I have been trying to write a dispatch here, a review of a documentary, for weeks now. It fits to use this odd extra day on the calendar to finally just do it, imperfectly, the only way I know how to do anything right now.
I have been in my hometown the past week with occasion to see a lot of old and semi-distant friends. During a meeting at the public library, I saw one of these beloveds and they mentioned “your newsletter has slowed down.” They said it without judgment and, honestly, I was flattered anyone had noticed. I responded in the way I have been lately when people ask how I am, or how my work’s going. I sort of gesture out the nearest window, or to a phone, and say, “well, you know…” and all the people I like and respect know that I’m talking about Gaza.
We talked about the particular feeling—not a feeling like hearing bombs above your city and searching for your family under rubble, but a dreadful cousin feeling nonetheless—of living inside the heart of the Empire and feeling far from its levers of power. We agreed that doing the best we can is the best we can do.
I keep putting off this review because I feel if I look away from my phone or skip the news for a day or two, I will be too far away from what is happening to update the portion about Rafah. But, really, what was true on Super Bowl Sunday when I started to write this is just as true now, and more so. Thanks for your patience with me, and with each other, and for what I hope is your own version of continued, meaningful solidarity.
“We did this amazing thing. An amazing, terrible thing.”
I watched Irene Lusztig’s documentary Richland three Sundays ago at the Spokane International Film Festival, seated between two women of different generations from Richland, Washington. I knew I wanted to see it when I watched the trailer.
It opens, as the film does, on a high school football game between the Richland Bombers—their mascot a mushroom cloud, their helmets bearing the outline of a B-52 bomber—and an unseen opponent. Once in the theater, I was hooked when the men drinking coffee and playing cards at Spudnut started to sing.
First, the WWII veteran, who grinned and bobbed his head, recalling every word to his gun ship’s anthem just as they sang it when they encircled Japan. Talk shifts to the bomb and a second man (I believe a former or current Hanford worker) strikes up an earnest a capella rendition of Linda Allen’s “Termination Winds,” singing “the desert wind can blow here 'til you've almost lost your mind / sand will fill your mouth and nose and eyes 'til you're half blind / some folks dig in deeper and just pray the storm will end / others pack their bags and leave these termination winds.”
Music and art run through the documentary, braided with understated interviews and “all American” archival footage from the patriotic heyday of the early Cold War years. The older of the two Tri Cities women I sat between leaned over and whispered, “I was there that day” when footage of JFK’s visit to Hanford (just two months before his assassination) played. “They let school out…I remember it was so dang hot.”
I grew up in Spokane, Washington, just a couple hundred miles from what we called the “Dry Shitties,” with all the smugness not-great places reserve for punching down at their neighboring communities. I knew some about Hanford, the Manhattan Project’s node on the Columbia River where plutonium was processed in secret for eventual use in the “Fat Man” atomic bomb detonated over Nagasaki. I knew about the pollution left behind and the “downwinders,” the cancer and the cow’s milk that delivered huge doses of radiation to the unsuspecting people living there, but only in the broadest strokes. It took years of learning an working as an anti-war activist and interviewing Hanford experts as a journalist to begin to chew and process the massive, horrific reality of what happened so nearby.
It would be more accurate to say, “what is happening,” or “what will be happening forever.”
Director Lusztig’s outsider perspective cut through the banality of living near Hanford. Her approach mixed the strictly observational with the theatrical and allowed huge questions to float in the theater’s air like the swarm of gnats in the film’s parting shot. What is our connection to history? Our responsibility as its inheritors? How do we navigate our roles within devious, complex systems? She didn’t set out to make a straightforward “anti-nuclear” film. Rather, Richland is a portrait of the town as it exists today. And today, for the vast majority of residents, the bomb remains an achievement to be proud of. As one interviewee said, “We did this amazing thing. An amazing, terrible thing. But people drop the ‘terrible.’”
The workers themselves did not know what material they handled. They didn’t know the end purpose of what they produced. Many of them were exposed extensively to radiation and died of cancer. They learned what they had done alongside everyone else in the country from the local headline, “IT’S ATOMIC BOMBS!” I didn’t live during the patriotic fervor of World War II, but I can understand, given its stakes, the ways in which pride would swell in a small community that took part in such a victory. What’s harder to stomach is the persistence of such a simple, mushroom-cloud-as-victorious-mascot mindset today.
The only moments that felt overwrought in the film were perhaps those showing tourists within the B Reactor, gleefully posing in front of imposing nuclear equipment, one woman in form-fitting MAGA-printed leggings. Beyond that loaded image, the undramatic truth of how many people feel about their connection to our country’s nuclear legacy. “People made money,” “people sent their kids to college,” “none of what happened at Hanford was illegal”—versions of these sentiments predictably punctuated interviews with locals. In comparison to the permanent damage to the land, what does it say about our culture to have internalized and justified these rationales, to have swallowed such denialism whole?
In her artist statement about the film, Lusztig writes, “We are living at a moment in history that is deeply structured by human denial, and it is in the shadow of this moment that this project about feelings and belief systems feels urgent…My intention with RICHLAND is to inhabit a more uncomfortable, intimate, and ambivalent space that ultimately points to the ways that each of us holds denial close.”
I was surprised the extent to which this film moved me. Maybe it was seeing people, rural and suburban white people in Eastern Washington, so much like those I grew up with, navigate the ethical complexity of the world with such transparency. Maybe it was the inclusion of haunting music and of Kathleen Flenniken’s poetry. Maybe it was artist Yukiyo Kawano’s hand-dyed fabric scale model of the Fat Man bomb floating in the hot desert air I could taste through the screen.
Maybe it was just the mushroom cloud mascot of it all, the stark example of the American embrace of violence as our cultural birthright.
Meanwhile, we watched this film on Super Bowl Sunday. It’s the biggest spectacle our empire has to offer and this year, it felt extra absurd. The game was held in Las Vegas, the American city perhaps most tied to consumption, myth making, and artifice. The Chiefs (somehow exempt so far from re-naming campaigns) were playing. The blandest celebrity romance imaginable brought Taylor Swift’s private jet to the stadium and her audience to the game. 100 million people watched a propaganda ad paid for by the Israeli government, a government whose narrative of frailty and victimization crumbles when you consider the budget necessary for those thirty seconds of airtime. And while we tuned in (or watched the memes and clips roll through social media later), our money and weapons bombed the captive civilian population in Rafah.
That night, when I checked my phone, the algorithm tried to bury news from Gaza (what I most closely follow on purpose right now) beneath images of Taylor, Blake and Ice Spice getting tipsy in the stands. I had to remind myself about the groundswell of attention and activism for Palestine from people who had never been involved before, about the urgent work being done to detach us from our violent legacy all over this country. The Super Bowl was just one more painful reminder of how well-resourced our default cultural products remain.
I remembered that the first scene in Richland was a high school football game. Not the Super Bowl by any means, but very much a normal Friday night in America. I thought about how normal the atomic bomb has become in the minds of the people where I live.
How normal destruction seems in a country so high on its own righteousness.
A haunting parallel. Great writing!