The East Is Red
by Paul Cameron Brown

We can survive a nuclear War. It's scarcely credible, I
know, but listen.
The human race has great resilience. We've come back
before    -     all those plagues, the Black Death,
despoliations, scorched earth policies "prove" it.
We're proliferate and we love the sex act. It won't be
hard; human fecundity is a count-on. There are so
many of us, see.
People have overestimated the alleged horror. After
all, (Khruschev pounding a UN table with his shoes).
somebody walked away from firebombing at Dresden.
Look at at all the escapees in Hiroshima. Get the drift?
A Bomb's a Bomb. Really. The really big one (to take
Ed Sullivan'a phrase out of context) is just more of the
same. Try to absorb that logic. Ergo, Ignorance must
be, in toto strength.
Enraged by the impropriety of it all? Anyone who
disagrees with this is coarse and vulgar.
Of course there would have to be "preparations". (If
you have "to prepare" to be a hairdresser, it stands to
reason you would have to ready yourself for this.)
Confronting, facts you can die only once. After that,
the mushroom cloud is anticlimactic. Remember the
Magic Mushroom    -    the cult that centred its teachings
around Christianlty's debt to hallucegenic drugs?
Some said preposterous    -    Christ a magician doping
his followers and using the Cross as a stage prop.
Amazing. In this world anything is possible. We have
finally created a mutant of people who eccept
anything. And God just another man, albeit a tricky
devil at that. Imagine fooling everyone for 2,000
years!
Next, we'll be told we're actually dead. I know some of
you have already suspected this but it will be
"confirmed". Our leaders will troopse out impressive
sounding "flow charts" and backup statistics. There
will even be a special chamber to experience what it
was like before you knew you were dead with
carefully monitored "response signals" to give the
audience a "sensasound" aura just like living through
an earthquake, only fake. Just remember Monty
Python and "possibility".
Meanwhile, in ensuing preparations for war, no
aspect of the psychological preparedness should be
overlooked. We don't have to be told there is no
substitute for victory.
"The play's the thing wherein I'll catch the conscience
of a King." Hamlet knew. So does The Kremlin. The
KGB can "prove" a nuclear scenario is winnable.
According to the most painstaking calculations, a
conventional war of any duration "swings" into a pre-nuclear
stage. That's when the nuclear option
becomes "viable". That's when Gorbachev and the
boys calculate "target readiness" and plummet the
depths of the human spirit.
The East is Red and ready. The Chinese have been told
by Mao 300 million or their number cremated is a
small price for global supremacy. A human dung hill
is being set in motion for another generation of
poppies. Marx lends credibility to this, but with a
different opiate for the masses. The
lumpenproletariat can hack it. Such clever playing
with facts, now I understand genius.
For a young physicist, a 100 megaton blast is the
culmination of the creative spirit. Certainly
irrefutable evidence, this quintessential "spirit".
I read Toronto would be "messy" in the event of a
nuclear strike. Half-baked and eviscerated thinking
Or just inescaspable?
Chin up. We'll survive or at least part of us will. We
really are "malleable". It will be a "transitional stage",
a step upwards on the evolutionary ladder.
Radioactivity and genetics are at work with one
another.
When the Enola Gay dropped the first atomic device,
the pilot was later to go mad.
Maybe this has already happened to the world and
there's no one to discern the difference.
Maybe a forest of "maybes" has already sprouted and
left a forest of dust clouding the collective vision.
Maybe it's all too terrifying to be taken seriously and
disbelief is the escape hatch. Like the pilot's lapse into
comforting drugs for reassurance or the dervishes
with their Magic Mushroom.
Maybe it's closer to what Harry Truman announced
after "deploying" the first "device" or exercising the
nuclear option in the jargon of the strategists.
They started it. We prepared to end it. No regrets.
Turned over on his deathbed and went to sleep