Nuke 'em 'til they glow and then wander around in the dark: TMI 1979

In the spring of 1979 I was pretty much what most 22-year-old guys are; clueless yet unabashed, barbarous in an oversocialized, post-industrial sort of fashion. I was also attending a small private college in south-central Pennsylvania. Like many of my peers I was concerned with my social life more than learning, with getting laid more than getting educated. In short, I was what a young nomad would have been had he been de-loused and shoved into Topsiders and a polo shirt and told to stop riding across other people's grazing lands.

What I was not was particularly aware of my surroundings. I paid as little attention to the world's business as I had just half a dozen years earlier when I was approaching draft age and the war in Southeast Asia was winding down...which says something about how gormless I was, given that I had not the slightest assurance that my government might want me to go to proof-test the Domino Theory with my body when I came to legal adulthood.

I was a dope. A fairly socialized, relatively educated dope, but a dope nonetheless.

So I can't say it was surprising that I hadn't the slightest idea on this day 38 years ago that as I was lazing about sleeping in my old bedroom in my parent's house on a Spring Break vacation Wednesday that about sixty miles to the northwest, at the Three Mile Island power station, reactor TMI-2 was melting down.

It was four in the fucking morning; who was getting up that early on a vacation weekday..?

Here's the sad, funny part of this story, though.

You can read the accounts of "Three Mile Island" to get the history; it's a bit beyond this post, which is just a personal momento nuki. The accident was more frightening than actually dangerous but it was frightening, and a fairly broad swath of central Pennsylvania (and, I think, even a bit of north-central Maryland) was warned that a deadly radioactive cloud might descend at any time in the manner of one of those Fifties mutant-monster films. The governor of Pennsylvania issued some sort of evacuation order which was widely ignored, and the public response was entirely determined by individual threshold levels of nuclear panic.

Young Chief, being, as noted above, a clueless git, had no panic because he had no clue. Literally; I didn't turn on the news or bother to read the newspaper. I had no idea what the fresh hell was going on along the banks of the Susquehanna River. Armored in that impervious ignorance I bagged up my clean laundry and shoved it in my father's secondhand Ford Pinto station wagon (all I could afford as college transportation and quite the babe-magnet it was, I tell you. Ugh.) that Friday. I had a couple of exams early in the next week, and my plan was to return to the dorm to get a weekend of studying in away from the fleshpots of Kennett Square, PA.

I won't pretend that my college, even in the coke-and-disco-fueled Seventies, was the sort of girls-gone-wild party school of college films so I wasn't really surprised that the campus was dark and quiet on an end-of-break Friday night. What was surprising, however, was that the outside door of my dorm was locked.

The exterior doors of dorms were never locked. They just weren't. Not only was it some sort of fire code rule there were always at least a handful of people who needed to go in and out. I recall yanking on the door handle in a sort of irritated disbelief. The fuck..? Who the hell locks a damn dorm door? Must be some sort of prank; the north side door will be open.

Except it wasn't. And on the walk around the outside I began to wonder. My school was pretty dead socially, but...not this dead. West of my dorm was the broad open space hemmed with classroom buildings, underclass dorms, and the student union. Even on the deadest of dead evenings there should have been someone walking across the oval; a couple going to the U, random library-seekers. Someone.

Not that evening.

I don't recall exactly what tuition was running in those days. Certainly much less than the current nearly-quarter-million it costs for four years there today. But for 1979 the costs were steep, so you'd think that after three years I'd have received enough of that expensive education to have figured out that something wasn't right. But you'd have underestimated the thickness of young Chief's skull. I ambled over to the union to find it dark and locked. The geology building? Locked. The freshman dorm across the oval? Yep; darkened and locked.

Finally I did what I should have done first; I wandered over to the campus cop shop. There, finally, was a light, and open door, and an extremely indifferent looking guy in a uniform.

"Ummm...where the heck is everybody?" I whined.

The law, in its impartial majesty, lowered his newspaper and looked at me with a perfect combination of boredom, amusement, and irritation.

"Not here. Campus is closed."

"Closed? What? Why?"

Irritation and boredom were replaced with mild disbelief.

"Because of the nuclear plant blowing up. You don't know about that?"

"Uh, no. What nuclear plant?"

"That one over by Harrisburg, on the river. Something happened, there's a warning, campus is closed until the warning is cancelled."

"The...what the hell? What am I supposed to do?" Now Officer Friendly looked at me with a frown that matched his increasing contempt for my stupidity.

"Go the hell home, kid. Before your balls start to glow in the dark."

So I did. My parents were surprised, and immediately called my kid sister (going to school at another small private college some ways to the north and west of Three Mile Island) to ensure that she was not in immediate danger of nuclear irradiation. She wasn't.

Nobody was, as it turns out.

(As a technical aside, one of the things that has always amazed, irked, and amused me about my country's private nuclear power generation is the ridiculously pre-industrial fashion that U.S. commercial nuclear plants have been typically designed and built.

Military reactors, and most commercial nuclear plants in Europe as well as Japan (where the cost of and access to fossil fuels mean that nuclear power is a much larger part of the power grid), are typically made as part of a mass-produced, standardized series. Reactors and their controls are alike - or identical - in the same way that automobiles of a particular model are alike or identical. Construction is simplified, operations are predictable, and lessons learned from failures can be quickly standardized and disseminated through the production run.

Most U.S. commercial reactors are one-offs, designed and constructed individually (or, at best, very small series of two or three or modifications from an earlier design) for each plant. So Massachusetts' Connecticut Yankee plant's reactors are different from Pennsylvania's Three Mile Island that are different from Oregon's Trojan. Every new plant reinvents the nuclear wheel, making the opportunities for design or operating flaws much greater.

Ironically, TMI-2 was an 879 MWe pressurized water reactor designed and constructed by the firm of Babcock & Wilcox. This type of reactor had a failure identical to the 1979 accident two years earlier at the Davis-Besse plant in Ohio. The Ohio reactor was running at a very low level compared to TMI-2, so the core didn't melt down...but the valve failure wasn't recognized as a design flaw or the problem diagnosed and that diagnosis sent to the other plants operating this type of reactor.

So two years later I got to wander around in the dark wondering where the hell everybody had gone.

If there's a lesson here, I'm not sure what it is, other than "young men are stupid".

But recruiting sergeants have known that since Ramses' regimental sergeant-major bought the village plowboys their first jug of palm wine.

Perhaps it's "Contractors whose sole purpose is profit are stupid so long as it profits them to be."

Although I'll bet pharoah's sergeants could have told you that about contractors, too.

Hard Work

I don't really have much to add to the volume of commentary on today, when the turning of the year brings us to the day when the great voice of civil rights was stilled.Except this; at the time he was killed, Dr. King had moved on. He was fighting then not just for civil rights, but for civil justice. And, specifically, for the idea that the rich and powerful nation he was born to was called to do more than merely build highways and float aircraft carriers. That as an American citizen he, and all of us, should be able to find and do a good day's work for a good day's pay.

Without having to fear death or injury. Without regard to what we looked like, or the color of our skin, or what we have for genitalia, or where (or if) we worship, or whom we love.

And it occurs to me; that's a truly wonderful, truly revolutionary idea.

What if one of the bedrock principles of this country; of our government, of our society, of our commerce and industry, was that anyone who wanted to work could work?Think about it. We commonly accept - in fact, it's an article of faith amongst most Americans and among the political Right as a body - that there are and always will be people in this country who cannot find a job. Not don't want a job; who desperately, fiercely want to work but cannot get hired.

And I'll tell you; I've been unemployed. I've had friends who lost their jobs. My wife is, at present, looking grimly for a job (in a field in which she is terrific and would be an asset to anyone who hired her, and that's not bias talking). and no one - no one - I know or knew wants to be unemployed.

And yet all around me I get the sense that outside a handful of people there seems to be this vast...indifference at best, and often angry hostility at worst to the notion that there's something wrong with the country, with the system, with the economy when these people are out of work.

The fault is assumed to be the person's; they're out of work because...they're just fucking lazy, or stupid, or shiftless. They won't move, they won't adapt, they won't do this or they won't do that. if they really wanted they could find a job that would pay them enough to live like a 21st Century American (meaning not in a shelter, or under a bridge, or in a warren five-to-a-bed, or eating fucking cat food).

To which I would simply say; bullshit.I've never known anyone who wouldn't try and fly across the Columbia River by flapping their arms if they could land a decent job at a decent wage. Why does this seem like such a damn deadly difficult thing for many Americans to recognize?So maybe today is as good a day as any to wonder; what would our nation be like if one of the most important things on our domestic agenda was finding good work; hard, satisfying, decently-paying work, for every American who wanted it?

Decimation

I thought after last year that our long national indulgence in the compounded delusions of self-pity and self-righteous anger were starting to fade.But for the tenth anniversary of the events of 11 SEP 2001 has brought out all the usual idiots parroting all the usual tropes; It's was all about US! OMFG it was Pure Evil! It was Such a Shock 'Cause We were just Minding Our Own Business when We were viciously mugged!Well, okay, so we've had ten years and we're STILL thinking about this.

(Anybody want to make a bet as to whether Pearl Harbor was still front page news on 7 DEC 1951? No? Didn't think so. It was a very different war in a very different time, and in many ways were were a cruder, harder, simpler...but more sensible people fifty years ago.)

So let's get a couple of things out of the way first.

That an Islamic attack of some sort was successfully completed on U.S. soil was an entirely rational and expected result of the Middle East policies we had been pursuing for decades; since 1948, at the very least. This doesn't make OBL or AQ any more loveable or "justified". But you bankroll, arm, and act as consigliere for one of the local mobs in a bad part of town, don't be surprised to wake up with a horse's head in your bed some morning. It ain't an "if", it's a when, goombah, capisce?That it succeeded beyond the wildest dreams of its Saudi maker is unquestionable. If 9/11 was a battle and you looked at it trying to define "Who won 9/11?" the world's tallest dead Saudi would have to be the winner, hands down. For the cost of a relatively small number of expendable fanatics (and the bombing and occupation of a stone-age tribal wasteland back into the stone age) he sent his target rampaging through the Middle East, bombing, shooting, and - worst of all - acting like the least competent imperial power in history. Too meek to conquer, too clueless and viciously self-protective to woo, too stupid to realize the difference...Osama must look back at the past ten years and the present position of his target, exchange incredulous looks at the demons tormenting him, and all three of them must collapse in helpless laughter. Satan in all his genius couldn't conceive of a richer foul joke.That the most significant, durable, and successful effect it has had has been the erection of a monstrous internal and external surveillance and propaganda contraption that extends across multiple agencies and continents, absorbs billions of dollars and tens of thousands of careers and lives...and all in pursuit of this chimera. Al posted the link to a Naval War College journal article in the preceding post. In it the author bemoans the costly, inept behemoth we know as the Department of Homeland Security.Because it is a massive boondoggle ginned up by the world's last superpower to oppose the efforts of a handful of raggedy-assed clerics and Muslim fabulists dreaming of Caliphate in dumpy rooms in Third World shitholes that, even if successful, would be unlikely to do better than 9/11 - that is, kill a relative handful of Americans compared to the number who drive into utility poles while texting every year?

No.

Because "...we need a longer term strategy for dealing with terrorism overall. Perhaps the most disappointing non-event of the past ten years has been the complete failure of America's intellectual infrastructure, including its colleges and universities, to create a reserve of expertise similar to that funded by the U.S. government in the wake of the Soviet challenge in the 1950s."

Got it?

The threat from a tiny band of poorly-funded, tactically-incompetent, Islamic boneheadsis and should be considered the modern equivalent of the challenge posed by the world's only other global superpowermassively armed with blue-water fleets, intercontinental bombers, an trained army of spies and assassins, and, oh, yeah, fucking nuclear ICBMs.

So one would think that this tenth anniversary of the moment we started the geopolitical equivalent of slamming eleven vodka and Red Bull shooters, stripping down to our skivvies, and leaping into the beer tub down at the local lesbian softball victory party swinging a length of tire chain and shouting "I can whip any bitch in the park!" we'd be looking around sheepishly at all the angry bull daggers, picking our saggy wet Jockeys out of the crack of our stinging ass and wondering what the fuck we had been thinking.

(Stops. Sighs. Shakes his head.)

Instead of indulging in an orgy of self-pity, maudlin sentimentality, and self-righteous victimhood.

But we won't.

Bread and Roses

One hundred years ago today something approaching 500 people were coming to the end of a long workday Saturday in the Triangle Waist Company building down in lower Manhattan near Washington Square.March had been a busy month that year. The first U.S. federal cemetery with both Union and Rebel graves had opened in Missouri. Victor Berger had taken his seat in the U.S. Congress as the first socialist, while back on the 7th of the month 20,000 troops had been sent south to the Mexican border to keep an eye on those pesky revolutionaries. Willis Farnsworth patented the coin-operated locker in Petaluma, California, while on Broadway Ivan Caryll's musical "Pink Lady," had opened the previous week and a splendid new theatre, the Winter Garden, had opened just last Monday. So the people hard at work in the upper floors of the Triangle Company must have had a lot to talk about.

Most of them were girls and young women, as was customary in the "garment trade". They were employed sewing "shirtwaists", women's shirts or blouses. It was repetitive, niggling work, and the seamstresses were paid by the piece, meaning that they had to work as fast as possible, but would not be payed for flawed garments, meaning that they had to be exact and avoid mistakes.Like most factory workers at the time - like most factory workers from the time there HAD been factories - the gals at the Triangle shop made what they could, and that was damn little. There were lots of young women ready to take any job for any wage; the immigrant boats were full of them, coming from Russia, Italy, Germany, and much of Eastern Europe. The owners had a business to run, not a charity. Their business was business, and any worker who made trouble - or didn't make enough shirtwaists, was out on their ass.

So it was just another Saturday on the ninth floor of the Triangle Building, the Singer sewing machines clattering, the working girls probably exchanging a word or two, looking forward to quitting time and the next day off.And then the first young woman breathed in a faint scent of smoke.

The Sunday New York Times said later; "The building was fireproof and the owners had put their trust in that. In fact, after the flames had done their worst last night, the building hardly showed a sign. Only the stock within it and the girl employees were burned."And they burned.

Like candles. One hundred and forty-six of them.

Some preferred to break themselves on the street ninety feet below rather than die in flames. The single staircase was quickly blocked by fire, the wretched "fire escape" broke in a cascade of twisted metal and twisted bodies. When New York's Bravest arrived they found that their ladders, crafted for a smaller, lower New York City, could only reach the sixth floor. Dust, rags, cloth scraps, all took fire like kindling. The firebuckets were quickly emptied, the exits blocked by debris, or, after a while, by bodies.So the women burned, or jumped. And died, their skin blackened like burst sausages, their guts looped ropy and blue on the pavement, spilling from ripped skirts, brains seeping from shattered skulls. The dead carts hauled them off to the morgue, to be identified, or not, by bits of cloth, or broken jewelry, or shards of teeth.The city was shocked by the carnage. Hundreds of funerals, a day of mourning, reminded even the least involved what had happened. For those who continued to work in the business, Triangle reminded them like a punch in the face how close they skirted to disaster every day they punched on the clock.

The fire that consumed the working girls of the Triangle company set alight the garment workers unions that had been trying to organize the workers in New York for years. Rose Schneiderman of the ILGWU said later that;

"We have tried you citizens; we are trying you now, and you have a couple of dollars for the sorrowing mothers, brothers and sisters by way of a charity gift. But every time the workers come out in the only way they know to protest against conditions which are unbearable, the strong hand of the law is allowed to press down heavily upon us....I know from my experience it is up to the working people to save themselves. The only way they can save themselves is by a strong working-class movement."

The State of New York tightened their fire safety inspections, and moved to change some of the rules that allowed the conditions of the Triangle fire. But not by much.

Even more insulting was the "trial" of the owners of the company for negligence and for locking all but a single exit door (to prevent pilferage, they said). They were acquitted within a month. Three years later the owners settled civil lawsuits for 75 bucks a corpse.Meanwhile they had gotten back in the shirtwaist business before April 1911 was out; their new factory was inspected later and found to be a wooden firetrap without fire escapes and a single exterior door. One of the Triangle owners, a character by the name of Max Blanck, was found guilty of again locking one of the doors of this factory during working hours and was fined twenty dollars.

Twenty.

Fucking.

Dollars.


The judge apologized to him for the hardship of the fine.

That same year an inspection of this workshop found it was "littered with rubbish piled six feet high, with scraps kept in non-regulation, flammable wicker baskets."

Max got a stern warning from Justice that time, you bet.

So.

Why remember this hundred-year-old fire today?

Because we Americans have had it pretty soft for a long time.

Because we take a lot of things for granted; things like safe workplaces. Things like weekends, and free time. Things like clean air and water. Things like a living wage, and vacations, and retirement, and professional courtesy and honest dealings from employers and civil servants.

Because we forget that we didn't "get" these things. They weren't "given" to us. We didn't "earn" them.

They were taken from people like Max Blanck, who fought and squealed, who called in cops and soldiers and scabs and strikebreakers, who locked out and beat up and laid off, the people who fought them to get these things.Because we have forgotten that the Max Blancks don't forget; that they'd take all those things back, if they could, and that they will if they can.

Because we seem to think that unions are bad, that workers are bad, that protests are bad, that government is bad.

Because the unions themselves have forgotten that they aren't in this just for a fat paycheck and a featherbedding job. Because the unions once helped make the United States a land where a man could live a middle class life through the work of his hands, and that that was something WORTH fighting for. That jobs weren't just "given" from the wealthy factory owners, they were made by the men and women who worked at them.

Because we've forgotten that, while capital and industry have brought us goods and services, comfort, ease, and entertainment, it has also brought us Love Canal and thalidomide, the Dalkon Shield and Deepwater Horizon. Because we've forgotten that if corporations are people as people they are often psychopaths; unconcerned with human lives, divorced from any responsibility other than Making a Goddamn Buck.Because we had forgotten that America has become as strong as she has because her people were strong, her people have risen together more closely than the deep divide that separates the rulers and the ruled in many nations. And that this has not been because of the grace of the American ruling classes but largely because of a ruthless coalition of liberal aristocrats like the Roosevelts, muckraking journalists, socialists and even communists but most of all because of American workingmen and women who fought for roses along with their bread, for days of rest as well as workdays, for relief in sickness and age as well as wages for labor.

It is fashionable today to flip a hand at the notion of "organization", at the idea that Americans who are not in the two-yacht families, who cannot aspire to wealth or society, should stand together against those who are. "Class-warfare" is the sneer, from the very class that is winning that war. It is popular today to dismiss the sort of people who died on the streets of New York as the losers of this war; the casualties of the New Economy.But we have not been beaten. We have surrendered; we have chosen to give up rather than try to fight the standards of the developing countries, with their starvation wages and festering sewers of rivers and trashpiles in ravines, driving us into a race back down to the bottom.

And it may well be that the combination of foreign competition and domestic mediocrity are indeed spelling the end of the Era of American Industrialism. That we are fated to become two nations; a wealthy elite and a mass of beaten wage-slaves, clinging to an every-tightening gyre of falling pay and rising debts, shrinking services and growing costs, as the vulture of greed tears as our liver.But the real shame of it is that we have gone down without a fight. In our fever to "lower our taxes" and save pennies we have handed our masters billions. In our haste to "shrink government" we have gutted the agencies that inspect our food and secure our workplaces. In our frenzy to "grow the wealth" so it will "trickle down" we have made little tin gods of the Trumps and the Kochs,and the Max Blancks.

Perhaps this is all inevitable. Perhaps the living-wage factory job really is as dead as the dodo; killed off by low tariffs, low-wage competition, automation, greedy unions, greedy stockholders, high costs and deregulation.

If automation, layoffs and offshoring, corporate profits and our desperate need to fill the stores with disposable plastic crap continues to destroy living-wage work, yes, it WILL be inevitable. But even if it is...we have chosen to surrender without a real fight. And that is not just defeat. That is dishonor.

If we are headed towards a nation that consists of the rich and the unemployed, if in our greed and fecklessness we allow the oligarchy - that has always been a part of the makeup of the United States since its founding - grow great and become our future...on the way to that nation we will have to pass under the stony eyes of the dead women of 1911, in whose pitiless gaze we will see reflected the exact dimensions of our dishonor, the final diminution of our nation, and the precise misery of our fate.

The Army I Knew: PEBD

Thirty years ago today the cover of "People" magazine featured Ronnie and Nancy, Rob Redford, Goldie Hawn, Brooke Shields, Larry Hagman (as "JR" from the TV show "Dallas") and the boxer Sugar Ray Leonard as the most "intriguing people" of the year.

That day Mary Tyler Moore turned 44. An episode called "A War for All Seasons" aired on the TV sitcom M*A*S*H. The country was getting ready for Ronnie Reagan's first inaugural parade, and the U.S. hostages in Tehran were preparing for the new year in Iranian captivity.

In China the post-Mao deconstruction of the Great Helmsman's rule continued with the trial of the Gang of Four. War continued in Chad, in Angola, across much of southern Africa, in fact, as the apartheid state there entered its final years, while in the Persian Gulf Iran and Iraq began their Pyrrhic eight-year war.The President of the U.S. was James Earl "Jimmy" Carter, Jr. and 227,224,680 people lived there with me. The GDP was $2,784.20 billion that year, the median Household Income was $17,710, a first class stamp cost 15 cents.

Unemployment was 7.1 percent, but, remember, we were in the tail-end of the "oil crisis". In a couple of years the economy would start recovering and Reagan would get the credit although his policies actually had little or nothing to do with it beyond increasing the federal deficit.

Alfred Hitchcock, Marshal Tito, Jean Piaget, and Mae West had died. John Lennon had been murdered by a nutbag.

Voyager I had reached Saturn back in November, returning data on its 14 moons as well as its more than 1,000 rings.

That year the USSR announced it planned to end its occupation of Afghanistan but didn't for another eight years. Andrei Sakhorov was exiled to Gorky, while here Operation "Abscam" indicted 30 government officials. In Poland workers seized the shipyards in Gdansk and a Polish court recognized Solidarity as umbrella union. 400 cases of "Toxic Shock Syndrome" were caused by certain kinds of tampons. Elvis' personal doc went on trial and revealed that the dead King took something like 10,000 pills in the 20 months prior his death. The big fads in the U.S. were Rubik's Cube, the new Sony Walkman, and Yoda toys and dolls; Garfield dolls and "Baby on Board" signs remained unseen in the future. Tom Selleck debuted in
"Magnum P.I."And I joined the U.S. Army, on this day, thirty years ago.

29 DEC 1980 is my Pay Entry Basic Date; the first day of the rest of my Army life.Over the next several weeks I wanted to talk about the Army I joined. The Army of the Eighties is little more than a memory now; thirty years and a hell of a lot of war has changed that Army all out of recognition. The Army of One bears little resemblance to the Army of 1980, the Army of "Be All That You Can Be".

I loved it then and I love it now; the Army has been part of me most of my adult life. But I have a special fondness for the Army of my youth, and so I wanted to put down on paper, so to speak, what it looked like, who we were and what we did, before those memories fade any further.Next: Beginnings - Fort Dix, New Jersey.

What not to do...

...when a dead whale washes up on your beach.Don't blow it up!

h/t to my friend Meghan, who culled this from a bit of little-known Oregon history