Demons, Commies, and Garbage Incinerators

    One line in Ray Bradbury’s “There Will Come Soft Rains” stands out to me: on the second page, detritus, tracked in by a dying dog, is swept away and destroyed in a garbage incinerator, which, in the book’s narration, is said to “ [sit] like evil Baal in a dark corner.” This is immediately strange: Baal (or Ba’al, it depends), is a historically broad term, referring to many varietal deities, but Bradbury was raised Baptist, so it is most useful for us to examine the Christian idea of Baal: variably idol of the Israelites, philistine Lord of the Flies, or Literally Just Satan. The garbage incinerator, on the other hand, is the garbage incinerator: a little quaint, Atomic©, perhaps, in its representation as an automated household fixture, but comparatively standard. Certainly not Literally The Lord of Hell and Prince of Demons. Strange to link the two.

     

    United States Senator Joseph McCarthy didn’t like those commies. It was really his whole thing. We like to consider McCarthyism as a purely institutional body, but the unpleasant fact of the matter is that, through the early 50s which exemplified the sentiment but leading back to the very first decades of the 20th century, anti-left sentiment was all the rage among the broad civilian body. And in the late 40s and early 50s, once the threat of the bomb was on the table, and once the reactionary culture so well liked in America had a fresh empty space for a demonized outgroup, having just finished up with demonizing and/or being scared of us East Asians, one of the if not the single greatest concerns in the mainstream culture became communists; reds under the bed; the Eastern horde: the Foreign.

    The obvious primary thrust of “There Will Come Soft Rains” is nuclear war, the common anxiety of the time. I argue that there is a second, quieter, anxiety the text expresses: the horrors, the length of agency, which the United States was willing to extend to itself and to the world in the fight against communism.

    Here is where we return to the garbage disposal. Once considered in the context of the xenophobic hysteria of the early Cold War, the incongruous, demoniacal, nature of the garbage incinerator becomes much less confusing. That the nominally friendly (and notably, idyllically American-suburban) house- bright animals, cheery poems, neat rooms and neat breakfast and a neat life- suddenly transforms itself into the ravening brimstone mouth of Literally Satan, is no coincidence- it is a reflection of America, of how its obsession with domestic prettiness (examine the suburbs and their overwhelming whiteness, the crisp workplace, no union action, nossir, and of course, the cities, and their anti-homeless spikes) disappears when faced with the Foreign (here, in the story, our friend the diseased dog, but of course in real life the Foreign was altogether more human), replaced with the inhuman horrors of violence, direct and institutional.

    I was going to end this on a far more grim note but that feels a little rude so just remember that if you see your neighbor engaging in Un-American-Activities, no you didn’t.