As well as affecting U.S. soldiers, DU has probably already harmed 250,000 Iraqis. The same can be said for residents of Bosnia, and soon we’ll be saying the same for the people of Afghanistan. Leukemias and cancers have gone up by 66 percent in recent years in southern Iraq, with some locales experiencing a 700 percent increase.75 And there have been birth defects. Oh, how there have been birth defects. One doctor began her report, “In August we had three babies born with no heads. Four had abnormally large heads. In September we had six with no heads, none with large heads, and two with short limbs. In October, one with no head, four with big heads and four with deformed limbs or other types of deformities.”76
Which finally brings us to the pictures. There are two groups: pictures I have not seen, and pictures I have. Here is what one person wrote about those I have not (and of course I don’t expect to soon see similar text in America’s much-vaunted and certainly uncensored capitalist “free press”™): “I thought I had a strong stomach—toughened by the minefields and foul frontline hospitals of Angola, by the handiwork of the death squads in Haiti and by the wholesale butchery of Rwanda. But I nearly lost my breakfast last week at the Basrah Maternity and Children’s Hospital in southern Iraq. Dr. Amer, the hospital’s director, had invited me into a room in which were displayed colour photographs of what, in cold medical language, are called “congenital anomalies,” but what you and I would better understand as horrific birth deformities. The images of these babies were head-spinningly grotesque—and thank God they didn’t bring out the real thing, pickled in formaldehyde. At one point I had to grab hold of the back of a chair to support my legs. I won’t spare you the details. You should know because—according to the Iraqis and in all likelihood the World Health Organization, which is soon to publish its findings on the spiraling birth defects in southern Iraq—we are responsible for these obscenities. During the Gulf war, Britain and the United States pounded the city and its surroundings with 96,000 depleted-uranium shells. The wretched creatures in the photographs—for they were scarcely human—are the result, Dr. Amer said. He guided me past pictures of children born without eyes, without brains. Another had arrived in the world with only half a head, nothing above the eyes. Then there was a head with legs, babies without genitalia, a little girl born with her brain outside her skull, and the whatever-it-was whose eyes were below the level of its nose. Then the chair-grabbing moment—a photograph of what I can only describe (inadequately) as a pair of buttocks with a face and two amphibian arms. Mercifully, none of these babies survived for long. Depleted uranium has an incubation period in humans of five years. In the four years from 1991 (the end of the Gulf War) until 1994, the Basrah Maternity Hospital saw 11 congenital anomalies. Last year there were 221.”77
There are photographs, too, that I have seen, some of the worst of my life. There are infants with one large eye in the middle of the face; infants—still alive, huge eyes staring—with the exploded heads of the hydrocephalic; infants with translucent skin or skin covered with some unknown white substance or covered with welts or deep split-open fissures or with charred-looking skin or skin like dark glazed pottery; infants with ambiguous genitals (these are called, for some reason, “non-viable children”); infants—unfortunately alive—with no eyes, their bones fused and stunted; an infant—also unfortunately alive—with no anus, and with her bowel and urinary tract on the outside of her body.78
These pictures all lead me to ask, not rhetorically, but with all expectation of answers: What, precisely, is this culture’s calculus of casualties? The lives of how many of these children are worth the life of one efficient executive, one prank-playing stockbroker? How many of these children’s lives are worth one Porsche, or the gasoline it burns to take off in the wind? The lives of how many children add up to the value, to take a unit of modern currency, of a barrel of oil?
The San Francisco Chronicle carried an article on page 3 entitled “Scientist’s Urgent Warning of World’s Failing Environment: Ailing Planet in Need of Mass Conservation.” The article disturbed me for several reasons. First, of course, is that the planet doesn’t so much need mass conservation as it needs to be relieved of that which is killing it: civilization. Next was the article’s placement, on the same spread—implying equivalent importance—with an article, on page two, entitled “Suit Catches Psychic Line Off Guard: Miss Cleo Accused of Rampant Fraud.” On page 1 of this day’s paper, just below the masthead, implying far greater importance, was an article with the headline: “Silver Turns to Gold for Canadian Pair: Skating Union Makes Amends for Judge’s Misconduct.” Above the masthead was a teaser for the most important article of the day, even more important than the one about figure skaters getting ripped off in the Olympics, which was, “Britney Crosses Over: Spears Trods Well-worn Path from Pop Star to Movie Actress in ‘Crossroads.’” And let’s not even compare the importance of the article about the killing of the planet to, say, the entire sections of the newspaper devoted daily to business, travel, and sports (Go Giants!). It bothered me also, maybe even more than the placement, that three full paragraphs of even this meager coverage were devoted to a Danish statistician who has gained great fame by arguing that the global environment is in fact improving, revealing once again the truth behind the thesis of another of my books, that in order for us to maintain our way of living, we must tell lies to each other, and especially to ourselves.
It’s important to note that the Chron followed up this article by giving the Danish statistician an article all to himself that was three times as large as the original (seventy column-inches versus twenty-four—yeah, I know, I’ve got to get a social life), covering an entire page (with the exception of two ads, one stating that larger Post-It notes give you “More yada yada per note,” and one that reads “SEX FOR LIFE! Erection Problems? Premature Ejaculation? Immediate results after one consultation!”), complete with smiling photograph and statistical sidebar stating “it is not cost efficient to spend money on certain environmental problems” because “the cost per year of [human] life saved” is too high. Perhaps because this person’s obscene calculations—his damn lies, or even worse, his statistics, as the saying goes—fit so well with the goals of civil society, he has been named to head a government-funded environmental monitoring agency in his native Denmark.79
I think, however, that what bothered me most about the original article was the pull-quote the editors chose to bold, which was, “We clearly will have an increasingly difficult time in maintaining our current levels of affluence.”80 The world is being killed before our eyes, and these editors are concerned primarily for the maintenance of their affluence?
That’s a silly question. Of course the answer is yes.
But it makes me ask again: What is the calculus of casualties? There’s no reason to confine this calculus to humans. How many baubles is life on the planet worth? How many salmon, how many generations of salmon, swimming upstream, spawning, dying, feeding humans, bears, eagles, their own offspring, entire forests, are worth the life of one politician, one executive, one lying statistician? The lives of how many species of salmon are worth the fortune of one politician, one executive? How many salmon are we willing to sacrifice so that an efficient executive can have a vintage car? How many rivers of fish—and how many rivers themselves, with their once-clean, free-flowing water—are worth sustaining a lifestyle based on exploitation, a lifestyle that will not last, and that will, we can only hope (the we in this case evidently not including the editors of the San Francisco Chronicle), end very soon.
The fifth premise of this book is that the property of those higher on the hierarchy is more valuable than the lives of those below. It is acceptable for those above to increase the amount of property they control—in everyday language, to make money—by destroying or taking the lives of those below. This is called production. If those below damage the property of those above, those above may kill or otherwise destroy the lives of those below. This is called justice.
This
is all certainly true of our intraspecies relations. Police can and routinely do bust up homeless camps, but homeless people are not allowed to dismantle police stations (or the homes of the police). Petrochemical companies are allowed to make people’s homes uninhabitable by toxifying the surrounding landscape, but the residents of those homes are not allowed to destroy the refineries (or the homes of the owners). Whites could, should, and would systematically destroy the possessions of the Indians, but Indians were not allowed to return the favor. And it’s true of our interspecies relations, as industrial production systematically devours the living planet, any nonhumans who threaten productivity must be destroyed. A functionary for the Canadian Department of Fisheries and Oceans expressed this perfectly—to present just one example among an entire planet full of them—in regards to the now-extinct Great Auk: “No matter how many there may have been, the Great Auk had to go. They must have consumed thousands of tons of marine life that commercial fish stocks depend on. There wasn’t room for them in any properly managed fishery. Personally, I think we ought to be grateful to the old timers for handling the problem for us.”81 If we could change the culture such that this premise were no longer true, the calculations of the Danish statistician would be recognized for the insanity they represent, prisons would not be stocked with small-scale criminals, and civilization would collapse in a heartbeat.
IRREDEEMABLE
I think we must face the possibility that something is dreadfully wrong with society and that this is somehow connected to the bloody history of Western culture, a bloodiness that surpasses all others.
Deborah Root 82
THE SIXTH PREMISE OF THIS BOOK, THE ONE ALLUDED TO EARLY ON, is that civilization is not redeemable. This culture will not undergo any sort of voluntary transformation to a sane and sustainable way of living. If we do not put a halt to it, civilization will continue to immiserate the vast majority of humans and to degrade the planet until it (civilization, and probably the planet) collapses. The effects of this degradation will continue to harm humans and nonhumans for a very long time.
Ever since I was a child, I’ve been asking: if this culture’s destructive behavior isn’t making us happy, why are we doing it?
I’ve come up with many answers so far. All of them, unfortunately, point toward the intractability of this culture’s destructiveness. In my book A Language Older Than Words, part of my answer was that the entire culture suffers from what trauma expert Judith Herman calls complex post-traumatic stress disorder, or complex PTSD. By now most of us are familiar with normal PTSD, if not in our bodies then at least from having read about it. PTSD is an embodied response to extreme trauma, to extreme terror, to the loss of control, connection, and meaning that can happen at the moment of trauma, the moment when, as Herman puts it, “the victim is rendered helpless by overwhelming force.”83 This force may be nonhuman, as in an earthquake or fire; or inhuman, as in the violence on which this culture is based: the rape, assault, battery, and so on that characterizes so much of this culture’s romantic and childrearing practices; the warfare that characterizes so much of this culture’s politics; and the grinding coercion that makes up so much of the rest of this culture, such as its economics, schooling, and so on. Herman states, “Traumatic reactions occur when no action is of avail. When neither resistance nor escape is possible, the human [and the same is clearly true for the nonhuman] system of self-defense becomes overwhelmed and disorganized.”84 Traumatized people, she writes, “feel and act as though their nervous systems have been disconnected from the present.”85 They may experience hyperarousal, sensing danger everywhere. Certain triggers may stimulate “flashbacks,” so that a child who was beaten by a parent while on a water skiing trip, for example, may even as an adult become terrified or full of rage when faced with this stimulus. The same may happen to a woman who was raped in a certain make and model of car. And the adult may wonder at the source of this sudden fear or anger. Those who have been traumatized may go into a state of surrender. Having been brought to the point of powerlessness, where any resistance was futile, this feeling may continue later into life. Faced with any emotionally threatening situation, these people may freeze, failing to resist even when resistance becomes feasible or necessary.
This entire culture is so violent, so traumatic, I argued in Language, as to render most all of us to one degree or another shell shocked, and therefore incapable of realizing or even imagining what it would be like to live a life not based on fear. This fear, in fact, runs so deep that it has become normalized in this culture, codified, made the basis of the entire society.
I am sure you can see these symptoms not only among those of your friends who may have been grotesquely and obviously traumatized, but in the culture at large: the culture is certainly disconnected from the present, else we could not possibly kill the planet (and each other) for the sake of production; it certainly sees danger everywhere, even when there is none (the culture’s politics, science, technology, religion, and much of its philosophy are all founded on the notion that the world is a vale of tears and danger); it just as certainly manifests in an otherwise incomprehensible rage at (and fear of) the indigenous everywhere, as well as the natural world; and of course those of us who hate the destruction consistently fail to resist in anything approaching a meaningful fashion.86
But there’s more to it than this. Judith Herman defined a new type of PTSD. She asked, what happens to people who have been traumatized not in one discreet incident—for example, an earthquake or a rape—but instead have suffered “subjection to totalitarian control over a prolonged period (months to years)”?87 Or, I would add, for the six thousand years of civilization. She includes not only hostages, prisoners of war, and the like, but also those who have survived the captivity of long-term domestic violence. Concerning this latter, she asks what happens to those whose personalities are not only deformed by extended violence, having suffered it as adults, but to those whose personalities are formed as children in such a crucible of totalitarian violence. The answer is that they may suffer amnesia, forgetting the violence of their childhood (or, I would once again add in our larger case, the violence on which, to choose just one example, white title to land in North America is based). They may suffer a sense of helplessness. They may identify with their abuser. They may come to perceive mutually beneficial relationships as impossible, and to believe instead that all relationships are based on force, on power. They may come to believe that the strong dominate the weak, the weak dominate the weaker, and the weakest survive as they can.
The understanding that the entire culture could reasonably be said to be suffering from complex PTSD helps to make sense of many of the culture’s otherwise absurd actions and philosophies. Our hatred of the body. The certainty that nature is red in tooth and claw. The long-standing movement toward centralized control. The neurotic insistence on repeatability (and control) in science, and the insane exclusion of emotion—which means the exclusion of life—from both science and economics. Using the lens of domestic violence to look at civilization’s unwavering violence helps to make sense of all of these symptoms, but the important thing about using this lens as it pertains to the sixth premise of this book, that of civilization’s unredeemability, is that perpetrators of domestic violence are among the most intractable of all who commit violence, so intractable, in fact, that in 2000, the United Kingdom removed all funding for therapy sessions designed to treat men guilty of domestic violence (putting the money instead into shelters and other means of keeping women safe from their attackers). Sandra Horley, chief executive of Refuge, that country’s largest single provider of support to abused women and children, said: “I am not a hard-line feminist and I am not against men receiving help, but in many years of experience I have known only one man who has changed his behaviour.” The Guardian put it simply: “There is no cure for men who beat their wives or partners, according to new Home Office research.”88
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