The Tool of Thiel in Thule

One Way to Escape the Atlantic Signal Debacle

The tool of course is the man who currently goes by the name of JD Vance. There he is above, wearing a coat that appears slightly too large for him. He visited Thule for three hours on March 28.

The Thiel in question is Peter Thiel, just another billionaire tech bro oligarch. He may not be the only person in his cohort who plans to live forever, but perhaps we should be grateful that he doesn't seem to have any interest in going to Mars.  

Thule is a place in Greenland that has a new name: Pituffik. It was a very important base for the U.S. Strategic Air Command back during the Cold War; now it seems to be basically a placeholder awaiting a new mission. 

The word Thule is an import from the ancient Mediterranean world. Strabo, in his Geography I, 4, 2, tells us that Pytheas of Massalia (the modern Marseille in France) reported that Thule lay "six days' sail north from Britain, and near the Frozen Sea." Pytheas was a geographer and explorer who seems to have circumnavigated the British Isles around 325 B.C. He wrote a book about his travels, which was well known in antiquity, but has not come down to us. 

More generally, it seems the ancients thought of Thule as the northernmost land in the world.

And perhaps Thule, or Pituffik, which apparently means "the place where the dogs are tied" in the local language, is a useful metaphor for the current American regime: cold and empty. Or, to put it more simply, the end of the world. 

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Starting during World War II, the American military established and maintained a bunch of installations on Greenland. My favorite is Project Iceworm, which was supposed to establish a large network of launch stations for nuclear missiles, all buried under the ice. After a while, the military figured out that the Greenland ice sheet was moving faster than anticipated, and that building launch pads on ice was more like building on cold jello than building on concrete. In due course, the military decided that it could not put lipstick on this pig, and shut the program down.

I had the thought that Project Iceworm, with some information declassified in 1996, might have influenced the plot of a movie called Smilla's Sense of Snow, which was released in 1997. In the movie, which is a mystery, it turns out that a meteorite has fallen to earth in Greenland, and eventually we learn that the meteorite contains poisonous worms. But the movie is based on a book, Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow, that was published in 1992. 

In 1968, a B-52 bomber crashed near Thule with four nuclear bombs aboard, causing a significant release of radioactive material but no nuclear or thermonuclear detonation. The general outlines of this story were public knowledge from the beginning; other interesting details have emerged over the years. I think it would be a stretch to suggest that the crash might have inspired the Smilla novel and movie. But it is one more example of non-Greenlanders using Greenland as their playpen.

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And yes, JD Vance dropped a college football trophy on April 14. You can google it for yourself. Awkward, clumsy, maladroit.

See also A Campaign Poster, Is Elon Musk a Vampire?