...That Said, About Sarcasm ...and Nuclear War

If a man is the literal sort and is troubled by the use of sarcasm, why, then, for about a year back in the late 1960's or early '70's, did he have hanging on his dining room wall a small canvas that he himself had painted and whose subject matter consisted solely of three large, bright, seven-letter words that read: "SUPPORT NUCLEAR WARFARE?" Isn't that the height of sarcasm?

The answer had nothing to do with wanting to see total and irremediable destruction and death rained down upon himself, and on the people he loved, and on the other people in his city (one of the two likeliest targets in the event of such warfare, the other being Moscow), and on the other people in his country and on his planet. Nor did it have anything to do with the shock value of the painting's words or even its neat use of his two favorite numbers, 3 and 7. Instead -- on the face of things -- it had had to do with his perception of nuclear weapons, for which he could see nothing but negatives stretching as far as the mind could see.

To him the mere existence of weapons as incredibly deadly and destructive as first atom bombs and later the much more powerful hydrogen bombs was already absolutely abominable and obscene enough, even if they were never actually used and instead served only as threats guaranteed to make enemies bow down in abject acquiescence...

Maybe this man's particular personal experiences heightened the strength of his feelings about this.

As a longtime chessplayer he knew all too well the effectiveness of one of that game's most basic tenets: "The threat is stronger than its execution." And he had always deeply resented being threatened about anything, nor was he in the habit of making threats. (It helped greatly that he had absolutely no credibility in carrying them out.)

Also he had a distinctly unpopular idea about the only time nuclear bombs had been dropped on people. He had been to Nagasaki once and Hiroshima twice, and it seemed to him that the destructive powers of Fat Boy and Little Man could've been demonstrated to the Japanese somewhere else and in ways other than on unsuspecting cities.

So it had already been bad enough to have actually used those weapons. He thought that the most profane part of their contemplated use in the future, especially by countries as large as Russia and the U.S.A,, was that, if they emptied their bomb bays and missile silos, the effects wouldn't be confined just to those countries. All of the land and water masses beyond their borders where dwelled other human beings and flora and fauna that had no stake or involvement in the differences between the warring parties, would be terminally affected as well.. And the parties wouldn't even be warring over essentials. Instead the supposedly "life and death" issues would be over matters as picayune as the opposing virtues of different political and economic philosophies. Nevertheless innocents the world over would also be swept by the detonations into the maelstrom of all-encompassing, radioactive destruction and death, and it seemed to this man that you couldn't get more obscene than that.

He had not glimpsed to the fullest yet another highly immoral aspect of nuclear weapons, namely that, if not their use, their threat would be exerted mainly against smaller and weaker nations abroad, from which the fallout boomerang was within acceptable limits.

These considerations led him inevitably to the conclusion that any country that would tolerate having leaders that would seriously consider using these weapons deserved to experience the throughly hellish effects of those bombs themselves.

This man never carried that poster-painting out of his house, and the few that saw it, while slightly taken aback, regarded it as being only the meaningless raving of a complete but harmless weirdo.

After about a year he destroyed that painting, but the words on it hadn't contained an ounce of sarcasm. Instead he had meant every inch of its message. He had meant it without any sort of smile, and instead only with the deepest sadness, dismay, and disgust.

..........

Oddly, it has taken me years to realize that actually that painting had had a second meaning even beyond nuclear warfare.

When, in the presence of certain company a few years earlier, I had started painting, we had always referred to our works not as paintings but instead as "statements."

So I see now, many years later, that that painting had been, even more, a statement about the distance I had long since felt from the species that had produced such weapons (not to mention from the subspecies of which I was seen as being a member). I had decided that the hands of humans are too heavy not only on each other but even more, and more inexcusably, on the planet, and so the less of it there was the better it would be for all concerned, and that was really what had been at the heart of the matter.

Isn't it interesting how we often don't know what we're doing, at the precise moment when we couldn't be more confident that we do know!.