From book monsters to nuclear war
For all sorts of reasons, mostly having to do with research, the last two weeks brought more reading than usual my way, but with no single book finished for any possible review. One of these books, Pat Frank’s “Alas, Babylon” I read 58 years ago, while Anthony Esolen’s “Nostalgia” I needed I read just this last year.
The other books — several biographies of Ronald Reagan; “Bringing Up Bookmonsters,” a guide for helping kids fall in love with reading; Daniel Pink’s “The Power of Regret;” and a couple more — I either skimmed or used the indices to locate the information I required.
Some of this reading left but few impressions. Two of the books, however, brought some long thoughts.
“The Power of Regret: How Looking Backward Moves Us Forward” begins by recounting the story of the 44-year-old singer Edith Piaf winning international fame with her 1960 song “Non, Je ne regrette rien,” which translates, “No, I regret nothing at all.”
Bold words and boldly rendered by the diminutive chanteuse, yet three years later Piaf was dead from her addictions and decades of hard living.
The truth is, regret is part of the human condition, and the person who slaps on a tattoo proclaiming “No Regrets” draws this reaction from Pink:
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“Embedded in songs, emblazoned on the skin, and embraced by sages, the anti-regret philosophy is so self-evidently true that it’s more often asserted than argued … Why rue what we did yesterday when we can dream of the limitless possibilities of tomorrow?
“This worldview makes intuitive sense. It seems right. It feels convincing. But it has one not insignificant flaw.
“It is dead wrong.”
To go through life without regrets, to live without hurting someone along the way or making some major mistake, is impossible. Using anecdotes, research in fields like psychology and economics, and lots of data, including his own World Regret Survey covering more than 16,000 people in 105 countries, Pink breaks our regrets into four basic groups. He then explains in detail what we can learn from remorse and how we can use that self-knowledge to lead better lives. If, for example, we regret not being kinder when we were young, as Pink does, then we resolve “to make kindness a higher priority.”
Pink ends his book with these words: “After a few years immersed in the science and experiences of our most misunderstood emotion, I’ve discovered about myself what I’ve discovered about others. Regret makes me human. Regret makes me better. Regret gives me hope.”
“The Power of Regret” will be worth my reading in full when I have the time.
Published in 1959, when the Cold War was in full swing, “Alas, Babylon” tells the story of a nuclear war between the Soviet Union and the West. While missiles obliterate many large American cities and military bases, one small Florida town survives this holocaust. The rest of the novel deals with the citizens who live there, most of them good people, who struggle to save themselves, their loved ones and neighbors, and the scraps of civilization still in existence.
In his Preface to “Alas, Babylon,” Pat Frank brings up a question asked him by an acquaintance, “a retired manufacturer, a practical man” before he began his novel: “What do you think would happen if the Russkies hit us when we weren’t looking — you know, like Pearl Harbor?”
Frank then writes, “It was a big question. I gave him a horseback opinion, which proved conservative compared with some of the official forecasts published later. I said, ‘Oh, I think they’d kill fifty or sixty million Americans — but I think we’d win the war.”
Keep in mind that the population of the United States in 1959 was 178 million men, women, and children.
That “Alas, Babylon” impressed me so deeply in my long-ago youth is a testament to its powers of description and conjecture. That it remains in print, in spite of being dated, speaks again to these powers.
Riffling through Frank’s novel brought home two revelations. First, our culture has long laughed at the drills conducted in public schools 60 years ago, like ducking under one’s desk, as preparation for a nuclear attack. It’s true, such drills now seem antiquated and amusing, but what’s also true is that our society today is even less prepared for such a national emergency. What defensive measures has our government taken against a nuclear strike on the ground or the horrors that would descend on us from an attack by Electromagnetic Pulse? Do you know the location of your public emergency shelters? Do such shelters even exist? Is there literature explaining what to do in case of a nuclear strike, either by a foreign power or terrorists, as there was in the 1960s? What rights do citizens maintain vis-à-vis the federal and state governments in a national emergency?
From “Alas, Babylon” to William Forstchen’s 2009 “One Second After,” writers have issued warnings about nuclear weapons. Keeping in mind the words and actions of some of our D.C. policymakers, Pat Frank’s novel stands as a stark reminder that children playing with dangerous toys will likely bring harm to themselves and others.
(Jeff Minick reviews books and has written four of his own: two novels, “Amanda Bell” and “Dust On Their Wings,” and two works of nonfiction, “Learning As I Go” and “Movies Make the Man.”)
