The song “The Black Seam,” referenced below, is an artistic statement of objection to nuclear power.
Here are a few lines of lyrics:
One day in a nuclear age
They may understand our rage
They build machines that they can’t control
And bury the waste in a great big hole
I just made my hourly visit to the front page of CNN.com and was reminded that a guy named Stewart Brand is stumping for nuclear power. Who is Brand? He was the founder of Coevolutionary Quarterly, which became the Whole Earth Catalogue, which became pioneering internet area The Well, which became Salon.com. He is almost universally regarded as groovy.
Now Brand says things like nuclear power is “as clean as it could be,” and he believes that it’s an important part of the solution to climate change, because it doesn’t involve the burning of carbon.
As clean as could be? This guy needs to switch to crack. He’ll feel better, coming down off of whatever drug he’s on; probably plutonium. Nuclear power is clean — except for the waste. Which can be used for dirty bombs. Except for what happens when a plant leaks or melt down; and they ALL leak, and they can all melt down, I don’t care how good of a design it is. Heck, many are made by GE and Westinghouse, who can barely make an electrical transformer that doesn’t blow up.
Chernobyl’s design was particularly horrendous (there was no containment structure), and as I understand it, we have three of those kinds of graphite-cooled plants in the United States (none of them are commercial plants, however).
Yes, nuclear power is perfect, except: how do you tell people the stuff in that great big hole is toxic in 10,000 years? Most people today can’t even read script written 100 years ago. We think we’re going to be able to warn people off of radioactive waste in 100 centuries?
I grew up in the shadow of the nuclear power business — my dad is one of its public relations men. We’ve had this conversations a lot of times. These guys just believe in technology like it’s a god. But they don’t really understand it, on the physical or metaphysical levels. Splitting the atom unleashed the fury of the cosmos in our dimension — the door that we should not have opened and that we cannot close. The entire enterprise lacks conscience; it lacks intelligence; it lacks any foresight at all; and if these idiots cannot figure out how to boil water without splitting uranium, maybe they need to go back to the science fair.
But Stewart Brand?
My friend Carol van Strum knew the guy, way back when.
“He never really was an environmentalist,” she said recently.
It’s time to come back to the Nuclear Axis chart; and the April anniversary of Chernobyl is coming up. For reference, a planet called Pholus has been dancing around the nuclear axis, which is at the midpoint of the mutable signs (particularly Gem/Sag). Pholus is small cause, big effect. What a great way to describe nuclear.
Okay I’ve just checked Brand’s chart. He has all kinds of stuff in the mid-to late mutables — in particular an exact Sun/Mercury conjunction in Sagittarius, square Moon/Neptune in Virgo. He really is delusional; and so are we, if we take the nuclear bait.
I was not planning to write about this today…….but Jere has touched on the psycho-sexual roots of disaster and self-destruction that have been implicitly built into the industrial revolution of the 20th century.
It would seem to me that all of the systems, from the first motor car from the 1920s Henry Ford school of Germanic planning….right through to the 1980s Star Wars programmes of Satellite based Missiles…… and including such plainly self-destructive monoliths as Nuclear Power Plants…. and an Arms Manuafactuaring industry that feeds on…pays for…and openly promotes war and genocide, have been created by men whose basic sexuality is fundamentally flawed.
Each of these systems…was the result of a group of men sitting down and actually…. quite cognitively…and usually as a result of a market demand….or a Government brief…. designing the required business model….with no thought to the catastrophic results that by-products…market spin-offs…. and collateral damage would bring. This…while returning to the secret mistress….outlawed gay lover….or little wife who was taught to lie back and do her duty. Curious that the soft porn magazine industry exploded into the market after World War 2. Bob Dylan wrote
“I drove down 52nd St…..in my Cadillac….good car to drive…after a war…” Lots of highly testosterone driven fellas returning to a market place that was geared for high production. Who cares if we end up filling all them holes that the oil comes out of with toxic waste.
I met a finance consultant…North Vietnamese by birth…. in Africa…who showed me the bullethole in his back and gleefully expressed…
“We fucked the Americans out of Saigon”…
And do you know what…that is exactly what they did. The most beautiful creative act…reduced to being used as a weapon of war. The Vietnamese women won that one!!
These examples of systematic abuse are all macrocosms of every dysfunctional relationship that each of these unfortunate creatures has lived through. The evidence has to be anecdotal… for it would be impossible to collate, but with each passing decade…it is becoming increasingly apparent that the loss of mans hunter/killer role in a world that automates the food cycle… would seem to have had a deep and profound effect on the male psyche. In order to produce “success” and traditional “respect from my woman” vibes… the 20th century male has consistently produced results that have left a machismo laden “clean-up” operation as the legacy……rather than a consummate fertile environment for the children to thrive in. This has involved Genocide….. and Agricultural destruction the like of which we have never ever witnessed before. Countries in South America are torn apart. South-East Asia and the Middle East have been raped too many times…..and I was reminded only this weekend of how we turned a blind eye to the destruction of Yugoslavia only 20 years ago…as a result of mans ambition.
All of these decision makers have produced a deep psycho-sexual impact on our planet. The Falklands/Malvinas struggle is again about to kick-off because of oil. It is a sad condemnation of Politics…and the system of what you have to do to join the club…that it was a women… Margeret Thatcher…who led the Brits to war in 1980s.
Religion has to be held accountable. Catholic Bishops hiding out in Rome….when they and their Priests are guilty of hundreds of years of psycho-sexual abuse…..and perhaps Gore Vidal was right….worshipping a dead body on a cross is a sado-masochistic practice.
I once laughingly suggested that anybody running for public office should be made to take a psychological commando course designed to eliminate greed…nepotism and self interest. I am beginning to think that this may well be the future for both the Public and Private sectors. And that sexuality and its healthy practice may well be high on that agenda.
Let me leave you with Ian Dury….the immortal…from his album New Boots and Panties…What a Waste.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZmopROxBnBU
PH
We can’t put it back in the box.
Nuclear is a conversation that needs to be had, imperatively, no joke.
There’s fear. Rightfully so when playing with fire.
This is mirrored topically to sexuality as root.
We have to open our collective intelligence.
From Carol:
http://www.alternet.org/module/printversion/145663
“Indeed, a desperate national industry now pushing for massive federal subsidies to build new reactors may not survive a flood of elderly clunkers being forced to close by the weight of their own contamination. “This is an industry trying to build a new fleet of Titanics while the old ones are sinking,” says Katz. “
I guess that is a strong term; I would not have said it had I not meant it. I was reading his chart and contrasting it with what he is saying: the hard bends around Neptune and Mercury, contrasted with “as clean as it gets.”
Nuclear power, like many industrial issues, is based on lies. Brand, with his age and experience, ought to be hip to this fact. He is a high credibility person and his word affects the opinions of many people. He is in a position where it’s his duty to know the issue; or to apply the precautionary principle.
Let’s consider Chernobyl. Countless cities, villages and towns were lost to this incident, as were hundreds of thousands of square miles of forest, inhabited land, and farm land. If the Indian Point nuclear power plant on the Hudson melts down and containment is breached, the radiation could easily spread north and wipe out the Mohonk Preserve, Minnewaska, the Grandmother Land and much besides. It would be reduced to a ghost town. If the radiation spreads south, that would be the upper NYC suburbs, the five boroughs and Long Island — about 15 million people in the region. It could easily cover both.
My friend Karen, who owns the Grandmother Land, checked the prevailing wind maps and had her car packed as Three Mile Island was leaking, knowing that the distance between Harrisburg, PA and the Hudson Valley is a stone’s throw.
So then this guy who is revered as Yoda in the eco movement comes along and says that it’s as clean as can be; this is the technical definition of a delusion: “A delusion, in everyday language, is a fixed belief that is either false, fanciful, or derived from deception.”
I think what he did prior to now is great, and I have long held Whole Earth as one of my models for Planet Waves. But Mr. Brand turning up as a spokesman for nuclear power is about as gross as it would be for me to turn up as a spokesman for General Electric. If I do that, please: call me delusional; that would be eminently kind.
http://planetwavesweekly.com/resources/chernobyl.html
(The Chernobyl ascendant goes right through Brand’s late Sagittarius Sun, to within one degree.)
Thank you, Eric, for a concise and pertinent update on this vital issue. First of all, i agree with you – we should not “take the nuclear bait”. The consequences of even a small accident are out of proportion with any possible benefit. In other words, it’s just not worth the inevitable price.
The whole story about Stewart Brand makes me very sad. Unlike Carol, never met him. Seems a shame, however, to overlook the good that he has done. Delusional? Strong term, even given what is at stake. We are all errant at one time or another, just as we all earn some credit for where we find our heart.
Every door we open has consequences. Having spent a good part of my life inhibited and in fear about opening doors makes me wonder about what i have missed and skeptical about the assertion that there are those that should not be opened (and how would we know to choose beforehand).
Finally, we are all in this together. If we can refrain from inflammatory language and put our energy into affirmation we have a chance to express our combined energy in a coherent manner, gently tempering, helping each other, keeping our balance together.