May 24, 2018

Dear citizen activist friends on our New Mexico "short list" --

There's a great deal we'd like to share with you but we have been really deluged with work on pit production -- here, in South Carolina, and in Washington, DC. Thank you for your patience with us.

First of all, I (Greg) will be speaking Friday evening along with Richard Becker of the ANSWER Coalition at the Revolution Organizing Center, 2626 Garfield SE, Albuquerque (map), on Russiagate, Syria, and war (Facebook event page).

The ANSWER Coalition's blurb on this event:

The media continues to hurl baseless allegations against Russia, manufacturing public opinion useful to the US war machine.

“Russiagate” began as a way for the Democratic party to avoid taking responsibility for it's failure in the 2016 elections. But with events in Syria, where Russian military intervention has been decisive in preventing the Syrian government from being toppled by US imperialism, its allies and proxies, there has been a major shift in US foreign policy thinking about Russia toward confrontation.

Join the ANSWER Coalition on Friday, May 25 to talk about the "Russiagate" controversy and its profound implications for US and global politics.

FEATURED SPEAKERS:

** Richard Becker, Western Region Coordinator of the ANSWER Coalition and a leading member of the Party for Socialism and Liberation, will discuss the phenomenon of "Russiagate," the new McCarthyism, that is being used to build a consensus in the US for military confrontation with Russia, as well to smear the Left, the Black liberation movement, and to attack independent third political parties, like the PSL. Becker has authored the PSL publications, "Imperialism in the 21st Century" and "Palestine, Israel and the US empire," and both will be available.

** Greg Mello of the Los Alamos Study Group will be speaking on the bipartisan war drive for US empire and how these wars do not benefit the American people. He will also discuss the US war on Syria, and how the chemical attack allegations against the Syrian government are not substantiated by evidence. The Los Alamos Study Group is based in New Mexico, and its work places nuclear weapons in the context of aggression abroad and the militarization of our society at home.

...Light food and beverages will be provided.

We hope you can come and join in the discussion. We have been corresponding and compare notes with a tiny handful of people about the horror show that is Russiagate, part of an openly imperialist foreign policy, for a long time now. We want to expand that circle. We hope you will join us.

*******

Second, it's time to unveil some of the "Atomic Summer" events that are in the planning stages around here so you can get them on your calendar if you are interested. First the events, then a brief explanation, with details to follow in due course.

• In Albuquerque: discussion and action organizing meetings at our main office (2901 Summit Place NE, map). Light food and beverages will be served. Guest speakers, mostly by Skype for the climate's sake, will appear as warranted. The unprecedented nuclear threats faced by New Mexico are coming to us at a pivotal moment for our state and our country. While it is an election year, elections are far from enough; overestimating what elections (and political parties) can do is a besetting problem we face. There are wonderful opportunities at hand. We hope we can catalyze some new thinking about, and new effective actions to address, the radical crisis we face. These discussions are open to newcomers. Please come.
  

• May 31, 6 pm: initial kickoff meeting, "Land of Enchantment: Atomic Summer." Initial discussion of campaign elements and personal actions.
  
• June 14, 6 pm
  
• June 28, 6 pm
  
• July 12, 6 pm 
• July 26, 6 pm
• August 9, 6 pm
  

• In Santa Fe: seminars, discussions, and action organizing meetings. After the first meeting, the three 6 pm meetings at St. John's United Methodist Church (July 2, 16, and 30) will be open to the public and will address current issues in a) nuclear weapons, b) nuclear waste, and c) practical development policies and scenarios for New Mexico. We will Skype in nationally-prominent guest speakers for these larger-format meetings. On July 2, 16, and 30 there will be organizing meetings in the afternoon in Santa Fe by mutual arrangement to discuss campaign elements, actions, and follow-on activities. 
  

• June 13, 6 pm, St. John's United Methodist Church, 1200 Old Pecos Trail (at Cordova Road, map), organizing meeting, Room GL103 (not a public event: this list + friends + spouses only)
  
• July 2, 6 pm, St. John's United Methodist Church (Gathering Room, open to public); Study Group organizing meeting earlier in afternoon by mutual arrangement
  
• July 7, 5 pm, Panel discussion with Godfrey Reggio, Greg Mello, others, venue TBD, hosted by the Friends of Tony Price, "Land of Enchantment: Atomic Summer" 
  
• July 16, 6 pm, St. John's United Methodist Church (Gathering Room, open to public); Study Group organizing meeting earlier in afternoon by mutual arrangement
• July 30, 6 pm, St. John's United Methodist Church (Gathering Room, open to public); Study Group organizing meeting earlier in afternoon by mutual arrangement
• August 6, Santa Fe; the precise nature of this event and/or meeting will be decided in the course of our planning group meetings.
  

Third, there will be other events and action opportunities in Santa Fe this summer, organized in cooperation with the Study Group by The Friends of Tony Price (the stewards of Tony Price's sculptural ouvre). The July 7 event shown above is one of these events. Their atomicsummer.org web site has just gone live; a billboard on I-25 will soon follow, with which we have helped a little. As their web site states,

LAND OF ENCHANTMENT: ATOMIC SUMMER is a series of art and educational events intended to resist the dominant, often romanticized, narrative of atomic history in New Mexico. The series will engage the community through art, dialogue and action.

The Friends of Tony Price stand with all conscientious citizens of New Mexico in calling for nuclear disarmament, environmental protection, social justice, and economic sustainability NOW. Your donations will support:

But why now? Why "Atomic Summer?"

One day last month we got a call from James Hart (proprietor of Phil Space and a Friend of Tony Price), who had been talking to Godfrey Reggio about the convergence of nuclear-themed cultural events in and around Santa Fe this summer, from the Santa Fe Opera ("Doctor Atomic"; sample aria here) to the New Mexico History Museum’s "Atomic Histories" exhibition to a "Disruptive Futures Dialogue: Doctor Atomic: The History and Future of Nuclear Weapons in New Mexico" at the Lensic, to a two-day "Tech in the West" Symposium, "planned in association with several of the organizations that contribute to the diversity of New Mexico's thinkers: Cinematheque at the Center for Contemporary Arts Santa Fe, Creative Santa Fe, the Lensic Performing Arts Center, the Los Alamos Historical Society, the New Mexico History Museum, the Santa Fe Institute, the School for Advanced Research, and the Thoma Foundation."

James and Godfrey realized what was going on in all this: romanticizing The Bomb.

In addition to the institutions listed, the Manhattan Project National Historical Park and the LANS-run, taxpayer-funded Bradbury Museum will be atomic-themed tourism nodes this summer, along with the National Museum of Nuclear Science and History in Albuquerque -- propaganda centers all.

Not mentioned much in the packaging of these events is their central raison d'etre and indirect prime mover: Los Alamos National Security, LLC, the managing operator of Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), which runs the world's most richly-funded facility designing, testing, and building weapons of mass destruction. Under Trump, LANL's nuclear weapons programs are growing like watered corn in the night. Billions in new construction is planned. A thousand new employees will be hired this year. The New Mexico Democratic delegation in Congress is fighting like hell to keep and expand LANL's plutonium processing and pit production missions (both), as we have written (background here; more on this later to our larger mailing list; developments occur daily).

Local opposition has been a real impediment to LANL's nuclear expansion over the past 29 years, as even a partial reading of this recent history shows. Importantly, there have been nineteen local government and tribal resolutions questioning or opposing LANL's nuclear missions and environmental impact. Previously, New Mexico senators, congresspersons, and a governor opposed building industrial plutonium missions at LANL, as did the University of California faculty and LANL itself. From the corporate perspective, this is a problem. Many approaches to co-opting local and state institutions have been pursued. While generally successful, they have not raised LANL's prestige to the desired level.

In the midst of this ongoing battle for acceptance come the "Atomic Summer" events listed above, anchored by the Santa Fe Opera.

In making the announcement, Santa Fe Opera General Director Charles MacKay was joined by Dr. Charles McMillan, director of Los Alamos National Laboratories, who said, “The ethics of 1945, which I think are very graphically portrayed in Doctor Atomic, are not that different than the ones that we face today.”

In a news release, Santa Fe Opera offered this cheerful observation: “No matter how great its impact elsewhere, Doctor Atomic promises to be overpowering when performed at a place where you can gaze out at the lights of Los Alamos and at a time when we are all just minutes away from possible destruction.”

"Overpowering" indeed. Inappropriate submission is precisely the problem. It is unfortunate, to say the least, that real evil so easily cuts through postmodern consciousness, like a hot knife through butter. These events will use local high-culture packaging to sell mock-sophisticated "complexity" and "moral ambiguity," leading to passive acceptance of a domesticated Bomb, to advance false narratives about history and our current place in it, and above all to increase the prestige of local WMD activities.

We are concerned about creating and valorizing artistic packaging for a fast-growing politics of human disposability at home and abroad. We claim a higher and more central cultural ground. Site Y/LASL/LANL, by contrast, has always been anticivilizational. As Inder Comar wrote yesterday,

It is time for America to stop relying on its weapons, and to start relying on ethical and civilized principles.

The fate of the U.S. and perhaps the world, rests on it finding a better way to deal with itself, and with others. There will be no meaningful response and preparation for climate change, species extinction and the great refugee crises to come unless the U.S. uses its power in a positive way, and contributes to a world where dialogue, cooperation, and the promotion of peace are the foundation blocks of a civilized order.

When James called, we realized that we had to step up efforts to counter some of the counterfactual narratives and cultural commitments involved -- from the created myth that the Manhattan Project played a significant role in ending the war, to the created myth that the Manhattan Project was primarily the work of physicists rather than chemists (a myth which elevates Los Alamos, where just 2% of Manhattan Project funds were expended, to a more central role than in fact it held) -- and on to the presumption (in "Doctor Atomic") that Oppenheimer's fictional feelings are a significant or important subject that should attract our attention today.

"Batter my heart," indeed. What complete and utter bullshit. It ruins -- inverts -- Donne. The "break, blow, burn" happened in fact, not in spirit, to Japanese civilians, not to Oppenheimer. It was mass death and a never-prosecuted war crime even by the laws and standards of the day. Without the mass destruction, the neurotic Oppie (neurotic or worse: he was diagnosed with what we could call schizophrenia today after attempting to poison his grad school professor, Blackett) would not be interesting. He was always the "Little Boy" to the racist, imperialist, and very capable Groves.

Wallowing in neurotic nostalgia for a fictional past on the part of elite culture-brokers and tourism boosters is a dangerous thing. As a long-experienced regional economist and economics department chair (William Weida) repeatedly said to me, failure to grasp that The Bomb was a mistake, and to put it behind us, is the central reason economic development of northern New Mexico has failed. The intellectual, moral, and political corruption of our culture by The Bomb is a cancer in our midst. As E.L. Doctorow said,

We have had the bomb on our minds since 1945. It was first our weaponry and then our diplomacy, and now it’s our economy. How can we suppose that something so monstrously powerful would not, after years, compose our identity?

It's our job to go beyond the bomb, and we intend to walk that road this summer. Who cares about Oppie's inauthentic suffering today, given what we now face? The power to which Oppie submitted, and which still "enchants" far too many, was never the power to create, only to destroy.

Oh but it is Art! Bad art, maybe. If we are healthy, we do not allow moral ambiguity about mass slaughter of defenseless human beings. It is aesthetically revolting. Germany could rebuild after the war because it fully condemned Nazi atrocities. In the US, we can't seem to do that. In New Mexico, we cannot ever seem to leave World War II behind. We still have a WWII economy. There is a repetition compulsion. It's still going on. The theme this summer seems secretly to be: "Out, damned spot" (Judi Dench in the role). But the action underway in the fast-rising military-industrial complex is just more murder, in ever more places. In any case there's precious little poetry in the "bombastic" Doctor Atomic, as one reviewer who walked out of a performance wrote. 

Commodification of nostalgia about war and destruction, as art or "art," -- itself a problematic alienation, but that's another story -- while the world's best-funded nuclear weapons facility, with its huge, operating nuclear dump visible just to the west for visiting opera-goers and the attending lab nuclear weapons workers alike. It's creepy. All that's missing are the snappy grey Hugo Boss caps with the double lightning bolt insignia. Cue Wotan's ravens -- the last act begins.

So what can you and we, who are working to reduce the violence in our society, who are working for peace instead of war, for real science instead of bureaucracy and corporate greed, actually do to marginalize the quasi-criminal legacy being being celebrated? Let's talk about that.

Best wishes to all,

Greg Mello