In Peter B. Hales' "The Atomic Sublime" — and in other works we've read so far — the mushroom cloud is described as something immediately recognizable to the American eye, although its implications and effects were not (necessarily). Even as images of the devastation in Hiroshima and Nagaski emerged, the mushroom cloud remained something almost separate from the destruction in the photos. Even though images of real people were accessible, the mushroom cloud seemed not to be responsible for the demolished buildings and mutilated bodies. Because of the glorified descriptions of the cloud ("Its light equaled that of many suns; its smoke plume rose nearly eight miles" (Hales 9) in Newsweek and "a huge ball of fiery yellow" in Life), the cloud existed outside of the destruction it created. In the minds of Americans, who displaced the blame by using flowery language for the mushroom in the sky, the cloud was taken out of context and through its repeated consumption, was rendered nearly unable to be put back into its original historical event.
This concept is the basis for Guy Debord's book Society of the Spectacle, in which he writes, "In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation." Although Debord meant "conditions of production" in the literal, capitalist sense, the image of the mushroom cloud is, in a way, an output of the American capitalist system; it became a commodity for people to visually consume until they nearly forgot its original significance. Debord also writes, "The images detached from every aspect of life fuse in a common stream in which the unity of this life can no longer be reestablished" — after the mushroom cloud was seen as an entity separate from Hiroshima or Nagasaki, maintaining Debord's argument, it could never be fully placed back into the act of atrocity in which it originated.
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