The Enola Gay
Captain Paul W. Tibbets Jr. is one of the greatest poets of the 20th Century. His work is stunning and amazing and most original, and utterly, transcendent. He is the author of the “the vilest act ever committed by a soldier is actually the purest, most noble, and kindest act ever performed by a soldier”.
Paul W. Tibbets was the captain of the Enola Gay. His mission, on August 6, 1945, was to drop the most powerful bomb ever made on the Japanese soldiers hiding in Hiroshima.
As you might think… there were also 450,000 mothers and grandmothers and children in the area of Hiroshima that ended up being under the bomb that Paul Tibbets dropped.
People who love Tibbet’s poetry, become enraged when you suggest that there was something tragic about the bomb. That’s because they can’t tell the difference between poetry and a limerick. Paul Tibbets thinks he has written a limerick. But he should learn to be a man and accept that what he has written is a poem, and a real man can use naughty words in a poem. You can forgive a great poet for his filthy language because a great poet cares more about the truth than anything else.
The only thing is… Paul Tibbets still believes he has written a limerick…
It is one thing to say the filthy language is okay, because it’s the truth. The filthy language is unpleasant and frightening and regrettable, but we are adults who live in an imperfect world and sometimes the imbalance of good and evil is so great that we need to use powerful, harsh words to put our feelings about this imbalance into a poem.
It is quite another to say, as many Americans seem to, that there is no filthy language there at all. Not a word.
And then there is the possibility that this poem was never written for the Japanese, who only wanted to keep their emperor. It was an atomic love letter to the Russians, to let them know that our radioactive hearts were overwhelmed with desire for their own filthy words.