Endgame Vol.1 (57 page)

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 between 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.

The first part of our task, then, is to attempt to break our own identification as the civilized and remember that we are human animals living in and reliant on our landbases for survival, to begin to care more about the survival of our landbase than the perpetuation of civilization. (What a concept!) Then we must break our identification as victims of this awful and deathly system called civilization and remember that we are survivors, resolve that we
will do what it takes
so that we—
and those we love, including nonhuman members of our landbase
—will survive, outlast, outlive, defeat civilization. That we will in time dance and play and love and live and die among the plants and animals who will someday grow amidst its ruins. Once we have made that shift inside of ourselves,
once we no longer see ourselves as victims of civilization but as its survivors, as those who will not let it kill us or those we love, we have freed ourselves to begin to pursue the more or less technical task of actually stopping those who are killing our landbases, killing us. One way to do that might be to get CEOs, cops, and politicians to identify themselves as human animals living in and reliant on their landbases and to break their identities as CEOs, cops, and politicians. The good news is that some few of them may listen to reason. The bad news is that history, sociology, psychology, and direct personal experience suggest that most—nearly all—will not.

In the second dream, I drove on a small road into a place I’d been before, a place that was wild. But my car could not pass between two small trees. I stopped and got out. I could not get into the wild. I was frustrated. There was a reservoir nearby, and as I walked toward it, it filled with warships. Richard Nixon was lashed, à la Admiral Farragut, to the mast (in this case radar tower) of a ship, flashing his trademark two-fingered salute. The beach was soon packed with patriots pushing me this way and that for not enthusing about the military takeover of the reservoir. The patriots began to party. I struggled to get away, and finally was able to walk alone into the wilderness.

Part of the grammar of my dreams is that when I have multiple dreams in the same sleep, they speak to the same questions. This dream, then, was a follow up to the first, with the first revealing our incapacity to face our predicament, to come up with any response more creative than suicide, and the second making clear that we cannot return to the wild and bring our cars and our machines with us. They will not fit. And so where does this leave us? It leaves us near artificial lakes filled with killers and liars who tie themselves to instruments of war. And it leaves us in the midst of crowds of people who perceive all of these death-machines as good things, and who party among their machines of death. It leaves us needing to find a different way to make it back to the wilderness, back to our home.
³¹⁰

The most common words I ever hear spoken by any environmentalists anywhere are, “We’re fucked.” Most of these environmentalists are fighting desperately, using whatever tools they have—or rather whatever legal tools they have, which means whatever tools those in power grant them the rights to use, which means whatever tools will be ultimately ineffective—to try to protect some piece of ground, to try to stop the manufacture or release of poisons, to
try to stop civilized humans from tormenting some groups of plants or animals. Sometimes they’re reduced to trying to protect one tree.

John Osborn, an extraordinary activist and friend who, when I met him, was the heart and soul of the Spokane, Washington environmental community, has often given his reasons for doing the work: “As things become increasingly chaotic, I want to make sure some doors remain open. If grizzly bears are still alive in twenty, thirty, and forty years, they may still be alive in fifty. If they’re gone in twenty, they’ll be gone forever.”

But no matter what we do, our best efforts are insufficient to the dangers we face. We’re losing badly, on every front. Those in power are hell-bent on destroying the planet, and most people don’t care.

Many of us know we’re fucked. But many don’t talk about it, especially publicly. We believe we’re alone in this feeling. But we’re not.

Just today I got this email: “I attended your talk last night, and was deeply surprised. I hadn’t read your works (except in the middle of the night last night), and was skeptical of your message, but not as you might normally think. I stopped going to hear Enviro speakers quite a while back, call it estrangement. I work as an environmental regulator, EPA Water Pollution, and have been doing that for 15 years. I’ve seen a bit of water go beneath the bridge. I know what’s in it.

“I’m a little tired of utopian environmental theory. It’s hard to hear someone talk about some perfect future society (spirituality, free love, etc.), when I’m trying to figure out what to do with some damaged place, or a slag pile, or the siting of a new chip mill that can eat 10,000 acres of forest per year. It ain’t about theory. It is very, very real.

“In the role of regulator I have to live in the world of what has been done, and what is doable. I’ve had to understand the brutal limitations of physics, history, law, technology, money, politics, and human folly. We’ve busted some things we can’t fix. We’re still doing it. I’ve had to witness more than I care to. I’ve had some very sweet victories, even been a Champion a few times. But, we are so FUCKED!!! I’ve never stated that anywhere. It just seemed like too difficult a truth to share. Thank you for saying that out loud. Hope bashing is OK, we can make more.”