Editor’s Note: Occasionally, an article published in ARTES evokes a profoundly personal and instructive reply by a reader. On very rare occasions, that response is crafted by a fellow writer and regular contributor to the magazine.  Recently (November, 2011), we ran a feature-length article by curator and consultant, Ken Yellis, as an expanded article originally appearing in Curator Magazine (2009).  Then, as now, he reflects on the social responsibility of collection-based and historical-oriented institutions to accurately represent our cultural and natural history in authentic and illuminating ways—even if it touches the ‘third rail’ of painful or controversial facets of our collective consciousness.  The myths we construct for ourselves—repeated with such frequency that they become our shared reality—are often at odds with the factual record. The nexus of these two world—fact and fable—serves as fertile ground for dialogue, debate, and even open conflict. artes fine arts magazine

Here, Stephen Vincent Kobasa evinces Smithsonian’s recent Enola Gay exhibition, drawing poignant and powerful associations in his own life; as well as on the warp and weft of the social fabric in which we, as a society, often choose to cloak ourselves. The first of these essays was originally published, in a somewhat different form, in the September, 1995 issue of Peacework; the second in the August 1, 2004 issue of The Nuclear Resister. After several years, they appear now on the pages of ARTES,  at the request of this editor. Their relevancy today—with historical facts and partisan emotions being played so fast and loose by our 21st century politicians—is that the first-person, singular narrative must continue to serve our communities as a powerful beacon for our responsibility as museums and institutions-of-learning to find balance in our story-telling. And it also reminds us that, while the historical record is cumulative and often anonymous, it is an unfolding saga that manifests itself each day, often in singular and profoundly personal ways.

A Machine for Lying: Reflections on the Enola Gay

By Stephen Vincent Kobasa, Guest Editorial Contributor

Sometimes, what we inherit from our parents are lies, not so much malevolent as they are necessary fictions, devices meant to convince us that our lives have found justification in situations where we are deeply afraid that there is no justification available.

In the early summer of 1945, my father was in Germany, having survived the violence of war for over one year. I have heard only fragments of his life during that time – he would recount one or two comic interludes (a tent collapsing under the weight of a heavy rain, leaving him muffled in a muddy ditch) – but only rarely would other moments surface: the soldier crouching alone in the middle of an English field as the rest of his unit drove away in the dark; the line of corpses like a tide mark along a Normandy beach; the accidental slaughter recorded in the British voice over my father’s headphones, “You’ve shot down one of ours.” This is all by way of evidence that I can never know the terror my father learned, somehow, to live with during that time – the ways in which he had to strip his humanity away in order to keep himself from madness. So when the war ended in Europe it must have seemed to him a release beyond measure – while the word which came soon after, that he would be shipping out to the violence which continued in the Pacific – can only have come as a brutal betrayal.

Here, then, the histories of my father and the Enola Gay come together, as they do for many other veterans of that time, and for their children. The atomic explosion over Hiroshima became an image of salvation, a terrible parody of the Crucifixion, in which the dying of a city spared their lives. And the Enola Gay, the B-29 aircraft that dropped the bomb, was transformed into the icon of their escape, a machine not only for destruction, but for lying. The skillful technology of the plane and the bomb was read as evidence of their worthiness, and the degree of the slaughter was proportionate to the value of their survival.

But these soldiers, now veterans, were not unaware of the horror the bomb had caused, and as details of the destruction became gradually available, their need for a myth to explain them away became more and more desperate. Atrocities carried out by the Japanese were essential to this rationalizing, although these arguments never acknowledged their assumption that our actions were atrocities as well; and that, for all our assertions of moral superiority, we actually yearned to become our enemy, to become capable of the crimes our enemy committed. We had begun to measure the world in competing levels of terror, and the atomic bomb now meant that our terror could be absolute.*

These are not mere abstractions. They play themselves out in the realities of parents and children of that time – for if my father’s logic prevailed, then my survival, too, was linked to the incineration of vast numbers of human beings and the slow dying of many thousands more.In this version of the story, the Enola Gay carried me to safety. This is the unforgiving inheritance that the children of many World War II veterans (and their spouses – I think of my mother’s role as companion to my father’s need for the lie) find imposed on their experience of the past.

And so, outrage at the original proposal for the 1995 exhibition of the Enola Gay at the Smithsonian must be seen as an act of self-defense on the part of those veterans who are as yet unprepared to let the lie go. In order to preserve a fragile fiction of moral sanity, the veterans who believe what my father does could not tolerate any threat to their attempt at self-justification. And while the much reduced form of that first exhibition of sections of the plane –echoed in the current display of the aircraft intact – does not recount their version of history in any great detail, it still serves their purposes through its silence – the myth remains intact.

How would it be possible, then, to confront that myth in the only way that is really essential – to ask what it means to live out lives that we believe depend entirely upon our willingness to undertake, at this very moment, an act of nuclear genocide? Although the machines themselves have evolved into Trident ballistic missile submarines, the lie of the Enola Gay is unchanged, and the exhibition is complicit in it.

Museums like the ones devoted to Air and Space on the Mall in Washington, D.C. – and now in the recently opened Udvar -Hazy facility near Dulles Airport – are, in one sense at least, as great a threat as any of our current working armaments. While obsolete as a weapon, the Enola Gay retains its power to deceive. It has not been so much restored as recreated in the form of a storytelling mechanism which depicts the reality of total war as a glittering prop in a theatre meant to indoctrinate and reassure. When Kathy Boylan, Anne Quintano and I undertook a direct action at the Smithsonian on July 2, 1995, it was not our purpose to damage that object – that thing – known as the Enola Gay (although we were, of course, charged with just such a crime). It would have been pointless to mangle a machine that is not capable of functioning, but even though our gesture was symbolic, it had a real object. We were after the illusion of the Enola Gay with our blood and ashes; not to destroy the “property” which was the government’s controlling notion about its museum artifact, but to expose it as a self-justifying fabrication, and reveal, in some small way, the horrible reality it attempts to suppress.

When, at our trial, the state’s attorney used the word ‘desecrate’ to describe what we had done to the airplane, he dramatically, if inadvertently, confirmed the necessity for our action. In an extraordinary perversion of the sacred, the machine that dropped the bomb on Hiroshima had been transformed into an object of worship, a relic of salvation through terror.

But where was the legal argument that would counter this idolatry? The necessity defense does not apply in the same way that it would for a plowshares action against a Minuteman missile silo – a working machine of the present moment. The Enola Gay is simply a lying story that helps this culture explain away the horrors it has committed in the past, while serving to give license for both our current willingness to commit nuclear genocide and our uncritical acceptance of the the claim that violence is inevitable in all human affairs.

And where in the constrained procedure of the court was there a place for arguments in defense of historical and moral truth? There have been suits successfully brought against revisionist historians who claimed that the Holocaust had not taken place. During our trial, Kathy Boylan described “the blood of the victims of Hiroshima finally reaching up to touch the plane,” but we were granted no legal formula that would acknowledge the voices of the dead as there is in Akira Kurosawa’s film Rashômon, where a ghost testifies at a murder investigation.

We attempted to put the Smithsonian Institution itself on trial. What obligation does a museum have to present accurate information in its exhibits? Can it be held legally responsible for failing to do that? In the Holocaust Memorial Museum, visitors are confronted with the fatal indifference of the United States’ denial of asylum to Jewish refugees on board the ship St. Louis in 1939, and the later refusal to bomb the railways leading to Auschwitz because, according to a 1944 War Department letter, “it would not warrant the use of our resources.” Do the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki deserve any less of an acknowledgement from our collective conscience?

We argued that our action was meant to repair a display that was in a vandalized condition when we came to it, with its real history mutilated by censorship and fear. If there was any alteration in value to the plane as a result of what we did, it was in restoring its importance as evidence of a crime. Our hope was that the museum leave the plane permanently transformed as a way of acknowledging – finally – its own part in the conspiracy to keep us from the truth…and from repentance. That did not happen. But our action is a part of the Enola Gay’s history now, and brief as it was, the plane can never be quite the same again to those who witnessed its moment of exposure.

What right do we, or any, have to demand that this country confront the horrors of its own creating? What consolation can be offered to veterans like my father in return for abandoning the lie? Our acts of resistance are always, if not only, in the form of stories meant to bring people, not simply to their senses, but to their consciences. To tell the secret of the Enola Gay is to drain that machine of its power over us to accept it as an inevitability in our lives. And when the fatalism of violence is broken – then real salvation is possible.

July, 1995– August, 2004

*This has its obvious contemporary parallels, most succinctly stated by John K. Stoner: “A country which has dangled the sword of nuclear holocaust over the world for half a century and claims that someone else invented terrorism is a country out of touch with reality.”

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More Lies from a Machine: Revisiting the Enola Gay

But I have words

That would be howled out in the desert air,

Where hearing should not latch them.” – Macbeth, IV, iii

Crowded in the vast museum hangar, a war toy now, the Enola Gay is once again intact. The weapon proved restorable, but not the world it destroyed. This is an example of those ironies which, along with violence, are our culture’s most notable products. But what protest is adequate to the outrage?

Eight years ago, when a part of the Enola Gay’s fuselage was first displayed at the Air and Space Museum in Washington, three of us marked it with blood and ashes, part of the history of resistance to the exhibit which has been lost in the same way the plane’s history has been erased by the Smithsonian curators.

For a brief moment, the plane was like one of those legendary sites of murder which ooze the evidence of the crimes committed there.

Now the plane has been once again washed clean, and the academics have gathered to beg for words, demanding that a more complete history of the plane’s use be included in a display which now praises it as merely a triumph of technology.

But what printed narrative would be complete? What list of the dead? How account for the mutilated conscience of a man like the one for whose mother the plane is named and who, when asked his opinion of the more contemporary demands for the use of nuclear weapons, replied:

“Oh, I wouldn’t hesitate if I had the choice.”

How will the Hibakusha present at the opening of this new museum console the dead with their message that they have seen the distant machine a second time, now displayed as near and wonderful?

A possible answer would be to drag the plane into the desert to be scoured by sand to a metal skeleton, puzzled over by wandering naturalists, and explained by no documents other than the screaming of ghosts.  – S.V.K., January, 2004

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Editor’s Footnote: I think the reason that Stephen’s narrative stikes such a strong emotional cord with me is that the deeply engrainedveil of fear we lived, under as a generation of children during the Cold War `50s and `60s, seemed to know no rational bounds.  Global annihilation was a reality that post-war generations came to accept as a distinct possibility.  The U.S. government was principally responsible for shaping and managing public awareness regarding the devastating consequences of a nuclear stike on any major city in the country.  Mutually Assurred Destruction was the watch-word–an unsettling claim that an ever-expanding atomic arms program was essential to insure that any enemy (assumed to be the Soviets) would be dissuaded from a pre-emptive strike–if they understood an equally-destructive counter-attack as a virtual certainty. 

Pulic education became a priority in the face of this looming Armagedon.  The language adopted to address the threat of nuclear war was carefully crafted to impart information aimed at survival strategies.  Popular notions of ‘Duck and Cover’ were practiced in all public schools and businesses in the 1950s.  The public felt reassured and prepared (my father built a fall-out shelter in our celler), while the reality confronting all those in range of a nuclear attack would have been certian incineration, or lingering death from burns, radiation and the calamatous failure of the societal infrastructure.

What follows is a brief exerpt from a national education program for children in the `50s that exemplifies the “lies” and “myths” alluded to in the esssays above.  I recall that we all allowed ourselves to be convinced that survival was possible after the awful reality of a nearby nucelar explosion; because to consider the alternative was just too unimaginable: http://youtu.be/u1MQ4eyg6U4