Godzilla 2014

In Majuro, Marshall Islands in the early ’80s, I witnessed a delayed radiation effect. An under-40 male was walking down the street when he collapsed and the island hospital pronounced him DOA. The diagnosis was death by radiation where the story told me was that he ate a fish carrying a dormant rogue atom that became active inside his body. The wild cavorting of radiated neutrons acted like a beam that went slashing the poor man’s innards like a laser causing terminal damage.

I am no scientist. I had difficulty understanding, let alone accepting the explanation, but there was no debate on what killed the man. It came as an effect from one of the nuclear bomb tests almost 30 years before in the Bikini Atoll north of Majuro, delivered by a fish!

This week, a 2014 version of Godzilla debuts in American cinemas. There are 28 films in the franchise that began in 1954 when the movie Godzilla was first released. Considered a filmographic metaphor for the United States that heartlessly delivered the A-bomb to hapless civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it was also an allegory of nuclear weapons to Japan’s memory 60 years ago of the effect of a Bikini test on its fishermen fishing in the Marshalls. The winds rained atomic fallout on their boat, scalding skin and shortening everyone’s breath, to put it mildly.

The early Godzilla (Gojira in Nihonggo) films portrayed its character as a frightening, nuclear monster. Japanese Gojira is actually a portmanteau of the word for gorilla (gorira) and a whale (kujira). Godzilla was described as a cross between a gorilla and a whale, a prehistoric sea monster awakened by nuclear fusion. The word G-O-D on the first syllable of the English translation alludes to power, infinite and almighty! Save the first Godzilla was not of Mother Nature but straight out of human invention, depravity’s force majeure!

We are the only nation that had used atomic power on people. And with Russia, we hold the capability to destroy life on Planet Earth seven times over, as if it makes a difference after the first!

If Godzilla is an allusion and a metaphor, ours in 2014 comes as climate change. Florida Sen. Rubio just came out recently claiming that humans do not contribute to climate change. This was just a week after the U.S. Congress itself issued an 800-page report on climate change and how our hydrocarbon emissions have contributed to its happenstance. This reminds me of the tobacco industry when I lived in Virginia and North Carolina, saying that there is no causality connecting tobacco smoking and lung cancer!

One only has to take a sweeping look at the hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, droughts, and floods occurring with greater strength in unlikely places to realize that something dramatic has changed and with the amount of hydrocarbons we have emitted into the atmosphere, existentially at least, we know in our bones that we did something amiss to the environment.

Of course, our capacity for denial knows no end. Why, when two regions of Ukraine held a referendum, Kiev not only ignored it; it claimed that the region was not holding one, and if they did, they will just declare it “illegal,” in the same way Crimea rejoining Russia is also “illegal.” Duh!

We continue to rely on fossil fuel for energy when the alternative (e.g., liquid hydrogen) is not only possible but cheaper. The cost we are paying for an economy based on oil, natural gas, coal, and now, tar sands and other bituminous ingredients is wasteful. Just look at all the war zones and why they are that way. East Timor uses the U.S. dollar for its currency, for heaven’s sake! “In defense of freedom” was that war fought? Nope! Natural gas, Matilda. Likewise, in Syria, Sudan, Iraq, Iran, the Stans, Nigeria, Libya, Egypt, China’s continental shelf and the islands of South China Sea (the 2012 Penguin World Map labels the Luzon Sea!), etc., are literally fossil fuel aflame, polluting the air, but we continue because it benefits the powerful few!

If Mark Rubio can honestly deny human contribution to climate change, why can’t we deny the reality of anything we do not approve of? Some “truthers” are now claiming that the Sandy Hook shooting was contrived, and yes, made up in a TV studio as a tactic to take away the constitutional right to bear arms. Right.

Let the human touch click on almighty power, in the way China committed its rapid rail technology to the Nairobi-Mombasa line in Kenya, and possibly, a pan-African rail system. Doable. Why, someone is actually figuring the practics of connecting Shanghai to L.A. through Russia’s Far East, tunneling under the Bering Strait into Alaska, to BC-Canada and down the west coast to CA. And why not a Hong Kong to Paris silk rail? Not a flight of fancy. It’s grounded. Montreal-to-Rio via Mexico and Santiago? Check. Better and cheaper than MH370s! The technology is in place to make this visioning feasible, a Godzilla of a different pedigree.

Time to make human technology user-friendly, I say, even as I am sure to die of asthma in Dong Bei’s coal-loaded air!