The crowd gave him a standing ovation.
Let’s just hope they convert his words into actions.
I think it would be virtually impossible for even the most dogmatic pacifist to make a moral argument against immediately taking down every cell phone tower in the world. Cell phones are, of course, annoying as hell. That might be a good enough reason to take down the towers, but there are even better reasons. There is of course the very real possibility that tower transmissions cause cancer and other health problems to humans and nonhumans alike. Even ignoring this, however, there’s the fact that towers—cell phone, radio, and television—act as mass killing machines for migratory songbirds: 5 to 50 million per year.254 These birds die so the jerk at the table next to you can yammer at full volume (of course) about his latest financial conquest (thank god this time the conquest isn’t sexual or you might soon be arraigned for murder). Now, I’m sure some hypothetical pacifist could assemble some hypothetical situation where cell phones save lives. For example, a woman is alone on a dark country road. Her car breaks down. She dials 911, then turns on the radio to pass the time while she waits for a cop to show up. She hears a report of a homicidal madman who escaped from a local prison (he was in prison because budgets for mental hospitals were gutted during the Reagan era, and no, silly, she doesn’t hear that on the radio: radio stations are owned by large corporations, and would never provide useful political analysis). He—the madman, not Reagan—likes to kill women on dark lonely roads (Reagan preferred killing poor brown people, and those at a distance, and no, that analysis doesn’t come from the radio either). He has only one hand, the other being a hook he uses for awful purposes at which the radio only hints. She shivers. Finally the cop arrives, approaches her driver’s side window. She checks his hands before she rolls it down just a fraction. She pops her hood from inside, he fiddles a moment, the car miraculously starts. He drops the hood, gets back in his car. She drives away, feeling a slight tug on her car as she does. When she gets home she looks at the passenger side, and finds, of course, a bloody hook stuck to the handle of her car door. Saved by a cell phone!
I recognize that we can construct much less fabulous cases: almost a third of 911 calls (almost 50 percent in big cities) come from cell phones.255
My point, however, is that we can just as easily construct hypothetical situations that will keep us from doing anything. The same woman, for example, driving alone down a dark country road, picks up her cell phone to call her dear elderly mother. Her mother shuffles to answer, falls down the stairs, and breaks her neck, but is able to grab the phone and gasp, “Dial 911.” Her daughter picks up her second cell phone (you do have multiple cell phones, don’t you?), begins to dial, and because she’s not paying attention to her driving, plows into three orphan waifs huddling for warmth, security, and comfort by the side of the road, leaving them all paralyzed from the neck down. (Because they have no health insurance, and because politicians steadfastly refuse to put in place universal health coverage, they all soon die). Her car hurtles across a ditch, wiping out the last population of a highly endangered salamander, then smashes into a tree. She hears her mother’s dying gasps, and as she loses consciousness she sees a hook shining in the moonlight outside her passenger window. The madman, by the way, did not have a thing for children or salamanders, meaning that they had previously been safe.
Are cell phones beneficial to human and nonhuman life? What are the effects of cell phones on the landbase?
We’d have an even harder time rationalizing our inaction in allowing television and radio towers to exist (and I hope you’re not going to suggest it would be immoral to take out television towers, that migratory songbirds should die so we can watch The Best Damn Sports Show, Period on Fox Sports Net).
To the direct killing of birds we can add as a cost of cell phones the effect of speeded-up business communications, which decreases the quality of individual lives in a culture addicted to speed (“People who work for me should have phones in their bathrooms,” said the CEO of one American corporation256), and which decreases the ability of the natural world to sustain itself (the activities of the economic system are killing the planet: the higher the GNP, the more quickly the living are converted to the dead).
The question becomes, how do you take out a cell phone tower?
I need to say up front that I’m a total novice at this sort of thing. I am, to slip into the language of the mean streets, a goody two-shoes. My whole life I’ve rarely done anything illegal, not out of an equation on my part of morality and obedience (or subservience) to laws—at least I hope not—but instead partly because many illegal activities such as using illegal drugs repulse or scare me while others such as insider trading simply do not hold my interest. Even with those that do hold my interest—e.g., taking out dams, hacking, destroying (or otherwise liberating) corporate property—I’m not only almost completely ignorant of how to do it but fairly nervous about getting caught. Don’t get me wrong: I’ve raised a little hell in my time. Sometimes I go crazy and turn right on red without coming to a complete stop, and I routinely drive four or sometimes even nine miles over the speed limit. A few anarchist friends were trying to set up a talk where I’d share the stage with a couple of former Black Panthers. One of them did time for robbing a bank, the other for hijacking a plane. I thought a moment, then confessed, “I once shoplifted dog food from Wal-Mart.” High fives were exchanged around the table.
I have to add that were I more attracted to illegal activities I would probably curtail them because of what I write. I presume, my mom’s reality checks notwithstanding, that I’ve drawn at least a little attention from the powers-that-be, and the last thing I want to do is give them an excuse to pop me for something non-political (and frankly I’m not too keen on getting popped for something political either). If they want to come after me because of what I write, I’ll take them on, and if someday I have the courage to quit writing and take out dams (note the plural, dams: I don’t agree with the Plowshares tactic of turning yourself in if you destroy property belonging to the occupiers), they can try to catch me. But in the meantime, I’m not going to give them any cheap opportunities.
All of which is to say I’m a coward. I’m going to write about how I would take down a cell phone tower here in town, but I’m not going to do it. If I were going to do it, I wouldn’t be so stupid as to write about it, or even talk about it with anyone I didn’t know and trust literally with my life. And all of that is to say that you FBI agents reading this book (and the ones tracking my strokes on my keyboard) can go ahead and lose your erections. This book isn’t a confession. And even if your CIA buddies decide to play smackyface with me there isn’t much I can confess (unless you count the survey stakes I’ve removed, but I’ve already written about that, and besides, removing survey stakes is a fundamental human duty).
Recon is always the first step in any military action, so I drive my mom’s car to the cell phone tower behind Safeway. I take her car not out of some fiendishly clever plot to make it so that if anything happens she’ll get sent up the river instead of me, but because my car has been sitting on blocks in her driveway for more than a year now (I never knew, by the way, that moss can grow along the weather stripping around the rear window).
There are two towers I know of in Crescent City. There’s the one behind Safeway, and another off in the woods a quarter mile north. The one closest to the grocery store is in the open, which would obviously make taking it down more problematic. The tower is enclosed in a chain-link fence topped by barbed wire. The two sides of this fence farthest from Safeway face thick woods, which would provide cover. I’m certain the fence could be cut easily and quickly.
The problem is that I wouldn’t know what to do next. There are a couple of sheds inside, and I’d imagine that some gasoline and matches could render the whole thing inoperable. That may be great for (temporarily) stopping the guy at the restaurant from bothering his neighbors, and would slow the destructive
march of the economic system, if only ever so slightly, but it wouldn’t do a damn thing for the birds. Unfortunately, the tower itself is probably three feet in diameter, hollow with a two-inch shell of some sort of metal.
I sit in my car and look at it. I’m nervous, as though even thinking about how I would do this is enough to draw cops to me. (The same is true now as I write this.) Of course if I were going to bring this down I would never have driven here for reconnaissance. At least not during the middle of the afternoon. I would have parked far away and walked. And there’s no way I would have done it in this town, either. Crescent City is too small and I’m too well known. For crying out loud, at the (excellent) Thai restaurant two blocks south of this tower they know me well enough to always bring me a huge glass of water without me asking, and they like me well enough to pack my salad rolls full to bursting (of course after they read this book my future salad rolls may be limp and wrinkly). I’m almost surprised no one has stopped by while I’m sitting in this car, just to say hi and pass the time of day.
I don’t know what to do. I’m a writer. I wouldn’t know how to take down this tower any better than I would know how to write a computer virus, or how to perform brain or heart surgery. Worse, I’m spatially and mechanically inept—probably a couple of standard deviations below the norm—with a heavy dose of absent mindedness thrown in for good measure (and it seems that absent mindedness would be a tremendous curse to anyone contemplating anything deemed illegal by those in power).
An example of the spatial ineptitude: whenever I pack for a road trip, my mom always takes a look at my suitcase, sighs, and repacks everything in about half the space.
An unfortunate experience in eighth-grade woodshop class highlights the mechanical problems. For our final project, we got to build whatever we wanted. I chose a birdhouse. I was excited. From close observation I knew the birds in our area (though I no longer live in a region with meadowlarks, recorded versions of their songs still make me smile), and from reading books I knew their habits and preferences. In some cases I knew their Latin names. I cut each piece of wood as meticulously as I could, nailed them together as tightly as they would go (admittedly there were a fair number of gaps where my cuts hadn’t quite been straight), then put putty in the nail holes. I stained it all (an irregular) dark brown. On the final day of class we each brought our projects to the front, one at a time. The other pieces looked pretty good and I got increasingly nervous as my turn approached. For good reason. When I held up my birdhouse, the entire class burst into laughter. One of them—I still remember your name, David Flagg, and you’re still not on my short list of people to invite over to dinner—pointed at the lumps of still-white putty and shouted, “It looks like the birds have already been on it.” Even the teacher laughed so hard he had to remove his shop glasses and wipe his eyes.
The infamous shower curtain episode makes clear my absent-mindedness. My shower curtain was hanging too far into the tub. It floated when I showered, and I often stepped on or even tripped over it. After about a year of this I decided to fix it and cut off the bottom of the shower curtain. Only later did I remember that the bar (which I had purchased and installed) was springloaded, and it was a simple matter to just raise it a few inches.
The point is that when it comes time for us to start taking out dams, I’m not sure I’m the one you want holding the explosives.
That said, here’s what I’m thinking as I look at the cell phone tower. Basic principles. There are, I’d think, maybe six major ways to take down anything that’s standing. You can dismantle it. You can cut it down. You can pull it down. You can blow it up. You can undermine it until it collapses. You can remove its supports and let it fall down on its own. This is all as true for civilization as it is for cell phone towers.
In the (smaller) case before us, I think we can out of hand dismiss dismantling and digging. So far as the former, the tower is constructed of two or three huge pieces, and is obviously not a candidate for dismantling. And the big parking lot (as well as presumably deep footings) would certainly eliminate digging.
Pulling it down can be dismissed just as easily, unless you’ve got some big earthmoving equipment and a hefty cable to attach fairly high up on the tower. I don’t think my mom’s car has the horsepower to move it (and I know mine sure as hell doesn’t). I keep picturing that scene from The Gods Must Be Crazy where they attach one end of a cable to a tree and the other to a jeep, and end up winching their vehicle into the air. Oh, hello, officer. What am I doing up here? That’s a very good question. My cell phone reception has been really crappy lately, and I thought I’d get better reception if I got closer to the antenna. And say, would you mind helping me down?
Cutting would probably work, so long as we’re clear that we’re not talking about hacksaws. In that case I may as well ask my friends the aplodontia to come gnaw it down. This tower is big. A grinder wouldn’t work either in this case. There are lots of cell phone and other towers out in the mountains, and so long as you had lookouts, grinders might work out there, but that much noise here in town seems contraindicated. Oh, hello, officer. What am I doing here? That’s a very good question. . . . But an acetylene torch might do the trick, although once again here in town there’s a good chance it would draw some attention. And so far as me doing it, I have used acetylene torches, but you don’t even want to hear about my experiences in metal shop class (and yes, David, I still remember you from there, too).
Explosives would have the advantage of rendering moot whether anyone notices, because timers are easy enough to make that even I could use them. By the time the tower comes down I could easily be in another state (not quite so dramatic as it sounds since I live about twenty minutes from the border). Additionally, in this case explosives would be safe. Although I’ve been saying that this tower is “behind Safeway,” it’s way behind Safeway, in an old abandoned parking lot. The problem, once again, is that I know nothing about explosives. I was certainly a nerd in high school, college, and beyond, but evidently the wrong kind of nerd for the task at hand. While the science geeks were busy seeing what bizarre ways they could combine chemicals to blow things up and dropping M-80s down toilets in (usually unsuccessful) attempts to get school cancelled (though, being geeks, I was never quite sure why they wanted to cancel school), my friends and I were reading books and playing Dungeons & Dragons (and a hell of a lot of good that does me now: if only a +3 Dwarven War Hammer could bring down civilization, I’d be in great shape).
Ah, the pity of a misspent youth.
This all makes me wish I would have joined the Navy Seals and learned how to blow things up (I probably would have learned how to kill people too: strange, isn’t it, how when the system’s soldiers are taught to kill, that’s banal—the final night at boot camp drill instructors sometimes christen their students’ new lives by saying, “You are now trained killers”257—but when someone who opposes the system even mentions the k word, it’s met with shock, horror, the fetishization of potential future victims, and the full power of the state manifesting as those who’ve been trained to kill in support of the centralization of power). Or better, it makes me wish I had a friend who was a Navy Seal and who shared my politics.
This brings us to removing the tower’s supports and letting it fall on its own. That may be the easiest, and something even I could handle. The other tower, in the woods to the north, has about twenty guy wires. Everything I’ve read suggests these wires are even more deadly to birds than the towers themselves. Some places you can pick up dead birds by the handful beneath the wires. Their necks are broken, skulls cracked, wings torn, beaks mangled. But I also know what happens when high-tension wires are severed: those opposed to their own decapitation ought to be far away.
But there’s good news in all of this. There are giant bolts surrounding the base of the tower behind Safeway. I’d imagine they’re very tight, but for one of the few times in my life my physics degree might come in handy. Of course you don’t really need
a physics degree to understand that if you want to unscrew a tight bolt all you need is a long lever arm on your wrench. Just as Archimedes said, “Give me a long enough lever and a place to stand and I can move the world,” I’ll go on record as saying that if you give me a long enough lever arm I can unscrew any bolt in the world—oh, okay, maybe just a lot of bolts that are pretty damn tight. So a huge pipefitters wrench with a long metal pipe over the end to extend your lever arm might be enough to get you the torque you’d need to loosen the base (failing that, you could always cut the bolts instead of the tower itself: remember, always attack the weakest point!). Then walk away and wait for the next windstorm to do the trick.
Emboldened by the realization that this just might be doable, I make my way through the dense forest to the northern tower. I quickly find a path, which opens into a large meadow. The only problem is that this is the wrong meadow: no tower. So it’s back into the woods, this time on a game trail. Note that I didn’t say big game. Sometimes I crawl on my belly. I cross a mucky streambed and see prints of (very small) deer. Often I stop to pull Himalayan blackberry thorns from my shirt. A few times from my arms, hands, fingers, face. I realize that somehow a thorn has lodged in my heavy denim pants at the—how do I say this delicately?—very top of the inseam. With every step it scrapes against my, well, let’s just say extremely high on my thigh. Finally the path opens out again, and I’m there.
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