Thursday, November 01, 2007

Hero-shima?

Several weeks after the devastation of Hiroshima, Commander Paul Warfield Tibbets walked through the swelled streets of Nagasaki where his comrades in arms had dropped the second bomb.

There to sate his academic curiosity, He nonchalantly purchased some souvenir rice bowls and wooden saucers and later remarked, Damndest thing you ever saw.

You betcha.

Around the same time, beat poet and City Lights Bookstore founder Lawrence Ferlinghetti walked among the same ruins where he observed -as San Francisco Chronicle writer Paul McHugh reported last Veterans Days: "I saw a giant field of scorched mulch. It sprawled out to the horizon; 3 square miles looking like someone had worked it over with a huge blowtorch. A few sticks from buildings jutted up like black arms," Ferlinghetti says. "I found a teacup that seemed like it had human flesh fused into it, just melted into the porcelain.

"In that instant," says Ferlinghetti, "I became a total pacifist."

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