Writing to be Read

Hello to my loyal readers: all dozen of you! If you are enjoying this blog, how about forwarding it to your friends? I'm human and just as egoncentric as everyone else. I'd love to be read. You can reach me at dianamdeluca@aol.com if you want to comment or argue. But there is also a place at the end of each entry for you to comment more publicly. Thanks for reading this! Diana

Me for Vice President

The wisest political commentary I’ve received lately comes from my hair stylist. She’s a single woman, earning her living the hard way, paying her taxes and not seeing that she’s getting much in return. “Calm down,” she told me as she cut my hair. “Now that the Wall Street thing has happened, people are reminded of what’s important. They’ll see through the cute stuff with Palin. We’re smarter than they think.”

Her calm confidence made me wonder why I am so personally offended by the selection of John McCain’s Mini-Me, the trophy Vice President, Sarah Palin. I think part of it may be because many other women—including me—appear better qualified to be a heartbeat away other than just being women, handy, and agreeing with John McCain.

Wow--you may be thinking. She thinks she's qualified to run for such high office? Well--if Ms. Palin is the yardstick, I think I am. And why not? I've been in public life for a lot longer than she has and I'll stack my university experience against her state experience. The budget and infrastructure of most big public universities are larger than Alaska's and I'm willing to bet that our students and faculty are just as independent and unruly as her citizens. So please bear with me and allow me to provide you with the following checklist of our qualifcations.

People Skills: In my younger days, I went out on the picket line for women’s issues. We didn’t get it all (the Equal Rights Amendment) and women still earn less than men but we got some of it. In fact, it was quite exciting to think that the FBI might have files on us all—alas, when I applied to see my file, the FBI claimed not have one. I bet Ms. Palin doesn’t even think about what we went through to make sure she could have a career. Score: one point for me for social activism.

Overcoming Adversity: My doctorate got earned the hard way—even though I was a good student the scholarships went to the men (they had families to support, don’t you know?) so the burden of graduate school fell on me and my family. Score: one point for me for proven determination.

Administrative Experience: My most salient experience, of course, is that I have been a cabinet member on the staff of the president of the University of Hawaii. I was, in fact, listed as one of three most powerfully placed women on the president’s staff. We worked with a budget about $1 billion (fifteen years ago), so it probably compares well with Alaska’s state budget today which is around $8 billion. Administering a university system has to be equivalent of being the mayor of a small town. Score: Let’s be generous: one point for each of us.

Dealing with Difficult People: The president sent me out as a trouble shooter to wherever trouble appeared. This included dealing with fraternities (who liked to send their pledges on a nude run round the campus after dark--the Honolulu Police Department loved that), the Athletics Department and the NCAA, which I am sure Ms. Palin has never been faced with. Score: One point for me although anyone who has dealt the NCAA might say this was worth two.

Federal Policy: Then there were the legal problems. I worked with the state attorney general to manage the university’s unending law suits (usually with the university as a defendant)—everything from people cutting their feet on sprinklers to equal opportunity and sexual harassment complaints. Ms. Palin probably knows about the employment policies given the brouhaha with her ex-brother-in-law, but I doubt she has dealt with a student complaining about being stalked by a professor. Score: One point for me.

State Legislature: When I left the university, I had two commendations from the State of Hawaii Legislature and a personal commendation from the governor. Now, I admit that I did not run for office but my office supervised the university’s lobbyists and I was named by the governor to commissions and task forces. I was part of the hands-on, direct process for establishing international agreements with Viet Nam (prior to normalization of relations), Russia, and Thailand. I figure my international experience (got her there) makes up for at least some of her public experience. Score: I’ll give myself a point here, but I’ll concede her three points.

The grand total then is six points for me and four for Ms. Palin. The only real advantage I see that she has over me (besides getting herself elected) is her hobby of shooting wolves from aircraft. But since I feel that even a wolf deserves a fair chance, I will concede that one to her. Forgive me if I don’t award any points.

Wal-Mart Mom: I’ve been told that Palin’s strength is with Wal-Mart Moms—apparently these are votes that McCain can’t get by himself. Now, I don’t know who they mean by Wal-Mart Moms— Cindy McCain may not shop at Wal-Mart, but I do. My step-granddaughter works there and if the economy keeps sliding, I might be glad of a job there myself. I therefore believe I can counter Ms. Palin’s advantage by arguing that I too am a mother and that I do indeed shop at Wal-Mart.

Therefore, given my obvious advantage, may I ask for your support of my nomination for Vice President of the United States? As I hope I have demonstrated, I have the requisite experience and will stand by my pledges to you (as long as they are useful). But I do make one promise that I intend to keep. I promise faithfully that I will not go out and buy new eyeglasses no matter how cute they look on my opponent.

Los Alamos Mon Amour

When I was an undergrad at the University of Hawaii’s Manoa campus back in the early sixties, there was a tavern called The Blue Goose in Mo’ili’ili, the small town below the campus. I had a husband and child at home so I didn’t get to spend much time there, but I did have lunch now and then. I remember it mostly as dark and somewhat noisy, but one thing remains vivid. On one wall, there was a large poster about what to do in the event of a nuclear attack on the Hawaiian Islands. There was a list of what sounded like fairly prudent precautions (stay away from windows, don’t look at the blast etc.) but it ended with the advice to get under a table, put your head between your legs, and kiss your ass goodbye.

The question of surviving a nuclear attack was intensely interesting to us in Hawaii because of the many military targets in the chain. We knew that if the main island of Oahu came under attack, very few would be left to kiss anything goodbye. This realization was underlined by the fact that Hiroshima and Nagasaki had happened less that twenty years before, there was a mad scramble among nations to amass as many weapons as possible, and even our own government was occupied blowing up empty land somewhere in the deserts of Nevada and New Mexico. I know every generation loses its innocence at some point, but I also have to believe the new power to blow up the world made our angst uniquely poignant.

All during the time I was in college, we lived under threat. It was the 1960s version of today’s terrorism and just as real. We watched the Cuban Missile Crisis unfold and held our breaths. Even when that passed, the threat didn’t. With time, we developed a cynical ability to laugh at what we feared—a point of view brilliantly reflected in the movie “Dr. Strangelove” in 1964. Some of us became activists against all wars, others tried not to think too much about it, yet others—like me—became morbidly curious. I found myself wondering why this monster had been developed, how it came about, and where it had all happened. This is what took me recently to Los Alamos—a city on a plateau high above Santa Fe, the site of the Manhattan Project that developed the bomb and still home to the Los Alamos National Lab.

I think I went to Los Alamos looking for a piece of the youthful joy that we of my generation lost. But as Sid and I drove down the main street of modern research facilities—still secure but not surrounded as they once were by barbed wire designed to both enclose and exclude—I realized I was seeking the wrong thing. All of a sudden it was 1942. The war could still be lost. The Axis allies were said to be working on a new weapon of catastrophic power and if this nation were to survive, the Axis had to be beaten to it. The most brilliant scientific brains were gathered on this muddy mesa with no less a mission than to develop a weapon that would end the war. Among those who literally “disappeared” from civilian life, there was a real sense of mission and excitement. The Los Alamos historical museum housed in one of the few surviving buildings used by the original project shows just how uncomfortable the setting was and what little reward there was except for contributing to the national effort. And yet that was enough. The scientists and the graduate students stayed and did the job.

I am quite sure the scientists didn’t think at first about the consequences of what they were achieving. Their focus was on solving the various technical issues associated with fission and implosion—a chain reaction that they weren’t even sure would work. They certainly weren’t thinking about students at The Blue Goose twenty years in the future. The awareness of the bomb’s potential came after the Trinity test and as the implications of nuclear weapons became more obvious and the post World War II world began to take shape. There were to be protests around the world. There were to be recriminations. There were to be the true horror stories of what happened at Ground Zero. There were to be accusations of disloyalty made against some of the scientists who wanted to harness the power of the atom for peaceful purposes and discourage its use as a military weapon. There was, in other words, to be the luxury of hindsight.

Los Alamos reminds me of the controversy surrounding WWII Bomber Command. At a time when Britain stood alone and at one point had only two-weeks’ worth of food for the island, the niceties of bombing only military targets seemed beside the point. No one wanted deliberately to bomb civilians, but in the struggle for survival they died on both sides. When the RAF and then the RCAF and the USAF took the war to Germany, the point was to win. Looking back on the bombing and the incredible loss of life both among the aircrews and those on the ground, some revisionist historians have tried to rewrite history to the intense annoyance of the surviving aircrews who risked their lives and watched their comrades—my father among them—drop to a fiery death. But nothing is clear-cut during wartime. I remember bomb craters in the roads in my hometown of Brighton on England’s south coast. I heard how adults still talked about the Blitz in London and how they said bombing Germany was getting a bit of our own back. It’s only natural that perspectives change with time and victory.

Much the same has happened at Los Alamos. When it comes to how we view the Manhattan Project and the scientists working on it, it seems to me that we have a choice. We can look only at the devastation caused by the splitting of the atom and decry the waste of the arms race that ensued. Many have done that and I can recall protesters in London waving placards saying ‘Ban the Bomb.’ Or we can marvel at the fact that the work was achieved at all, let alone under conditions of extreme security and haste, and understand that it was part and parcel of the time that spawned it. Perhaps we need to do a bit of both. But however we choose to view the work conducted at Los Alamos, we need to acknowledge that it changed our world forever.