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Flashforward Democracy: American Exceptionalism and the Atomic Bomb in Barefoot Gen

2009; Penn State University Press; Volume: 46; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/cls.0.0066

1528-4212

Christine Hong,

French Historical and Cultural Studies

Flashforward Democracy:American Exceptionalism and the Atomic Bomb in Barefoot Gen Christine Hong (bio) In a Fortune magazine poll late in 1945, only 5 percent of the respondents opposed the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and a significant minority wished that the United States had dropped more A-bombs on the Japanese. The lack of detailed visual evidence of the bomb's effects reinforced this initial positive response. US occupation authorities censored reports from the city and suppressed the more horrifying films and photographs of corpses and maimed survivors. Americans initially saw only images of the awesome mushroom cloud. —Paul Boyer America's Hiroshima Of the numbing singularity of the mushroom cloud as dominant image-icon of Hiroshima in post-war US historical consciousness, we might consider Gertrude Stein's performance of zero-affect in her 1946 prose piece, "Reflection on the Atomic Bomb": "They asked me what I thought of the atomic bomb. I said I had not been able to take any interest in it . . . . Sure it will destroy a lot and kill a lot, but it's the living that are interesting not the way of killing them."1 Graspable solely as depersonalized abstraction, a mode of destruction so thorough as to render viability moot, the bomb is unthinkable, to follow this reasoning, as a human rights matter. Whether sincere or ironic, Stein's indifference to the decision to use the bomb, let [End Page 125] alone her breezy disregard for the bomb's profound human toll and enduring material consequences, speaks to Hiroshima's non-centrality within the US imagination. A harbinger of American responses to come, her apathy emblematizes the obduracy of US reception, rife with aesthetic implications, with which cultural accounts of the atomic bombings—particularly those aimed at humanizing their costs—have repeatedly been forced to contend. If not with unconcern then with a spirit of triumph, the US public, carefully shielded in the early post-war years from graphic images of human ruin, hailed the atomic decimation of Japan. In 1956, Eugene Rabinowitch, editor of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, recalled the exultant mood: "With few exceptions, public opinion rejoiced over Hiroshima and Nagasaki as demonstrations of American technical ingenuity and military ascendancy."2 Yet here, we might ask: if for each post-1945 generation of Americans, Hiroshima has risked "becom[ing] a non-issue" (Boyer, 166), then to what extent can its marginalization as a human rights narrative be attributed to the initial withholding of visual evidence of the bomb's horrific human impact? In other words, can the obscuring of the human rights dimension of Hiroshima within a US context be understood, at least in the first instance, as a visual problematic? This question bears pursuing insofar as the limitations of US historical consciousness with regard to the atomic bombings of Japan—what cultural critic, Kyo Maclear, has punningly dubbed America's "beclouded vision"—are frequently assumed to be an effect of the literal shortcomings of perspective as conventionalized in the iconic aerial images of the mushroom cloud and scorched earth.3 That the mushroom cloud stands not only as an abstraction of US technological prowess and Cold War ascendancy, but also as a screen memory of the human costs of the bombings has become commonplace. Anesthetizing, infinitely reproduced, technologically triumphalist, and to borrow from Stein, uninteresting, this image of nuclear sublimity is inescapably identified with an arrogantly narrow US frame of reference. Against this image's inadequacy as a representative historical document, there have been countervailing attempts to privilege narration from a different deictic position, the "here" of the explosion versus the "there," so as to present the neglected human dimension of the atomic bombings. In accordance with the prevalent belief that "if the American people ever saw what the bomb had done to human beings they would demand an end to the arms race," ground-level images, hibakusha [literally, "explosion-affected people"] perspectives, and testimonial narration thus appear to intervene with the missing other side, the "human" side, of a unilateral US version of the story of the bomb.4 Yet it merits asking what the valorization [End Page 126] of hypocentral, ground-zero perspectives as...