In Times of Great Flood presents an eclectic collection of stories about Sicilian immigrant life and family experiences spanning from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. Along with these personal tales, Author Anthony Peranio interweaves humorous Sicilian stories and fables and autobiographical descriptions of landmarks in his life and family history. Anthony was first and foremost a scientist-an inventor, a deep thinker, and philosopher, predicting events and economical changes years before they actually occurred. In addition to personal stories, In Times of Great Flood offers enlightening and thought-provoking observations expressing Anthony’s thoughts and views on life on this ever-changing, often surprising planet. He shares his philosophical ideas concerning human nature and survival within a complicated, difficult, and challenging environment,Anthony passed away after a long illness, unable to complete In Times of Great Flood. Now presented here is his incomplete work, which, viewed as a whole, offers insight, humor, and potent warnings for the future.

IN TIMES OF GREAT FLOOD ...

Stories to help us stay afloatBy Anthony Peranio

Trafford Publishing

Copyright © 2011 Anthony Peranio
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4269-5101-5

Contents

Preface.............................................................................xiEpiphany at Hiroshima...............................................................1The Radioactive Dust of Flattened Hiroshima.........................................1Some Atomic Bomb History............................................................6Curse of Babylon ... Taunting the Gods!.............................................15Applying Babel's Curse to Several Situations........................................17The Curse Applied to Babbling amongst People of the same Tongue.....................19A Shaggy Dog Story..................................................................19Scilian Family Life.................................................................24The Marino Clan.....................................................................24Grandpa Checks Out at Caporetto.....................................................24Grandma Maria in the New World......................................................29The Anastasio Interlude.............................................................45Hard Times in Chicago...............................................................47Finding a Job for Guiseppe in the Windy City........................................50Beware of Stubborn Asses............................................................54Experts and their Predictions.......................................................56Lady under the Stairs...............................................................60The Lampedusan Goose that Minted Golden Ducats......................................65Grandson Gittai's "Death of Trumpeldor".............................................75Farts that can be Heard around the World............................................76A Waxen-ass offering for Curing Constipation........................................78Dad's "Heart Failure" and Dried Chestnuts...........................................81Chapter IV—Philosophical Matters..............................................84Trump's Apocalypse..................................................................84Freud's Model of Human Aggression...................................................91EPILOGUE............................................................................96Bibliography........................................................................98

Chapter One

Matters of Enlightenment

Epiphany at Hiroshima

I took a sudden intuitive leap of understanding, when, with my own eyes; I saw the reality of destruction that had been wrought at Hiroshima. Early December 1945—on the spot—it came to me that here was an event which would change my life and the history of our entire world.

I was an inexperienced-in-the-ways-of-life US 2nd Lieutenant, twenty two-years of age, doing service in the Far Eastern Air Forces at Tokyo. It is true that during service I had personally witnessed other scenes of destruction in the Philippines, Okinawa and Tokyo, but Hiroshima's were devastatingly different! The annihilation of this Japanese city was so complete and absolute that it evoked intense feelings in me—like no other I had ever experienced.

The Radioactive Dust of Flattened Hiroshima

Standing on the cupped mountain ridge that stored its remains, prostrate before me, I could see and feel the presence of the corpse of the city that once was Hiroshima. It was just before noon on this cold winter's day. There was no sun shining. Slowly, ever so slowly, the scene below began to blot out all other stimuli to my being. I stood there with no other awareness of my surroundings.

Just behind me was the Japanese railroad train from which I had alighted to take a thirty-minute break. I had lost concern over the purpose of the trip that was taking me and several other officers to Fukuoka, on Japan's southern Island of Kyushu.

Only an instant before I had been aware of the hissing sound of the engineer blowing off some of the locomotive boiler steam and the clang and rattling of metallic pipes and other machinery, making the loading of coal and taking on water for the remainder of our 800 mile trip from Tokyo. Just now these sounds were not being relayed to my brain. Nor did I feel the effect of the cold ridge-top breeze cutting into my heavy woolen service jacket. Even with all the bustle of several hundred Japanese passengers, alighting to stretch their legs, and a steaming railroad train right next to me, my world was silent.

Above, a dull and listless sky served as our cover; unmoving gray, unbroken formless low-hanging clouds. From this overhead blanket, there were no signs of movement that might have competed with the scene below.

What the Holy Hell was this scene before me? I knew there had been a bombing here, but the complete devastation from this one was different from two-ton bombs, quite capable of producing serious destruction! Still, afterwards in the "block-busters" mess, one could discern at least part of the masonry or wood of what once had been a building line; or pieces of twisted and uprooted railroad tracks, snaking their way through blown-over earth. There might even be the pilings and supports, or parts of them, for what was once a bridge, or what might have been the remains of an industrial plant with grotesquely torn open and dismembered, twisted steel storage tanks. But below me, now and here, there was none of that!

It was as though several square miles of the city once called Hiroshima had been scooped up by some giant hand and thrown into a blending machine; a homogenizer kept at very high temperature, capable of vaporizing steel and all materials extant. Fiendishly, additional power had been injected into the fiery cauldron to unleash the fury of giant, hard, sharp mincing blades, moving at supersonic speed. The result, I imagined, would be what I now saw; radioactive, hot and messy matter, which—after being poured out of this previously unimaginable blender—would cool into the black and gray dust and rubble that had settled down into the flattened area that was once the center of Hiroshima.

I estimated that the "ground zero" area of virtually complete annihilation covered an area of a thousand or more "blocks" as I knew them in my native New York City (A destruction, for example, of all of the lower tip of Manhattan; or all of Central Park and everything round about for a mile or so).

And then, having repressed it up to this point, I began to think of the horrible death of the humans and all other living things in that blotted out circle. There must have been, I estimated, many tens of thousands of Japanese "osterized" at Hiroshima.

At the instant before the bomb was triggered on that fateful August morning, a mass of humanity was going through its routine activities and chores. Immediately afterwards, it was gone! no recognizable trace of their remains was left. Everything alive had been transformed from biological to inert chemical matter, souped-up radioactively.

I studied the scene more closely and my technical mind wondered how far out the circle of instant obliteration might have gone. And, standing as silent sentinels, I saw the distance markers providing my answer. Here and there, sticking out of the now more black than gray dust, outside the inner circle, were stubborn steel girders that had managed to survive. As my vision shifted outwards from the center, I began to discern more rubble that looked somewhat like that in other places I had seen bombed out by conventional "chemical" explosives. In the outer areas, I imagined, there had been countless visible fatalities and wounded; dismemberment of heads and limbs, wounds of all kinds; abounding physical and psychological trauma.

What were the more local effects of the high levels of the vast amounts of radioactive dust and particles produced?

In our Tokyo briefing before the trip south, we officers had been warned by our Orientation Lecturer about the danger of "fallout" in the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The order was not to enter the city past the designated barriers. To do so, we were told, might jeopardize our health and, amongst other things, the ability we might have to impregnate our future wives with viable sperm. We were warned about "... ionizing radiation". This effect, we communications officers were told, is similar to the silent danger of x-rays and very high frequency radar waves emanating from military electronic equipment. It was explained that although not immediately perceived or felt, the damage definitely occurs.

And so here it was, a whole city (and region) full of this radioactive stuff emitting its life-destroying radiation. This once living city might become inhabitable only after a mandatory long time, and after on-going radioactive decay of the many tons of toxic by-products resulting from the atomic explosion. What would be the long-term effects on the future procreation results of the exposed people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the areas between and around them?

After several minutes, I started to feel cold. My sense of skin temperature was returning. With the returning physical awareness came those impulses in my psyche:

The feelings of a reduction of individual existence to nothingness, an aloneness. A vague sense of guilt accompanied my feeling of alienation from fellow GI's whom I had helped bring this monstrous thing into being. Here was despair, guilt, sadness and anxiety, indescribably intertwined in me. There was also fear for my own life and future well-being, in light of the release of this monstrous force with horrible delayed-action capabilities. And, almost paradoxically at the same time, a certain "joy" that I was alive and still capable of experiencing events, mixed up and flowing from one into the other.

These were compelling thoughts, evoking deep conscious and sub-conscious emotions, and I just knew that everything from now on in my existence would be tempered by intrusions of the scene below, revisited upon me.

This was the Hiroshima epiphany, which had become, and has continued to be my most life-transforming event.

Presently, at age eighty five, the intuition that surged through me then has, if anything, been reinforced and is set more deeply into my psyche.

I don't expect any further exceptional revelations except, perhaps, the final big one; near and at the moment of my death. Otherwise, there just should be the little flashes of clarity and actual pleasure most of us usually get by partaking of, and perhaps somewhat understanding, the ever-flowing mysteries surrounding the unfathomable miracle we call "existence".

Some Atomic Bomb History

The U.S. 1st Air Force dropped atomic bombs in early August 1945; first on Hiroshima and then three days later on Nagasaki. My visit to Hiroshima occurred four months afterwards, in December 1945. I was a Second Lieutenant Communications Officer on special assignment, traveling from headquarters in Tokyo to Fukuoka base, located almost mid-way between Nagasaki (100 miles) and Hiroshima (150 miles).

On the cold winter's day of the beginning of this quasi-mystical transformation in me, I had no detailed "scientific" knowledge about the effects of this "justifiable" act of war by "my country" against the Japanese.

At the time of my epiphany:

I didn't know that 140,000 of the people of Hiroshima had been killed instantaneously by the detonation of a uranium-type, low-level bomb dubbed "Little Man". From hours to years later, another 100,000 human beings (of bones, flesh and blood, like you and me) had died from blast and radiation-related illnesses—a total of 240,000 fatalities.

In Nagasaki a ground-level plutonium type bomb ("Fat Boy") was exploded, killing 70,000 people immediately, and another 70,000 dead afterwards, as a result of the explosive power of the bomb and its radiation-related illnesses.

I didn't know that the "technical marvel" nicknamed "Little Man"—unlike any other weapon in mankind's torturous, psychopathic history of war—had generated a heat wave of extreme temperature (about 7,200F) and velocity (several hundred miles per hour) that had spread over four square miles of the unfortunate city, obliterating most of its inhabitants!

I didn't know that the Hiroshima (and Nagasaki) atomic bombs were later to be considered "small" fission-types and that improved fusion-type (H-bombs), were to be developed, with hundreds and even thousands of times the destructive capabilities of the Hiroshima/ Nagasaki types. These "biggies" would be capable of completely obliterating the largest of cities and contaminating whole countries, regions and the Earth itself. Also—

I didn't know that there had been military alternatives to destroying Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It turned out that for political, military, and scientific expediency, President Truman (my Commander-in-Chief, Head of all US forces) was advised to make the decision to have two different types of fissionable material bombs tested at two levels of explosion.; one at ground level (Hiroshima) zero sea level, and the other several thousand feet in the air above the city (Nagasaki).

These two targets comprised mainly of civilian populations and destruction was rained down upon mostly innocent victims.

In later years, as more and more of the horrible aspects of nuclear weapons and the politics they involve became clear, my absolute repugnancy was sharpened and reinforced.

I did not know then, December 1945, what I understand and know now about humans and our sad "condition": As life unfolded for me, I suffered the crimes of egocentric, megalomaniacal world leaders and their politicians, the idiocy and hypocrisy of wars and the cold-blooded use of weapons of mass destruction. (This more detailed information came later in a series of minor revelations, after the Hiroshima epiphany.)

During the years of World War II, due to military secrecy and press censorship, I had only limited understanding of the power of nuclear weapons. Notwithstanding this ignorance, the sight at Hiroshima, through my own eyes, of so much visible utter destruction—caused by a single bomb—was sufficient to cause the branding into my consciousness of this experience.

It was clear from what I did know, that the fission weapon used at Hiroshima—a small nuclear weapon—was some freakin' bomb that surely should be capable of instilling fear in the hearts of all. That this type of bomb, capable of such vast destruction, must never be used again; and humankind must decide to end the processes leading to any and all wars. The sight of the dead city of Hiroshima was enough for me! I wrote these things in my diary entry for that day, underlining:

War is an expression of the psychopathology of Human Societies; in any of its forms it must be stopped!

Back at our train stop at Hiroshima, I stood in silent meditation. The almost empty GI sleeper and seating section of four cars was up front. We were separated from the Japanese riding in six over-stuffed-passenger cars at the rear.

Some minutes after the scene of devastation had penetrated deeply and had been integrated into my being, I became aware of the approach of a Major wearing the insignia of the 5th Air Force. He had stepped down from the sleeping car next to mine. Without waiting for my salute (in the war zone we had nearly all stopped the procedure) he introduced himself.

"Hi! I'm Tom Whitley, attached to Administration based in Tokyo 5th Air Force." He proffered his hand for shaking.

"Good to know you! I'm Tony Peranio, FEAF (Far Eastern Air Forces) communications officer."

There was a cold breeze blowing, and both of us pulled our coats around ourselves. Apparently we were both thinking of food, since our last meal was in the evening before boarding the "Tokyo-Fukuoka Express".

Feeling his own hunger signals for a lunch, Tom asked, "What do we do for chow around here? Is there anything more to eat besides the miserable canned and dried rations we took with us from Tokyo?"

Then I told him that I had tried to prepare myself for the two-day trip by bringing the most edible of the GI rations; canned meat and rice and chocolate-bran biscuits. I had included a sufficient supply of water and my own cooking equipment. He smiled acceptance when I offered to share my bounty with him.

From my back pack I retrieved and unfolded the flat cooking stove that I had constructed from corrugated sheet iron. This had a lower section for holding my heat source and above that a grill, upon which I could place my mess kit with rations to be heated. I loaded the canned chicken and rice rations and an additional can of vegetables that the major contributed, into my mess tin.

About the heat source: In my mind I was proud of my invention. It was a takeoff on the "Sterno" cans of jellied alcohol, which could be lit by a match and would provide enough heat to prepare a meal.

Note:

As a young adolescent I had first seen "Sterno" being used by homeless vagrants in New York City during the Depression and Prohibition days. The poor and dispossessed men would use the heat for meals and for keeping at least their hands warm during cold nights in the open.

During Prohibition, in desperation, alcoholics would spread the soft jelly on bread and swallow it to get a kick out of the alcohol used in jellied "Sterno". What these desperate creatures didn't know—or if they knew, they were so desperate that they could not care—was that the alcohol was not "ethyl alcohol", a drinkable type, but instead was the dangerous commercial methyl alcohol. This caused blindness and often death in many of the "Sterno eaters".

In my adaptation for canned heat, I used "GI" cans of a semisolid "dubbing" wax, issued to us for impregnating leather boots to make them less permeable to water. I mixed the dubbing wax with gasoline into a loose paste. This I had done a few hours before boarding the train trip.

I had not done a previous-to-use "field test" of my canned heat. Anyway, at the Hiroshima stop it had its trial run, outside on the hard tamped ground near the railroad tracks. For safety's sake I decided to keep about twenty feet between my contraption and the train.

The mess tin loaded with food and some water was left open just a crack to let steam out. (I had well-learned the Boy Scout camping admonition of "Never put a sealed can of food—unopened at least with some small holes in its lid— directly into the fire!" To do so might find an exploded can of pork and beans spread quite democratically over the leaves of trees and bushes in the vicinity.)

(Continues...)

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