ELEGY FOR A NUCLEAR PROGRAM WITHOUT A BOMB
& a baptism of fire in New York City
ISTANBUL—Ever since my first real job at a magazine, a very tiny magazine that hardly anybody still read, Iran and its nuclear program have been with us, its centrifuges spinning, always enriching uranium a little too much for certain Western officials comfort but never quite enough for an actual bomb, only enough that such a device might be months or weeks away, not soon enough to justify bombing the facilities (a word that connotes both places where doomsday weapons are fabricated and lavatories) until Saturday night when official rumour had it that the enrichment blimps were going ninety. It must have been the summer of 2005 when Mahmoud Ahmadinejad first appeared on the front page of the New York Times touring a bunker full of centrifuges, wearing a white lab coat. The Iraq War was two years old and here it was as if the Washington Consensusphere’s new Saddam Hussein was posing with the notorious aluminum tubes, no satellite photos necessary. I had a new job the next year and the editorial test was to cut a piece down that included the latitude and longitude of the nuclear facility at Natanz for potential bomber pilots but argued for not dropping the munitions “yet.” I worked at a local newspaper for a year and didn’t worry about the bomb, only how bombed my nightlife reporter had gotten before and how much I’d have to rewrite his stuff, which should have been pristine, because the kid had talent. At my next job, the first piece I worked on, along with the other editors, for months it seemed, so thorny was the issue, was a history of Iran’s nuclear aspirations. Just before I left that office, the Obama administration at last negotiated the nuclear deal of his second term along with Russia et al., and my Persian friends and I—they came to London from Tehran via an adolescence as immigrants in Toronto and made me dinner every Friday night for a year—had a dance party we were so happy. Last week in my freelance editing life I was editing a report about the current war. Now that the bombs have been dropped, the New York Times says the Defense Intelligence Agency says the program hasn’t been halted and the same near capability may be back in a few months. (And all that talk about regime change happening spontaneously as if these motherfuckers didn’t spend a decade doing trench warfare with the Iraqis.) The party never stops over there.
What is it about nuclear weapons that makes us so narcissistic? The answer is that if nuclear bombs go off near us we are all going to die, not just collectively but individually. Like all of us Trump understands this, but he thinks he’s the only one who understands it, or at least he likes to say so in interviews. That’s one of the reasons it must have been so tempting to stage a “nuclear” confrontation with an adversary that wasn’t quite there yet. In my opinion, nuclear proliferation would be a good thing and ultimately peaceful because when everybody’s got the bomb nobody’s gonna use it until the day the aliens show up, which they never will, sorry. But don’t worry about my opinions because like Dave, a guy I emailed with a couple of times, I write better than I think, at least some days, and my opinions don’t matter, not even to me. Want to hear another one? Francis Ford Coppolla’s Megalopolis of last autumn was a masterpiece. It embodied the spirit of the age, the late spirit of a generation, and especially the spirit of the Biden administration. A city that’s Rome and New York and America itself run by a gerontocracy is struck by a Soviet (!) satellite that drops out of the sky and is also a nuclear bomb. (This after a couple of hours of gangster melodrama matrix designed by the Big Daddy of such.) Coppolla’s hippie dream, like Trump’s swinger dream, like Biden’s Joe College dream (Jon Voight plays a combination of the three—“Hey, you like my boner?” Bang! Bang!) was for a nuclear confrontation they spent their youths waiting for under their school desks (was that real or just a TV thing?) that never showed up. After this limited apocalypse they, the Boomers, and their children are the survivors who get to remake the world in their vision of innovation, hedonism, and enlightenment via family and education, nepotistic meritocracy. Adam Driver is Hunter Biden if he was less of a crackhead and sex addict and sleazy businessman but still decadent and savvy and a genius, the President Hunter we never got to have except for a couple of weeks last June after his dad’s bad Thursday night. Anyway, great movie, even if the super-flubber substance Driver-Hunter invents, part magic plastic surgery regenerative flesh gum and part moving walkway from a long airport corridor, is a bit half-baked. Never elaborate on the McGuffin. Not you’d expect a masterpiece expressing the Biden era to be perfect—far from it. What a goddamn cursed era, drenched in blood. At least they made some money off the bombs in Ohio and Arizona.
Meanwhile back in present reality, the Boomers are flailing and the Millennials are triumphant