That time of year

"The Person That I Am" (column)
Expressweek (weekly magazine of The Daily Express)
late 1970s, exact issue date unconfirmed

Who was it who wrote once that the veneer of life was getting thinner? On a hot day after the storms, tempers flare over traffic jams, bad roads, inefficient systems, closed bridges. The heat is on, somebody says, and he doesn't mean just literally.

One letter we received not too long ago, about a comment we made on a certain performance on television, accused us of being "controlled." This "concerned mother," in beautiful handwriting, in almost flawless English, on a piece of immaculate white stationery, wrote me that it was the last time she would let her children be exposed to controlled journalism through the magazine for which we wrote the piece. Or any magazine. She talked about control with such a closed, cold mind I almost heard the imperceptible dropping of a bomb before it goes off. I wonder what she would say to her children about the violence of "independent" spirits and the "bravery" of people who cannot affix their signatures to their letters.

But I can imagine that violence has become a regular thing these days. We see so much of it on television, and except in the most extreme of cases, violence on television hardly moves us anymore. We suppose that, as audiences everywhere get more and more inured, producers sitting down in the safe and air-conditioned offices of US networks will have to think of more and more ways to attract and sensationalize. It is all a part of their business. So, perhaps, whoever said the veneer of life is getting thinner should also have said that man's hide is getting thicker.

But it is true: there is something to be said about how little violence--real violence, not just TV violence--affects us these days. Ten years ago, Vietnam was "a purgatory, an agony, a bloody hell." Men died, though they may never have set foot on the muddy earth of a Vietnamese kampong, for the right to castigate world leaders over what they had done to Indochina. Even earlier, men and women cried over the useless deaths--of the two Kennedys, Martin Luther King, Pope John XXIII--even though they had never seen these men, much less known them.

Now, it is different. Wars are going on everywhere and people are still dying uselessly in Asia, in Africa, everywhere. But very few within the ages of 15-25 seem to care. Most of them are turned on to the artificial violence on television, to the fantasy life created by the US networks. During our time, we probably cared too much. We cried over fires and deaths, worried about floods, got goose pimples over accidents and the death of a pope.

These days, what seems to concern many is whether the Red Brigades will storm a papal burial and teach the world a lesson or two about passion and dedication. Five thousand soldiers had to stand guard against Italy's terrorist groups while the body of Pope Paul VI went through a week of public viewing. And if we are to believe a weekly newsmagazine, the papal conclave that followed had to guard against being bugged.

Irreverent as we are, we find that precaution a little funny. But then, Pope Paul VI, who added that directive to the rules governing a papal conclave, was probably right. There's been too much technical interference around. All those machines are beginning to drown human voices.

Every day in the house, the maids turn on the radio, morning to night, listening to weird and endless soaps. When the children come in from school, they turn to either the stereo or the television. We can hardly hear each other in all the din.

Unfortunately, there's something we hear instead, loud and clear, the way we feel the heat coming on slowly while we cross a closed bridge on foot. A young man at Princeton University was cited for his paper on how to make an atomic bomb. It is, he says, not too difficult to do. That one little piece of news on a morning paper has set many people thinking.

Here's more: a US congressional advisory group called the Nuclear Proliferation and Safeguard Advisory Panel has released the results of one year of hard work. Its 522-page report says it is all so much later than we idealists think. Very soon, some truly violent and sophisticated group can put a bomb together.

This mythical group, probably a dozen well-trained and very experienced people, with adequate knowledge of science and engineering, supported by scientific, technical, and organizational infrastructure, can buy fissionable material on the blackmarket, or steal it. If they execute the process properly, they can have a militarily effective nuclear explosive ready within two years.

Now, you can understand why some people say the heat is on. With six nations possessing the bomb, two dozens more with the economic and technical capability to produce it, and all others wanting anything and everything connected with it, it thus seem so much easier to get a bomb. And both conservatives and liberals are equally afraid of it.

Certainly, every time the terrorists call in with their demands after a kidnapping, some people's hearts must jump. What if the terrorists have put together a bomb, however primitive? Even a Molotov can harm. The bomb started in 1945, supposedly to end a world war. These days, it can start a new one. The technical means used more than three decades ago to end a world crisis can ignite a new one today.

But we are talking about some far-off possibility, some of the elders suggest, a thing too far removed from our lives. On a September day, our thoughts should not stray too far away from traffic jams and bad roads and closed bridges. But that our thoughts can span the gap may be a sad reflection on us, rather than on the human race.

Or perhaps it is just that time of year.

-- NBT