Trinity Test
Some background on the previous entry, Honorable Bird….
A note on the Michael Douglas film in that previous entry:
“This film is not to be confused with Japanese director Shohei Imamura’s BLACK RAIN, which was produced around the same time. Imamura’s film deals with the lives of a Japanese family who survived the nuclear-bombing of Hiroshima. The phrase ‘black rain,’ used in both films, refers to the deadly fallout caused by the detonation of an atomic weapon.”
For related material on the religion of Trinity, see Hiroshima Mayor Says US Worships Nukes, a news story quoted in Death of a Holy Man (8/10/03). The phrase “holy man” there is from John Steinbeck, who once wrote a sentence saying that sons of bitches, viewed from another perspective, are holy men.
Here is the death of another holy man, Clayton S. White, a medical researcher who developed the field of blast biology — the study of how nuclear explosions affect people immediately and over time. This holy man died on April 26, 2004. A log24 entry of that date supplies an appropriate epitaph for the holy man, dead at 91, who has now joined his younger brother, the late Supreme Court Justice Byron R. White, in some region of the afterworld.