Question 7

Driving into Rosebery with the documentary’s host, Flanagan remembered being at a friend’s birthday party when he was seven where the boy’s miner father, despite being drunk and tired, played the trumpet for them. The next day, Flanagan attends the funeral procession for a miner who was killed in a mining accident with his mother.

As a child, Flanagan’s mother drove them northwest near her hometown to gather bags of red soil that she would spread in their back garden in Hobart, in the south of the island.

Flanagan says his mother had her high-spirited nature “beaten out of her” by her own mother, Mate, and Catholic school, but she was not resentful (173). However, after his father retired, his mother came to visit Flanagan and told him that his father was rearranging her cupboards—a violation that frustrated her so much she started to cry.

Flanagan’s mother grew up poor on a farm and she held to many routines she grew up with, like making bread daily and eating whatever scraps were left. Flanagan wished she hadn’t made so many compromises and had let her true personality shine through regardless of the expectations others had of her.

Flanagan’s mother would sometimes hit him and his siblings when they were growing up. When he was an adult, she apologized, but he told her he “never thought of those acts as violent”—she was simply doing what she had to in order to keep the household running (179).

With the documentary crew, Flanagan found his childhood home, which had since been overgrown by the rainforest. He reflects on how, as a child, he had a condition that led him to become increasingly deaf, isolating him somewhat from the rest of their community. He learned to appreciate small details of the world, like “the smell of rain” (181).

Flanagan once wrote about a character who rubbed hand cream on her dying mother’s hand, but Flanagan never actually did this when his mother was dying in the nursing home. He feels ashamed that he refused to let his elderly parents come to live with him.

Many people came to visit his mother during the three days she was dying in the nursing home. She said something meaningful to each visitor. Flanagan saw that death could be “beautiful.”

The chapter is a sentence fragment: “My mother and my father—” (185).

Flanagan reflects on his parents as fiercely principled people despite their difficult lives. They worked to create love in their own lives and the lives of others. Flanagan once thought this was naïve, but he later realized that “the naïveté was all mine” (186).

Standing outside his childhood home, Flanagan thought about his mother helping him with his speech therapy when he was six. He thought about all the love in that action that he was “unable to express” to the documentary crew (187).

After the US dropped nuclear bombs on Japan, scientist Leo Szilard spent the rest of his life raising awareness about the danger of nuclear warfare. However, nuclear proliferation continued apace, and Szilard’s campaign became increasingly “quixotic.”

Toward the end of his life, Szilard wrote a short story called “The Voice of the Dolphins” published in a 1961 collection by the same name about dolphins who work with scientists to end nuclear proliferation and usher in an era of world peace. Six months after it was published, the USSR detonated the largest nuclear bomb in history, the Tsar Bomba.

The Tsar Bomba was 3,300 times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Szilard’s idealism about the integrity of scientists had been tarnished—in part because of Szilard’s own contributions to the field—by their work on nuclear weapons.

In 1931, H. G. Wells toured General Electric’s research facility with chemist Irving Langmuir and Langmuir’s assistant, Bernard Vonnegut. Langmuir suggested Wells write a story about a form of ice that “could freeze whole oceans” (194) via chemical chain reaction. Bernard passed this idea on to his brother, Kurt, and in 1962 Kurt Vonnegut published a novel based on that premise called Cat’s Cradle. The novel mentions the genocide of the Tasmanian Aboriginal people as an example of an “apocalypse.”

Cat’s Cradle was positively reviewed in the New York Times by Terry Southern who co-wrote the Stanley Kubrick film Dr. Strangelove (1964) about a Nazi-inflected madman who creates a Doomsday Bomb that “could kill all life on the planet” (196). The cynical vision of scientific progress in Cat’s Cradle and Dr. Strangelove is a far cry from Wells’s optimistic view of progress.

The physicist behind the Tsar Bomba, Andrei Sakharov, read a story called “My Trial as a War Criminal” in Szilard’s collection The Voice of the Dolphins. The story is about Szilard’s trial as a war criminal for his encouragement of the US development of the nuclear bomb. Sakharov was inspired by the story to speak out against the USSR’s nuclear weapons program and became a “dissident.”

Szilard did his best to bring a moral framework to scientific progress, but he failed.

Prior to the bombing of Hiroshima, the Americans were planning on invading Japan which would have resulted in millions of casualties. Captain Thomas Ferebee and others felt dropping the bomb saved those lives. Flanagan notes that some atrocities are labeled war crimes, like the dropping of the bomb on Hiroshima, while others, like the Death Railway [that transported slave labor used in Japan during WWII] are forgotten.

Before bombing Hiroshima, Ferebee had accidentally bombed French civilians in Rouen. Twenty years later, he participated in the carpet bombing of Vietnam. The equivalent of 3,571 bombs dropped on Hiroshima were dropped in the Vietnamese war. Flanagan reflects that some of war crimes are remembered more than others.

After visiting the coal mine where his father had worked, Flanagan goes to Tokyo to meet with people who worked in the POW camps. He meets with a medical orderly who describes the camp as “hell,” but he didn’t help the POWs because “we did not see them as human beings” (204).

Later, Flanagan meets with another former POW camp guard who his father hated. The man’s name is Korean, Lee Hak-rae, but he went by the Japanese name Kakurai Hiromura during WWII. He was convicted of war crimes and later released in 1956.

In an interview with Flanagan, Lee Hak-rae claimed not to remember any violence that took place in the camp except the “violent face slapping” punishment called binta. Flanagan asks Lee Hak-rae to slap him, and the man does, three times. Flanagan can see that Lee’s body remembered how to inflict violence even if his mind couldn’t. On the third slap, a 7.3 earthquake hits Tokyo.

After the interview, Lee Hak-rae gives Flanagan an envelope of money worth about $20 to give to his father. Flanagan accepts it but immediately throws the money away after leaving.

By August 1945, the POWs were starving to death. Flanagan notes that they would likely have been killed in the event of a US invasion, in which case their lives were saved by the bombing of Hiroshima.

Flanagan tells his now 97-year-old father about how the Japanese people who worked in the camps claimed not to remember many details but seemed ashamed about what they had done. Flanagan’s father has himself forgotten about his time in the camps and “in the end all that remain[s] to him [is] an idea of love” (213).

Flanagan says he wrote a novel to understand the violence inflicted on his father and others during the war, but when he finished it, he “realized [he] understood nothing” (213).

Flanagan repeats the quote from Chekhov’s short story: “Who loves longer?” (213).

Flanagan’s father gets sick and Flanagan goes to visit him. He tells his father the book based on his experiences as a POW is finished. That night his father dies.