The mannequins are about to get their plaster asses blown off. Vaporized. Nuked on the Nevada Test Site. But somehow they don't seem tremendously concerned. In fact, they're barely paying attention. They appear, in this black and white 1960s newsreel, almost dispassionate. They're lounging in their living room, lamentably located a few thousand feet from ground zero, and they're smiling. No crazed fret, no fist-shaking protests, no folk songs.
Their apathy is not lost on the narrator of this government propaganda film, the comely actress June Collins. She's the first to point it out. "Look at the mannequins sitting about indifferently," she says, shaming them in the voiceover. "Will you, like the mannequins, just sit and wait?"
It was a few weeks prior to Bush's bombing of Iraq, and I was watching this Civil Defense Administration's war-preparedness video on a Greyhound-size bus trekking across the dirt floor of a giant earth wound, a gaping A-bomb scar in the desert. About 40 people showed up for the Department of Energy's free monthly tour of the Test Site, because, apparently, despite wall-to-wall military coverage leading up to the invasion of Iraq, we couldn't slake our wretched thirst for all things potentially apocalyptic.
So we took a tour of our destructive nature. It was a fine day. We brought picnic lunches. We saw where our government tested hundreds of weapons of mass destruction. We looked out the bus windows at warped skeletons of steel bridges, empty death pens where dogs and pigs were radiated, all manner of sample house and hotel burnt, bent, turned to rubble. At each scrap of ruin, we leaned and stretched for the best view, and our tour guide said, "Had you been in that, you probably wouldn't have made it," or "This shot was a real success. You can see that the concussion tore all the skin off of that building."
In between stops where we got to stand on the lip of devastation and look down into would-be death pits, we watched videos of test blasts and mushroom clouds. Over and over on the TVs in the bus, a countdown—10, nine eight ... kaboom! We oohed and ahhed like it was the Fourth of July. A woman a few rows back said of a small mushroom cloud, "Isn't that a cute one?"
And that was the comment that foreshadowed the whole disturbing rest-of-the-story. Because a few hours later, I would find myself standing at the Nevada Test Site Historical Foundation's gift stand, holding earrings made to look like Fat Man and Little Boy, the atomic bombs the U.S. dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima, killing a hundred thousand people and ending WWII. I looked at the dangly miniatures and thought, "Aren't those cute?" before my inner killjoy quickly bellowed, "What kind of sicko are you? People died."
And now, six months later, as the precision strategery in Iraq swells into a death trap and the Foundation prepares to open the Atomic Testing Museum and Store on October 2 on East Flamingo, it all makes terrible sense: In the end, it's always about the spoils of war, the booty. And I'm way too far down the food chain to debate the large-scale international booty here. But on the teeny, fun-loving-capitalist scale, the booty may be the freedom to want very badly a set of salt 'n' pepper shakers shaped like nuclear bombs ($4.50, e-Bay), or Fat Man and Little Boy shot glasses ($8.95, U.S. National Atomic Museum), or a photo of Miss Atomic Bomb, a cheery pin-up girl sporting a mushroom cloud bodysuit ($15, e-Bay).
This sort of thing seems sporting in the what's-not-fun-about-kitschifying-genocide sort of way, but it isn't always received in the same indelicate spirit.
Turns out, determining what's a cute symbol of a war atrocity and what's not is tricky business. In Amsterdam this month, a Polish artist was routed by the public for selling "Auschwitz souvenirs"—keychains and T-shirts with skull-and-crossbones signs from the camp's electric fences. She apologized.
And in 1999, the Japan Council Against A and H Bombs learned that the U.S. National Atomic Museum was selling those very same Fat Man and Little Boy earrings. They were pissed. Offended. Reminded of thousands dead. They objected. They issued a statement: "We are enraged by the United States, which proudly presents replicas of nuclear weapons without showing any repentance for the bombing."
But last spring, after picnicking at an A-bomb crater, I considered buying the earrings at the Test Site. Proceeds were to benefit the Historical Foundation, which in turn uses the money to fund the new Atomic Testing Museum, which seems to be a long overdue recognition of an important passage of Nevada, U.S. and world history.
I didn't buy them. I couldn't. Instead, I bought a couple of cheesy postcards with almost no kitsch factor, and felt alternately prudish and unpatriotic.