by John Kinsella
It is the air of atrocity.
An event as ordinary
As a President.
A plume of smoke, visible at a distance
In which people burn.
George Oppen (from Of Being Numerous, 1968)
When I was a boy, actually through to the age of sixteen, I was
obsessed with explosives and rocketry. Looking back from this point in my life,
as a pacifist of thirty-plus years, I am bemused why the physics of explosions
so fascinated me then. It was ‘technical’ and not ‘political’, though I was
also in those days interested in things ‘military’, especially in terms of
technology, equipment, ordnance and their relationship to strategy and tactics.
The Australian military could have made good use of me if I had not had a
pacifist epiphany (eventually).
And when I read of Al Weimorts, the civilian engineer working for
the US Air Force Research Laboratory who designed the GBU-43/B Massive OrdnanceAir Blast bomb used yesterday on a Taliban cave network in Afghanistan, a
horror of disconnection falls on me in so many ways. Obviously, the sheer
brutality of this largest non-nuclear explosive device ever deployed as an act
of war is horror enough in itself. This device, that has a one-kilometre-plus
blast radius, and that will inevitably cause non-targeted casualties (though
in the aftermath this has been denied), is the inheritor of the Vietnam
forest-clearing 15000-pound bombs, ‘daisy cutters’, used by the US airforce,
and then the bunker-busting bombs used by the US in the first Iraq War. The
glibly nicknamed MOAB (I won’t even begin to untangle the Biblical subtexts), was
designed for use in the last Iraq war but not ‘called upon’.
Al Weimorts, who died of a brain tumour in 2005, and was even celebrated
in a New York Times obituary, was
also the designer of cluster bombs used in Vietnam. On his hands is the blood
of those killed by his death devices. He was a ‘righteous’ murderer, in the
same way the designer Kalashnikov was (even with his near-the-end epiphany), or,
for that matter, Leonardo da Vinci.
Many of us are personally implicated in this in subtle and obvious ways — and that is for each
of us to consider and work out. Personally, as a child and early teenager, the
fascination I had for ‘explosions’ (more than their ‘application’) was intense,
and was only moved on from when I underwent an ethical and political shift at
seventeen, developing an awareness that my politics of action were tied to the
place/s I was in. That ‘explosions’ were a contradiction of place, that all I
loved and respected was undone not only physically but also conceptually by my experiments.
When I exploded a ‘device’ to observe for effect, or set off a
rocket to see what kind of altitude it could achieve, I was indifferent to the
effect it had on the immediate ecology. The same kind of view of place as a
performative stage for individual desire is what allowed me in those days to
shoot things and fetishise weapons (all of which I long ago renounced and still
renounce). Now I see that when those kinds of seeings are directed through work
and patriotism into the Al-Weimorts-take on the world (that man with his
children and grandchildren, well-dressed even at work, neatly groomed in the
pics), the gap between being in a place and destroying that place is wider than
death.
Weimorts witnessed the one previous explosion of a prototype of the
weapon in 2003 at a site in the US (we see a forest in the background which we
imagine was vaporised), so he physically felt and saw what it did to place. A
place set aside for the testing of weapons, a place that had lost cultural and
ecological variables to ‘necessity’, a replacement of ontology of existence
with temporariness (the site before explosion) and a new presence of emptiness
(post-explosion). The explosion caused by that prototype resulted in a mushroom
cloud that could be seen 32 kilometres away.
Now, many years after Weimorts’s death, the Trump administration has
used Afghanistan as a site of demonstration to impose its new global order. The
American command in Afghanistan is denying that the use of this weapon is
connected with Trump administration posturing, saying it was purely an internal
‘on-the-ground’ military decision made because the terrain and target were
‘tough’ — but only the deluded would accept this bit of propaganda as fact.
This was an act to show the world that the US is ‘permanent’ (at least the
pro-Trump parts of it!) while the rest of us are ‘temporary’.
The US military used ‘daisy
cutter’ bombs (at least one) early in the capitalist war in Afghanistan to
vaporise entire deployments of Taliban, so a country was already made temporary
before the new permanence of mass destruction. The non-nuclear is sold as a
step down from total annihilation, but it’s also the calling-card of the total
destruction that will come. The simulacrum of a nuclear weapon without the
‘fallout’. Just deletion and cascading effects on habitat (of humans, birds,
animals, micro-organisms, those scarce plants in ‘desert’, and inhospitable —
how can we even use this word? — place/s).
The desire to go nuclear, to merge the theory of general relativity,
the escapism of wormholes, and the mediated ethics of Einstein (representative
of human aspiration and ‘genius’), into a digestible paradox of being, of being
under conditions of capitalist-state ‘liberties’. The ultimate home defence is
to attack before they get to the
door. In the same way the Geneva Convention underpins warfare by defining
degrees of abuse, in the same way the RSPCA underwrites the slaughter industry
as long as it operates within their definitions of non-cruelty, so the MOAB is
the atomic bomb when you’re not having (allowed to have) an atom bomb. It is a
lot less ‘powerful’ than an atomic weapon, but it makes a big impression and
causes big damage.
Also, as a thermobaric weapon, the MOAB (it offends to use the
acronym — they wish us to use it... this is the problem with all namings) sucks
oxygen from the area around the detonation to feed the reaction, and in doing so
evacuates space/place of even that marker of life. Through the caves and
tunnels in the mountains it was targeted at, it deletes in manifest ways. There
is more than a symbolic act in this.
The ultimate message: all living things, all places, are temporary
before the might of US imperialism. Weimorts is the enabler of this imperialism,
rewarded with the signs of the empire. Further, it’s not just a deletion of
people (potentially on a massive scale), but also the deletion of the markers
of culture and even the topography, geology and ecology of the place. This particular
weapon is not a deep-penetration weapon, but is said to have ‘low to medium’
level below-ground impact with an absolute deletion of what’s on the surface in
the blast range. Yet it does affect what’s below (thus its use against a
broader cave system), so its implications are those of terraforming — rescaping
the planet for eventual colonisation.
There is no gap between the cultural weapons of radical religious
bomb-makers and the Al Weimorts of the United States. Both look to ‘defend’ by
‘attacking’ — conserving and extending their belief systems in the process — and
also to remove the markers of the previous culturality and topography. It’s
worth noting that the Russian military brags of having a ‘conventional’ bomb at
least four times more ‘powerful’ than the MOAB, and the Americans themselves
have a ‘bunker-buster’ that has a higher ‘conventional’ explosive yield. And
with the ultimate deployment of ‘nukes’.
Nukes — that word that has almost become affectionate euphemism in a
gaming age, as a kind of reflex action regarding power and inadequacy... Trump
thinks of these endgames in the same way... because they are so real, they are
made unreal... a taunt in the playground in which the taunters, the victims,
and the playground, are all temporalities... slippages in time-space that have
everything to do with going to sleep and nothing to do with waking. The
temporary itself is forced through a wormhole of temporal fantasising — vast
time-scales are drawn upon, the half-life of plutonium bandied about like
military budgets. We live in this grotesque unreality where place is localised
or internationalised by causational connection, and shared responsibility is
somehow lost.
It was with disturbed interest that I read of an ‘end-state’ in
military-political thinking today (I wrote this article on ‘Good Friday’ but am
revising on the Saturday) — its glibness is horrifying (and I think likely also
to the academic who deployed it) and in writing my Graphology Endgame poems it sadly has to come into play as a static
in the background, or a different form of fallout. This from the ABC news website regarding the use of the MOAB, quoting Professor John Blaxland (of the Strategic and
Defence Studies Centre at the Australian National University): “‘This is
telegraphing to the opponents of the Government in Kabul that the United States
… is now upping the ante, and is prepared to kill many people to achieve its
political end-state,’ he said. That end-state, said Professor Blaxland, is for
the Taliban to cave and for the US to be able to reduce its presence in
Afghanistan.” So we have pursuits of end-state while playing humanity to an end-game.
Grotesque.
As a young person obsessed with ordnance, an obsession I no longer
have, I went through a variety of decision-making processes every time I made
an explosion. My interest was specifically in the rapid uptake of oxygen in a
reaction (the MOAB exploits this to the fullest) and literally the colours an
ignition produced.
I was less interested in the stress placed on the container in which
the ignition took place, though I almost died (along with two others) when a
3mm steel pipe went off ahead of time and sent shrapnel three feet underground,
the explosion being heard 5kms away. That was my epiphany — because of coming
close to losing life and causing the loss of life, but also because (a) the
‘controlled’ event did not behave as I’d expected (b) the ecology around the
event changed so decisively that I finally understood that such events have
long-lasting effects on topography and on culturality. They permanently change
what we (especially as kids) might consider as temporary and continually available
to change (our little ‘improvements’! or a change can happen because it was
‘nothing much to worry about’ to begin with) — that is, the change can have
repercussions.
And such events do change
surroundings — they damage flora and fauna, of course, but also a place’s
psychology. They make it ‘feel’ vulnerable. They place it (and I choose the
word carefully) on tenterhooks. What
I was doing (in the name of ‘science’!) was wrong, and I turned against it,
which given I was also deeply interested in things military back then, was
surely a healthy thing. And as my politics and ethics evolved, my repugnance at
such terraforming, such cultural impressings, has led me to metaphors as
redemptive acts of place ecology.
Having said that, I think creative thinkers can hide behind the
figurative while still being fully implicated in the damage being done.
Metaphors can be violent as well as healing; but more than that, they can
create a reality in which the performance of a screen-place, in which the
creator’s morality is played off against the (bad) morality of the non-creative
materialist. We surely have to be wary of this.
I am looking at a photo in the public domain, presumably supplied by
the US airforce to the world at large, with the caption: ‘Al Weimorts (right),
the creator of the GBU-43/B Massive Ordnance Air Blast bomb, and Joseph
Fellenz, lead model maker, look over the prototype before it was painted and
tested.’ Rather than paste the photo in, I’ll tell you what I see. (‘Brown bear
brown bear, what do you see?’, that classic of American literature my son grew
up with, that prepares ways of seeing that loop our selves into a material
reality, a linguistic and visual presence in place.)
I see two men and the ‘homemade’ bomb before it becomes the
industrial weapon (apparently, to this point, only fourteen have been
manufactured); they look serious and yet
‘mature’. The ‘model-maker’ — such a ‘play’ title — and the designer, both
exhibiting confidence and gravitas, there’s a most serious production. And yet
almost casual, too — we can whip this up in the back shed because that’s US
know-how and culturisation. This place of making can replace all places. And
more than that is not worth noting. It is what it is — from someone who played
weapons inspector in Iraq, a seeker for weapons of mass destruction, a weapon
of mass destruction ‘half in love with easeful death’. The weapon looks solid,
well constructed, permanent. Its moment of destruction is an eternal marker of
human endeavour — the post-it note on place, dropped from high altitude (‘air
supremacy’) from the back of a cargo plane (an MC-130) and ‘guided in’ with GPS,
from here to there. The ironies implode in direct proportion to the explosion.
Oh, and the men touching the unpainted weapon: lovingly, cautiously, and
confidently. All of this, in the theatre of the photograph. And never forget
the early days of the war: Halliburton, Bush, gas. Lest we forget.
These horrific doings in the unravelling of the narrative of human
presence on the planet — its unravelling by the few who have the power, also of
all our narratives in our inability to prevent them, and in some cases,
complicity — are a denial of the essence of place in the human condition. By
disarranging place, we deny place. Such massive violence against life and
presence, against the markers of belonging, is showing our temporariness while
claiming an imperial permanence in which power and enslavement to death are
projected through time and space. All our stories of implication are relevant
to attempts to reassert Eros over Thanatos, to reconfigure the spatial and
temporal variables of our shared existence. We need to analyse the play, the
actions, the events, and the narratives of our own lives from earliest memory
and see how they have participated in or diverged from the deathstory of global
and local militarism.
On occasions, I have turned to Maurice Blanchot’s The Writing of the Disaster (trans. Ann
Smock; University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, 1995) for ‘pithy’ summations of
horror. But it too often fails me. Regarding Eros and Thanatos he says, and I
can see this, ‘There is not the death
drive; the throes of death are thefts from unity, lost multitudes.’ (p.46) But
as part of his essay, Blanchot also cites Mallarmé: ‘There is no explosion except a book.’ (p. 7). This is under a
separate ‘bullet’ and sits alone: it is a critique, of course, of its own
absurdity, but it is also given reflective space. It is true, and yet absurd.
Under the MOAB blast, in the caves of the violent and sadistic and deathcultish
enemy, there are gestures of the human. Snuffed collectively. And insects and
birds move above. And creatures we ignore. Snuffed. The English teacher,
Mallarmé, has to shake our foundations linguistically to make such a declaration
simultaneously float, and attach. All our personal stories validating our
presence, the presence of our families, our people. As entwined (or not) in
place, the land/s.
And yet, the MOAB is still made and many people are proud of its
making. It’s what you’d expect. The schools that made the engineer. The jobs.
The belief systems. Family (liking it or not). Community. Circumstance. Notions
of enemies. The fallout is devastating. We register the explosion on a seismograph.
And yet, there is no spike in measurements of radioactive fallout. That almost ‘largest’ non-nuclear device.
But then Blanchot follows with his next — or his publisher’s next —
bullet point: ‘The disaster, unexperienced. It is what escapes the very
possibility of experience — it is the limit of writing. This must be
repeated: the disaster de-scribes. What does not mean that the disaster, as the
force of writing, is excluded from it, is beyond the pale of writing or
extratextual’ (p. 7). Yes, because all writing has been vaporised. Even those
who in their caves see literature as corruption, even their hands for writing
and typing have been vaporised. The page is gone. No new pages replace. Does
the translator of Blanchot, does Blanchot himself know what ‘beyond the pale’
does in this context? Probably. And if so, what of beyond writing beyond
fragments beyond disaster? The disaster has been deleted. This post-disaster
acceptance. These acts we perform after hearing the news, as we all do. These
copyings and rewritings of our own narratives.
Just a few ‘paragraphs’ before he mentions the Bishop Faustus, Saint
Augustine in his Confessions writes
(roughly, in the Penguin books R.S. Pine-Coffin English translation, 1961): ‘Clearly the
wicked do not know that you are everywhere. But you are not bound within the
limits of any place. You alone are always present, even to those who set
themselves apart from you.’ (p. 92). I treat this in a secular light on Good
Friday, the most sacred Christian time. I copy this onto this ‘page’ in the
long hemispheric of a secular patriotism that allows such barbarity as the MOAB
to even exist. Make no mistake that such massive deployments of violence
require spiritual sanction: even the most brutal states will make use of any
‘permission’ and validation they can acquire. The wicked do know ‘God’ is
everywhere, and that God is unbound by the limits of place. And the same for
the temporal.
But this idea that place is a human limitation over-ridden or
over-come or incorporated by God is a very earthly desire: the desire to be
larger, and controlling of place. And what better way to do that than delete
place. To replace ‘place’ with the constructs of military-capitalism, fill in
the holes with the machinery of ‘liberty’. The metaphors of othered history that
we pick over for evidence of material and non-material existence are the
permissions we collect for our actions, collectively and individually. We could all stand up and refuse! If that
happened, the war machine would stop, and the God so many want to believe in
would be respected in all place(s), not in acts of hubristic and horrific
deletion.
Graphology
Endgame 63
We wish to extract
from what we can’t see?
Oxygen from surroundings
to facilitate an explosion
spirit from emptiness
to fill those voids
A love — no, no, a need —
for gravity wheedling us out.
Or a question of limits,
statutes, gasping
for aspirations.
Workshops
of erasure.
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