“Thank God for the Atom Bomb” The New Republic - August 1981 by Paul Fussell Many years ago in New York I saw on the side of a bus a whiskey ad I’ve remembered all this time. It’s been for me a model of the short poem, and indeed I’ve come upon few short poems subsequently that exhibited more poetic talent. The ad consisted of two eleven-syllable lines of “verse,” thus: In life, experience is the great teacher. In Scotch, Teacher’s is the great experience. For present purposes we must jettison the second line (licking our lips, to be sure, as it disappears), leaving the first to register a principle whose banality suggests that it enshrines a most useful truth.(1)I bring up the matter because, writing on the forty- second anniversary of the atom-bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, I want to consider something suggested by the long debate about the ethics, if any, of that ghastly affair. Namely, the importance of experience, sheer, vulgar experience, in influencing, if not determining, one’s views about that use of the atom bomb.(2) 1.The author is suggesting that sometimes things that are very simple are also very true. 2.What point is the author making about experience in WWII? This is the key to the author’s main argument.
