Hundreds of close calls we never knew about

Back in the late 1970s and ’80s, I was involved in the antinuclear weapons movement. We tried to warn people about the danger of so many nuclear weapons—more than 50,000. One was too many, many of us felt, but we also tried to argue with such logic as, Why do we need to be able to blow up the world 50 times over? We also warned people about the risk of accidents and an inadvertent error leading to a suicidal nuclear exchange between the United States and the Soviet Union.

Little did we know that we were actually understating the danger. Little did we know how many times we came dangerously close to a nuclear war.

Now, with the publication of Eric Schlosser’s book Command and Control (Penguin, 2013), we know much more about that history.

Louis Menand reviews the book in the Sept. 30 issue of The New Yorker. He includes summaries of some of the stories Schlosser tells. For example, on Jan. 25, 1995, more than four years after the end of the Cold War, Russian leader Boris Yeltsin received news at 9:28 a.m. Moscow time that “a missile had been launched four minutes earlier from the vicinity of the Norwegian Sea, and that it appeared to be headed toward Moscow.” Yeltsin had the option of launching an immediate nuclear strike against targets around the world. He had 4,700 nuclear warheads ready to go.

It turned out the “missile” was a weather rocket launched from Norway to study the aurora borealis. “The Norwegians had, in fact, notified the Russians several weeks in advance of the launch,” Menand writes, but “whoever received the notice didn’t grasp the implications or simply forgot to forward it to military authorities.”

This was one of hundreds of incidents after 1945 when “accident, miscommunication, human error, mechanical malfunction or some combination of glitches nearly resulted in the detonation of nuclear weapons.”

Menand includes other stories. In 1958, “a B-47 bomber carrying a Mark 36 hydrogen bomb, one of the most powerful weapons in the American arsenal, caught fire while taxiing on a runway at an airbase in Morocco.” Fortunately, or luckily, and the word must be repeated many times, the explosives in the warhead did not detonate.

Only six weeks later, another Mark 6 landed in the back yard of a house in Mars Bluff, S.C. “It had fallen when a crewman had mistakenly grabbed the manual bomb-release lever.” Fortunately (there’s that word again), the nuclear core had not been inserted. The bomb left a 35-foot crater, killed a lot of chickens and sent family members (humans, that is) to the hospital.

One study discovered that “between 1950 and 1968 at least 1,200 nuclear weapons had been involved in ‘significant’ accidents.” Even the bomb dropped on Nagasaki was a mile off target (and killed 40,000 people).

Perhaps the most harrowing incident occurred in 1980 at a Titan II missile silo in Arkansas, when a worker dropped a socket into the silo and left a hole in the missile.

The explosive force of a Titan II was three times the force of all the bombs dropped in World War II, including the atomic bombs dropped on Japan. If detonated, it would have wiped out most of the state of Arkansas.

Schlosser also discusses at length the insane strategy of the Cold War powers, which called for full-scale nuclear war in response to any attack. A general tells Schlosser that “we escaped the Cold War without a nuclear holocaust by some combination of skill, luck and divine intervention, and I suspect the latter in greatest proportion.” Indeed.

Today many smaller powers also have nuclear weapons, and the possibility of their use, by design or accident, is high.

A deeper reality, a certain grace

Alice McDermott is such a pleasure to read. Her new novel, her seventh, extends her outstanding body of work and further cements her stature as one of our finer writers, with one of her novels winning the National Book Award and three others finalists for the Pulitzer Prize.

 

Someone (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013, $25, 240 pages) traces the life of Marie, the novel’s narrator, from her childhood in the 1920s and ’30s in an Irish neighborhood in Brooklyn to her old age, recovering from eye surgery in a hospital room.

The novel moves desultorily among different periods of her life, not always in chronological order, each chapter a nearly complete story in itself. Yet McDermott maintains a sense of movement and suspense, withholding information about certain characters until the right narrative moment.

Marie grows up with her parents and her older brother, Gabe, who is bookish and devout. Marie, much less devout, is “a bold piece,” according to her mother. And her father refers to his children wryly as “one bishop … and one little pagan.”

McDermott paints a fulsome portrait of not only Marie and her family but of the neighborhood, peopling the novel with a variety of interesting characters. These include Blind Bill Corrigan, who was gassed in World War I, and Walter Hartnett, whose one leg is shorter than the other. And there’s Fagin, the undertaker and later Marie’s employer, who wants to redeem the name of one of Dickens’ famous characters.

Marie faces many disappointments—the deaths of her parents, rejection by a suitor, Gabe leaving the priesthood—but also joys—her jovial, loquacious husband, Tom, her four children. Through it all she remains attentive to the changing world around her and her place in it.

McDermott fills her book with copious detail and poetic observation, like this: “Small city birds the color of ashes rose and fell along the rooftops. In the fading evening light, the stoop beneath my thighs, as warm as breath when I first sat down, now exhaled a shallow chill.”

Or this description of Marie’s 17-year-old daughter: “There was a way her body had, in those days, of bobbing and weaving as she spoke: as if a more assertive, adult Susan—the lawyer she would become—was elbowing past the shy child she, too, had once been.”

She captures the Irish obsession with faith, with heaven and hell, but then points beyond it to a deeper reality, such as “that other, earlier uncertainty: the darkness before the slow coming to awareness of the first light.”

Tom recalls a sermon he heard Gabe preach when he was a parish priest, about Jesus healing a blind man without being asked. He tells how he remembered this sermon about God’s grace when he was in a POW camp in Germany during World War II: “It was a good thing to remember, over there. That you didn’t necessarily have to ask. Or even believe. It gave me hope.”

This sense of a deeper reality, a certain grace, undergirds the narrative. At one point, after being rejected, Marie asks Gabe, “Who’s going to love me?” He replies, “Someone.”

At the end of the novel, Marie recalls her friend Pegeen, who died from a fall as a girl. She had told Marie that she planned to pretend to fall so that “someone nice” would catch her.

In spite of life’s many difficulties and sorrows, we continue to long, McDermott makes us feel, for someone—Someone—to catch us.

First Circles of Kansas conference

On Sept. 11, the Circles of Kansas Community of Practice 2013 was held at Trinity Heights Methodist Church in Newton. This was the first such meeting of Circles for Kansas.

Organizers hoped for around 25 people; more than 100 signed up. People came from across the state, some from Circles groups already formed, others just beginning, while others were in the exploration stage.
What is always inspiring to me are testimonies from Circle leaders--people in poverty who are working to get out. One such leader, Jo Lewis, made this insightful comment: "We're all in the same boat but have different paddles. Mine was a fork."
Heather Cunningham, the National Circles Training Center coach, spoke to the group. She noted the importance of community practices. She said that workers spend one-third of their time looking for information and are five times more likely to ask a co-worker for it.
She said there are more than 1,000 Circles groups in over 70 communities in 23 states and part of Canada. The first national conference for Circles was held this year. The second one will be held April 28-May 2, 2014, in Fort Collins, Colo.
The conference had breakout sessions in the morning and afternoon. In the first slot, I sat in on "Conflict Resolution Language" with Jeanne Erickson. She distinguished unnecessary conflict from genuine conflict and emphasized focusing on people's interests, not their positions. There was too much to summarize here, but it was excellent. She recommended the book Getting Past No: Negotiating in Difficult Situations by William Ury.
In the afternoon, I sat in on "Trauma, the Brain and Your Circle" with Wanda Pumphrey, also excellent. She talked about the long-term effects of trauma on the brain and how the prefrontal cortex--the thinking, analytical part of our brain that moderates our fight or flight behavior--may shut down. She talked about ways Circles can support the healing process. Here's a good quote: "Healing starts as soon as someone listens to you and your story."
Over the lunch period, Ed O'Malley, director of the Leadership Center in Wichita, talked about the Circles vision. He mentioned three things Circles groups need to do:
• increase their comfort with ambiguity,
• hold to the purpose,
• create the container for the work.
Heather Cunningham closed the conference with a short presentation about leadership. She said that if we make leadership something bigger than ourselves, we fail to recognize it.
I came away further encouraged to continue being involved in this important work of being with people who are working hard to get out of poverty, in the face of huge systemic barriers. I bristle each time I hear some politician (or anyone) talk about how lazy poor people are. I've never met such courageous and resourceful people. I want to say, Just try to walk in their shoes.

A lesson on the Civil Rights Movement

Whenever a film says it is “inspired by a true story,” you can bet there isn’t much in it that’s true.

Such is the case for The Butler, directed by Lee Daniels, a highly fictionalized account of Eugene Allen, who served as a butler in the White House during the administrations of eight presidents, from Truman to Reagan.

In the movie, Allen is named Cecil Gaines (Forest Whitaker) and begins working in the White House during the Eisenhower administration. Daniels uses this framework to juxtapose this man’s faithful service with the racial turmoil going on in the country over these years.

The film wants to show us and help us feel the pain of African Americans during the years of this man’s life (he died in 2010). So we witness Cecil’s father being shot to death in the cotton fields by the white owner, who has just raped Cecil’s mother. While this didn’t happen to Eugene Allen’s parents, it likely happened to many others.

And the movie has Cecil’s older son, Louis (David Oyelowo), conveniently take part in just about every important event of the civil rights era, from the Nashville lunch-counter sit-ins to the Freedom Rides and even being present in the motel room with Dr. King just before he is shot. Then, of course, he joins the Black Panthers.

While such coincidence is beyond belief, it nevertheless introduces audiences who don’t know to these important events and the impact they had on the country. We also witness the various presidents as they try to decide how to respond to this movement. Meanwhile, Cecil continues his service without voicing any political opinions on the job.

Home is a different story. There he quarrels with his son, opposing his actions and worried for his safety. And his wife, Gloria (Oprah Winfrey), left alone while Cecil works long hours, turns to drink for solace.

Daniels has made a dramatic yet didactic film that serves well those who haven’t taken the time to watch such documentaries as Eyes on the Prize or Freedom Riders. He has assembled an impressive cast of actors, including the wonderful Whitaker in the title role, plus Terrence Howard and Cuba Gooding Jr. The actors who play presidents are well-known (Robin Williams as Eisenhower, John Cusack as Nixon, for example) and, because of that, distracting. I had to laugh when seeing Jane Fonda playing Nancy Reagan.

The Butler also serves to give us a glimpse of African-American domestic life in a middle-class home during these years. We also get a glimpse of Cecil’s Christian faith. The real butler, Eugene, was a long-time, active member of his church.

Daniels’ film has been number one at the box office for the past few weeks. It’s good that audiences are being exposed to stories of African Americans and their struggle to find freedom and dignity in a country that too often denies them that, especially since many of these viewers will not take time to watch documentaries that tell a fuller, truer story.

Are family issues only women's issues?

One of the conversations going on in our society is a debate about work-life balance: how to balance one’s work life with the responsibilities of parenting. However, the conversation is happening almost exclusively among women. Men remain largely excluded from the debate.

In the July/August issue of The Atlantic, Stephen Marche’s essay “The Masculine Mystique” comments on this exclusion of fathers from debates about balancing work and parenting. He notes that “decisions in heterosexual relationships are made by women and men together,” and “when men aren’t part of the discussion about balancing work and life, outdated assumptions about fatherhood are allowed to go unchallenged.”

Marche challenges a myth perpetuated by Sheryl Sandberg’s popular book Lean In: that talent and hard work can take you to the top. He calls this “pure balderdash, for women and men.” Denmark now has more social mobility than the United States. 

The central conflict right now, Marche writes, is “family versus money.” The Pew Research Center released a study in March called “Modern Parenthood” that found about half of all working parents say it is difficult to balance career and family responsibilities, with “no significant gap in attitudes between mothers and fathers.”

Marche discusses women’s rise to economic dominance within the middle class. While “it is an outrage that the male-female wage gap persists,” he writes, “over the past 10 years, in almost every country in the developed world, it has shrunk.” And “of the 15 fastest-growing job categories in the United States, 13 are dominated by women.”

However, the “top leadership positions remain overwhelmingly filled by men.” According to the World Economic Forum’s “Global Gender Gap” report, he writes, “women around the world hold a mere 20 percent of powerful political positions. In the United States, the female board-membership rate is 12 percent—a disgrace.”

But Marche calls this a “hollow patriarchy: the edifice is patriarchal, while the majority of its occupants approach egalitarianism.” Nevertheless, men wield power. He notes a paradox: “Masculinity grows less and less powerful while remaining iconic of power. And therefore men are silent. After all, there is nothing less manly than talking about waning manliness.”

A 2008 Pew study asked cohabiting male-female couples, “Who makes the decisions at home?” In 26 percent of households, the man did; in 43 percent, the woman did.

This hollow patriarchy “keeps women from power and confounds male identity,” Marche writes. He notes parenthetically that “the average working-class guy has the strange experience of belonging to a gender that is railed against for having a lock on power, even as he has none of it.”

While enlisting men in the domestic sphere may be a good idea, Marche writes, “the solution is establishing social supports that allow families to function.” Sharing the load of parenting equally doesn’t matter if the load is unbearable. And it will only become bearable when things like paid parental leave and affordable, quality child care become commonplace. In every state, the average annual cost of day care for two children exceeds the average annual rent, he says.

Marche blames men for failing to make themselves heard in this debate. “Where is the chorus of men asking for paternity leave?”

Meanwhile, the society sees parenting as a women’s issue. The U.S. Census Bureau, when it refers to child care, "considers mothers the 'designated parent,' even when both parents are in the home," Sandberg writes. “When mothers care for their children, it’s ‘parenting,’ but when fathers care for their children, the government deems it a ‘child-care arrangement.’ ”

Marche concludes, “As long as family issues are miscast as women’s issues, they will be dismissed as the pleadings of one interest group among many.”

The African-American male as a human being

In the early hours of Jan. 1, 2009, Oscar Grant, a 22-year-old African-American man, was shot in the back while being held by police at Fruitvale Station in Oakland, Calif. He later died. In the days and weeks following, Grant was alternately labeled a saint or a villain, a loving father or a drug dealer. Ryan Coogler’s extraordinary debut film shows that he was actually a complicated human being. 

What makes the film Fruitvale Station important is that it avoids the polarizing, simplistic notion that a person is only either a saint or a villain. Coogler shows Grant’s humanity: He is a loving father and a convicted felon; he loves his girlfriend but cheated on her; he loves his mother but lies to her.

The film opens with a cellphone video taken by a bystander of the actual Oscar Grant being shot. Then we switch to Dec. 31, 2008, the last day of his life, and watch Michael B. Jordan’s remarkable portrayal of Grant.

On the verge of a new year and only three months out of prison, Oscar is looking to change his life, to begin anew. He tells his girlfriend, Sophina (Melonie Diaz), that he is committed to her and their daughter, Tatiana (Ariana Neal).

After dropping off Tatiana at preschool and Sophina at work, he goes to a grocery to try to get his job back. He’s been fired for showing up late, though he hasn’t told Sophina or his mother (Octavia Spencer) this. He says to his former boss, “You want me to sell drugs?”

Oscar has an easygoing nature, and Coogler uses the device of showing his cellphone texts to portray his quick navigation of relationships as he moves from one difficulty to another. We witness his struggle to be a better person in the face of systemic forces that try to hold him back. Finding legal work to support him and his family poses a huge problem.

All the while, as he seeks to change, as he expresses his delight in Tatiana and his affection for Sophina, our gut wrenches because we know what’s coming.

Oscar and his friends are on the train after celebrating the New Year, when a white thug he encountered while in prison baits him into a fight. Later, the police are called and hold Oscar and several of his friends on the platform, and a white officer, struggling to handcuff Oscar, shoots him. (He later claimed he thought he was grabbing his taser instead of his gun, and he served 11 months in prison.)

Coogler has created not only an important film but an excellent film. He shows the complicated humanity behind the stereotype of the young African-American male. The film’s pace, editing, acting and writing are superb, and we come away sad and angry about one more wasted life because we’ve come to know this man—his aspirations, his struggles, his potential.

That the film was released around the time of the Trayvon Martin trial was unintentional yet raises many parallels. A young African-American male, killed by someone overreacting with a gun. Still, Coogler steers clear of racial polarizing. Oscar has several positive interactions with whites.

Fruitvale Station succeeds in portraying a specific human in his realistic complexity, and that story resonates with us viewers who see Oscar’s tragic death as something that affects us all.