Endgame Vol.1 (44 page)

Instead of the Unabomber/Tylenol rule, I could have called it the Fantasy Football rule, or maybe the Rotisserie League rule. The Earth Liberation Front and the Animal Liberation Front are considered by the FBI to be together the nation’s number one domestic terrorist threat, even though they’ve never hurt anyone. The feds’ rationale is that the ELF and ALF have caused significant financial loss to corporations. And it is true that some members of the ELF—elves—seem proud of the fact that the ELF has cost corporations and the government tens of millions of dollars through “economic sabotage.” I hate to break it to both the elves and the G-men, but that’s comparatively trivial compared to the real terrorists. I am of course describing those who play fantasy
football and baseball. According to a scoop in today’s
San Francisco Chronicle
, “America’s addiction to fantasy sports could cost the nation’s businesses $36.7 million daily”
²³⁶
as people who “should” be working are instead checking the internet to see how their favorite players fared (I’ll bet you wish you’d picked up Johan Santana after his first few starts). If the FBI really cared about stopping serious economic sabotage, they would crack down immediately on websites that encourage such behavior. They would shut down
rototimes.com
,
rotoworld.com
,
hardballtimes.com
, and even
ESPN.com
. It’s a travesty that such sites are allowed to operate openly, without harassment! They’re encouraging terrorist behavior!

Maybe this means that if members of the ELF
really
want to cause economic damage to those in power, instead of burning SUVs they should just play fantasy baseball.

Or maybe not.

Instead of the Unabomber/Tylenol rule, I could have called it the Terrorism rule. Although members of governments around the world and members of the capitalist press like to talk a lot about terrorism, the numbers aren’t that high. Using their definitions of terrorism,
²³⁷
there have been about 1,300 people killed per year by terrorists since the September 11, 2001 attacks, and precisely zero in the United States. Contrast that with the numbers above. But the politicians talk incessantly about terrorism (or at least terrorism by enemies of states), and they do not talk about these other deaths. This is partly because of premise four of this book, and partly because of the Unabomber/Tylenol rule.

Think of that whenever you hear those in power mention the word
terrorism
.

Abusers are volatile. They may be pleasant one moment, and violent the next. I go back and forth on whether I believe their volatility is real.

Argument in favor: Abusers are fragile. They’re frightened. Because they have no identities of their own (which also means that they could never identify with their bodies nor with the landbases that give them life) they have no capacity to react fluidly to whatever circumstances arise. They must then control their surroundings. So long as those surroundings remain perfectly under control abusers can maintain at least an exterior calm. But threaten that control (or
their perceived entitlement to control and exploit) and the fury that forever seethes beneath their surface bursts full-blown into the world.

Argument against: I strongly suspect, based on my own experience of abusers, that their volatility is at least quite often fabricated for manipulative purposes, making the volatility of abusers akin to the planned “outbursts” of CIA interrogators when victims refuse to fall into the trap of abusing themselves, refusing, for example, to stand for days at a time. In other words, the volatility may not be real at all, but part of a calculated strategy to keep victims off guard, to get them to police themselves.

But there’s another argument for the fundamental falsity of an abuser’s volatility, which refers instead to the first half of the statement: it is possible that an abuser’s pleasantness is never real pleasantness, instead being a mere temporary (and probably tactical) lessening of the relentless tightening of attempted control. Instead of an abuser being like a jug of gasoline—noxious enough, but often not immediately fatal until and unless some spark sets it off, meaning ultimate responsibility for your own immolation rests on you for being silly enough to ever let flint strike steel—perhaps it’s more accurate to say that to enter or to be forced to enter into a relationship with an abuser is more like being bound tightly by ropes tied by someone trained in the Japanese art of
hojojutsu
, about which one expert wrote: “Knots were developed that could hold almost anybody in any position. The knots were so designed that if a person tried to wiggle free the rope around the neck would tighten, restricting the airflow and choking the victim.”
²³⁸

This, for me, is the experience of being in a relationship with an abuser: if you do not struggle but only lie motionless, the abuser merely confines you, but every slightest movement in any direction on your part—and I want to emphasize
every
movement in
any
direction—tightens the abuser’s hold over you.

Given all this, how real is the “pleasantness” of an abuser? Only very stupid or very desperate abusers—and this is as true on the larger social scale as it is on the familial—are
always
oppressive. Unrelenting oppression is not nearly so effective at control as is intermittent oppression mixed with rewards. If the oppressor were
only
oppressive, victims would realize they have nothing left to lose. Those who believe they have something left to lose are ever-so-much-more manipulable. Those who realize they have nothing left to lose have nothing left to fear, and they can be extremely dangerous to their victimizers.

I go back and forth on this question—is an abuser’s volatility real?—on the cultural level, too, and for the same reasons. Certainly those in power have always hated the indigenous and have always reacted with rage toward those
who threaten their perceived entitlement (as I put it in
The Culture of Make Believe
, “[I]f the rhetoric of superiority works to maintain the entitlement, hatred and direct physical force remain underground. But when that rhetoric begins to fail, force and hatred wait in the wings, ready to explode”
²³⁹
).

In addition to this hatred and rage that undergirds so many of the actions of those in power and the culture in general, I strongly suspect that much of the moral outrage and righteous indignation expressed by those in power before they invade yet another (probably defenseless) country containing resources they want or need, or before they punish those who try to stop their depredations, is so much playacting. I know, you’re shocked—shocked!—at the implication that those in power may be sometimes less than honest about their true motivations and feelings. But it’s pretty clearly true.

The question remains: are they then volatile, or do they just pretend to be volatile. Or both?

Not that any of this necessarily makes a difference in the real world. Whether those in power blow you up because they hate you for wanting to defend your landbase or because they want your resources doesn’t much matter. You’re just as dead.

But there
still
remains the second part of this question: is this culture’s
niceness
real?

Here’s why I’m belaboring this point: people who haven’t thought about these issues at all—especially those who are aware of neither history nor current events, which means a hell of a lot of people—sometimes ask, if industrial civilization (or occasionally more specifically the U.S.) is so awful, why does everyone want to be “like us”? Well, the truth is, they generally don’t, at least not until their landbase, and thus culture, has been destroyed. As J. Hector St. John de Crévecoeur commented in his
Letters from an American Farmer
, “There must be in the Indians’ social bond something singularly captivating, and far superior to be boasted of among us; for thousands of Europeans are Indians, and we have no examples of even one of those Aborigines having from choice become Europeans! There must be something very bewitching in their manners, something very indelible and marked by the very hands of Nature. For, take a young Indian lad, give him the best education you possibly can, load him with your bounty, with presents, nay with riches, yet he would secretly long for his native woods, which you would imagine he must have long since forgot; and on the first opportunity he can possibly find, you will see him voluntarily leave behind all you have given him and return with inexpressible joy to lie on the mats of his fathers.”
²⁴⁰
Here’s how Benjamin Franklin put it: “No European who has tasted
Savage life can afterwards bear to live in our societies.”
²⁴¹
He also wrote, “When an Indian Child has been brought up among us, taught our language and habituated to our Customs, yet if he goes to see his relations and make one Indian Ramble with them, there is no persuading him ever to return, and that this is not natural [to them] merely as Indians, but as men, is plain from this, that when white persons of either sex have been taken prisoners young by the Indians, and lived a while among them, tho’ ransomed by their Friends, and treated with all imaginable tenderness to prevail with them to stay among the English, yet in a Short time they become disgusted with our manner of life, and the care and pains that are necessary to support it, and take the first good Opportunity of escaping again into the Woods, from whence there is no reclaiming them.”
²⁴²
These descriptions are common. Cadwallader Colden wrote in 1747 of whites captured by Indians, “No Arguments, no Intreaties, nor Tears of their Friends and Relations, could persuade many of them to leave their new Indian Friends and Acquaintance[s]; several of them that were by the Caressings of their Relations persuaded to come Home, in a little time grew tired of our Manner of living, and run away again to the Indians, and ended their Days with them. On the other Hand, Indian Children have been carefully educated among the English, cloathed and taught, yet, I think, there is not one Instance that any of these, after they had Liberty to go among their own People, and were come to Age, would remain with the English, but returned to their own Nations, and became as fond of the Indian Manner of Life as those that knew nothing of a civilized Manner of living.”
²⁴³
At prisoner exchanges, Indians would run joyously back to their families, while white captives had to be bound hand and foot to not run back to their captors.
²⁴⁴

The civilized who chose to stay among the Indians did so because, according to historian James Axtell, summarizing the stories of whites who wrote about their lives among Indians, “they found Indian life to possess a strong sense of community, abundant love, and uncommon integrity—values that the European colonists also honored, if less successfully. But Indian life was attractive for other values—for social equality, mobility, adventure, and, as two adult converts acknowledged, ‘the most perfect freedom, the ease of living, [and] the absence of those cares and corroding solicitudes which so often prevail with us.’”
²⁴⁵

Because Indian life was more enjoyable, pleasant, and non-abusive than life among the civilized, the conquistador Hernando de Soto had to place armed guards around his camps, not so much to keep Indians from attacking, but to keep European men and women from defecting to the Indians.
²⁴⁶
Likewise,
Pilgrim leaders made running away to join the Indians an offense punishable by death.
²⁴⁷
Other colonial rulers did the same. When, to provide one example among many, in 1612 some young Europeans in Virginia “did runne away unto the Indyans,”
²⁴⁸
the governor ordered them hunted down, tortured, and killed: “Some he apointed to be hanged Some burned Some to be broken upon wheles, others to be staked and some to be shott to deathe.”
²⁴⁹
We can ask ourselves whether the governor was actually outraged and acting out his volatility, or whether he simply preferred that his subjects fear him, even if that meant they hate him. The reasoning was straightforward: “all theis extreme and crewell tortures he used and inflicted upon them to terrify the rests for Attempting the Lyke.”
²⁵⁰