Endgame Vol.1 (56 page)

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.

Desperation is the raw material of drastic change. Only those who can leave behind everything they have ever believed in can hope to escape.

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 the 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.