Until recent months it had been many years since the juicy, titillating
subject of espionage involving America’s nuclear weaponry was featured in the news.
Lately, for reasons far more ambiguous than apparent, nuclear espionage in America is on
the front pages and in the nightly news.
A nuclear scientist of Chinese ancestry at Los Alamos has been accused of
stealing classified nuclear secrets by downloading them onto unsecured computers and then
copying the files to computer tapes, some of which have vanished. He claims the
information is readily available and not at all secret, that he took it home in order to
work on it, stole nothing, sold nothing, is as American as the best WASP, and is being
victimized by, among other things, racism.
He is under investigation for suspicion of passing secrets to China,
though he has not been charged with espionage. He contends that he is a target of
selective prosecution and that "ethnic Chinese" workers are the subject of
racial profiling by federal counterintelligence investigators.
And then, two computer hard drives containing top secret classified
information concerning the construction and disarming of nuclear weapons that might fall
into the hands of terrorists vanished for a month while Los Alamos burned as a wildfire
swept through the area. When they were found after the fire, more or less where they had
last been seen, espionage became the first explanation of choice. It is not at all clear
what the truth is concerning either of these "incidents."
"Suspicion" is the key word of the above two paragraphs.
At this writing, no one has been charged with espionage in either case;
but there are witch hunts brewing in Los Alamos.
The witch hunt is an American tradition beginning (on this continent) in
Salem, Mass., in the 17th century. Salem provided the name and the format for all
subsequent public sacrifice to the God of Fear on the Altar of Power. The one brewing in
Los Alamos could not have arrived at a more propitious time for the faltering nuclear
weapons industries of America. After all, the Cold War froze to death years ago; the Red
Menace, in the words of William Gass of Washington University in St. Louis, "has
largely gone back to the comics from whence it came"; and the public is catching on
that nuclear energy for both atomic bombs and light bulbs is neither clean, benign,
economical or safe, nor can its wastes be safely disposed.
The citizenry is slowly but surely becoming aware that the nuclear
industry has deceived the public from its inception. And American taxpayers are becoming
aware that they have paid dearly and will continue to pay dearly for those deceptions of
the nuclear industry and its minions in the government and military. Government
prosecutors, using the dead as a domino language of the Cold War, contend that the
downloaded files threaten the nuclear balance of power; and the public knows that
"balance of power" is officialspeak for spending more tax money on
nuclear weaponry to counter a power that does not exist.
A good witch hunt might drum up support for the cause, as reason, good
judgment, sanity and statesmanship will not.
In American literature and culture the best know portrayal of the witch
hunt is surely Arthur Miller’s play "The Crucible." It uses the witch
trials of Salem to illuminate, among other things, the witch hunts of the late Sen. Joseph
McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee of the 1950s, and the abuse of
power, fear and superstition and, in truth, stupidity that drives and allows all witch
hunts. It is required reading (or viewing) for anyone concerned about misuse of power and
the manipulation of people and justice and truth through fear and superstition.
My own favorite work of American literature concerning the witch hunt (in
America) is the extraordinary novel by Robert Coover, "The Public Burning." It
is fiction very loosely and metaphorically revolving around the three days leading up to
the June 1953 executions by electrocution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. It is a book
written in the early 1970s that had a hard time getting itself published because, though
it is fiction, in a sense every word of it is true if not exactly factual. It uses real
people to speak that truth. And every word of that truth is outrageous and wonderful and
as disturbing as seriously contemplating adult human beings hunting for witches.
It is also very, very funny. That some of those people in the book were
still alive and very well known in the early 1970s caused publishers to quake with fear at
the idea of printing "The Public Burning." But even the fearful recognized it as
great literature and an American classic—a very important novel. It was the first to
use the thoughts and words of real present day living characters to reveal through fiction
deep truths about those characters and the historical events in which they are involved.
Among those characters are Richard Nixon, Dwight Eisenhower, the
Rosenbergs, William O. Douglas, Time magazine (sarcastically referred to by author Coover
as "the National Poet Laureate"), John Foster Dulles, Herbert Brownell and J.
Edgar Hoover. There are cameo appearances by Betty Crocker, Joe McCarthy, Jack Benny, the
Marx Brothers, Walter Winchell and Gen. Douglas MacArthur.
Two fictional characters who are more real than some of the real
characters are fictional are also prominent in the book, Uncle Sam and The Phantom.
Best of all, for those of us who miss having Richard Nixon to kick around,
"The Public Burning" is a reminder of the use of the witch hunt for those who
wish to gain or maintain power. It is a reminder of how well Richard Nixon used the device
for his own benefit at the expense of the nation. It is a reminder of what a hypocritical,
treacherous, self-serving, ruthless and deluded man he was. For instance, Coover has Nixon
saying, "I’m a lot like Lincoln, I guess, who was kind and compassionate on the
one hand, and strong and competitive on the other."
A man capable of warping reality that much is a man capable of embracing
the witch hunt to advance his own ambitions.
"The Public Burning" is a fine and hilarious rendering of the
mechanics and rationale of the witch hunt. It has just been re-issued by Grove Press and
it is time to read it again. After all, the Rosenbergs burned, and there are witch hunts
brewing in Los Alamos.
