 | |
|
May 14, 2003
Axes, Swords, Guns, and Nukes
If you've never been to West Point, it's definitely worth the trip. Despite the heightened security concerns of the last 20 months, the facility remains open to the public, although you MUST bring photo ID and be prepared to have your vehicle searched (Hell, you have to be prepared for this if you expect to make it across town in any major city in the USA these days). And if you have any serious interest in U.S. history, going "on-campus" will be an eye-opening experience, even if you don't endorse every single move our political leadership has made in the last 50 years (and I don't know a single American who has). Best of all, it's free. You don't have to pay a dime to get a first-hand look at stuff that you've been staring at for months on the History Channel. There's a lot to see at the USMA Museum and unfortunately, the Web page maintained by the Academy for this purpose hardly does the Museum's extraodinary collection of death-dealing weapons justice: see: http://www.usma.edu/Museum/Galleries.htm It just scratches the surface, which is better than nothing, but not by much. If you've never been to the Museum, here's a quick surmise. Once you clear security, you drive up, park, and head to the Visitors Center. Then, you walk over to the Museum. Oddly, you walk down a rampt to an underground level, which seems weird, except that this subterranean detour immediately deposits you in one of the most awe-inspiring rooms of Heavy Weaponry this side of the Imperial War Museum. In it, you'll find a World War I tank, a classic Willy's Jeep, a shitload of cannons and howitzers, the steel casing of "Fat Man", the first atom bomb, and cases full of exotic heavy armaments, the most peculiar of which was the prototype for the first Bazooka. This crudely-made device looks - at least to my eyes - as if some guy simply welded a grip and a stock from a Thompson submachine gun to a 5-foot length of steel pipe that was lying in a yard somewhere, and figured out a way to fire it. Ugly, crude, weird - but it worked. Call it Yankee ingenuity. A very poor photo of this device is available at: http://www.nfatoys.com/tsmg/tcn/1997/mar/mar97p3.htm
Not that the USMA Museum isn't anything but ecumenical. In fact, weaponry warez from German, Japanese and Russian sources are well represented. In fact, one of the wildest weapons I've ever seen has to be the Mauser Model 1918 Anti-Tank Rifle: See:
http://members.rogers.com/georgeparada/articles/pzb.htm.
What were these designers thinking? Well, apparently the armor on early tanks was flimsy enough to disable the juggernaut with a well-aimed rifle shot. It was the biggest, most malevolent bolt-action rifle I've ever seen, bar none. Nice to know that you can still buy one (if you have $15,000, see: http://www.midwestordnance.com/ By the time I had spent about 15 minutes in the Heavy Weapons gallery, I was reeling. I didn't know if I was a Republican, a Democrat, a peace-lover, a war-monger, or a kid in a candy store. So I drifted upstairs, past cases full of truly primitive weapons, including muskets, maces, clubs, polearms, blunderbusses, and God knows what. Before long, I was drifting past a long line of weapons I recognized from recent war movies and news footage: AK-47's, Uzis, BARs, Tommmy Guns, Colts, Peacemakers, and M-16's. My eyes glazed over and things began to distort, because some of the weapons, especially the Italian and Japanese jobs, seemed too delicate to kill anybody but the poor guy who had to fire them. Others seemed so heavy that it would kill an average man to even lift them, much less aim them. Finally, my eyes came back into focus, and I found myself staring at: The Liberator Pistol See: http://home.pacbell.net/rlhag65/ Reputed to be "the only pistol that could be made faster than it was loaded", this el-cheopo weapon was manufactured by General Motors and distributed widely in France, China, and the Phillipines, for less than $2.00 a pop (I guess that would be about $25 now). If you think that this .45 caliber pistol looks fragile on a Web page, well, it looks even flimsier in a glass case. I don't know why I fixated on this weapon, except that I perhaps suspected that if anybody aimed one of these at me, I'd probably laugh so hard that it would cause my assailant to kill me immediately. But that's what happens to you when you when, coming out of a perfectly peaceful, idyllic day in the Hudson Valley, you elect to wonder among guns, clubs, blunderbusses, and atomic bombs. I checked my watch, and realized, much to my dismay, that I had to move on, without even reading 1/10th of the informative nameplates which accompanied the hundreds of weapons that the USMA has on display. Without even seeing what the heck was on the upper two floors.
I walked downstairs, but before to the exit, I noticed something that I hadn't really noticed before, because it was so darned, um, small. So delicate and harmless looking. It was the Davy Crockett, a 25 kg. tactical nuke that was designed to be fired from a bazooka at advancing Soviet troops from a range of a couple of thousand yards. Fielded between 1961, it was retired when its mission was evidently deemed suicidal. See:
http://www.infantry.army.mil/museum/inside_tour/ I left the Museum, proud to be an American, but aware, somewhat uncomfortably, that Americans aren't the only people with an astounding genius for ingenuity these days - it's been globalized, along with everything else. And that somewhere out there there are people who, with a length of pipe, a firing mechanism, and some bad bad stuff, would like nothing more than to set off some shop-built version of the Davy Crockett in our general direction. I wish those people would go away. I wish they'd mind their gardens instead of taking aim at a nation that deep down, I still believe has peace in its heart. But I don't think that anything we're doing right now in the world is gong to make us hate us much less. That there will be enough of them out there - the one's who could be coming up with a cure for cancer, or baldness, or an energy-efficient car, who will take the easy way out, and reach for the gun, instead of the microscope. Which, in the peculiarly narrow syllogism that life in this dangerous world instills, means only one thing, we've got to find them and kill them first. "Now you're thinking like Don Rumsfeld", I said to myself inwardly, chastening this uncomfortable flow of weapon-induced logic with the hope that somehow, sometime, we might do better. That we might find a language other than war to make our message clear. But then, after staring at all those weapons, I'm not all that sure that history - going back to axe and mace, through machine gun and tank, through Fat Man and Davy Crockett up to the present age of the networked battlefield, will prove my hopes right.
In fact, I'm almost sure it will prove them wrong.
|
Ghost-o-Meter You're on the web a lot. You've seen many a dead site. You've forgotten our email address... and you don't feel like coming back here to get it. What do you do? Ghost-o-Meter (javascript required) The Ghost-o-Meter opens a small, movable window... if you've found a Ghost Site, fill in the blanks, fire it off, and go back to foolin' around. Its that easy. You can also use this form: What the ??! Well, this is all very interesting, but what the heck is Ghost Sites anyway? Why devote a live site to Dead Sites? If you're interested in this Ghost Sites thing, it is a project that I began in the summer of 1996 while I was working for Time-Warner's Pathfinder. Late in the evening of July 4th, while piloting a small craft across Long Island Sound, I had what only can be described as an epiphany. From out of the depths came a cruel vision of the World Wide Web. It wasn't a friendly place - an innocent place of community, commerce and chat. It was a great and utterly pitiless electronic ocean that swallowed up sites, careers, and venture capital like a ravenous killer whale. Great sites - sites like Mecklerweb and iGuide - were going down with all hands. Great fortunes were collapsing and proud content sites lay wrecked on the bottom. No one seemed to care. The future was a vast abyss - who would record these days of New Media folly, disaster and despair? Back on shore, but still haunted by this vision, I launched Ghost Sites as a modest attempt to document the great disappearing fleet of web sites sinking beneath the waves. This project briefly made me spectacularly famous, and then I was quickly, and completely forgotten. By March of 1997, Ghost Sites had succumbed to the same deadly entropy that had settled over the Internet, and became a crewless wreck itself. For six cruel months, it drifted like a despised garbage barge, broke its keel in a summer squall, and finally washed up on Geocities. On an icy November morning, Morbus boarded the wreck, inspected the damage, and offered the captain a safe harbor. The bilge pump was started, and the squealing, rusty hull lifted off the sands again. It soon arrived here - in the dark, unquiet waters of Disobey.Com. If you have a favorite rotting site that you'd like to mention, email me at Steve_Baldwin@hotmail.com. Ghost Sites has appeared in a number of places including Time Magazine, ZDNet, The Netly News and more. For a list of all those we know of, as well as links to online counterparts, click here. You can also take a look at the limited edition t-shirt we once offered. Previous Issues Text issues? Click here.
|
 |