Flirting with Apocalypse - Part 2: Nukes

Having completed some work on commerce and oil spills, my work on this project (see earlier post) has now moved on to nuclear science, weapons, and opposition in British cartoons. Below is a my first draft of how this section will open:

Nuclear weapons, testing, threats and fears were a central political narrative of the twentieth century. The existence, power, persistence, and apocalyptic potential of nuclear weaponry were also central to the emergence of a strong environmental rhetoric in the western world. Unsurprisingly therefore cartoon responses to the nuclear problem were (and remain) both legion and myriad. Moreover the visual language of nuclear warfare and fallout have been used to inform and augment comic commentaries upon a variety of subjects.
Threading clear representational threads through and trends from this vast corpus is not the purpose of this section. Instead, it presents striking examples of how 'the bomb' has been imagined by British cartoonists, as a facet of a wider conversation upon man's flirtation with self-induced apocalypse.

(c) British Cartoon Archive, University of Kent, David Low, Evening Standard (02 Jan 1928) LSE 0326
   
“She came upon a low curtain she had not noticed before, and behind it was a little door about fifteen inches high [...] Alice opened the door and found that it led into a small passage, not much larger than a rat-hole: she knelt down and looked along the passage into the loveliest garden you ever saw”
Much like Lewis Carroll's Alice, a small boy of 1928 peeks with intrigue behind a curtain. He is met with a feast of technological invention, an imagined future of weather control, robots, and communicative media (here 'TELETASTE' stands out as a particularly jovial comic flourish). However among these delights of utopian and egalitarian optimism stands three portentous potentialities – 'THE FINAL POISON GAS?', 'THE FINAL EXPLOSIVE?', 'THE HARNESSED ATOM'?.

Post-war optimism, science-fiction, and technological achievement combined to create an aura of optimism in the 1920s. Things hitherto imagined could, it seemed, be brought into actuality. Yet as Alice discovered as she traversed Wonderland, appearances can deceive and the beneficial does not always discern itself clearly from the troublesome. Low here plays upon this conundrum, thereby problematising the hope underpinning scientific prediction. Little did he know that Ernest Rutherford's model of the atom, discoveries in astrophysics, and the experiments with radioactivity and nuclear physics to which he refers in this piece, would in the coming years form the basis of an atomic weapon possessing such shocking violence, toxicity, and finality.

Flirting with Apocalypse - Part 1: Christmas

I have recently been commissioned by the British Cartoon Archive to produce a series of teaching and learning aids using their digital collections (as an appendage to the JISC funded CARD project). These aids will take the form of groups of cartoons selected, interpreted and given scholarly context by me, and will be made live on the BCA website in the coming months.
This morning I've been working on a group entitled 'Flirting with Apocalypse', which plans to go beyond the 20th century symbol of doomsday, the atomic bomb, and explore through cartoons man's relationship with what Al Gore famously called 'our only home'. Themes such as rural erosion, consumerism, oil spills, green politics and natural disasters will be covered, with the aim of offering students a starting point towardss thinking about how man's construction of their world (not only physically, but also mentally) impacts upon the environment we all inhabit.

Over the coming weeks I plan to share some preliminary findings here. And today I offer some thoughts Christmas:

        Michael Heath, The Independent (7 Dec 1998) PC5102

        http://www.cartoons.ac.uk/record/PC5102

Christmas is, despite its spiritual origins, the modern symbol of reckless and conspicuous consumption. Moreover its centrality to annual trade cycles and its use to gauge such virtual signifiers as 'economic growth' and 'consumer confidence' demonstrate the exploitative mentality of big business.

Heath's bold, brash style may make for an obvious critique of consumerism (notably how Christmas as greed subverts its selfless origins), but subtle witty commentaries remain present. Note, for example, the few figures picked out of this otherwise faceless parade. Towards the bottom right two middle-aged businessmen, frustrated and anxious, make their way from the busy high street. Nearby a well dressed female raises her voice to a crying child. Behind them small groups, including women sporting what resemble fine ushanka hats, browse the shop windows. These well-to-do types represent the chaos, the hysteria, the madness of the 'SPEND! SPEND! SPEND! SPEND! SPEND!' mentality, and they contrast starkly with the less orthodox figures who stand bemused, and speak for the cartoonist/left-leaning Independent reader, in the bottom left-hand corner. This couple are not exempt from critique, they after all carry a gaudily wrapped gift, yet they cut through the masquerade and see Christmas as it really is. The signs reading 'BE GREEDY IT'S COOL' and 'GET LEGLESS THIS CHRISTMAS' are then what they project onto the scene - once the glitzy mask, under considerable strain, has cracked, this Christian festival is revealed to them as in reality a hyper-consumerist Vanity Fair.

Tradition

Though decided on the AV debate - #Yes2AV - following the political mudslinging over the recent weeks has proven curiously captivating.

This morning I stumbled across this interview of Baroness Warsi conducted by the ever pugnacious Adam Boulton. Surprisingly, and not merely because he was on 'my side', Boulton came across rather well, particularly during his dissection of what Warsi classified as 'tradition' (She did not actually use the word, but statements such as 'fundamental principles' and 'generations have fought for' suggest what she is getting at. Well at least it did for me).

Two semantic problems arise from this which probably should trouble us more than they do.

First, how old is 'tradition'? Warsi was appealing (erroneously of course) to a tradition beginning around 1945, thus disregarding from tradition a long history of parliamentary adaptation. In a similar vein the Old Price rioters at Covent Garden theatre during the Autumn of 1809 classified the rights of Englishmen to public entertainments as existing since 'time immemorial'. In the same way that Milton's Areopagitica claimed press freedoms to be inalienable, the OP rioters had a dislocated and distorted sense of what terms such as 'tradition' and 'ancient' meant. Equally during a period of acute food shortages in the early-nineteenth century, Justice Kenyon prosecuted against forestallers and regrators. These practices, which inflated food prices artificially, were perfectly legal. However common law and custom stated that they were not, and thus many ignored the 1771 legislation repealing prohibitions on these practices. Kenyon, under the Cruikshankian gaze, became a popular hero, a defender of natural rights. Yet, there is more, the legislation making forestalling and regrating illegal was neither ancient nor natural but had clear sixteenth century legislative origins.

Tradition then is a complex beast. And depends on the perspective of those who claim something or other to be traditional. Indeed as environmental historians are keen to tell us, there is nothing ancient or traditional about any of this. Human existence, Bill McKibben notes, is to the lifespan of the Earth but a blink of the eye.

Second, whose tradition is tradition? This may seem a very obvious point, but if 'tradition' has chronological problems it is also impacted upon by gender, class, nationality, faith et al. This is exemplified by returning to our forestallers and regrators - for 'the people' (I use that word begrudgingly, with an awareness of the huge problems it entails...) treating food as a special case, as outside of market forces, was customary; for the acolytes of Adam Smith on the other hand food was just another product, another unit to be monetised (and so followed land, labour and, in the present day, carbon - see Doreen Massey's beautiful essay on such matters here).

For Warsi and many in the #No2AV camp, 'tradition' is associated with post-war frugality (both intellectually and financially), settling and stoicism. For many in the #Yes2AV camp, like myself, 'tradition' is something more theoretical, something more timeless (at least in theory, it can, I guess, never be so in reality) - that being a simple belief in individual agency and in a rejection of clannish traditions based upon words enshrined upon paper which one may not question.

Tradition then is the very rejection of tradition. And I suspect this definition (if we swap over the two traditions) nicely encapsulates where Warsi stands on the issue too.