It’s quite a scam, if you can get people to buy into it. Those in power make the rules, and those in power enforce the rules. If those in power decide to toxify the landscape, toxify they will, and part of the bargain we evidently agree to on being part of this society is that they can use violence to enforce their edicts, and we cannot use violence to resist them. When they are killing the planet this quickly becomes absurd.
Recently in Bolivia a group of Aymara Indians kidnapped and killed an extraordinarily corrupt mayor, after legal means of redress failed. Legal means of redress had never stood a chance: the mayor represents the state, and the legal system supports the state and its representatives. As one of the Indians said, “We would have been satisfied if Altamirano [the mayor] admitted he had made mistakes, or if he had proposed a punishment for himself, or if the authorities had fined him. But none of this happened. What else could we do?”302 Representatives of the state used this killing—which was definitely a fair execution according to Aymara justice, as well as their only real option for stopping the mayor’s thuggery—as an excuse to arrest the leader of a land ownership reform movement, although not even the prosecution claimed he was anywhere near the scene of the kidnapping or execution. The prosecution really had no choice but to pursue this case. Far more is at stake than the murder of one corrupt politician. The prosecution stated, “There is only one justice, the justice of the state, of the law, there cannot be another justice.”303
Of course a representative of the state would say that.
I disagree. There must be another justice, in fact many other justices. What is justice to the state, to the powerful, is not justice to the poor, to the land. What is justice to the CEO of ExxonMobil is not justice to the polar bears being driven to extinction by global warming. So long as we only believe in the justice of the state, of the law—made by those in power, to serve those in power—so long will we continue to be exploited by those in power. The rule of the state is always, hearkening back to the competing laws of Greek tragedies, in conflict with the rule of the people. And in a culture driven mad, the justice of the state will always be in conflict with the justice of the land.
Dear Abby’s advice to her readers was, in glorious all caps: “IF YOUR PARTNER SHOWS THESE SIGNS, IT’S TIME TO GET OUT.” We can say the same about the culture, and if all caps are good enough for Abby, then by all means they’re good enough for me: IF YOUR CULTURE SHOWS THESE SIGNS, IT’S TIME TO GET OUT.
It’s time to get out.
COURAGE
Desperation is the raw material of drastic change. Only those who can leave behind everything they have ever believed in can hope to escape.
William S. Burroughs
I LEARNED ABOUT E-BOMBS FROM ONE OF MY STUDENTS—CASEY MADDOX, an excellent writer—at the prison. He wrote an extraordinary novel about someone who is kidnapped and put through a twelve-step recovery program for an addiction to Western civilization. The book’s title is The Day Philosophy Died, and, as we’ll get to in a moment, that title is related to E-bombs.304
E-bombs are, to my reckoning, one of the few useful inventions of the military-industrial complex. They are kind of the opposite of neutron bombs, which, if you remember, kill living beings but leave nonliving structures such as cities relatively intact: the quintessence of civilization. E-bombs, on the other hand, are explosive devices that do not hurt living beings, but instead destroy all electronics. Casey calls them “time machines,” because when you set one off you go back one hundred and fifty years.
At one point in the novel the kidnappers are going to use a small plane to drop an E-bomb over the Bay Area. They carry the bomb on board inside a casket. The main character asks, “Who died?”
“Philosophy,” someone says. “When philosophy dies,” that person continues, “action begins.”
As they prepare to set off the E-bomb, the main character keeps thinking, “There’s something wrong with our plan.” The thought keeps nagging him as they do their countdown to the celebration. Five, four, three, two, one. And the main character gets it, but too late. The E-bomb explodes. Their plane plummets.
One of the kidnappers clutches his chest, keels over. He’s got a pacemaker. Even nonviolent actions can kill people. At this point, any action, including inaction, has lethal consequences. If you are civilized, your hands are more or less permanently stained deep dark red with the blood of countless human and nonhuman victims.
Long before he finished the book, Casey showed me where he first read about E-bombs. It was in, of all places, Popular Mechanics. If you check the September 2001 issue out of the library—which even has rudimentary instructions for how to construct one—make sure you use someone else’s library card. Preferably someone you don’t like.
The article was titled, “E-bomb: In the Blink of an Eye, Electromagnetic Bombs Could Throw Civilization Back 200 Years. And Terrorists [sic] Can Build Them for $400.”
And that’s a bad thing?
The author, Jim Wilson, begins: “The next Pearl Harbor will not announce itself with a searing flash of nuclear light or with the plaintive wails of those dying of Ebola or its genetically engineered twin. You will hear a sharp crack in the distance. By the time you mistakenly identify this sound as an innocent clap of thunder, the civilized world will have become unhinged.”
So far so good.
He continues, “Fluorescent lights and television sets will glow eerily bright, despite being turned off. The aroma of ozone mixed with smoldering plastic will seep from outlet covers as electric wires arc and telephone lines melt. Your Palm Pilot and MP3 player will feel warm to the touch, their batteries overloaded. Your computer, and every bit of data on it, will be toast.”
I know, I know, this all sounds too good to be true. But it gets even better.
Wilson writes, “And then you will notice that the world sounds different too. The background music of civilization, the whirl of internal-combustion engines, will have stopped. Save a few diesels, engines will never start again. You, however, will remain unharmed, as you find yourself thrust backward 200 years, to a time when electricity meant a lightning bolt fracturing the night sky. This is not a hypothetical, son-of-Y2K scenario. It is a realistic assessment of the damage the Pentagon believes could be inflicted by a new generation of weapons—E-bombs.”
When I mention all this at my shows, people often interrupt me with cheers.
The core of the E-bomb idea is something called a Flux Compression Generator (FCG), which the article in Popular Mechanics calls “an astoundingly simple weapon. It consists of an explosives-packed tube placed inside a slightly larger copper coil, as shown below. [The article even has a diagram!] The instant before the chemical explosive is detonated, the coil is energized by a bank of capacitors, creating a magnetic field. The explosive charge detonates from the rear forward. As the tube flares outward it touches the edge of the coil, thereby creating a moving short circuit. ‘The propagating short has the effect of compressing the magnetic field while reducing the inductance of the stator [coil],’ says Carlo Kopp [an Australian-based expert on high-tech warfare]. ‘The result is that FCGs will produce a ramping current pulse, which breaks before the final disintegration of the device. Published results suggest ramp times of tens of hundreds of microseconds and peak currents of tens of millions of amps.’ The pulse that emerges makes a lightning bolt seem like a flashbulb by comparison.”
As good as all this may sound (oh, sorry, I forgot that technological progress is good; civilization is good; destroying the planet is good; computers and televisions and telephones and automobiles and fluorescent lights are all good, and certainly more important than a living and livable planet, more important than salmon, swordfish, grizzly bears, and tigers, which means the effects of E-bombs are so horrible that nobody but the U.S. military and its brave and glorious allies should ever have the capacity to set these off, and they should only be set off to support vital U.S. interests such as access to oil, which can be burned to keep th
e U.S. economy growing, to keep people consuming, to keep the world heating up from global warming, to keep tearing down the last vestiges of wild places from which the world may be able to recover if civilization comes down soon enough), it gets even better (or worse, if you identify more with civilization than your landbase): After an E-bomb is detonated, and destroys local electronics, the pulse piggybacks through the power and telecommunication infrastructure. This, according to the article, “means that terrorists [sic] would not have to drop their homemade E-bombs directly on the targets they wish to destroy. Heavily guarded sites, such as telephone switching centers and electronic funds-transfer exchanges, could be attacked through their electric and telecommunication connections.”
The article concludes on this hopeful note: “Knock out electric power, computers and telecommunication and you’ve destroyed the foundation of modern society. In the age of Third World-sponsored terrorism,305 the E-bomb is the great equalizer.”306
I go to the post office. Jim, my favorite clerk there, with whom I often chat as he processes the packages I’m mailing, comments on the heat. It’s eighty-five or eighty-six, he says, the second or third highest temperature on record here. I know, cry me a fricking river, but I live on the cool coast of northern California.
“It makes you think about global warming,” he says.
I nod, then reply, “Nineteen thousand people dead in Europe from the heat, and the damn newspapers don’t even mention global warming.” I don’t mention that this is more than six times the number killed in the attacks on the World Trade Center. Jim likes my politics, but polite discourse generally demands that we ignore many obvious things.
Now it’s his turn to nod. He says, “Did you see those pictures of glaciers melting in Europe?”
“The climate is changing, and those in power won’t do anything about it.”
“The culture has too much momentum,” he responds, “and those in charge have too much money and power for us to stop them.”
“That’s why my next book is about how to take down civilization.”
He looks at me for a moment. “You can write a book about it, but you can’t make it happen.”
“I can help push in the right direction at the right times, and I think that can make a difference.”
“It will come down all right, and pretty soon at that. But it won’t be your doing. It will be the system collapsing in on itself.”
This is the guy at the Post Office! There are many who know this, but few who speak it out loud. I say, “We can hurry it up.”
“It’s going to be nasty,” he responds.
“It already is.”
“That nastiness is exactly why I bought a gun. A thirty-eight.”
I’m about to say that’s also exactly why I bought a gun a few years ago, but he carries my packages to the big bins in back.
When he returns he says, “It’s for myself.”
I don’t know what he means.
He says, “I don’t want to live like that.”
“I don’t want to live like this.”
“I don’t want to live like an animal.”
“I’ve got news for you, Jim. You already are an animal.”
“I need my electricity. I can’t live without it.”
I don’t say anything. I think, Is it worth it to you?
He looks me straight in the eyes, and says, “I’m going to retire in January. Don’t do this right now. Give me a few years to enjoy my retirement.”
It’s the next day. I’m flying to Pennsylvania to give a talk. I hope my talk does more good than the oil that’s burned to get me there.
I’ve just learned that the largest ice shelf in the Arctic—a solid feature for 3,000 years—has broken up. I’ve also just learned that a scientist studying this ice shelf—overseeing the destruction, as it were—stated, “I am not comfortable linking it to global warming. It is difficult to tease out what is due to global warming and what is due to regional warming.”307
And here’s something else I’ve recently learned. Global warming (or is it just regional warming that somehow seems to happen all over the globe?) has caused phytoplankton to decrease 6 percent in the last twenty years.308 That is very bad. That is unspeakably bad. When the phytoplankton goes, it’s all over.
I left before six this morning. I woke up at 4:15. It’s now 8:30. I’m on a plane sitting on a runway in Sacramento. This will be my third take-off of the day. I’m tired, and at least pretending to sleep. My two row partners are talking about the weather. One says, “This was the first year since 1888 that we had more than ten days in a month over the century mark. Eighteen days it was.”
I hear the other murmur something.
The first says, “That’s damn hot, it is. It sure is damn hot.”
It’s only going to get worse, I think. And then I try to sleep.
I had two dreams. In the first, my father came to my home. I did not want him here. He began to throw rocks at me. I tried to evade the rocks and did not throw any back. His daughter in the dream, who was not my sister, approached me. She spoke. She was pregnant, she said. Her father, my father, was the fetus’s father. She was unable to bring herself to have an abortion. This would, she said, be an act of violence she could not commit. Nor could she bear to give birth to this product of rape. She could not bear to continue her father’s lineage. Her only choice, she said, was to kill herself. She saw that as the only way to stop the horror that her parent had perpetrated upon her, and to stop the product of that horror growing inside of her.
Two thoughts came to me as I slept. First I noticed that it never occurred to her or to me in the dream to kill her father, my father, nor did she abort the baby, kill her father inside of her, and begin to live her life anew, free from him and his rapes. The second was to recognize that this is of course what we as a culture are doing. We so identify with the poisonous processes that have been forcibly implanted inside of us by our ancestors that we see no way to remove them save suicide. To kill the oppressors, and even to kill their influences they’ve implanted in us would be a violence we must avoid at all costs. And so we kill ourselves and the world with us. Somehow we do not perceive this as violence.
Several years ago I spoke with Luis Rodriguez, who wrote the wonderful book Always Running: La Vida Loca: Gang Days in L.A. He is a former gang member who got out through the literature of revolution. One of the things I asked him was why so many gang kids stand on street corners shooting at mirror images of themselves. If they’re so angry, I asked, why don’t they at least shoot at capitalists?
He said that part of the answer is that cops pit gang kids against each other. Another part is that the kids want to die. Of course they want to die. They are, after all, teenagers, and one of the things teenagers must do before they can become adults is die to their childhood. The child dies so the adult can be born. But no one is telling these kids that the deaths can be spiritual and metaphorical instead of physical. And so they stand on street corners, killing themselves and killing each other.
Luis also said that when he was younger he wanted to kill every CEO and cop he saw, because they were killing those he loved. But he later realized that he wasn’t so interested in killing those individual human beings as he was in killing the relationships that allow them to kill kids. That is, he wanted to break their identities as CEOs or cops, and get them instead to identify with their animal humanity.
I’ve thought about this a lot in terms of tactics for women (and men) who are threatened with rape. Now, first, I need to say that anyone in that situation can do no wrong: no one can ever complain about anything she may or may not think or say or do, nor at any attitude she may or may not assume. Having said that though, I need to say that something that has helped some women, both as they are being threatened or assaulted and then afterwards, has been to redefine the relationship they suddenly find themselves in. The first step in this redefinition is to change her perception of the relationship from one betwee
n a rapist and a victim to one between a rapist and a survivor, that is, to begin to perceive herself not as a victim with no choices (although she may recognize that her range of choices may have been at least temporarily diminished because of the circumstances she finds herself in through no fault of her own) but as someone who is going to use any available means she chooses in order to survive this encounter (or not, as she chooses). For some women this choosing to be a survivor may then lead to them submitting to the rapist’s physical demands, allowing him to have her body while her soul remains her own. This is one of the points I think Bertholt Brecht was making in his fable about a man who lives alone who one day hears a knock on his door. When he answers, he sees The Tyrant outside, who asks, “Will you submit?” The man says nothing. He steps aside. The Tyrant enters his home. The man serves him for years, until The Tyrant becomes sick from food poisoning and dies. The man wraps the body, takes it outside, returns to his home, closes the door behind him, and firmly answers, “No.” For other women this may mean fighting to the death, preferably his. Still others—many others—do not consciously make the choice to move from victim to survivor in that moment of violation—they are too busy simply surviving to think about labeling themselves as survivors—but they make that choice over time, in the months, years, and decades that follow, as they metabolize what was done to them and their responses. And of course yet others choose different approaches: there are as many approaches to this question of reidentifying oneself from victim to survivor as there are potential victims, potential survivors.
The next step that at least some women pursue in this process of changing their circumstances is to attempt to get the man to no longer identify himself as a rapist, but as something else (one hopes not a murderer). An example may help clarify. One morning in the mid-1970s, my sister was reading in bed when suddenly she felt a man’s weight on her back and a knife at her throat. The man said he was going to rape her. She said, “You can do that if you’d like, but I have to tell you that my husband and I are being treated for syphilis. I don’t know if you want to risk catching it.” Our mother had always told her to keep a prescription bottle by her bedside for exactly this contingency. (And what does it say about our culture that mothers need to prepare their daughters for this possibility, or really, given the rates of rape in our culture, this likelihood?) Fortunately, the man didn’t look closely at the bottle, or he would have learned that the original prescription was several years old, for medicines designed to alleviate my sister’s migraines, and that the bottle was now full of aspirin. He told her that it wasn’t worth the risk, and that instead he wanted all of her money. She had twenty dollars in her purse and she gave him five.309 He left. The point is that my sister had caused the man to no longer identify himself as a rapist, but as a robber, and to act on that identification. She effectively killed the rapist. Sometimes, when men strongly identify as rapists, it is not possible to kill the rapist without killing the man. So be it.
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