Gone Fission (Horrible Pun)

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For instance, Robert Oppenheimer led the project in a town that Army engineers created on the top of a mesa that was accessible by a hazardous mountain road. A large group of the best scientists in the country were hauled up there, along with their families. They could not tell anyone the truth about what they were doing or where they were living for the 27 months that they were up there.

Oppenheimer’s story is dramatic, and many of us know at least part of his story. But he had a wife. What happened to her during these two years? How did all of these people get through what must have been a sort of madness when they were thrown together in the middle of nowhere?

So when the movie comes to town we will hustle down to see it. This is a great story and we can hope that the film does it justice.

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A little ditty from the early sixties when “the bomb” was very much on people’s minds.

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Utilitarian? This means riding to work, school, shopping, the public library, movies, meetings, etc. Our town lends itself very well to bicycling because there isn’t a lot of change in elevation from one section to the next. From our home on the eastern edge of town it is a long sloooow downhill west to the river. Probably drops less than 200 feet in that 2 miles.

Our weather also makes bicycling an option for most of the year. The streets are free of ice and snow all but, let’s say, 15 days of the year. (Unofficial figure). So if you don’t mind the feel of a cold saddle on a warm behind on a chilly January morning, why, you can bike year-round.

But one can easily cycle 8 months of the year without being a weather hero. It has made being a one-car family much easier for Robin and I. Rain and snow? On average, Montrose gets some form of precipitation only 79 days a year. And it never rains all day … we are an arid spot on the planet surface.

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From The New Yorker, a smattering of past covers.

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While musing last week after listening to yet one more person ask the question “How can those people still follow Cluck?” it occurred to me that I might know the answer. Or more properly stated, where someone else wrote the answer down. Eric Hoffer was a longshoreman who wrote a book that described his view of how mass movements arose. (And Cluckism whether we want to accept it or not, is a mass movement.) The book was called The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements, and was published in 1951. The book has become a classic in socio-politics. It’s a sobering read.

Here is a paragraph from the Wikipedia article about the book that I thought put things very well.

Hoffer states that mass movements begin with a widespread “desire for change” from discontented people who place their locus of control outside their power and who also have no confidence in existing culture or traditions. Feeling their lives are “irredeemably spoiled” and believing there is no hope for advancement or satisfaction as an individual, true believers seek “self-renunciation”. Thus, such people are ripe to participate in a movement that offers the option of subsuming their individual lives in a larger collective. Leaders are vital in the growth of a mass movement, as outlined below, but for the leader to find any success, the seeds of the mass movement must already exist in people’s hearts.

The True Believer, Wikipedia

Doesn’t that all sound familiar? Loss of control, lack of confidence in existing traditions, feeling that life has been “spoiled” somehow … isn’t that what’s at the heart of MAGA territory, along with bigotry, white nationalism, and various sorts of felonious behavior ? But note that last sentence: for the leader to find any success, the seeds of the mass movement must already exist in people’s hearts. These people were there before Cluck came along, and will still be there when and if the orange man takes up residence in Cluckcatraz.

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What is it about our brains that they are not content with befuddling us during the day, but must mess with us during sleep as well?

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