In 2012, at San Diego\u2019s annual Fourth of July \u2018Big Bay Boom\u2019, all the fireworks went off at once. What was meant to be an 18 minute display, was over in 15 seconds; the rockets, fountains, brocade crowns, strobes and comets launching into the sky with a boom, forming a mushroom cloud with a rain of sparkling light collapsing into the water, as the crowd looked on with a mix of excitement and fear.
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\nFireworks were invented around 800 AD, when an alchemist in China mixed potassium nitrate, sulphur and charcoal hoping to find the secret to eternal life. Instead, they invented gunpowder, and when it was poured into bamboo tubes and lit on fire, the air passing through the tube made the flames crackle and spark. Fireworks were thought to ward off evil spirits, and they continue to be set off all over the world, to celebrate, commemorate, and mark the stroke of midnight on New Year\u2019s Eve. The turn of a new year has been celebrated since about 2000 BCE, in Mesopotamia, and it has always occurred on different dates according to variations in traditions, calendars, ruling powers, and positions in relation to the sun. New Year\u2019s Eve holds a balance of anticipation and regret, with people seeking hope and forgiveness, joy and oblivion.
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\nIn the same way that it can be difficult to tell whether someone is laughing or crying, a raucous party and a bustling protest can mimic each other, or cross over into a unified entity. In periods of political upheaval and social unrest, people\u2019s frustrations and desires are often expressed through the music they are making and listening to; the most challenging times requiring the most elaborate distraction or release. Acid house, which grew from disco and Chicago house, was popularised in the UK, and particularly at Manchester\u2019s Ha\u00e7ienda, as people fought the systematic oppression of Margaret Thatcher\u2019s government. The Conservative party had been in power since 1979, the scale of privatisation, decimation of rights and hollowing out of welfare, health and education had drained people of their faith in government, but rather than giving in, the response was one of strength and retaliation through community and celebration.
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\nMusic, film, literature and art have long reflected our anxieties, or what those in power want to be the dominant mode of thought, with cultural shifts rising up through youth culture, subcultures and social movements, or trickling down through soft power policies and intelligence agencies. In the 1950s, the CIA promoted and funded Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art as part of a programme promoting American ideals abroad, which also sought to discredit Socialist Realism. Anti-Communist sentiment in America had grown from the geopolitical tensions between the United States and Soviet Russia after the Second World War, and the soft power tactics of the CIA deepened peoples suspicions \u2014 the Cold War mounting through propaganda, espionage, psychological warfare, and the nuclear arms race.
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\nIn 1945, US President Harry Truman had ordered for two atomic bombs \u2014 the first and only to be used in warfare \u2014\u00a0to be dropped on Japan, the \u2018Thin Man\u2019 or \u2018Little Boy\u2019 on Hiroshima and \u2018Fat Man\u2019 on Nagasaki. Justified as the result of an ultimatum from the United Nations to Imperial Japan, the bombs killed upwards of 200,000 people, and ongoing radiation impacted the long-term health of the population and land. Only a year after its founding in 1946, the UN created the United Nations Atomic Energy Commission, which sought to eliminate the use of nuclear weapons, but six months later the United States conducted its first post-war nuclear tests, Operation Crossroads at Bikini Atoll.
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\nBikini Atoll is part of the Marshall Islands, which sit near the Equator in the Pacific Ocean. The indigenous population were sent into permanent exile when the US military arrived and told them they were being evacuated \u201cfor the good of mankind and to end all world wars\u201d. The first nuclear tests at Bikini Atoll were publicly announced and observed by an audience of invited guests and press, as fleets of target ships assembled in the lagoon. The first bomb, named \u2018Gilda\u2019 after a Rita Hayworth character, was dropped from a plane \u2014\u00a0and four days later, designer and engineer Louis R\u00e9ard introduced the two-piece swimsuit design, the bikini, at a public swimming pool in Paris \u2014\u00a0
\nthe second, known as \u2018Helen of Bikini\u2019 was detonated 27 metres under water, with radioactive sea spray causing extensive contamination. In 1954, a second series of tests took place at Bikini Atoll, with thermonuclear bombs that were 1,000 times as powerful as those dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, creating large craters and contaminating both Bikini and its surrounding islands.
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\nBikini Atoll had been rich in flora and fauna, and when the islanders were forcibly evicted they were moved to previously uninhabited islands that would go on to be proven unsuitable for sustaining life. The indigenous community had been promised they would return to Bikini Atoll, but the resulting radiation from years of nuclear activity had contaminated the soil and water, and apart from a failed, lethal attempt at repatriation in the 1970s, the people of Bikini Atoll continue to be displaced.
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\nIn 2017, a study by Stanford University reported that the Atoll\u2019s lagoon was full of schools of fish that appeared healthy to the naked eye, with abundant living coral, crabs and sharks. Ocean life seemed to be thriving, because it had been left alone, and was somehow resilient to the effects of radiation poisoning. The legacy of colonial and chemical violence at Bikini Atoll has rendered the island uninhabitable, but the lagoon seems to have found a way to adapt in the absence of human interference.
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\nWhile nuclear tests were being conducted at Bikini Atoll, President Truman had another site established in the Nevada desert. Homes, shops and restaurants were built, and cars, aircrafts and mannequins were placed around the site, to establish the impact of a nuclear blast. Shockwaves and radiation spread to neighbouring indigenous land, and as far as Arizona, Utah, Oregon, Washington and Idaho, with nuclear fallout travelling downwind. The mushroom clouds could be seen for 100 miles, and nuclear tests became a tourist attraction for guests at downtown hotels in Las Vegas, with casinos hosting parties, and creating \u2018atomic-theme\u2019 cocktails.
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\nThe National Atomic Testing Museum, Las Vegas sits behind the Paris Las Vegas casino, a 30 minute walk off the main strip on East Flamingo Road. The museum holds materials and artefacts relating to nuclear testing, spanning from reports and data, to advertisements for nuclear testing, \u2018atomic\u2019 wine, merchandise, comics and a crossover collection of \u2018UFO and Alien Pop Culture\u2019. The way America\u2019s nuclear history has been to some extent fictionalised, or aligned with fantastical theories of alien activity, speaks to an effort to detach the legacy of chemical violence from history. At the same time, narratives focused on nuclear testing and the socio-political context of the Cold War in books, films and artworks publicised peoples\u2019 fears, critiques and suspicions about nuclear testing and what was driving it. Films like
Godzilla, The Atomic Kid, On the Beach, Planet of the Apes<\/em> and Goldeneye<\/em> spoke to people’s anxieties, but it was only later \u2014\u00a0or in films produced outside of America \u2014\u00a0that people would fully critically engage with the military context in America.
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\nThe Cold War Hollywood blacklist prevented actors, writers and directors seen to be associated with or sympathetic to Communism from working, and this included perceived sympathy through the critique of government. Stanley Kubrick\u2019s black comedy Dr Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb<\/em> \u2014 released in 1964 and filmed in London \u2014\u00a0satirises fears of a nuclear conflict between the United States and Soviet Union; following the battle for authority between a US Air Force general and the President and his \u2018War Room\u2019, as they try to prevent the general from starting World War Three. The film closes with a medley of atomic mushroom clouds, set to the tune of We\u2019ll Meet Again<\/em> by Vera Lynn.
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\nWhen faced with difficulty, or states of emergency, human nature seems to swing between the desire to escape and avoid (whether literally or through distraction) or stay in place and face reality. Popular entertainment, art, music and parties can provide a distraction, or they can be a site of refusal \u2014 of state violence, and victimisation. Those at the centre of a crisis, who feel its direct impact reverberate through their life, often have a sense of calm about them, as they find remarkable ways to adapt.
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\nFor people living on Stromboli, an active volcano a few miles off the coast of Italy, the regular booms and molten debris are essentially background noise. Although the populated areas appear to be at the base of the volcano, where the island meets the sea, most of the 2 miles of rock extend under the sea, and the people of Stromboli, visiting scientists, tourists, and artists taking parts in the Fiorucci Art Trust\u2019s \u2018Volcano Extravaganza\u2019, are actually living near the top. There is a constant threat of a devastating blast, but the spectacle of molten lava leaping from Stromboli\u2019s peak like a firework, or the ground shaking as if an atomic bomb had just gone off \u2014 or an asteroid hit Earth \u2014 creates both a sense of excitement, and a connection to the cycles of nature. In a 2021 piece for The New York Times, a resident of Stromboli said: \u201cWe love danger, in some ways. It lets us feel immortal. It brings fear and joy together.\u201d
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\nIt is ironic that a near-death experience, or living constantly with existential threat, can make us feel immortal \u2014\u00a0as if by surviving one brush with death, the odds stack in our favour indefinitely. Perhaps rather than feeling immortal, in living on an active volcano, people have to continually face the reality of the fragility of life, be more in tune with their surroundings, and live in spite of that. Like those who continue to go to work, invite friends for dinner, party and protest after a natural or manmade disaster, during economic crises, wartime or grief.
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\nWhile technology, NASA tests, medical research and \u2018survivalist’ merchandise are providing ways to prolong \u2014 or at least feel in control of \u2014\u00a0life; the large-scale response to the climate emergency \u2014\u00a0or lack thereof \u2014\u00a0continues to threaten life at a scale that is hard to fully comprehend. The last mass extinction was set in motion when an asteroid struck Earth, or specifically Chicxulub, Mexico, an area that unlike Lourdes \u2014 where the Virgin Mary is said to have appeared at the Grotto of the Apparitions, and is now the Las Vegas of Catholicism \u2014\u00a0goes largely uncelebrated, its name translating as \u2018the devil\u2019s flea\u2019.
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\nThe next mass extinction is less likely to be the result of an asteroid hitting Earth, than it is an implosion caused by the impact of imperialism, capital and wilful ignorance. In Richard Kelly\u2019s 2007 film Southland Tales<\/em>, the opening scene tracks a crowd of laughing families celebrating the Fourth of July, before a mushroom cloud blasts into the sky and launches World War Three. As the smoke dissipates, the voiceover of an Iraq war veteran \u2014 played by Justin Timberlake \u2014 declares: “This is the way the world ends, this is the way the world ends, this is the way the world ends, not with a whimper but with a bang.”<\/div><\/div><\/div>
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