Concerning Power, Nuclear and Otherwise: A Response to Ellen Messer-Davidow

Abstract

The guest speaker, an administrator at the university where I teach now, talks about his days working on the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos. Bliss was it in that nuclear dawn to be alive, and to be a grad student working with Oppie and the others, he admits, was very heaven, though he also calls our attention to the ironies inherent in his tale of youthful adventure. I watch energy play across his face as he remembers, and I think I understand how vital that time must have been for him, for all of them. In his years since Los Alamos, the speaker has prided himself on being a humanist as well as a physicist. I have seen him act the senex in a Roman comedy, and explain how Marcel Duchamp's work uses principles of optics; I have heard him argue strategy for attracting more minority and women students and faculty. We are seated at dinner together but probably not for sympathies we might be thought to share about nukes or interdisciplinary studies or university politics. I think maybe it's because we are both-heh, heh-graduates of Yale, two old boys from the other institution. A Navajo high school senior shares our table. He and I get talking a little about the Reservation and his family, and, after a while, he tells me quietly about some Navajo witches-skinwalkers-he had a brush with last summer up in the Chuska Mountains, near his uncle's sheep camp. It's a frightening story even amid the mirrors and chrome of the Hilton Inn.