July 16

 July 16th has longstanding bleak resonance in Mad Dog's life, for personal reasons.

But in cosmic terms, July 16, 1945 is the day the world ended, in Kurt Vonnegut's words, the day Robert Oppenheimer's Trinity test in New Mexico exploded the first atomic bomb. 

That sword of Damocles is still hovering over our heads.

Vladimir Putin continues to snarl about using nuclear weapons whenever he feels particularly threatened in his rat cage. 

We still have people with their fingers on the button who are men who are determined to prove they are real men, not cowards.

As Adlai Stevenson once said, "Maybe what the world needs when it comes to nuclear extinction is a man who is willing to be a coward."

What the world needs is another Mickhail Gorbachev.

 

Hasn't been one since him.

Oddly, it took a President likely in early dementia, a man who race baited, who invented the "Welfare Queen" a man who said that there will always be poor and implied the poor deserve to be poor and if they worked harder they wouldn't be poor--that same President was able to say, having 1500 missiles armed with multiple warheads is enough.  And so we came down from 70,000 on each side to simply enough missiles to annihilate both countries but maybe leave a sliver of habitable planet.

Having read two of Gorbachev's memoirs, Mad Dog wound up thinking: Too bad we didn't have an American Gorbachev. Never have. Never will.

And Gorbachev was overthrown, dismissed and ostracized for his humanity. But while he lasted he was a world figure who may just have saved humanity from itself.

Surely, Harry Truman was nothing close. He never lost a wink of sleep about dropping atom bombs. To his credit he resisted dropping them in Korea or elsewhere.

During Vietnam, Lyndon Johnson went down the road of trying to prove his masculinity with bombs, but he resisted the advice from his Dr. Strangelove generals to drop atomic bombs on North Vietnam.

For all the existential threats we face today: climate change, pandemics, nuclear Armageddon is the game ender.  

That is the legacy of July 16.