A Review: Thank God for the Atom Bomb & Other Essays
Title of Work: Thank God for the Atom Bomb & Other Essays
Author: Paul Fussell
Format:
Published: 1988
Started:
Finished: 2022-10-16\
Posted: Goodreads
Rating: 4/5
This was a very high value thrift store find. Took a chance on this one because it only cost me a nickel and the title + cover art were tempting enough. While not all great, there are quite a few excellent essays in this collection and I was happily thorough with my highlighting and annotating once I got going. I will say that overall, I think these works give deep insight into western culture of the mid-20th century across a range of subjects from the dropping of the atomic bomb at the end of WWII to 2nd Amendment debates to nudity and travel. Fussell is witty — sometimes he drops in a hint of sassiness toward debate opponents which I do appreciate — and rigorous with language through social critique, literary analysis, and other investigations that invite us to question why things are as they are. Published in 1988, Fussell’s views can occasionally come across as outdated but are for the most part still relevant today.
I think I’ll take some space here to indicate my favorite essays of the bunch and include a few excerpts I highlighted.
Thank God for the Atom Bomb
Warning: graphic descriptions of war violence and atrocities contained between ****** (hidden spoilers don’t work in-app unfortunately).
”When the war ended, Bruce Page was nine years old. For someone of his experience, phrases like “imperialist class forces” come easily, and the issues look perfectly clear.”
It’s worth noting that Fussell actually served in the Pacific during WWII and likely would have been involved in a land invasion of Japan had the atomic bombs not been dropped.
Why delay and allow one more American high school kid to see his own intestines blown out of his body and spread before him in the dirt while he screams and screams when with the new bomb we can end the whole thing just like that?
There are many intense descriptions and accounts of actual fighting at the front. I think we need to be honest about the brutalities of war. We shouldn’t sugar coat what we’re doing to each other “out there”, far from the comforts of home.
”We existed in an environment totally incomprehensible to men behind the lines…even to men as intelligent and sensitive as Glenn Gray, who missed seeing with his own eyes Sledge’s marine friends sliding under fire down a shell-pocked ridge slimy with mud and liquid dysentery shit into the maggoty Japanese and USMC corpses at the bottom, vomiting as the maggots burrowed into their own foul clothing.”
My own stomach turns but it’s only within the limits of empathetic imagination.
”War is not a contest with gloves. It is resorted to only when laws, which are rules, have failed.”
”My object was to offer a soldier’s view, to indicate the complex moral situation of knowing that one’s life has ben saved because others’ have been most cruelly snuffed out.”
Postscript on Japanese Skulls
Skulls, among other corporal “trophies”, were taken by USMC soldiers during the Pacific island campaigns. This was something I feel was white washed in my limited historical learnings of WWII and I feel is important to know and understand in context. We are not without our own atrocities and vile acts.
”[early skull-taking] seems to register less a sinking of the USMC to the Japanese level of brutality—that would come later—than a simple 1940s American racial contempt. Why have more respect for the skull of a Jap than for the skull of a weasel, a rat, or any other form of mad, soulless vermin?”
Of course it’s uncomfortable and even painful to admit our own sins but we must. We did this. Americans, Japanese, and the whole lot. Humanity did this to ourselves.
”He hacked off the head of a Japanese body he found on the beach there, skinned it, and then gave it the salt-water-immersion treatment until it was fit to be held on his flattened hand and gazed at, producing the effect of a sailor-boy Hamlet considering not his childhood friend but a detested enemy.”
Dahmer much?
”We shot prisoners in cold blood, wiped out hospitals, strafed lifeboats, killed or mistreated enemy civilians, finished off the enemy wounded, tossed the dying into a hole with the dead, and in the Pacific boiled the flesh off enemy skulls to make table ornaments for sweethearts, or carved their bones into letter-openers.”
Brutal.
Travel, Tourism, and “International Understanding”
A lot is said about the differences between “travel” and “tourism”.
”Those whose goal it is to insulate people from the foreign and to move them around profitably in large groups hope to persuade them that the terms tourism and travel are synonymous.”
And also things Europeans do better or worse.
”I don’t want to suggest that Europeans have a special lien on honest dealing, only that they are sometimes better at facing than euphemizing embarrassing realities, if not unpleasant facts. The bidet is a case in point.”
We’re finally getting on the clean bum train America! You can order a bidet kit straight to your door (they deliver to the back door) from your favorite online retailer!
”…tourism, which is to travel as plastic is to wood.”
He quotes Albert Camus (one of my favorite quotes in the whole collection) in saying,
”What gives value to travel is fear. It breaks down a kind of inner structure we have. One can no longer cheat—hide behind the hours spent at the office or at the plant… Travel robs us of such refuge. Far from our own people, our own language, stripped of all our props, deprived of our masks (one doesn’t know the fare of the streetcars, or anything else), we are completely on the surface of ourselves…But also, we restore to every being and every object its miraculous value.”
Of Americans’ lack of historical context—we are a young nation and the ancient traumas that are second nature to much of the rest of the world escape us—he says,
”In the United States, if you want to sense the ironic relation between past and present, you read The Waste Land or Ulysses. Abroad, you raise your eyes from your book and look around.”
Of the tenets of “post-tourism” he quotes Hilary Mantel saying,
”When you come across an alien culture you must not automatically respect it. You must sometimes pay it the compliment of hating it.”
Taking it All Off in the Balkans
Nudism or “naturism”.
”The naturist feeling? A new and lovely sense of perfect freedom, not just from jocks and waistbands and bras but from social fears and niggling gentilities. You quickly overcome your standard anxieties about what the neighbors or the boss will think. The illusion, which naturists recognize as an illusion, is that all evil has been for the moment banished from the beach. Including the grave risk of skin cancer, which is never mentioned by the naturists.”
Of the anxieties of body image,
”The same with men: if you think nature has been unfair to you in the sexual anatomy sweepstakes, spend some time among the naturists. You will learn that every man looks roughly the same—quite small, that is, and that heroic fixtures are not just extremely rare, they are deformities.”
Funny observations—or I suppose lack thereof—on butthole prudes at nude beaches:
Nature must have known exactly what she was doing, for she took care to hide from customary view the least prepossessing external body opening…In fact, that undignified, even comical, part of the body is never knowingly exposed by a naturist, a fact suggesting that even naturism retains its pruderies, for all its pretense of bravely casting them aside.”