Songs of the Dead (12 page)

The German victories in Poland and France made more distant the possibilities of victory for any coup attempt, as the regime became more popular and the resistance lost support: then as now, there were many who did not mind a dictator, so long as he was successful. But there were others who persevered in attempted to kill Hitler. Eugen Gersenmaier and Fritz-Dietlof Graf von der Schulenberg were two of these. Together, they assembled a group of officers to arrest Hitler, killing him if, as presumed, resistance was offered. Despite many attempts, they were never able to get close enough to pull it off. The closest they came was in Paris in 1940; they planned to attack Hitler during his victory parade. But at the last moment, Hitler decided against having this parade. Instead he flew into Paris at five o'clock that morning and visited the Champs-Elysées, the Opéra, the Louvre, the Eiffel Tower, and the Invalides (including Napoleon's tomb) before catching an 8:00 a.m. flight back to Prussia.

Evidently—and of course this is true of conquerors in general, on every level from the most intimate to the most glob- al—Hitler could conquer Paris, but he couldn't comfortably visit it. The act of conquest makes any sort of real visitation impossible. This is, once again, as true of those who rape individuals as it is of those who rape countries as it is of those who rape landbases.

I don't think I've told you yet about the bears and the apple trees. A family of bears lives in the neighborhood, and all of us humans have agreed to not call Fish and Game, because we know that Fish and Game would kill them. That's what they do. The cliché is that a fed bear is a dead bear, but it's more accurate to say that a bear who has been ratted out to the state or federal mobile killing units is a dead bear. The humans in our neighborhood who don't like bears make sure to not leave trash where the bears can get at it. Those who do like bears leave offerings of corn or dog food, and are sometimes blessed by seeing a bear or, better, a mother and cub. At the very least we all get to see lots of bear poop.

Allison and I decided to take this one step further. We kept thinking about the old adage about how if you give a man a fish, you feed him for a day, but if you teach him how to fish, you'll feed him for a lifetime (and if you blow up a dam you'll feed his descendants forever). Well, we knew we couldn't teach bears to fish any better than they already do, and besides, the wétikos have killed the streams and rivers (where are the salmon, lampreys, and sturgeon?). And both Allison and I already work on dam removal and anti-logging issues, so we're already helping the fish some, though obviously not enough. We wanted to do something more direct. We couldn't figure out what we should do until bear poop gave us the answer.

We noticed that each year during apple season we often see huge piles of poop that reveal to us all too clearly the inefficiency of bear metabolism. If I can venture perhaps too much detail, the poop looks like filling for apple cobbler. If you had enough patience and really liked three-dimensional puzzles, you could fit the apple pieces back together, glue them, put them on your kitchen counter, and no one would be the wiser.

In any case, we decided that if you give a bear an apple you feed her for a day—or more accurately in a bear's case about five minutes—but if you plant a tree you feed her and her descendants for many generations, maybe even long enough for civilization to crash and for what little wild that remains to begin to recover.

So we planted apple trees. Spokane has hot, dry summers, and we knew the trees wouldn't survive their first few years unattended, so we planted them near water sources. We planted some near Hangman Creek, and some near its tributaries. We planted some in a beautiful little meadow on a tributary that begins near our home, then winds down to cross beneath the Pullman Highway and open into Hangman Creek.

We planted heirlooms. I'm not sure if bears find red delicious apples as bland as I do, but we wanted to give them and all the other critters a variety, and besides, the centralization and standardization of agriculture is destroying diversity of fruit and vegetable varieties just as it is destroying all other forms of diversity, so we bought bunches of different types of apple trees: Ashmead's Kernel, Belle de Boskoop, Black Oxford, Calville Blanc d'Hiver, Cox's Orange Pippin, Kandil Sinap, Pink Pearmain, Scarlet Crofton, and so on.

Someday those trees will hang heavy over the grass and over the water. Sometimes I picture people—including nonhuman people—reaching to pick the apples and wondering at the bouquets of tastes. I picture the apples being eaten by bears, foxes, raccoons, opossums, coyotes, robins, jays, wasps, hornets, ants, flies, worms. I picture some of the apples falling into the streams and flowing down until they're caught against branches, and then I picture those fruits being eaten by those who live in the water as well as those who live on the land or in the air. There is almost nothing that makes me happier than to give something back to the land where I live, something that the land can use for its own ends.

There were others in Paris who wanted to kill Hitler. These included the staff of Field Marshal von Witzleben. Frantic plotters in Berlin often visited Paris to beg the officers to act. The officers assured them that everything was in place. The moment Hitler entered Paris, he would be arrested or killed.

Their best opportunity came in May, 1941, during a planned parade of German divisions down the Champs-Elysées.

The troops were assembled, and a saluting base was set up near the Place de la Concorde. Two officers were ready to shoot Hitler at the saluting base, and a third stood by with a bomb should the other two fail in their suicide attacks.

Hitler never showed up.

I say, “I think the problem is God.”

Allison opens her eyes wide, says, “Not. . . .”

“No,” I say, smiling, “not seeing god, not with you. The problem is God with a capital G.”

Allison says, “Do you mean a belief in some distant sky God. . . .”

“No. . . .”

“. . . the belief that God isn't of the earth?”

“No.”

“That our bodies are shameful and that the earth isn't our real home?”

“No.”

“No?”

“Can I say something?”

“Yes.”

“I don't think the problem is a virus.”

“No?”

“I think viruses get a bad rap. Viruses are necessary, natural. Some are even beneficial to us as individuals: we couldn't survive without them. We've got long relationships with them. And I think we can say that almost all, if not all, of them are beneficial to their landbases. Even the most predatory of them provide necessary checks, just like any other predator, or for that matter, just like almost any animal. You get too much vegetation, well, some bunnies have to come eat it. Too many bunnies, some lynx have to come eat them. If lynxes aren't around, then maybe a virus will come along to keep the bunnies in check. And the vegetation says, ‘Thank you very much.' So do the bunnies. So does the landbase. In fact, the vegetation exists in part for the bunnies, who exist in part for the lynx, who exist in part for the viruses, who exist in part for the plants. We all exist for each other. The point is that viruses aren't malevolent. Whatever is killing the planet is.”

Allison nods.

“Which brings us,” I say, “to God. Let's pretend that God really exists, and He's just like the Judeo-Christians say. Well, what do we know about this God?”

“That He's one mean motherfucker?”

“He hates women,” I say. “He hates sex. He's a God of rape. He's a God of war. He's a God of conquest.”

“He's a projection of the patriarchal mindset,” she responds. “A bunch of abusers—male abusers—figured out that if they simply went around raping women and children, it wouldn't take long for them to get called out. And maybe some of these abusers even had consciences, and felt bad about what they did. So in order to shut up their consciences and in order to get their victims to stop fighting back, they created this elaborate story of a God who gives them the right to rape and conquer and do all sorts of nasty stuff, who not only gives them the right, but the mandate: who tells them to commit atrocities, who tells them that if they don't they're not good servants of this God, and who tells their victims that they better not fight back, that if they do they will incur the wrath of God and be sent to hell, and tells them that if they are good enough victims, well, the meek shall inherit what's left of the earth.”

“No,” I say.

“What do you mean, no?”

“No. It means no.”

Allison shoots me a look, then says, “This is all Post-Christian Feminism 101.”

“But what if God is real?”

“As in. . . .”

“Real.”

“I don't know what you mean.”

“What if the stories in the Bible are true? Oh, not all of them. God didn't
create
the world. He—and this is so typical of a patriarchal male—just took credit for it. But the smaller miracles, those are true. And the smiting. Lots of smiting.”

“So you're saying—”

“Your muse really exists. My muse really exists. So why should we get so skeptical when it comes to the capital G God? Why are the spirits we experience real and the Big Guy is just a projection, a mass hallucination on the part of hundreds of millions of Christians, nothing more than an excuse to commit atrocities on the part of the powerful and a solace for the victimized?”

“Because your muse is good. My muse is good. They haven't told anyone to go forth and conquer. They aren't responsible for the murder of hundreds of millions of human beings. They aren't responsible for the mindset that's killing the planet.”

“Why do all of these spirits have to be good? Why do they have to wish us well?”

Allison blinks hard, twice.

I say, “The central questions become: Why does He hate us so much? And, Why does He want to destroy the earth?”

eleven

who's in charge

I'm thinking about pinworms,
Enterobius vermicularis
. If you accidentally—or I suppose on purpose, although I don't know why you would—ingest pinworm eggs, the eggs pass down to the small intestine, where they hatch. The male and female worms then migrate to the large intestine, and live and breed near your rectum. Early in the mornings females crawl out of your anus and lay eggs, then crawl back into their nice warm home.