In human life natural events can be more or less human. The sun rose into a perfectly clear sky in Hiroshima on August 6, 1945. The sun rising and the processes of nuclear reaction in the sun that generated the light and warmth on that morning are natural events, though of course, the meanings of any sunny morning are layered into our feeling and our thinking.

The perfect clarity of that morning came to be defined at 8.15am by another nuclear reaction, the explosion of an atom bomb in the sky above the center of the city. Both events, the sun rising on that day and the explosion of the bomb, had human meanings. Both were events in nature to the extent that nuclear reactions are physical events. But the structure of agency in each case was different.

The natural historical event that is life on earth is dependent upon nuclear reaction in the sun, a fact of both natural and human history. Death on that day, perhaps 90,000, perhaps 150,000 souls, was inflicted upon natural creatures who perish under such conditions, and so this occurred in a structure of agency also involving both natural history and human history.

“LeMay spoke in monosyllables. I never heard him say more than two words in sequence,” Robert McNamara recalled. “It was basically ‘Yes,’ ‘No,’ ‘Yup,’ or ‘The hell with it.’”

General Curtis LeMay was McNamara’s commanding general during the Second World War, and McNamara later became US Secretary of State during the Vietnam War.

“LeMay said, ‘If we’d lost the war, we’d all have been prosecuted as war criminals.’ And I think he’s right. He, and I’d say I, were behaving as war criminals. LeMay recognized that what he was doing would be thought immoral if his side had lost. But what makes it immoral if you lose and not immoral if you win?”¹

“He,” “I,” “We,” “It” (the sun on that day or the bomb on that day) are some pointers in the direction of agency. LeMay’s limited facility with speech alone fails to capture the pattern of agency in this event. We need a transpositional grammar for that.

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¹ www.scripts.com/script.php?id=the_fog_of_war%253A_eleven_lessons_from_the_life_of_robert_s._mcnamara_8370&p=9

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Cope, Bill, and Mary Kalantzis. 2020. Making Sense: Reference, Agency and Structure in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, pp. 174-175. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316459645

Errol Morris’ "Fog of War" §MS2.0a