“On casting my eyes around, I perceived another beast of equal size, raised half out of the water. . . . I crept through the bushes until I came opposite to him, and interrupted his repast, by sending a ball through his head; it entered a little above his left eye, went out at the root of his right ear, and knocked him over, he then appeared to be in the agonies of death for some time; but at last recovered sufficiently to land on my side of the river, and to stagger into the woods.
“Never in my life did I regret the want of ammunition so much as on this day; as I was by the failure interrupted in the finest sport that man ever had. I am certain, that I could with great ease have killed four or five brace more.266
Eskimo curlews: “Hunters would drive out from Omaha and shoot the birds without mercy until they had literally slaughtered a wagonload of them, the wagon being actually filled, and with the sideboards on at that. Sometimes when the flights were unusually heavy and the hunters well-supplied with ammunition, their wagons were too quickly and easily filled, so whole loads of the birds would be dumped on the prairie, their bodies forming piles as large as a couple of tons of coal, where they would be allowed to rot while the hunters proceeded to refill their wagons with fresh victims.”267
Wilson snipe: “The birds being only in the country for a short time I had no mercy on them and killed all I could, for a snipe once missed might never be seen again.”268
Golden plover: “The gunners had assembled in parties of from 20 to 50 at places where they knew from experience that the plovers would pass. . . . Every gun went off in succession, and with such effect that I several times saw a flock of a hundred or more reduced to a miserable remnant of five or six. . . . The sport was continued all day and at sunset when I left one of these lines of gunners they were as intent on killing more as they were when I arrived [before dawn]. A man near where I was seated had killed 63 dozens. I calculated the number [of hunters] in the field at 200, and supposing each to have shot only 20 dozens, 48,000 golden plovers would have fallen there that day.”269
Ivory-billed woodpeckers: As the state of Louisiana tried desperately in the early 1940s to buy the habitat of the last of these birds in the United States, the board chair of Chicago Mill and Lumber responded, “We are just money grubbers. We are not concerned, as are you folks, with ethical considerations.” The company argued that cutting this habitat would provide jobs (where have we heard that argument before?) but they lied (where have we seen corporate executives lie before?): their labor force consisted of German POWs, who themselves were “incredulous at the waste—only the best wood taken, the rest left in wreckage.” The trees were used to make chests to hold tea.270
Northern spotted owls: Just to show how much things have changed in the last sixty years, I need to say that, coincidentally, the very day I wrote the previous paragraph, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation carried a news story entitled “B.C. Court OKs Logging in Endangered Owl Habitat.” There are, it seems, only twenty-five pairs of northern spotted owls still living in British Columbia, indeed in Canada. The birds are going extinct in the United States as well. The article stated, “The B.C. Court of Appeal has upheld a lower court ruling permitting old-growth logging in the last remaining habitat for the bird, saying economic interests can be weighed against the interest of the species.”271
Remember that one working definition of insanity is to have lost one’s connections to physical reality, to consider one’s delusions as being more real than the real world. The judges (and other industry representatives) in this case are insane, attempting to “weigh” the needs of an intellectual and philosophical system against living beings.
Of course environmentalists are just as insane. As part of their pathetic and necessarily ineffective “defense” of these and other creatures, environmentalists have been reduced to saying, “If the logging industry gets [sic] a reputation for having killed a [sic] species, they’re not going to benefit because worldwide markets aren’t going to buy wood from B.C. if they know that B.C. logging companies are killing owls to get it.”272
Another reasonable working definition of insanity is that it is insane to keep acting in the same way and to expect different results. Apart from the appalling stupidity of this environmentalist’s statement, it has no basis in historical fact. Destroying the habitat of ivory-billed woodpeckers obviously did not harm the U.S. timber industry. Destroying the habitat of creatures never harms corporations, or at least it doesn’t harm them because of public perception (if people within this culture loved the natural world, they would stop its destruction): corporations can certainly destroy the landbase and thus undercut their own eventual profitability, but of course by then the damage is done. Within this culture, the fantastic and ever-changing “needs” of the economic system will always “outweigh” the needs of physical reality (in exactly the same way that the fantastic and ever-changing “needs” of abusers always “outweigh” the needs of everyone else). If we do not understand this, we have no chance of surviving.
Halibut: “The fishermen of Newfoundland are much exasperated whenever an unfortunate halibut happens to seize their baits: they are frequently known in such cases to wreak their vengeance on the poor fish by thrusting a piece of wood through its gills and in that condition turning it adrift. The efforts which are made by the tortured fish to get its head beneath the water afford a high source of amusement.”273
I have before me a photograph of—what do I call this?—a mound of fish inside a rolled up commercial fishing net. The pressure from the tons of fish inside the net forces the faces of those on the outside of the mass through the net. Their eyes bulge from the pressure, their mouths gape. In the background a man looks off to the side, presumably working the machinery that tightens the net around the wild fish. If this catch is typical of commercial catches, most of these fish will be thrown back overboard, dead.274
Prairie dogs: If you have internet access, you might do a Google search for “red mist,” or go to www.seekersoftheredmist.com/. You will discover that when someone shoots a prairie dog or other “varmint” with a high powered rifle, the creature explodes into fine red mist. This provides “varmint hunters” with what they call “instant visual gratification.” Oftentimes the “hunters” sit in chairs, scoped rifles attached to specially made tables, and then attempt to create red mist. They will also try for what they call “flipper shots”—also called “The Olga Korbut”—where the creature is sent flying end over end; or “the Chamois” in which the creature’s entire skin is removed with one shot; or “Hoover Time,” a head shot on a prairie dog peeking out of its den.275
Sometimes the “hunters” do not rest their guns on tables. Here is an account—not unusual in the least—I saw just today: “I had to run up to the Caprock yesterday for an errand. I took the opportunity to stow the .223 and a can of ammo in the truck before I took off. I got the chance to take my 3 year old with me, so when we got in the truck, he found my earphones and played with them. I talked to him about wearing them and leaving them on, how important it was, and that he had to do what I told him. It takes about 1.5 hours to get from here to there, so we had several chances to go over the rules. When we got to the first PD town, I ordered him to put on his ears, and I rolled down the window and grabbed the gun. Those PDs must have been shot recently because that was the last I saw of them. Further down the road, we pulled over again. I checked his ears several times before I finally pulled the trigger. I was very impressed. He watched, followed orders, kept his ears on and handed me rounds, one at a time. Very cool. I didn’t feel like I had a lot of time, so I only got 7 pups and 1 barbed-wire fence (oops! Dad or I will fix the neighbor’s fence . . . again). After a couple of hits, Gavin said, ‘Cool! Fly!’ Oh, yeah! It was a good day, even though I only got to shoot for about 10 minutes. I’ve got a ‘hunt’ planned for next weekend, so I’m excited.”276
WHY CIVILIZATION IS KILLING THE WORLD, TAKE SEVENTEEN. My only experience of military boot camp comes from movies,
and thus is fictitious. I’d probably know more about them if I had never seen these movies (all writers, remember, including writers of movies, are propagandists). Here is what a former Marine sergeant says about boot camp: “Deceit and manipulation accompany the necessity to motivate troops to murder on command. You can’t take civilians from the street, give them a machine gun, and expect them to kill without question in a democratic society; therefore people must be indoctrinated to do so. This fact alone should sound off alarms in our collective American brain. If the cause of war is justified, then why do we have to be put through boot camp? If you answer that we have to be trained in killing skills, well, then why is most of boot camp not focused on combat training? Why are our privates shown videos of U.S. military massacres while playing Metallica in the background, thus causing us to scream with the joy of the killer instinct [sic] as brown bodies are obliterated? Why do privates answer every command with an enthusiastic ‘kill!’ instead of, ‘yes, sir!’ like it is in the movies? Why do we sing cadences like these?: ‘Throw some candy in the schoolyard, watch the children gather round. Load a belt in your M-60, mow them little bastards down!!’ and “We’re gonna rape, kill, pillage and burn, gonna rape, kill, pillage, and burn!!’ These chants are meant to motivate the troops; they enjoy it, salivate from it, and get off on it. If one repeats these hundreds of times, one eventually begins to accept them as paradigmatically valid.”277
HATRED
Alienation as we find it in modern society is almost total: it pervades the relationship of man to his work, to the things he consumes, to the state, to his fellow man, and to himself.278 Man has created a world of man-made things as it never existed before. He has constructed a complex social machine to administer the technical machine he has built. Yet this whole creation of his stands over and above him. He does not feel himself as a creator and center, but as the servant of a Golem, which his hands have built. The more powerful and gigantic the forces are which he unleashes, the more powerless he feels himself as a human being. He is owned by his cre- ations, and has lost ownership of himself.
Erich Fromm279
IF YOU RECALL, THE TENTH PREMISE OF THIS BOOK IS “THE CULTURE as a whole and most of its members are insane. The culture is driven by a death urge, an urge to destroy life.” The fourteenth premise, somewhat related to the tenth, is, “From birth on—and probably from conception, but I’m not sure how I’d make the case—we are individually and collectively enculturated to hate life, hate the natural world, hate the wild, hate wild animals, hate women, hate children, hate our bodies, hate and fear our emotions, hate ourselves. If we did not hate the world, we could not allow it to be destroyed before our eyes. If we did not hate ourselves, we could not allow our homes—and our bodies—to be poisoned.”
This hatred can be more or less overt, in such manifestations as the Seekers of the Red Mist, the KKK, or the military (called “peacekeepers” by those in power, and “trained killers” by those who teach them their cadences). Sometimes the hatred is harder to see. As I tried to show exhaustively in The Culture of Make Believe, any hatred felt long enough no longer feels like hatred, it feels like what passes in this culture for religion, economics, tradition, the erotic (each of these being toxic mimics of what they would be in a human culture). It feels like science. It feels like technology. It feels like civilization. It feels like the way things are.
When you somehow extricate yourself from these iron cages of hate, what do you see?
I’m standing in line at a Safeway checkout counter, holding torment in my hands—torment I will soon enough take into my body—holding in my hands the processed flesh of plants and animals who were systematically enslaved and tortured, who were not merely killed—we all have to kill to eat: as a tree said to me, “You’re an animal, you consume, get over it”—but who were denied their very nature, disallowed from ever simply existing, from being who they are, free and wild.
I look at the magazines, so many processed women, artificial models showing others, by contrast, their own inadequacies—including the attractive flesh-and-blood woman standing right in front of me, who is nowhere near as attractive (can never be as attractive) as these distant women neither she nor I shall ever meet—teaching them first and foremost to hate themselves, to hate their own never-good-enough bodies.
The checkout guy hates his job. Or at least he would if he allowed himself to feel in his body the slipping away of his own precious lifetime. Perhaps, though, it’s more accurate to say “his own no-longer-precious lifetime,” since if it were really precious he would not—could not—sell it so cheaply, nor even sell it for money at all. But he has been trained to never think of that, and especially to never feel it. If he thought of that—if he felt himself spending the majority of his life doing things he did not want to do—how would he then act? Who would he then be? What would he then do? How would he survive in this awful, unsurvivable system we call civilization? How, too, would we all respond if we fully awoke to the effects of the drip, drip, drip of hour after hour, day after day, year after year sold to jobs we do not love (jobs that are probably destroying our landbase to boot), and how would we respond, too, if we paid attention to the effects of other incessant drippings such as airbrushed photo after airbrushed photo on something so intimate as what—not whom, never whom—we find attractive?
Two days ago I was at a meeting of local grassroots environmentalists. One longtime activist approached me to say, “I read your books, and even if your facts are true and your analysis is correct—and it really seems they are—I cannot allow myself to go there, because I would not survive in this system. I need denial, even if I know that’s what it is, and I need to hope that the system will change on its own, even if I know it won’t.”
A high school student bags the groceries. She’s been through the mill. Twelve years of it, not counting her home life, twelve years of sitting in rows wishing she were somewhere else, wishing she were free, wishing it was later in the day, later in the year, later in her life when at long last her time—her life—would be her own. Moment after moment she wishes this. She wishes it day after day, year after year, until—and this was the point all along—she ceases anymore to wish at all (except to wish her body looked like those in the magazines, and to wish she had more money to buy things she hopes will for at least that one sparkling moment of purchase take away the ache she never lets herself feel), until she has become subservient, docile, domestic. Until her will—what’s that?—has been broken. Until rebellion against the system comes to consist of yet more purchasing—don’t you love those ads conflating alcohol consumption (purchased, of course, from major corporations) and rebelliousness?—or of nothing at all, until rebellion, like will, simply ceases to exist. Until the last vestiges of the wildness and freedom that are her birthright—as they are the birthright of every animal, plant, rock, river, piece of ground, breath of wind—have been worn or torn away.
Free will at this point becomes almost meaningless, because by now victims participate of their own free will—having long-since lost touch with what free will might be. Indeed, they can be said to no longer have any meaningful will at all. Their will has been broken. Of course. That’s the point. Now, they are workers. They are productive members of this great and benevolent structure of civilization that brings good to all it touches. They are happy, even if this happiness requires routine chemical assistance. There is no longer any need for force, because the people—or more precisely those who were once people—have been fully metabolized into the system, have become self-regulating, self-policing.
Welcome to the end of the world.
She wears around her neck a cross, symbol of Christianity, symbol of dying to the flesh so she can be reborn to the spirit, symbol of perceiving the world—the body, her own body—as an evil place, a vale of tears where the enemy death constantly stalks, a place that is not and can never be as real as the heaven where bodies—these wild and uncontrollable things we’ve come to see as so f
lawed—no longer exist, a place that can never be home. (Would Christians object to the systematic exploitation, toxification, and despoliation of heaven as I object to the same on earth?)
I have friends who are Buddhists. They, too, are trained away from their bodies, away from the real, away from the primary, away from the material, away from their experience, away from what they call samsara (literally passing through in Sanskrit: what my dictionary calls “the indefinitely repeated cycles of birth, misery, and death caused by karma,”280 and what one Zen Buddhist calls “the hellish world of time and space and the shifting shapes which energy assumes, the fluctuating world which is apprehended by the senses and presided over by the judgmental ego,”281 all of which sounds like an awful drag, and really, to be honest, does not sound in the slightest like life as I experience it), away from what they call illusion, and toward what they tellingly and pathetically call “liberation” from this earth. As Richard Hooker puts it on his “World Civilizations” web pages, “If the changing world is but an illusion and we are condemned [sic] to remain in it through birth after birth, what purpose is there in atmansiddhi? The goal became not an eternity in a blissful afterlife, but moksha, or ‘liberation’ from samsara. This quest for liberation is the hallmark of the Upanishads and forms the fundamental doctrine of both Buddhism and Jainism.”282
In short, Buddhism and Christianity both do what all religions of civilization must do, which is to naturalize the oppressiveness of the culture—get people (victims) to believe that their enslavement is not simply cultural but a necessary part of the existence to which they’ve been “condemned” (what does it say about them and the lives they lead that they perceive life not as a beautiful gift from the world, something for them to cherish and be grateful for, but as something to which they’ve been condemned?)—and then to point these people away from their awful (civilized) existence and toward “liberation” in some illusory better place (or even more abstractly, no place at all!). How very convenient for those in power. How very convenient for those who enslave human and nonhuman alike. These are religions for the powerless. These are religions to keep people powerless.
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