I've tried NOT to watch Craig Mazin's astonishing TV series Chernobyl -- the nearly hour-by-hour recounting of the 1986 Soviet nuclear reactor disaster -- through the prism of our own national catastrophe. It's really tough when a parade of craven apparatchiks snap to, salute, toady, bleat and lie as millions are poisoned by bureaucratic bungling and incompetence and motions toward truth-telling are silenced by threats of bullets or defenestration.
With apologies to Stephen Stills, "I think it's time we stop, children. What's that sound. Everybody look what's coming down.
The final episode is wonderfully written and this scene (link below) is particularly powerful, as the two men leading the clean up after the meltdown reflect on human frailty, the tyrannical Central Committee of the U.S.S.R. and the men and women who were forced to do its bidding. Both Stellan Skarsgard and Jared Harris are stellar throughout but especially here.
I reflect on this scene now, in the midst of a health care and economic catastrophe, the severity of which might have been averted if wisdom had trumped pride, and wonder if its too late for "one good man" to help us.
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