July 6, 2018

"...Atom and Evil
If you don't break up that romance soon
We'll all fall down and go boom, boom, boom!"
        "Atom and Evil," Golden Gate Quartet

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

This is a reminder about tomorrow's panel discussion “Resist the Romance: Nuclear History in the Land of Enchantment,” to be held at the Phil Space Gallery, 1410 Second Street, Santa Fe (map), from 5 to 7:30 pm, with Godfrey Reggio and yours truly (Greg).

My part of the event is entitled, "R.I.P. Dr. Atomic: Healing Nuclear History in the Land of Enchantment," and will concern itself primarily with (non-nuclear) themes of personal, social, and political renewal in our unique historical moment, when history itself is threatened with extinction -- not just by nuclear apocalypse but also by our all-destructive way of life, in which organized greed dictates the imminent end of all things, unless we overthrow it.

To heal nuclear history it is not enough to dispel the myths and counter the propaganda that aims at creating a nuclear identity for New Mexico, the true goal of which is to pacify the natives -- us -- and prepare us for what amounts to a second nuclear entrada.

More than this, healing nuclear history calls us to look back to the cultural projects that were underway here in the Land of Enchantment before the Manhattan Project, and to a biophilic, humane future, the building of which is our task today.

In the long history of efforts toward harmony and respect for human persons in the living landscape, the Manhattan Project finds no place. We need to let it go. Requiescat in pace.

Many years ago William Weida, a regional economist with whom I was working, said to me, "New Mexico's greatest economic problem is that it has never realized The Bomb was a mistake." Again: let it go.

And yet this year, the tourism professionals and brokers of high culture in Santa Fe are embracing The Bomb more tightly and desperately than ever. Erich Fromm, a co-founder of SANE, wrote, "The destruction of the world is the last, almost desperate attempt to save myself from being crushed by it." The realities of our existential crises today are indeed crushing, but wallowing in nuclear nostalgia -- which, as propaganda, has all too clear an origin and purpose -- is just another escape from the truths and the actions which can set us free.

Of course there is a market in pandering to the compulsion to understand, in the abstract, where it all went so very wrong. But to get beyond the nuclear repetition compulsion that grips New Mexico politics today we invaders need to go back and build on deeper foundations regionally, and in our civilization. Back to Haniel Long, Mary Austin, Edith Warner, and Aldo Leopold. Back far beyond them to St. Francis, the patron saint of Santa Fe. Everything we hold dear and precious, in every culture, is now existentially threatened. We will heal ourselves and our history only when we truly redeem ourselves from the dark road we are on in this country. We need to leave the Jornada del Muerto and take the royal road, on which we can find the genuine El Dorado if we become that genuine man or woman. We need to commit, to be "all in," to save the children, and the badgers.

These will be some of the themes of tomorrow's talk.

Look to our calendar for subsequent "Atomic Summer" events.

Best,

Greg Mello