Blood Money and Reveries

Walking through a parade for the blind

1951

Imagine: a single moment waited 63 years for me, hidden in a blue shoebox. And when I say a moment, I mean it: a sixtieth of a second, maybe less.

I wasn’t there for it back when it happened. I wasn’t even born.

The moment I’m talking about — and which I’m going to talk about (boy am I ever) — takes place in 1951. That’s a few short years after World War II, when human beings tore each other apart in all kinds of new ways, six years that now seem to be falling out of memory.

1951 is the year of Operation Greenhouse in which the American military ran the world’s first thermonuclear weapons test, a smashing success: the South Pacific islet of Elugelab was vapourized and the islands of Enewetak Atoll spew radiation to this day. It’s the year a 26 year old Mexican chemist named Luis Miramontes — he should be a household name but isn’t — seeded a revolution by inventing the first oral contraceptive. 1951 is when the Civil Rights Congress presented a document to the United Nations called We Charge Genocide, citing crimes of genocide against Black Americans by the U.S. government. And Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon won the Honorary Foreign Language Film Award at the Oscars, one more step on its way to not only entering the canon of cinema but becoming an idiom.

A lot happened in 1951.