All the World Gasped

By Roger Rosenblatt

A tragic gas leak offers a parable of industrial life

In Specimen Days Walt Whitman created a terrible picture of the proximity of human progress and human frailty by describing the U.S. Patent Office when it was used as a hospital during the Civil War. There the dead and dying soldiers lay on cots surrounded by the latest inventions of the day, high shelves packed with gleaming instruments devised to ensure the world's safety and advancement. India provided some specimen days last week. On Monday the death toll was 410. On Friday, more than 2,500. By the weekend, numbers had no meaning any more, since no one could tell how many of the citizens of Bhopal who managed to survive the leaking toxic gas would eventually be counted among the dead. Something went very wrong at the Union Carbide pesticide plant. Human progress came up against human frailty. The air was poisoned, and the world gasped.

It was, in fact, the world's tragedy that occurred in Bhopal, not only because one saw fellow mortals stricken but because the industrialized society has created a shared fragility. The sources of enhancement are also the sources of fear and peril-all the chemical plants, nuclear power plants and other strangely shaped structures concocting potential salvation and destruction in remote and quiet places. The citizens of Bhopal lived near the Union Carbide plant because they sought to live there. The plant provided jobs, the pesticide more food. Bhopal was a modern parable of the risks and rewards originally engendered by the Industrial Revolution: Frankenstein's wonder becoming Frankenstein's monster.

Not that it was an abstract lesson that we watched all week, as mothers rocked blinded children in their arms and old men convulsed in their hospital beds. The pictures were all too real. More human frailty was on display than human progress. Odd how little it takes to pick up the facts involved in so sudden a catastrophe-to learn all about "methyl isocyanate," and how the pressure built up in a storage tank too rapidly for the "scrubber" to neutralize the gas that escaped into the atmosphere. Even a tragedy becomes a moment in technology, as if we feel compelled to advance knowledge at the same time we experience shock and grief. But acquiring information also serves as a deflection of feeling. In the long run we remember people like ourselves, drowned in the air by an enemy that was supposed to be an ally.

If the world felt especially close to Bhopal last week, it may be because the world is Bhopal, a place where the occupational hazard is modern life. History teaches that there is no avoiding that hazard, and no point in trying; one only trusts that the gods in the machines will give a good deal more than they take away. But the problem is not purely mystical either. If social advancement lies in something as lethal as methyl isocyanate, it only argues for handling with the greatest care. After this tragedy is out of the news, and the lawsuits are filed, and the dead cremated, things ought to be made considerably safer than they were before Bhopal. Human progress, human frailty. Ashes float in the air near the pesticide plant. -By Roger Rosenblatt