Author: Marty Aussenberg

Well, it’s finally happening; as the headline of my piece in February, “Gadfly: Aux Barricades, Wisconsin!”, foreshadowed, the barricades are finally being stormed, and, this time not just in Madison, Wisconsin. It’s beginning to look like “American Spring” may have finally arrived!

The truly grass-roots-initiated (as opposed to the Astroturfed “Tea Party”) “Occupy Wall Street” demonstration has caught on, not only in lower Manhattan, but from Portland, Maine to Honolulu, Hawaii, and many places in between, including (amazingly enough), right here in River City (and internationally as well).

Unsurprisingly, the corporate media did their best to ignore the uprising, preferring to wait for the de rigeur over-reaction of the local constabulary to cover the disobedient rabble aspects of the demonstrations. And, while the MSM’s obliviousness to the events was predictable, even some of the alternative media (ahem), have ignored events that have begun to acquire a life all their own, even when those events have been happening right in their own backyard.

The media were faced with the problem of how best to discredit this rising tide of protest, and settled on suggesting that the protesters didn’t even know what they were protesting about, were unfocused and had no coherent message. Strange how that criticism was never leveled at the Tea Party during the demonstrations that marked its infancy. It must be because they wore better costumes.

Better yet, many in the media decided they could dismiss the protest by caricaturing the protesters as hippies, counter-culturalists, or best of all, anarchists. The fact that many of the protestors have been young, or students, has been seen as an effective way to marginalize the protest, in toto. I mean, it’s not as if students, many of whom are crushed under the burden of loans together with an eviscerated job market, have any skin in the game, right, or like many of the most effective protest movements in history were started by students.

Admittedly, the protestors on Wall Street don’t have the luxury of a single-issue grievance, like the Wisconsin public unions did, and are not as easily grouped under a single banner as those union members were, but their grievances are no less well defined. Their problem (and what makes the media think they’re so easily marginalized) is the sheer number of those grievances, from Wall Street’s avarice and corruption to a government that is presiding over the demise of the middle class, the dangerously wide income disparity and an increase in corporate power and entitlement while rendering the peon working classes powerless and disenfranchised.

And then, of course, it makes it ever so much easier to ridicule any attempt to protest society’s injustices if “Hollywood” gets involved. How dare famous people have principles, much less stand up for them! We saw that with the efforts to liberate the West Memphis Three, and it’s being used, once again, with the Wall Street protests, as celebrities like Michael Moore and Susan Sarandon demonstrate their solidarity with the protestors.

I have no idea whether these protests will end up being nothing more than a flash in the pan, or will spawn the kind of push-back against the status quo that could result in meaningful reform of our entire social, economic or electoral systems. What I do know, however, is that these protests are a long overdue departure from the kind of complacency that has facilitated the takeover of our society by greedy, power-hungry corporatists, facilitated by their willing (and well-paid-for) handmaidens in the halls of government, and that can’t be anything but good.

Right on, brothers and sisters!

Are we safe yet? From 9/11 commemoration hysteria, I mean.

It astounds me that every year since the tragedy (and this year more than ever before), we don sackcloth and ashes to bemoan the untimely and tragic deaths of 2,974 innocents, and in the process, pay homage (if you buy the official story) to a bunch of ragtag zealots for bringing an entire country to its knees, supposedly with a handful of sharp objects.

Doesn’t anyone understand that, by doing so, what we’re doing is actually celebrating the terrorists’ success, and doing what we’re supposed to so assiduously avoid, namely hand them yet another victory.

Where is the outrage?, I constantly wonder on these Groundhog-Day-like occasions, which should be righteously targeted at the people who allowed this disaster to happen? Why did the supposedly most exceptional country on earth—-you know, the one our politicians ask for God to bless at the end of every speech they make—-fall victim, again according to the official story, to a tiny band of dedicated madmen who managed to turn the most elaborate, gargantuan, expensive defensive apparatus ever amassed in the history of mankind into an ineffectual outfit more characteristic of the Keystone Kops?

Why is George Bush, who ignored the warnings leading up to the event and who couldn’t even get off his butt with anything like a sense of urgency to assume his role as commander-in-chief when he was told the country was under attack, given a place of honor in the ceremonies commemorating the 10th anniversary of a tragedy he allowed to happen?

And why is Rudi Giuliani, whose failure to learn, much less apply, any of the lessons he should have learned from the first attack on the World Trade Center made him directly responsible for the deaths of over 400 of New York’s first responders eight years later, allowed anywhere near those ceremonies, much less to parlay that abject incompetence into a lucrative consulting career and even a shot at the presidency?

Oh, I know: in the words our current president used to explain why Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, et al, aren’t being prosecuted (or even investigated) for war crimes: We’re supposed to look forward, not backward, which, of course, flies in the face of the very raison d’etre for the 9/11 commemorations.

When you stop to think about it, the direct (and I emphasize that word) effect of what happened on 9/11 actually impacted a relatively small number of people. How many relatives, friends, acquaintances, fellow workers, businesses, etc. do 3,000 people have connections to? 20,00? 50,000? Maybe even 100,000, but not much more, in a country of (at the time) about 280 million people.

The main reason the events of that day affected the country as a whole was because of our government’s reaction to it, and, of course, because of our collective astonishment that our government could have let it happen. Just like the last sneak attack on our citizens, Pearl Harbor, the events of 9/11 had a far greater penumbral, than immediate, effect because of the war(s) it caused us to enter/start, than the event itself ever had.

Make no mistake: the events of 9/11 aren’t commemorated to honor, or even to avenge, the memory of the people who died on that day; it’s commemorated as part of a continuing effort by our government to justify everything it’s done in reaction to it. 9/11 cannot be allowed to fade from the country’s collective memory because, if it did, people would never tolerate the atrocities our government has committed in the name of those who died on that day. As if to accentuate that purpose, have you noticed how the government comes up with some new (but inevitably either non-existent or inconsequential) terrorist threat just about the time of the commemoration? This year was no exception.

The real outrage, and the event that truly deserves the attention and collective grief of the entire country, is the deaths that occurred after 9/11. Over 6,000 American troops have died in the two wars that were started using 9/11 as a ruse, and that doesn’t count the thousands of Iraqis, Afghans, Pakistanis and who knows what other nationals we’ve killed as a result of those wars, or the tens of thousands more who’ve been wounded.

One could argue that dying was one of the consequences the men and women who volunteered for the military knew was a risk of their willingness to fight, whereas the victims on 9/11 never thought dying was a risk of going to work that day, which makes them more worthy of our collective sympathy. But injustice comes in various forms, post-9/11: it is no less unjust for soldiers to die as cannon fodder in wars they didn’t start, and never should have been started, than for civilians to die in ones they didn’t start either but are being fought in their names.

But the crowning irony of the consequences of 9/11 is that while we’ve engaged in an exercise of collective grief every September 11th for its relatively few victims, in that same time, over 150,000 people in this country have been murdered, nearly 6 million people have died of cancer and untold thousands more have died because the supposedly richest country in the world couldn’t figure out a way to provide them the health care they needed to live. But we don’t hold annual rituals of remembrance for those victims of 9/11, even though that’s what they are, because with the untold trillions this country has wasted fighting two (now three) unnecessary wars, more police could have been hired, more medical research could have been done and the deaths of millions of uninsured citizens could have been prevented.

So, forgive me if I didn’t join our country’s collective lamentation about the events of 9/11, since I would rather mourn the lack of accountability of the people who let it happen, or the people who continue to be its victims, far-removed from where it happened though they may be.

If you’re reading this, I suppose you should rejoice that the end of the world didn’t happen last Saturday, as the kooky, self-professed prophet of doom, Harold Camping, the octogenarian televangelist who made a similar prediction in 1994, prophesied. Congratulations for being a survivor, and, more importantly, for not buying into this goofball’s apocalyptic scenario.

Camping’s not the first, and he undoubtedly won’t be the last, to confidently predict the end of the world. I’m reminded of the New Yorker cartoon showing a Christ-like figure holding a sign that reads “The End Is Near” chanting, as he walks down a crowded Manhattan sidewalk, to the obvious alarm of his fellow pedestrians, “10-9-8-7…” Remember the Heaven’s Gate episode of the 90’s? In that one, dozens of believers committed mass suicide because they bought into the prediction, brought on by the appearance of the Hale-Bopp comet, that the earth’s demise was imminent, but that they would be saved/resurrected by an alien spacecraft supposedly flying behind that comet.

If you think that’s fanciful, you’re obviously not familiar with the precepts of a couple modern-day, broadly accepted, so-called religions, whose tenets aren’t far removed from that kind of inanity. It’s enough to make a rational person wonder whether there’s anything that’s presented as biblically-based, as Camping’s prediction supposedly was, that wouldn’t be accepted by a credulous, religion-besotted public that has long since replaced what passes as “faith” for science or common sense. But, I digress. Back to doomsday predictions.

If you think this most recent prediction of Armageddon was absurd (aside: knock, knock; who’s there; Armageddon; Armageddon who; Armageddon tired of these stupid Armageddon predictions), ask yourself where you were on Monday, December 3rd, 1990. If you were anywhere near Memphis, you should remember a prediction of localized annihilation by a self -professed climatologist, (my disdain for whose practitioners has been well documented in comments I posted in memphisflyer.com in connection with the recent flood) named Iben Browning.

Browning confidently predicted a “major” earthquake (7 on the Richter Scale or greater—-the 2010 Haiti earthquake was a 7) along the New Madrid fault that would rival the one in February, 1812, during which the Mississippi River flowed backward and Reelfoot Lake was formed.

Unlike Camping, whose earlier, similar, prediction fizzled, Browning claimed (dubiously, as it turns out) accuracy in predicting the Mt. St. Helens eruption, as well as the Mexico City quake of 1985 and the Loma Prieta (California) quake of 1989. The surprising thing is how generally-accepted this charlatan’s prediction became. The town of New Madrid, Missouri was inundated by journalists from around the world, prompting one resident to say he was more concerned about being run over by one of the dozens of media trucks that suddenly swamped the area than by any earthquake, while the local media in Memphis ginned up a combination of fear and anticipation about the imminence of the earthquake the likes of which had never been seen before and, thankfully, hasn’t since.

Offices in Memphis closed and many workers spent time in basement shelters in anticipation of the event. Schools in four states shut down, earthquake insurance became unobtainable, flashlights and bottled water (which had yet to achieve cult-like status) were sold out, and people left the area in droves. All of that for a prediction that wasn’t even biblically based. Admit it: if you were here, you probably bought into the prediction to some extent, even if you didn’t prepare for your inevitable demise. So, should we be surprised that as many people as did bought into Mr. Camping’s prediction, especially when, for so many, the Bible trumps science?

Dr. Browning died a few short months after his bogus prediction, probably from sheer disappointment, and while it would be cruel to wish the same fate for Mr. Camping, one can only hope he has learned his lesson, and will never be heard from, ever again. But is there any doubt some other false prophet will come along to take his place, or that some religioholics among us will credit the next yahoo who predicts yet another doomsday based on biblical certitude? Heaven help us. I hope not.

• Marty Aussenberg

I’m about to reveal something about myself that may surprise my detractors: I’m a big crybaby. Of course, I cry at movies—-all that crescendoing music never fails to jerk my tears, as it’s intended to. Is there anyone who can keep a dry eye when they watch the scene in “An Affair To Remember” where Cary Grant realizes Deborah Kerr didn’t meet him atop the Empire State Building, as they had arranged during their shipboard romance, because she was the victim of an automobile accident on the way to that appointed rendezvous?

Or how about the final scene in “Rudy” where, in spite of being a walk-on, his fellow Notre Dame football team members carry him off the field after he finds a place on the team roster, even if only for a single game? I cry when I see examples of animals suffering. And, even though I’m not much of a patriot by the standard of what passes for it these days, I cry when the Star Spangled Banner is sung, no matter how badly, at the start of athletic events. As an immigrant to this country, brought by parents who sought refuge from what they experienced at the hands of the Nazis, believe me, I know what patriotism really is, but I also know what isn’t.

So it should be no surprise that, just as Obama admitted about himself, I watched most of the Booker T. Washington graduation ceremony on Monday through teary eyes, and, if you watched the festivities, you know I wasn’t the only one who did. I frequently bemoan the overuse of my least favorite word in the English language these days, but if there was ever a time its use was called for, that ceremony was it: It was awesome, in the truest, as opposed to the overused, sense of that word. And, of course, the reason the whole graduation event was awesome was that it was (in a phrase repeated so much, it almost became the cliché du jour) inspiring.

The day was a triumph, all the way around: For BTW, it was a triumph for stick-to-it-iveness and, to use the Dale Carnegie term, the power of positive thinking. It was a tribute to an indefatigable, albeit preternaturally young, principal, and to the ability of the denizens of a subculture in Memphis whom most folks have given up on or counted out, to surmount the obstacles, both natural and manmade, that have been placed as impediments to their success.

It came at a particularly poignant time, against the background of a school-merger battle in which BTW represents what the suburban school districts view as the quintessential bogeyman of the urban school district they may be forced to take over, namely as a threat to their desire to maintain a lily-white demographic. ‘In your face, Germantown, Bartlett, Arlington, Collierville, and the county school board members and state legislators who are trying to help them maintain their pre-Brown v. Board of Education profiles,’ is what BTW has, in essence, said. ‘We’re every bit as good as you, in educational achievement, and in so many other ways, and probably a whole lot better. You’ll be lucky to have us as in your school system.’

The day was also a triumph for Memphis, a city which, it sometimes seems, never catches a break when it comes to its depiction in the national media, or in getting its fair share of positive attention. Who among us hasn’t watched in dismay as Memphis got skipped over for achievement after achievement, whether it was the siting of the Rock ‘n Roll museum, the award of an NFL franchise, or the location of businesses and industries that would help mitigate deepening poverty and unemployment problems. That is starting to change, subtly, with recent announcements on the economic development front, and yet Memphis still gets tarred, albeit unfairly, primarily for its crime problem.

The national media never seem to get it right about Memphis, and failed to once again by making it seem that the city had been entirely inundated by recent flooding. BTW’s victory in the White House’s “Race To The Top” contest has the potential to take some of the sting out of all that negative publicity, and show the world that, even in a neighborhood with, yes, a crime problem, good people can overcome bad situations.

And, finally, the day was a triumphal one for Barack Obama. Coming, as it did, on the heels of one of the greatest accomplishments of any wartime president since Harry Truman made the difficult decision to drop the nuclear bombs on Japan that hastened the end of World War II, his appearance in Memphis was an opportunity for Obama to burnish his image and standing by displaying something he has mastered so well, the common touch.

I have major problems with our current president, from his failure to deliver on so many of the promises he made to get elected to his seemingly never-ending capitulation to the intransigent methods of the conservatives in Congress. And yet who could fail to be touched by the way he related to those BTW graduates, bending over to console one of them who was reduced to tears by the enormity of the moment, hugging some of them as they received their diplomas, complimenting them on their achievements, or encouraging them to pursue their goals.

It didn’t hurt that Obama showed his sense of humor either, by laughing heartily when the student who introduced him suggested that where the President was born was now one of the many must-know facts about him, or by jesting about the prospect of becoming the principal of his daughters’ school to control unwanted (by a father) advances by boys.

I won’t dwell on the negatives about the days’ activities, which, in my opinion, included the unfortunate politicization of the event, including the presence of politicians who didn’t belong in the room, and the sophomoric way the local broadcast media handled their coverage. Suffice it to say, BTW and Obama carried the day, and Memphis was (and will be) a whole lot better for it.

For more takes on the occasion, see also here and here.

I hate to be a wet rag, and far be it from me to get in the way of the biggest spurts of nationalistic jingoism since VJ day, but am I the only one who has some nagging doubts about the “official story” of bin Laden’s demise at the hands of Navy Seals?

The first red flag is that not even the government can get the “official story” straight, having to issue, by now, at least two modifications to what we were originally told, first by John Brennan, the National Security Advisor, and then by Jay Carney, the White House press secretary. First we were told our villain’s wife was killed during the assault because she was being used as a human shield. Turns out that wasn’t true. The woman involved was neither his wife nor was she killed.

Then we were told bin Laden was armed when he was confronted and was killed in a firefight. Not true either. He was, we’re now told, unarmed but “resisted apprehension.” How do you resist being captured and/or shot by a bunch of commandos who are armed to the teeth if you don’t have a way of doing so in kind—-by holding up your hand and saying, “stop in the name of Allah?” And, the bin Laden son who was killed in the raid was also, as it turns out, misidentified in the first versions.

The gaps and inconsistencies in the story would be easier to explain if the story was being told under battlefield conditions, of from various sources, but that’s not the case here. This is the White House we’re dealing with here, supposedly one of the most practiced sources of information in the civilized world. And let’s not forget, because by now we’ve all seen the images of senior White House officials in mesmerized attention to what they were seeing, this entire incident was being watched by those officials, supposedly in “real-time.”

Then, there’s the whole thing about proving to the world that it really was bin Laden who was dispatched. I’m sure I’m not the only one who raised an eyebrow at the “trust us, we’ve killed bin Laden” announcement. It doesn’t do much for the credibility of the claim, either, that he was whisked away and “buried at sea” a matter of hours after he was shot. How come? We’re told it was to avoid creating a shrine if he was buried conventionally, yet we weren’t concerned about that with Saddam Hussein. The first version of the story indicated his body was placed in a metal casket for that “burial,” but later versions indicate his body was wrapped in a sheet of some kind and slipped off the deck of the ship it was taken to. Which is it? And, how does professing concern with burying bin Laden in accordance with Islamic principles square with shooting him, unarmed as we now know he was, execution-style. Is that consistent with Islamic principles?

The story also includes the claim that bin Laden’s identity was verified by DNA tests. How come? Was visual verification not enough? It’s not like this man’s pictures haven’t been the most visible in the history of the universe for the last ten years. Contrary to popular belief about dark-skinned ethnic or racial groups, all Arabs don’t look alike. And, how come the DNA test was accomplished so quickly, and under less than ideal conditions? Is there a DNA lab in the backwater known as Islamabad, or on board the ship his body was taken to? DNA testing is highly complex, requires specialized expertise, and, the last time I checked (about twenty minutes ago as I wrote this), takes more than a few hours to accomplish. It involves separating the DNA itself from other material, purifying and fragmenting it, and then subjecting it to a technique called “PCR” (polymerase chain reaction), all of which takes time. In fact, most of the DNA labs with information sites on the Web indicate the minimum time for a DNA test to be conducted is three to five days.

Also, for DNA to be verified, there has to be a control sample to compare it to. In other words, the government would have to have DNA from a known relative of bin Laden’s to be able to verify the DNA sample they took from him as being his family’s. Where did they get that sample, and how did they know, for sure, it was from a verified bin Laden relative? And, how do they know, even with DNA testing, it was Osama bin Laden’s DNA, and not that of one of his 50 (yes, 50) brothers and sisters.

Now the White House is weighing whether or not to release pictures they supposedly have of bin Laden’s body. Why is there any question about whether or not to do this? They claim the pictures are gruesome. Well, of course they are, but isn’t that the point? Everything about this man during his lifetime was gruesome; September 11th was gruesome. Whose feelings are we worried about here? Al Quaeda’s? It’s not like Islam has the same prohibition on publishing the likeness of its terrorists as it does on its deities, is it, or like if we play nice with the terrorists they won’t try to strike us again. And, just as an aside, what’s up with helicopters that fail at exactly the wrong time, like one of them reportedly did during this operation? Remember when that happened during the failed Iranian hostage rescue in 1980? That was the reverse of a jingoism-inspiring episode if there ever was one.

Look, I’m not touting some half-baked conspiracy theory here, I promise. This isn’t about whether there was more than one gunman on the grassy knoll in Dallas, or whether the World Trade Center towers were brought down by controlled demolition, and it certainly isn’t about whether we really landed on the moon or whether Obama’s long form birth certificate is a fake. By the same token, I’m naturally suspicious of the “official version” of a story, but especially when the government that issues it can’t get it straight.

Does our government ever lie to us? Does a bear shit in the woods? I still haven’t gotten past (and neither has his family) the big lie the government told us about the demise of Pat Tillman, or, for that matter, about weapons of mass destruction. Our government lies to us all the time. I’m not suggesting Obama lied when he made the statement he did to the country in his nationally-televised address on Sunday night. I’m just saying there are some things about the story that, at least so far, raise more questions than they answer.

How much do you think what you do for a living is worth, dollars-and-cents-wise? Putting aside the fact that most people think they’re worth more than they’re paid, are you worth the 20, 50 or $250K your employer/firm/business pays you. If you make $250K, you’re in the top 3% of all earners in the U.S.—-congratulations; you can take the day off (and you don’t even need to donate blood or write a check to United Way to do so). But, you’re still a piker, by some standards. How would you like to make that much money in half an hour? Yup, that’s what I said: make $250,000 in 30 minutes (and no, this is not an offer from some magnanimous Nigerian potentate). $500,000 per hour makes even some local lawyers’ rates seem like a bargain.

Well, believe it or not, there is a group of masters of the universe who do just that. No, I’m not referring to Bill Gates or Warren Buffet, the Sultan of Brunei or a Russian oligarch. They’re small fry, when compared to who I’m talking about. The group I’m referring to are hedge fund managers, the top 25 of whom made (hold your breath) 22 BILLION dollars in 2010. Of that August group, the highest earner made 4.9 BILLION dollars. Remember what I once said about the significance of “billions?” That’s more than the GDP of 40 countries listed by the World Bank.

And, how did he do that? Did he build the proverbial better mousetrap to make life as we know it better for society? Um, no. Did he provide employment for tens of thousands of people? Uh-uh. Well, then he must have contributed his fair share of taxes, right? Wrong again. In fact, until very recently, hedge fund managers benefitted from highly favorable (read: Bush-type) tax treatment. No, what he and his brethren have been doing is, basically, moving money around; a/k/a speculating. Not only does that do nothing for the economy, it has also been causing a rise in agricultural commodity and oil prices that have caused the recent spikes in the price of food and gasoline (you’re not still buying the “supply and demand” nonsense, are you?) which threaten to de-stabilize, if not explode, many teetering economies, not to mention endanger (or at least lengthen) recovery from the worldwide recession.

What possible reason could anyone have to make, or need, $5 billion in one year? At what point does untrammeled capitalism become a form of pernicious gluttony? Oh, and by the way: where is that socialist Obama when we need him to ”spread the wealth around?” Instead, of course, he and the Democrats (surprise, surprise!) capitulated to the fat cat party on extension of the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy. Boy, I’ll bet those hedge fund managers breathed a sigh of relief knowing they’d still be able, albeit barely, to put food on the table.

Hedge fund guys aren’t the only ones reaping bonanzas in our supposedly down economy. Corporate CEO’s saw their compensation increase by 27% in 2010 even while workers saw their pay decrease or only slightly increase. Even Lloyd Blankfein, the CEO of Goldman Sachs, and the face of the mortgage/economy meltdown,
got his $5 million bonus this year. Corporations are reporting record earnings, in part because they downsized their work forces and outsourced many of their functions, all while avoiding paying corporate income taxes. And, let’s not even talk about what’s happening to unionized workers, particularly if they’re public employees. They’re starting to understand how the dodo bird must have felt.

You know income disparity in this country is pretty bad if there are 100 countries on the CIA’s World Factbook list whose “GINI” Index (a measure of such things) is better than ours. Much is being said and written about the fact that the top 1% of earners in this country make more money than 24% of the rest of the country. Put another way, 400 Americans have more wealth than 150 million of their countrymen, combined. These are startling figures, and, left unremedied, presage tremendous upheaval in our society. History (some of it as recent as the last several months) has shown us that, eventually, people reach the “mad as hell…not going to take it any more” point when a country/culture/civilization’s elites reach stratospheric levels of wealth (and its accompanying power) while their lower-class brethren struggle to make ends meet. The atmospherics are certainly indicative of our approaching, if not already reaching, that stage. It wouldn’t be all that surprising to find out that one or more of our very own economic aristocrats has already uttered the upper-crustian “let them eat cake” rallying cry in response to the travails of millions of fellow countrymen he undoubtedly considers to be peasants.

Our social fabric is fraying. The pitchfork and torch crowds have already started to gather. As evidence of that, I offer the recent uprisings in many American states by incipiently disenfranchised public workers, even as they watch the politicians who are responsible for their repression being wined, dined and subsidized by corporate oligarchs. The demonstrations in Madison, Wisconsin (which I take no small measure of credit for having instigated) were the first indication that the natives are getting more than just restless. Demonstrations in response to the foreclosure fraud debacle have already started, and threaten to widen in the face of what appears to be a forthcoming government whitewash of the practices of the bailed-out, big-bank fraudsters, even while foreclosures threaten to increase dramatically in the next two years and cause further turmoil in the housing market.

As for me, I’m going to test the market by seeing how close I can come to that magical $500,000 hourly rate. In the meantime, more cake anyone?

We interrupt this column to bring you the following bulletin: Along with the terms “jumbo shrimp,” “legal brief” and “military intelligence” as noteworthy oxymorons, we can now, once and for all, add the term “safe nukes” in reference to nuclear power plants. Once again, the world is witnessing the dangers these powder kegs pose with the threatened meltdown of several of them in Japan following the recent earthquake and tsunami that have struck there.

We’ve always known, intuitively, that living anywhere in the vicinity of a factory that generates electricity essentially by means of a controlled chemical reaction of the kind that killed upwards of 300,000 people in Hiroshima and Nagasaki was, at best, an iffy proposition, a fact that’s been brought home to the roughly 200,000 people who have had to be evacuated from the vicinity of the Japanese plants.

But, of course, living in the vicinity of any plant that handles or manufactures toxic substances isn’t likely to increase your longevity. Just ask the folks who lived in Bhopal, India or near the Love Canal in Niagara Falls, New York about that. Oh sure, nuclear power plants are full of structural and technological fail-safes that are supposed to prevent meltdowns and the release of radioactivity that follows them, but what comfort is that now to the residents of the Fukushima Prefecture in Japan, or was it to residents of the towns adjacent to Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania in 1979 or Chernobyl in the USSR in 1986.

“Supposed to” is never much comfort in the aftermath of “didn’t,” is it? Just ask shrimpers in the Gulf of Mexico how much comfort it is to them now that BP’s deep water oil well in the Gulf was “supposed to” prevent the kind of spill that will likely affect their livelihoods for the next 20 years. Or ask the thousands of folks who lost their life savings at the hands of Bernie Madoff how much comfort it was to them that his Ponzi scheme was “supposed to” be discovered by the regulators.

Energy, and its generation, is a troublesome business. No matter what the source of the juice civilization relies on to power its cars, factories and homes, trouble always seems to follow. The main sources of energy in this country are oil and coal, both of which are fraught with perilous side-effects, whether geopolitical, environmental or both. Accidents happen in and around oil wells and their transmission and storage facilities, as they do in and around coal mines. And, let’s not forget that wars are instigated over petroleum or that climate change is accelerated by burning coal.

But, there’s something qualitatively different about nuclear energy. Maybe it’s because nothing else—-no accident, screw-up, terrorist plot or military misadventure—-has the potential to sicken or kill as many people as nuclear radiation does. It’s no accident, then, that the term “nuclear option” has come to mean what it has when used as a bargaining chip, whether in the context of the school systems in Shelby County, Tennessee or the passage of controversial legislation in Washington, D.C. or Madison, Wisconsin.

No one uses the term “petroleum option” or “bituminous option” to convey the same sense of brinkmanship the threat of unleashing atomic radiation, literally or figuratively, does. And nothing has the potential to wreak its havoc like substances that can linger for decades, as many radioactive substances can. The effects of Chernobyl, for example, are still being felt, 25 years later. And, the Fukishima incident doesn’t even deal with the other dangers raised by atomic energy, like the disposal of spent nuclear fuel. Very few things (well, maybe other than the bitterness of a scorned spouse) take 200,000 years or more to dissipate, like many atomic substances do.

So, the question becomes, are the benefits of nuclear power generation worth the risks attendant to it? The Japanese incident is causing a re-examination of that question by politicians who may have been, until now, a bit blithe in their support for nuclear power as the solution to this country’s reliance on fossil fuel, and particularly the Middle Eastern kind. The ground under the push for nuclear energy has suddenly shifted, dramatically.

If the example of the Fukushima plants serves any useful purpose, it will be, first, to cause a rigorous re-inspection of the nuclear power plants that already exist in the U.S. (and maybe even to re-think bringing new ones, like the Clinch River plant in East Tennessee, on line), and strengthen the existing safeguards against any of them leading to another Fukushima incident, and second, to make solar, wind, geothermal, and other, non-nuclear, sources of energy a whole lot more attractive, maybe enough so that “safe energy” won’t become a contradiction in terms.