Word: clouding
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White Noise features a cloud of toxic industrial waste, although the author's larger concern is with death as metaphor. As usual, DeLillo mixes black comedy with a ceremonious tone: "The enormous dark mass moved like some death ship in a Norse legend, escorted across the night by armored creatures with spiral wings." The whirly appendages belong to helicopters tracking the monster smudge over Iron City, a small industrial town and home of the College-on-the-Hill...
Unrelieved worry about self-preservation is one of life's more depressing preoccupations. DeLillo illustrates this sad fact and attempts to lift the dread with satire and comic invention. An expert explains the poison cloud that threatens Iron City: "This is Nyodene D. A whole new generation of toxic waste. What we call state of the art." There are lampoons (if that is possible) of occult tabloids: "From beyond the grave, dead living legend John Wayne will communicate telepathically with President Reagan to help frame U.S. foreign policy. Mellowed by death, the strapping actor will advocate a hopeful policy...
...begin their holiday celebrations by monitoring a unique experiment: the creation of the first man-made comet. A satellite orbiting some 70,000 miles above earth will release four canisters containing about 90 lbs. of barium and copper powder, worth $240,000. The powder will swell into a gaseous cloud 100 miles across that will glow pale yellow-green and then a dusky purple; as it expands, the cloud will grow a comet's classic tail...
Others thought it was a nuclear bomb or an earthquake or the end of the world. As word of the cloud of poison began to spread, hundreds, then thousands, took to the road in flight from the fumes. In cars and rickshaws, on foot and bicycles, residents moved as fast as they could. As in some eerie science-fiction nightmare, hundreds of people blinded by the gas groped vainly toward uncontaminated air or stumbled into one another in the darkness. Others simply collapsed by the side of the road in the crush. At least 37 people who had inhaled...
Western Europe also has its share of potential disasters. That lesson was made clear eight years ago, when a chemical reaction at a plant in Seveso, outside Milan, Italy, set off a mild explosion, discharging a cloud of between 1 lb. and 22 lbs. of poisonous dioxin into the atmosphere. Since then, 10 million cu. ft. of contaminated earth has been buried in large pits and covered with clay, plastic sheets and cement. Newly seeded grass masks any signs of the event. Although no one died because of the mishap, it remains to be seen whether the local cancer rate...