1904. New York City. A burgeoning metropolis beginning to stand upright and not just walk, but run. To sprint. Feeling lactic acid immigrating to its tissues. On the twenty-second of April, a wealthy textile importer and his painter wife have their first child. The boy is named Julius.
Julius grows up in circumstances approaching dreams: a house with three original paintings from Van Gogh sprinkled between pieces from Picasso and Vuillard, studying at the Ethical Culture Society School which remains to this day a bastion of progressive thought, a father with a keen interest in schools who serves also as a member of the Society of Ethical Culture, a mother openly encouraging Julius and his younger brother to be eager with their interests and to try new things and to be inquisitive.
Julius finishes the third and fourth grades in the same school year and eventually skips the eighth grade entirely. He enjoys French and English literature as well as mineralogy. With his interest shifted to chemistry, he graduates early, set to attend Harvard. But on a summer vacation in Europe, while prospecting out of a want and curiosity, Julius becomes sick. A disease. Colitis. His family brings him to the southwest of America, to New Mexico. He recovers and, in the process, falls in love with the region and horseback riding.
Julius enters Harvard a year "late" at 18. In his first year, he is allowed graduate standing in physics where a course on thermodynamics piques a considerable interest with regards to experimental physics. Taking six courses each semester, he completes undergrad in three years and graduates summa cum laude. Upon being accepted for postgraduate work at Christ's College, Cambridge, Julius asks the professor from his course in thermodynamics, Percy Bridgman, to write him a letter of recommendation to the Cavendish Laboratory. In the letter, Bridgman notes Julius' interests in physics extend more to the theoretical than the experimental.
Life abroad is not entirely peaches and cream for Julius. He places an apple saturated with noxious chemicals on the desk of tutor. While the tutor doesn't eat it, the troubled Julius is reprimanded with psychiatrist sessions in London. Later, in Paris, while venting his frustrations to a friend about the state of experimental physics, Julius snaps and attempts to strangle the friend. The attack is warded off, but Julius' stability is questioned.
Needing a change of scenery and a environment more specific to his theoretical pursuits, Julius transfers to the University of Göttingen, a world leader in theoretical physics. Under Max Born, Julius flourishes. He overwhelms discussions and seminars with an ecstatic tenacity and intense aptitude. The professor who administers the oral exam for his degree, James Franck, reportedly says: "I'm glad that's over. He was on the point of questioning me."
Julius went on to apply his considerable gifts to the fields of general relativity, spectroscopy, quantum field theory and quantum electrodynamics, among others. His work successfully predicted later discoveries like the neutron, the meson and the neutron star.
On 16 July, 1945, Julius finds himself back in his beloved southwest and, at the local time of 05:49:25, he witnesses a sight never before seen in human history. A sight of radiating light superior to that from the sun at noon across the still-night sky, illuminating the valleys and mountains and flatlands. A light with flashes of purple and a searing, unrelenting edge. Julius is J. Robert Oppenheimer, Director of the Manhattan Project, and he is witness to the first ever weapons test of an atomic bomb.
After the euphoria of the moment passes, Kenneth Bainbridge turns to Oppenheimer.
"Now we are all sons of bitches," Bainbridge says.
Wisconsin owns a $3.6 billion shortfall for the upcoming biennial budget. Which is to say, in the bookkeeping of Wisconsin, an atomic bomb has gone off. While the number itself is an abstract, a looming specter, the devastating blast will be a wielded scythe amputating local, state and school programs or altogether lopping their heads off. Two years of programs underfunded or ended. How does one get that time back after? How does a student receive the education lost from two years of swollen class sizes? This romantic notion of "sucking it up" or "doing more with less"? The state is on fire and even when the towering flames from the inferno of the atomic debt are put out, the lingering radiation will be a parasitic companion latched on with a death grip that even when pried off the marks of its clutches will still be seen.
To say a lot of vitriol has spread airborne through the populous recently would be at best apt and at worst an understatement. In many pro-Walker circles, public employees -- namely teachers -- are demonized as leeches to a corrupt system. That their benefits are a drain on the state and the budget repair bill is the infallible plug or at least a sufficient amount of random hair. That while perhaps they are not responsible for the crisis, they share enough of the blame to justify the gladiator arena howling. That because they are suffering and making sacrifices, so too should the public-union employees to say nothing of the tangible contempt for unions in general. In the opposing circles, exasperated masses have taken to the streets of Madison and the corridors of the Capitol in protest, screaming and chanting their lungs empty and razor blades into their throats. Others start blogs.
The union supporters have their Son of a Bitch: Scott Walker.
The loyal subjects of the Walker-regime have their Sons of Bitches: public unions.
But who is the real Son of a Bitch? Who are the real Sons of Bitches? The answer will not come from who screams the loudest or who has the more clever quip or who has more numbers on their side; two and two is four, regardless of the number of people screaming five.
Governor Walker, for all of his disinformation, doublethink and dishonest discourse, has been in office for mere months. It can't be him. Even on the national scale, the battle being waged on unions, he's just a link in the chain rather than the Reagan figure he has delusions of. He is but a facade of a larger problem. A punching bag, albeit one that is a great deal of fun to punch.
The public-unions? It is ridiculous to assert them as anything other than a manufactured outlet for right-wing rage. To vilify them for accepting terms of contracts from collective bargaining, and then to willingly concede those terms for the ability continue collective bargaining, is seven shades of disingenuous.
Governor Walker is a half-wit attempting damage, public-unions are the right's Emmanuel Goldstein and the Son of a Bitch lies elsewhere. That elsewhere comes next.
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