Fresh Air Over Las Vegas

I am sitting in an afternoon of utter boredom, tedium vitae, as Oscar Wilde called it and as a kid one night I discovered The Ballad of the Reading Gaol—oh well, I always try to outsmart boredom and ennui with remembering—the things I am reading first of all, then the things I have read, and lastly the personal names who have given me lessons in survival, which is all it’s all about, surviving, and the odds are against us, even if we’re rich. But aren’t odds as we human’s know them constantly against us? I don’t believe in gambling away life. Blow it on fun, yes, but sitting and gambling and knowing the odds are against you, that to me is utter stupidity. Odds are against you even collecting on insurance policies—how do you think the insurance companies are able to invest in multibillion dollar construction projects and stuff like that. I’ve heard that people who live in Las Vegas, Nevada, don’t patronize the casinos and have a saying among them, “Those casinos were built off suckers" and so is the city of Las Vegas being built off suckers into one of the fastest growing cities in the world, now with a population over a million—think of that!

Las Vegas, Nevada, sits in the middle of a god-awful desert. It sometimes stays over a 100 during the days all summer though the temperature may drop into the fifties at night. The air in Las Vegas isn’t pure either. That’s thanks to the Yucca Flats that lie up north of Las Vegas. That’s where for decades the U.S. of A. did nuclear testing, first with above ground tests and then in huge underground tests. And I mean huge! Nukes going off with such a regularity, Las Vegas’s air was permeated with nuclear fallout for years, which I think stays in the air for years afterwards and certainly seeped into the ground around there and must be deep into the soil.

Between 1951 and 1992, there were a total of 925 announced nuclear tests at Nevada Test Site. 825 of them were underground (seismic data has indicated there may have been many unannounced underground tests as well). The site is covered with subsidence craters from the testing [1]. The Nevada Test Site was the primary testing location of American atomic bombs; only 129 tests were conducted elsewhere (many at the Pacific Proving Grounds in the Marshall Islands).

Map showing the NTS and other federal territories in southern Nevada

During the 1950's, the mushroom cloud from these tests could be seen for almost 100 miles in either direction, including the city of Las Vegas, where the tests became tourist attractions. Americans headed for Las Vegas to witness the distant mushroom clouds that could be seen from the downtown hotels.

On July 17, 1962 the test shot "Little Feller I" of Operation Sunbeam became the last atmospheric test detonation at the Nevada Test Site. Underground testing of weapons continued until September 23, 1992, and although the United States did not ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, the articles of the treaty are nevertheless honored and further tests have not occurred. Tests not involving fission continue.

From Wikipedia

Why, hell, as recently as Slick Willie Clinton’s lover-man presidency, they were threatening to set off nuclear underground tests—at about the same time the F-ing stupid French were blowing away islands in the South Pacific, ruining atoll systems and undersea coral societies with their insistence on nuclear tests—remember then? That was when France declared war on Green Peace and actually killed some of those extraordinarily gutsy dudes that started attacking the French all over the South Pacific over this nuclear-national-ego-mania. The goofy French went ahead and set off two or three tests anyway, F the South Pacific islanders, most of them former French colonials—and look at the mess France has made of the South Pacific—the trouble in Fiji and Tahita, all because of the F-ing stupid French. Don’t get me started or I’ll take you all the way back to Dien Bien Phu and the French getting their asses kicked by Ho Chi Minh and the real Vietnamese—Ho Chi Minh who so admired America’s forefathers the Vietnamese Constitution under Uncle Ho was almost word-for-word like ours. But the French puppies whined so loudly—all about how the French helped us in the American Revolution so now it was time for payback—they finally got to Good Ole Heart-troubled Dwight Eisenhower and he got us involved in the Viet Nam War, another war where the mighty US Army and Air Force and Navy were gonna wipe ass with a peasant (pissant) army—I mean, come on, these were little skinny riceeaters we thought of as “Gooks” would be wiped out in a matter of days. My dictionary gives 1935 as the date of the first usage of "Gook," but goes on to say its origins are unknown.

All the generals in the Viet Nam War were racists. Harry Truman had integrated the army but the army was still hell for black kids who went to Korea and then especially in Viet Nam. I’ve heard some Viet Nam stories from my ex-Viet Nam vet buddies that would curdle the blood of the average gung-ho pot-bellied patriotic goon and his boufanted hairdo-ed dodo wife and dworky gullible kids—“Suit up my boys, I don’t give a damn. I served my time in WWII, baby, and I know war’s hell, but somebody’s got to protect this country from those who want to destroy it.” Racists generals like old Maxwell Taylor and finally South Carolina’s own General Westmoreland—old Colon’s Pal’s master in ‘Nam. Colon's Pal got his rank rise from being a leader in the “search and destroy” strategy we tried out in the early days of our Viet Nam participation—you remember the so-called “advisors” we sent there whose mission it was to work their ways into villages where there was a suspected communist majority and actually wipe that village out using South Vietnamese “forces,” said by American GIs who made it through that war to be the stupidest soldiers ever—one vet friend of mine told me one night while he was stoned out of his mind they fragged several South Vietnamese officers simply because they were in the way—the drugs and the fraggings habits he’d picked up in ‘Nam, where he told me heroin was available like toothpaste and toilet paper were—from the huge black market the American and South Vietnamese soldiers set up overthere. Colon’s Pal could tell us all about the seediness of his role in ‘Nam, but he never will. He’s been programmed to repress any truth about what was right and wrong in that war—they called it “psychological” warfare and they’d learned it from the Red Chinese in the Korean conflict and it involved suggestion—hypnosis, no shit. By the Viet Nam War, the Army’s psycho unit was in full force, battlefield psychologists, combat psychologists, with their weapons of constant suggestion—“You can’t trust any of these gooks, men, women, or children. The best way to handle that unknown is to go in shooting and then find out the truth of the situation later. So you massacre a village of loyal supporters of the South Vietnam government? So what. You must respect the statistics we’ve crunched for you, the percentages, and you go by those rather than the resulting actuality. To you, you have to assume all villages in which you are searching will have to be destroyed, loyal or otherwise.” That’s what Viet Nam soldiers got day-in and day-out along with the rations of heroin, cocaine, and pot. Remember Country Joe and the Fish’s immortal Viet Nam song—it still rings so true in my ears. “Gimme an F! Gimme a U! Gimme a C! Gimme a K!”

And it's one, two, three
What are we fighting for ?
Don't ask me, I don't give a damn,
Next stop is Vietnam.
And it's five, six, seven,
Open up the pearly gates,
Well there ain't no time to wonder why,
Whoopee! we're all gonna die.

From Oscar Wilde:

Yet each man kills the thing he loves
By each let this be heard,
Some do it with a bitter look,
Some with a flattering word,
The coward does it with a kiss,
The brave man with a sword!

Some kill their love when they are young,
And some when they are old;
Some strangle with the hands of Lust,
Some with the hands of Gold:
The kindest use a knife, because
The dead so soon grow cold.

Some love too little, some too long,
Some sell, and others buy;
Some do the deed with many tears,
And some without a sigh:
For each man kills the thing he loves,
Yet each man does not die.
___
He does not die a death of shame
On a day of dark disgrace,
Nor have a noose about his neck,
Nor a cloth upon his face,
Nor drop feet foremost through the floor
Into an empty place

thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler