Whoopsie Boom.
75 years and two days ago, on August 6, 1945, the United States military detonated a nuclear bomb a couple of thousand feet directly above a hospital in Hiroshima, Japan. Three days later, on August 9, 1945, the United States military detonated a second nuclear bomb a couple of thousand feet above a tennis court in Nagasaki, Japan. Something in the neighborhood of 200,000 people were killed. They killed all those people on purpose, they killed them with minimal exertion and maximal horrific theatricality on purpose—for the psychological impact on the Japanese, to expediently end World War II, to impress and intimidate the USSR. Results were mixed.
The Soviets proved their own nuclear capability in 1949. By the early 1960s, for the first time in history, humans possessed the technological ability to end all life on earth at any moment of their choosing, or by mere accident. Every year of arbitrary survival since is misunderstood as the necessary default, the control—and not a near impossible, repeating and increasingly audacious miracle—only because we are still around, capable of perception but not the imagination necessary to grasp its negation. We have endured on the brink of nuclear annihilation for more than half a century—largely oblivious to it though we are today—and here we are. The planet that lived.
For now.
On Tuesday, something like 3000 tons of ammonium nitrate exploded in a warehouse in Beirut’s port. The explosion killed around 150 people, injured 5000 more, and destroyed much of the city. The videos of the event are astounding.
The causal chain that ends with that rather large explosion—bigger than any airdropped non-nuclear bomb in the US military arsenal, significantly smaller than Hiroshima—is an absurd years-long comedy of broken systems, mistakes, accidents, and ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. Here is what seems to have happened: In 2013, a ship came to port in Beirut that was deemed unfit to continue on its journey to Mozambique. The owner abandoned the ship, cargo, and crew rather than pay for repairs and port fees necessary to liberate it. (This happens kinda often, apparently.) The ship was impounded, the crew stuck on board for a year without the paperwork necessary to disembark in a foreign country, and 2,750 tons of ammonium nitrate were eventually warehoused at the port, which was deemed safer than leaving it aboard an abandoned and deteriorating ship. Six hot and humid years later, the ammonium nitrate—forgotten or ignored by the relevant authorities—had caked and hardened into its highly explosive state. A fire of unknown provenance started somewhere nearby, a fire that—because reality is a cheap knock-off of Looney Tunes—soon engulfed a cache of fireworks or ammunition, and then spread quickly to the ammonium nitrate.
Whoopsie boom.
So far as anyone knows, an accident. An accident that only could have happened with the help of years of human and bureaucratic incompetence and negligence, but an accident. A natural disaster, even—not the kind we’re used to talking about, maybe, but a sort of natural disaster. An unfortunate outcome that is in keeping with the unfolding of life, here. An “adverse event resulting from natural processes of the earth.” Humans are not distinct or somehow removed from earth’s nature—we are a mere expression of it. Human nature, the whole awful spectrum of it, is just nature. Our purposive actions and our accidents. Our useful products and our waste. Humans did that. Look—at all of it—it’s just a thing that happens, here.
Whoopsie boom.
Whatever you may think of so-called cancel culture—whether it’s a thing, or not a thing, or a good or a bad thing—I don’t think it’s controversial to suggest that we live in a time of unprecedented universal opprobrium. Social media is a never-ceasing transcription of other people’s sins—as oblivious to one tribe as obviously damnable to the next—displayed, condemned, denied, reveled in, and even, occasionally, a public plea for atonement. Sins of the past, sins of the present, sins of strangers, sins of the dead, sins of neighbors and nations and centuries. The public square is just a stupid sit-com high school cafeteria, with all the attendant table-by-table factionization and hierarchies. The only binding agent, the gravity of the age, is the shared emotional language of disgust and derision, self-righteousness and certainty.
The Catholic Church has nothing on social media, in this regard. This furious orgy of moral censure, this humorless absolutism, this fundamentalism without even a founding text, just whatever the prevailing winds are, today. Let he who is without sin cast the first stone? Easy enough when the only sin that counts is the sin of being outside the group. At least the priests were selling absolution! Here, there is never mercy, only the promised immunity of the herd. An immunity contingent on the maintenance of good standing within the group.
Social media. Platforms “to build community and bring the world closer together.” “To give people the power to create and share ideas without barriers.” “To capture and share the world’s moments.” “To organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”
Whoopsie boom. A natural disaster. A thing that humans did. A thing that humans keep doing.
The other day, Donald Trump—a thing that Americans did—was trying to say the word “Yosemite.” As in Yosemite National Park. As in Yosemite Sam. Results were mixed.
As in the Yosemite Indians, or the people indigenous to the Yosemite Valley. “Indigenous” means occurring naturally in a particular place, according to the dictionary. But that’s not terribly coherent, when it comes to humans off the mother continent. Humans, who only left Africa sometime between 50,000 and 200,000 years ago. Humans, who only populated the (so-called) Americas 14,000 years ago. Indigenous? Indigenous since when, you mean. More indigenous than you, you mean.
And that’s fine. That’s just something humans do.
Yosemite is a Miwok word. The Miwok were indigenous people who lived in Northern California hundreds and hundreds of years ago, and some still do. Yosemite, in the Miwok language, means “those who kill.” The thing that bound together the four distinct Native American groups in that part of Northern California was their shared language. Miwok means “people” in Miwok. The only binding agent, the gravity of the age, is the shared language. And the indigenous Miwok people called their indigenous neighbors in the valley “the people who kill.” Yo! Semites!
“Semites” is just any people who speak a Semitic language. The binding agent. The gravity of the age.
The Miwok were destroyed by the Spanish, by the Mexicans, by Americans. By people bringing Christianity and diseases. By people looking for farmland or for gold. Eventually, there was the Mariposa War, and an American militia of gold prospectors and miners broke them up for good.
Human nature. Just the things humans do, in this repeating and increasingly audacious miracle of endurance. For now.
Whoopsie boom.
