Last night I saw Copenhagen at the TimeLine Theatre on Wellington Avenue on the border of Lakeview in northern Lincoln Park. The play, by Mark Frayn, attempts to reconstruct a meeting between two physicists, Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg, in German-occupied Copenhagen in 1941. Bohr, the "father of atomic phsyics," was a mentor to Heisenberg, who authored the "Uncertainty Principle" which according to the notes (I'm no physicist, so please bear with me!), says that we can't know both the position of a particle and it's velocity simultaneously. Heisenberg stayed in Germany during the rise of Hitler and Nazism, working for the German government at the university in Leipzig, while Bohr was forced to flee from Denmark by the Germans because of his Jewish ancestry. In the course of a short visit between these two old friends, a conversation ensued that may have changed the course of World War II, though the details of the conversation are to this day unknown.

It is the question of this uncertainty, the uncertainty of what the two men talked about that afternoon, that is the crux of the play. Heisenberg stayed in Germany and worked for the Nazi regime, developing a nuclear reactor but no weapons. Bohr fled to the US in 1943 and ended up working at Los Alamos and ultimately on the bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki sixty years ago this year, causing the deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians. In the play, Bohr and his wife challenge Heisenberg (in the reconstructions of the visit and perhaps in the afterlife -- the opening scene has Margrethe, Bohr's wife, talking about how they are dead now and finally safe to tell all) and accuse him of trying to develop the bomb for the Germans. Heisenberg, who never developed the bomb and claimed to have stayed in Germany to maintain control over Germany's program as to ensure they never did develop nuclear weapons, challenged Bohr to defend his role in developing the bomb and unleashing it on the world. During that afternoon in 1941, Heisenberg supposedly asked Bohr what moral responsibility scientists had during times of war (basically if their loyalties should lie with humanity as a whole or with their country) and the question alone made Bohr think Heisenberg was trying to find out if the Allies were developing the atom bomb and admitting that the Germans were. In the end, Heisenberg was villified for working with the Germans and Bohr and the other Allied scientists were seen as heroes for developing and dropping the atomic bomb. The play challenges us to review this logic by showing both men as they question their own roles and the consequences of their actions. Heisenberg, who by living in Germany throughout the war saw the destructive power of conventional bombs, said he would never have developed the bomb because its victims "could have been my widowed mother...my wife, my son." The two wonder if there will one day be a quantitative physics, one that decides how many are too many and when horrors are justified.

During intermission, my mother and her friend and I talked about the state of uncertainty in our country right now, and our seemingly limitless tolerance for chaos. Her friend said that he thought the neocons, through privatization and wars of choice, are trying to "starve the beast" of government and make it completely ineffective and bankrupt, as Grover Norquist has proposed. I argued that though their rhetoric talks about this it isn't what they actually want, and that instead of dreaming of some sort of libertarian/anarchic hollow government, the neocons actually want our government to be a capitalist/conservative version of the Mexican PRI, the Institutional Revolutionary Party that ruled the country for nearly a century until Vincente Fox was elected in 2000. The PRI is still very much in control and are poised to take back the presidency next year. Unlike the dream of teeny tiny government, the PRI believe in gangster government, one that is about laundering money, filtering it from the people to the corporations and their elite directors. Our government is doing the same thing. We have the largest deficit in our nation's history, yet we have an atrocious lack of services and support. Our government is growing monetarily in ways few "conservatives" could have fathomed five years ago, and most of the money is going to private corporations, subcontractors, who do the jobs goverment used to do less efficiently and clearly at a higher cost. It is a brilliant money-laundering scheme: tax the people, putting a higher burden on the middle class and working poor, and spend that money on corporate contracts and handouts. Say that it is through privatization that a more "lean" government will be produced, and convince legions of "conservatives" that it will lead to "smaller" government while growing government spending exponentially. The money changes hands seamlessly from the people to the government to the corporation, therefore "cleaning" it no differently than Al Capone did in the 1930s or Salinas in the 1990s when he sold Mexico's resources for a handful of campaign contributions. My mom's friend said that this made no sense because it wasn't sustainable -- eventually the system would collapse and the elites would suffer too -- but I pointed out that it seemed it was sustainable, since Mexico, though it is one of the most corrupt countries in the world, goes on and on with its elites gaining more power and more money even as the average person continues to suffer.

If we are going through a "Mexicanization," then our future is even more bleak than we can imagine, seeing that Mexico is going through its own transformation, its "Colombiazacion" as the drug cartels take over law enforcement and other governmental positions. Imagine a future like Colombia's present. My only hope is that Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle applies to politics and economics too, and that because we're in the middle of this thing we can't know how fast we're going, so maybe we're not careening off the cliff as we seem to be but rather taking a slow enough sail we can turn ourselves around before it's too late. I'm becoming more of a cynic, but I have to have some sort of hope.

Yes, the uncertainty of it all. I talked to S yesterday morning and he's back in Kabul where he'll be for about ten days before heading back to his FOB near the Pakistan border. He told me that he went to take out $200 from his account and was told that he had to have a "permission slip" from an officer E-7 or higher. A permission slip to take out his own money that he's earned!!! It's so completely outrageous and it's new. Before he left for his two week R+R, no one needed "permission" to access their own bank accounts. Also new are soldiers wearing electronic monitoring anklets. He saw two on base yesterday. Apparently they are under house arrest at home, but that doesn't preclude them from being called up for duty in Afghanistan. What the hell is going on?!

We're both rather down these days and our conversation was pretty brief. "I'm feeling pretty bad," he told me, "so I'll have to call you tomorrow. I just want to go to sleep." The initial rebound was easier this time, but I think we're both feeling our loneliness more acutely because we had so much fun together. Two weeks out of an entire year is not enough. We're holding onto the certainty (false, perhaps) that he will be home by mid-February or maybe sooner if by some miracle Afghanistan settles down between now and then. He's ready to come home. And I'm ready to have him home again for good.

Just as Friday turns to Saturday, a photo of decay from San Quintin, Baja.