John Hughes died. How he helped me through the teenage years.
August 6th is always a weird date. I spend so many hours every year, thinking about Hiroshima. Thinking about the bomb, detonating 600 meters up in the air, taking about 100 000 people with it, most of them instantly, some of them later on. I wonder what it was like when it hit at 8:15 in the morning. The funniest girl in Hiroshima, the most handsome guy gone together in a blinding light. The ugly, the fat, the wise, the young the old, the mothers carrying their newborn, siblings fighting over a favorite toy, the ones who were eating, the ones cheating on their math test, the ones on swings, the ones gardening, the ones in the market, the ones having tea. 100 000 lives to end in a flash. And how horrible for the folks of Nagasaki, reading about Hiroshima in the papers only to experience it first hand 3 days later. Nowhere to run, nowhere to hide.
August 6th. What a terrible, terrible day.
A good thing happened yesterday though. Sonia Sotomayor!
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9 comments:
i like your linking the death of john hughes to hiroshima. i didn't see that coming. john hughes's movies are like a map of my high school experience, except we didn't have james spader, sadly.
I see a huge connection. In the 80's what did we do? Worried about the bomb, watched John Hughes movies. As usual, the connections that are so clear to me are not visible to others.
perhaps I should get one of these:
http://tinyurl.com/m58nd6
you should definitely get one of those. i wonder if their shirts still come in little plastic shrink-wrapped bags. i think your assessment of fear of nuclear holocaust as displayed in the films of john hughes is a dissertation waiting to be written. i can see a chapter now: "Long Duk Dong: Taming the Chinese Menace."
I would really love to see the video footage of Taiwanese prisoners doing the dance scene in the library and around school from The Breakfast Club in homage to John Hughes.
Those movies really defined me for a time in my life.
"Life is not whatnot..." There's your tie in to Hiroshima.
Yay for Sotomayor! Boo for Hiroshima. May it be a reminder of how grusome we must never be again.
Ok, I'm gonna go. I'm alone and drunk in a bar in Madrid, turning 31 in 1 hour and 20 minutes.
jennie, you're never alone! Congratulations!
i visited the dome and the museum in hiroshima when i was doing this music festival in japan (in college) and the thing that sticks in my mind so clearly was seeing this little girl's dress that survived the bombing.. it's horrific i know, but that was the image (near the end of the museum tour) that really drove it home for me. it's hard to imagine that kind of tragedy.
oh btw to jennie--i was lonely (but not drunk unfortunately)--when i aged a year yesterday; happy birthday to us! (i'd like to be in madrid!)
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