 by Dr. Jeffrey Lant. Author's program note. Since we puny, frail, vulnerable inhabitants of Planet Earth have claimed sovereignty over the land and the boundless seas, we have made one catastrophic error over and over again, namely that Nature can be constrained, contained, curtailed, always subject to our self-deceit and capricious will. However, as the events commencing November 2, 2013 in the Federated States of Micronesia have starkly demonstrated, for all our bombast, arrogance, smugness, pride, pretension, hubris, disdain, and unending temerity, we are but the careless tenants in a world we not only do not own but hardly understand at all; this the recent events have made glaringly apparent, to the misery of millions now desperate, stricken, our fellow mankind despairing amidst the anguish of their traumatized, truncated lives. Hear then Thy people, O God, for they suffer and call upon Thy endless mercy. Amen. Typhoon Haiyan, perhaps the greatest such storm ever. The day before. The day after. As October ended, there was as yet no sign of the apocalypse to come. Twelve million people and more went about their ordinary occupations with no sense whatsoever that these very tasks so often dismissed as pedestrian and dull would be, and in just a handful of hours, so precious as to seem the gift of God Himself. Thus did a boy tell the little white lies to the girl he was cheating on about the girl he loved... tomorrow all three participants in this engaging soap opera would be dead, interred together in a mass grave, the unimaginable now the new reality. Drivers would complain, as every driver does everywhere, of the high cost of gas, all unknowing that tomorrow there would be no gas for them at all, all movement at an end, gas a luxury not to be had at any price. The grocery store owner would fret because the pothole outside his all-important establishment had not yet been filled, despite the mayor's promise. Tomorrow that store owner would be washed ashore, body battered by the surging seas, ruthless, remorseless, humanity unknown, come to his eternal rest in the very hole which provided his grave... his destroyed property littered with the bodies of his friends and customers, those determined to ride out the storm..., and so they did, so many corpses, people no longer, but a negligible part of a growing statistic, frightening to behold, now reeking, an acute hygienic problem and gruesome nightmare for the living. And so from Micronesia through the Philippines, to Vietnam and southern China, parents would dine with their children for the last time, these common events with their family chatter, their jokes and chaff, their very ordinariness their charm... gone, all gone, forever and ever more. This, too, is the new reality. The Ride of the Valkyries. 23 July 1851, one of the greatest of composers (he would have insisted on being called the greatest of all) sat down to write what became the main theme of the Ride, the leitmotif labelled "Walkureritt", a composition so celebrated, so immediately recognized that partisans of the Master demanded to hear it played over and over again as a single work, instead of a piece of a larger opera and the larger four opera Ring Cycle, one of the glories of mankind.. Predictably this infuriated Richard Wagner (1813-1883) who in 1870 exploded in the kind of rage only an artist can understand. Those who wanted to play the Ride alone were committing an "utter indiscretion", and he forbade in the strongest possible terms "any such thing." However his wishes were disregarded in his own day... and are being disregarded here now, for there is no composition by any artist which so successfully creates the atmosphere of growing menace, feeding on itself, overcoming all, fast-running, an agent of the greatest possible hazard and parlous danger unparalleled. Go now and find it in any search engine. Tread carefully for death, painful, exquisite, final follows in its wake. These are the Valkyries. Mayhem is their business. The Ride is their chant, their destiny, now yours. Tacloban is their particular target, the valley of the shadow of death. How like the passengers on RMS Titanic the residents of Tacloban must have been and how apt the comparison, for Tacloban was as gleaming and notable an achievement in its sphere as Titanic was in hers. It was the first city in Region VIII of the Philippines to become a coveted "Highly Urbanized City", the gateway to the important Eastern Visayas. It was ranked amongst the ten most competitive cities of its proud nation, the pride of Leyte, where General Douglas MacArthur in magnificent kit redeemed in 1944 his pledge of 1942, "I shall return" and he did -- twice. You see, the first time MacArthur waded ashore in the waters of Leyte, the cameras didn't produce the epic photographs this man of destiny wanted. So.... he changed his clothes into yet another uniform of crisp magnificence and this time got what he wanted... pictures for history, pictures that would be so very useful in his quest for the Republican presidential nomination of 1948, where he underwhelmed the delegates. They liked the idea of a military hero... but found MacArthur and his lordly ways hard to swallow. Why hadn't he simply saved his highly polished shoes and pristine trousers by coming ashore in the customary manner, the way Haiyan would come ashore, with more combined power and energy than MacArthur could ever imagine, more impact than the massed weaponry and punch of a thousand great navies? This is the wallop called Haiyan, which began as a watery wisp in a nation you can hardly find on a map, a thing of strange beauty and force, what the Chinese call haiyan, the stormy petrel that all await in awe and gripping fear -- if we are properly advised, in seriousness and at the earliest possible moment. But that didn't happen here. The storm, engorged, came more swiftly and with greater determination than man expected or reported... and thus man -- and all his works -- suffered accordingly. The stages of fast-moving death, as the Valkries shriek and yell, unimaginable power theirs to wield, theirs to command... and they do, they do.... No one is worried when the first manifestations of Haiyan are announced. Some "alarmists" of course leave; they are taking no chances.... but the millions of Asia, who have seen so many storms before, casually shrug their shoulders and say, "Que sera, sera. We have weathered so many storms, we shall weather this storm, too." After all they had all the latest information from all the latest equipment. Surely, that would provide the most accurate and timely warnings... But here the fast augmenting power of Haiyan was hugely augmented by the power of human ineptitude and miscalculation. Item. Despite receiving about 20 tropical cyclones yearly, there was no evacuation plan. It was "sauve-qui-peut", a prayer, not a plan. Item: The U.S. military discontinued up-close typhoon hunting airplanes in 1987. The joint Typhoon Warning Center now relies primarily on satellite and radar data. That's why it was so difficult to pin down precisely how strong the great storm was. Inadequately briefed, the government's warnings were too little, too late, unnecessary death the result. Item: There are 4 regional typhoon-monitoring agencies, in Hawaii, China, Japan, and Taiwan. But these organizations, all engaged in similar tasks, work separately, no cooperation. People died as a result. The cackling Valkyries saw to that, shrill, ear-splitting, cacophanous, their diabolical joy on full display as Wagner captured with such horrid beauty ... Thus the typhoon became a Super-Typhoon equivalent to 4 or 5 hurricanes. Its core expanded to be large enough to span the Upper Midwest of the United States. Its sustained winds rose at land fall to at least 195 miles per hour. It was the truest manifestation of shock and awe, and there was nothing in its path of utter destruction to stop it. And so the verities of yesterday gave way to the cruder verities of tomorrow, summarized by just one appalling photograph of graphic disgust... A body hangs upside down from a gnarled tree, attached by a shoelace, swinging eerily through day and night, a fact, a warning, an admonition, a cautionary tale, if there are any left to heed it, if there are any left at all.... |
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