New Queue Lure

Folks,

I visited the atomic testing museum today - http://www.atomictestingmuseum.org/

It's a living monument to the folks who waged and won a war of showmanship - what else can we call the Cold War - we are in Vegas.  Interestingly enough 86% of Nevada is owned by the Federal Government, part of which is the infamous Area 51 portrayed in Independence Day - which linked it to Roswell.  And of course Hangar 51 in the new Indiana Jones film is a reference to this area as well.  If you are into Google Earth, just try looking at that area of Nevada - they'll have a drone homed in your house so fast you won't be able to say 'alien abduction' before you're smoked.

It was interesting to note that several of the test nuclear detonations resulted in fallout clouds that reached as far north as St. George, Utah.  In fact, there are a number of local folks who suggest that the neon in Vegas is simply a cover-up for the fact that city glows just as brightly without it.

I don't know about you guys but I grew up at a time when the Cold War verged on hot and I still remember drills in school where we were militarily marched to the basement in case of a nuclear attack.  I can still remember the wail of the air raid sirens that were set-up and also remember reading about local folks who had built bomb shelters, etc.  And of course there was the Diefenbunker - http://www.diefenbunker.ca/

But the best depiction of those times still remains the Kubrick film, 'Dr. Strangelove' -

'Mr. President, I would not rule out the chance to preserve a nucleus of human specimens. It would be quite easy… heh heh… At the bottom of ah… some of our deeper mine shafts'.  

In it's utter madness, and let's face it, that is what the Cold War was, it neatly sums up a time in our history that simply cannot be rationally explained today.  It's like ethnic 'humour', X-ray machines in shoe stores so you can see how the bones of your feet are fitting in those new shoes, smoking, asbestos, and a number of other once common practices - you look back and shake your head.  And I'm sure our children will look back at us and say the same thing - with regard to energy consumption, big SUVs and maybe conspicuous consumption in general.  Another good film about this era is of course, 'The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming ....' and 'The Day The Earth Stood Still', - the original, is not bad either.

When the Cold War ended, I guess officially when the Berlin Wall came down - and they have a three ton section of the wall here in the men's washroom of the Main Street Casino - I think a lot of folks were caught cold (pun) - OK, we won, now what!  Every war has it's casualties and this one was no different - like Marines returning home from combat - you name the campaign - they are still fighting it.  I look at the security folks here at the hotel, and at all the hotels, and they seem to be of that vintage.

You see in my mind they are here to make sure people aren't getting too rambunctious and that there are no fights over my machine and my chair - and that was my payoff - I just went to the washroom - I have been playing that machine all day, etc.  In their minds, it doesn't play out that way - you represent a threat to the world order of the casino and should you choose to threaten that order you will be sanctioned with extreme prejudice.  I know when they go home they dream of plutonium, palladium, spheres, Fat Man, Little Boy, mushroom clouds, hydrodynamic fronts, blast winds, fire storms, electromagnetic pulses, radioactive contamination, nuclear fallout and tritium and how neon ain't so bright against the backdrop of a ten kiloton flash.  You mention peaceful uses for nuclear energy and they fix you with a 3000 yard stare .... you suddenly realize the Cold War isn't over ..... it's just on pause .....

To quote Dwight D. Eisenhower, 'Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.'

And from verse 16 of the Krome Koan, 'Nuke 'em all ... we need more cave paintings',

Phil