A Language older than Words Page 25

  I mentioned a fantasy before, of Jesus or someone like him not being crucified but accepted. I have another fantasy. I wish that those of us who feel anger—which is most of us—could learn to see our anger for what it is, and turn it toward appropriate sources. Instead of cursing a white guy for missing a layup I wish that the people in the gym would turn that anger toward bringing about change. Instead of complaining about racist basketball players I wish I would turn my own anger also toward change. I wrote this again to my friend. He wrote back, "If only it were that easy. It'd be great if we could simply pick out the real enemy instead of having the poor fight the poor. But our culture is designed for us not to see that. Instead we find some 'common enemy' to unite against. It's all sleight of hand. 'Look how the welfare bums ruin society.' Or blacks, Jews, the Ayatolla, Saddam, Mexicans, Cubans, commies, homosexuals, feminists, environmentalists, Indians, the white guy who just missed a layup. All of which takes our attention away from the mega-corporations that basically dictate, and destroy, life as we know it."

  He's right again, of course. But it's actually even worse than that. Who, exactly, are we supposed to get mad at? Picture this: you're driving down the interstate, and you get passed by a semi of logs going to a Weyerhaeuser mill. You know, from having read Weyerhaeuser's own documents, that the company has clearcut more than four million acres. You know that just in 1992, the company deforested forty-five square miles in Washington, twenty-five square miles in Oregon, and 152 square miles in the southern United States. You know that Weyerhaeuser is a major deforester of tropical rainforests. You know that the company has from the beginning been a strong supporter of the Indonesian military dictatorship that has murdered nearly a million of its own citizens. You've read vice-president Charles Bingham's response to criticism of the company's genocidal destruction of the land bases upon which indigenous peoples (and all of us, for that matter) depend: "I feel no apologies are necessary for offering the members of those ["primitive," his word from a previous sentence] societies a choice." You know that Weyerhaeuser offers similar choices to indigenous peoples across the globe, deforesting its way from continent to continent, consciences cleared all around the boardroom by the multiple claims to virtue of creating profits for shareholders and choices for the newly landless primitives. You know that the choices offered now to "primitive" peoples by transnational corporations differ little in tangible effect from those offered not-so-long-ago by Christian missionaries.

  What do you do? Do you follow the trucker to a rest stop, and slash his tires while he uses the toilet? After all, he is wittingly or unwittingly lending his talents and time to an ecocidal project, to an institution actively committing genocide. And slashing his tires will slow the destruction, even if only ever so slightly. Or do you drive on, and wave and smile as you pass him? After all, he is simply a working man trying to earn his living, and support his family. The chances are good in any case that he harbors a more righteous and understanding hatred of the company than you do: that has been the case for the independent loggers, drivers, and mill owners I've known who've been forced to contract out to timber transnational. And slashing his tires will probably not accomplish much more than ruin the day of a semi-random person. Does that help? How do you make sense of this contradiction: that you have nothing against the man personally, and may be able to understand the reasons for his actions, but once again the tangible effects of his actions are to contribute to ecocide—the destruction of one's house—and genocide.

  Is it a displacement of anger to act against this person?

  Or how about this: do you find Charles Bingham's home address, and do you go there, and do you destroy his home as his decisions similarly destroy the homes of humans and nonhumans across the globe? Now that he has no home, and he can move anywhere, do you say to him, perhaps as the police lead you away, "I feel no apologies are necessary for offering the members of this family a choice as to where they will next live"? If you do this, what have you gained, and what has the world gained? Even though the destruction of his home is less of a sin—though more of a crime—than the destruction he causes (for three primary reasons: he has the money to relocate; he does not feel the unity with his land that his victims feel, or he could not commit ecocide; he is not without blame), is it a displacement of anger to act against this person?

  Or how about this: do you systematically slash the tires—you and everyone you know—of every Weyerhaeuser vehicle you see? Do you do everything you can to drive Weyerhaeuser out of business? And when you're done with Weyerhaeuser, do you start over with Boise Cascade, then Potlatch, then Louisiana Pacific, then Georgia Pacific, then Daishowa, then Mitsubishi? Do you clearcut your way through timber transnationals with the same relentlessness with which they clearcut their way through living communities? And then do you choose another industry? Is this a displacement of anger?

  Or do you do nothing? Do you write respectful letters to Weyerhaeuser executives politely requesting they stop deforesting—as Gandhi wrote respectfully to Hitler—and do you request also that Weyerhaeuser's executives stop the genocide they will not, and cannot, even admit? Do you write your congresspeople? Do you contribute twenty-five dollars to the Sierra Club, and go about your day? Do you write articles and books articulating the problems as clearly as you can, and hope it will make some difference? Is all this a displacement of anger? Or is it a denial of anger and a displacement of responsibility? Is all this as much as you can do? If salmon, tuna, or wolverine could take on human manifestation, what would they do?

  I don't know where to place the anger. If Slade Gorton and Larry Craig, as I mentioned before, are tools for the enacting of atrocity, and if the same can be said, to greater or lesser degrees of culpability, for Charles Bingham, for George Weyerhaeuser, for those who lend their talents to Weyerhaeuser, for the institution of Weyerhaeuser itself, for all other transnational timber and other types of corporations, for all of us insofar as we participate in the economy of death that surrounds us, informs us, engulfs us, that determines for us how we will spend the majority of our waking hours, that determines for us what chemicals we unbeknownst to us ingest with every meal and inspire with every breath, that determines which creatures among us will live— for now—and which will die, then who is it, precisely, who is wielding these tools? Who, or what, is behind it all? Where do we look for ultimate responsibility, and where exactly do we strike out, either in righteous anger at the destruction of all life, or, coolly, calmly, like the Buddha, like the samurai who tracks down the murderer of his master, because it is the right thing to do?

  Coercion

  "I have never been able to conceive how any rational being could propose happiness to himself from the exercise of power over others." Thomas Jefferson, Owner of slaves

  I HAVE TO ADMIT I'm pretty fucked up. I keep telling myself I'm one of the lucky ones—the lucky one—and that's true. I told myself that as I sat on the couch and watched my brothers beaten and humiliated. It could have been me, but it wasn't. As I watched my sisters cringe in the middle of the room, expectant of the next blow, I told myself I was lucky to only be witness and not victim. I still tell myself I'm lucky. My brother's epilepsy, from blows to the head, is among the least of his problems. Having been struck so hard that your brain is damaged in that way, how can you ever create a life? Having been formed in a fire of hatred—or is it love, I never can be sure—and refined in a crucible of violence, how can you even think of carrying on? How can you even think, or more to the point, ever stop thinking? Yes, I was the lucky one.

  It's hard. Have you wondered that the great scenes of intimacy and ecstasy I've described in this book have had as their other the stars, a tree, high jumping? Have you wondered what high jumping taught me about love? And that the romantic partners I've described in this book have been peripheral to the discussion: I've spoken more of my conversations with coyotes than with lovers. What does that mean? What does it mean that on the night I confronted the politicians I returne
d to the arms of a tree, and not of a woman?

  I have no answers, and feel as though most of the time I don't even have questions. The questions I do have so often seem simple avoidances of what I feel, and of what I am afraid to feel, underneath.

  Until the end of my twenties I had nightmares almost every night. A vampire who slashed my face with a razor as I said to him, "You cannot hurt me." A doctor who strapped me seated to a wall, then pulled away the seat and spread my legs to rape me. Dream after dream where I escaped danger, only to find myself back where I began, or to find that those I trusted turned out, too, to be vampires. Or rapists. Or murderers. The nightmares have slowed, to perhaps two or three per week.

  I often feel as though I've forgotten how to fall asleep. I can lie there awake for hours. Not scared, always. Just awake. And when I do fall asleep I often reawaken, probably an average of fifteen to twenty times per night. I am likely as not frightened, yet I am able to fall back asleep. I am thankful for that, or I would not sleep at all.

  The first woman I ever dated snuck up behind me once to tickle me. Once. I whirled, fists raised, before I even thought, and my own look of horror that reflected back to me in her face has stayed with me ever since. Of course I did not hit her. I have never hit anyone. But no one sneaks up on me.

  I sometimes feel as though the tone of this book is not appropriate. I'm not certain the language is raw enough. My language is too fine, the sentences too lyrical, to describe things neither child nor adult should have to describe at all. As for the atrocities that are not mine but are experienced by others—just today I read a report from Algeria that police routinely pump salt water into political prisoners' stomachs until they burst, or have prisoners stand naked before a table, testicles on the flat surface, and.. . . they, too, should not have to be described. But I know also that if I pretend they do not happen by not writing about them, and you pretend they do not happen by not reading about them, the horrors themselves will not go away. Given the numbers, right now somewhere in a torture center in Algeria (or in many other countries) a woman is being gang-raped by guards, and a man is having a hole bored through his leg with an electric drill. Right now in factory farms. . . . It's not the writing that must change, but the reality.

  Writing this book is the hardest thing I have ever done, but so long as I allow myself to remain focused on choosing the words precisely, I can keep myself distracted not only from the difficulty but from the feelings. And keeping ourselves distracted from our feelings is the point of so much of what we do, is it not?

  This book is as artificial as any other, and is bound by the laws of cultural production. I allow you to know only what I want you to know of what I know. Even I am allowed to know only a small portion of what I know.

  I do not know who I am. When my father came into my room, and I went away—poof-—what happened to the part who remained behind? Who is he, and what does he feel? What did he feel? How can I ever make right to him what I put him through by leaving? I know I saved myself, and I do not precisely blame myself, but what of the me I left behind?

  I have been splintered into a thousand pieces, and I do not know if I shall ever be whole. I do not even know what wholeness means, and looking around it does not seem that many others do, either.

  It should be clear by now that a central belief of our culture—if not the central belief—is that it is not only acceptable but desirable and necessary to bend others to our own will. This belief in the rightness of coercion motivates us not only collectively but individually, not only consciously but subliminally.

  Coercion is central to our religion, whether we offer those different from us the immediate choice of Christianity or death, or the more eternal choice of Jesus or damnation.

  Coercion is central to our scientific philosophy, whether we speak of Descartes' dream of possessing nature, Bacon's storming of nature's strongholds to make her our slave, the suggestion in Demonic Males that a woman's safest future may be to bond with a violent man, or Dawkins' pathetic description of selfish genes coercing us to coerce others.

  Coercion is central to our applied sciences, whether we speak of dammed rivers, "scientific management" of forests, predator "control" projects, or the exploration of the human genome by self-styled "genetic prospectors" seeking to exploit the chromosomal makeup of often-unwilling peoples.

  Coercion is central to our economics, whether we speak of the Middle Passage, the modern-day enslavement of one hundred and fifty million children, the forcing of people to enter the wage economy through the removal of realistic options and more broadly the wage slavery that defines capitalism, or the routine use of police and the military to assist the men atop their boxes to accumulate ever-more wealth.

  Coercion is central to our legal system, which presents one face to those in power, and a different face to those who fight this power. In the case of the former, coercion is systematized through a body of lawmakers and interpreters which supports and rationalizes the use of force by those in power to gain material possessions or otherwise bend certain others—the powerless, the silenced, the not-fully-human—to the will of the already powerful. Just as my father never beat anyone without good reason, it is more pleasing to the now-silenced consciences of those doing the coercing to arm themselves not just with weapons and claims to virtue but also with a system of legalistic arguments that justify coercion.

  The legal system presents a different face to those who infringe upon the right of those in power to use coercion. Thus the crucifixion of Jesus, and of Spartacus. Thus the slaughter of the Anabaptists. Thus the murder of more than 100,000 in the Peasants' Revolt of 1524, and the torture and murder—purely legal, of course, and fully supported by such luminaries as Martin Luther—of their leader, Thomas Münzer. Thus the torture and murder of the mestizo chief Tupac Amaru, who in 1781 led an unsuccessful rebellion that, until it was crushed, abolished all forms of forced labor in liberated territories around Cuzco. Thus the murder of Crazy Horse. Thus the murder of half the Haymarket conspirators in Illinois. Thus the betrayal of Nestor Makhno and other anarchists after the Russian revolution. Thus in 1995, hot on the heels of the Nigerian military memo stating, "Shell [Oil Corporation] operations still impossible unless ruthless military operations are undertaken [against the Ogoni people] for smooth economic activities to commence," Nigeria executed writer and environmentalist Ken Saro-Wiwa.

  Coercion is central to our politics, whether we speak of James Madison insisting, during our country's constitutional convention, that the main goal of the political system must be "to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority," or whether we listen to the words of Adam Smith, godfather of modern economics: "Civil government ... is in reality instituted for the defense of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all," or whether we read the words of seminal political theorist John Locke, who observed, "Government has no other end but the preservation of property." Or we can listen to Richard Nixon: "The American national psychology has few doubts that reasonable men can settle all differences by honest compromise. But the reality is that force has always been the ultimate sanction at a conference table. Diplomacy by itself cannot be effective unless our opponents know what pressures we will be willing to bring to bear."

  Coercion is central to the raising of our children, whether we speak of grades, desks arranged in rows before a central authority, or the wearing out of the belt. Consider in contrast the Semay of Malaya who "emphatically deny" that they teach their children, but insist "our children just learn by themselves." If a parent tells a child to do something and the child responds, "I bood [a word meaning "to not feel like doing something]," the subject is closed. To put pressure on the child is strictly forbidden. Children learn most activities through imitative play that in time becomes adult behavior.

  Coercion is central to our relations with other species, whether we speak of vivisection, factory farming, industrial forestry, or commercial fish
ing. All grossly immoral and exploitative, all most often scrupulously legal.

  The rates for rape and other abuses of women make clear that coercion is central to our cross-gender relations.

  As water is to fish, as air is to birds, so coercion is to us. It is where we live. It is what we drink. It is what we breathe. It is transparent. So deeply inured are we that we no longer perceive when we are coercing or being coerced. Grades. Wages. Jobs. The sale of fingers one by one and the purchasing of sex in seemingly simple monetary transactions. On a more grand, though no more outrageous, scale, napalm, penitentiaries, deforestation: all these manifest this need to coerce others.

  I have been thinking once again about rape. Given the geography in which we find ourselves, this habitat in which we are reared, this landscape of coercion that surrounds us seemingly everywhere we look, everywhere our culture has been able to touch and transform, it is no wonder, it occurs to me at last, that the levels of adult rape, child abuse, and child rape are so high. But there is another, and much more powerful, point to be made here: given the degree to which coercion suffuses every person and every action born of this culture, and given coercion's so-often utter transparency, it is a testament to the resilient goodness inherent in each and every one of us that these acts of deeply intimate coercion do not occur even more frequently.

  But they do not. There still exist many of us who do not rape, who neither strike nor egregiously coerce others. For the time being, goodness and mutuality have not been exterminated. Like the species still surviving the onslaught of our economics, like the indigenous cultures still surviving our religion, our wars, our guns, our liquor, and our money, like the rivers still surviving our concrete, heavy metals, and pesticides, and like the stars that once again have begun to speak to me at night, or perhaps were speaking all along, I understand now that somewhere inside of each of us—some more than others—still survives that person who would not and will not rape, who would not and will not coerce, that person who understands what it means to be alive and to be a part of a relationship, a family, a community both human and nonhuman. Like the women and children lost after Sand Creek, these lost survivors—or those who at least recognize that they are lost, and who deeply do not wish to coerce—merely need someone—human, star, wolf, bee, or anyone else under the sun—to lead them home.