whatever. They ought to turn the whole goddamn place into a parking lot, he says, meaning the Mideast. Ah, the easy apocalypses of Christendom, as distinguished from authentic Christianity. Did not Caiaphas tell the Sanhedrin that it were better that one man (Jesus Christ) die than the whole nation perish? And yet the One died and was risen and the Nation of Israel perished anyways. I believe St. John includes this detail as a warning against speculative utilitarian murder. And in a curious inversion the truck driver will murder the many for the sins of the few. It is an easy habit to fall into, this sociopathy on a grand scale, and by projecting it onto a giant reptilian monster, a leviathan of dumb destruction, it is also easier to deny our own monstrousness.

(The image above is of the Marian statue of Urikami which 'survived' the Nagasaki atomic bombing. Nagasaki was the most Christian city in Japan and possibly the gateway to Christianity in Southeast Asia.)

In the next installment America gets its own monster in the wake of the September 11 attacks of 2001. His name is Cloverfield.