When dealing with the autocrats of the Kremlin, President Reagan
engaged in a recurring fantasy. What if we, the prime powers in the
world, were faced with some exogenous calamity, an
extra-terrestrial force that threatened earth’s destruction? Then,
couldn’t we pull together? Immerse our differences in a common will
to survive? In other words, he saw the immense forces arrayed
against one another put to a common use and, calamity avoided,
imagined the better world that would surely emerge.
Hollywood has had occasion to pick up the theme; aliens arriving
à la War of the Worlds, an errant asteroid that
must be diverted or destroyed, variations on the theme of
extraneous danger. Which gets us to the tsunami. I would say “tidal
wave,” but gosh how that would date us, wouldn’t it? Only in 1930s
movies do we hear “tidal wave.” The avant garde TV’ers were swift
to adopt that Japanese word, tsunami, or “harbor wave,”
and clutch it to their lexicographic bosoms as though they had
known its meaning all along. Just as they were pronouncing with
certainty the “known” death toll as it mounted by tens of thousands
with each passing hour. It will never be known. Partly because it
never was known how many lived in the affected area to begin with.
Consensus seems to indicate 150,000 dead. But with ten times that
number acutely affected.
Was this it? Was this natural catastrophe the overweening event
of the late President’s ruminations? Do we see now, the Tamil of
Sri Lanka, and the bomb-maker in Bali, what greater enemies we face
— the ultimate mortality that dwarfs our petty concerns with one
another’s politics, even faiths? Do we find in this epochal event
the larger lesson of humanity? As we write the check to UNICEF dare
we hope the driver of the bomb-laden car will drive on by next
time?
Probably not. The cleavage was maintained early on, not by the
needy in the trees, but by the well-fed in the offices. The
Americans were stingy, went the complaint. The richest country on
earth putting up a pittance, $15 million for starters. The amount
of course was swiftly multiplied, a Secretary of State dispatched
to the area and a national donations campaign was formed headed by
the two most-recent ex-Presidents. There had been a reflex action
well before the organized relief campaign got off the ground. Tons
of material, from toys to canned food, lie stacked around the
United States with no immediate means of getting it to the Indian
Ocean. “Money,” say the experienced charity relievers. “Send money
and we’ll use it to buy what’s needed and to transport it to where
it’s needed.”
There was a sneaking suspicion during World War Two that the
tons of aid being sent the Soviet Union was getting re-labeled
before it left the receiving port so those capitalists in America
wouldn’t get credited by the recipients. But in the tsunami case,
who cares? Feed the children, treat the water, relieve the pain.
Let the guy in the glass office bitch ‘til the cows come home.
So, was this it? No, Mr. President. Afraid not. This attack may
be a mere precursor of what lies beyond the ken of us who stay a
little while here on a neutral planet. This was big, this tidal
wave thing. And terrifying. But selective of a given section of the
populace. Not the threatened mutual annihilation that could bind
diverse humanity to a common cause. That lesson lies just beyond
reach.
Or is it much closer at hand, in the contemplation of one’s own
individual mortality?
