Today (July 20) we went to see “Oppenheimer,” a movie about a quantum physicist who built atomic bombs. And, surprisingly, I discovered intriguing facts and possibilities that connected the two of us — yes, Oppenheimer and me — the movie’s famous hero and a no-name columnist for a small town newspaper in western Massachusetts. Of course, we live in an era in which anything is possible. So, let’s start with some facts:

Oppenheimer, a stupendous prodigy, skipped a year here and there in school and obtained his Ph.D. in two years from his B.A. in Germany. I was something of a prodigy, too: I skipped my entire middle and high school years and, after a three-year stint in the U.S. Army, obtained my Ph.D. also in two years (at UCLA). I received my master’s in six months and advanced to doctoral candidacy in an unheard-of nine months. Within a year of completing my Ph.D., I wrote my first major book, “The Dead End,” published in 1977.

Oppenheimer is famous for destroying Hiroshima and Nagasaki (1945). But I destroyed something much bigger: I destroyed the entire nation of America in 1980. As a social scientist who deals only with words, not material particles, I made it clear — with a 100,000 words in “The Dead End” — that America as a nation would not survive.

The book was my own 10,000 tons of TNT dropped on America. What did the book say that made the mighty United States a doomed nation? Fatefully dedicated to the proposition of individual freedom (also called selfishness), inherited from the Enlightenment ideals, the nation would destroy itself by its own inherently selfish citizens.

Fame often requires coincidences of events, such as World War II for Oppenheimer, and in my case, less predictably an exposure in Time magazine. In 1980, amid declining patriotism and military manpower, and uncontrollable citizen selfishness in post-Vietnam deregulation and consumerism, Time magazine opened up the most important question of its time with the caption, “Who Will Fight for America?” splashed over the cover picture of a faceless soldier.

As the Department of Defense found the answer in Oppenheimer and atoms in 1942, Time magazine found the answer in “The Dead End” in 1980, and the answer was: Nobody! The nation was doomed to be destroyed by its own self-consuming generations. The Time magazine editorial discussed the apocalyptic shock delivered by my book at length and concluded that it was “an important and brilliant book” for shining light on what the editorial called America’s “national death wish.”

This was America in 1980 at the zenith of its power, and four decades before Trumpism brought the issue of America’s steady decline to a national consciousness. I had persuaded the hardened Time editors and jaded intellectuals that my book was the greatest achievement of originality since Alexis De Tocqueville and James Bryce. According to a reviewer, I was “the most astute humanist writer in America today,” heir to Thorstein Veblen and C. Wright Mills, a heady company of famous social thinkers.

Barely 30 at the time, and only with the sheer force of my argument, I had succeeded in persuading the world-dominant nation at the peak of its power and smugness that it was a doomed nation “by design.”

Does all this match the split atoms?

Alas, this is where the similarities between the two accomplished scientists end and the inconvenient reality creeps into the tale. I wrote a dozen more books of social criticism, art philosophy and political economy, all with considerable originality, but I never repeated the heyday of 1980. Obviously, in a nation of perpetual sunshine, nobody likes critics and doomsayers.

In the playground of demigods, fame came to Oppenheimer, but only shame came to me. My prophesy of death for America, unacceptable just outside Time’s intellectual circle, brought me nothing but devastation. To wit:

My colleagues at Indiana University where I began my professorial career, dismissed the book (still in manuscript form) as “an embarrassment to the department and profession,” and terminated my contract.

At the University of Alabama, my next job, my fortune didn’t improve. I was denied tenure only three days before Time’s national celebration of my fame. Two years later I had to leave Alabama, dismissed.

My book itself was rejected by 150 publishers in America, which broke the Guinness Book’s “most rejected book manuscript” category. Only an upstart, fairly desperate to find a book to print, rescued it.

Throughout my whole professional life, two pronouncements alternately dogged me: “You are a genius” and “You are terminated.”

In the last 25 years of my academic career, I found refuge in the most un-academic of all places, the military, as a Department of Defense contract-professor teaching at all military bases in Europe and Asia, and managed to retire from it.

Why such discrepancies between two minds whose brilliance is recognized, one universally and the other provisionally?

It’s the difference between the physical world of nature and the social world of feelings and relationships. Oppenheimer’s brilliance was universally recognized; mine only among those who cared to recognize it. Such is the monumental difference between “things” in nature and “minds” in society, and between Oppenheimer’s world and my world.

Finally, whose job was more difficult? Oppenheimer’s in converting the atomic energy into a bomb? Or, my task of persuading a very powerful and haughty nation to accept its own present failure and imminent doom before it is too late?

After all, Oppenheimer wanted to convert physical energy, helped by a multitude of scientists and billions of dollars, in a trial-and-error process — while I was trying to convert the stubborn human hearts and minds in an incorrigibly spoiled nation.

With due respect to Oppenheimer, I would still believe it’s easier to change atoms into energy than change an obstinate nation’s character and destiny.

Jon Huer lives in Greenfield.

]]>