Zeese Papanikolas: We arm ourselves with fetishes

When I was growing up in Cold War Utah, we periodically had drills in my grade school in which we had to crouch under our desks with our heads down and our arms over our eyes in case a nuclear bomb was dropped on our school.

World War II was over and the United States had ended it by dropping atomic bombs on two Japanese cities in which thousands were killed. But no one had seen such a bomb except in newsreels or the papers. No one knew anyone who had died in Japan. A bomb dropping on our peaceful city was hypothetical.

The duck and cover drills were one of those unaccountable rituals of school, like lining up in alphabetical order by our first names. I believe that those drills and the threat of nuclear war had a deep effect on my generation, but it was unconscious. No one talked about the bomb.

In those days I believe a lot of Utah houses, like ours, had guns. Utah was and still is a largely rural state, and it was a state of hunters. My father had grown up in the Depression hunting jackrabbits, ducks and sometimes deer. Then and now people hunted to put food on the table.

There was a cupboard in our house that held my father’s guns. It had, from time to time, a double-barreled shotgun, which was replaced by a Browning automatic, a deer rifle and my maternal grandfather’s old hexagon-barreled rifle. Finally it had my own guns, a .22 rifle my father gave me and, when I became a teenager, a .410 shotgun so that I could hunt ducks with him.

The cupboard was never locked. It didn’t need to be. Learning to shoot was a solemn ritual. You learned to treat a gun as if it was always loaded. You learned to keep the safety catch on until the moment you were ready to fire. And you learned to never, ever point a gun at any human being, not even in play. I am sorry to say I never killed anything, except tin cans with the .22 and with the pistol my father kept in his bedroom, as I assume many other Utahans did.

That was the Utah I grew up in. The state is still full of hunters, but now there is something else. Along with the shotguns and rifles the state is now filled with weapons of war, and a pistol doesn’t sit gathering dust in a box under the bed, but is worn on a belt or hidden in a pocket or a purse. And it’s a new and improved model.

A fetish is an inanimate object worshiped for its supposed magical powers or because it is considered to be inhabited by a spirit. There is something more to be said about fetishes: Often they are made by human hands. In “Moby Dick,” the South Sea Islander Queequeg carved his own fetish, then prayed to it, perhaps carved a bit off its nose and stuck it in the pocket of his sailor’s jacket.

How, you might ask, can something you make with your own hands suddenly have such power? How can it take over your agency as a human being and control you?

The world is an increasingly complicated place. We are overwhelmed by its power to shatter what we most rely on and what we most believe in an instant, like the blow of a whale’s flukes on a fragile boat. We have incredible technological abilities, but our ability to understand and to adapt psychologically to such a world has not kept up with its changes. We turn back. We arm ourselves with fetishes. We look at what the forefathers of our country did and we fetishize our own interpretations of the Constitution and the weapons the laws put into our hands.

Children don’t duck and cover in our schools anymore. They have active shooter drills, but the drills are not about some disaster that seems unimaginable and far away. The disaster is all around them. They see it happening before their eyes. The damage that it does to them and to those who are left to mourn is incalculable.

Zeese Papanikolas, Oakland, Calif., was born in Salt Lake City, was a Stegner Fellow in Creative Writing at Stanford and is the author of, most recently, “An American Cakewalk: Ten Syncopators of the Modern World,” published by Stanford University Press.