A Language older than Words Read online

  What is writ large in the destruction of the biosphere is writ small on the bodies of women, and inscribed on the psyches of these, our leaders, the men who will determine for us whether we as a species survive.

  In 1994, the Mayan Indians of Chiapas, Mexico, began a revolution, calling themselves Zapatistas. The revolution was their response to extreme poverty caused by control of their homeland by distant economic interests. ("Where I live, everyone dies of illness—they die without anyone having to kill them.") Soon after the beginning of the insurrection, an advisor to Chase Manhattan Bank wrote a memo advising, "While Chiapas, in our opinion, does not pose a fundamental threat to Mexican political stability, it is perceived to be so by many in the investment community. The government will need to eliminate the Zapatistas to demonstrate their effective control of the national territory and of security policy."

  What is writ small in the bedrooms of politicians is writ large across the south of Mexico, and anywhere else that anyone resists the control of their lives by those who would destroy.

  It is 5:30 in the morning. A few moments ago I awoke with a start. This time I am not confused. I have never been more clear. I know the nightmare can have only one conclusion, and 1 know also that the nightmare cannot be defeated on its own terms. It is not possible to fix this culture, to halt or even significantly slow its destructiveness. Nightmarish shape shifter, as I hope by now I've made clear, this cultures destructive urges can yoke all circumstances to its advantage. A parable of this adaptability begins with a single person. He or she wakes up from the nightmare to reject the behavior modifications of our culture. He or she becomes the catalyst of a popular movement advocating cooperation, sharing, and love. Call this person Jesus, or Spartacus, or Martin Luther King, or Gandhi, and this movement the Zapatistas, or the Anabaptists, or any number of names. The response by authorities, those atop the box and the soldiers who also dream the nightmare, is swift and certain. First, the authorities eliminate the offending person or group, "to demonstrate their effective control of the national territory and of security policy." This elimination has been the fate of all who effectively oppose the perceived divine right of the wealthy to control the lives of those they impoverish or enslave: Jesus, Martin Luther King Jr., the Anabaptists, the Arawaks, the Khoikhoi, the San, and tens of millions of other individuals and groups; if we go back far enough, it happened to the ancient indigenous Europeans and Middle Easterners.

  The next and most important step in the nightmare's process of adaptation must be to coopt and subvert the message, as Christians have done with the story of Jesus, as corporations and mainstream environmental groups do with peoples' desire to live on a healthy planet, as the New Age movement does with Indian symbology.

  Here is the real lesson of the story of Jesus, the main myth of our Christian culture: oppose us and we will kill you, speak to us of love and we will nail you to a cross. We will deify your image and ignore your words. Within the span of three generations, your precious people will be killing each other in your name.

  The real gods of our culture—those who are esteemed, granted great social power—are not those who try to implement egalitarianism, who try to put in place a "siphon system," who try to make ours into a "good" culture; the real gods are those who gain and wield control through the use of force. The real gods are the emperors, the kings, the presidents, the wealthy—the Roosevelts, Rockefellers, Bushes, Kennedys, Weycrhaeuscrs—those who enrich themselves by despoiling land, people, everything and everyone within their reach. The nightmare cannot be defeated on its own terms.

  This does not mean that Jesus, Spartacus, and the Arawaks lived and died in vain. They merely came too soon for their words and actions to alter the destructive course of this culture: they intersected this cannibal culture before it had sufficiently destroyed its ecosystemic base, and entered its endgame. Although I cannot predict the future, I do know that any culture that consumes its natural environment base will eventually collapse under the weight of its own strengths. Until then, what we each need to do is awaken to our own personal role in this nightmare, to loosen the delusion's hold. Once we have awakened, once we know that the man does not sit atop the box through divine right, once we recognize that cultural convention is merely cultural invention, once we know that it does not have to be this way, that not all cultures have as their trajectory centralized control and ultimate annihilation, it is time to start the real work, time to devote our lives to saving what few fish remain, time to make sure that no one ever again sits atop the box.

  Violence Revisited

  "What I fear is being in the presence of evil and doing nothing. I fear that more than death." Otilia deKoster

  I’M NOT SUGGESTING, by the way, that a few well-aimed assassinations would solve all of our problems. If it were that simple, I wouldn't be writing this book. But to assassinate Slade Gorton and Larry Craig, for example, two Senators from the Northwest whose work may be charitably described as unremittingly genocidal and ecocidal, would probably not slow the destruction much more than it would for me to write them each a letter. For that is where the analog between my family and the culture begins to fall apart, or at least lose simplicity. Although my father is not unique within the culture, he was alone within the family, in that he was a discrete package of violence, which means that his removal would have stopped the horrors. Once his violence had been eliminated, the rest of us could have attempted to pick up the pieces of our shattered lives and to heal, both physically and psychically. Although his removal would not have guaranteed our emotional survival, it would have helped promote it. But Slade Gorton and Larry Craig are not discrete packages of violence. They are neither unique nor alone within the culture, but are merely tools for enacting genocide, ecocide, and other atrocities, as surely as are dams, corporations, chainsaws, napalm, nuclear weapons, Colonel Chivington, the Malleus Maleficarum, and claims to virtue.

  If I were to kill Slade Gorton and Larry Craig—and remember as you read this the difficulty I have killing fish or birds, and the surge of emotion I feel at the killing of an aphid by a ladybug larva, and know that to kill a human being would be extremely difficult for me, if not impossible—they would simply be replaced by two more people with the same worldview. The geno-cidal and ecocidal programs originating specifically from the damaged psyches of Gorton and Craig would die with them, but the shared nature of the destructive impulse would continue, making their replacement as easy as buying a new hoe.

  I recently shared a heated argument on this subject with my Buddhist friend George. I suggested, sort of contradicting the previous paragraph, that there are some cases where assassination is appropriate. Hitler, for example. Had the German resistance succeeded in killing Hitler in their July 20, 1944 bomb plot, or better, long before, the lives of literally millions of Jews, Gypsies, Russians, Slavs, homosexuals, communists, intellectuals, and so forth would have been spared. The generals had planned to negotiate a peace with the Allies, which means that millions of soldiers would also not have lost their lives; the same would have been true for millions of civilians killed by United States and British terror bombings, and millions more killed by German and Soviet programs of systematic terror.

  George argued, rightly enough, that killing Hitler would have done nothing to eradicate the underlying anti-Semitism, as well as the culture's broader urge to destroy, and that Hitler merely manifested this urge brilliantly enough to capture the hearts of those who voted him into power and to hold the loyalty of the millions of soldiers and citizens who actively carried out his plans. In essence, George was merely pointing out, once again rightly enough, that Hitler didn't act alone.

  "But," I said, "What about Anne Frank? She would still be alive." I recalled a photograph I'd seen of an unknown member of the French Resistance murdered by the Gestapo in September 1944. The photograph showed only his back, and the razor marks of his torture. He would have lived. "It's fine," I continued, "to talk about historical forces, but what about
this person, or this person, or this person, each an individual, each dead because we hesitated to kill Hitler?"

  "What are you going to do?" George asked, "Kill everybody who helped him? And what about Suharto in Indonesia, Mobutu in Zaire, Hussein in Iraq, Schwarzkopf and Bush for that matter? What about Reagan? His policies were every bit as genocidal as Hitler's. Are you going to kill each of them? And if you do, what about you?"

  "If I would have killed Hitler, the Gestapo would have killed me. Not my first choice for how to die, but I would have needed to prepare for that possibility."

  "That's not what I mean," he said. "If you kill Hitler, or if you kill all of them, what does that make you?"

  Silence stretched between us. I thought of the story George told about the Buddha committing murder, but in this moment that didn't seem to help. Finally, I said, "A killer."

  I thought again of the immense gap that separates those who do not destroy from those who do. That gap is one of the reasons for the success and contagion of the cannibal sickness, because cannibals have fewer problems killing than noncannibals, and especially because the cannibals have trapped us in an alley with two dead ends. If we fail to fight them we die, and if we fight them we run the risk of becoming them.

  Another problem with violence is its finality.

  When I'm on the road, I always carry a baseball bat in the back of my truck to use each time I see a snake. If the snake is sunning herself, I stop the truck and use the bat to shoo her to safety. Sometimes, if the snake is especially sluggish, I loop her over the bat and carry her out of traffic. If she's already dead I don't use the bat at all, but carry her to my truck, then take her to some quiet spot where she can lie to decompose with dignity. But most often when I stop I have to use the bat not to save the snake but kill her. Too many times I've seen them live and writhing with broken backs, flattened vertebrae, even crushed heads.

  Early this spring I came across a garter snake sunning at the edge of a road. He didn't move as I approached. I nudged him with my toe and he still didn't move. Peering more closely, I saw that his head looked strange in a way I couldn't quite put my finger on. I prodded him again. Still nothing. The closer I looked the more I thought his back must be broken.

  I got the bat and struck him.

  But I was wrong. He wasn't injured. Only cold. When I smashed his head he writhed for all he was worth on the pavement. Of course now I had no choice but to finish killing him. I cannot now pass that spot without thinking of the mistake I made, and especially of the finality of that mistake. I can go on, and I can shoo snakes off the road in the future. But this one is dead. I do not like the fact that my wrong decision cost this snake his life.

  Recently I came across three quotes that reveal much about our culture. The first, from the October 26, 1939, issue of the newspaper Daily Sketch, describes our economics in a nutshell: "New York Stock Exchange had a boom yesterday following Von Ribbentrop's speech at Danzig. Wall Street interprets the speech as meaning a long war. Stocks rose almost to the highest levels of the year."

  The second, from Winston Churchill, describes in a nutshell our future: "It is probable—nay, certain that among the means which will next time be at their disposal will be agencies and processes of destruction wholesale, unlimited and perhaps, once launched, uncontrollable. . . . Death stands at attention, obedient, ready to shear away the peoples en masse; ready if called on to pulverize, without hope or repair, what is left of civilization. He awaits only the word of command."

  The third, from Albert Einstein, describes our capacity to destroy: "I know not with what weapons World War Three will be fought, but World War Four will be fought with sticks and stones."

  When as a teenager I first heard about Mutually Assured Destruction—the American and Soviet policies of building massive arsenals of nuclear weapons, guaranteeing that if either side struck all life on the planet would be destroyed—it became clear that something is fatally wrong with our culture. Even though at the time I considered myself conservative—as late as my freshman year in college I voted for Ronald Reagan—I understood that to build enough bombs to kill everyone on the planet hundreds of times over made no sense. Who gains from such an irresponsible and stupid undertaking? Even to construct enough bombs, nerve gas, containers of anthrax bacilli, or what have you, to kill everyone just once would be monstrously insane (to construct any weapons of mass destruction is monstrously insane). What seemed even more insane was that most people didn't seem to share this perception of runaway lunacy, but went about their business as though this capacity for destruction—we're talking about killing everybody on the planet, here—was nothing out of the ordinary. I couldn't wrap my mind around it. Because I wanted to believe what I had been told, that our country was doing the right thing, the best thing, the most civilized thing, the sane thing, I began to read history books, speeches, even policy documents. It still didn't make sense. I read the commentary of political columnists who stated they would rather see their daughters dead than married to communists, and I wondered why no one challenged this thinking. Even as a teen I wondered how these people maintained credibility after giving voice to sentiments so unthinkable, shameful, hateful, controlling, and just plain stupid. I heard policy makers refer blithely to the deaths of hundreds of millions of people as though they were speaking of wheat falling from an open hand. This made no sense to me. I read an article lamenting that unless we built more bombs—perhaps enough to kill everyone not hundreds but thousands of times over—the United States would soon be conquered by the Soviet Union, the conquest being "done in such a way that at no one point will we feel it sensible to resist at a cost of 100 million lives." One hundred million. My family. The families of my friends. Their friends. Everyone I had ever met. Everyone I had ever seen. All dead, with room for millions more. This made no sense to me.

  Don't get me wrong. I was opposed to communism, whatever that was, and believed that the Soviet Union was not only communist (which it was not) but was also, as Reagan put it, an "evil empire" (which it was, though certainly no more so than the United States). Asked to write an essay in praise of the United States for its bicentennial, I attacked the government for failing to "protect our brave allies" in South Vietnam.

  But even though I thought "defending" South Vietnam was a righteous undertaking, the way it was done made no sense to me. No, I was not one of those people calling for the defoliation of the entire countryside, believing that all would be fine if we could just nuke the commies out of existence. Instead, I remember reading that the cost to American taxpayers to prosecute the war was between $250 and $350 billion. This money was spent to kill between one and three million people, which means that during the war the government paid between $80,000 and $350,000 to kill a Vietnamese person. This in a country where the per capita income is well under $1000 per year. Not a whole lot of "bang for the buck," as military analysts are wont to say. A cheaper, more effective, and certainly more life-affirming anti-Soviet policy would have been to hand each of our supposed enemies $40,000, then tell them to go home and take care of their families. Forty to eighty years' worth of wages in one pop would buy a hell of a lot of goodwill: had the Soviets offered me an equivalent amount of money to vote for Gus Hall, perennial Communist party presidential candidate in the United States, I would have voted, signed petitions, carried placards, and written letters to the editor. Anything to allow me to permanently stay on the gravy train.

  So the goal was never to stop the Soviets. That's what we said, but our actions and inventions pointed to the real goal of our culture.

  Incendiary devices causing firestorms that burn to death hundreds of thousands of people in a single night. Bouncing Bettys. Land mines. Atomic bombs. Hydrogen bombs. Neutron bombs. How do we make sense of these?

  The military and CIA experts James A. Dunnigan and Albert A. Nofi analyzed military spending, and made comparisons that reveal much about the real intent of our culture: "For what the world spends on defense every 2.
5 hours, about $300 million, smallpox was eliminated back in the late seventies. For the price of a single new nuclear-attack submarine, $726 million to $ 1 billion, we could send 5 to 7.5 million Third World children to school for a year. For the price of a single B-1 bomber, about $285 million, we could provide basic immunization treatments, such as shots for chicken pox, diphtheria, and measles, to the roughly 575 million children in the world who lack them, thus saving 2.5 million lives annually. For what the world spends on defense every forty hours, about $4.6 billion, we could provide sanitary water for every human being who currently lacks it. Looking at it another way, the roughly $290-$300 billion that the United States [spent] on defense in 1990 is greater than the total amount that Americans contribute to charity each year, about $100 billion, plus total federal, state, local, public, and private expenditures for education, roughly $150 billion, plus NASA's entire budget of $7.6 billion, plus federal and state aid to families with dependent children, $16.3 billion, plus the cost of the entire federal judiciary and the Justice Department combined, $5.5 billion, plus federal transportation aid to state and local governments, $17.5 billion. ... A single Stinger missile costs $40,000, or roughly 30 percent more than the income of the average American family, nearly twice more than the income of the average black American family, and about 400 percent more than the so-called poverty line. .. [and] the price of 2,000 rounds of 7.62-mm rifle or machine-gun ammunition, about $480.00, is slightly more than what the average Social Security beneficiary receives every month." How do we wrap our minds around these priorities?