nude highway driving

Sorry for the sporadic posting; I’ve been all hopped up on Smack lately. Too much stress, not enough play. Japanese soft drinks named after drug slang (or short for Skim Milk Acid Carbonate Keeping) are my only way out. When I become cooler, I’ll start drinking Los Angeles Cola — it goes great with whale burgers.

The Mainichi Shimbun has a special today about the lost articles of Pulitzer Prize-winner George Weller — the first Western journalist to see Nagasaki after the nuclear bombing 60 years ago. Weller snuck in despite a Gen. MacArthur ban, and wrote 25,000 words detailing what he saw. He sent them to Tokyo by hand, where the military refused to release or return them. Weller thought they were lost forever, but his son, Andrew, found carbon copies a year ago in his father’s Rome apartment.

An Editor & Publisher article quotes Weller’s son saying that Weller thought he was censored because MacArthur wanted all the credit for winning the war, while others suggest the U.S. didn’t want details of the horrific effects of radiation affecting world opinion. At the time, the standard line was that anyone not killed in the blast of the bombs was fine — there was no such thing as radiation sickness, which Weller named “disease X” in the pieces.

The Mainichi has four of the articles online. The second and fourth go into disturbing detail about what’s happening to the people who “survived” the blast.

It’s hard to say if the American public would have been more horrified sooner or if the nuclear program would have been hurt had Weller’s stories been published then. Australian journalist Wilfred Burchett filed reports from Hiroshima that were originally published in London, but reaction was muted by an intense propaganda effort by the U.S. military (with the help of the New York Times) to convince people that the whole “radiation sickness” thing was just Japanese propaganda.

Us journalists love to think that what we do helps make a difference, but it’s not always easy to believe that, especially when the fight to share the truth never seems to end. Luckily, I know we’ll never throw in the towel.

“Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.”

Click above for the inspiring Stanford commencement speech from Steve Jobs. Seriously good stuff. I understand what he’s saying and I totally agree with what he’s saying … but for some annoying reason I can’t actually live by what he’s saying — something I’ve been struggling with for years. What does it take, short of almost dying, to push us into that frame of existence?

But which one is the robot?