Yesterday was a very light day with scattered bursts of doom-laden heaviness.
We spent four hours or so at the excellent Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center, the other half of the Smithsonian's National Air & Space Museum. It's right out by the airport which makes it a little bit of a drive from DC, but it's much more convenient for people who need to donate outrageously wonderful air/spacecraft as they don't need to perform emergency landings on the National Mall.
The place is full, literally from floor to rafters, with incredible and often beautiful machines. The highlights, if that is the right word, include the first space shuttle, Enterprise, an SR71 "Blackbird" reconnaissance plane and the Enola Gay, a B-29 Superfortress bomber that dropped the first nuclear weapon on Hiroshima. As you can imagine, this last provokes some sober reflection, not least on the part of the museum itself. In 1995 the plane was attacked by protesters who threw ash and human blood at the fuselage. The same exhibit was criticised by the Air Force Association who felt that it dwelt too much on the Japanese casualties and didn't provide enough context.
By accident, we caught two guides (both volunteers) giving tours around the plane. The first was a former pilot who had flown B-52s during the Cold War. He made a great deal out of the American casualties that had been saved by eliminating the need for a land invasion of Japan and he bluntly admitted that part of the importance of the mission was the fact that it was an experiment: both Hiroshima and Nagasaki were selected as targets because they had not been conventionally bombed before - the Americans wanted to know what an atom bomb would do to an undamaged city.
The second guide also made no apology for the bombing although he was obviously disturbed by the horrifying details of the attack which he relayed. He did make a significant effort to put these events into the historical context of the Second World War on behalf of visitors for whom a dozen casualties in Iraq or Afghanistan is considered appalling.
When the bomb detonated above the city it killed around 80,000 people instantly and around 100,000 died of radiation-related illnesses over the next five years. The entire war probably cost the lives of as many as 80 million people. Poland lost one fifth of its population, he said. He went on to outline other atrocities, like the fire-bombing of Tokyo by the USAF that killed 100,000 in one night, and Japanese war crimes in China that included the use of biological and chemical weapons on civilians. He didn't even mention the Holocaust, or need to.
His point (whilst not offering up an excuse for the use of the atom bombs) was that those years were a period of extreme and perhaps unprecedented levels of global violence. It is perhaps a tribute to our own, often seemingly apocalyptic, times that such events should feel so alien and incomprehensible to us.
"What you mean," says Laura reading over my shoulder, "is 'that such events only happen in Africa so we don't have to worry about them.'" And she's right.
Another thing Laura was right about (I know, twice in one day: uncanny!) was her idea that I should go with her to the opera on Friday night. I enjoyed it a lot. I love A Midsummer Night's Dream and I'm sure I'll never see it again sung so beautifully in such an intimate theatre as Wolf Trap. The orchestra washed up over the lip of the pit so that I literally had three double basses and two harps on the end of my row. This was wonderful, of course, and made the incredible sound-scape of the forest utterly immersive.
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