Mud-Slide

At some time in the 1970’s, it became obvious that homo politicus, the propertied white male that our dearly beloved Founding Fathers had originally entrusted with the vote, and others over the centuries that were begrudgingly allowed to join them in the privilege, had been transmuted into homo economicus. Now treated as human capital, we are but factors in GDP enhancement, our political lives curtailed by the rise of neoliberalism.

When I turned the key in my car’s ignition recently to flee the Thomas Fire, California’s largest and almost certainly exacerbated by global warming, I was both victim and perpetrator, caught in the ouroboric moment of the snake eating its own tail. When, in October 2016, I cast my postal vote for Jill Stein, I was supporting the sham of American democracy in full knowledge that the institutions supported by this byzantine mechanism regularly victimize my economic, social and recreational opportunities while at every moment endangering life on the planet.

How can I show solidarity with others in our shared and authentic political interest? What level of energy sacrifice is necessary to escape the pay-back of geo-historical forces? What level of anarchic action is required to amend our democracy’s dysfunction without disastrous personal reprisals imposed by the state? Can we do good within a corrupt system with which we are complicit? Or, as Adrian Parr notes, in her startling new book, Birth of a New Earth – The Radical Politics of Environmentalism, 2017, “political awareness arises from the realization that” (quoting Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari) “the reality I see is never ‘whole’ – not because a large part of it eludes me, but because it contains a stain, a blind spot which indicates my inclusion in it.” That stain, that blind spot includes each of us and our profound enmeshment within the global entanglements of neo-liberalism. Remarkably, she sees emancipatory and egalitarian promise within a movement of radical environmentalism that traverses “the identity barriers of race, class, gender, sexuality, geography, age, physical ability and speciesism”.

When a friend suggested to me that the New Year was just a continuation of the annus horribilis of 2017, and all hope for any sort of new beginning must be deferred until the mid-term elections this coming November, I felt very alone. Had he learnt nothing from the remarkably clarifying revelations of the last twelve months? Was he still looking for solutions from within a system that promises freedom, choice and individualism but delivers militarism, exploitation, suffering and oppression along with epochal planetary degradation? Had he not, in 2017, recognized the stain that was his culpability in the horror show of neoliberalism?

Was he, for instance, momentarily buoyed by the victory of Doug Jones over Roy Moore in the recent Alabama senate race? Should we even care to follow the news of such contrived events knowing full well that they are a part of the theater of the surreal whose reality is imposed upon us by our consumption of its tawdry performances? How significant is it that a decent human being fielded by the Democratic Party was able to defeat, by less than two percentage points, a Republican candidate whose reputation places him, on the historical spectrum of evil, somewhere between Rasputin and Adolf Hitler?

Why have any faith in an electoral process that is itself intensely ouroboric in its selection of congress people and senators who, whatever their altruistic ambitions, secure victories ensured by the contributions of the very wealthy and whose interests they then serve legislatively, to ensure their future electability? What solace can possibly be found in the coliseum of our politics? Better, of course, that Jones won, but he too will sink into the quagmire of corruption that is the U.S. senate - an institution that passed a tax bill, at the end of 2017, that will be deeply injurious to the economic and physiological health of the vast majority of the country’s population; ironically the Golden Goose’s base fully expects its reward when they ascend to the ranks of the uber wealthy, eagerly anticipated with every purchase of a lottery ticket. More disturbingly, Adrian Parr raises the following specter: what, she asks, “if the masses desire their own oppression?”

On the night of November 8, 2016, I was genuinely thrilled that Hillary had failed in her entitled bid for the U.S. presidency. There was nothing I feared more than another eight years of my life in America overseen by an administration that wrapped itself in hypocrisy while pursuing the most pernicious principles of neoliberalism - having already suffered through sixteen years of Democratic National Committee rule, headed by Presidents Clinton and Obama, in which I saw the country pushed ruthlessly to the right; towards the neo-liberal ideals of globalism, competition, militarism and the commodification of everything.

We are done with the elegant and smooth-talking Obama (and long done with Clinton) and are now exposed to the crude, but refreshingly un-hypocritical brutalities of Trump. How could this not be an improvement within the polity? How could this not be an opportunity to understand the true nature of our predicament? How could this not be a much-sought-after revelation?

2017 was also the year that Americans were fulsomely reminded of the power of weather terrorism - that frightening derangement of the climate that Bruno Latour calls “a profound mutation in our relation to the world”. As Hurricane Maria raped the Island of Borikén (or colonially, Puerto Rico); as Harvey exposed the petro-chemical sink-hole that is the low-lying prairie surrounding Houston, cutting a swathe through suburbs already condemned by environmental racism; as Florida’s doomed Atlantic coast-line was roiled, and Tampa was ravaged by Irma; as brush-fires destroyed over half a million acres of California wildlands, adjacent suburbs, mountain houses, beach houses, and commercial and industrial infrastructure, the connections between these revelations and the disequilibrium in our environment spawned by the systems of global capitalism may have finally dawned on a few. Certainly, many survivors established meaningful solidarity with each other in ways that transcend difference. But it was the spectacle of these events, framed by the media, that absorbed most of us and vitiated, as Parr writes, “our social energies and forces in the simplified representation of history”.

Amidst police brutality, the relentless incarceration of minorities, the poor and the mentally ill, and alongside the other social and economic savageries of neoliberalism, environmental emergencies exacerbate social fault lines, the crisis of health care and endanger the material and the psychological well-being of increasing numbers of American residents; such oppressive social and environmental disasters are often rendered as apocalyptical entertainment. Parr writes, “A diabolical faith in individualism has fractured us as a society. The sensuality of human beings has been reduced to the narcissistic pleasures of a spectacle culture”. Yet it is within the revelatory truth of such events, as Parr suggests, that we may also move towards solidarity with future generations, other species, and most immediately, with our fellow humans.

2017 provided many such potentially emancipatory revelations in politics, climate and beyond for my friend, and for each one of us. 2018 will doubtless be replete with further expository pantomime from Trump and many moments in other realms that are pregnant with elucidation. As I write, fifteen deaths have been confirmed in the tragic mud-slides of Montecito, a consequence of the recent Thomas Fire which burnt the mountains above this wealthy enclave and made the soils vulnerable to the extraordinary rain-fall of the last two days. Twenty-four people remain missing.

These are deaths, like most incurred in globally-warmed weather events, of extreme terror. As we continue our modern lives, stained by our complicity in an economic and political system which is nourished by the degradation of our terrestrial and atmospheric environment, we might bear witness to their short-lived screams as they were enfolded within the airless horror of mud which bore them towards the ocean at speeds of up to 50 m.p.h. The fact of their deaths, promulgated in the media as a frisson of spectacle and disaster, might be dedicated instead, to emancipatory and egalitarian purpose.

Afterburn

On December 22nd. the skies over Southern California lit up with the afterburn of a Space-X rocket, launched from Vandenberg Air Force base, a few miles north of Point Conception - its spent hydrocarbons leaving an ethereal plume that flared across the western sky. The event was reflexively echoed, in real time, by social media. Below, deep in the Sespe Wilderness, the Thomas fire still raged.

The Falcon 9 rocket was sent on its way (across a lonely headland that once served the local Purisimeño Chumash Indians as the threshold of the Western Land of the Dead, from which they projected the souls of their departed) to launch ten Iridium ‘Next’ communications satellites. They are part of a second-generation constellation of sixty-six telecommunications satellites planned to be fully operational by the end of next year.

Somewhere, in this confluence of signs lay indications of the Anthropocene. The enigma of the epoch was made explicit both in this kerosene fueled apparition in the late evening sky and in the burning of over 275,000 acres of Southern California landscape in the month of December.

While many of the leaders of our federal government continue to deny climate reality, the American military machine, sheltered behind this opera bouffe façade, is fully cognizant that global warming de-stabilizes vulnerable populations, political regimes and drives the refugee crisis. The Washington think-tank CNA (Center for Naval Analysis) in a recent report, succinctly states that “climate change can act as a threat multiplier for instability in some of the most volatile regions of the world, and it presents significant national security challenges for the United States”. Left unsaid is that the rolling acts of weather terrorism across the United States in 2017, which included Hurricanes Harvey, Irma and Maria as well as the massive forest fires in Northern and Southern California indicate the vulnerabilities of this country to internal instability: the climate-driven economic, social, and existential anxieties which, magnified in the crucible of social media, may lead towards imminent political fracture. The real threat to our polity is from within.

Trumpist notions of maintaining internal security by pursuing border walls, anti-immigrant policing and aggressive anti-terrorist militarism are powerless against the threats imposed by climate change. California’s megafires occurred in lands long accustomed to seasonal wildfires, but global warming, manifested in marginal increases in average temperatures, an extension of the summer fuel dehydration season, the increased occurrence of winter drought conditions and the extraordinary prolongation of fall’s off-shore winds, supercharges these events into acts of extreme, highly prejudicial terror.

As a survivor of the Upper Ojai firestorm, one of the two generative events that sparked the largest wildfire in California’s history, I have experienced firsthand the kind of weather terrorism that now threatens the credibility of national, provincial and local governments to protect their citizens.

The small country town of Ojai, at the green unburned center of California’s Thomas Fire, is festooned with signs in the windows of businesses and residences thanking Firefighters and First Responders for saving their community, suggesting great faith in the power of municipal, state and national authorities to protect them. Agencies from all levels of government were indeed arrayed against the fire on their behalf.

However, the feel-good narrative of the lower valley, Ojai’s commercial and tourist heart, which was saved by strategic back-burning and fuel reduction on its perimeter combined with favorable winds, the flanking of comparatively fire-resistant irrigated citrus and avocado fields  and topographical serendipity, contrasts with the grim realities of Upper Ojai’s firestorm where twenty percent of the residences were destroyed, and which went largely unchallenged on Monday night, December 4th, and into Tuesday morning. 

At the heart of the fire initiated by an exploding pole-top transformer in the upper valley, four local Ventura County Fire crews and a fifth volunteer brigade from the nearby city of Fillmore, sheltered in place at the top of our road trapped by the great dragon’s breath of fire that raced down the fuel rich drainages on their way to Sisar Creek which runs along State Route 150. After this first wave of the firestorm moved on to the northern flank of Sulphur Mountain ridge to meet up with the other leg of the fire that had started further east and an hour before, the crews retreated to the lower valley choosing not to defend the residential streets running off SR 150 where most of the upper valley’s dwellings are situated. Lack of specific wildland fire training (ensure your line of retreat!) together with a conservative command structure may have contributed to the impotence of their response.

Once the command structure was able to regroup and call in resources from all over the Western States there was a massive response beyond the Ojai Valley where Santa Paula, Ventura, Montecito and Santa Barbara were all saved from overwhelming residential losses. Miraculously, there was no loss of civilian life; sadly, one professional fire technician died in fighting the flames that consumed the Condor Sanctuary, deep in the Los Padres National Forest.

In the eulogizing of our public safety personnel, it is little understood that they are abetted by huge influxes of inmate-labor on the fire-line – where the latter are involved in the most hazardous, health and life-threatening roles in wild-fire suppression, while the better equipped, better trained and infinitely better paid professionals provide command, back-up and communications well behind the front lines. A highly-placed source in the fire-fighting community estimates the involvement of prisoner firefighters at 80% of the boots on the ground in fighting the Thomas Fire.

Ironically, the prison-industrial complex absorbs vast gobs of state resources while other local agencies are starved of funds resulting in this strange hybridization of public services - where prison-labor eliminates paid-work (exacerbating the very social conditions that swell the prison population) and reduces both the professionalism and the morale of the fire-fighting force.

Media reflexivity, political instability driven by wealth disparity, weather terrorism and the expansion of public service (and corporate) utilization of inmate-labor represent an incendiary stew of contemporary derangements - home-grown ingredients that may eventually explode, like an improvised fertilizer bomb, into the heart of this country’s social order.

The fuse for such a device could likely be ignited by a massive loss of life in a weather terrorism event. By coincidence, on Christmas day, we four fire survivors (my wife, our younger son Griffin and neighbor Betty) on day twenty-one of our hegira, found ourselves in a likely location for just such a scenario. We had been invited to a dinner in Topanga, a bohemian suburb north of Los Angeles, deep in the Wildland-Urban-Interface.

When I turned the corner of our house at 7:15 pm, on that first night of the Thomas fire, to close the north facing fire doors, I saw a wall of flame engulfing the back of our property – the dark and customarily brooding landforms had become vividly alive in a moment of supreme, non-human animation. Those moments stay in one’s thoughts: ever after, the lizard brain is stamped with an immanent existentialism.

Driving in Topanga, from one canyon side to the other, from one set of friends to the other, we were all hyper-aware of the extreme perilousness of the exit routes, the ad hoc, highly flammable building styles in evidence, and the total lack of defensible space amidst the chaos of antic residential development. The community exists for now, harboring a very heterogeneous population, but it is heavily mortgaged to the next act of weather terrorism perpetrated by the non-human actors that have once more arisen amongst us, after the brief interregnum of modernity, when we foolishly thought them tamed.

FEMA may be irretrievably dysfunctional, insurance companies may go broke, fire departments are demoralized and their personnel under-trained, and the Golden State may largely rely for control of these pyromaniacal step-children of global warming – for the fire next time – on their vast prison population of over 100,000 inmates. It is the extreme contingency of such preparedness, or the lack thereof, that speaks to the fragile nature of our social compact.

We had believed that our taxes ensured some level of personal safety – some, like the lucky residents of the Ojai Valley, still believe it.

Ring of Fire

Southern California’s Thomas Fire, the state’s fourth largest, continues to grow. To date, it has consumed over 250,000 acres but in the middle of its burn area, which stretches from Santa Paula in the south east to Santa Barbara in the north west, the Ojai Valley (barring an extraordinary turn-of events), has survived. A week ago, the local weekly, The Ojai Valley News, emblazoned its front page with the banner headline, “Ring of Fire”, a phrase that had been in local circulation for several days previously as residents watched the flames encircle their communities on their seemingly inevitable way to the coast.

Many of us who have reached a certain age cannot hear that phrase without hearing, in our mind’s ear, the thudding voice of Johnny Cash running through his sister-in-law’s honky-tonk ditty of 1963. His earnest rendition has become a cultural touchstone: now, in central coast California and its inland valleys, it has become entwined with the epic events of December 2017 when much of the landscape that lies to the south of the Santa Ynez transverse mountain range was charred in the ring of fire that girdled the Ojai Valley; as it continues to burn to the north and west, it has already destroyed over a thousand structures - the surrounding chaparral blackened, somber, and pungent with congealed super-heated resins.

Cash had a great deal of history in the area. He recorded the song Ring of Fire in a small Ojai recording studio while living in Casitas Springs, the western-most community in the Valley. The town now proclaims itself as “The Home of Johnny Cash” and the trailer park he purchased for relatives to manage still stands forlorn in an area whose center is anchored by a convenience store, nameless but for the red neon sign over its door that reads ‘Bait and Liquor’.

Casitas Springs was founded in 1834 when local Chumash Indians, formerly wards of the Mission San Buenaventura were relocated to pastures along the Ventura River flood plain half a dozen miles inland from the coast. There they settled, built rough shelters (euphemistically called casitas and memorialized in the town’s name) and led lives tragically foreclosed by both the loss of their connection to a tribal life and the enforced institutionalization to which they had succumbed during the Mission era. Their sad histories were washed away in the frequent floods that plague these rank bottom-lands; their archeological footprint, primarily evidenced by their basketry, destroyed by the brush fires that periodically sweep along the escarpment to the south. The fire this time skirted Casitas Springs and the three other towns that run east between the Santa Ynez mountains to the north and Sulphur Mountain to the south - the Valley saved by its topographical character, its heavily irrigated buffers of citrus and avocado groves, accommodating winds and the battalions of fire fighters who worked at its margins.

For all its local resonance, this literal ring of fire also reflects the wild fires that customarily girdle the planet and are shown in a stunning animation on NASA’s Eco Earth website generated from information transmitted by its Terra satellite. Perhaps most of these fires represent versions of slash and burn agriculture, but whatever their origin they are now all non-human creatures of the Anthropocene, their fiery conflagrations, exacerbated by global warming to some unknown degree, reflections of the burning of the planet’s stored solar energy scavenged from its crust.

The Thomas fire has now swept through territory once lightly populated with Chumash Indians who regularly burned their food-gathering lands. As Kat Anderson has shown in Tending the Wild, Native American Knowledge and the Management of California's Natural Resources, 2006, local Indians managed their wild food resources by burning the land to encourage their growth and to create clearings in which they could better hunt game. While the coastal Chumash relied heavily on sea food, inland groups harvested acorns as their staple supplemented with chia seeds, the fruits of the holly leafed cherry and small game. The untouched wilderness eulogized by John Muir was in fact a carefully managed environment, with swathes of chaparral charred in controlled burns where the plants had long co-evolved with regenerative lightning-sparked conflagrations.

Following the European invasion of California in 1769 and the subsequent sacking of the territory by Anglo Americans in the mid nineteenth century in pursuit of gold, rampant infrastructural development in these fire-lands has raised the stakes for the rapid containment of its cyclical irruptions. Californian and Federal agencies, as well as municipal fire-brigades from all over the western states and the National Guard have massed their land and air forces to battle the Thomas fire. They are backed-up by a large police presence and loosely aggregated community support groups. There is a sense that in controlling the flames, in taming their wildness, the chaparral is being returned to the asylum, its place of subjugation. As Thomas H. Birch notes in The Incarceration of Wildness: Wilderness areas as Prisons, “when this place is made, and wildness is incarcerated in it, the imperium is completed”.

If we accept fire as a natural event (although, in the case of the Thomas fire its two starting points were of an anthropogenic origin), then the determination to contain it is very much in the tradition of Mao's Great Leap Forward of the 1950’s which proposed conquering nature through human intervention. In an arguably more enlightened twenty-first century America might we begin to move towards policies of accommodation and of co-existence with non-human entities and their often cataclysmic manifestations? Reasonable containment strategies could then be incorporated into urban planning practices, or in the case of existing developments, accorded the same level of priority as other infrastructure upgrades in the areas of transportation, public health, communications and the supply of goods and services. 

To continue the manic patchwork of whack-a-mole fire suppression is a profoundly reactionary approach that both validates and preserves the existing incongruities of urban and suburban developments within areas whose ecologies requires them to burn.  In many respects, this reaction echoes the mindset that drives the U.S. military towards the lethal suppression of armed resistance in areas of conflict rather than pursuing soft strategies of social, political, and economic accommodation that might remove the underlying grievances of the putative enemy. In both cases, these aggressive policies are the testosterone fueled products of the Neolithic mind. 

In addition, the perception of the firefighter as Hero (who saved our town/house/life/pet) gets in the way of a sensible appraisal of the issues at stake. Firefighters do their job and for the most part are handsomely paid for their efforts (prisoners from state penitentiaries on the fire-line excepted) and while they often display extraordinary bravery in the protection of stranger's lives, their property and pets, our adulation likely confirms in them and their command structure a sense of the ineffable righteousness of their work. We, as a community, are thus locked into the whack-a-mole ethos, which stands in the way of a measured coexistence with forest fires. Co-existence and accommodation do not represent humanity's defeat in its battle with the elements but indicate a level of solidarity with the non-human and of an appropriate humility in acknowledgement of the other powers with whom we share the Earth. 

In the aftermath of the fire running through areas of Upper Ojai there were several instances of looting of evacuated and damaged houses. I witnessed the arrest of a suspected looter on my street. Three Ventura County Sheriff's black and white SUV's were pulled up behind a beige Chevy Suburban bulging with boxes of household goods and clothing. Two bicycles were thrown haphazardly on the roof rack. A deputy knelt at the curb carefully probing one box of civilizational detritus at a time. The cuffed suspect was standing by his vehicle, his female companion still in the front passenger seat. I pulled up and my enquiring gaze was met with an explanation from one of the sheriff’s deputies that they were patrolling the streets around the burn area apprehending looters and other ‘undesirables’. I drove off, that last word etched in my consciousness.

Some years after Cash recorded Ring of Fire he went to Folsom prison, actively consorted with the state's undesirables, then entertained and demonstrated solidarity with them. He revived his fading career by adopting an outlaw image as ‘The Man in Black’. He understood the plight of all those who refused to be totally coopted by the rules-making capitalist imperium. Perhaps, as a profoundly Christian man, he foresaw a day, in an epoch we now call the Anthropocene, when the 'undesirables' (in the neo-liberal lexicon, but one step away from the non-human), would inherit the Earth.

The Epic of our Awakening

The hubris of the Neolithic mind has been much in evidence recently; witness the sexual predation of the economically, culturally or politically powerful on the weak; the many refusals to acknowledge our complicity in global warming and the bone-headed military, economic and social aggressions of our statutory leaders (see also sexual predation, global warming, above).

The ability of humankind to control events has never been more tenuous. Like it or not, we have ceded much of that control to the realm of those non-human actors that we have long ignored or, more recently, actively aggravated: now, we are collectively suffering real-life home invasions by the dark powers that we had thought safely relegated to the past, buried deep in our subconscious, or rendered impotent by our technological prowess. Is it possible that the overt expression of our atavistic aggressions is stirred by new realizations of our impotence? 

Or, can we trace our bad behaviors to the first scratchings on rock of anthropomorphic gods - of the fetishization of the female form and the celebration of the virility of the bull? Have we distanced ourselves from each other and the environment and, in celebrating our otherness (our alienation) are licensed to predate with impunity, like the gods of old? 

As the kids say, karma is a bitch: but it is also, more simply, less sexistly, a mirror. I was caught up in some of its pay-back earlier in the week, my temerity (surely another name for hubris) at having built a home for myself and my family in the Wildland Urban Interface was cosmically answered by the ravages of Southern California's Thomas fire.

It is no longer necessary to hike in the moonlight to experience a monochrome world. Our house now lies dark amidst the ashes of the chaparral, wisps of grey smoke rising into a smoke-smudged sky.  But it looms intact, testament to the steel fire doors that protected its glazed openings, to the landscape management that eliminated much of the fuel within two hundred feet and to the gravel terrace and pool that shielded its northern, uphill flank. 

On Monday evening, December 4, having been alerted to the approaching Thomas fire by our son, who lives eight miles away to the west in the small country town of Ojai, I began locking the sliding doors in place then, on turning the corner of our building saw flames leaping over the back ridge. This precipitated an immediate evacuation with time only to grab passports, abandon the half-eaten evening meal on the table, jump in the car, pick up our neighbor and exit north on State Route 150 to the three storey, exterior corridored Motel 6 in Carpinteria, an appropriately carceral environment in which to spend our first night as ecological refugees.  

There followed a move north to Santa Barbara, the smoke following us. We filled our days scanning our devices for news of our home, of our neighbors, family and friends, and that palpable hyperobject, as Timothy Morton would have it, the fire. Up-to-date information, it turns out, was the first casualty of the event; maps generated by Ventura County and the state portal, CAL FIRE, consistently lagged well behind news channeled in the chaotic argot of social media - those fractal fictions sometimes gelling, amongst our three devices, sets of 'friends' and platforms, into real, current news. Out of it all we determined to conduct a reconnaissance run on Thursday, not altogether sure whether we would be able to get back into our neighborhood. 

We were stopped six miles short of our goal by a road closure, but parked the car planning to walk in - confident, once inside the perimeter, that we could cadge a lift. Barely a mile into the google-projected two-and-a-half-hour walk, a friend drove by and took us to our properties. 

Having confirmed the miracle of survival for both our house and newly completed guest-house, and mourned the loss of the house in which our neighbor had been staying (its owner in Los Angeles), we returned to the smoky, palm-etched Santa Barbara and next day we all three returned to Upper Ojai where standing and collapsed structures were set alike in an amazing chaparral landscape. Here stood skeletal trees, scorched rocks and ash in a grey scale that we realized reflected the intensity of the burn - the hottest areas beneath oaks bleached white while the bunch grasses' impoverished fire-offerings of cellulose smudged the land an inky black. That evening I wandered our twenty-some acres (the minimum lot area for a single-family house in this zone). Starkly illuminated by my flash-light, the land was grotesquely shadowed like some bleakly expressionist stage set for a post-atomic butoh performance. Sharp, chemical smells of burnt wood were carried in the breezes that stirred trails of white ash from the runnels threading the land towards the gaping gorge of Bear Creek which channeled the hottest fire, focusing the explosive Santa Ana wind like the rifled barrel of a gun and driving the flames before it. The creek-side location of my neighbor’s house was fatal that Monday night as flames shot from it (we surmise) hungry to consume the caloric content of the wood framed house.

 In the morning, I again tramped the land, less bewitched by the chiaroscuro of white ash and blackened branch and more enthralled by the opportunity to understand its revealed shape and behold this once in a generation burn cycle of the chaparral. The owner of the neighboring house, a landscape restoration ecologist, cherished her home but loves the land: indomitable, she will rebuild and is already counting the days to the explosion of wild flowers that will surely follow the winter rains. My survivor’s guilt is somewhat assuaged.

On the weekend before the fires, I had begun reading The Great Derangement, Climate Change and the Unthinkable, 2016, by Amitav Gosh. He writes that “the Anthropocene is precisely a world of insistent, inescapable continuities, animated by forces that are nothing if not inconceivably vast”.  Caught up in the fire-fueled Ojai diaspora, I was a tiny part of the global dislocations that are now, and will continue to be characteristic of our unfolding geohistory. In the immediacy of personal peril and threatened property loss, we may lose sight of our part in the great ideological, cultural and geographic shifts now upon us.  It may be of comfort to some that our domestic political arrangements are but awkward laggards in this epochal transformation.

That, indeed, is a part of Ghosh’s thesis: the domestic, human world of the novel (a primary source by which modern society has historically described itself) and where society has been situated within a “sense of place” – in Ghosh’s telling, one of the form’s “great conjurations”- is incapable of expressing the vast cataclysm of climate change, which can only be expressed in epics such as Gilgamesh, Ramayana or even the Odyssey which encompass multiple universes of the human and non-human. The “regularity of bourgeois life” supported by global networks of imperialism and now neo-liberalism threatens to be entirely displaced by the end of Modernity whose signature achievement, as Jacob Burkhardt has it, was in the “discovery of the world and man”. In the Anthropocene, we are discovering that we are not alone!

Upper Ojai is an area, like much of Ventura and Santa Barbara Counties, of intense oil production.  The oil seeps that still smolder at the bottom of our road were the source of tar to caulk Chumash tomols (reed canoes) and the first indication to Americans that there might be an exploitable resource beneath the chaparral. ‘Ojai 6’, just a mile away, was the first commercial well in California, drilled in 1865. Now, the air that we breathe here is laced with the toxins from burnt brush and from the burnt-over oil and gas production facilities in the area. The resource that generates great wealth in the counties and contributes, in its application as a fuel and industrial chemical, to the shift in planetary weather patterns, is thus doubly responsible for our present discomfiture.

 The novel, in its portrayal of the “regularity of bourgeois life” has been displaced by a vast and unfolding petrochemical epic as the appropriate form for the recordation of our puny lives. We are freshly conscious of how society describes itself. We are freshly conscious of the agency of non-human actors as they intrude into the settled (and unsettled) patterns of domesticity in which we have ensconced ourselves. As I write, huge thunderclouds of bruised smoke arise to the west as the fires run their inevitable course to the sea.

But after a week of Ojai fires, am I yet fully awakened from the long sleep of Modernity, ready to eschew the comfortably pernicious trappings of the Neolithic mind?

Photo Credit: Bruce Botnick

The Milky Way

At the recent twenty-third session of the Conference of the Parties (COP 23) in Bonn, Germany, presided over by the Government of Fiji - and featuring their national themes of Bula (friendly welcome) and Talanoa (listening to each other) - there was the usual byzantine wrangling by committee on the ways and means by which greenhouse gas emissions might be reduced globally, states might sustainably adapt to climate change and the global North might recompense the global South for causing the whole mess in the first place. (COP 23: Truth Without Consequences, Curtis F.J. Doebblen)

 At 400 p.p.m. and still rising, many of us have moved on to carbon catastrophism: the UN’s impotent policy palaver drowned out by the existential realities of climate change. Absent a global bureaucratic fix, and with the certainty that Geo-Engineering is a “what could go wrong?” false-hope, where do we go to find a way out of this geo-historical calamity?

Not so long ago, in 2011, there were those who believed that global consciousness was about to fundamentally change. Dr. Johan Carl Calleman, the millenarian new-age Mayanist, declared that September 5, 2011, marked our entering into the 6th Day of Flowering in the final 9th wave of Unity Consciousness as foretold by the Mayan Calendar - which purportedly begins 16.4 billion years ago in the time of the “Cellular Underworld” (which you are forgiven for mistaking as the dark-age before the i-phone, which stretches from 2008 back to the dawn of time). There may still be some who, in the face of all evidence to the contrary, believe that their consciousness is resonating with the Dance of Unity begun that very day – and if such souls exist, they are very likely to be found right here, in the thrall of the local spiritual vortex, in Ojai, California.

But despite the apparent failure of Mayan calendric prophecy, the idea that global consciousness can indeed change, and go on to have profound material consequences, has some academic credibility. In The Birth of the Gods and the Origins of Agriculture, 2000, the French archeologist Jacques Cauvin, makes the argument that it was not only climate change associated with the end of the last ice age – about 15,000 years ago -  that initiated agriculture and the Neolithic Revolution; indeed, he largely rejects ecology and the environment as causal agents in the exploration of new ways of organizing communities and the feeding of its members.  Instead, he suggests that a re-structuring of human consciousness coincided with a significantly altered world view in which humans could see themselves as separate from external reality. He argues that the emergence of personified divinities dominating humanity ‘from above’ and the emergence of the bull as symbolic of a masculine anthropomorphic god, led to an alienated sense of self and the will to transform wild landscapes into agricultural resources. Coincidentally, the imposition of a linear geometry on dwellings is similarly associated with the bull cult of masculine virility and a more conscious expression of self inscribed upon the landscape. Cauvin stresses that “the chronological sequence leading from cognitive transformations on the one hand, to socioeconomic changes on the other, forms part of a factual realm that the prehistorian may uncover at the end of a trowel – it is not a theory”.

The philosopher Timothy Morton, who practices post-Heideggerian object oriented ontology (OOO), suggests that culturally and psychologically we are still, effectively, Mesopotamian – heirs to the great civilization of farming, logistics, hydrology and accounting which began with the Neolithic Revolution. Yet he believes that this world is at an end. Following Heidegger, meaning, according to OOO, is exuded by objects – which themselves are overarched by hyperobjects.  He identifies Global Warming as one such hyperobject, (a geo-historical artifact that has created the existential reality of the sixth extinction) and from which we, our consciousness, and other planetary objects, are subtended. The human conceit of making worlds in which our individual consciousness is foregrounded, is no long tenable. In Hyperobjects, Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World, 2013, he writes,

“The end of the world has already occurred. We can be uncannily precise about the date on which the world ended…. It was April 1784, when James Watt patented the steam engine, an act that commenced the depositing of carbon in Earth’s crust – namely, the inception of humanity as a geophysical force on a planetary scale”.

He goes on to suggest that this ending was confirmed in 1945, in Trinity, New Mexico, with the first successful detonation of an atom bomb and reconfirmed by the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki later that year.

It is Morton’s limning of hyperobjects (one of which is the Earth itself) that begins to suggest a geophilosophy capable of transforming consciousness: where the primacy of human events and human significance (pre-figured by the Neolithic Revolution) is finally denied by overarching geo-historical realities. While this transformative psychic shift may be difficult to imagine, it is useful to remember that it was Neolithic imagery symbolizing personal divinities, that instigated new levels of human intervention in the environment – where mental development preceded the triggering of human agency.

Cauvin’s work has been validated by field work in the Near East in the sixteen years since his death.  Ludwig Morenz, the noted Egyptologist, suggests that Cauvin was visionary in his recognition that symbolic images allowed for new ways of world-defining, a process that reaches back into the cave paintings of the Paleolithic. Morenz writes, in his paper, Media-evolution and the Generation of New Ways of Thinking, 2014, that “new and fundamental impulses for the conquest of Denkraum (thought-space) through symbolic linkages emerged in the Near Eastern Early Neolithic and were developed further in subsequent decades, centuries and millennia”. Cauvin shows that these changes in thought resulted in material, civilizational transformations.

 Now Morton, in a series of recent books, is suggesting new philosophical approaches in response to what he calls a “horrifying coincidence of human history and terrestrial geology”, as a part of a broad movement known as Speculative Realism (with Graham Harmon and others) which is dedicated to breaking the spell known as correlationism which suggests that meaning is only possible between a human mind and what it thinks. The autonomous human mind, freed to act on its environment with impunity, was a creation of the Neolithic. To the extent that this psychology reached its apogee with Descartes, Morton is arguing for a post-modern psychology freed from the exclusivity of human consciousness, thus his call, in his most recent book, Humanity, 2107, for “solidarity with non-human people”.

It is in the recognition of realities that are not simply the products of a human gaze, of ecologies that transcend ‘Nature’ (a product of modernity fashioned as a neutral backdrop to human activity and cognition) that he sees possibilities: we have, he suggests, woken up in a hyperobject – the ecological emergency known as global warming. We are surrounded by yet more hyperobjects. Morton writes, “they have contacted us” ……now is the time that “Nonhuman beings are responsible for the next moment of human history and thinking”.

This evening, I walked in one of the canyons that riddle the flanks of the Santa Ynez Mountains. It is called Matilija from Mat’ilha, a place where the Chumash collected pinyon nuts. The Milky Way was known by the local people as “the way of the piñón gatherers”. There was a full moon, a super-moon, with no visible Milky Way, but I thought about its hidden presence, and I tried to be in solidarity with it - while walking in the footprints of the terrestrial piñón gatherers, in a spooky, monochrome landscape.  Me, punily subtended from one of the biggest hyperobjects of them all. Me, walking on a warming planet, connecting with a non-human consciousness, re-wiring my brain in ways that can quiet its Neolithic hubris.

Escape from Modernity

How do we escape Modernity? In Ecological Thought, 2014, Timothy Morton writes,

We simply can’t unthink modernity. If there is any enchantment, it lies in the future. The ecological “enchants the world,” if enchantment means exploring the profound and wonderful openness and intimacy of the mesh. What can we make of the new constellation? What art, literature, music, science, and philosophy are suitable to it? Art can contain utopian energy. As Percy Shelley put it, art is a kind of shadow from the future that looms into our present world.

In what kinds art do we find these foreshadowings? I can only speak from my own experience: earlier this month I underwent just such a foreshadowing at UCLA’s Royce Hall. Attractor, a dance performance by Australia’s Dancenorth and Lucy Guerin Inc. choreographed by Gideon Obarzanek and Lucy Guerin with music by the Indonesian duo, Senyawa, enchanted me. I was mesmerized by a vision that seemed to broach the sentience of the nonhuman – that, for the fleeting moments of the performance, seemed to animate the universe.

 I was primed for the experience, having just finished Morton’s book Humankind, Solidarity with Nonhuman People, 2017, in which he invites us to eschew the anthropocentric and embrace the “cold and dark and mysterious and spooky….spectrality” that lurks within the modern world of exclusively human animation - which we have fashioned so carefully over the last half millennium. The dance represented an invitation to establish a solidarity with nonhuman people (Morton’s phrase for all the species, land forms, geological formations, and  micro-organisms that subsist betwixt, between and within us all, in elaborate symbiosis). This, even though it was a dance of human people (their micro-organisms jiggling, giggling within) - but their movements and the music referred to the fully animate universe in which we all, human and nonhuman, dwell.

Susan Leigh Foster, who is Professor of Choreography, History and Theories of the Body, in the Department of Dance at U.C.L.A., and a friend, attended the same performance. She was at pains to enumerate the formal shortcomings and clichéd stylings of the performance. Such is the lot of an experienced eye and ear as opposed to my joyfully naïve viewpoint.

In UCLA’s Center for the Art of Performance program, under the heading, “A Note on this Unique Ritual” it claims that “Senyawa reinterprets the Javanese tradition of entering trance through dance and music as a powerful, secular, present day ritual”, and goes on to suggest that the music “builds to a euphoric pitch while the dancers are propelled into wild physical abandonment and ecstatic release, creating a visceral, empathic experience for the audience”. So yes, we are told what to feel; and yes, as Susan complained, there may be an element of cultural appropriation here – perhaps of ancient paleolithic cultural rites and yes, from this appropriation arises the stench of colonialism which hangs heavy over Australia, where Europeans have largely subsumed the aboriginal tribal culture within their conquering Western civilization.

 In Indonesia, under colonial rule for half a millennium, first by the Portuguese and then the Dutch, the Austronesian people (who had arrived in the archipelago some 1,500 years earlier) survived and now make up most of the population. Ironically, they usurped the original Island inhabitants who had populated both Indonesia and Australia some 45,000 years ago. These ancient migrants continued to live undisturbed in Australia until a few hundred years ago, when they suffered a genocide during the European invasion.

Cultural appropriation of primitive rites in this performance piece concerns Javanese rituals rather than aboriginal practices of corroboree. Ancient Australian aboriginal music was composed of clap sticks and voice chants, while their dance moves focused on the imitation of animals and birds (the didgeridoo is a very late addition to aboriginal musical culture). Javanese music is substantially richer to western ears but in any case, the stringed instruments, flutes and polyphonic percussion such as the gamelan are all comparatively recent, dating back, perhaps, to the twelfth century. Senyawa’s appropriation of these historic forms is influenced by Heavy Metal bands like Black Sabbath, Metallica and Iron Maiden where the noise and distortion usually transcend the melody line and demands screamed and frantic vocal performances.  In Attractor, faux primitive instruments are electrified and amplified to Heavy Metal pitch while the dancing echoes the ecstatic, frenzied and repetitive vocal parts. 

This brief overview of the elements of appropriation make it clear that the artists are not acting out of any obvious colonial privilege nor condescending to tribal primitivism. Instead, the artists have created a mash-up of historic musical forms (Heavy Metal and Javanese trance music) and applied choreographed movement that is a combination of traditional ecstatic dance forms and a kinetic shadowing of vigorous, headbanging Heavy Metal vocals. The two members of Seyawa, Rully Shabara and Wukir Suryadi are avant-garde artists toying with various Javanese and Western traditions – they are in no way traditional folk musicians but belong instead to a global tribe of musicians - comfortable collaborating with sound engineers in Denmark, Australia, or the U.S. to produce their combination of abstract (nonhuman?) vocalizations played against the sonic assault of Suryadi’s home made electric instruments. No patronizing of indigenous cultures here: full membership instead (for better or worse), in the global media village; their live performances in Java recorded, for instance, by the fashionable French filmmaker, Vincent Moon (Calling The New Gods - Senyawa Live in Java). The choreographers, Gideon Obarzanek and Lucy Guerin, are acting out of a similarly avant-garde, international practice.

So, their collaborative performance in Attractor injects contemporary essences of ecstatic faux-primitivism directly into the audience and establishes intimations of future regressions into a fully animate world. In their presence, we may glimpse a future no longer completely beholden to the modernist project and imagine a world of connections instead of ideological impositions. They generate a whiff of freedom: of a future where we are no longer indentured to neoliberalism, where we can escape the Western disease and can find new meaning in the nonhuman realm.

 Is this consciousness available outside the realm of art and performance? Can we carry it with us out into the world? David Orr writes in his new book, Dangerous Years, the Long Emergency and the Way Forward, 2016, that we cannot simply “will ourselves to that empathic new world”, but he notes that there exists “an inexplicable process of metanoia” which involves “liberation from bondage – physical, mental emotional – a total change of perspective”. Morton’s notion ‘of utopian energy’ generated by art can kick-start Orr’s ‘metanoia’ where we can establish, in this change of perspective, solidarity with the human and nonhuman.  

On a personal level, we must wish it: finding light in the darkness of a climate-changed world - where weather terrorism has become the critical limit on humankind’s social, economic and scientific endeavors – involves a religious conversion, not towards what Orr speaks of as a Christian renewal, but towards an eschewal of the monotheisms which originally depended on the elimination of animist gods, and a reversion to an animated universe - to a world overflowing with nonhuman gods. This is the world to which Attractor transports us.

It is a world where there is an elision of the divisions between the human and nonhuman, where we might loose the bonds of Modernity and attempt our escape from its tentacular grip.

Psych Ward

It started at the end of the fifteenth century. A cohort of brutal, sociopathic Europeans, fresh from the torture rooms of the Spanish Inquisition, and later from duty in the religious wars, arrived on American shores to kick butt. By 1610, they and their successors, by steel sword, axe, knife, and pike, biological pathogens and very occasionally by blunderbuss, had killed fifty million largely stone-age indigenous people.  In the northern temperate zone of this vast continent, some of those mass murderers became the founding patients of the Psych Ward; others followed, less blood thirsty perhaps, but they too quickly adopted the deadly imperial ethos established by those first conquerors. This is the institution in which we Americans now find ourselves immured.

Today, we continue to condone, as we whimper in our cells, condos or McMansions, institutional killing at an industrial scale. We continue to countenance the training of thousands of killers (otherwise known as 'our boys') in 'boot camps' where their sensitivities towards evisceration and ensanguining are blunted, and many thousands more men and women who directly support them logistically, nutritionally and medically. We continue to revere the executives who command them and who themselves train in elite colleges where they are taught the fine arts of chemical, ballistic, incendiary and steel-edged death. They are taught both the mastery of their death cadres and of elaborate technical methods for the destruction of transportation networks, food production, water supplies, shelter and culture; some may graduate with minors in wreaking political mayhem, plundering and the practice of torture and mind control.

From 1610, a year now marked in honor of the fact that native cultures had been destroyed to the point where vast acreages of temperate and tropical forests had replaced their seasonally burnt hunting and gathering fields and thus established the benchmark for the global encapsulation of CO2, behavior within the Psych Ward changed little. The patients' mission to destroy lives, settlements, agricultures, self-sufficient cultures and their ecosystems remained in place - rationalized by their desire for treasure and the satiation of their blood lust.

At the end of the century, as their psychoses began to metastasize, the patients turned in on themselves and murdered, by hanging, twenty women who spoke against the Ward's ethos and established themselves as people of peace, or who embraced their sexuality or who declared their independence from the domineering men who exemplified the prevailing, and much honored, sicknesses of the mind.

Although partly peopled by those in search of the freedom to worship their monotheistic deity, increasingly, the population of the Ward transferred their religious allegiance to the Market, where the bounties reaped from the spilling of blood were traded one against the other in a downwardly spiraling death frenzy of exploitation. Nothing remained sacred except the Market. Man and beast, ecosystems and mineral deposits were sacrificed to this deity's ceaseless demands for more, ever more, of everything.

In the eighteenth century, this ‘everything’ began to include the trafficking of Africans stolen from their homes, families and cultures and shipped to the burgeoning plantation economies of the Ward. In a vicious triangular trade between Britain, Africa and America - from whence flowed mostly the drug crops of sugar and tobacco - those that survived the Middle Passage slaved for their enslavers and bred new slaves for their master's sexual and economic gratification; from Europe came the fine goods that fell into the maw of the Ward's omnivorous Market. The by then ritualized killing of natives and the stealing of their lands continued through the years in desultory fashion.

Towards the end of the century there was occasion for more bloodletting as the Ward patients rose up against their imperial master, the dotty King of England, to demand full control in their worship of the Market and so gain revolutionary freedoms in the practice of new liturgies in service to their God. A further skirmish at the beginning of the nineteenth century confirmed in the patients the dark desire to press on in the annihilation of the indigenous people and to fully occupy what they had come to imagine as their God-given, rightful swathe of temperate North America. Cotton shortly became the economic driver of this blood-thirsty expansion.

Europe outlawed the slave trade in 1807, and the Ward was forced to rely on their own production of enslaved Africans. They bent to their task with a will, shipping coffles of shackled slaves south and west to tend the new fields of cotton - now the world's most valuable commodity. There they were forged by what Edward Baptiste calls the whipping machine, into an army of scourged bodies, a cotton-picking industrial machine of ferocious efficiency. For six or more decades, this machine produced the great wealth of the Ward that enabled it to create the world’s second industrial revolution; its sickest patients becoming some of the richest people in the world.

Even now, the red stripes of the Ward flag evoke the bloody striations of the whipped slave's back and the box of stars in its corner the miss-firing synapses of the black man's brain, beaten about the head by the overseer's cudgel for missing his ever-growing quota of picked cotton.

African Americans were finally emancipated in the first war in which automatic weapons played a significant part, and in which over 600,000 patients lost their lives.  In time, the freed slaves adopted the arts and culture of death and they too became patients of the Ward. Because of the color of their skin, many were at first hung by the neck from trees on the slightest pretext, but over time the many were more mercifully, but equally unjustly, quarantined in the vast infrastructures of incarceration that have since become a vital part of the Ward's culture.

Towards the end of the 1800’s, the generals mandated the destruction of the Buffalo because it served as life-support for those few remaining Native warriors and their families who stayed outside of the Ward - their extirpation promising in return, the rich breadbasket of the Prairies. The beasts were piled high on the plains, machine-gunned to death with only the tongues removed from the carcasses, as demanded of the fickle marketplace.

Meanwhile, civilian patients shot millions of passenger pigeons out of the sky and out of their roosts in a vast butchery that resulted in a tiny fraction of the birds reaching market and ending up on a patient's table, whilst ensuring the extinction of this once ubiquitous bird. This was a time, against a background of great technological progress, of the railroad and telegraph, of oil wells and mechanized mining, when the endemic psychosis of the Ward sunk deeper and deeper into the land and forever blighted its indigenous people, its flora, fauna, and earthen crust.

It is redundant to list the wars of empire in which, over the last century and a half, the Ward has participated. The dead are numberless. The technologies of death are ever more efficient and they are spread ever more carelessly beyond the Ward to release the toxic spores of its psychoses.

As unregulated patients, outside of the organized death squads, we are permitted to possess weapons which are, it seems, necessary implements for the expression of our primal, psychotic urges. Remarkably, for the most part, we don't just kill each other; but within the Ward, guns claim the lives of over 30,000 patients a year, many are children, most are suicides. Gun violence is the dark cloacal river that runs through the Ward and expels the waste of our deepest mental disturbances.

Last week a patient killed almost sixty people and injured five hundred more as he fired automatic weapons into a crowd of country music fans dancing in an arena below his hotel window. It was much remarked upon by the Ward media. We were instructed by our leaders to pray for the loved ones of the patients who had died.

I deeply regret their deaths: but it was just another night in the Psych Ward.

New Party Pledge

Well that didn’t take long - for two signature policies to emerge that can win the presidency in 2020. Never mind preserving DACA, we need a full amnesty program for all un-documented immigrants and not a path, but an open door to citizenship. Never mind preserving Obamacare, we need, as Bernie Sanders has proposed, a Medicare-for-all program that guarantees health care for all the people of this country.

These are simple, straight-forward programs that might even exist in a kind of synergy, whereby all those currently designated as ‘illegals’, a largely youthful demographic, emerge as healthy, full tax paying Americans. Two policies that cut across the nativist, née populist defeatism that identified not a plausible future but a return to an entirely mythical America, that won the election for Herr Trump.

Is it too early to celebrate? Is it too early to futurize? Can we dream?

Once installed on the back of their signature policies the new president can set about de-mythologizing our history. For it is only on a basis of profoundly truthful revelations about ourselves and then an arduous process of reconciliation, that we can confidently move forward as a nation. Tinkering with, or even revolutionizing social policy is all well and good but we are ultimately prisoners of our history: in 1965, James Baldwin wrote, speaking first of African Americans then of whites,

“Only a creature despised by history finds history a questionable matter. On the other hand, people who imagine that history flatters them (and it does, indeed, since they wrote it) are impaled on their history like a butterfly on a pin and become incapable of seeing or changing themselves or the world”.

We cannot continue in a world based on hypocrisy if we are to thrive. It’s time for a full accounting of our tragic, blood thirsty, genocidal past and an understanding of our predatory, incarceratory, oligarchic and imperialist present. It is time, as Baldwin recognized, that white Americans emerge from the “curtain of guilt and lies behind which (they) hide” and we collectively face our history and begin to change our lives: failure to do so threatens both this country and the entire planet. This is the truth and reconciliation agenda we need our next president to undertake.

How difficult will it be? And how will it begin? We could simply start with a new Pledge of Allegiance:

"I pledge allegiance to the United States of America, where we seek truth, liberty, economic justice and legal protection for all."

This is a humble offering, but it addresses key issues.  I’ve removed the ‘under god’ reference: that was about an Eisenhower imagined old-testament deity who was going to assure us of victory over the atheistic communists – and that already happened. Its elision also reinstates the religion and state separation so important to our constitution. The fifty states ‘indivisible’? As a Californian, I would counsel: let’s wait and see. And the nod to the flag must go: its glorious iconography is now thoroughly besmirched by too many reprehensible deeds conducted beneath its fluttering shade. Nations are mutable and date-stamped (Hitler understood that, he projected that his Third Reich would last as long as the Holy Roman Empire, or one thousand years - in the event it mercifully fell short by nine hundred and eighty-eight) so the word nation is excised. Preserved are the necessary parts of the pledge subtly augmented to address our contemporary condition. Most importantly, the sentence is activated by its reference to process: a continuing search for historical truth and present justice - rather than a recapitulation of an entirely fraudulent past and the economic and racial injustices that are exculpated under its false construction. It is this fraudulent past that we must now attempt to deconstruct.

In my thirty-seven years in California I have mostly avoided the pledge. When faced with the inevitably of its performance, I stand and mumble my Tibetan Buddhist mantra in its stead, both hands discreetly tracing the faux magical passes that I have fashioned for each of its seven words (there is one repetition) - ensuring that my right hand remains well clear of my heart.  It is a petty rebellion, but one deeply felt. Next time, perhaps, I will stand moist-eyed, hand to heart, and recite my alternative pledge. Meanwhile, I continue my odyssey to understand the truth about the country I love and seek out historians that help elucidate the last half millennium of our collective New World experience. But my personal journey is irrelevant unless it becomes a part of a larger movement towards truth and justice, towards a reconciliation with our past and those presently traumatized by it (which, I suspect, knowingly or not, includes most of us).

Others recognize the truth of this experience. The organization Standing Up for Racial Justice (SURJ), which, in its own words, “works to undermine white support for white supremacy as part of a multi-racial, cross-class movement for racial justice” may or may not being doing good work in this arena. DiDi Delgado offers a withering critique of the organization in her post, SURJ and the Caucasian Invasion of Racial Justice Spaces. White Americans have distressingly little credibility in addressing these issues precisely because, racially, they are members of the oppressor class. But because of their historical and present privilege, particularly in educational opportunity, they are also well situated to do the work of historical deconstruction.

Case in point: Cornell’s white historian Edward E. Baptist and his magisterial work, The Half Has Never Been Told, 2014. Baptist’s premise is that the economic rewards of owning slaves provided the financial boost that propelled the United States to the forefront of global capitalism by the end of the nineteenth century. As such, there may be credible claims made for recompense by the slaves’ descendants. This notion is in opposition to the narrative that the economic advantages of slavery were marginal - and that some of the meagre benefits accrued to the black families harbored within the system as well as to their owners. While we may be long past believing in happy slaves and paternalistic masters existing in a pre-modern backwater, Baptist newly emphasizes the embedment of the system, particularly in the growing of cotton, within the modern industrialized world that emerged in the first half of the nineteenth century.  

This world developed coincident with the establishment of the United States as an independent nation supposedly founded in freedom and liberty. It was in the first eight decades of the new Republic that, as Baptist writes, “the number of slaves in the United States increased five times over, and all this expansion made a powerful nation”. A corollary of the territorial expansion occasioned by slavery was the brutal extirpation of native populations who stood in the way of this vicious economic model.

The connection Baptist makes between the growth of industrial capitalism and slavery is vital to an understanding of the emergence of that financial system’s newest iteration in post 1970's entrepreneurial neoliberalism, which also functions as a fundamentally predatory system - victimizing vast swathes of the population, but none more so than non-white communities, for the benefit of the few.

The history of the United States does not make for a pretty picture. The Pledge of Allegiance, composed in 1887 and formally adopted by congress in 1942 - and reaching its current form with the addition of “under God” in 1954 – inculcates in its often young pledgers a propogandist vision of this country entirely disconnected to reality. At a time when critical thinking is supposedly valued, it is urgent that we all engage in exposing the fraud that is our commonly perceived history. Is it entirely too idealistic to imagine our next president taking the lead in this vital project?

So, whether it’s Jill, Cynthia, Elizabeth, Kamala, Bernie, or Transgender ‘X’ who leads the New Party, they are welcome to stickerize my alt. Pledge of Allegiance. Its adoption might signal the beginning of this country's emergence from its ugly, hubristic and self-aggrandizing adolescence.

Stormy Weather

In Capitalism: A Ghost Story, 2015, Arundhati Roy writes, "the middle class in India live side-by-side with spirits of the nether world, the poltergeist of dead rivers, dry wells, bald mountains and denuded forests; the ghosts of 250,000 debt ridden farmers who have killed themselves, and of the 800 million who have been impoverished and dispossessed to make way for them".

Is it any different in the good ol' U.S. of A? Other than clarifying class-calibration whereby India’s emergent middle class can be equated with America’s mostly white ten-percenters, or upper-class, I suspect not.

Indeed, as the precipitated waters of the gulf coast inundate the sunken oil and chemical lands of Texas and Louisiana, we are experiencing our own sub-continental, Bangladeshi nightmare. The spirits of dead dinosaurs have arisen to re-arrange geographies and elide the physical certainties that used to exist between solid and liquid, between water and land, between salt water and fresh, and between the potable and the poisoned. Nature and Society now share equal billing. The elephant of climate change trumpets, as it rampages through what we used to think of as our room.

Here and elsewhere, we are castaways amidst the hobgoblins of our own horror show. It is not only the demonic cries of over 100,000 suicides amongst Vietnam Vets and a further 25,000 ex-service men and women dead by their own hand since 2012 - from our more recent wars of empire - that we hear: the psychic airwaves tremor not only with their suffering, their sacrifices and their condemnations but also, as Roy writes of her country, are rent with screams from our own mountain-top lobotomies, sickened streams, clear-cut forests and our daily extinctions. That pounding rhythm you may hear is propelled by the sonorous bass notes of our deeply troubled history.

We too have a nether world populated with those trapped in the purgatory of three jobs, a superannuated car and sub-standard housing; or of those a step below them, who roam the black-top parking-lots and streets amidst shuttered malls and fast-food emporia, car-lots and other materially manifest survivors of our digital age; or lurk at night in the shadows between the mercury vapor security lights and surveillance cameras, thinking idle thoughts, perhaps, of what makes America great or, more pressingly, of where they might spend the night. This underbelly of the impoverished and the dispossessed forms a part of a greater whole: the vast middle class disenfranchised from its access to prosperity by successive waves of red-lining by which the institutions of hyper-capitalism define their prey. The armies of the white, now in solidarity with the black and brown by their comparative impoverishment desperately seek to differentiate themselves by their ethnic heritage – real or imagined – and by their common, sordid histories of predation, albeit practiced at a distinctly minor league, non-executive level.

This world remains hermetically sealed until some great meteorological event rips the plastic shrink-wrap skin away and we see, mostly second hand, via the voyeurism of the media, both social and mainstream, the festering wounds of fossil-fueled financial finagling that lie beneath the glossy surfaces of the upper-class world which, full disclosure, I uneasily inhabit. In this reveal, we may glimpse that underworld’s carnivalia, both arisen from the recent morbid history of this tragic country and more ancient, indigenous demons stirred from their sleeping places deep within the earth by extremes of weather, its winds and water; and perhaps glimpse too, the swirling, vaporous brimstone that arises out of the land, psychic testament to our half millennium of careless predations upon it, it's indigenous people and those brought here under force or through the artful dissemination of the duplicitous American Dream - where double dealing hides the reality that the many will forever be enslaved by the few. The extremes of our globally warmed weather stir these macabre specters of neo-liberalism that now arise from their sick-boxes to haunt our dreams.

Welcome to our Whitemare. As a character declares in Colson Whitehead 's The Underground Railroad, 2016, the writer's pro-forma, episodic novel that glosses the far greater Uncle Tom's Cabin, 1852, by Harriet Beecher Stowe, (which possessed real moral agency in the long struggle towards the abolition of slavery),

".... America too, is a delusion, the grandest one of all. The white race believes - believes with all its heart - that it is their right to take the land. To kill Indians. Make war. Enslave their brothers. This nation shouldn't exist, if there is any justice in the world, for its foundations are murder, theft, cruelty."

Now the nation is a little less disingenuous in its understanding of its foundations, thanks to the installation of a depraved hyper-capitalist in the aptly named White House, the traditional seat of male, almost exclusively white hegemony over the colored races. From this great white throne, judgements are cast upon the land that torture the souls of the indigenes - that encourage the rape of the earth's crust, pollute their sources of water and deny them sovereignty over their lands. And from this great white throne judgements are cast that seek to expel so many of our Latino neighbors from the country and stifle their free movement across borders imposed by a war constructed of a depraved imperialism, incarnated by one James Polk. And from this great white throne and its web of plenipotentiaries ensconced in State houses across America are administered those houses of the mostly black and brown arrayed across an evil empire of incarceration. That empire too, is for a moment exposed as its sub-tropical edges are under threat of a vengeful hurricane and its mournful legions are relocated under armed guard to safer ground.

In North America we are no longer, (as aftershocks rumble through Chiapas and elsewhere in earthquake stricken southern Mexico) either literally nor metaphorically on solid ground. As Bruno Latour has it, "the decor has gotten up on stage to share the drama with the actors". The separation between Nature and Society has been rent, in this latest iteration of a dissolving modernist epistemology, by hurricane force winds: winds - in an old locution - that are truly the winds of change blowing us towards a re-integration, whether we wish it or not, of natural context and social content. It is this radical re-structuring of our understanding of the world that is letting loose the psychic content of our histories with one another and with our natural environment.

Current literary work, set against the churning news cycle, is the bellwether of our predicament. George Saunders' Lincoln in the Bardo, 2017; The Underground Railroad, and the partially grave-yard set, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, 2017, Roy's novelistic setting of her social and political concerns and so, so much other cultural production, all toll for our futures. As Rosalind Crisp, the Australian dancer and choreographer writes, "The borders between sensation, imagination and fiction are now very slippery". She goes on, in describing her dance cycle, The Boom Project, 2015, inspired by the environmental ravishment of her home country,

“….I breathe and at almost the almost-same instant I am filled with horror at the clear felling of the last old growth forest in my region and from the crack in my elbow sawdust pours out.  This news from my body as it happens is a capturing of each miniscule, local detail of change in my body (even breathing makes us move!), and a welcoming into the body of sensation-images from my lived experiences in this terrible time of extinctions".

Storm battered Texans, wind-swept Floridians and shaken Chiapans can relate: epistemological change is now a kinetic experience. We are being tossed, willy-nilly into a new (and the Universe knows, I hate to use this word) paradigm.

Our sensibilities and our flesh are under assault from both the real and the spectral, from the mundane and the magical, as the weather stirs our land and our imaginations. Wakened from the slumber of a post-racial age that falsely dawned under a bi-racial president, whose proclivities and will-to-power proved to arise more from his whiteness than his blackness, we are reminded that black, brown and indigenous lives matter, not only for their lives lived - our lives lived - but for their reification of our shared history that is mostly built on backs broken by white privilege realized in a great and on-going American imperial project. But it is a project that is now storm battered: its obfuscations ironically clarified in the meteorological and spectral clouds that gather above us.

Coup de Planète

There has been a military coup in the United States and nobody noticed, least of all our president. Just when we were following the MSM down the Russian rabbit hole convinced that the deep state would eventually pull us out of this nose dive and perhaps even collude in the impeachment of the apricot-hued one, along come the Generals - Kelly, Mattis and McMaster - to join the other adult in the room, Rexxon Tillerson, to right the ship of state and navigate it back on track towards the end of the world.

This voyage has been long ongoing, certainly since the middle of the nineteenth century, but has mostly been traveled just outside of our range of consciousness. Starting in the 1990’s, however, the science became clear: the warming world represents an existential threat to humanity and many other life-forms – the planet, as we had come to know it, was heading for extinction.  Governments throughout the world have colluded in its incipient demise but none until now, as willfully as the Trump administration.

It is Bruno Latour, the French philosopher, anthropologist and sociologist who situates climate change as the pivotal socio-economic-political event of our time (Europe alone - only Europe). He links our awareness of the event directly with the collapse of the trente glorieuse (those thirty postwar years when rising wages and the welfare state in the West flattened income distribution and contributed to a buoyant middle class) and the subsequent rise of massive income disparities in exactly those places most responsible for the carbon emissions driving global warming.

He suggests that global elites have been aware of our planet’s trajectory for some four decades and have prepared alternate navigational strategies. They have encouraged deregulation by which they could consolidate their share of global wealth at the expense of the other 99% to whom they had sold the vision of a unified, globalized community or, alternatively, they have denied the reality of climate change. The genius of Trumpist politics (what Latour calls “one of those rare innovations”), is that it combines the two.

The global elites have been busy making plans, ahead of the emerging reality that the habitable portions of the planet will no longer be big enough for everyone, for the protection of its most privileged people and places. This has not gone entirely unnoticed. Many folks understand that they have been abandoned by these predatory, solipsistic cadres who have no intention of sharing the world and its remaining wealth with them. The populist reaction to this abandonment is a retreat behind national boundaries and under the blanket of traditional culture, in a total renunciation of globalization.

Latour sees in Trumpist politics the perfect storm of low pressure moving over warm water – personified as those grappling for the spoils of extreme capitalism colliding with those heading for the exits – towards the perceived protections of ethnic separatism, reactionary conservatism and racial violence (viz. Charlottesville). This combination of extremes – predation by the elites and the profound chagrin of those whose dreams of affluence in a globalized world have been snatched away from them – now comes under the protection and management of a military junta nominally headed by an impotent, narcissistic, borderline sociopathic president; all this against a background of denial of its precipitating circumstances – of climate change and its attendant science. Oh, happy days!

It is only possible to fuse globalization (with its inherent financial rewards to the elite) with a return to blood and soil if one denies the connection between modernization (and its handmaiden neo-liberalism) with the deleterious condition of the planet. This, Latour suggests, is the first time a political party has been organized around ecological circumstance, if only by dint of its strenuous denial of a connection between the health of the planet and climate change. Trump’s rise to power on the back of this contradiction indicates an abandonment of the will to create a world order, so evident under Bush I, Clinton, Bush II and Obama. The rise of the Generals will likely change that, if only to return to the field of battle for the enrichment of the military industrial and services complex whilst simultaneously increasing the global insecurities necessary for the imposition of fascist (or as Latour has it, Trumpist) policies.

Latour further argues that a united Europe was shielded by a moral umbrella because it represented “the greatest institutional invention for exceeding the limits of state sovereignty”. Now the umbrella under which this benign construction sheltered has been shattered by Brexit. In the U.S., we might similarly suggest that we have harbored a great institutional invention for the sequestering of benighted populations fleeing the old aristocracies of Europe and their colonial dependencies. That historical project is now cast into disrepute by our current actions, and with our own moral umbrella in tatters; the goal of global hegemonic rule by the U.S. is now fully delegitimized too, by our government’s refusal to accept the climatological realities of the day (viz. Hurricane Harvey, the gargantuan, invisible storm).

Latour sees opportunities for a still mostly united Europe to become an example for the ordering of the world, but only he warns, if it heads the ship of state (the European Parliament) in the opposite direction to the USS America (being alert, it should be noted, to the possibilities for a collision). Such a direction would entail a navigational understanding of the fundamental antagonism between the health of the planet and modernization and that climate change transcends all other contemporary social, economic and political issues. As Latour writes, “the modern world is just not possible. Either you have a world – and it will not be modern. Or you are modern, but without a real world”.

The retreat from modernity may legitimately precipitate a reduction in global population flux, a staying put, if only because the infrastructures of travel are highly vulnerable to the vicissitudes of climate. What Latour argues for is not a global re-ordering - as we scamper towards our ethnic homelands - but quite simply, and logistically more plausibly, a return to our common home, to the earth, wherever we happen to be situated upon it.

That must now be the utopian goal: a return to our homeland - not by some heroic trek over the hinterlands, but by a zen-like acceptance of where we are now - to a patch of earth that is neither national nor global. A place where no allegiance is owed to a political construct that exists uneasily in a patchwork of others such, and certainly where there exists no global project. To a place, in other words, of intentional occupation and stewardship. Or, a place where we might be content, as William Blake has it,

“To see a World in a Grain of Sand

And a Heaven in a Wild Flower 

Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand 

And Eternity in an hour….”

Will our Generals understand that a moral umbrella is more powerful than a nuclear shield and that their modern world of warfare guarantees nothing in a world threatened by far greater natural processes of planetary change……and will they ever see “a World in a Grain of Sand”? The only thing less likely is that their notional leader might become so enlightened.

Holocausts "R" Us

Late last century I spent a few years teaching what is quaintly called 'Social Studies' at a small private high school in Southern California. High school subject matter is ordained by the State and is organized by grade: thus tenth grade is World History and eleventh is American History. Being of a progressive frame of mind and teaching at a nominally progressive school, I chose as my principal texts Clive Ponting's A Green History of the World, 1991, and Howard Zinn's A People's History of The United States, Revised Edition, 1995, for the successive classes; these texts, at the time, represented an almost unprecedented dose of radicalism for the young minds under my charge.

While Ponting's volume, now revised as A New Green History of the World, 2007, remains an invaluable primer on the impact of Homo sapiens on planet Earth beginning some 100,000 years ago and of truly modern humans, Homo sapiens sapiens, beginning 30,000 years ago, and is, I believe, a foundational document for anyone wishing to acquire a 'green' consciousness, Zinn's book has worn less well. Were I to teach high school history again (heaven forbid), I would choose a replacement for his volume.

We cannot, I think, begin to approach the history of the United States without thoroughly ingesting, at the molecular level, the impact of European settler colonialism over the last half millennium. Thus it is that the comparatively new volume, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’, The Indigenous People's History of The United States, 2015, seems to be an essential antidote to the rote mythologies of this country (essentially regurgitated by Zinn with a populist twist) and which, at the high school level, might be effective (perhaps in conjunction with an introduction to 'green' consciousness) in developing a generation that begins to understand this land's History Degree Zero (to paraphrase Barthes' term). In other words, a history that does not accept as natural, the imposition by means of genocide, of European values on a continent peopled by highly varied groups who nevertheless shared an ethos that almost always ran counter to the materialistic, hierarchical, monotheistic characteristics of Western civilization, (just as Barthes refused to accept the French literary canon, infused, as he correctly saw it, with the values of 'a triumphant middle class').

The capture of the Republican Party by the extreme right and the installation of a racist demagogue in the White House have inevitably raised the specter of Germany in the 1930's. Timothy Snyder has made explicit connections between the founding of the Third Reich and the rise of Trump (Tyranny, 2017). Hitler's ‘Final Solution’ to rid the world of Jews in a messianic holocaust dominates any consideration of the German leader. His morbidly twisted mind personified both capitalism and communism within the Jewish people. The fabrication of Judeobolshevism was aggregated with a more traditional anti-Semitism into a bizarre pseudo-scientific theory of race whereby the Aryan people must exterminate the weaker Jew in order to ensure their survival and ultimate global supremacy. Hitler was a uniquely malignant leader. Yet he remains a shadowy presence behind more recent, far right-wing, fascist politicians, and once again our genocide radar is alerted.

Trump, for his part, has serially vilified the Mexican people and Moslems for transparent political gain (it's the base, stupid) but he possesses none of the insanely racist ideological rigor that saw Hitler reify the ideas expressed in Mein Kampf, 1925 and 1926, in the trenches and gas chambers of Eastern Europe. Trump's struggle, we now know, was in avoiding S.T.D's in his youthful sexual escapades. His The Art of the Deal, co-authored with Tony Schwarz, 1987, is a paean to conniving capitalism and his dubious financial dealings - the suspicion that he is now using his office to further enrich himself and his family is a straight forward expression of his base financial motivations. Reassuringly, he is a very American politician, squarely in that tradition of graft, dark money, oligarchic tendencies and licentious sexual appetites which the voting public seems to expect and even appreciate in its male law makers and presidents.

But Snyder has cursed us (those, at least, who read him) with a renewed fascination with what he calls the killing fields of Eastern Europe in the 1930’s and 40’s. Prior to his revisionist histories (Bloodlands, 2010 and Black Earth, 2015) the Holocaust, in the popular imagination, remained a singular event that concerned the killing of six million Jews and others deemed to be sub-human, sanctioned by the German government just before and during the Second World War, and was often conflated with the gas chambers of Auschwitz - that emblematic infrastructure, the death factory where mechanized, industrial scale killing was perfected.

The Soviets liberated Auschwitz, but the reaction of the G.I.’s who stumbled across other camps is telling.  One invoked the image, “bodies stacked like cordwood”: another was struck by the hundreds of survivors - “the skinniest people you saw in your life. Huge, huge eyes - and there was not a sound out of them. You never saw people like this before” (Michael Hirsch, The Liberators: America’s Witnesses to the Holocaust, 2010). The death camps, starvation diets for the barely living, endemic disease and the threadbare striped rags in which they were clothed were all entirely alien concepts to the squeaky clean, eighteen, nineteen or twenty year-old G.I.'s. Blame their educations: conditions created by Andrew Jackson’s ‘Final Solution’ for America’s indigenous people east of the Mississippi, were substantially similar. The young soldiers were unknowing heirs to the tradition of American Genocide.

Less than a decade after the liberation of the Nazi camps and the atomic firestorms of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, almost three million Asians lay dead in Korea, at least half of whom were civilians; further south and west and a few years on, another 3.1 million Asians died during the Vietnam War (by Vietnam's own estimate in 1995 and confirmed in 2008 by the British Medical Journal). These were deaths suffered in the pursuit of ideological goals - because one side of each country's civil war putatively threatened the primacy of capitalism. For those keeping count, that's almost exactly the total of Jews, Gypsies and the disabled killed under the German Reich. 

The killing goes on: in Iraq since the turn of this century, more than half a million men, women and children have died for their (or their parent's) temerity in supporting a regime that declared its independence in the disposition of its own oil reserves. ‘Operation Iraqi Freedom’ was the reaffirmation of an Imperial ideology based on the primacy of free market capitalism in all human and state-to-state transactions and of the American dollar as its reserve currency - all cloaked in the all-purpose euphemism of 'Freedom’, promiscuously applied both at home and abroad.

In each of this Country’s imperial wars, beginning with the Mexican American war of 1846 - 1848, U.S. troops used techniques, specific language related to operations, equipment and codes that were developed in the extermination of this country’s indigenous peoples. Now military equipment rings with the names of Indian tribes, weaponry and band leaders (Apache, Tomahawk and Black Hawk). Enemy territory is still known in the military as Indian country and its heritage of genocidal actions have been reincarnated in the modern era across the globe - in Africa, Central and South America, the Middle East, Asia and beyond. The American Holocaust remains a living tradition.

The planned elimination of Jews and the subjugation of Slavs and North Africans (doubly damned by their Moslem faith), had an economic purpose - to create Lebensraum, or living room for German (or Italian) agriculture on colonized lands conveniently denuded of non-Aryan mouths to feed, as well as a crackpot, supremacist  ideological rationale. Hitler, a reader of 'Westerns' written by the German writer Karl May, in addition to possessing a more than cursory knowledge of world history, was much taken by the American racial genocide of indigenous peoples and took it as validation of his agronomic model. Under those waving fields of grain beneath a prairie sky are interred, as Dunbar-Ortiz notes, "the bones, villages, fields, and sacred objects of American Indians". For Hitler in the 1930's, the bread basket of the Ukraine beckoned, if once its Jews and Slavs were interred beneath its black earth.

It is now Capitalism (just gathering steam as an ideology at the moment of the 'discovery' of the New World), that is reasonably considered to be the proximate cause of what may prove to be the ultimate holocaust - the ecocide of the planet, the destruction of the systems that support human life on Earth. It is in this holocaust in which Trump, like the vast majority of the world's leaders, is complicit: try teaching that at high school. Perhaps in twelfth-grade Economics?

The Vision Thing

Planning documents describe how our world will be shaped and how it will be destroyed. 

The Spanish arrived in California in 1769 with such a plan: it was to protect the lands along the west coast north of their colonial holdings in Mexico and the Southwest from the threatened incursions of the Russians by establishing a series of Missions, each a days ride from the other, and along this royal road would journey the holy fathers and their accompanying military support. Their endeavors were planned to be economically supported by the establishment of agricultural estates surrounding the Missions which would be worked by the indigenous peoples of the area acting as serfs in an essentially medieval agricultural system. The surplus wealth of these estates would flow back first to Mexico City and thence to the Spanish crown. In the event, there was no surplus and the lands became killing fields as the Indians succumbed to European diseases, mistreatment, hunger and the overwhelming grief of lands and cultures lost. 

Between 1834 and 1836, some years after the Mexican War of Independence, the Missions were secularized and their lands distributed by the Mexican government to political favorites and victorious military commanders as spoils of war (after initially agreeing to redistribute the lands to the local Indians) who created vast ranchos where remnant populations of the indigenous peoples became peons or vaqueros. The Mexican - American War, the discovery of gold in 1848, and the coming of the railroads led to the Wild West - where privately held land became foundational to fortunes made in farming, minerals, oil, real estate and commerce. Not much has changed since, although beginning in the late nineteenth century, planning codes now delineate how these stolen lands may be developed.

The County of Ventura in Southern California, covering territory that was ground zero in the Anglo-Spanish destruction of the most populous and technologically advanced indigenous communities in North America, is now working on a comprehensive update to its General Plan for the first time since 1988. In a recent meeting of the Municipal Advisory Council (MAC) that serves the unincorporated area in which I live, local residents gathered to review the opportunities for helping shape the plan. The meeting was held in Oak View, some dozen miles from the coast and on the way, if not to nowhere, to nowhere very significant - it is one of a gaggle of small communities that dot the road through the Ojai Valley, between the foothills of the transverse Santa Ynez mountain range and the Sulphur Mountain ridge towards the valley's eponymous city. 

My reasons for spending time in Oak View are limited to attending MAC meetings and getting my car’s tires rotated at Fred’s Tire Man. Enough time, however, to wonder at the works of entrepreneurial humankind; to wonder at the survival of an odd selection of stores that eke out a living for their owners in the harsh economic climate of this beleaguered township. Right in the middle of the commercial strip, exactly in a row, as in some sort of ecological climax community of the tawdry are Donuts and More; Nails Forever; Herbs of Hope; 805 Vapes Vapor Lounge; His ‘n’ Hairs; Gold ‘n’ Essence Tanning Salon; and anchoring the eastern end of this block, the newly opened Coffee Connection (which is attempting an injection of hipsterism into what is an avowedly working-class enterprise zone). Across the street is the newly opened Jack’s Dollar Plus. Then - in the next block - it’s Ojai  Valley Muffler; Rte. 33 Laundry; and Ojai Valley MAMA (Modern American Martial Arts) before the stand-alone, red-trimmed Ojai Valley Glass which sits next to Fred’s.

On this stretch of State Highway 33, which runs east from the 101 Coast Highway, and winds through Casitas Springs (Bait and Liquor), Oak View and Mira Monte, the commercial presence must be considered woeful to those of bourgeois tastes and twenty-first century proclivities (pilgrimaging, perhaps, towards their Mecca) but the very persistence of its stores and services and the unfailing optimism of the owners of the new ones that replace the failed - gambling against the economic odds - possesses a kind of grandeur. Their openings and closings represent the ongoing process of transformation, in which all things arise and pass away, a concept that is at the very heart of the Taoist understanding of the cosmos which lightly graces the consciousness of the Venice and Silverlake diasporas that will crowd the markets, yoga gyms, vegan restaurants and coffee shops that await them a few miles on.

All of which is to say that Ventura County serves a very heterogeneous population. From the Oaxacan Indian, non-Spanish speaking Mixtec farm laborers and fruit pickers on the fertile plains of Oxnard, the upper-middle class bohemians of Ojai, Latinos everywhere, Asians, African Americans, wealthy white conservatives, native peoples and the red-necked, blue-collared legions between, the County runs the ethnic and socio-economic gamut. Those attending the MAC meeting were mostly aging, white liberals - a societal spectrum much involved in officially sanctioned politics. One outlier was the young, local representative of S.U.R.J. (Showing Up for Racial Justice, a multi-racial movement dedicated to undermining white support for white supremacy) who semi-officially tagged the number of non-whites in the crowd of fifty plus at two, an Asian and a Latina. The muti-racialist was a ginger-haired Anglo. So it is that input into the County's visioning process is chromatically challenged, at least based on this showing. But there are even more serious limitations in its attempts to incorporate the will of the people. 

Despite a member of the County's planning department avowal that they had conducted an exhaustive sweep of public opinion in order to shape their General Plan they had, after a dozen community workshops across the county, a booth at the County Fair and an on-line questionnaire, garnered a mere thirty two participants from the Ojai Valley, which has a population approaching 30,000. Results were similarly sparse elsewhere in the County. Out of this statistically irrelevant sample the County and its consultant had fashioned a crude matrix that featured the top five responses to 'What I love most about Ventura County'; 'Our biggest challenges' and 'What could make our community better'. Stock responses such as 'Agriculture and Farms', 'Beaches', 'Water', 'Roads and Transportation' and 'Open Spaces and Greenbelts' were distributed meaninglessly across the matrix. Residents of the Ojai Valley were given a scant one-week notice of the MAC meeting addressing these issues.

Since I believe I have been defrauded of my rights to legitimately provide input to the process by a patently specious outreach program conducted as window dressing to the machinations (and low-grade word-smithing) conducted in the vape-filled rooms of the County Planning Commission on a document initially drafted by a planning consultant, I feel empowered to propose a draft of my own five-point Guiding Principles for The People's Paradise (F.K.A. County) of Ventura.

(1) Residents' inalienable human-rights (at a minimum nourishment, shelter, security, and access to health   care, education and wild spaces) shall be privileged over property rights.

(2) Native flora and fauna, as the visible expressions of underlying native ecosystems, are to be privileged over all exogenous plantings (except for food production) and exogenous fauna (except for food     production and licensed recreational and therapeutic purposes). Native fauna shall have priority access       between their remaining and future habitats.

(3) All the developed lands of Ventura County are to be regarded as a safe space -  a sanctuary for all,       regardless of Federal immigration status.

(4) The County's beaches and coastal waters are to be freely accessible but otherwise sacrosanct (for they are wild places) - there shall be no commercial fishing or oil drilling in its waters nor new development         within the traditional areas of wetland and sand-dune succession. Restoration of this liminal zone shall         be a priority.

(5) Reduction of energy use (along with the on-going replacement of fossil fuels with renewables) will be     the first principle in assessing the viability of future development and applied with equal primacy, in the     re-shaping of existing infrastructures.

That's right! I am so up for a re-visioning that adumbrates the Proudhonian concept that privately owned property is essentially theft from the common wealth and Thoreau's epiphany that in wilderness is the preservation of the world - fiercely focused on a local level, on the grass roots, on (or in) the trenches, even on the entirely powerless  Municipal Advisory Council; and actively targets the hide-bound, reactionary County bureaucracy. The alternative is to quietly accede to the milquetoast, verdant radicalism of our local Ojai Valley Green Coalition and the estimable C.F.R.O.G. (Citizens for Responsible Oil and Gas) who have taken for their alternative model the vision statement and planning guidelines of the uber-liberal Marin County, north of San Francisco. Neither injections of realism into the continuing, but ultimately entirely unsustainable status quo so fiercely protected by the County and its political supporters is likely to pierce, at the present time, the heavily armored  skin of this institutional dinosaur. 

The day awaits when County leadership acknowledges the illegitimacy of private land ownership in Ventura County entwined as it is with the Native American holocaust unleashed (not altogether deliberately) by the Spanish, the sham of Mexican Land grants and the subsequent depredations of the majority Anglo hordes who invaded the State in the second half of the nineteenth century.  Left, are picturesque Spanish colonial Mission buildings, built by native labor - essentially the architecture of the holocaust - that are again centers of the Roman Catholic faith, now significant tourist attractions and icons in the mythology of California, surrounded by the massive infrastructures of a militarized global capitalism - forever impinging on the remaining wild lands of California.

Common Sense - Now!

Summer is turned up to eleven in southern California with temperatures regularly topping 100 degrees Fahrenheit inland from the (crowded) beaches. Just up the coast, an anthropogenic forest fire rages in the hills behind Santa Barbara while Trump threatens to reduce the budget of the U.S. Forest Service - guardians of California's National Forests. Days ago, the Donald was playing musical chairs with Ivanka in Hamburg, the G-20 got momentarily downgraded to the G-19; and strawberries with cream were being served up to tennis fans at Wimbledon, not so very far from the burnt-out hulk of Grenfell Tower, a public housing project whose $15M refurbishment privileged its aesthetic impact on wealthy neighbors rather than the health and safety of its majority non-white and low income inhabitants. Last week, National Public Radio took flak from overly sensitive right-wingers who interpreted its tweeted rendition of the Declaration of Independence as a call for contemporary revolution. @JustEsrafel responded with, "So, NPR is calling for Revolution. Interesting way to condone the violence while trying to sound "Patriotic".....You'd be excused for thinking that the Silly Season has begun. Isn't it time for a little un-tweeted Common Sense?

This plain-spoken pamphlet by Thomas Paine, published on January 10, 1776 was the blunt instrument of insurrection of which our Declaration of Independence (published, you'll remember, early in July that same year), was the Cliffs Notes; the Reader's Digest condensed version; the abridged, potted, synoptic, broadsheet version. Better to read the pamphlet.

There is, for instance, in Common Sense, a short disquisition on how to build a navy on a budget - a necessary adjunct to successful revolution if the inevitable counter-revolution was to be resisted. In the event, barely. In 1812, the British bloodied its cousins' noses, blackened the White House and chased the Americans into Canada. Today, might we righteous citizens draw up a laundry list of drones, cruise missiles, automatic weapons, depleted uranium ammunition, Humvees, helicopters and MRE's with which to fight the next existential threat to the glorious freedoms bequeathed to us by our Revolution (were that function not so gleefully and gratuitously already practiced by our government)? Some lessons, it seems, can be learnt too well.

We now face not an aging, demented king, his pliant parliament and the wealth of Great Britain as the agents of Tyranny but instead an oligarchic president, a captive congress, an accommodating judiciary and a hydra-headed bureaucracy whose self-serving, un-elected leaders are Trump appointments - who collectively pay little heed to our hard won liberties: thus it is that should you, dear reader, care to undertake a little light paraphrasing, Thomas Paine's words will spring into a tight, contemporary focus.

Firstly, despite the dearest wish of the Founding Fathers, our presidency has devolved into a kind of cut-rate monarchy or into the role of an Imperial Caesar (that owes more to Vegas than to Rome). Hereditary or not, our system all too often serves up mediocrities. As Tom has it,

"One of the strongest natural proofs of the folly of hereditary right in kings, is, that nature disapproves it, otherwise she would not so frequently turn it into ridicule by giving mankind an ass for a lion".

Next, a nod to the esteemed family patriarch, the former Klansman (with links to the mob) and political patron: Fred Trump, the first of his line (a fact now known to the world via John Oliver's racist dog-whistle which suggested that his erstwhile Germanic family name of Drumf somehow signified a person of less probity, integrity and intelligence than the anglicized Trump).

"This is supposing the present race of kings in the world to have had an honorable origin; whereas it is more than probable, that could we take off the dark covering of antiquity, and trace them to their first rise, that we should find the first of them nothing better than the principal ruffian of some restless gang, whose savage manners or pre-eminence in subtility obtained him the title of chief among plunderers".

Or, as Timothy Snyder predicts, Trump may forgo future elections based, perhaps, on some false flag emergency such as the Reichstag fire, and then assume dictatorial powers - this gambit, Snyder claims, is one that "it's pretty much inevitable they will try", (Salon, May 1st. 2017). There may indeed be a terrorist threat that conveniently demands an extra-constitutional response, its necessity crammed, as Paine suggests, "down the throats of the vulgar".

"…..hereditary succession in the early ages of monarchy could not take place as a matter of claim, but as something casual or complimental; but as few or no records were extant in those days, and traditional history stuffed with fables, it was very easy, after the lapse of a few generations, to trump up some superstitious tale, conveniently timed, Mahomet like, to cram hereditary right down the throats of the vulgar".

Then a paragraph that needs no alteration to secure its contemporary relevance: our incumbent president having been nurtured from his earliest lick of a silver spoon in the arts and attitudes of entitlement.

"Men who look upon themselves born to reign, and others to obey, soon grow insolent; selected from the rest of mankind their minds are early poisoned by importance; and the world they act in differs so materially from the world at large, that they have but little opportunity of knowing its true interests, and when they succeed to the government are frequently the most ignorant and unfit of any throughout the dominions".

The aforementioned Timothy Snyder, bastion of the academy, author recently of Bloodlands, 2010, and Black Earth, 2015 - revisionist histories of the twentieth century Stalinist and Nazi atrocities in Central Europe, turned this Spring, to the writing of a pamphlet very much in the tradition of Tom Paine. Barely longer than Common Sense, it proposed certain prophylactic actions an engaged American citizenry might take to ward off the onset of a Trumpian tyranny. Number nine, in his work titled On Tyranny - Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century, 2017, counsels, "Read Books".

Snyder notes in his introduction that "both fascism and communism were responses to globalization: to the real and perceived inequalities it created, and the apparent helplessness of the democracies in addressing them". Trump is now the beneficiary of the failures of neoliberalism and the collapse of the White American Dream over the last four decades, after its careful nurturing by Truman and Eisenhower in the 1950's. He suggests that "We (have) allowed ourselves to accept the politics of inevitability, the sense that history could only move in one direction: toward liberal democracy";  what is ignored in this elitist presumption is the roiling rip-tide of populist resentment that has lately surfaced with the American Election of 2016 and Britain's Brexit vote.

Some have questioned (notably Jeet Heer in the New Republic, March 2017) whether it is necessary to invoke Europe's totalitarian boogeymen when we have so many home grown nativists to which we might compare our current president. He reels off his list of suspects: Barry Goldwater, George Wallace, and Pat Buchanan, while suggesting that both Ronald Reagan and Ross Perot were, like Trump, well practiced in condemning the inequities of international trade and of our free-loading allies. A wider net of proto-Trumpian politicians might include Huey Long, Joseph McCarthy and most scurrilously of all, Thomas Watson of the People's Party who, in 1910, spewed the following venom,

"…the scum of creation has been dumped on us. Some of our principle cities are more foreign than American. The most dangerous and corrupting hordes of the old world have invaded us. The vice and crime which they have planted in our midst is sickening and terrifying".

We can reasonably hope that Snyder’s implicit comparison of Trump to Stalin and Hitler is a shock-tactic to awaken us from our complacency and is, historically, an overreach. But it is surely time, as he suggests, for the common man and woman to begin building their Libraries of Insurrection to ward against the onset of tyranny. His injunction to ‘Read a Book’, however, might be simply reduced to ‘Read a Pamphlet’ - his own, On Tyranny and the eternally on-point, Common Sense.

The words of Thomas Paine now ring truer than ever, for who cannot be stirred in these dark times by his rousing call for a truly noble American exceptionalism?

“O ye that love mankind! Ye that dare oppose, not only the tyranny, but the tyrant, stand forth! Every spot of the old world is overrun with oppression. Freedom hath been hunted round the globe. Asia, and Africa, have long expelled her. — Europe regards her like a stranger, and England hath given her warning to depart. O! receive the fugitive, and prepare in time an asylum for mankind”.

The Pursuit of Happiness

There are no peasants in America: thousands and then millions arrived from Europe and Asia in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the pursuit of happiness, but they were quickly consumed within the maw of industrial capitalism.

They no longer toiled for their own subsistence while transferring their agricultural surplus to their landlord as they had in their homelands but became, instead, cogs in the industrial production of food, dry goods and furniture, hardware and machinery. In short, their economic purpose was as foot soldiers in the making of stuff and in their off-work consumption of it. Their lives were bifurcated: soul-destroying wage-work and meretricious consumption. It was in the consuming that they measured their lives, in the working, not so much.

As peasants, the producing and consuming had been joyfully, tragically, and sometimes comedically entwined and always subject to back-breaking toil, the complexities of the natural world, the messy biology of domesticated animals and the vagaries of the weather. Life in America beckoned as the future: as the living incarnation of modernity. They exchanged membership in societies that existed as mechanisms to aggregate wealth in the hands of hereditary land owners, to a society where, by the mid 1800's, the sinews of a global kleptocracy were being built, where wealth was legally stolen by the powerful through the new industries of railroads, industrial scale farming, chemicals, armaments and manufacturing. Others fled to the United States as victims of the British Empire (notably the Irish) which already existed as the most wide reaching system of global subjugation and wealth harvesting the world had ever known.

Before Columbus, Native Americans existed in a world where the pursuit of happiness had no meaning: space and time were enfolded in a profound circularity, and within the slow eddying of this bottomless pool, futurizing was impossible. The medieval peasant, the world over, remained in the shallows of this spatio-temporal conception, but the creeping impact of technological innovation and the emergence of a market system began to disrupt the still center of their universe. The market monetized time and space.

By the middle of the nineteenth century, American Indians existed almost exclusively in contested space. They had never recognized the concept of land ownership and in many cases their societal structure existed as not much more than extended families or bands. Many tribes maintained elaborate rituals of feasting and gift-giving, which were devices for wealth sharing and inter-tribal diplomacy rather than markers of indebtedness, territorial or otherwise. But by the end of the century, having been essentially made dependent on the government for food and shelter in duplicitous deals for their land, the few natives that remained also reached for a version of modernity: although sequestered in Reservations, they too wished to bathe in the river of money that the white man had created. Much, much later, they would be granted casino licenses on Reservation lands – viewed by all as a financial gusher - in a gift surely as tainted as the diseased blankets they had received in an earlier age.

The Great Father (the synecdoche by which nineteenth century Indians referred to the President and his authority) had previously practiced similar acts of self-serving paternalism when, in embryonic form as the Founding Fathers (a phrase coined by Warren G. Harding in 1916) "they created the most effective system of national control devised in modern times, and showed future leaders the advantages of combining paternalism with command" (Howard Zinn, A People's History of the United States, 1980).

The Declaration of Independence was the foundational document in the attenuated process by which this country wrested national control from Britain whose figure-head, Farmer George (George III), was the proximate cause of the colonists’ discomfiture. In the year 1776, under cover of Thomas Paine's populist rhetoric, Jefferson word-smithed a document that effectively proposed the transfer of tithing rights from England's aristocracy and its rising population of industrialists to the rich and powerful colonists in what would shortly become the United States.

Thus was born an Atlantic rivalry between the British Empire and America in the business of global kleptocracy that was finally decided in this country’s favor at the end of WWII when the United States insisted on the repayment of its British ally’s wartime loans and materiel transfers while simultaneously rebuilding the economies of its defeated enemies, Germany and Japan. Russia, the real victor in WWII, threatened an alternative system of government that would demand a reinvention of the revenue streams so carefully tended over more than a century and a half to transfer wealth upstream from the poor and middle class to the rich. In the event, this threat (characterized as the Cold War) was transformed into a tidal wave of wealth funneled to the one percent as armament manufacturers ramped up production to equip our boys deployed around the world in defense of freedom – freedom of the few to steal from the many.

The elaborate shell-games of the Great Father’s representatives used in the defrauding of Indian tribes of their well-watered hunting and gathering lands in exchange for denuded Reservations and sparse rations of meat, beans and flour - regularly manipulated by the Indian Agent (a regional representative of the Great Father’s authority) - pale against the vast machinations by which the military industrial complex, the ethical drug business, banking, real estate, media, and agri-business (amongst virtually all industry groups) maximize their profits via tax relief, uncontrolled price gouging, contracting boondoggles and undisguised hand-outs; considerations conferred on them by their bought and paid for politicians in Washington and State Houses across the country. Dollar rations reluctantly doled out to their lower echelon employees are maintained at levels that ensure that many of them have to maintain multiple jobs to maintain their true patriotic duty of consuming - coded as ‘supporting a family’ by the nation’s politicians.

Few of us now get to escape the Reservation, where we are dependents of Federal and State governments whose legislation is of the wealthy, by the wealthy, for the wealthy. We remain pathetic supplicants to our Government’s niggardly parsimony while it practices activist interventions for the rich. Much of this was foreshadowed in 1776. The wealthy Founding Fathers never intended for equality to be established between slave and master or, indeed, between the rich and the poor (Zinn).  In The Declaration of Independence, Jefferson cribbed the line “Life, Liberty and Property’, from the English philosopher John Locke and then changed the last noun to the phrase “the pursuit of happiness”… an Orwellian prescription if ever there was one, worthy indeed, of the most oleaginous of Madison Avenue’s scribes.

And yet we, whose forebears were peasants, refugees from the British Empire, African Americans whose ancestors were shipped here as slaves, Native Americans and the myriad others who count themselves lucky to be Americans, will gather on July 4th and celebrate the mythography of the nation. Or not. We live in a modern and thoroughly malignant construction of reality where many remain in the frantic pursuit of the sugar rush of happiness. Can we instead take this holiday as a slightly belated Summer Solstice Festival, barbecue the same food and drink the same (craft) beer and begin to fully understand that property is indeed theft and the notion of linear time is the means to larceny; a festival where the erstwhile holism of the nation’s immigrant peasants and of its native peoples is celebrated as a possible gateway to our living in the universe as fully sentient beings?

In the sun-bleached foothills of the Santa Ynez mountains in southern California the turn of the sun northwards is marked by a fading of the spring flowers, the slithering of snakes and, yesterday, the emergence of a rare black-tailed jack rabbit (Lepus californicus) onto the trail. The natural world demands our engagement – not as citizens and consumers in the pursuit of happiness but as participants in the quiet glow of its embrace.

Let's Dance

As many have observed, violence is embodied within the American State and its people. This week has seen it manifested in the usual futile and tragic ways: one incident, however, was distinguished by the fact that one of its targets was deemed of sufficient value to the State to be afforded two bodyguards who summarily dispatched the shooter. In a State born of violence each act of brutality against a fellow being is a horrifying reaffirmation of its bloody foundational principles and is itself a political act –irrespective of the perpetrators particular party affiliation, ideology, religion, color or sexual identity.

Our response to this pathology might reasonably be resistance – a turning away from all forms of violence and the righteous embodiment of peace. Resistance, as it is now popularly understood in the public realm, however, has come to be more narrowly defined as opposition to the president and the political party on whose support he relies and it is this warped vision that may even have played a part in the Congressional Baseball Practice shooting.  This conception of resistance has also been more reasonably manifested in several large rallies, in the wearing of emblematic headgear and in the tribal devotion to late-show hosts who nightly eviscerate the president and his allies to comedic effect. To date, these peaceful public and private acts, while perhaps personally therapeutic, have had no discernible impact on their intended target. As symbols of defiance, by any historical measure, they fall woefully short.

In 1917, by contrast, the playing of jazz was considered by the State to represent an existential threat and the U.S. Navy was dispatched to close down the font from which such revolutionary music flowed – Storyville in New Orleans. By the miracle of unintended consequences this act initiated a great diaspora of the displaced musicians to northern states and guaranteed that jazz would become a truly national rather than a regional art form.

Last weekend, at the Ojai Music Festival, this most American of musical traditions was reinvested with its revolutionary intent, its posture of defiance and its subtext of resistance. Vijay Ayer, the acclaimed American Jazz pianist, Harvard professor and MacArthur fellow, who served as music director for the event, sees in his music the power to become “a fully corporeal mode of sustained antagonism: a hexis, a position, a way of being, an aesthetically precise way of embodying alterity”. In other words: resistance-as-music.

Certainly, on the Festival’s closing night, his sextet’s propulsive set of infinitely braided melodies structured within complex rhythmic armatures shell-shocked the mostly white, mostly highly privileged audience, more attuned to the festival’s usual offerings of twentieth century classical and mildly avant garde music, that had popped as much as $125 for the ninety minute assault of alterity. But Ayer’s intent is clear: it is to send his audience home with an “embodied memory….that you will carry back with you” and which “represents our very future in a time of fierce urgency and precarity”. (71st.Ojai Musical Festival Program, 2017)

In 1890, almost five hundred drunken troops of the U.S. Seventh Cavalry under the command of Colonel James Forsyth armed with rifles and several rapid-fire Hotchkiss cannons massacred more than 250 Indians at Wounded Knee in South Dakota because members of their tribe had been dancing. Most of the victims were women and children. This is what resistance looks like: simple acts of music and dance that so inflame the practitioners’ oppressors that they respond by egregious acts of vandalism and murder. Publicly expressed elemental gestures that speak to purity and grace, rhythm and melody are, it seems, a monumental affront to our government, its military and its corporate allies who daily stir an impoverishing stew of corruption. Partisan marches, oppositional satire and even perhaps the odd Urban wildland essay are ground up in that stew and pointed to as an example of its inclusivist piquancy. By contrast, blandishments of embodied kinesis and complex rhythms and melodies scare the living daylights out of our tormentors. In profoundly felt music and dance they sense a cosmic truth descending upon their reign of petty tyranny.

Certainly the Indian dancers who practiced the Ghost Dance towards the end of the nineteenth century were all too effective in projecting resistance by entirely non-violent and mostly non-verbal ways. The dedication to their sacral act was such that the dances might last non-stop for as long as six days and the circle of dancers grow to a circumference of over five miles. At the same time, their Paiute Indian prophet known as Wovoka (a.k.a. Jack Wilson) clearly enunciated the demands they were making of the Great Spirit.

As Louis S. Warren suggests in God’s Red Sun, The Ghost Dance Religion and the Making of Modern America, 2017, the Paiute had, by the end of the nineteenth century, bought into the idea of progress and were willing to accept that the metaphorical river of money had supplanted the real Nevada rivers which had once been a vital part of their subsistence livelihood but whose waters had been serially siphoned off to irrigate white farmers’ monocultures. Their hunting and gathering ranges had also been decimated and, of course, the Paiute had been subject to the usual onslaughts of disease and Indian-killing that had always characterized the frontier.

While they accepted their reality the Paiute still yearned for a prelapsarian past and it is this that their prophet promised – a return most immediately to the winter rains that watered their Great Basin desert lands and had vanished with the onset of the great drought in 1888; and more conjecturally of a time before the coming of the white-man. Their gatherings under Wovoka’s leadership “featured no drum or other instruments, only the beating of thousands of feet upon the valley floor”.  From the turning circle their voices rose chanting hymns which invoked weather spirits and celebrated other natural phenomena. The solidarity and new found spiritual focus of these Nevadan Native Americans was of some slight concern to those who had taken their land; that the Indian complaint was couched in a messianic religion that bore little relation to Christianity they found profoundly troubling.

In was but a short time before the Ghost Dance Religion spread east to the Lakota and Oglala peoples of the Northern Plains, and it was here that it reached its apotheosis. Gone was some of the more conciliatory language that suggested that Indians should happily cooperate with whites in the conquest of their lands in return for limited bathing privileges in the river of money: in its place was the Ghost Dance vest which magically protected the wearer from bullets; a guarantee of a return of all their fallen comrades, and a return too, of the thundering herds of buffalo which once roamed the Plains and had been mercilessly reduced by the pathological killing spree of white hunters - who shot at them with joyful abandon (and .50 caliber rifles) from the new transcontinental railway, the owners of which organized special ‘hunting by rail’ excursions and which a led to the great animal’s almost total extinction.

But still in place was the joyful massed circle dancing, which differed little from the Sun Dances the tribes had organized in times past, but which now addressed not the enduring cycle of death and regeneration but the present imperative of survival amidst a colonizing civilization which threatened their extermination. This survival was framed in terms of a return to the old ways, of resistance to the new and a magical re-emergence of their traditional means of subsistence. Yet the outward manifestation of the Plains Indian’ entreaties to the Great Spirit remained this simple dance and the spirits of ecstasy and revelation which it invoked.

Over the past few decades, we have drastically lost ground to the American Dream of middle class prosperity and of a future where all socio-economic classes can ascend the ladder of material comfort, health and education, which was all too briefly glimpsed in the 1950's; and having lost faith in a pluralistic society capable of embracing all colors, creeds and sexual orientations (long promised but never realized) where is our Wovoka to lead us forward (or back) to the world we so urgently desire?

We may never be able to precisely define that world: but we do know it is present when we embody spirit - when we are deeply moved by music and dance, feel a genuine resistance to all the falsity welling within us and outside of us; and believe, finally, that all good things are possible. 

So: Let's Dance!......but please be ready to run for cover.

Our Rough Beast

We are possessed of a protean president who has now turned his back on the world: as he explained last Thursday, he has plumped for Pittsburgh not Paris. We are now exiles from the climate accord and having thus abandoned a planetary consensus we find ourselves on the very frontier of the civilized world. This is a place in which many Americans feel comfortable: it was where generations of the most enterprising of this nation lived for nearly three centuries (1607-1890). Indeed, it is a place that has a highly valued role in our economic and cultural heritage - in a profound historical sense, our president has led us back home.

There is a passage in J. Hector St. John de Crevecoeur's Letters from an American Farmer, 1782, in which he explains his optimism when, after his family's farm is threatened by Indian attack, he picks up and moves west: he writes,

"I will revert into a state approaching nearer to that of nature, unencumbered either with voluminous laws or contradictory codes, often galling the very necks of those whom they protect; and at the same time sufficiently remote ....where far removed from the accursed neighborhood of Europeans, its inhabitants live with more ease decency and peace than you can imagine; where governed by no laws, yet find, in uncontaminated simple manners all that laws can afford."

We are about to experience again the pleasures and perils of the frontier - where we can prosper, or not, under the broiling western sun, governed by no (climate) laws and unbothered by the disapproval of the wider world. The President, in his simple act of renunciation has rekindled our historical purpose: to stand apart and be the (coal-fired) beacon that lights the world.

Jefferson would have understood. Francophile that he was, he nevertheless believed that America's destiny was as a pastoral paradise far from the intellectual ferment of Europe and its fast developing industrial base. In spurning our voluntary commitment to national carbon reductions (based on a scientific consensus of the perils of global warming) established in Paris, Trump has effectively taken us a step away from the leading edge of science, not only in terms of the amelioration of a worsening climate, but by implication, from all those cooperative endeavors that occur at the very highest levels of academic and technological inquiry. As a nation, we have likely become the poison pill of international scientific research. Together with our long-standing refusal to adopt the metric system (admittedly largely ignored by almost all American scientists who now no longer professionally enumerate in Imperial) this further retreat from international consensus may consign our home grown technologies to a creeping primitivism and even lead, eventually, to a de-industrialization of The United States. 

Does a pastoral future beckon - a land of husbandmen and women following the oxen and plow over roughly furrowed ground, tending chickens, goats, sheep and cattle on the meadow and rejoicing in 'uncontaminated simple manners'? Many would wish it so.

After all, the spirit of progress, which has driven history since the mid-seventeenth century, has been greatly discredited by almost four decades of neoliberalism. Initiated in the late 1970's by Paul Volcker (he was appointed by Carter in 1979 and re-appointed in 1981 by Reagan) whose policy of high interest rates resulted in recession, unemployment, low inflation (thus protecting the wealth of the moneyed classes) and the decimation of organized labor, neoliberalism truly came of age under the 1987 Reagan appointee Alan Greenspan. It was he, under the notional control of four presidents – Reagan, Bush Snr., Clinton and George W. – who proceeded to deregulate the financial sector which led directly to the financial crisis of 2008. Much of his philosophy was mirrored in Europe, most notably in Britain under Margaret Thatcher. Its purpose has been to allow the market to control major social and political decisions and corporations to become state actors. Its results have been a winnowing of social protections, a decline in real wages, the destruction of Trade Unions, and an obscene enrichment of the elites.

With the passage of Brexit, the election of Trump and now the U.S. rejection of the Paris climate accords, the candle flame of regression is beginning to flicker. In Mexico, the council of the Zapatista candidate for the presidency, María de Jesús Patricio, has called for “anti-capitalist and honest” government. It proclaims that “we don’t seek to administer power; we seek to dismantle it......". Ironically, the council seeks an end to representative democracy and a reversion to indigenous, consensual means of achieving social harmony in a post maquiladora-based industrial state: a reversion, in other words, to a pastoral land. In such a North American world, the vast panoply of property laws erected to supplant individual savagery and replace it with state sanctioned violence might yet be distilled into 'simple manners'. Jefferson understood as much. In his only book, Notes on Virginia, 1782, he writes,

“…were it made a question, whether no law, as among the savage Americans, or too much law, as among the civilized Europeans, submits man to the greatest evil, one who has seen both conditions of existence would pronounce it to be the last: and that the sheep are happier of themselves, than under the care of the wolves.”

It may be debatable as to whether the global climate czars are wolves, but the President has deemed it thus: that the American people are happier of themselves.

So it is that we have arrived at a point of inflexion: to proceed with arguing over the ‘content of progress’ as Paul Kingsnorth has it (an argument that has been effectively reduced to mildly differing degrees of neoliberalism); to retreat into stasis or actively pursue a course of regression. This latter option might bring us towards what John Berger, the British novelist and critic who died at the beginning of this year, has called ‘the culture of survival’, the culture of the peasant, of the indigenous and of the pre-modern and it is this culture toward which our president may unknowingly be leading us.

There are many in the middle of this country who actively spurn notions of liberalism and its implications of progress. It is they, we are told by a liberal media, who are responsible for voting into office the anathema that is our president. His was a triumph of the under-educated, under-paid and under-appreciated. Similarly, across the pond, in the passage of Brexit, Kingsworth writes, “The working classes and the lower middle classes – not the cultural or political elites – pulled off a kind of peasants’ revolt, against the advice of every section of the establishment”.

Last time I checked, Trump’s decision to withdraw from the Paris accord has been roundly criticized by most of the chattering classes as churlish, anti-international and potentially disastrous for the climate and our standing in the world. What if instead, it signifies the creation of another chink in the wall; of another rending of the fabric that is the Modernity Project; of another nail in the coffin of neo-liberalism; of another adobe brick that might rebuild indigenous cultures? Is it entirely blasphemous to ask in these troubled, tipping point times, in echo of Yeats, “……what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”

Into the gyre we have been pitched and the center may not hold, but given what the center has come to represent these past forty years surely that is no bad thing: some revelation too, may be at hand as we regress twisting and tumbling far, far back to a time when, as Locke perceived, All the World was America.

Beyond Hope

Fat cats like to breathe clean air: that was the facile takeaway from the Sierra Club's recent conferring of its Trailblazer Award on Michael Bloomberg for his advocacy of the Club's 'Beyond Coal' program and the support provided by Bloomberg Philanthropies. The event was held at a cavernous exhibition hall in San Francisco's Palace of Fine Arts complex - an early monument to globalism built as the centerpiece of the Panama-Pacific International Exposition of 1915, which celebrated the completion of the Panama Canal and thus the linkage of the old Atlantic World with the emergent Pacific Rim.

There's plenty of historical precedent for the rich and powerful supporting environmental advocacy or simply ensuring that certain parts of the world are maintained in a pristine state for their edification and enjoyment. The shahs of Persia built their pleasure gardens, English kings maintained depopulated forests for the pleasures of the chase and Teddy Roosevelt saw in the creation of America’s National Parks (depopulated too, of their Native American inhabitants) the preservation of his big-game hunting privileges. Bloomberg is set to enjoy the results of shutting down the nation's coal-powered power plants and breathing the cool fresh air (free of sooty particulates) that may thus result from averting global warming: and he is magnanimously sharing this beneficence with the rest of us. Not that there's anything wrong with that - unless you are uncomfortable with the self-interested perspectives of the uber wealthy.

It is just such a blinkered vision that informs Michael Bloomberg's and Carl Pope's recent best-seller, Climate of Hope, 2017. Pope is a former executive director and chairman of the Sierra Club (any synergy resulting from the publication of the book and the Club’s award to one of its authors is doubtless coincidental). The two writers seem like twin Pollyannas with conjoined fingers to the wind, which they only care to extend when the breezes are balmy.  Somehow, out of ever-worsening climate scenarios, they manage to fashion a book that conflates the amelioration of climate change with capitalism, new technologies and economic growth. Left unmentioned is any reference to the U.S. military as the country's biggest CO2 polluter and that, lo these many years, economic growth and the unforeseen results of technological innovation have consistently been the primary drivers of anthropogenic climate change. Bloomberg and Pope celebrate a new generation of technological innovation that attempts the reduction of the climate impact of large-scale agri-business, inter-continental trade, discretionary travel, urban growth and a burgeoning global GDP; nary a word of disapproval is aimed at these fundamental building blocks of civilizational hubris, egregious energy consumption and of the destruction of wildlife habitat.

Their book documents the Sierra Club's campaign 'Beyond Coal', which has been hugely successful in reducing the number of coal burning power plants in the U.S. and thus their climate impacting CO2 emissions, and is to be lauded on that account; but while Bloomberg and the Club may be in the process of winning this particular battle (he has pledged to continue his support of the program for a further three years), by undertaking environmental reform with the allied purpose of technologically driven economic growth, they and others like them, are fated to lose the battle for a sustainable planet.

Entirely missing from Climate of Hope is an historical awareness that coal itself was initially considered a great boon to mankind in its ability to power machines that vastly reduced the levels of back-breaking labor to which many had been inured for centuries, quite apart from its miraculous ability to energize the economy and jump-start the Industrial Revolution. These impacts were thought to totally out-weigh the brutal circumstances of its mining and were embraced in complete ignorance of coal's long-term deleterious climate effects when burnt as a fuel, which were first identified at the end of the nineteenth century.

Now, production of photo-voltaic panels requires major inputs of energy and raw materials, including iron, copper and aluminum.  Indeed, the panels require greater amounts of iron per produced KWh than conventional sources of energy – including coal fired installations. They also require a number of exotic minerals such as Telluride, Indium, Cadmium and Gallium which are by-products of the mining of zinc, aluminum and copper. The benefits of solar energy almost certainly outweigh the negative impacts of the panels' production and land utilization, but the authors scrupulously excise any such considerations from their relentlessly upbeat survey. Other alternative energy strategies harbor deleterious environmental impacts which are entirely overlooked both in this book and in their euphoric public acclamation.

The authors do, however, document the very recent history of how ozone depleting CFCs, a class of multi-purpose industrial chemicals primarily used in refrigerant lines and aerosols, were replaced in the late 1980's with HFCs which have subsequently added greatly to the atmospheric release of carbon dioxide and which themselves are now subject to global banishment - a cautionary tale that should have tempered their enthusiasm for the other behavioral and technological fixes for climate damaging economic activities which they tout so enthusiastically.

They acknowledge the role of concrete production in adding to the atmosphere's carbon load, but blithely applaud infrastructure projects that feature massive use of the material. The Global Commission on the Economy and Climate estimates that the world will add $90 trillion in infrastructure by 2030. Much of that will be physically underpinned with concrete which currently contributes 5% of annual global anthropogenic CO2 production. The Commission further suggests that the level of today’s infrastructure will be doubled within the next thirty-five years: Bloomberg characteristically sees this as a financing challenge rather than the devastating source of aggravated CO2 production and of the eco-system destruction that it truly represents. As Carl Pope writes, in another context, “we need to get out of the nature-destruction business and into the habitat-restoration business”.

There is a great deal to be said for many of the initiatives which Bloomberg and Pope document in the on-going fight to restrain climate change. They chart progress in eco-system restoration projects throughout the world. Their plea for the capture of methane released in agricultural and oil production processes for use as a fuel is beyond reproach. Similarly, their documentation of efforts to reduce the use of automobiles and promote walking and bicycling is nothing but encouraging. They quite reasonably favor the city for its live/work adjacencies, as well as its more efficient utilization of ground space and energy because of its high rise apartments and concentrations of commercial and retail spaces.

But Climate of Hope remains relentlessly self-serving: it validates the continuing predation of the oligarchy whilst valorizing their selective support of green initiatives – the ones that, as Bloomberg candidly admits, hold the most promise of profit. It denies the reality that capitalism depends on economic growth – and that the planet likely reached the limits of sustaining that growth some decades ago.

What we need now is a similarly popular book, and perhaps a similarly popular and well-funded environmental non-profit (which might also adopt the imprimatur of John Muir) to serve as similarly relentless shills for the adoption of a new economic model of no-growth, one not addicted to technological fixes, and one that is fully compatible with the goal of keeping the planet in a condition which supports the vibrant mix of species in which they have evolved. Discontinuous environmental change, to which we are fated if the alteration of our climate and eco-systems is not checked, will inevitably pick favorites: humanity is not likely to be amongst them.

Full Disclosure: the book and an umbrella with a fabric rain canopy by the American designer Maya Lin (but made in China) were gifted to me at the end of the Sierra Club event. 

America in 3-D

There is a canyon on the island of Santa Rosa, just off the California coast, where the wild flowers, trees and animals appear strangely mannerist - they are distorted by their isolation from their fellow species on the mainland. There are uniquely evolved versions of miner’s lettuce, Indian paint-brush, cream cups, deerweed, California fuchsia, golden yarrow, woolly blue-curls and the native thistle just now flowering alongside Island live oaks, festooned with Spanish moss, which grow between ancient lichened rocks. In pools left by the tumbling creek, now mostly dry, tadpoles await their metamorphosis into Island frogs. Along the trail, overhung by both oaks and holly leafed cherry, Island foxes have left their scat and can sometimes be spotted, almost engulfed in dry grasses visible only as grey and russet shadows amidst the stalks, hunting their prey, the tiny Island deer mouse.

Ten thousand years ago, an Island pygmy mammoth might have lurched down the canyon and stopped to slurp at the tadpole soup before moving on to grind the dry grasses between its powerful mandibles, ever watchful of the surrounding chaparral where its only predator, a Chumash Indian, might be waiting for an opportunity to unleash his atlatl in one more instance of the relentless hunting that led to the species’ extinction.

It is here, in the Northern Channel Islands, sometimes known as America’s Galapagos, that there exists the opportunity to glimpse the next America. The Islands are contained within the country’s least visited National Park – where concerted efforts at restoration have begun to reverse the damage caused by over a century of sheep and cattle grazing and the careless introduction of non-native pigs and rats. The canyon of which I write is sufficiently steep to have been inaccessible to these marauding herbivores.

Like the pygmy mammoth, the Chumash are long gone, but some relict mainland populations retain aspirations to repopulate the islands, for it was on these lands that their tribe’s American story began. Legend has it that there appeared a rainbow bridge that led them across the channel and onto the mainland. Those that fell off the diaphanous span into the ocean below became dolphins.

The triple-threat of deglobalization, deleveraging and depopulation (3-D) as described by Ruchir Sharma, the Chief Global Strategist at Morgan Stanley, in a piece in the current Foreign Affairs (and elsewhere in his on-line publishing-empire), suggests there may be an opportunity for the kind of re-wilding originally proposed by Dave Foreman and newly elaborated by William Hawes (Counterpunch), as the economy slowly darkens and tunnels back into the past. Population, global trade and global borrowing statistics are being rewound as I write. Can humanity and its natural environment wait out the reversal of several centuries of the damage mercantile capitalism, industrial capitalism and now neoliberalism, have wreaked upon them?

The Channel Islands represent a strange example of these regressive but ultimately welcome trends: ranching has long been banished, its human and animal populations removed; fishing is prohibited in several sensitive areas and the native ecosystems are undergoing restoration. Politically, the Park is administered by a Federal bureaucratic fiefdom, the National Park Service, and a non-profit, The Nature Conservancy, which purchased the western half of Santa Cruz island after its owner abandoned fractious negotiations with the Park Service. Visitation is by permit enforced by paramilitary park personnel (they pack 9mm H&K P7M13 pistols), and its waters are patrolled by the Coast Guard, ever vigilant for drug-running ghost boats – purpose-built, high powered, all fiberglass, stealthy Picuda, which, lacking all navigation aids (the better to be invisible) sometimes mistake the western shores of the islands for the deserted coast line north of Santa Barbara, their intended rendezvous location.

The Islands rise up out of the ocean just beyond the Santa Barbara Channel, a vast gorge that runs parallel to the coast and is as deep in places as the Grand Canyon and which has always kept the islands separate from the mainland - even before the melting of the ice, more than ten thousand years ago and the dramatic rise in sea levels. During the last Ice-Age, the islands were one, known as Santa Rosae, an expression of the plate tectonics which birthed the transverse ranges that penetrate far into the mainland from west to east, across the lower half of the State. Now, with the Pacific having risen some one hundred meters over the last ten thousand years, only the mountain peaks remain above water where they are protected by cliffs, rocky beaches, almost constantly crashing surf and the aforementioned paramilitaries.

Looking back to the mainland, brick shaped vessels ply the shipping channel - giant constructions of containers and Korean-made tub-like hulls delivering the best of Asia to a big box store near you - their navigation route identical to the path of migrating hump-back and grey whales that they bump, brutalize and sometimes kill. Voyaging midway between the Islands and the mainland they represent the visible edge of America’s vast tangle of transportation infrastructure, its lines broached only by pleasure craft, Island ferries and fishing boats – most notably squid jiggers, manned by nocturnal fishermen who lure the giant cephalopods with bright lights into their basket nets and contribute to California’s largest sea-food export. 3-D may reduce both demand from Japan for California’s squid and our lust for the cheap goods from the Celestial Empire now desanctified as the Workshop of the World. It may also reduce the commercial jet traffic that plies the California coastal skies, criss-crossing or laterally connecting centers of population around the Pacific Rim.

Just across from the northernmost island of San Miguel lies Vandenburg Air Force Base which sprawls over Point Conception on California’s central coast. It is here that the 30th Space Wing is charged with launching military and commercial satellites, and stands ready to fire intercept rockets to take down missiles launched from North Korea. Its role may only expand as nationalism, isolationism and xenophobia rise in concert with the disruptive impacts of 3-D. The base is on lands rich with significance for the Chumash people and is reputed to be the site of ‘The Western Gate’ from whence Chumash souls ascend to Shimilaqsha, the western land of the dead. Now satellites are launched over the ocean in order that they assume the requisite north-south Polar orbit and may fall safely into the Pacific if their launch fails. (Situated on the westernmost point of California’s mainland, its beaches, like those of Santa Barbara, face south). While it might be argued that the U.S. Air Force are good stewards of the notional Western Gate and other sacred sites on their base (they maintain a full-time archaeologist on site), the ironies of the land’s current functions are almost overwhelming.

Both the Federal and private stewards of the Channel Islands also attempt to preserve remaining sacred sites, but decades of ranching have mostly destroyed the fragile remnants of native culture. Many other coastal Chumash sites are overseen by the various branches of the armed forces, the State’s largest landlord, where sacred power spots vie for psychic preeminence with the brute force of the military’s death culture.

The intensely braided global entanglements of the West Coast, along with the rest of the United States, will not give way easily. The depopulated Channel Islands represent comparatively neutral space, largely unencumbered by economic and political interests where the environment may recover sooner rather than later. On an altogether different timescale, a long term economic decline may be mirrored in a slowly devolving civilizational infrastructure on the mainland offering interstitial opportunities for a revival of the natural world.

An up-welling of privatization, militarization and a decline in democratic institutions as Federal authorities fragment into powerful semi-autonomous paramilitaries such as the A.T.F. (Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms), I.C.E. (Immigration and Customs Enforcement), the U.S.C.G. (U.S Coast Guard), the D.E.A. (Drug Enforcement Agency) and, Heavens to Betsy, even the N.P.S. (National Park Service), will likely accompany the social, economic and political disruptions of 3-D. It is a dystopian vision, but even on California’s Northern Channel Islands, rocky bastions of the re-emergence of a pristine wild environment, it is already foreshadowed.

Horror Show

To paraphrase Marx on the occasion of the accession of Napoleon III, the class struggle has created circumstances that have conspired to give the Presidency of the United States to a grotesque mediocrity – a reality-show host now surrounded by his family, a beautiful entrepreneurial daughter and her handsome real-estate developer husband, the First Lady (an ice princess from a distant kingdom), and a ten year old princeling, speculatively named Barron. Banished, fairy-tale (or reality-show) style, is second daughter Tiffany, reputedly to be sequestered shortly at Harvard Law School.

The President, his wife and young son retreat to their Florida chateau, Mar-a-Lago, on many weekends for family time within the make-believe society of their private club, where would-be knights and their ladies pay princely ransoms to become members and hob-nob (or curry favor) with the President and visiting dignitaries. Mother and young son spend quality time, perhaps, in the mansion’s brocaded rooms and wander the outlands of the ocean-view estate far from its formal gardens and they spurn too, the eighteen-hole jousting fields located just across the bridge in the ever-so-slightly louche West Palm Beach. Meanwhile, back at the White House, Jared and Ivanka hold court and ponder their nebulous responsibilities.

The Executive Branch has gone Regal. The Supremes and Congress stand idly by as a new Camelot emerges, the gilded kingdom now realized in the space-time of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Air Force One and a verdant estate on the southern spit of the moated Palm Beach. The First Family and its courtiers lightly hold the levers of power, as Arthur deftly wielded Excalibur over his fractured Kingdom, their roles both inspirational and ceremonial, while knights errant venture forth to manifest their President’s desire to slay the dragons of administrative power – clear in their mission of ridding the Federal Government of its role in bureaucratic management. Henceforth, it seems, the nation’s peoples shall live in an anarchic limbo where their livelihood is guaranteed only in the excessive acquisition of capital, its hoarding protected by the all-powerful caparison of the First Family.

The State’s vast military machine occupies a dark land where the villainous Mordred (now played by Mad Dog Mattis) hold sway, and is oft spurred into action - but only after receiving the imprimatur of the White (but lightly poached) Knight who draws the approbation of his peoples and obeisance from afar for his derring-do as the might of Empire creates havoc across the planet.

The nation’s citizens have been mostly lulled into acquiescence of this state of affairs by the historical majesty of the constitutional apparatus. There has been no revolution: only the slow movement towards an apotheosis, prefigured by the Royal houses of Bush and Clinton, whereby Democracy devolves into Dynasty. Now, another familial figurehead is wrapped in the flag, enrobed with the magical powers of the American myth, securely throned in the Oval Office. Without, an eligible child and a son-in-law lurk, terrifyingly available to continue the Royal line.

The Constitution of the United States is a document that, almost from the start was designed to facilitate Capitalism rather than Democracy, promoting, in the hands of its interpreters, the oligarchical enslavement of most of the population by a small elite. In its Declaration of Independence, the proto-nation asserted the role of government to be the facilitation of ‘the pursuit of happiness’ – a phrase which originally read ‘the pursuit of wealth’, until bowdlerized by Thomas Jefferson. This first version is a prescriptive for venal rapacity rather than its PG-rated replacement, which suggests a state of communitarian bliss: we all know how things turned out.

In Report on the Subject of Manufactures prepared by Alexander Hamilton for the congress in 1791, he is, as Leo Marx notes in The Machine in the Garden, 2000, creating a blueprint for the young Republic which aims at “maximum productivity, not as an end in itself, but as the key to national wealth, self-sufficiency and power”. At once a nationalist and a capitalist, Hamilton saw the United States as a corporate entity becoming preeminent among all nations based on its harnessing the economic power inherent in the nascent Industrial Revolution. Congress, the Supreme Court and the President have been dedicated to supporting the accumulation of wealth as a means and measure of National greatness ever since. Thomas Carlyle (who coined the term industrialism) is one of the thinkers contemporary to Hamilton who immediately understood that the addition of wealth to the Republic inevitably increased the distance between rich and poor, not least because, as Karl not Leo explained, half a century later, capitalist production relies on the exploitation of its workers.

A little more than two decades before the be-sashed and be-medaled Napoleon III was to rule over France’s Second Empire (1852-1870), William IV fulfilled his constitutional duty in Britain by wearing the crown (1830-1837). Real monarchic power lay with the institution and the fealty it engendered in the scattered multi-national kingdom of Great Britain, thus William’s subjects were somewhat forgiving of their King’s particular idiosyncrasies. Lytton Strachey describes him in his biography, Victoria, 1921, as,

“A bursting, bubbling old gentleman, with quarter-deck gestures, round rolling eyes, and a head like a pineapple, whose elevation to the throne after fifty-six years of utter insignificance had almost sent him crazy…He rushed about doing preposterous things in an extraordinary manner, spreading amusement and terror in every direction, and talking all the time”.

During his reign, however, when he is claimed to have said, ‘I feel the Crown tottering on my head’ significant strides were made in establishing a measure of democracy in the election of the members of Parliament through the passage of the Great Reform Bill of 1832, which quieted the revolutionary fervor soon to break out elsewhere in Europe in 1848. (Napoleon III also softened his despotic inclinations to similarly liberalize the French Republic). Yet, as Tom Nairn points out in The Enchanted Glass, 2011, his trenchant critique of the British Monarchy, the Royal family, ever since its reinvention in 1688, has tended to neuter radicalism by upholding the status quo, or in his words, has “again and again broken the political teeth of opposition by inducing…the Word of Regal Constitutionalism down its throat”.

A very similar phenomenon has occurred in the United States where, since 1787, the Constitution and the Flag have presented a formidable barrier to radical thought, let alone action. The quality of presidential leadership or the royal personage is almost inconsequential when weighed against the vast panoply of implied power - the majesty of either Britain’s un-written (but Royally underwritten) constitution or our own tortuously word-smithed, but now sacrosanct governing document.

London’s place as the financial center of the United Kingdom (and home to the Royal Family) with the north and west of England functioning as the productive outlands, and Wales, Scotland and Northern Island as the ever insecure periphery has established a geographical hierarchy that is echoed in the United States by the financial centers of the east and west coasts in their relationship to the flyover country of its productive heartlands.

Washington D.C., as the seat of presidential power, has now been extended as if by Presidential fiat from one drained swampland to another, but the White House - Mar-a-Lago axis immediately parallels the Atlantic and by this circumstance alone possesses a cosmopolitanism that will be forever be denied the river cities of the Mississippi, or anywhere else in the Heartland. As in London, this cosmopolitanism befits the power center of a (past or present) Empire where the urban fabric represents the reification of the capitalist ethos.

The ultimate irony in all of this is that it is the class struggle in America (reflected morphologically by the middle against the edges) that has resulted in a Presidency determined to demonstrate that the constitutionally mandated rejection of Aristocracy has run its course. Mr. President he remains, but the lack of a more distinguished honorific cannot disguise the Midas creep towards effulgent Regalism where Capitalism and Democracy, as Habermas has demonstrated over his long career, remain inimical to one another.

No matter, the people are comforted by the status quo: focused on the idiosyncrasies of turnip-head, they ignore the implacable forces of an institution carefully guarded by a legal framework, clearly working against their best interests. Can we doubt that they will welcome the accession of Ivanka or Jared in eight years’ time?

No Tomorrow or Fashion Forward

The dark subtext of the neoliberal economy, based as it is on a model of perpetual growth situated on a planet of finite resources, is that it is entirely unsustainable. This is not news. Yet in California, many continue to live as though there is no tomorrow perhaps because, as Joan Didion writes, “the future always looks good in the golden land because no one remembers the past”. This is a fine fragment of the glib, always a hallmark of the Didion canon, but writing in the seventies, she was well aware of legions of young people drawing heavily from the past in creating the Hippy lifestyle, and is shown in photographs from that era wearing the flowing long dresses that were emblematic of their culture. Today, although many of us continue to live avowedly in the present, the past has been resurrected by another cohort of loosely aggregated young people and they use their historical awareness to shine a light on the planet’s potential tomorrows.

To glance into the rear-view mirror (encompassing just this hemisphere) is to reveal past civilizations with fundamental flaws in their economic systems whose societies remained in complete denial of the day when those flaws might be exposed: where the future always looks good, until it doesn’t. We know something about these tomorrows that finally arrive, because archaeologists study them: our long-ago yesterdays, when civilizations were massively disrupted by sudden economic, societal and environmental collapse - so to begin, a jeremiad.

David E. Stuart, an archaeologist in the Southwest, and author of Anasazi America, 2014, suggests that we are now all Chacoans. By this he means that contemporary America resonates with the narrative arc of the Pueblo people who developed a successful society in Chaco Canyon, in what is now New Mexico, but which foundered, almost nine hundred years ago, on excessive attenuation of trade, income inequality and climate change.

The Chacoans devised a diversified economy which combined agriculture and hunting and gathering, which enabled them to prosper in the first millennium despite living in a desert region with less than reliable summer rainfall. Around 1000 C.E., the climatic conditions became more favorable and the Puebloans were emboldened to expand their agricultural base. Stuart writes, “Charcoan society could have used this reprieve to improve the lot of individual farmers and create incremental efficiencies, but it did not. Instead it chose growth and power”.

In their new territories they built ever larger great houses of up to four stories tall and sometimes containing more than six hundred rooms, connected to their home canyon by more than four hundred miles of roadway. Their trade network stretched from southern Canada to the Gulf of Mexico; and while the size, complexity and power of the society grew, so too did the disparity of wealth reflected in rates of infant mortality and average adult height, which varied by almost two inches between rich and poor.

Around 1090 C.E., a devastating five year drought led to widespread famine and the abandonment of many outlying farms. The Chacoan elite responded by creating vast new infra-structure projects which temporarily absorbed the un-employed farm laborers but did nothing to solve the underlying problem of agricultural productivity. A second major drought forty years later led to the unraveling of Chacoan society as more and more farmers fled their lands and joined an exodus to the uplands of the east. Stuart notes that within a generation, amidst sporadic warfare and plundering, Chacoan society had ceased to exist.

As Jared Diamond shows in Collapse, 2015, a similar process was at play in the downfall of the Mayan civilization sometime between the eighth and ninth centuries. Again, a prolonged drought, this time exacerbated by the deforestation necessary to the expansion of their agricultural lands, led to the abandonment of population centers in the central lowlands of Yucatan, leaving their cities and ceremonial sites to be swallowed up by the second growth of tropical and sub-tropical broadleaf forests.

The story of Easter Island (Rapa Nui) is almost too well known to bear repeating: suffice it to say that a combination of environmental depredations, notably a deforestation that may or may not have been connected to the transport of their giant ceremonial sculptures or moai, recurring rat plagues and the long term use of the palm forests as fuel, combined with the natural limits of their small island severely stressed the population long before the arrival of the first Europeans in 1722. Indeed, by the late seventeenth century, it is reliably reported that vestiges of a population that once approached fifteen thousand, had been tragically reduced to living in caves, eating rats and sharpening their obsidian pointed spears to ward off fractious neighbors. Whilst not quite the perfect ‘Green’ parable of a society willfully chopping down the last tree to serve the elite’s desire to out compete each other by the erection of ceremonial statuary - and suffering the consequences of soil loss and starvation - the decline of the Rapanui was clearly intimately entwined with the climate and ecology of their tiny bio-sphere.

For all our advanced technologies, it is highly unlikely that we are immune to similar environmental melt-downs: hostage to an economic system that must grow or die and living at a time of inevitable and potentially cataclysmic climate change, the possibilities for major societal disruption are clear. An increasing gap between rich and poor and the geographic segregation between the prosperous and the striving only heightens this potential for collapse. When many of our most promising youth are sold into the debt peonage of a frequently valueless college education lured by hopes and dreams seeded by the propaganda arm (comprising the government, the media and grade-school education) of a pervasive neoliberal ideology, the outlook looks bleak indeed. But out of this dire societal amalgam there has arisen a cadre of unlikely potential saviors: the hipsters.

Those who write of environmental catastrophism (and it’s a rich tradition) and its shadow of economic collapse are limning a dystopian future in order that it might be avoided. Others, in the charming small town that lies eight miles distant from my perch in the urban wildland, and throughout the planet in places inflected with a hipster sensibility, practice, or at least consume, arts, crafts and produce that are informed by a sophisticated awareness of a potentially blighted tomorrow.

They practice under the rubric of rustic modernism: ceramicists, woodworkers and weavers who deliberately eschew the glossy surfaces of high technology and employ primal techniques to shape earthy materials while others play with the detritus of civilization to create art. A friend salvages grain bags from a local craft-brewery which, artfully unraveled, make wall-hangings; and salvages drift wood from Rincon, a notable surf beach a little way up the coast, which she lashes together with sisal to create coyly utilitarian armatures. Still others hand-make soap or candles or practice permaculture. Medieval techniques of brewing, wine and cider making are revived in dank warehouses where once bright futures were imagined in distributing imported plastic consumer goods, electronic gizmos or nutritional supplements.

In these and other similar ways, this community plays out a limited version of the New Age - or the subversion of neoliberalism.  Within these creative, craft and agricultural realms there are attempts to find alternatives to a system fated to end in the apocalypse of environmental collapse; but while these artists, craftspeople, cottage-industrialists and market-farmers (and many of their customers) practice alternate economic and social behaviors they do so within a prevailing and constantly enticing economic system that threatens every act that is independent of its sway - and like an on-rushing ocean often obliterates their efforts like footprints on the shore.  

But their power of example remains immense: that they have assumed a position in the fashion vanguard of this country is hugely significant. On the one hand they are fully entwined in the meretricious machinations of a malevolent economic system while on the other they play creatively with the tropes of its destruction. Our future may well lie with these legions of the fashion-forward. Out of the rich soil of societal decay, this movement, of whom many are the spawn of society’s most prosperous, has arisen to offer ideas for our salvation.