Endgame Vol.1 (32 page)

The next characteristic is that abusers are at least insensate to the pain of children and nonhumans. Bringing this to the larger cultural level requires, I think, only one word: vivisection. Okay, another: zoos. A couple more: factory farms. Okay, a few more: we’re killing the planet. Correction: they’re killing the planet, and they clearly do not hear the screams.

Do you?

Abusers often conflate sex and violence. Rates of rape—so common as to be essentially normalized in the culture—make clear the conflation of sex and violence on the social level. Many films make it clear, too. So do many relationships. One can also say those magic words: breast augmentation surgery. Just yesterday I heard of a new fad in plastic surgery: reshaping the vulva to make it more visually pleasing, whatever that means (what about the notion that if you love a woman you will find her vulva beautiful, simply because it is hers?).

Really, though, this cultural conflation of sex and violence can be reduced to one word:
fuck
. It’s an extraordinary comment on this culture that the same word that means
make love to
also means
do great violence to
.

Abusers often actualize rigid sex roles. That this is true on the larger cultural level hardly needs remarking, and goes far beyond the stereotypically masculine values that dominate the culture. It also goes beyond the homophobia that’s based on a fear of anything that confuses those rigid sex roles.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the seeming scientific obsession to artificially create or modify life, and also the obsession to search for life in outer space. It has always seemed profoundly absurd and immoral to me that billions of dollars are spent trying to discover life on other planets as trillions more are spent to eradicate life on this one. Were scientists to discover cute furry creatures on Mars with floppy ears and wriggly noses, Nobel prizes would soon be forthcoming (for the scientists, not the floppy-eared Martians). Yet when scientists on the real world see real creatures just like these, they reach for hair spray to put in the creatures’ eyes for Draize tests (of course, the scientists would also leap to exploit the Martian bunnies faster than you can say Huntington Life Sciences).

Similarly, it makes no sense to me that we (read
they
) keep trying to recreate the “miracle of life” in laboratories as we (read
they
) daily the destroy the
plenitude—we’re learning it’s not an infinitude—of miracles that surround us all.

But now I get it. It’s those rigid sex roles combined with a devaluing of the feminine and a really bad case of womb envy, all topped with a heaping of sour grapes, boiling down to the fact that women have babies and men don’t. If women are identified primarily or exclusively—rigidly—by their roles as creators of life, and if women are perceived as inferior (meaning whatever women do, men do better) then men, so as to not perceive themselves as less powerful than the women for whom they feel contempt, must figure out not only how to destroy the natural life they despise, but how to create some sort of life of their own.

Imagine if, for the last fifty years, we had sprayed the whole earth with a nerve gas. Would you be upset? Would I be upset? Yes. I think people would be screaming in the streets. Well, we’ve done that. We’ve released endocrine disruptors through out the world that are having fundamental effects on the immune system, on the reproductive system. We have good data that shows that wildlife and humans are being affected. Should we be upset? Yes, I think that we should be fundamen tally upset. I think we should be screaming in the streets.

I’M DRIVING THROUGH REDWOODS ON A FOUR-LANE FIGHWAY. A CAR materializes behind me, then speeds by so quickly I barely make out the sentence frosted on the rear window:
Drive it like you stole it
.

I laugh, then marvel at the boldness of this person seeming to beg police to give her tickets. But the longer I drive this ribbon of asphalt, the more significant the phrase seems. Let’s change
it
in that sentence from a car to the land:
Live on this land like you stole it
. That’s what members of this culture do. Probably because they did.

We should admit to ourselves, and this forms the eleventh premise of this book, that
from the beginning, this culture—civilization—has been a culture of occupation.

What do occupiers do? They seize territory by force or threat of force. They take resources for use at the center of an empire. They degrade the landscape. They kill those who resist this theft. They enslave those whose labor is necessary for this theft, this degradation of the landscape. They eradicate those who are in the way—the humans and nonhumans whose land this is—and who must be removed so the occupiers can put the land to better use. They force the remaining humans to live under the laws and moral code of the occupiers. They inculcate future generations to forget their non-occupied past and to aspire to join the ranks of their occupiers, to actually join in the degradation of the landbase that was once theirs.

Because exploitation is so central to any culture of occupation—that’s part of what defines it—this exploitation infects and characterizes every part of the culture.

This means any civilized government, by all means including the United States, is a government of occupation, set up to facilitate resource extraction (to bring resources from the country to the city, from colony to empire), a process these days called production, and to prevent interference in this process by those whose lives are diminished or destroyed by the devastation of their landbase, and also by those whose lives are diminished or destroyed laboring to serve production.

Any civilized economics, by all means including capitalism, is an economics of occupation, set up to rationalize resource extraction, and to pre-empt reasonable discourse about non-exploitative community relations.

Any civilized religion, including Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Confucianism, and so on, is a religion of occupation. A religion is supposed to teach us how to live, which if we’re to live sustainably, means it must teach us how to live in place. But people will live differently in different places, which means religions must be different in different places, and must emerge from the land itself, and not abstract themselves from it. It’s absurd to think that people will need the same guidance to live in the Middle East as in Tibet or the Pacific Northwest. And a transposable religion means that it could not have emerged from the particularities of that landscape. A religion is also supposed to teach us how to connect to the divine. Yet if a religion is transposed over space, it won’t—can’t—be so quick to speak to the divine in that particular place. The bottom line is that civilized religions lead people away from their intimate connection to the divinity in the land that is their own home and toward the abstract principles of this distant religion. How differently would we relate to trees if instead of singing “Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so,” we, those of us who live in Tu’nes, were to sing, “I love these redwoods, and they love me. There’s no finer feeling than to be loved by a tree”? On the other hand, what better words to get young slave children to sing in unison than “Little ones to Him belong, They are weak but He is strong.” And finally, given the near ubiquitous belief among the overlords that their wealth and power is divinely ordained, how’s this for a hymn to teach the poor? “I want to be a worker for the Lord, I want to love and trust His holy word, I want to sing and pray and be busy every day, in the vineyard of the Lord.”

Any science of civilization will be a science of occupation, aiming toward ever more control of the occupied world, and toward the creation of ever more destructive technologies. Imagine the technologies that would be invented by a culture of inhabitation, that is, a sustainable culture, that is, a culture planning on being in the same place for ten thousand years. That culture would create technologies that enhance the landscape—what a concept! —and would decompose afterwards into components that help, not poison, the soil. The technologies would remind human inhabitants of their place in this landscape. The technologies would promote leisure, not production. The technologies would not be bombs and factory conveyor belts but perhaps stories, songs, and dances, and nets to catch set and sustainable numbers of salmon.

The Squamish people, who live near what is now Vancouver, British Columbia, tell this story: A long time ago, even before the time of the flood, the Cheakamus River provided food for the Squamish people. Each year, at the end of summer, when the salmon came home to spawn, the people would cast their cedar root nets into the water and get enough fish for the winter to come.

One day, a man came to fish for the winter. He looked into the river and found that many fish were coming home this year. He said thanks to the spirit of the fish for giving themselves as food for his family, and cast his net into the river and waited. In time, he drew his nets in and they were full of fish, enough for his family for the whole year. He packed these away into cedar bark baskets, and prepared to go home.

But he looked into the river and saw all those fish, and decided to cast his net again. And he did so, and it again filled with fish, which he threw onto the shore. A third time, he cast his net into the water and waited.

This time, when he pulled his net in, it was torn beyond repair by sticks, stumps, and branches which filled the net. To his dismay, the fish on the shore and the fish in the cedar bark baskets were also sticks and branches. He had no fish, his nets were ruined.

It was then he looked up at the mountain and saw Wountie, the spirit protecting the Cheakamus, who told him that he had broken the faith with the river and with nature, by taking more than he needed for himself and his family. And this was the consequence.

And to this day, high on the mountain overlooking the Cheakamus and Paradise Valley, is the image of Wountie, protecting the Cheakamus.

The fisherman? Well, his family went hungry and starved, a lesson for all the people.