Green Dreams

A friend asked me, ‘What is the one thing we must do in the face of the planetary crisis?’ My answer, ‘nothing’, was both a typically facetious response but also one that reflected my philosophical preference for inaction. Faced with an age when the ideology of progress has us all in its thrall, passivity offers a counterweight to the frenetic energy that drives our collective notions of futurity. Progress demands change. To deny it is to challenge an ideology whose development is precisely concurrent with the Global North’s capture of lands in the South where export crops were privileged over existing local, sustainable economies and where land-hungry settlers violently repressed or replaced native peoples. Cheap labor, even cheaper resources, generous doses of cut-rate exoticism and the historical revenues of slavery still underpin contemporary capitalism – the financial lynchpin of progress.

Modernity runs on progress, and progress, for the last two hundred and fifty years, has run on fossil fuels. Now, various predictions of disaster power many of our transformative urges. But a passive acceptance of the present, without straining to parse the future, offers up opportunities to reflect on the hard points within which we live our lives. It is these physical, biological, and statistical constraints that Vaclav Smil describes in, How the World Really Works, 2022. His book offers a rational response to the viral contagions spread by global climate catastrophists and the technological and behavioral antidotes they prescribe. Smil eschews predictions and notes their failures such as the nostrum of ‘Peak Oil’. Confidently forecast since the 1920’s it was hyped as an existential crisis between the 1990’s and the early 2000’s when dire forecasts of energy depletion prompted the Transition-Town movement which, for a decade or more, successfully promoted a boutique, pre-industrial, carbon-free, self-sufficiency. (Full disclosure: I dabbled in the movement shortly after arriving in Ojai, in 2010). Peak oil scenarios are now usually framed in terms of demand rather than supply and it is the demand side that is expected to peak mid-century.

Smil emphasizes the complexity and continuity inherent in both natural and industrial systems and the physical limits to their disruption. He suggests that basic strategies for reducing energy usage are more efficacious than prescribing a massive shift in sourcing energy – from fossil to renewables (sun, wind, hydro and nuclear). In other words, do not do much of anything other than practice commonsense economies in energy use. He singles out the improved insulation of buildings and incremental improvements in the efficiency of the combustion motors that power cars, trucks, ships and planes as key strategies. 

Smil emphasizes that industrial civilization (the fatal combination of Modernity and fossil fuels) remains entirely dependent on the energy density of fossilized biomass. The power to weight ratio of current and foreseeable storage batteries severely limits their application to heavy goods vehicles, where power demands would result in the weight of batteries largely replacing carrying capacity. Similarly, there is no likely electrical replacement for bunker-fueled cargo ships or kerosene powered passenger and cargo airplanes. Additionally, oil remains vital as a feedstock for the chemical, plastics, and fertilizer industries, and fossil fuels are essential to the production of the high temperatures required in the manufacture of steel and cement.

For some time now, liberals in the North have been scaring themselves to death with the terrors of global heating. The analog terrors of the green-house effect have been replaced by the digital palpitations of the parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. That metric stands at over 420, per the observatory at Mauna Loa, Hawaii, which represents a more than 50% increase over the pre-industrial levels of CO2 in the late eighteenth century. Despite the fear and trembling, there is no concerted effort to roll back the industrial civilization which is the proximate cause of that numerical escalation and its subsequent impact on annual, mean global temperatures.

There is good reason for this lack of revolutionary fervor. Much of the world would starve without the processing of oil because of its role in the manufacture of fertilizer and in the transportation of grain across the world’s oceans. Doing nothing (beyond nibbling at the softer edges of the fossil fuel/climate conundrum) turns out to be the most humancentric way forward. Excepting the radical ideology of Earth Firsters, where humans are not privileged over other life-forms, the fundamental hypocrisy of the green movement resides in their refusal to accept the consequence of massive famine in moving to a carbon neutral world.  

I would suggest that there is a global ethical responsibility to maintain the processing of methane (natural gas) into nitrogen rich fertilizers and to maintain the oceanic, fossil-fueled transshipment of grain to feed the world. As we approach a global population of 8 billion, this is no time to revert to pre-industrial agriculture, unless we are prepared for a massive die-off in the human species. Only a chemically and mechanically augmented agriculture can reliably feed the planet’s engorged population.  While we can collectively pursue a moderated birth rate, already in place in many industrially advanced countries, a global decline in population is only projected to occur after it peaks at 9.4 billion in 2070 before beginning a gentle decline to 9 billion in 2100.

As Smil and others argue, it is reasonable to presume that peoples in the Global South wish to enjoy the civilizational advantages of industrialization – which will inevitably increase their energy use. Ideally, those of us in the Global North can moderate our consumption and by example, moderate the aspirations of the Global South. But aware that it was their labor and their resources that enriched the advanced areas of the world which are now the most profligate consumers of fossil fuels, developing countries are more concerned with industrializing than in mitigating the climate sins of the North - even as visible sea level rise threatens their tropical islands in Micronesia, forest fires threaten their crops and homes across Indonesia, or storm surges destroy their mangrove swamps in the Sundarbans of Bangladesh.

In Bright Green Lies, 2021, Derrick Jensen, the ‘deep green’ propogandist, is typically adamant in his condemnation of industrial civilization. He notes that we have a zero-sum choice between its survival and the survival of the planet. But he suggests that the latter is possible, including its human population, if we attend to strictly human needs, not our luxuries, not our addictions, and not our industry and commerce. He does not broach the issue of feeding 8 billion people with an organic, pre-modern agriculture. Others have, however, and John Reganold, writing in the peer reviewed journal, Nature Plants, has found the rosiest scenario is that it is theoretically possible if the entire global population is vegan. This does not account for the distribution of food to population centers, although such a draconian socio-economic and dietary disruption might well include a Pol Pot style mass relocation of urban dwellers to the countryside. Reganold also bizarrely assumes a continuation of commerce and industry in which entrepreneurship and profit feature prominently.

Jensen, however, does make some useful observations with respect to the inherent inefficiencies of solar technologies, particularly regarding the discontinuities of solar and wind and the lack of available, economically viable storage systems. He also points out that building the infrastructure necessary to provide a sustainable energy supply will rely on the use of fossil fuels. As already indicated, many industrial processes will continue to rely on oil and gas, and chemical plants on fossil feed stocks. Egregious despoliation of habitat is already underway in the mining of the rare earth minerals and the copper vital to solar and wind technologies, their storage batteries or the electrical grid they will supply. The exponential growth of mining activity to service the global scaling of green energy will only further devastate the wildlands where these elements are sourced, and multiply the carbon footprint of the giant diesel-powered earth moving equipment that are the agents of its destruction. Along the way, Jensen systematically exposes the “Lies” necessary to a continuing belief in the “Green” miracles of Recycling, City Living, Hydropower, and more.

If the transition to a sustainable energy economy is a fiction, then perhaps it is appropriate that the Sci-Fi novelist, Kim Stanley Robinson, tackles the subject in The Ministry for the Future, 2020. The novel begins with a vivid description of a heat wave in the north of India where the wet bulb temperature scales beyond 35 degrees Celsius – a point where prolonged exposure results in death because the body can no longer use evaporative cooling, via sweat, to control its internal temperature. Wet bulb temperatures are a combined metric of heat and humidity measured by wrapping a damp cloth around a thermometer and reading the temperature at which evaporation occurs.

Death by heat and humidity is a commonplace in America. In 2021, seventy-two people died in Portland’s heat-dome event where temperatures reached 46 Celsius in high humidity. In Robinson’s novel, millions die in Utta Pradesh as the grid fails under extreme air-conditioner loads. This event finally spurs the political world into action, and he recounts the technological, bureaucratic, and financial machinations necessary to eventually lower atmospheric levels of CO2.  His future-world of moderate temperatures is achieved through geoengineering, an equitable social economy, solar powered dirigibles and sailing ships, humane animal husbandry, and permaculture farming.

Along with convincing examples of innovative technologies to meet the challenge of global heating, all grounded in real-world physics and earth sciences, Robinson resorts to the work of a deus ex machina in the shape of a network of eco-terrorists he styles as the Children of Kali. It is they who successfully bomb power plants, down jetliners, and destroy CAFO’s (Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations) – thus enabling him to write what amounts to an oxymoron: an ultimately optimistic Cli-Fi novel.

His work can be viewed as an elaborate up-dating of The Monkey Wrench Gang, 1975, Edward Abbey’s magisterial tale of eco-terrorism set in the early 1970’s. It points to the vastly more complex world we live in, fifty years on. We have moved from one fictional act of eco-terrorism to another. Putting sugar in the diesel tanks of earth-moving equipment poised to begin construction of the Glen Canyon Dam, on the Colorado river, seems quaintly antique compared to the downing of airliners with rocket propelled grenades.

But Robinson’s fictional, or Jensen’s hypothetical extreme measures may be necessary to pierce the veil of green hypocrisies which now camouflage the addition of solar technologies to the available industrial and consumer resources – all designed to enrich the few. Make no mistake, as Smil confirms, solar is an addition to, not a replacement of, current fossil-based energy consumption. Its promotion (including the production of electric cars) encourages a continuation of excessive resource extraction from an already beleaguered  planet. It is, in short, a classic neo-liberal boondoggle.

In the circumstances, doing nothing may well be an act of radical revolt against the overwhelmingly negative implications of further progress.

Life and Death

The open stanza of Les Murray’s poem, The Trances, runs like this:

 “We came from the Ice Age,
we work for the trances.
The hunter, the Mother,
seers’ inside-out glances”

 Murray’s work has been lauded throughout the English-speaking world, and for some time, he was in the running for a Nobel laureate. But few would deny that his work could be abstruse – far beyond the occlusion generated by mere poetic concision. Here, I suspect, he is referring to the end of the Ice Age whence humankind achieved a vast territorial and numerical expansion, and in which neolithic societies came together still partial to their Moon Goddess and their vision questing …

 In 1998, at the Poetry International Festival in Rotterdam, this Australian poet began his talk by declaring,

 “The continent on which I live was ruled by poetry for tens of thousands of years, and I mean it was ruled openly and overtly by poetry. Only since European settlement in 1788 has it been substantially ruled by prose. The sacred law which still governs the lives of traditional Aborigines is carried by a vast map of song-poetry attached to innumerable mythic sites. Each group ‘sings’ the tract of country it occupies, just as each initiated person sings the ceremonial songs of the holy places for which he or she is responsible within that territory. A person may unselfconsciously say ‘That Mountain is my mother: it is her ancestor and mine; it is the body of our ancestor, and the story we sing and enact there is her body. We are her body, too, and the songs are her body, and the ceremonies are her body. That is the Aboriginal Law.’”

Australian Aboriginals are a people inviolably enmeshed within their landscape: theirs is a profound understanding that the relatedness of all life is the consequence of its existence within a vast regenerative system, the Cosmos - which they model, not in theoretical abstractions, but in the lived terrain of their vast homeland. Modernity has greatly advanced our scientific understanding, but for most of us, our visceral experience of the Cosmos has atrophied. We have become estranged from its expression in our environment, and in our connection with the reciprocity of Life and Death. The acknowledgement of one half of this dyad, which, characteristically is call the Life cycle, dwarfs the other and cancels their reciprocity.

 As Aboriginal Law demonstrates, it was not always, and everywhere, like this. There remain glimpses of how pre-modern societies organize a more equitable consideration of the reciprocal elements of the regenerative cycle. These societies seem to enable their people to hold both parts of a conjoined reality in their heads (and hearts), at the same time. Life and death, Ken Wilbur suggests, can be seen as a vibration like an ocean wave - a sine wave representing a fluid movement from peak to trough in a singular, indivisible action.

A society’s interaction with the flora, fauna and the landforms found in its environment can promote an understanding of the cosmic process as a continuum, rather than as Modernity’s stop-start, binary model of endings and beginnings. 60,000 years of human habitation in Australia attests to the sustainability of this model.  Any society alert to its local environment on which it is manifestly dependent for its sustenance, will have a fuller understanding of life and death than a society in which money mediates and obscures how its food is obtained – which in either case, is inevitably through the death of other living organisms or their domestication to human needs. In the 21st century, when we, in the West, seek out the natural environment, it is often to have our experience of it construed by an Emersonian awe - to experience an enraptured psychological state. Modernity has sequestered nature – and within it, the inevitable processes of regeneration through death.

Robert Graves shows how the rituals associated with a mythological rather than a scientific interpretation of existence balance life and death in ways that are mutually enriching. Each aspect of the cosmic dance is celebrated in both their prosaic and sacred aspects: for Graves, the survival of this foundational cultural trope is achieved across time through the tradition of Romantic poetry which, in turn, is driven by the White Goddess as muse. He subtitles her eponymous book as A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth.

His central discovery, as he claims in a postscript to The White Goddess, is that, “the most important single fact in the early history of  Western religion and sociology was undoubtedly the gradual suppression of the Lunar Mother-goddess’s inspiratory cult, and its suppression not by the perfunctory cult of a Sky-god, the god of illiterate cattle-raising Aryan immigrants, but by the busy rational cult of the Solar God Apollo, who rejected the Orphic tree-alphabet in favor of the commercial Phoenician alphabet – the familiar ABC – and initiated European literature and science”. This casting out of a female deity that sprung from earth’s homely satellite, the pock-marked moon, and her replacement with a male god who personified an impossibly distant and austere dying star, began in the Middle East towards the end of the second millennium BC, and slowly spread across Europe.  The usurpation of the grounded, lunar presence that informed local cycles of planting, gathering, hunting, fishing, and ritual, as an object of worship, represented a shift from the terrestrial to the cosmic; from the programmatic to the theoretical.  It reflected a male egoic connectedness to the infinite, rather than an earthbound female bond within the instinctual id.

As Graves tells it,  

“Early in the sixth century AD, certain muscular Christians from Strathclyde marched south into Wales, and dispossessed the muse-goddess Caridwen, who had hitherto been served there by highly educated poet-magicians: supplanting these with untrained scalds and hymn-writers.”

But, in more remote parts of northern Europe, the Goddess cult survived well into the second millennium, and her expropriation was only fully complete with the onset of the Scientific Revolution in the mid sixteenth century. Today, we remain in the steely Apollonian grip of secular humanism. Dionysian chaos has been eschewed on all fronts: evident, most of all, in our relations with the natural world which, hitherto, fell somewhere amidst respect, adoration, revelry, reciprocity and which, above all, served as a modelling of the world’s process, a process to which we are all, eternally beholden.

In This Cold Heaven, Gretel Ehrlich’s achingly beautiful journal of her seven seasons in Greenland, she writes of Inuit hunters, early this century, desperately trying to keep the old ways alive in the face of incoming snowmobiles, high powered rifles, and GPS. Her friend Torben, a local anthropologist, argues, “The Inuit are modern-day stone age tool people who are born clever and smart…. We Europeans are becoming more and more primitive…we don’t know how to live well, as the Inuit do.” A friend remarks, “When you have been with those people – with the Inuit – you know you have been with human beings.” Ehrlich suggests that their innate humanity springs from their lives as hunters and gatherers. She understands their lives as lived existentially, uncontaminated by modernity, but enlivened instead by the threats of drowning, starvation, and sub-zero temperatures. It is a lifestyle framed by 16,000 years of shamanic practice - now in a precipitous decline after the European and Anglo-American Arctic explorations, at the end of the nineteenth century, first exposed the Inuit to modernity.

Like Ehrlich, a white Californian, the poet Les Murray, a white Australian, was born in a land transformed by settler colonialism yet which still possesses a relict indigenous population –survivors of thoroughgoing genocides conducted by the writers’ European ancestors. His analysis of a lost, elemental pre-modernity is sketched in his poem, The Meaning of Existence,

“Everything except language
knows the meaning of existence.
Trees, planets, rivers, time
know nothing else. They express it
moment by moment as the universe.
Even this fool of a body
lives it in part, and would
have full dignity within it
but for the ignorant freedom
of my talking mind.”

Ehrlich was born on Chumash land in Santa Barbara, and later purchased a 100-acre parcel in Hollister Ranch, where much of the original coastal sage scrub has been destroyed by large animal gazing and residential development. These were some of North America’s most densely populated indigenous lands where native villages were supported by hunting, gathering, a rich marine ecosystem and a spiritual practice profoundly entwined with the local environment – conditions that she found still extant in the northern reaches of Greenland.

Les Murray, who described himself as a “Subhuman Redneck who writes poems", lived in the country town of Bunyah in New South Wales’ mid-north coast – land that was originally dense, sub-tropical eucalypt forest before colonial grazing and lumber interests founded settlements of white Australians amidst these newly transformed landscapes. The town now hosts an Aboriginal Land Council, a belated and some would suggest, token attempt to support the rights of its indigenous peoples.

 Murray was inescapably influenced by both aboriginal culture and ‘the bush’, which in Australia denotes those infinite inland reaches across which its original people wandered. Murray noted that their culture was “carried by a vast map of song-poetry” (famously celebrated, in prose, by Bruce Chatwin). His poem celebrates the primordial while deprecating his own imprisonment within his ‘talking mind’: a mind conditioned by modernity.

Both writers find, in their respective geographic areas of literary interest, object lessons in the loss we moderns have suffered in our sensorial expulsion from the cosmic web. Both focus on primitive lands newly degraded by the appetites of the modern world. Mining for uranium began in Australia’s Northern Territory in 1954, and continues to this day, albeit under more restrictive environmental standards.  Along the Northwest coast of Greenland, where Ehrlich dog-sledded rhapsodically from village to village, two capital funds, ‘KuBold’, funded by Silicon Valley venture capitalists and ‘Breakthrough Energy Ventures’ founded by Bill Gates and funded by Bezos, Bloomberg and Branson, have initiated their initial explorations for the mining of cobalt, copper and nickel.

The West will not voluntarily renounce modernity. On an individual basis, however, Kathleen Dowling Singh shows in The Grace in Dying, how it is possible to regain a balance in our life by reanimating death within it. Absent an existentially driven connectedness to the natural world, we have become involuted, mentally solipsistic, isolated within our egoic primacy. She writes,

“It is the belief in the reality of the separate self that is the origin of suffering. It is the desires, both to have and to avoid, arising in the ego, the personal sense of self, that are the cause of human suffering. Desire both strengthens the belief in the mental ego and causes it pain. The origin of suffering is in the thought, I am separate.” She goes on, “The challenge of the dying process is the challenge of living while dying, rather than dying while living”. The separateness of which she writes, is bodily manifested in our isolation from the processes of the natural world.

Although unthreatened by the environmental extremes that the Inuit and the Australian Aboriginal daily experience, we now all face the common threat of Global Heating in which our ability to continue to flourish as a species is menaced by climatic violence. Dowling Singh exhibits a note of optimism in our spiritual evolution. “Our culture is witnessing a small but growing acceptance of the transitoriness of our appearance on this plane of existence, precisely because there is a small but growing insight into our Original Nature”.

Perhaps our ‘Original Nature’ can be reanimated by the undertaking of a mythic understanding of our world - driven by ritual considerations of Life and Death, and in which the global environmental cataclysm is fully enfolded.

The War

The War, to the Vietnamese and Vietnamese Americans, references their country’s struggle for independence and freedom from their imperial conquerors and would-be saviors - first the French and then the United States, in which upwards of five million of its citizens died. To the British, and to many Americans, the most definitive recent armed conflict remains the Second World War, when democracy was threatened by the Axis powers of Nazi Germany, Italy and Japan - their leaders, Hitler, Mussolini, and Emperor Hirohito, each considered evil incarnate.  Those fortunate not to have experienced a war in their homeland in the last 77 years no doubt continue to rank WWII as The War. Yet the United States has caused unparalleled death and destruction across the globe in that time and the recipients of its hellfire, like the Vietnamese, will have translated that experience into some kind of ranking of its importance in both their personal and national histories. Indeed, given the universality of war, all peoples likely have a sense of just which war has been definitive in their and their country’s recent history.

For the first time in my life as a post - WWII British child, and now as an American citizen, I am amending my personal ranking of global conflicts. The war in Ukraine has galvanized Europe and the United States into a paroxysm of blood lust – directed at the Russian Federation and its president, Vladimir Putin. This may be The War, it seems to me, that will prove to be the pivotal cultural, geo-political and military conflict of our times.

It marks, I believe, an epochal global socio-political and economic fracturing initiated by the demonization of Russia by the West. The poisoning of the relationship between the alliance of The United States and Europe (manifested militarily as USNATO) and Moscow was not inevitable. There was an opportunity, after the collapse of the USSR, for Europe and America to offer meaningful help to offset the unraveling of Russia’s communist social safety net that had, since the death of Stalin, assured its population of a minimum of food, healthcare, and education. In an act that would have recalled the Marshall Plan implemented after the defeat of Germany and Japan in WWII, bonds of friendship and cooperation might have been forged between the Russian Federation and Europe that ensured Russia’s allegiance to the West.  Instead, the U.S. and the World Bank introduced a vicious kind of neoliberal vulture capitalism that fed upon the ruins of the country’s rich mineral and industrial infrastructure leaving only a population with a plummeting life-expectancy, an ever-increasing dependence on alcohol and the creation of an uber-rich flock of global raptors - who picked the country clean within a decade while their extreme wealth and influence peddling have since destabilized democracies and real estate prices around the world. Understandably aggrieved, Putin, in power since 2000, has consistently sought other global alliances, culminating in his recent agreement with the Chinese.

Just as the Cold War was fostered to provide a continuing role for the Military Industrial Complex after the end of WWII, Russia somehow had to be resuscitated after the collapse of the USSR as a continuing military threat, otherwise wither NATO, and wither the egregious military spending of the United States? Maintaining Russia as a viable threat also assured the U.S. of a continuation of its exports to Europe, in sales of its egregiously expensive and dubiously effective hi-tech armaments. For the record, Russia produces cheaper, more dependable, battle-tested equipment, as is now evidenced in their Special Military Operation in Ukraine. Putin declines to call it a war because it is a war that the American Empire deeply desires - a proxy war with Russia that is blatant in its attempt to turn Ukraine into killing fields for the destruction of young Russian soldiers, never mind the collateral death and displacement of that country’s civilians. Biden sees an opportunity to reprise the tactics that supported the Mujahedeen in Afghanistan and turn the black soil of Ukraine into a meat grinder, the better to effect regime change in Russia. The comedian Zelensky plays along at the tragic expense of his countrymen.

There has long been a sustained effort to create a forward emplacement of advanced offensive weaponry on Russia’s south-western border by the USNATO consortium, which is effectively the military arm of Western civilization. The U.S. prepared the ground by spending many billions of dollars to turn the hearts and minds of Ukraine’s civil society against its traditional homeland of Russia and towards the West. And, in 2004 and 2014, it sponsored color revolutions that assured Ukraine’s political leadership was aligned with Europe (and NATO) rather than its eastern neighbor. Washington has faithfully followed the playbook established by Zbigniew Brzeznski in his book, The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives, in which he suggests that “Without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be a Eurasian empire.” Ukraine is central to Russia’s conception of itself as a Slavic homeland, integral to its Federation of Republics Territories and Regions. Ukraine, true to the literal meaning of its name, has long been a traditional border land vital to Russia’s security. Without it, Russia loses its historical identity as an Empire and it is thus that Ukraine is essential to the American Empire: because it is a prime choke point for Putin’s dreams of his homeland’s cultural and geographic integrity.

And yet it is now clear that resource rich Russia bodes to become a key player in a new global hegemon that will entirely eclipse the American Empire. The economic union of China, Russia, India, Pakistan, Iran and potentially Turkey, (tied together along China’s Belt and Road Initiative) and with the support of most of the rest of Asia, Africa and South and Central America will reduce USNATO to the military arm of a West Asian Bantustan impotently allied with a politically riven, ungovernable United States. Russia’s control of its vast energy reserves gives it the ability to pauperize the people of Europe and starve its industries. Furthermore, Russia can eschew the dollar because it can now demand rubles in payment for its oil and natural gas. By freezing Russia’s dollar reserves the U.S. has unilaterally destroyed the value of its fiat currency. Who wants to hold monetary reserves that can be frozen by the issuing bank?

Meanwhile, America, self-sufficient in oil and gas thanks to its fracking technologies, and still enormously wealthy, will remain comfortably air-conditioned.  But its long-term trade imbalance with China will inexorably weaken it. Militarily, it will be rendered impotent, dwarfed by the new hegemon headed by Russia and China.

I blame Hillary Clinton. It was she, along with her coterie of Democratic National Committee centrists, who refused to accept their electoral defeat in 2016. In an ironic twist on the Party’s inability to read the mood of the electorate – highlighted by Clinton’s characterization of those who supported the Republican candidate as ‘deplorables’ - it desperately sought a Deus ex machina that might explain their confounding loss. The two years leading up to the mid-terms of 2018 were spent in a sleazy campaign of personal vilification of the president (remember the Steele pee dossier?) and accusations of Russia’s meddling in the election through its manipulation of social media. In the event, the Justice Department’s Mueller Investigation into the President’s collusion with Russia turned out to be a damp squib and the Steele Dossier was discredited.

After regaining the House in 2018, Democrats were emboldened to initiate further Impeachment proceedings in 2019 when a new smoking gun was unholstered in the form of Trump’s attempt to leverage Military Aid to Ukraine for Zelensky’s help in gathering intelligence on Biden (in Trump’s sights as his potential 2020 presidential opponent) and his son Hunter’s self-serving dealings with some of Ukraine’s most notorious oligarchs (remember Hunter’s $85,000 a month gig with the oil giant Burisma?).

Never mind Trump’s ignominious rule as a racist, wannabe autocrat, and his stacking of the Supreme Court with right-wing stooges, the real fall-out from his four-year term was the relentless impugning of Russia as an ‘evil empire’, the stoking of a second cold war, the expansion of the military budget, and the complete trivialization of the Democrats – exposed as a party devoid of any vision for the 21st century beyond hapless recriminations for their defeat and gratuitous character assassination. As such it was perhaps inevitable that they would choose that aging bumbler, and international influence peddler, Joe Biden, as their standard bearer in 2020’s victory.

His victory, and the accession of Scholz in Germany emboldened Putin. The Russian leader now faces two old, weak, leaders who, in cahoots with the puerile Zelensky, believe they can bloody the bear’s nose. The two putative leaders of the free world have shackled themselves together as an emasculated ‘West’ in a newly dichotomous world.  

There has been an extraordinary suppression of free speech related to a conflict half a world away, in which the U.S. is not even a declared combatant. The Greek tragedian, Aeschylus, famously noted that ‘In War, Truth is the first casualty.’ In the first few days of this conflict, access to the Russian news sites, RT and Sputnik was denied on the web. Now, Scott Ritter, a decorated Marine Corps veteran and former chief UN weapons inspector who exposed the lies being promoted by the Bush administration and its mouthpiece the NYT, concerning Iraq’s supposed weapons of Mass Destruction, has had his Twitter account canceled – for attempting to expose the culpability of the U.S. in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Ten years after Bush II’s Iraq invasion, the NYT quoted him as averring, “Today everybody knows I was right. I was right about one of the most significant issues in modern American history. I was the only one who was right about one of the most significant issues in modern American history.”

Today, the NYT and Britain’s Guardian newspaper are mouthpieces for their respective country’s security services. It is impossible to trust their reportage – suffused as it is by blatant propaganda for, effectively, the American Empire – each supposed Russian war crime a reprise of the murder of 312 babies taken from their incubators in Kuwait, and long, long ago, other mythical babies skewered on German bayonets in WWI. Doubtless horrendous crimes are being committed on both sides. It is a war, despite Russian circumlocutions to the contrary.  Nevertheless, there remain stalwart journalists who I believe are revealing the truth in odd corners of the web. We are seeing, despite the blanket coverage of mainstream media beholden to the State, glimpses of an unfolding reality that will, I am convinced, to paraphrase Ritter, prove to be one of the most significant portents in modern Global history.

Magic

In Oak, I expressed the notion that magic has forsaken Ojai’s Upper Valley. It had undoubtedly existed, prehistorically, within Awhay, the Chumash village formerly located on the south side of State Highway 150, east of Sulphur Mountain Road, and at other less permanent Indian settlements scattered along the valley’s creeks and within its oak meadowlands. This magic, dispensed in ceremonies and rituals overseen by the Chumash ‘antap - tribal elders skilled in the practices of time-keeping, spiritual vision questing and healing – pervaded the local Native American sense of the world. So it was, that for the ten or twelve thousand years that Homo sapiens occupied this land, up until shortly after the arrival of the Spanish at the very end of the eighteenth century, we can speculate that Upper Ojai was singularly experienced, understood, and revered, as a deeply magical place.

But as I suggested in that post, this magic has been well and truly blown out of the tailpipes of the Harley Davidsons that now careen along the highway which runs along this fertile valley floor. Before that, it was eviscerated by the put-put of model T’s and by all the other appurtenances of Western civilization that have spread across the land over the last two hundred and fifty years. It has disappeared, to paraphrase Walter Benjamin, in the storm we call progress. It has been reduced to a nothingness by the relentless homogenization of time (to borrow another Benjamin trope) in which every moment is equivalent and empty of meaning in contrast to the cyclical, ritual and ceremonial time of pre-modernity that had pertained in Ojai, and indeed all of California, up until the moment of European colonization.

While it was the science that emerged during the Enlightenment that underpinned the logistics of the Iberian colonization project, its Christian emissaries represented a highly reactionary, distinctly pre-Enlightenment institution. It was the rites and customs of the church, its liturgy, that Spain’s Franciscan friars attempted to impose upon their subject population. This imposition included a ritualized Christian calendar which possessed a panoply of magic - in which the transubstantiation of sacralized bread and wine into the body of Christ was preeminent. This magic meant little, however, to a profoundly disrupted Native society whose settlements, along with their hunting and gathering lands, had been usurped by the Padres for their Missions, gardens, and grazing lands. The complex, life-giving relationship of the Chumash with their natural environment was upended – leaving the deracinated Indians little choice but to offer themselves up as slaves within the Mission system.

The frame of the world that the Franciscans brought with them to California was profoundly medieval. The sustainability of the Missions was based on Italian practices of agriculture that had existed before the Black Death in the mid-fourteenth century, where all labor was provided by local, indigenous peasants acting as serfs. In California, the Franciscans corralled its indigenous people both as souls to be saved and as serfs to labor on the Mission’s lands. As the salvation project foundered, the capture of indigenes, for their unpaid labor,  intensified.

Although Franciscan hegemony in Southern California was relatively short-lived, it nevertheless created the conditions for the genocidal destruction of the local tribal bands. In 1821, Mexico won independence from Spain and by 1834, the Franciscan infrastructure began to be secularized and its lands distributed as spoils of victory to Mexican grandees, generals, and political functionaries. There followed a period of Mexican rule characterized by the establishment of vast cattle ranches on the newly acquired tracts and it was here that Native Americans found employment as ranch-hands - under conditions of serfdom only marginally preferrable to life in the Missions. Then, in the fifty years after the establishment of California as a free, non-slavery state under the compromise of 1850, the Chumash people, and their magic infused language and culture, almost disappeared from the face of the earth in the vicious pogroms of slaughter, starvation, and enslavement that had become endemic throughout the state.

In 1884, Helen Hunt Jackson’s novel, Ramona, was published to raise awareness of the plight of indigenous Californians in an attempted echo of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 1852, which had contributed so greatly to popular anti-slavery sentiment. Instead, her work was misconstrued as further evidence of ‘The Romance of the Ranchos’ and, like her earlier nonfiction book, Century of Dishonor, 1881, it would have little impact on the fate of the indigenous population in California.  Despite the work of the legendary linguist and anthropologist, J.P. Harrington, who assiduously documented moribund Indian cultures between 1907 and the early 1950’s, and that of academics such as Alfred Kroeber and  Robert F. Heizer, the rich traditions of the American Indian were largely erased from the popular imagination until the widespread political and social ferment of the 1960’s and 1970’s, led to a proliferation of radicalized Indian organizations highlighted by an occupation of Alcatraz Island. Although initiated in Northern California, these events reverberated in the archetypal Southern Californian Hippie town of Ojai. Stripped of its revolutionary liberation ethos and its implicit demands for a return of ancestral lands, a fascination with the residual incandescence of Indian culture presented itself to this sleepy rural town, and across America, as an opportunity to inject some magic into young white lives made pallid by consumerism and political and social alienation.

In 1972, the British sociologist Colin Campbell developed the concept of the ‘cultic milieu’ to explain incidental communities of truth seekers testing systems of alternative knowledge, spirituality, and artistic expression. Situated within a valley formed between the magnificent peaks of the Santa Ynez Range and the heavily oaked slopes of the Sulphur Mountain Ridge, Ojai exudes the sacredness of the natural world. As such, the area has long been considered a vortex of spiritual awakening. It was this psychic allure that drew Theosophists to establish their Krotona community in 1924, when their original settlement in Beechwood Canyon, Los Angeles, was threatened by increasing development in Hollywood. Founded in 1875 by the Russian émigré, Helena Blavatsky, who claimed to be a ‘missionary of ancient knowledge’, Theosophy was based on ideas of universal brotherhood, the equivalence of all major religions in their seeking of spiritual truth, and the occult transmission of information from ancient masters, or Mahatmas, via the ‘astral plane’.  

In 1889, Annie Besant, the divorced wife of an Anglican vicar, newly liberated to circulate amongst London’s upper-middle class bohemian society, published a review of Blavatsky’s The Secret Doctrine, which laid out the tenets of Theosophy. Shortly afterwards, having met with an ailing Blavatsky, she published her pamphlet, Why I became a Theosophist. Adopted by Blavatsky as her heir apparent, she travelled to India as President of the Theosophical Society In 1893.

In southern India, she joined Charles Leadbetter who had been instructed, over the astral plane, to search for the Society’s ‘World Leader’. On a lonely beach in the city of Madras (now Chennai), Leadbetter espied the ethereal, prepubescent Krishnamurti who was bathing in the ocean, and declared that he was to be the vessel for the coming of Krishna, Lord of the World. Adopted by Besant and Leadbetter, Krishnamurti and his brother Nitya were sent to England in the years before WW1, to complete their educations. Nitya successfully attended Cambridge University while the otherworldly K, as he was by then known, repeatedly failed the Oxford entrance exam.

In 1922, both men were invited to Ojai by a wealthy Theosophical family in the attempt to cure Nitya’s terminal tuberculosis. That year, sitting beneath a pepper tree on McAndrew Road, K began to receive the Holy Spirit in a racked and tortuous process that lasted many days and nights. He emerged, declaring,

I am the lover and the very love itself. I am the saint, the adorer, the worshipper, and the follower. I am God.

Some seven years later, deeply conflicted by his role as the Messiah, Krishnamurti renounced the Theosophical Society and the Order of the Star, which served to promote his teachings, and announced that,

Truth is a pathless land … Truth being limitless, unconditioned, unapproachable by any path whatsoever, cannot be organized; nor should any organization be formed to lead or coerce people along any particular path … I do not want followers, and I mean this.

Nevertheless, for the rest of his life, K continued to speak around the world, explain his philosophy in numerous books and audio tapes, and visit Ojai - the place where he believed he had been filled with the Holy Spirit -on an almost annual basis until his death here, in 1986.

The early presence of Theosophists, and Krishnamurti’s regular gatherings beneath the oaks of Ojai, between 1922 and 1985, formed the foundation of the town’s cultic milieu. Subsequently, the exploration of alternative spiritual paths, the practice of alternative health modalities of body and mind, as well as a long-established connection to L.A.’s film industry creatives, have built upon this foundation. Within this cultic milieu, there also remains a connection to the indigenous people through a continuation of local shamanic traditions, echoes of the effulgent hippie era, and the presence of Chumash tribal members in the valley.

Magic requires a supportive environment in which to do its work. Despite the strong proclivity towards enchantment shown by the sub-set of Ojai’s population that forms its cultic milieu, residual magic that might linger in the valley is vitiated under the oppressive weight of modernity. This condition was diagnosed by Max Weber in 1917, when he suggested, “The fate of our times is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization and, above all, by the disenchantment of the world.” The ‘Disenchantment of the Modern World’ now constitutes a significant academic trope.

Michael Salen, in Modernity and Enchantment, 2006, suggests that “pre-modern wonders and marvels have been demystified by science, spirituality has been supplanted by secularism, spontaneity has been replaced by bureaucratization, and imagination has been supplanted by instrumental reason.” Ojai, like much of the world, is now entirely removed from those ‘wonders and marvels’ which were found embedded in occasions of communal transcendence that characterized societies in the West prior to the Enlightenment - the era that initiated modernity.

The wonder of California is that it remained in a pristine pre-modern condition until 1769, when it was first sundered by the arrival of the Spanish, despite earlier coastal incursions initiated in the sixteenth century, in voyages led by Cortes and Cabrillo and by the British sea-captain, Francis Drake. But four decades of Franciscan assault, backed by squads of Spanish soldiers marshalled under Governor Don Pedro Fages, then the arrival of Californios (civilian settlers of Spanish and Mexican descent) and finally, the American takeover of California, finally led to its destruction.

Most of the three hundred thousand men who had arrived in Northern California for the Gold Rush quickly fanned out across the State, wildly seeking profit, after production collapsed in the early 1850’s. Lacking community, and unconstrained by ritual, ceremony, reverence, or regard for life beyond their own, these pioneers of the 31st state exulted in their destruction of California’s web of indigenous people, flora, and fauna. For  the next several decades, this violence blossomed across the land and all but extinguished the magic inherent in our Valley.

It is Ojai’s cultic milieu that now holds space for its eventual return.

Rain

The pre-classical Thunder-God, the Oak King, came through for Southern California in December of 2021. Following the driest rain year for almost a century, from October 1st 2020, to September 30th 2021, when scarcely 5” fell in the Ojai valley, the local rain gauge at the Summit Fire Station recorded 13 ½” inches in the second half of December, making the season total, thus far, a very respectable 15.62”. Our house, on a south facing foot slope of the Topatopas traditionally receives slightly more rain than measured at the fire station which sits on the broad Upper Ojai valley floor.

My entreaty to the Oak King, embedded in the final paragraphs of the previous post, that, “He rattle his oak-club thunderously in a hollow oak and stir our lightly chlorinated pool with an oak branch” - a mild adaptation of Graves’ description of the rain-making ritual in The White Goddess - was answered on the day after Lorrie and I left to fly to New York. We were away for almost three weeks, but we followed the progress of the storms on Ventura County’s Public Works rainfall map.

Now returned to the property in Upper Ojai, I have seen my first peony flower of the season, an early reminder of the revival of life that occurs in the chaparral with the arrival of winter’s rain. This morning, on a run up Sisar Canyon, I took note of what passes for fall color in Southern California. Sycamore leaves have turned a deep rust red, those of the cottonwoods a brilliant yellow-gold, while the willows are clothed in mottled green and yellow. It is only the deciduous trees of the local riparian plant community that parade the vibrant colors of their leaf decay. In the chaparral, winter is predominantly a season of green, and its characteristically verdant shrubs and dwarfish trees have all been freshened by the season’s rain.

The recent storm represented the first substantial rainfall since the 2018-2019 season, but in that year the moisture fell onto soil blackened by the Thomas Fire of December 4th and 5th 2017. Nevertheless, the spring flowers of 2018 and 2019 were remarkable, highlighted by masses of phacelia grande, whispering bells, and the native antirrhinum, rose snapdragon. These and other fire followers have now retreated to their respective seed banks beneath the chaparral crust to await the next conflagration - in which the newly grown shrub canopy, which customarily shades the shrubland’s floor, is destroyed again to reveal a sun that nurtures the sprouting of the dormant seeds.

The east slopes that rise up beyond the house are covered with a mix of ceanothus, chamise and mountain mahogany. Of these, only ceanothus crassifolius relies on the seed bank to regenerate, rather than stump sprouting, and has thus been the slowest to regenerate. Last spring, I saw that its seedlings were recolonizing the slopes, but many of the new plants perished as the drought took hold. The survivors now have a chance to establish a sufficient root ball in the well-moistened soil to assure their maturation towards drought tolerance.

The La Niña weather pattern, which oscillates with El Niño and a neutral condition, that emerged in October 2021, will be around well into spring 2022, and typically produces a drier than normal winter. The remaining weeks of January are predicted to be dry. Last year, the traditionally wet month of February produced not a drop of rain. All thanks to the Oak King for the December deluge, for it has assured us of a tolerably wet winter in which we have already tripled 2021’s meagre rainfall.

While I was away in New York, I read Gilbert White’s, Natural History of Selbourne, 1789, a book to which my father often referred, and which was a fixture in the lead-lit glass fronted bookcase in our living room in darkest Surrey. It shared shelf space with William Cobbett’s Rural Rides, 1830. Both books represented work by a local author concerned with his environment and who wrote in an episodic or epistolary manner. Both featured fine print and the unmistakable must of ages and were of little interest to me as a youth, yet I now understand that in this blog, Urbanwildland, I have been channeling both writers.

This past year, having eschewed the political and social implications of the Trump years in posts which were recognizably aligned with the work of Cobbett, I reverted to the original goal of simply writing of my local surroundings on Koenigstein Road in Upper Ojai. Writing in England, in the second half of the eighteenth century, White had similarly parochial goals. But his collected writings, in letters to friends, of the flora and fauna of his rural village in Hampshire, not so very far from where I grew up, became, in 1785, one of the very first natural histories that possessed a rigorous, eighteenth-century scientific method. His was the age of Linnaeus, of close observation of the natural world and its classification into types or classes. It was an age that celebrated particularism rather than a holism and was forged in reaction to the magical, mythological, and spiritual tropes which had defined previous centuries.

A quarter of a millennium later, we head, if our survival as a species is to be assured, back toward the pre-modern – toward an epoch in which humankind is humbly reunited with an environment no longer viewed as a resource for its hubristic goals of self-aggrandizement, but as a non-hierarchical element within a swirling cosmos which, as Graves attests, is indeed best understood in terms of myth and magic. In The White Goddess, he describes how the pre-historic, pre-classical, classical, medieval, and pre-modern worlds were rendered in number, shape, color and myth such that the seasons were measured within a richly imagined and symbolic natural world – a world animated by a panoply of Gods that were named, re-named, re-sexed, and doubled, over the millennia.

Up in Bear Canyon there is a single track that continues after the unpaved extension of Koenigstein finally peters out. The path is threaded with tributary streams, which ran dry in November but are now running again, until it reaches the creek.  At the crossing, there is a carpet of gold and white-gold leaves spread around a grove of cotton woods that line the steam. The winds have reduced the trees to fine traceries of branches that stretch beyond their pale, slender trunks. Splashes of gold remain in the trees from leaves too small to be blown away. Each fallen leaf is a brilliant yellow-gold on its upper surface and a creamy white on the underside. Occasional splotches of vestigial chlorophyll remain on some and many are veined brown with decay at their edges. The fallen leaves ruffle softly as I run through them and step over the still drought-diminished creek.

Oak

It’s mid-November and the sun is moving resolutely to the south. Or so it appears, as the earth makes its elliptical circuit around its energy source. Case in point: last evening the sun set over the western end of Sulphur Mountain, and as it dipped below the horizon it seemed to be sliding down ​an escarpment somewhere close to Casitas Springs. Sulphur Mountain is more ridge than mountain – a disjunct piece of the Santa Ynez Mountains which run west to east from Jalama Creek in Santa Barbara County to Santa Paula Creek where it flows under State Highway 150, right by Thomas Aquinas College. The creek then doubles back under the highway and remains on its eastern side as it travels towards the Santa Clara River.

It is the eastern nub of Sulphur Mountain that turns the creek back upon itself. Somewhere, on another page of this blog, I likened the Santa Ynez Mountains to a dragon, its tail rising out of the ocean at Jalama and its head rearing up at Santa Paula Mountain. If such an image has any resonance, then the spine of Sulphur Mountain can be seen as its tongue which, at this time of the year, wreathed in the fire of a setting sun, is apparently consuming the westerly landscape.

There are, of course other indications of a change of seasons, but temperature, here in Southern California, is not reliably one of them. Today, it was 98 degrees Fahrenheit in Ojai. Nevertheless, leaves of the sycamores, walnuts and willows are turning an orange-gold; monkey flower (Mimulus aurantiacus) and the native currant are in bloom and grasses are pushing their way out of the dirt. Moribund clumps of native bunch grasses and deerweed are flushed with new growth. Three weeks ago, we received two and a quarter inches of rain – the first of the season. Confusingly, it’s spring in the Chaparral! But, on average, it is indeed cooler. At night, we cover the pool to retain the last of the summer’s heat and we are swimming in seventy-degree water deeper than ever into the fall.

Chaparral is intrinsically drought tolerant, but last year’s miserly harvest of six inches of rain must, even by its low expectations, have been truly shocking. Goldenbush (Isocoma menziesii) and coyote brush (Baccharis pilularis) are reliable pioneers of climax chaparral, and they have volunteered at the edges of our random restoration of previously trammeled land, but several specimens have now expired in the face of … well, let’s face it: global warming. Some of the new, post Thomas Fire ceanothus have given up, after quietly sprouting during the winter season of 2018 - 2019, when we received almost thirty inches of rain.

The oaks, however, endure impassively. As a species, they have done so for sixty-five million years. What does that mean in geologic time? Where, in the post-Pangean world of drifting, newly fissured land masses did the oak first appear? And, what do they have to do with the Chicxulub Crater in the Mexican Caribbean?

Modern humans (Homo sapiens) emerged in southern Africa about 200,000 years ago having evolved from the hominid line that separated genetically from Apes perhaps eight million years ago. In the vastness of time that precedes the rise of humanity on planet Earth, our arrival can be considered very recent history. That vastness has few humanly resonant markers beyond the Cretaceous – Paleogene extinction event which occurred sixty-six million years ago and triggered the death of seventy five percent of all plant and animal species on Earth, including the charismatic dinosaurs.

Plant life was forever changed by the abyssal twilight into which the Earth was plunged following it’s collision with an asteroid which cratered an area we know as the Yucatan Peninsula. The indigenous communities of Chicxulub Puerto and Chicxulub Pueblo now occupy that long ago ground zero. Sometime, in the million years after the dust, earth and rock storm encircled the globe, the oak evolved from within the beech family and opportunistically established itself in the southeastern corner of an amorphous land mass comprised of the incipient continents of Asia, Europe, and North America. The genus Quercus would go on to flourish and, using its novel strategy of wind-borne pollination, spread throughout a northern hemisphere still suffering from massive impoverishment of its flora and insect life.

The oaks that now live on north facing slopes and along streams in the chaparral are evergreen coast live oaks, Quercus agrifolia.  On other chaparral slopes, dwarfish scrub oaks persist, mostly Quercus berberidifolia. These are amongst the 130 odd varieties that grow in the mountains of Northern Baja and Southern California. In their conquest of varied terrain and climate the oak has acquired an adaptability based on small changes in their genetic code. This penchant for hybridity is evident within the patch of the Topatopa foothills where I live. There are several live oaks of distinctly different physical character, some, indeed, scarcely credible members of their species. One gnarled and misshaped genetic accident we know as ‘old shaggy’.

Over the summer, we had Jonas McPhail’s crew trim up some fifty odd oak survivors from the 2017 Thomas Fire. We lost perhaps a dozen oaks on the night of the conflagration, while others have succumbed in wind and rainstorms over the last few years. As recently as last Spring, a fire-damaged oak keeled over into a seasonal stream that parallels our driveway. Despite losing a major limb and lying prostrate along the stream bank it continues to push out new foliage. It was trimmed back judiciously, and we will await the verdict on its long-term viability. An arborist’s rule of thumb suggests that a shadow of premature death hangs over severely fire weakened trees for a period of four or five years.

Native oaks are renowned for their ability to withstand the ravages of fire. Many of our trees had been burnt before 2017, certainly all those of sufficient age were charred in the Ferndale Fire of 1985, and others perhaps, burnt before 1898 when fire records began. The Ranch Fire of 1999, which began about 500 feet from our western property line, left the land unscathed but driven by north easterly winds it burnt nearly 5,000 acres and threatened much of the East End in the lower valley.

* * *

Robert Graves in, The White Goddess, A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth, 1948, writes of an ancient pre-classical Thunder-god, “Known variously as Zeus, Tantalus, Jupiter, Telamon and Hercules … He performs an annual green-wood marriage with a queen of the woods, a sort of Maid Marion. He is a mighty hunter and makes rain, when it is needed, by rattling an oak-club thunderously in a hollow oak and stirring a pool with an oak branch”.

His term is strictly prescribed. “At mid-summer, at the end of a half-year reign, Hercules is made drunk with mead and led into a circle of stones arranged around an oak, in front of which stands an altar stone … Bound with willow thongs, he is then flayed, blinded, castrated, impaled with a mistletoe stake, and finally hacked into joints on the altar-stone … His Joints are roasted at twin fires of oak-loppings, kindled with sacred fire from a lightning blasted oak.”

The centrality of the oak tree evidenced in European mythology reflects its importance in the social, economic, and ritual life of ancient peoples. The last surviving balanoculture (an acorn-centric society) examples of which had once straddled the globe’s temperate zone, existed in California into the early twentieth century. Locally, it is still possible to see the lower branches of ancient oaks that have been bent low by the Chumash peoples to afford the simpler harvesting of acorns, and mortars ground into sandstone boulders by their griding acorns can be found across wilderness areas favored by local tribes. Oak groves still exist as relict groupings in the once densely forested oak meadow lands that favored areas below the drainages of chaparral covered hillsides. Yet historically, it is exactly these lands that have been most prized for agriculture, housing and commercial development. In the cities, towns and farms of Ventura, oaks now only survive in odd corners, protected by the County against further wanton removal.

It is a grouping of oaks in the northwest corner of the land that first attracted Lorrie and me to our property. I remember seeing a large boulder set in the grove that I imagined as a sacrificial altar. My visions of mid-summer’s revels I now find bloodily confirmed in The White Goddess. The oak remains as a fantastic relic of Druidism where it formed a pivotal role within the ancient realm of trees. In Europe, it was a part of a folkloric alphabet of divination and timekeeping where each of the thirteen tree-consonants represents a particular lunar month. Graves shows that the name for ‘oak’ means door in many early European languages, including Sanskrit, Latin, Greek and Hebrew, and its role as the month of the mid-summer revels is to act as closure to the first half of the year and provide an opening to the second. Thus set in the middle of the thirteen consonant-months, the oak serves as a hinge. In the Chumash lunar calendar, June was known as ‘the month when things get divided in half’.

As the year draws to a close, and the season of winter festivals begins, the oaks of Upper Ojai have great need of a mighty hunter who makes rain. May he rattle his oak-club thunderously in a hollow oak and stir our lightly chlorinated pool with an oak branch retrieved from the superfluity of boughs that lie still beneath our trimmed trees.

Sadly, thunderous rattling, these forlorn days, is only likely to arise from a Harley Davidson careening along the State Highway which bifurcates the oak’s magic-forsaken valley.

The Ethics of Architecture

The Industrial Revolution transformed building from a craft using local materials built by hand into a mechanized process dependent on a global supply chain, and, at least in the West, is now built by hands manipulating machinery. Architecture purports to give this process meaning beyond the utilitarian, but when all construction, artful or not, is subsumed within capitalism, it is pursued with a greed that now imperils the planet.

Today, those who practice architecture’s arts and sciences are engulfed within the Anthropocene, an epoch characterized by epidemic, species extinction, a human population ballooning towards eight billion, rampant destruction of habitat and, most pernicious of all, runaway global warming and its evil twin, ocean acidification.

In these circumstances it is an intrepid author who braves the subject of ethics in the profession. The finer points of morality in this and so many other pursuits now have all the relevance of moving the deck chairs. The iceberg is visible, although slowly melting, and our fate is sealed. Yet the orchestra plays on. Now, Mark Kingwell offers us a diverting entertainment in, The Ethics of Architecture, 2021, the first volume in the Oxford University Press series, ‘Ethics in Context’.

My context is as follows. I am an almost retired, recovering architect living at the Wildland Urban Interface in the foothills of California’s Santa Ynez Mountains between two small towns: one, named Ojai, dependent on the tourism based on its spectacular mountain scenery and its intact early twentieth century, Spanish Colonial Revival shopping arcade; and the other, Santa Paula, reliant on the agriculture and oil of the Santa Clara River basin in which it lies. Both towns offer broad access to the Pacific coast some fifteen miles away in the City of Ventura.

The ethics involved in building replicas of the mission style architecture which originally arrived in California in 1769, with the Franciscans and their posse of Spanish troops, have lately been clarified. The statue of Fr. Junipero Serra, the founder of the mission system in California, and thus intimately involved in the genocidal destruction of the local Indigenous peoples, was removed from Ventura City Hall in 2020. His image has also been expunged from the County seal. But the architectural tropes that are the signifiers of the mission style remain much in evidence and will, at least in my mind, be forever associated with that genocide. Sixteen miles to the east, the eclectic architectural riches of Santa Paula reflect its history as the headquarters of the Union Oil Company and as the hub of the surrounding agribusinesses.

Kingwell suggests that the first question the ethical architect must answer is, “who do you work for”. Ojai’s arcade was commissioned by a Chicagoan glass manufacturer who made the town a part of his ‘Romance of the Ranchos’ fantasy - entirely distanced from both the local realities of the decimated, deracinated and impoverished indigenous people and the low-wage Latinx farm workers who labored (and whose decedents still labor) in the nearby orange groves. Entrepreneurs of early twentieth century oil exploration, and those who first destroyed local grasslands and riparian habitat - one of the last refuges of the surviving native population - to farm mostly luxury fruits and vegetables, were the clients who commissioned Santa Paula’s array of finely wrought commercial buildings.

In lands as highly contested as the United States, the ethics of architecture are a weapon in the hands of competing interests. Kingwell acknowledges as much, when he writes, “All social space is suffused with meanings and agendas, the very stones and walls a kind of testament to the ongoing struggles for liberation and justice”.  The local small-town buildings to which I have referred are now besmirched by contemporary standards of wokeness. Their historical realities are deprecated as a part of a greater awareness of the horrific depredations of settler colonialism and of the price paid, in a society fueled, then and now, by fossil biomass and fed by an industrial agriculture that responds to profit rather than the need for human nutrition.

My context is more than the two quaint, historic towns that bracket my existence amidst the chaparral, at the very edge of the 220,000-acre Sespe Wilderness. It also embraces my proximity to Los Angeles, about seventy-five miles down the coast. To get there I drive through Santa Paul to Oxnard, a light industrial and farming community that runs between the Santa Clara River delta and the City of Ventura. The link road to the Pacific Coast Highway takes me across a richly fertile sedimentary plain, a portion of which has just been sacrificed to the Gods of Consumption as the site for an Amazon Fulfillment Center. The historic Sakioka Farm (the Japanese formed the second wave of Agricultural workers in pre-war California) was acquired by Amazon in 2020 and now a behemoth has arisen in the shape of two concrete tilt-up buildings laid end-to-end that stretch for half a mile across the plain. They are bordered by a hundred or more acres of graded and drained land that will serve as a car park for its workers and, who knows, perhaps as an auxiliary portal for Bezos’ Blue Origin spaceship.

Fed by a supply chain that winds through China’s emerging belt and road system which will then travel across the Pacific to the Los Angeles container terminal, where goods will be trucked up U.S. Route 101, this enterprise is a triumph of laissez faire, let-the-market-rule neoliberalism. The energy footprint of the building and its proposed contents is incalculable, notwithstanding the field of rare earth Chinese photovoltaics on the building’s roof, backed-up by ranks of lithium cobalt batteries below, all built on the backs of open-pit mine workers oceans away. The engineers, construction managers, and perhaps an in-house architect, all checked their ethics at the door, as did the City Council that proclaimed this as a huge win for the people of Oxnard by adding nearly 1,500, soon-to-be-replaced-by-robots, low-wage jobs to the community.

All this is pertinent because my context, like that of the future workers at the local Fulfillment Center, and all the inhabitants of the surrounding region, is also one of frequent wild fires, floods, drought, water shortages, power outages, debris flows, and periods of extreme heat, all of which can be attributed to rising atmospheric levels of CO2. While Kingwell acknowledges levels of risk, predominantly in the global south “where large chunks of the earth’s population daily face material challenges unknown to the rest of the world” he does so as a self-admitted, “global globetrotter of a certain vintage, luckier than most”.

Primarily ensconced at the University of Toronto, which sits on land of the Huron-Wendat, the Seneca and the Mississaugas, the author is not entirely immune to the negative manifestations of late modernity. He prefaces his book with an essay on the impacts of Covid-19, provocatively titled ‘Plague Cities of the Future’, but the delightfully erudite and gracefully written chapters that constitute the main body of his work disavow any sort of existential alarm at the beleaguered condition of the planet - much of which is attributable to our predilection for pouring concrete (his favorite architectural material), our massive consumption of carbon laced fuels, our often extravagant lifestyles that depend on acquiring cheap goods from across the world, and for eating industrially farmed cheap food.

Ethical positions within the United States are in a constant process of reassessment. Nowhere is this more evident than in the arena of environmental justice. The industrial poisoning of front-line communities continues. As reported in the Journal of the American Institute of Architects (Architect, September 2021), the U.K. multi-disciplinary group, Forensic Architecture, has studied an area that spans Louisiana known as ‘Death Alley’ where plastic and oil processing plants produce some of the nation’s most toxic air resulting in an abnormally high incidence of cancer, pulmonary and other diseases, amongst inhabitants of neighboring residential districts.  These petrochemical facilities are predominantly built upon former sugarcane plantations where the informal graves of African slaves, who died in service to their putative owners, are now sequestered - creating a palimpsest of racism. As Jill Lepore reports, (The New Yorker October 4, 2021) African American graveyards are routinely developed for construction projects across the South creating what she calls an “apartheid of the departed”. In 1990, the passage of the Native American Grave and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) ensured some protection for the graves of Indigenous Peoples, but no such protection is afforded the graves of African Americans. The construction development process is initiated in a site evaluation, a process which architects customarily manage. As Kingwell suggests, any reasonable self-enquiry of “who do you work for” must embrace the goals of environmental and racial justice.

This country’s infrastructure program is at least partly based on the enrichment of the design, engineering and construction industries which routinely use federal funds to create carbon bombs – projects which liberate massive amounts of greenhouse gases while creating new urban developments, roads, bridges, seawalls, and dykes - all hardened to mitigate the very impacts they propagate. This irony is largely missed on Capitol Hill and likely does not feature in any ethical enquiry undertaken by the professions who undertake the program’s implementation. Ethics in Architecture is a timely reminder of the professional responsibilities of those charged with making the world a better place through their thoughtful interventions in the built environment. But as I have indicated, contemporary standards of mechanized construction, which involve catastrophic levels of embedded energy, like steel and concrete, use profligate amounts of industrially harvested wood, plastics, gyprock, and off-gassing synthetic polymers, renders almost all building antithetical to personal and planetary well-being.

The eighteenth-century liberal ideals upon which this country’s political system is based, and to which all its citizens are expected to pay obeisance, were the philosophical justification of modernity as the epochal successor to the stifling hierarchies of aristocracy. But modernity was, and is, a project built upon the subjugation of the peoples of the global south and on the environmental rape of their lands. Understandably, as an elite, liberal academic, Kingswell seems entirely more comfortable discussing early twentieth-century modernism in literature and architecture than broaching the ethical dissonances afforded by the heinous legacies of the last six hundred years of Western civilization. He concedes that life is now '“shot through with commitment to the goods and services of the global economy” and that “we are capitalism made flesh”. Yet he seems unwilling to delve too deeply into the historical conditions that created this condition.

Instead, the author gleefully embraces the notion of progress, the engine of modernity. He applauds the innovations which were built upon the Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century, began to be fully manifested in the Industrial Revolution of the nineteenth, and were then refined under the fertile conditions of global war in the twentieth, and have now led us to the cusp of A.I. in the twenty-first. He is a fan of the future. He embraces a ‘post-human’ scenario in which we meld our biological selves with an electronic carapace that communes with our ‘smart’ environment.

His final ethical concern, expressed in an, ‘Epilogue: Afterthoughts, or Thoughts After Walking’, is the uneven distribution of the future, as diagnosed by the science fiction writer, William Gibson. This techno-optimist’s solution? “Let’s distribute the future more evenly …” Amazon are doing their bit: 1,200 Fulfillment Centers are currently under construction, across the United States.

Fading to Sepia

I am in my comfort zone. Everything around me is falling apart. I am suffused with the warm and fuzzies, bathed in the sepia tones of my childhood, luxuriating in the precipitous decline of a great Empire and contemplating the end of the world.

I grew up post-WW2, in the still beating heart of the British Empire. There was a grocery store chain called ‘Home & Colonial’. Our butter came from New Zealand, cheese from Australia, tea from India and tapioca from Africa. The slightly scruffy, pre-war red cloth-bound atlases we used in primary school had their inside pages awash in pink - the color that signified land that lay within the British Empire. As school boys, our thoughts remained in the clouds of glory that trailed from the Second World War – our heroes were commandos, fighter pilots and Navy captains portrayed on still predominantly black and white film, and described in children’s comic papers such as  Lion (literary home of WWII Spitfire ace, Paddy Payne) and the young-adult novels of W.E. Johns, who immortalized Biggles, an ageless pilot who flew everything from the Sopwith Camel in WWI to the Hawker Hunter, a British post-war jet fighter.

These were strange times, when the decaying Empire still fancied it had a future –poignantly epitomized in Eagle - the comic paper home of the intrepid British space explorer, Dan Dare, and when a sporty British bicycle was named Blue Streak, after a short-lived and short-range ballistic missile that was to be the launch vehicle for Britain’s independent nuclear weapon.

The imminent collapse of Empire was apparent after WWII when Britain faced the new global reality of transcendent American military, political and financial power. Its evident decline was nevertheless cushioned by the creation of the British Commonwealth, in 1949, as a familial, supranational organization – the official legatee of Empire. It was based on economic agreements, sporting contests, a nostalgic allegiance to the throne, and made coherent by a shared heritage of colonial occupation.  The organization continues to be celebrated for its equanimity rather than and its belligerence and affords the Queen and other members of the Royal household myriad opportunities for demonstrating multicultural noblesse oblige.

On May 23rd. 1953, Edmund Hilary, a New Zealander, and Tenzing Norgay, a Sherpa (a transnational ethnic minority with roots in both Nepal and India, the latter being the largest country in the Commonwealth), become the first climbers to reach the summit of Mount Everest. A little over a week later, on June 2nd, a new Queen was crowned. The celebratory bonfire in our tiny village on London’s distant southern fringe remains faintly in my memory while she remains on a beleaguered throne – the myth of monarchy and my memory both much dimmed by circumstance and time.

The conquering of Everest and the Coronation generated vast media attention throughout the English-speaking world. The hoopla was only eclipsed, sixteen years later, when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the moon – as part of the Apollo program initiated by Kennedy in 1963. These spectacles may forever stand as the climactic acts of the dying Empires they each honored.

The military defeat that sealed the fate of Britain as a declining, second-rate power, was Suez, where Britain, France and Israel failed in their attempt to reassert control of the canal, in the fall of 1956, after its seizure by the Egyptian nationalist upstart Colonel Nasser – a humiliation of which Eisenhower remained a passive observer. This lives in my memory as convoys of Land Rovers, armored personnel carriers, and tanks, all painted in desert camouflage, trundling through our village en-route to Portsmouth for their shipment to the Middle East.

The decline of the American Empire has similarly occurred under my entirely innocent gaze, bookended by its defeats in Vietnam and now in Iraq and Afghanistan. Full Disclosure: I was subject to the military draft in Australia in 1970, the only Commonwealth country to offer support (in a non-combat role) to the Americans in their proxy war with the Vietcong. In the event, my number did not come up. In further disclosure, I would have cheerfully submitted to the administrative warrant had its shadow fallen on me, not enticed by the spurious glamour of battle, early inculcated as noted above, but because of a profound historicist curiosity about the ways of the world.

The central facts of the 20th Century are these: the last-gasp wars of competing
European Empires that had arisen in the nineteenth century devolved, by the mid-twentieth, into a titanic ideological struggle between socialism and capitalism resulting in the eventual triumph of an epic global materialism. This was largely facilitated by the technological advances that were achieved under the duress of the century’s hot and cold wars. A quarter century after the end of WWII, the totalitarian impulses of its primary protagonists, Left (Communist) and Right (National Socialist), were co-opted by a neoliberal ‘center’ that emerged in nations of the West inspired by the work of the Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek. Hayek believed that the unfettered operation of the ‘free market’ offered the only alternative to The Road to Serfdom, the title of his first book, published in 1944 and written in the shadow of the Anschluss. By the end of the century, that alternative was fully revealed as the tyranny of late capitalism.

As Wendy Brown shows, neoliberalism, the ideological engine that drives twenty-first century capitalism, undermines both politics and democracy. Politics functions as the ideology’s entertainment division - the opium of the middle classes. The faux drama of combative political parties and fiercely antagonistic political personalities is set within a construct that attempts the emotional and intellectual commitment of a powerless population suborned by the deceitful mechanism of voting. This charade is endlessly documented by the lamestream press - the WaPo and NYT, the broadcast Networks, CNN, MSNBC, and most insidious of all, NPR and PBS. The toxic sludge that settles out from all this bloviation dulls the senses and terminally irradiates the critical faculties of those who follow the sad saga of our make-believe democracy - rendering them entirely receptive to a process Chomsky called Manufacturing Consent, by which the governed concede their agency to the oligarchy.

The British Empire reached its apotheosis in the nineteenth century, but its long decline spanned two world wars in the twentieth. In the post-war period, ruinously indebted to the United States, the realization dawned that its job was to divest itself of Empire and fashion a national mission in keeping with its modest scale, limited economic power and slightly out-sized cultural influence. Its procrastination over joining the Common Market (as it was initially known), its subsequent never very whole-hearted membership of the European Community and now the living hell of Brexit have left it vastly weaker. Its position as the hub of a fifty-four nation Commonwealth, along with a soap-opera Royal family remain as the last vestiges of its former glory.

America’s abyssal arc is clearly less advanced than that of its former colonial master, but the country’s humiliating retreat from Afghanistan is an indicator that this formerly imperious political and military power is now woefully inadequate to the task of combatting the exigencies of terrorism, religious fundamentalism, tribal solidarity, asymmetrical warfare and the fortitude of those it attempts to grasp within its materialist thrall and wrap in its empty rhetoric of democracy and human rights.  

Then there’s the end of the world … Our thoughts of the future are now clouded by the climate crisis and the sixth extinction although the prospect of nuclear annihilation, for old time’s sake, remains a menu option. Nostalgia offers refuge, but we are regularly prodded instead, to consider actions that might ameliorate our terminal condition and to support a transition from the burning of fossil biomass to clean and sustainable solar energy.

But this transition, which is clearly underway, involves using vast quantities of oil and gas to build the new energy infrastructure composed of tons of concrete, steel, aluminum, copper, plastics, glass, and rare metals. As such, it is very appealing to those who benefit from an ever-expanding energy economy that will, as an inevitable consequence, hasten all those deleterious impacts that the transition is supposed to mitigate. It is, in short, a classic neoliberal boondoggle.

As Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, understood, the rampant growth of technology has destroyed the old compact between humanity and its environment. As we contemplate the fate of Biden’s Brobdingnagian infrastructure bill, let us cherish the weeds that grow at the edges of our roads and runways; let us celebrate the rust that consumes our bridges, railroads and ports; let us cheer every crumbling building entwined in roots and vines. For it is in a revival of times past amidst the decay of the present that we may find a way towards a sustainable future.

Nostalgia can be reified – acted upon and made manifest. We can return to an age of muscle, water and wind power. We can relinquish our individualist, materialist values and reassert the primacy of communal and spiritual principles in the ordering of our societies. We can sustain ourselves by collectively fading to sepia - renouncing power-hungry digitized simulacra and reinvigorating our sense of wonder in the world.

Or - drought, fire, flood, famine, and the wars of dying Empires, as they vie for the last of the planet’s resources, will likely force upon us a far bleaker future.

Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution, Wendy Brown, 2017

Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, Noam Chomsky, 2002

Bear Canyon

I have just completed the wearisome journey that is the reading of Peter Matthiessen’s book, The Snow Leopard, 1978. He documents a trek into that mystical borderland of Dolpo (hidden land) on the Himalayan edge of the Tibetan Plateau. The expedition was undertaken with the naturalist George Schaller in the early 1970’s.

His is a journey into the still center of the human storm – a path pioneered within the Taoist philosophical tradition that emerged in the Paleolithic. He travels into the deep structure of the cosmos in the mountain landscapes where Tao, or the way, was originally revealed to ancient sage-masters. This is the reason he traveled to Nepal rather than remain in Manhattan where he had established his practice in his own zendo with a small group of fellow adepts - to delve further into what David Hinton calls “a primal cosmology oriented around earth’s mysterious generative force.” Nowhere, by virtue of its spiritual tradition, iconography, poetry and painting, is that ‘mysterious generative force’ more legible than in the sacred mountains of the Himalayas.

Matthiessen’s spiritual journey, begun in America, is made fully manifest in the dizzying altitudes of the Himalayan passes. Trekking along vanishingly narrow mountain ledges between medieval hamlets, stupa, and Buddhist monasteries (gompa) in the gathering cold of autumn, he lived on little more than lentils, a few eggs, a scavenged yak’s neck and occasional shots of mountain-still arak. He roughs it, along with George and their motley band of unreliable porters and taciturn Sherpa, sleeping in flimsy tents or in the shelter of stone sheep pens. Above the tree line, across snow fields, along river, gorge, and canyon, his experience of flora often limited to lichen and of fauna to occasional sightings of relict blue sheep and wolves, his senses are overwhelmed by the lithic majesty of the Himalaya rising into the crystalline empyrean.

Collections of prayer flags, cairns, and sometimes a stupa, erected across the ages by traders, herders and pilgrims, in thanks to the gods for safe passage, greet Matthiessen as he treks through the high passes. These ad-hoc mountain shrines mark both his geographic progress and his advancement along his etheric, spiritual path. They also act as prods to his intention - to be submerged in the moment.  This temporal engagement is furthered by an itinerary that imposes withering physical demands almost totally unmediated by material comforts or leavened by meaningful social contact. George is an absent companion, busy observing the local sheep and investigating their genetic proximity to mountain goats.

This story of extreme tourism is lightly foreshadowed by the likes of David Livingston, Sir Richard Burton, Ernest Shackleton, and T.E. Lawrence, who traveled and wrote during the great age of European colonial adventuring.  Matthiessen jets into Kathmandu from New York City and begins his journey into the Himalayas whilst shifting, culturally and materially, from the twentieth century to the Middle Ages. He travels in search of personal spiritual gain rather than material exploitation, or nationalist expropriation, but he cannot be entirely absolved of charges of cultural voyeurism, nor from Western paternalism. Enthralled by his sublime writing I experienced a powerful sense of place - only slightly addled by the knowledge that Dolpo lies within a continent that has long been caricatured by the West as redolent, “of antiquity, romance, exotic beings, haunting memories and landscapes,” a cartoon that Matthiessen subtly embellishes with this tale of Eastern mysticism.

A world away, running up Bear Canyon, in the foothills of the eastern Santa Ynez mountains, as it emerges beyond the detritus of wildland-urban housing, cattle pastures, and avocado ranches, I am unguided by markers, for the most part, beyond a single track pounded into the earth by the passage of black bears and now occasionally tended by my removal of errant rocks, twigs and foliage. This and every spring, however, it is signaled by the chaparral’s floral sentinel, the torch-like blossom of Yucca Whipplei - our Lord’s candle – which rise intermittently along the northwest face of the canyon.

Survivors of the rainy season’s antithetical drought, they have now seeded in gnarled green globules, each the size of an elongated walnut, ascending in antic pattern along the spines of the dead blossom. These pods will desiccate and drop their seed in the fall, leaving a display of dry husks along a stalk anchored by a spine-tipped rosette of blade-like leaves. In simpler times, W.S. Head recounts that during, “…the years when the Model ‘T’ Ford touring automobile was the predominant family car, the proud yucca stalks were lashed to sides of cars, after the traditional Sunday drive. The yucca was usually shown to friends but was in the trash by Tuesday.”  I harvest a yucca late in December, and entwined in a string of white Christmas lights, the dead, dried and bleached yucca remains in a corner of our living room over the winter festivities. The prayer flags of the Nepalese mountains are shredded by the near constant winds, cycles of freeze and thaw, and faded by a sun unfiltered by pollution; yet like our yucca, it is in their senescence that they are most highly venerated.

Dolpo is bordered to the north by the Tibetan plateau which has an average elevation of 4500 meters. Sparsely populated with barely one person per square mile, the ‘Roof of the World’ harbors the planet’s largest reserves of fresh water beyond the polar regions. Edged by the great mountains of the Himalayas to the south and the Gobi Desert to the north, its indigenous people have, for millennia, steadfastly resisted the encroachment of Chinese civilization. Some have chosen to flee and settle in the Himalayan region of Nepal or, like the fourteenth Dalai Lama, have trekked across the mountains to find religious refuge in Dharamshala. Others have discovered ways to continue their pastoral traditions - unburdened by Han Chinese cultural oppression - in Ladakh, a territory tucked away in the far northeast of India.

America’s Great Basin, which occupies most of Nevada, southern eastern Oregon and about half of Utah, functions hydrologically like the Tibetan Plateau. It is bordered to the west by the Sierra Nevada, where its highest peak, Mt. Whitney, rises to 4,421m - puny compared to the Himalaya’s Everest, which is more than twice its height. Nevertheless, the Sierras effectively block drainage from the Great Basin where precipitation, mostly falling as snow, drains internally and evaporates into salt lakes or flows into vast underground sinks. Unlike its water, which remains forever trapped in the high desert, its pre-historic peoples, predominantly the Shoshone and Paiute, expanded into richer ecosystems beyond the basin. Their migrations included journeying west over the Sierras into the fertile lands enfolded between the mountains and the sea – now California. This ethnographic dispersal from an increasingly inhospitable environment echoes the Tibetan plateau’s Buddhist diaspora, the Sierras offering considerably less resistance to the flood tide of humanity than the Himalayas. 

Locally, the indigenous people of Bear Canyon were a part of the Chumash grouping of tribes that first arrived via the ‘Kelp Road’ – Jon Erlandson’s term for the coastal waters that lie off the west coast of the continent south of the Bering strait - where cool artic currents foster an ecosystem based around the giant seaweed which provided a familiar life-support system for the voyagers. Around 15,000 years ago, they settled on the Channel Islands before expanding onto the mainland across the narrow strait, a journey subsequently enshrined in myth as a passage across the ‘Rainbow Bridge’. Much later, In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, many of their descendants attempted to escape the ravages of European settlement by moving inland to areas populated by the Paiute.

It has been perhaps a century and a half since indigenous people could be seen along the Bear Canyon trail with gathering baskets filled with chia, acorns or soap plant roots. The grizzly bears that shared the trail left shortly afterwards, hunted to extinction – the last of the Pleistocene megafauna. In the Himalayas, Matthiessen and Schaller are obsessed with seeing the snow leopard, the rare mountain cat that stalks the Dolpo region. Amidst patches of snow, rock, edelweiss, blue gentian and dwarf rhododendron they search in vain for this immensely charismatic animal which, from obervations of it in captivity, Matthiessen describes as having, “…pale frosty eyes and a coat of pale misty gray, with black rosettes that are clouded by the depth of the rich fur.”

Yucca Whipplei are not prayer flags. The foothills of the Santa Ynez Mountain range are not those of the Annapurna. But the mountain lions that shadow the local hills are as elusive as the snow leopard; and Bear Canyon offers similar opportunities to be engulfed in the “…all-pervading presence of the Present,” that sublime connection to the generative force of the universe which Matthiessen sought as he trekked along the high mountain trails of Dolpo.

He and I share remarkably similar Tibetan Buddhist mantras in our attempts to quiet the mind: he to prevent his thoughts wandering into the prosaic complications of his life in the twentieth century, and I from the minutia that cloud mine in the twenty-first. The feel and sound of our footsteps are, I suspect, not so dissimilar, connecting us to each other and to the enduring tradition of venturing into the wildlands - where cultural hubris is entirely extinguished, and the Tao beckons.

Om Mani Padme Hum…

The Snow Leopard, Peter Matthiessen, 1978

Hunger Mountain, David Hinton, 2012

The California Chaparral, W.S.Head, 1972

Orientalism, Edward W. Said, 1978

Sisar

Since I began running chaparral trails regularly in April 1999, I have made it a point of honor to run directly from my house. For the nine of those years that I lived in Santa Monica Canyon, Will Rogers State Park, which effectively constitutes the north western wildland border to the great urban presence of Los Angeles, was close enough to count as being on my doorstep. For the past dozen years in Upper Ojai, I have lived at the Wildland Urban Interface, which in practical terms means that a short run from the house enables me to access the Sespe Wilderness, a part of the Los Padres National Forest.

After the Thomas fire, however, my old route across the hills west of Koenigstein, that took me to a precipitous slope down to Sisar Canyon, just north of the first creek crossing, became untenable. Missing the hand holds provided by chamise, mountain mahogany and ceanothus branches that bordered the declivity, this section of my trail (almost no one else ever used it) had become a charred chute, booby-trapped with newly exposed rocks, roots and fire-loosened earth.

 I returned to check on its status about a year ago and found that the chaparral had taken the opportunity to obliterate this section of the trail. I eventually picked my way down the slope but failed to establish a new, viable route. Now, my honor be damned, I drive the mile or so over to Sisar and then run two and a half miles to the ‘look out’ which projects south over the upper valley after a steep climb out of the canyon. The real payoff, in terms of view, is not the residential and agricultural details of the valley below, which reveal themselves south from the lookout, but the recto verso experience as one turns to retrace the route. Beyond the wooded canyon to the north east, the spalled rock faces of the Topatopas rise out of the chaparral with an emphatic majesty.

This northerly view offers an opportunity to experience what Peter Linebaugh calls the ‘pre-existing condition’ – nature unburdened by the state and potentially available for the commingling of human labor by which our physical sustenance, spiritual connection with the sublime and societal relationships have long been achieved. In other words, an opportunity to be aware of the raw power of an unmediated natural world which, for most of humankind’s existence, has provided for our means of survival.

Although within a ‘National Forest’ and under the jurisdiction of the U.S. Forest Service, the Sisar trail, while gated, is largely unpatrolled and thus essentially ‘unburdened by the state.’ This republic, and the bureaucracies that do its bidding, are constructs of modernity and reflect ideologies that reach back at least as far as the European Renaissance. It was this era, based largely on a revival of Greek anthropocentrism, encapsulated in Protagoras’ dictum that ’Man is the measure of al things’, which led directly into the development of Humanism and the Scientific Revolution both of which depended upon an idealization of consciousness that imagined it disengaged from the natural world. In this essentialized form, the human mind flattered itself that it was capable of the ‘rational’ study and exposition of that world. This perverse conjuring of human sentience – set against an inert backdrop of the non-human - remains at the root of modernity and functions as the defining trope of Western civilization.

Marx introduced an antidote to this idealism by developing an understanding of humans as historically shaped by their material conditions rather than their floating free, as the independent, sine qua non of terrestrial existence. This perception arose during an era in which mechanical contrivances, such as the steam engine, which were the practical applications of newly acquired scientific knowledge, disrupted the last vestiges of that pre-modern comingling of human labor with an enveloping natural world to which Linebaugh refers. As Andreas Malm has noted, mills driven by the essentially free motive power of falling water were quickly replaced by those powered by steam whose location was based on the availability of cheap labor rather than hydro-geomorphology.

The inevitable subtext – fully comprehended or not – of a walk (or run) up Sisar, or any consciously ‘present’ experience of the wildland is the dialectical relationship between one’s consciousness and the flora, fauna, micro-organisms, and the geologic and atmospheric conditions that, broadly speaking, constitute the environment through which one is passing. Such ratiocination does not depend on the extraordinary, such as the Topatopa view, although its majesty is undoubtedly an adjunct to the expansion of awareness, but it can also be realized in the minutiae of plant life, the markings of the seasons, the ruffle of the katabatic wind that streams down the canyon early morning, the behavior of birds and other fauna and, indeed, in the geological processes that generate the reality of the rock and soil beneath one’s feet.  It is, however, the phenomenon of the Topatopas, embedded on the southern flank of the Santa Ynez mountain chain, that most often provokes within me this highly caffeinated jolt of existential enquiry. Any such disquisition depends on the level of engagement with the natural world one is willing to risk. Total engagement will, I suggest, inevitably shake lose one’s allegiance to the ideological foundations of modernity.

This relationship between human consciousness and the wild is at the core of most ‘nature writing’ of which this blog, over the last decade or so, has often been a humble exemplar, and is echoed in its masthead tagline, ‘Reintegrating Human and Wild Cultures.’ It is also the subject matter of a great deal of my reading. Dipresh Chakrabarty reaches back beyond the Renaissance to note that human history and natural history were forcibly separated at the birth of civilization which began to develop about ten thousand years ago at the end the geologic era known as the Pleistocene. As the planet warmed, farming became a viable means of subsistence and led to the rise of cities in the riverine settlements of the Middle East, and eventually to the development of the major world religions which established humans as the exclusive vessels of spiritual essence – a quality previously taken to exist throughout Creation.

Modernity, which began to emerge five or six hundred years ago, further severed western consciousness from those vestiges of animism that had survived in the medieval world. Now, in the twenty-first century, the long process of our species’ alienation from the natural world is beginning to be reversed, at least partly because nature, hitherto taken to be a reasonably stable back drop to human activities, has been profoundly disrupted by our burning of fossil fuels for a quarter millennium, and most egregiously, post 1950. We now understand that our species’ survival is contingent on adapting to the wildly unpredictable consequences of climate change and to be thoroughly co-mingled with the fate of all other terrestrial life forms – whose plenitude is diminished daily as our bloated population takes its toll of extraction, exploitation and extinction.

Running, early morning, through the riparian woodlands bordering Sisar creek, I silently name check the spring flowers: monkey flower, California everlasting, yellow pincushion, Solanum, Antirrhinum (pink snapdragon), virgin’s bower (the native Clematis), Eriodictyon (yerba santa), morning glory, white sage, chaparral yucca (Our Lord’s candle), deerweed and poison oak, and note the exuberant foliage of mugwort, waiting to flower in a few weeks’ time. I listen for the muffled hoot of the great horned owl, the doleful coo of the mourning dove and the chirpy notes of the chaparral wren-tit - its song sliding down the musical scale – amidst a dawn’s chorus of indistinguishable avian chatter. Oak, walnut, bay, and sycamore shade the trail, and as you begin to rise out of the canyon, Cottonwoods reach for the sky, beyond the riparian canopy. Their temerity was punished by last fall’s violent santa ana winds which have left many snapped mid-trunk, their fallen limbs strewn across the creek.

Thomas Berry, a leading twentieth century cultural historian and spiritual philosopher, intuited a return to a more democratic devolution of spiritual essence, succinctly noting that the “universe is a communion of subjects, not a collection of objects.” The native American writer, Robin Wall Kimmerer, of Braiding Sweetgrass fame, bemoans the lack of a “grammar of animacy that might acknowledge the autonomy of plant life”. The massed wildflowers along the Sisar trail, energized by the opening of the canopy following the Thomas Fire and nourished by the nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, calcium, magnesium, and sulfur released by its ash, demonstrate a life-force that demands an appreciation of their sentience - an acknowledgement, in other words, of their animacy.

In Underland, Robert Macfarlane references the reputedly pagan philosopher and novelist, Albert Camus, in noting how strangeness emanates from the ‘denseness’ of the universe. Macfarlane confronts the ice-wrapped lithic landscape in Greenland as one that “could not be communicated in human terms or forms.” What is present, Macfarlane claims, is the weird language of ice and stone. Both elements represent mute presences that nevertheless have a profound resonance at the frequency of the human soul. It is thus that the spalled face of the Topatopas speaks across eons in the basso profundo of the cosmos, reverberating within the deepest levels of human consciousness.

Peter Linebaugh, Stop, Thief!, 2014

Dipresh Chakrabarty, The Climate of History: Four Theses, 2009

Andreas Malm, Fossil Capital, 2016

Robin Wall Kimmerer, Speaking of Nature, Orion Magazine, April, 2017

Robert Macfarlane, Underland, 2019

In the Weeds of History

After four years or more of bloviation focused on Trump, American democracy and the deep wounds of this country’s colonial past, it is time to return to the enchantments of the Urban Wildland - except that there is no escape, even in the hinterlands, from the psychic toll of conquest.

I have been weeding in damaged areas at the edge of the chaparral and celebrating the 2020 - 2021 drought. The lack of rain favors the drought tolerant local flora while invasive weeds often fail to germinate or wither quickly in the heat of this preternaturally dry spring. This is evidenced, for instance, in bare patches of earth where only parched and dwarfish dots of erodium are scattered. Then, often suddenly revealed, is a native deerweed, golden bush or buckwheat seedling in the newly denuded space. The gratifications of weeding are few - Sisyphus is our mythological overseer - but the drought is making life for those of us who tend the wild a little easier.

To maintain faith in the importance of restoring the purity of Southern California’s native plant communities requires a constant stream of justifications to ward against the easier option of an acceptance of the hybridized landscape that has evolved over the past three centuries or more, since erodium seeds started blowing up from Mexico where the plant had been introduced by the Spanish as rough pasturage. The religious and military conquest, that began in California in 1769, hastened the introduction of mostly European plants already naturalized in Mexico, which then included great swathes of what was to become the American southwest, as both food crops and animal fodder. Incidental propagation also occurred from seeds transported in clothing, animal skins, food and sundry supplies that reached the chaparral from Sante Fe and other centers of Spanish trade.

While the missions functioned as super-spreaders of non-indigenous plants, their dissolution in the 1820’s after Mexican independence made the land available to Mexican grandees. Often gifted as political reward or as recognition of military service in the revolution, the rancheros began large scale operations across California. It was the success of these ranchos that persuaded Anglo-Americans and European migrants who had arrived during the gold rush that great fortunes could be made in the cattle business. Indeed, the rancheros thrived throughout the gold rush, but as Tom Philpott writes, “By 1856 their fortunes had shifted. A severe drought that year cut production….and rancheros began to lose their herds, their lands and their homes”. By 1870, California’s cattle herd had dropped to little more than 500,000 from a high of three million.

Like the missions before them, but with an even greater impact, the development of ranchos devastated the native American population by denying them access to their richest hunting, fishing and gathering lands.  Established on the native grass and forb lands of the great valleys in times of above average rainfall, the cattle industry also wreaked irreparable ecological damage across California before it was terminally diminished by a combination of prolonged drought interspersed with devastating flood years, such as 1861-2, which saw much of the Central Valley under fifteen feet of water. The pattern of drought and flood continues today with both phenomena intricately linked to the cycle of rampaging wildfires which destroy desiccated biomass nurtured in years of heavy rainfall.

Robert Macfarlane writes that, “Any landscape that enchants” – as surely the chaparral does – “but has been the site of violence in the past produces a kind of dissonance.” Here, in my patch of chaparral, I sense that dissonance. It is land settled in the past by the Chumash and subsequently served as ranchland. The steep hillsides that flank the meadows, now rampant with tocalote, mustard, brome and rye grasses, thistles and erodium, were covered with impenetrable chaparral before the Thomas Fire of 2017-18. Violence has been visited on the land - once lightly peopled, sympathetically tended by them and home to a rich and plentiful variety of fauna, including grizzlies, mountain lions, bobcats, deer, coyote, and rabbits - ever since it fell into the thrall of the Mission system. Their native lifeways denied to them, the Chumash were decimated by disease and hunger as they sought refuge in the Franciscan compounds. Ranchers, oil prospectors and hunters then further ravaged the land and succeeded in exterminating the grizzly by the early 1920’s. The infrastructure of urban and suburban development, oil and gas, agriculture, and roads and railways, have now critically fragmented the breeding territories of the big cats and pushed them to the edge of extinction.

 In purposeful weeding, given a smattering of horticultural knowledge, one is made aware of the floral markers of colonization, and by extension, of all the floral, faunal and human violence which attends it. In speaking of the mountains of Slovenia, lands fiercely contested by Balkan peoples of warring creeds and ethnicities, Macfarlane writes, “But to read such a place only for its dark histories is to disallow its possibilities for future life, to deny reparation or hope – and this is another kind of oppression.” My limited acts of chaparral restoration serve as small gestures of reparation and are inevitably based on hope. I can do nothing to re-introduce the grizzly or restore the vibrant society of those native tribes now collectively known as the Chumash­­­­. The sense of violence and pain that has seeped into the chaparral, creeks and oak meadowlands over the last quarter millennium haunts my consciousness.

This is not memory - it is lived experience. Weeding non-natives keeps the dark meaning of the landscape ever-present. Silvia Federici makes a subtly different calculus to Macfarlane’s. She writes, “Loss of memory is the root of oppression, for obliviousness to the past renders meaningless the world in which we move, strips the spaces in which we live of any significance, as we forget at what cost we tread the ground we walk upon.” Macfarlane’s stricture to read not only a landscape’s tortured history, but to also allow for the possibilities of an exorcism of it hauntings, is sound, but given the lack of awareness of most to the psychic shadings embedded in our environment, better to heed Federici’s dictum that those who have a sense of such historic wounds and their manifestations in contemporary pain should hold close to that experience, even amidst their enchantment with present beauty - the better to confront the injustices of the past.

Tom Philpott, Perilous Bounty, 2020

Robert Macfarlane, Underland, 2019

Silvia Federici, Re-Enchanting the World, 2019

Rejoinder

Considering the events of January 6th, I could, of course, edit my previous post, ‘What Shall We call It?’. I might for instance, remove the first declarative sentence, “There was no coup”, but I will let it stand: as of December 13th. 2020, that statement was demonstrably true. I am saved some prognostic embarrassment by the fact that most of the U.S. media have now settled on calling the extraordinary events of that infamous day at the Capitol an insurrection rather than a coup. While there is little to choose between the meaning of the two words, insurrection alone demands no modifier to reflect its results.

A reasonable interpretation of the events might classify them as an ‘attempted’ coup; Trump called his supporters to arms and urged them to prevent Vice President Pence from certifying Biden’s victory on the grounds that the election had been stolen from him. Notwithstanding the failure of the mob to achieve their goals, Trump and his supporters have continued to press their case. To date, they have not succeeded in overturning the will of the American people, to the extent that that is reflected in the federal election process, and Biden retains the presidency of the United States. As of this moment, we are obliged to use the modifiers ‘failed’ or ‘attempted’ when referring to the events as a coup. Insurrection, however, as in uprising, is a complete act in and of itself and retains its relevance independent of its wider ramifications or results. My takeaway – as a solipsistic blogger – is that the title of my piece now has an unintended prescience, and that these semantically punctilious paragraphs are sufficient rejoinder to its opening salvo.

What Shall We Call It?

There was no coup. American democracy worked as designed: it took the progressive energies unleashed in opposition to the Trump administration and entirely neutered them with the orderly election of the avuncular Joseph Biden, protector of the Empire, the military industrial complex, banking and finance, insurance, biotech, Silicon Valley, the revolving door bureaucracies of the Washington swamplands and the wheedling parasites of K Street.

The whole rotten armature of the Republic will be put back together by Biden and his crew despite the overwhelming evidence of its, never mind his, decrepitude. Under Trump, the nation has absorbed extraordinary episodes of domestic chaos -  closing in on 300,000 citizens killed in a disastrously mismanaged pandemic, four years of deliberately divisive, white supremacist rule by the Republicans, witch-hunts by the Democrats, an impeachment of the president, and, this year, the most remarkable series of iconoclastic demonstrations against the country’s  historically rooted values of oppression, exploitation, enslavement, and the annihilation of indigenous peoples, during the Black Lives Matter uprising.

Yet the recent Federal election is an affirmation of business-as-usual, a celebration of a return to normality - despite the startling indications of the system’s bodily corruption. Faith in the restorative power of our democracy remains high, faith in the power of voting remains undiminished and, for a little over half of the electorate, a sense of victory hangs in the air.

The country’s revered institution of ‘government by the people, for the people’ began with the advent of Jacksonian democracy in the 1820’s. A dramatic expansion of the franchise had occurred when new states were added to the Union which imposed no property requirements for voting, prompting most of the original states to remove their restrictions on the enfranchisement of white males.  For almost half a century, the vote had not extended much beyond propertied oligarchs – men of similar status and the fundamentally aristocratic impulses of the nation’s founders, and from whose ranks the first five presidents of the United States were elected. The mobilization of frontiersmen, small farmers and the urban poor into politics was of a piece with contemporary revolutionary movements in Europe, but in the United States, this radicalism was inspired by a pursuit of ‘freedom’ rather than social and economic equality - its citizens being under the sway of national mythologies that often weighed more heavily with them than their immediate economic circumstance. It was freedom ‘from’ that motivated them – notably perceived government interference in their competitive commercial, agrarian or manufacturing pursuits. From the start of their democratic engagement, white males in America were, or aspired to be, entrepreneurial and independent such that ‘wage-slaves’ often considered their lot a bump in the road that would lead to propertied independence rather than a stable economic relationship between them and their employer. Thus, the organization of workers was rarely prioritized and when it was, heavily opposed by factory and workshop owners.  

Jackson’s election in 1828 established the Democrats as the party of the people and he as the ‘people’s president’. But while Jackson received a mandate from the vastly expanded electorate of white males, the election exposed traits which continue to characterize American democracy. His election depended on his having crafted a powerful cult of personality largely based on a hagiographic biography that he had commissioned. He celebrated the freedom of the American people whilst ignoring the racial subjugation that shadowed the country, and he entirely dismissed the rights of indigenous people in pursuit of the economic potential of their lands. Specifically, his successful removal of native peoples from their homelands in which Americans speculated, on which they homesteaded, and on which slaves were driven to clear-cut and drain in order to plant cotton, laid the foundation for America’s unparalleled wealth. That wealth was, and is, harvested by the few who then, and now, use a portion of it to influence the voting behavior of the many.

In order to understand how we got to this twenty-first century moment, barely more than a month away from the swearing in of Joe Biden as this country’s 64th president who is regarded by many as the potential savior of a democracy that was plunged into an abyss by his Republican predecessor, it is useful to consider the road this nation has traveled since the establishment of Jackson’s broad, but highly conflicted, ‘government by the people’.

From the beginning, the great paradox of American freedom was its practice of slavery. It was an issue not fully broached until the emancipation movement forced the attention of the nation on its horrors, eventually splitting the Union in half over this most basic issue of human rights. Its military conclusion cost three-quarters of a million lives and ultimately denied liberated African Americans full participation in the nation’s democracy, and deliberately stunted their economic opportunities. After the war, the southern states practiced the de facto segregation of Jim Crow for almost a century, and carried out terror lynchings, as a strategy of subduing the Black population, for more than eight decades. Despite its defeat, the culture, the military heroes and the flag of the Confederate States of America – a state that subjugated and tortured fully 45% of its population – are still celebrated.  The pretense of democracy in such circumstances is a travesty.

Well into the nineteenth century, America remained a substantially agrarian economy, but the massive influx of European migrants not only spurred urban industrialization but also promoted the consolidation of small family producers, which Jefferson had promoted as the bedrock of democratic independence, into vastly more efficient factory farms. Late nineteenth century populism attempted to marshal disaffected farm laborers, factory workers, coal miners and iron workers to resist the increasing concentration of wealth fostered under laissez-faire government policies, while workers questioned whether ‘freedom’ could survive in conditions of oppression, injustice and poverty.

Economic inequality increased dramatically in this era of technological innovation and the corporate monopolization of essential market sectors.  It was a situation that went unchallenged until Congress passed a series of anti-trust legislation in the 1890’s tarnishing the so-called Gilded Age and encouraging the social activism and political reform that comprised the Progressive Era. America’s triumphant involvement in the First World War, and its leading role in the peace negotiations, resulted in a celebration of its role as a beacon of freedom and a champion of democratic values. It was also a time of rampant xenophobia reflected in the passage of restrictive immigration laws and the total exclusion of Chinese nationals - the mythology of America as the land of freedom and opportunity was again abraded by the harsh reality of its politics.

When the Harding administration, 1921-23, collapsed under the weight of its own corruption, it left the country in the hands of Calvin Coolidge, who promoted policies that fueled the ’Roaring Twenties’, a period in which American society finally threw off the social and moral strictures of the nineteenth century. It was a time in which many ordinary Americans pursued economic opportunity in a careening stock market, but their hopes were dashed when the market crashed in a violent economic collapse which many of the elite were sufficiently savvy to avoid. The Great Depression, which immediately followed, and the economic and environmental disaster of the Dust Bowl, ended conservative, laissez-faire economics and initiated an era of activist, interventionist liberalism, under Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Despite the New Deal, abstract notions of ‘freedom’ and ‘equality’ did not survive in conditions of extreme social need and were only revived by the surge of patriotism unleashed by the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor.

The start of WWII ended the Great Depression, and its conclusion opened an era of unparalleled prosperity which mightily favored the nation’s white middle class. Barely drawing a breath at the end of the war in 1945, the U.S. military embarked on a decades long struggle with communist regimes across Asia, a cold war with the Soviet Union and proxy wars across the planet. The armaments industry had not existed in America before the war, but on leaving office in January 1961, President Eisenhower warned of the development of, “an immense military establishment and a large arms industry.” As he correctly predicted, the development of the military-industrial complex has had an immense influence on the nation’s governance – simply put, the economics of Empire favors the corporate elite while pauperizing the precariat. The growth of the defense budget is such that it now consumes close to half of all the federal government’s discretionary spending.  It is the line item most favored in the ideologically driven pursuit of draining wealth from tax-paying Americans and redistributing it to defense contractors – a characteristic only amplified by members of Congress who, devoted to the harvesting of arms industry cash to fund their re-election, are much inclined to inflate the defense budget rather than prioritizing the needs of their constituents.

The New Deal had enjoyed a broad consensus of support while the country was in economic extremis, but when good times returned after WWII, conservatives were determined to reclaim the idea of ‘freedom’ to their cause, which necessitated a renunciation of anything that smacked of the enhanced state control of people’s economic lives that FDR had introduced in the 1930’s. Similarly motivated after his experience of German and Italian Fascism, the Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek published, The Road to Serfdom, 1944, in which he suggested that state interference in its citizen’s well-being would potentially subvert their freedom and return them to an impoverished condition of servitude. Milton Freidman, the influential American economist, took this to mean, in practical, actionable terms, that political power should be decentralized, government limited, and the market economy be given total freedom to work its magic. Thus inspired, conservatives in the 1960’s began to equate individual freedom with unregulated capitalism - in a return to the earliest principles of those frontiersmen, small farmers and the urban poor who had driven Jacksonian democracy.

Goldwater enthusiastically adopted Friedman’s precepts and added the notion of law and order as a necessary counterweight to the anarchic student demonstrations of the 60’s, and the perceived threats of both the civil rights movement and Johnson’s landmark legislation, the Civil Rights Act of 1964. His bellicose nationalism and apparent willingness to deploy the atomic bomb in its pursuit may have doomed his campaign, but his ideas were largely taken up by Ronald Reagan who came to power in 1981.  Reagan turned the nation into an avatar of neoliberalism in which both the public good and political engagement are disparaged - leaving a wafer-thin democracy, characterized by the duopoly of supposedly antagonistic parties, with which to paper over an oligarchic state.

Every two years, members of the two parties compete for the approbation of the voting public who, regardless of their choice, give unwitting political legitimacy to the brute force of the market. This process, which Thomas Carlyle, the nineteenth century historian and philosopher, called the cash nexus, remains at the heart of American democracy - in which a vote for either party ensures the continuation of their danse macabre. It is this legacy to which Biden, as the country’s next president, is now heir – rightfully so, it may be argued since he has been partially responsible for the last fifty years of its most reactionary manifestations.

In order to heal racial injustice, economic injustice, environmental injustice and to fill the voids of mind, body and spirit that exist in the American commonweal, vast sums of public treasure need to be expended. That intention is currently blocked both by a philosophy of governance that privileges the free market and by the impregnable massif that is the military establishment - the mastodon in the room of a profoundly unquiet American society.  Such socially targeted expenditures might prevent America from sinking further into a quagmire of pathological dependencies - the gloss of its over-consumption since WWII having long since been made pallid by the endemic inadequacies of health care, education, infrastructure, nutrition, housing, income distribution and the historically charged racial injustices that haunt the nation. These represent profound failures of state in terms of both remediation and restitution. Such failures demand a revolutionary re-focusing of the purposes of government; a redefinition of democracy; and a relinquishment of the grand myths that have sustained them - myths that have weaponized the base economic impulses of freedom loving conservatives over the life of the Republic. That re-focus will come with a price-tag, but one that is almost certainly less that the inordinate sums channeled to the military industrial complex, now justified by the maintenance of a superannuated Empire.  

Redemption from the sins of the past is possible: the nations of Germany and Japan both took the difficult steps to excise their respective historical cancers which metastasized into nightmares of state sponsored horror in the first half of the twentieth century. South Africa, through the processes of resistance, revolution and tribunals of truth and reconciliation, replaced a violent white supremacist government with a multi-racial democracy in the early 1990’s. America’s historical sins are well known. That its nuclear arsenal further burdens the human spirit with an existential dread that compounds our everyday intimations of mortality is less recognized.

Trumps victory four years ago, and his recent defeat, were both cries for help from the voting public. After the Civil War, a great and noble effort was made by Americans to heal the wounds of slavery. It was called Reconstruction. The effort was destroyed within a dozen years by the mean and ignoble. Old wounds continue to fester, and new lacerations of mind, body and spirit have continued to assail the nation. It is now time again for the country to make a great and noble effort to heal its wounds. Call it Reconstruction II.

The Nation's New Crime Boss

A great deal of energy was expended recently to influence who would be the next president of the criminal enterprise that is the United States of America. The nation’s criminality was established historically by its extermination of indigenous populations inconvenient to its imperial goals and its enslavement of Africans expressly imported into the country under hideous conditions for the further ease and enrichment of the already wealthy. Although these were crimes initiated long before the formal constitution of the U.S., when the slave trade was belatedly outlawed in 1808, slaves were bred in the Upper South and driven in chains across the country or shipped down the Mississippi to be sold in the Deep South. There, they joined their brothers and sisters in an industrialized system of enforced labor cruelly driven by the whip. The expansion of cotton across the south required the removal of Indian tribes who lived on the land the plantation owners wished to cultivate. Their forced removal included documented acts of genocide.

The nation’s criminality continues into the present, most egregiously but not exclusively, by its refusal to make adequate reparations for these historical acts of inhumanity; by its acceptance of the violently racist policing of minority populations; by its ongoing program of mass incarceration of non-white men and boys; by its deportation of so called ‘illegals’ and by its frequent refusal to give asylum to those fleeing dire political, economic, and environmental conditions south of the border for which the U.S. is primarily responsible. Government sanctioned domestic executions, extra-judicial drone hits on foreign subjects, which may on occasion also kill American citizens, and numerous instances of psychological and physical torture inflicted on its perceived enemies, domestic and foreign, further impugn the probity of the state. A federally sanctioned health care system that is leveraged for corporate profit rather than human need represents a systematic attack on the well-being of large sections of the civilian population, and thus can be considered a crime against humanity. All the while, the nation’s nuclear-armed war machine, embedded in its planetary network of military bases, pursues declared and undeclared wars, creating a global backdrop to the nation’s domestic offenses.

The current president has done nothing to correct this underlying criminality. Indeed, he has exacerbated it by his personal corruption, his fostering of the inhumane treatment of migrants at the country’s southern border, his explicit support of racist, white nationalism and, arguably, his criminal mismanagement of the federal response to the Covid-19 pandemic.  The incoming president, however, is deeply enmeshed in the vicious turpitude of Empire, a condition to which he has either actively contributed or passively countenanced during his thirty-six years in the Senate and his eight years as vice president.

Now that the leadership decision has been made, most of the population is split between jubilation and anguish. On the other hand, I spent the long and fevered days of this election in a state of relative equanimity, invested in neither the continued leadership of the family currently at the helm nor in the now imminent installation of a family that not only has a long history of enabling this criminal enterprise but has also personally benefited from its association with the highest echelons of the Empire’s leadership. It would have been useful to have maintained the illusion that the recent contest was between private notions of corruption as practiced, for instance, in the world of casinos, real-estate development, hotels, private clubs and golf resorts, versus the public corruption of influence peddling as practiced, for instance, in the Empire’s  outlands where it can be sold in markets awash with armaments and cold hard cash. But such distinctions are razor thin. Thus, there is little reason for either jubilation or anguish at the result. More meaningful perhaps, is to gauge the erstwhile contestants’ wider responsibility, as accessories to the maintenance of the establishment under which the broader sins of Empire are permitted to flourish.

In this time of a recalcitrant lame duck who, it is widely proclaimed, threatened and continues to threaten ‘democracy’ -  the fig leaf of respectability under which the nation’s criminality festers - liberal triumphalism is shadowed by a residual anguish that rises to fever pitch when confronted by criticisms of Biden, or suggestions raised, in the enclaves of the enlightened, that he is not the savior whom we all seek. Those liberals whose egos are bound up in the defeat of the incumbent remain immensely fragile - their inner core beaten to a pulp by the ungainly, ungrammatical, incoherent, Trump, and their sense of propriety deeply wounded by the déclassé president.

In early November, sufficient ballots made their way into the hands of upstanding election officials for reliable confirmation that Trumpworld had foundered on the shores of the deep state. The president’s political insurgency is now forestalled, at least until 2024. But this is hardly cause for celebration when his defeat has resulted in the reaffirmation of business as usual, a business which, for half a millennium, has thrived on the exploitation of the great many for the enrichment of the very few, and which, in the modern state, is now expressed as neoliberalism – an ideology which comfortably accommodates the state’s criminal offenses. While this criminality is primarily predicated on an invidious taxonomy of human worth, the government’s gaping ethical void also allows for the relentless breeding, fattening and killing regimes of factory farmed livestock, and permits the gross, unsustainable exploitation of botanical, lithic, and chemical elements for industrial use. The nation’s vast historic and contemporary mining of fossil biomass and its conversion into cheap thermal energy has significantly contributed to the chemical restructuring of the Earth’s atmosphere and to the resultant global warming. The cheap energy of oil and gas has metastasized urban development and enabled rural monocropping which together have decimated the biological diversity of the U.S. land mass. These profoundly existential planetary ills exist as the ultimate brand extensions of the criminal enterprise that is the United States.

Almost four years of the Trump insurgency have not changed these fundamental realities, but they have shifted the terms of the debate. Generals, politicians, lawyers, financiers, the intelligence community, tech entrepreneurs, factory farmers and developers lay awake at night because one of the levers of power over which they believed they had some control was wrested from their hands by an uncultured, overweight, racist, loud-mouthed, sexist pig. For that we should be grateful, for it exposed a vulnerability that has rarely been evident in the almost impregnable bastions of wealth, power and privilege that exist at the core of this nation. It was, as so many in this country recognized and related to, a moment in which the cunning of the uncouth triumphed over the self-servingly venal noblesse oblige of the well-born, well-educated, well-dressed and well-mannered.

Now, we are about to return to a time when the evils of Empire operate with impunity, fully protected within the carapace of democracy, that shell of legitimacy that occludes its own fraudulence and shelters the broader larcenies of the state. The porcine face of corruption soon departs to be replaced by the establishment candidate who has, over his almost five decades in subaltern power, faithfully served the super-rich and the egregiously powerful whose interests are served by their government’s inhumane criminality.

Any euphoria experienced in Trump’s dismissal must surely be tempered by the depression that descends upon consideration of the impending elevation of Biden, poster-boy of the Peter principle, to the highest political post in the land. A career politician deeply mired in mediocrity, connivance and compromise; he reached his apotheosis in the eight years he served as Obama’s wingman. Infinitely less patrician and vastly less intelligent, he was nevertheless an appropriate ornament to Barack’s imperial presence, emphasizing the president’s blackness in ways unavailable to the man himself. Now, he will be assisted in his work of walking back every mildly progressive program blithely promised during his lackluster campaign, by Prosecutor Harris: younger, smarter, more ambitious and far more ruthless than her boss. Thus threatened, we can be sure that her role in the traditionally thankless task of vice-president will be further trivialized by ‘The Big Guy’ and reduced to a token signifier of his commitment to The Movement for Black Lives.

Biden’s elevation to the Presidency will critically constrain the development of a progressive agenda within the Democratic party for a further four or eight years and likely assure a more aggressive foreign policy. In the last half-century, there was never a military action, CIA assassination, or trade sanction against a foreign power that he meaningfully opposed. Despite campaign trail disavowals, we can expect a continuation of Obama’s criminal war in Yemen as well as the cessation of troop withdrawals from Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan. The generals will be back in charge.

Long-time recipient of thin blue line union support, Biden is incapable of delivering peace on our streets - which demands a defunding of their militarized police presence. The future president’s commitment to the continued success of the health insurance industry will fatally constrain the development of socialized health and welfare provisions. Wall Street will continue to be privileged over Main Street. Already reneging on his campaign promise to ban fracking, he remains supportive of the country’s oil industry and seems increasingly confident in his eschewal of the Green New Deal.

The nation’s new crime-boss-elect is a man of mind-numbing mediocrity, but he will, I suspect, be hugely successful in sustaining the criminal enterprise with which the electorate has entrusted him.

Two White Men

There have been fifty-seven presidential elections in the United States since the first in 1788. In each of them, two white men (with the recent exceptions of Obama winning in 2008 and 2012 and Hilary Clinton losing in 2016) have competed for the privilege of leading this country. With these few exceptions, each and every pair of them has been dedicated to this nation’s not-so-hidden agenda - the maintenance of white-male supremacy - a system of oppression first established by Columbus, in 1492. This November 3rd, presidential election number fifty-nine will be held and, true to form, it will be a contest between two white men who, I suggest, both share the ingrained, cultural assumption that their sex and skin color makes them entitled to rule and otherwise enjoy the privileges of wealth and power.

How do we know this?

Our institutions, which our presidents are sworn to uphold, are designed to maintain this privilege. The U.S. Supreme Court is an oracle that claims every question in the present can be answered by precedent. This is a country that defines itself by reference to the past. Never mind that our past is founded on the slave labor of Black Americans and the genocidal elimination of Native Americans. Its innate prejudice is further elaborated by the Chinese Exclusion acts, the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, the mass incarceration of black and brown men, and, most recently, the heinous acts of family separation and commitment to concentration camps that await Mexican and Central American immigrants. These are acts committed under the full protection of the laws and institutions of the United States, and by a leadership that has fully internalized the validity of white-male supremacy.

How do we know this?

Women, through much of American history, had a status little better than slaves. In her paper, Race and Gender Discrimination: A Historical Case for Equal Treatment under the Fourteenth Amendment, 1994, Sandra L. Rierson, a noted legal scholar, writes, “Historically, women and Blacks in America have shared a common experience, especially in the context of those rights protected by the Fourteenth Amendment. Sexism and racism in American society have prevented women of all races and Black men from enjoying the rights - civil, social, and political - to which they are entitled under the Constitution.”

This is a country where women are treated, regardless of color, as inferior beings – politely, the weaker sex - and denied the constitutional protection of equal rights; their voting rights only tardily granted in 1920. Control over their own bodies is ever threatened. Despite their critical role in social reproduction, the system pays them nothing for their domestic labor and less than men for their work outside the home. If they work, it likely denies them paid maternity leave and then fails to provide child-care and other social services for their children. White males may suffer many deprivations, but they are forever bolstered by the notion that they are called upon to uphold these systems of prejudice. Whatever impoverishment or indignities they may suffer, they can exult in this power that society grants them. The worst of them - bullies all - become politicians and even presidential candidates.

How do we know this?

Our government fights wars of Empire that are extensions of the colonial urge to exploit people of color and to extract wealth from the lands upon which they depend for their survival. The territory that now constitutes the United States includes the thirteen original colonies liberated from the British in 1783; Jefferson’s Louisiana purchase, negotiated from the French in 1803; Texas, a vast swathe of the southwest and all of California, acquired from a defeated Mexico in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, 1848; Alaska purchased from the Russians in 1867; and Hawaii annexed in 1898 by President McKinley – all lands sustainably inhabited solely by their indigenous peoples before Columbus. The nation’s late nineteenth and early twentieth century colonial adventurism in Central America and the Pacific similarly depended on Imperial notions of racial and civilizational superiority.

After its reluctant, laggardly participation in the twentieth century’s two World Wars, America has pursued an almost continuous string of regional wars in the Mid-east, Africa and Asia that have all exhibited racist characteristics. When WWII broadened to the Pacific theater, this country’s innate prejudices fully emerged. In the concluding act of that war, it is unlikely that the U.S. would have dropped two gratuitous, experimental atomic bombs on white civilian populations. It was the in-grained white supremacism of the president and his generals that doomed Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

How do we know this?

The economic and health conditions in the US reflect the profound racism and sexism inherent in all its commercial, financial and governmental institutions. The Brookings Institute estimates that the average wealth of white families is almost ten times greater than that of Black families. This disparity is only amplified in the current pandemic in which infection and death rates recorded in populations of color are up to five times higher than in the non-Hispanic, white population, according to the CDC.  Essential workers in the U.S. are predominantly of color and disproportionately female. Many of the disadvantages experienced by the country’s non-white population can be attributed to historical circumstances. But these circumstances have baked-in prejudice at the heart of American society, and it is this prejudice that is reaffirmed, every four years, in the investiture of a white man as president in an act of profound practical and symbolic significance. It betokens the population’s subservience to the white-male and confirms the patriarchalism evident at every level of social organization.

To make these arguments is to veer into the realm of the glaringly obvious. Yet, many of the historical antecedents that confirm the genesis of the American Republic as a constitutionally racist and sexist society, upheld both by its presidents and its most revered institutions of governance, are obscured by the multi-layered mythology that emphasizes the country’s Enlightenment credentials as a cradle of freedom and equality.  But the language in the Declaration of Independence self-evidently establishes it to be a sexist document, typical of its time, while it entirely ignores the considerable presence of enslaved Africans within the colonies when it blithely suggests that, “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.”

The U.S. Constitution of 1787 began as a document that permitted slavery under State law and confirmed the continuation of the slave trade until 1816.  The notorious compromise that resulted in the inclusion of the Fugitive Slave Clause (Article IV, Section2, Clause 3), made all Americans of that time a party to the dehumanization of African Americans as fungible economic objects, obliging them to return fleeing slaves to their lives of enslavement. It made all Americans a party to the crass reduction of Black men to three-fifths of their headcount in order to provide states in which they were held the political clout to uphold the institution of slavery.

In denial of this history, the administration of Donald J. Trump issued an Executive Order on Combatting Race and Sex Stereotyping, on September, 22. Its purpose is to roll back the progress made this summer by the Black Lives Matter demonstrations in exposing the falsehood that all Americans, of whatever gender or race, are equal under the laws of the Republic. Trump’s Order denounces, “the pernicious and false belief that America is an irredeemably racist and sexist country; that some people, simply on account of their race or sex, are oppressors; and that racial and sexual identities are more important than our common status as human beings and Americans.” The Executive Order goes on to suggest that, “This destructive ideology is grounded in misrepresentations of our country’s history and its role in the world. Although presented as new and revolutionary, they resurrect the discredited notions of the nineteenth century’s apologists for slavery who, like President Lincoln’s rival Stephen A. Douglas, maintained that our government “was made on the white basis…by white men, for the benefit of white men.”

The Executive Order presents a laughably sanitized version of American history any refutation of which is threatening, it suggests, to the country’s ability to realize its ‘destiny.’ The bombast is recognizably Trumpian as we read, “Our Founding documents rejected these racialized views of America, which were soundly defeated on the blood-stained battlefields of the Civil War. Yet they are now being repackaged and sold as cutting-edge insights. They are designed to divide us and to prevent us from uniting as one people in pursuit of one common destiny for our great country.”

America’s ‘common destiny’ in the late eighteenth century was to secure Indian lands beyond the Appalachians. Following their victory over the French in the Seven Years War, the British had declared, in King George’s Royal Proclamation of 1763, that this territory was to be the exclusive province of Native peoples. However, they were already lightly settled by colonists and it is where at least two of our revered Founding Fathers, George Washington and Benjamin Franklin, were engaged in land speculation. Britain, as the sole colonial power after the war, stood in the way of such speculation because of its promised protection of the Indian tribes residing on the prospective real estate. It was this fact that weighed far more heavily than the price of tea in the Founding Father’s decision to declare independence from Britain. By the middle of the nineteenth century, ‘Manifest Destiny’ would be declared as the ideology that validated the dispossession of native peoples across the continent and, by century’s end, the almost total, government sponsored, destruction of the vast buffalo herds that had been central to the survival of the Great Plains tribes.

The nineteenth century English philosopher, John Stuart Mill, noted that in antebellum American society, Blacks were forced to do agricultural labor and women coerced to marry and produce children - echoing the primordial oppression of the weak by the strong. Manifestations of race and gender oppression have changed over time, but they remain obdurate, and are now fully systematized in our revered institutions. Their removal requires radical institutional dismantling, yet we continue to elect our presidents to defend these bastions of the indefensible. In the election of 2020, to paraphrase James Carville’s 1992 dictum, “It’s the Institutions stupid.” In this epiphany is revealed the horrifying truth that the voting public is unknowingly complicit in the elaborate mythology that preserves the nation’s racism and sexism - the twin supports of its overarching ideology of white-male supremacy.

Law & Order vs. Empathy & Healing

Americans citizens have considered, knowingly or not, the legacy of American history every four years since 1788. This election season, we have the choice of ‘Law and Order’ - conservatism as a morally bankrupt subservience to power, or ‘Empathy and Healing’ - a nostrum that offers compassionate listening rather than progressive change.  Both represent attempts to shape society based on some idealized historical fiction rather than confronting the clear and present exigencies of past injustices.

‘Law and Order’ was first invoked by John Adams, America’s second president, who basically wrote the rule book that is now faithfully followed by number forty-five. He passed the Aliens and Sedition Acts in 1798, making it more difficult for immigrants to become citizens and simultaneously easier to deport them - conducting a war of fear upon an already oppressed underclass of newly arrived indentured servants, dayworkers, and itinerant craftspeople.

Popular insurrections had arisen shortly after the successful conclusion of the War of Independence, all sparked by the imposition of onerous taxes on the working class.  Most famously, there were Shay’s Rebellion of 1786 - 7, the Whiskey Rebellion of 1794, and Fries Rebellion in S.E. Pennsylvania of 1798, to which Adams responded with his infamous Proclamation #9, which called for the marshalling of federal troops to suppress the protesters.

‘Empathy and Healing’, as practiced as a political art, represents the displacement of action with wheedling emotional manipulation. This country’s last two Democratic presidents were masters of the art, although they practiced it in very different styles. They both successfully continued the predations of neoliberalism, where the greed of the few feeds on the needs of the many, while eloquently suggesting that the opposite should and could be the case. The current Democratic candidate for the post is an adequate and highly experienced, if by now slightly addled, exponent of this dark art.

Those who call for the imposition of ‘Law and Order’ are demanding a confirmation of the arrangements of power that favor their own position in society. Encoded within that demand is the notion that any change to the status quo threatens the stability of society and that opinions challenging the establishment are intrinsically seditious. ‘Law and Order’ is the politesse that veils the use of brute force and tactical weaponry in the maintenance of legal, social and economic conditions of oppression. It is the handmaiden of Authoritarianism and the sworn enemy of the street.

Those citizens who call for ‘Empathy and Healing’ are seeking a nullification of the endless reenactment of the nation’s through line – the Adamesque scolding of immigrants; the flagrant favoring of the wealthy; the embracing of an economy based on exploitation and extraction and entirely heedless of the value of the natural world; the heinous imposition of social controls through excessive force; and the subjugation of women. However, their political leaders are beholden to the same wealthy interests that support the ‘Law and Order’ faction, and beneath a progressive veneer they too flex the iron fist of economic oppression - but it is velvet-gloved in the sweet talk of freedom and justice. In the 1760’s and 1770’s, wealthy American colonists bound the middle class to their cause by just such a device. The talk of liberty and equality allowed them to secure a coalition sufficient to defeat the British without surrendering either the institution of slavery or their vast material advantage over most of the white population.

Each represents support for what Eric Foner, the American historian, describes as an “Invented national history and a putative destiny that revolve around the idea of freedom.” But the founding of the country depended on a revolution that was born on the street – in the back alleys of Boston, on the streets of New York, in the public squares of Philadelphia, and in rural enclaves in the Hudson Valley, Vermont and South Carolina. There, revolution was driven by material needs rather than Enlightenment ideology, by poverty wages, fetid housing conditions, poor food, inadequate clothing and excessive taxation, rather than the writings of Locke, Montesquieu and Rousseau. But while this underclass energy may have birthed the political entity we know as America, the infant was suckled by the wealthy and swaddled in institutions of their design.

America had first been colonized by wealthy individuals and by corporations licensed by the British crown, along with the workers necessary to fulfill their ambitions. Its development was predicated on the geographic expansion of the economies of extraction and exploitation which had emerged in Europe in the late middle ages, and had almost entirely usurped the communitarian impulses of feudalism. From the beginning, the New World’s ‘discovery’ was the product of greed. Its leading actors were wealthy proto-capitalists in search of treasure. Only later, in North America, with the arrival of the pilgrims, did the land become a field of dreams where ideologies of the Enlightenment and notions of religious freedom took flight. But from the beginning, there was a disconnect between the philosophical and spiritual high ground and the base realities of settler colonialism, dependent as it was (and remains) on the usurpation of the land’s indigenous inhabitants.

By the late sixteenth century, the colonies engaged in the triangle of trade between the Americas, Europe and Africa. Rum was distilled in New England from Barbadian sugar and shipped to Britain where it generated sufficient profit to purchase additional slaves to maintain production of the raw material in the Caribbean. The colonies were complicit in the slave trade for many decades before slaves themselves arrived in 1619, where they were used to establish the large-scale production of export crops, such as cotton, that were the making of America’s extraordinary wealth. The enslavement of Africans was thus deeply embedded in both America’s economy and its society when it came time to discuss how the finer points of liberty were to be enshrined in the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution. In the event, the Founding Fathers kicked the issue down the road, forever compromising themselves and their country – and foreshadowing the contemporary moral turpitude of American political leaders who consistently refuse to engage with the major social, environmental and economic ills of the day.

In early America, racial justice was deeply compromised by both slavery and the genocidal elimination of the indigenous population. We can presume that women were treated no better than the they were in European society - or far worse where an androcentric, pioneer environment prevailed, or where racial hierarchy enabled their abuse. Violence shadowed greed. Poverty was endemic. These were the ingredients of a nation in the making. The American Revolution, which established independence from Britain and enabled the country to emerge from a still mostly aristocratic Europe, allowed for the creation of a clean-sheet constitution - but it was a document that institutionalized, rather than eliminated, the country’s originating characteristics, and it is to this legacy that we are now woke.

All hope of racial justice, income equality, climate action and the elimination of gender bias awaits the next revolution, not the result of this November’s federal election. Each of these broad areas of present societal disfunction have roots that reach deep into the American past. Authentic equality, justice, inclusivity and environmental hope can only manifest through a confrontation with this history, not the tweaking of its foundational institutions. Truth and reconciliation depend on the radical deconstruction of the American mythology – the wellspring of our flag waving, anthem singing, allegiance-pledging nationalism. This can only occur on the field of battle, out of protest, incivility and disruption. Thomas Paine’s suggestion, in Common Sense, 1776, that, “We have it in our power to begin the world over again,” remains valid if we eschew the bastions of reaction, our corrupt institutions and the political parties committed to their maintenance. In our second revolution, the social, economic and political order of the nation will be reshaped, like the first, within the American agora – on the street.

No Fire Without Smoke

The smoke travels down the coast in a great southerly flow. For the past week, the particulate rich air has been sucked south by a tropical depression off of Baja, Mexico, that for a few days became sufficiently deep and focused to warrant a christening by the National Hurricane Center as Tropical Cyclone Genevieve. Now, downgraded to a post-tropical depression, smoky air still streams south over the Pacific, pushed into flood plains, canyons and valleys by local onshore winds. The landscape here, in a high, inland valley well north of Los Angeles, has turned pallid - grey washed by smoky air. The naturally occurring atmospheric sfumato is close and toxic rather than remaining as a distant and alluring scrim at the horizon. The air quality is officially branded as ‘unhealthy’, but here in the Southland its aesthetic transformations are stunning, with fiery dawns and sunsets composing dramatic, incarnadine reflections of the fire terror in Northern California.

The aesthetics of the apocalypse are a well-worn art history trope, and writing at a distance from the clustered fires up north, sparked by lightning strikes, their consideration is an extravagance only made permissible, perhaps, by the recent local experiences of the Thomas and Woolsey fires which ravaged areas north of Los Angeles in 2017 - 2018. These more recent fires, however, are the clearest indication to date of the anthropogenic, global warming provenance of California’s twenty-first century fire history.  The fires arrived with the full force of Revelations 4:8, “From the throne came flashes of lightning, and rumblings and peals of thunder.”

Since 1980, according to a report issued by Stanford University earlier this year, climate change has resulted in the doubling of the number of extreme-risk days for California wildfires, while average temperatures have risen almost two degrees Fahrenheit, and rainfall has dropped by a full 30%. Lightning strikes have proliferated. The State is now on the front-line of America’s unfolding global warming disaster, experiencing unprecedented fire, flood related debris flows, drought, heat-related deaths, crop failures and rising sea levels. Even now, the silent intrusion of salt water into coastal ground water, estuaries and rivers, pushed by rising tides fed by the melting of the West Antarctic ice sheet, is beginning to wreak devastation on the rich coastal plains upon which much of California’s agriculture is dependent, threatening both livelihoods and food supplies.

The Red Queen effect that requires that the economy run at full speed in order for us all to stay in the same place, has been put into abeyance by the COVID lockdown. The possibility now exists for this country to consider a re-evaluation of its insistent need to achieve growth through ever rising production and consumption in what remains a fossil-based economy. Neither state nor federal responses are hopeful. But the stagnation of neo-liberalism, entrenched since 1980, is beginning to be challenged. Some, like Ganesh Sitaraman, Joseph Stieglitz, and Alfredo Saad-Filho, regard these as the end days of the ideology, its demise hastened by the obvious failures in dealing with the pandemic demonstrated by those nations, such as the U.K., the U.S.A. and Brazil, which have been amongst its most ardent proponents.  

What is remarkable about this country is its ability to adapt, to re-think its history and redefine its heroes and villains - all amply demonstrated during the BLM protests earlier this summer. That this reconsideration of America’s past, spearheaded by a rising multi-racial generation, is occurring during a critical confluence of the protests, the COVID-19 pandemic, an awareness of the impacts of global warming and the impending federal election suggests that it may serve as a prelude to a genuine reimagining of its future. As ever, at stake is the instantiation of America’s historical promise. While it is now evident that long overdue racial justice is an inextricable part of environmental, economic and social justice, it is the climate crisis that will establish the inevitable context of its equitable resolution.

Unless there is radical, programmatic reform, the country’s ability to deal with the economic, health and welfare implications of increasing temperatures and other extreme climatological phenomena is doubtful. Serial failure on this count will likely see its social fabric further disintegrate. In these circumstances, the preservation of our democracy and its historical promise of justice for all will be moot. At the same time, we must acknowledge that while the U.S. can impact the reduction of global CO2, that responsibility is now majority owned by China and other Asian economies. This country’s greatest climate leverage is as a consumer of global production and as a cultural avatar. It can moderate its appetite for its own and Asian production, and it has the power to make genuine sustainability desirable both in its practical application and through its portrayal in its globally disseminated popular culture.

To be clear: global trade, tourism, transportation, industrial agriculture, the defense establishment and excessive consumer consumption are the sustaining elements of the fossil economy. Clean energy cannot sufficiently replace oil and gas in the few short years we have to turn things around. Thus, the elimination of fossil biomass from the energy stream requires an immediate and drastic reduction in overall energy use so that our needs can be entirely served by sustainable ‘green’ sources such as wind, hydro and photovoltaic. Basic societal behaviors which encourage energy consumption must be transformed.  The COVID shut down, when economic activity was suddenly quieted, suggests a way forward. But politicians are unlikely to embrace its possibilities in their haste to revive the status quo ante – to fully resuscitate the Red Queen economy.

The pandemic has amply demonstrated the broad ill-preparedness of the U.S. to deal with a public health crisis. We can only expect that the environmental stresses of global warming and the deleterious impacts of the expansion of global development will present even greater challenges. Its weaknesses are long-standing and systemic rather than attributable to a particular party or leader. Its government, under either the Democrats or Republicans, has focused, since the end of the Cold War, on a series of wars of empire that had to do with controlling global trade routes, preserving oil flows and maintaining military hegemony across the planet; on loosening restrictions on financial institutions and reducing taxes on the wealthy; on social policies highlighted by mandatory sentencing resulting in the increased warehousing of black and brown youth; on a rickety health insurance scheme that still leaves millions un-insured and many others impoverished by steep premiums; and on environmental policies that consistently favor extraction and exploitation in the form of oil and gas exploration, mining, ranching, logging and fishing.  It has largely ignored the building of infrastructure, the strengthening of coastal defenses again sea-level rise and consistently defunded social services. This dystopian governmental universe will not be overturned, in the next election cycle, by one of its major architects, nor of course, by our current lord of misrule.

Programmatic, structural economic realignment of the kind sketched here, will not be primarily about the continuation of our existing economy while we transition to alternative energy sources, and add jobs while we do it. It represents instead, a deadly confrontation with an anthropogenic atmospheric chemistry capable of destroying the habitability of the planet. This task has an urgency that transcends notions of normalcy and continuity – it demands a revolution. It must be undertaken in the knowledge that other major CO2 polluters may not take similar measures, but that this country’s actions still have meaning in the world. The pain will be extreme, the rewards bountiful for generations ever after.

Alexandria Ocasio Cortez is a Democrat pure and brave enough to advocate, when speaking at the 2020 Democratic National Convention, for the nation’s need to recognize and repair the wounds of colonization. She was also miraculously saved, in that briar patch of mawkish Americana, from the opprobrium of backing Biden because she was limited to a role of seconding the nomination of Bernie Sanders. She may well be our reformist hero in 2024 - her time is not now, but it is in sight. Her Green New Deal remains a faint light flickering in the stygian gloom of Congress.

The clouds of CO2, and other noxious fumes that billowed from the hyperactive industrial activity of 21st century humankind, were stilled by the COVID lockdown. As the veil of pollution slowly drifted away, the drill-rigs, ocean platforms, tankers, trucks, pipelines and sprawling refineries which fuel our factories, planes, container ships and motor vehicles, were revealed as a senescent and deeply fraudulent infrastructure. The promise made as the nineteenth century became the twentieth - that our muscle-work and the muscle-work of our equine partners would be totally assumed by the burning of oil - was quickly turned into a wracked and disease-promoting addiction to hyper-mobility and excessive consumption that has cost us far, far more than the effort the former has saved, or the trivial pleasures the latter has bequeathed.

It is this energy source, in a convoluted chemical chain of causality, that now reveals itself in fires burning more than a million acres of Northern California and in the smoke that occludes my distant view and blocks the sun’s rays in usually sunny Southern California.   

The COVID-Interregnum

A little over 500 years ago, Europeans, driven by a lust for riches and enabled by new technologies, colonized the Americas and set about making them productive in an entirely new way. The reasonably self-sustaining economies of the indigenous peoples were swept away and the organic and mineral resources of their lands were incorporated into systems of production that generated surplus wealth, by serving newly established markets in the Americas and around the world. Thus, was the New World enfolded into the then emerging system of capitalism.

In the early 1980’s, Margaret Thatcher was fond, in defending her policies, of stating emphatically that, ‘There Is No Alternative.’ Establishing this kind of rhetorical endgame became her way of cutting off debate and signaling an iron-willed determination to pursue her chosen plan of action. For almost forty years, the neoliberal states of the world, including those in Western Europe, the Americas and parts of Asia, have lived by her credo and refused to countenance any alternative to the privatization of social services; the globalization of trade, tourism and culture; and the financialization of everything. Now enabled by technologies unimaginable in the fifteenth century, these arrangements of our social, political and economic life encourage rapacious production by corporations serving ever-increasing popular consumption. The corporations, in turn, richly reward their executives while, for the most part, paying poverty wages to their employees.

This is the system which Mark Fisher describes in Capitalist Realism, 2009, in which capital is exposed as it really is, “…rapacious, indifferent, inhuman.” Harking back to the 1980’s, as neoliberalism was being established in Britain, Fisher writes, “Margaret Thatcher’s doctrine that, ‘There Is No Alternative’ –  as succinct a slogan of capitalist realism as you could hope for – became a self-fulfilling prophecy.” Following the financial crash of 2008, there were hopes that the system might be undermined, but the massive scale of the bank bailouts reaffirmed its inevitable survival and were a resounding vindication of her dictum.

Between the global shutdown in response to the COVID pandemic and some imagined future when communities around the world are all fully reopened, there is the opportunity to review the narratives that underpin neoliberalism - the ideology that supports current, post-industrial, capitalism. In the United States, this time of sheltering from the ravening appetite of the virus has been replete with street violence, urban occupation, sloganeering, wheat-pasting, spray painted graffiti, and the physical destruction of public monuments.

This broadly based unrest recapitulates the historical record of protest since the 1960’s. Racial injustice, economic injustice, police brutality and degradation of the environment remain at the forefront of the protesters’, and the wider public’s, concerns. But something new has arisen. The public iconography of racism and oppression which reflects the progress of Western civilization through the New World, is being dismantled. The monuments that often memorialize those responsible for the most egregious acts of commercial exploitation and extraction, or the military practice of genocide, or the defense of enslavement, are being excised from the public square. This editing of the nation’s historical narrative, as it has come to be expressed in bronze and stone, echoes revisions that have already have begun to be made within academia, but is now being undertaken by those whose lives remain constrained and exploited by the oppressive power of the class, race, sex, and economic prejudices contained within it.

As the statues have tumbled across the land, there is an understanding that we will emerge from what might be called the COVID-Interregnum as a much-altered nation - our histories reimagined, and our values reconfigured. A significant driver of this change is the perception that it is people from communities of color, immigrants, the poor and the marginalized - the very people who have been largely discounted in the nation’s history – that now constitute the majority of the nation’s critical workers. It is they, during this pandemic, who keep the country running and provide the essential services we all rely on. Their service to this country has become apparent while many of their communities are the most severely impacted by the virus - both because of their inhabitants’ exposure in the workplace and because those communities are often ‘underserved’ and already suffering gross racial, economic and environmental inequities.

It is a truism to suggest that the public has now been replaced by the consumer; that the public good has been replaced by individual desire; that public space has been reduced to the private visions of the individual; that democracy has been sacrificed on the altar of economics. As Wendy Brown writes, in, Undoing the Demos, 2012, “Neoliberal reason, ubiquitous today in statecraft and the workplace, in jurisprudence, education, culture, and a vast range of quotidian activity, is converting the distinctly political character, meaning, and operation of democracy’s constituent elements into economic ones.”. Thus, the Left’s traditional urge to build a bureaucracy that restrains predatory commerce in the interest of the public good is subverted by the growth of a corporate state designed to suppress its vestigial caring dimension.

This neoliberal attribute fatally weakens the viability of the obvious ‘Alternative’ to which Thatcher was so averse, that of democratic socialism, which thrived in post-war Western Europe as it emerged from the worldwide crisis.  Those governments were driven by a mission: to embrace responsibility for the health of all of their citizens – rather than let it be controlled by black marketeers or corporate looters; to ensure that elder care, youth services and childcare be freely available – not powered by profit; to provide good, free education to all - not restricted by its expense to the privileged few; to declare that housing and adequate nutrition are a human right - not resources to be leveraged by the financially strong; to assert that homelessness has no place in an enlightened state – not accepted as a necessary alternative to the supposed evils of welfare; to declare that the mentally ill, together with the anxious and alienated, find a haven in adequate social services – not left to swell the ranks of mendicant street people; and to ensure that public order is maintained without a militarized police force supporting the criminalization of poverty, the presumption of Black and minority criminality and the thuggish treatment of those it arrests. All these beneficent outcomes must now be sought elsewhere. As Bruno Latour points out in his recent essay, ‘Are you ready to extract yourself from the Economy?’, “After a hundred years devoted to socialism limited just to the redistribution of the benefits of the economy, it might now be more a matter of inventing a socialism that contests production itself”.

Latour makes the point that in the miraculous COVID-inspired halting of production, travel and pollution, the world discovered a hitherto unsuspected superpower – the power of interruption. We have the ability, collectively, it now seems, to become globalization interrupters, neoliberalism interrupters and interrupters of all those modes of production that are destroying the habitability of the earth for humans and our neighboring species. He suggests we have an opportunity of, “Getting away from production as the overriding principle of our relationship to the world.” This constitutes a retreat from the very principle that informed the colonization of the Americas and continues to inform its despoliation.

In the City of Ventura, along California’s central coast some twenty miles from where I live, a large bronze statue of Junipero Serra has been officially removed from outside of City Hall, signaling an understanding that the Spanish colonial project, the Catholic Church, the Franciscan Order, and Serra, as founder of the Mission system, bear responsibility for the almost total destruction of the native Chumash people who had peopled the area for some fifteen thousand years prior to the Spanish invasion of California in 1769. The City has also promised to remove the image of Serra from its official seal.

The City has interrupted what once was cast in bronze, set in stone, and typeset in Grade Four histories – a veneration not for the people who had a complex and symbiotic relationship with the world but for the exploiters, the desecrators and the mercenary agents of their destruction, who for so long have been the heroes of Californian and American history. The Franciscan Order and the Government of Spain under Charles III planned to generate great agricultural wealth in California by using a feudal system in which the native peoples worked as serfs building infrastructure and tending irrigated crops, whilst at the same time undergoing a conversion to Christianity. One of Spain’s goals in building the Mission system, of sending vast remittances back to the home country failed utterly, but not before their efforts resulted in the effective genocide of the local Chumash peoples.

On the coastal plains of Ventura, in the Central Valley and elsewhere in California, industrial agriculture now generates wealth beyond the imagining of the Franciscans and their military detail, but its production still comes at vast human and environmental costs. The predominantly Latinx field workers have suffered withering rates of COVID infection, and their communities’ health resources have been correspondingly stressed. As essential workers, they continue to toil in the sun - growing fruits and vegetables sold across the country in an industry dedicated to generating a surplus rather than a sufficiency; to growing food as a product rather than as a staple source of nutrition.

The removal of Serra from California’s pantheon of those who have historically privileged the value of production over humanity (an essential quality of capitalist realism) is a valuable symbolic gesture. Its real power, however, can only be unleashed if it also signals an interruption of those values of exploitation and extraction which he embodied, and which remain embedded in the economy of the state. As with the toppling of other contested historical statues across the country, such protests will mean little if they do not result in the broader interruption of the ideologies these erstwhile exalted figures represent.

Perhaps the COVID-interregnum has indeed halted the inevitability of the neoliberal continuum. The door has been opened to an ‘Alternative’, but It requires that we push on it, as Latour advises, by considering an exit from the economy rather than helping in the warp-speed recovery most heartily wished for by the guardians of neoliberalism. Our economization, our existence as droids devoted to consumption in support of the G.D.P., has given us the power to change our world. In applauding the destruction of the iconography of our past do we now have the courage to change the future?

This is No Way to Live

Every glimpse of the Stars and Stripes has me lurching between love and loathing - emotionally torn between the romantic and the rational.  I fell in love with the idea of America at a young age in a distant and dismal land. Much later, when my cognitive, analytical brain kicked in, that pure and chivalrous adoration was deeply compromised by both historical knowledge and lived experience.

Earlier this month, in extraordinary circumstances, the nation experienced the most potent date on the American calendar – July 4th. It is a day that inevitably prompts some reflection on the nature of the American experience – a highly heterogenous set of phenomena which is nevertheless somehow reflected in the vivid graphic design of Old Glory.

For me, it all began with a miniature, die-cast, Matchbox model of the 1959 Chevy Impala. It was clear that a thing of such outlandish beauty could only exist, at full-scale, in a world entirely removed from the one that I inhabited. Its existence must rely, I reasoned, on a distant, fabled world, the shadowy outlines of which had already appeared to me when I first heard “Jail House Rock” by Elvis Presley a year or so earlier. Later, my brain was awash in the music of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. But when I heard “River Deep – Mountain High,” by Ike and Tina Turner and produced by Phil Spector, that music was eclipsed, and my vision of America was fully restored - based on the musical stylings of Los Angeles and the curvature of Detroit sheet metal. It was this vision which shaped my emotional, adolescent brain and rendered it immune to the realities of the Watts Rebellion in the summer of 1965, the Detroit Riots of 1967, and America’s annus horribilis of 1968.

Now, having lived in California for forty years, I remain riven between this country’s still powerful romantic allure and its gruesome historical reality. I recognize that the one greatly depends on the other – the pain and sometimes joy of the African American experience, for instance, provided the foundation for the Blues, out of which sprang all the music to which I have referred, and which continue to inform culture more generally. The creative energies that once burned brightly in Detroit, and may now reside in Silicon Valley, continue to arise out of an economy based on freedom and opportunity, but are deeply shadowed by its ubiquitous practices of extraction and exploitation.

From the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights arose a  political infrastructure that papered over the most egregious injustices of the nation, and was bathed in a powerful mystique that, even today, retains much of its emotional resonance. The founding ideas of our politics, based on the philosophies of the European Enlightenment which established the classic liberalism of civil society, as well as its home-grown mechanics - the whole business of voting, the campaigns, the passage of legislation, and the defining of the country’s laws by reference to the U.S. Constitution – remain key to our emotional well-being. We rely, it seems to me, on the presumed justice of a governmental framework to counterbalance the lived inequities of a capitalist society bound up with notions of private property – which Rousseau correctly identified as the source of all inequality. Whatever balance might be achieved is, however, further roiled by historic notions of caste – defined, at least in part, by skin color.

Within this intrinsically contentious framework, we have established broad categories of philosophical opinion – liberal and conservative; donkey and elephant; blue and red; Democrat and Republican. So it is that we live in a highly polarized nation where about half of the country is disappointed with the tenor of whichever party holds sway in local, state and federal elections. This half of the country is then lacking in equanimity, instead harboring feelings of aggression, fear and even hatred towards the other half, but especially towards their representatives who, for the moment, collectively hold a majority, or individually, hold an office, in this or that notionally democratic institution.

This is no way to live. This year, we have been exposed to a number of realities that entirely transcend the pettiness of our politics and have a far greater impact on our lives than do our moribund democratic institutions. I’m talking about issues of sickness and health, work or no work, plenty or precarity, pleasure or pain, care or neglect, life and death - and the continued viability of our planet as a nurturing environment to humans and non-humans alike. These are transcendent issues which politicians can only impact at the margins. Yet, many of us mortgage our sense of personal well-being and the fate of a threatened planet to the results of elections – those profoundly flawed, state-sanctioned enactments of ideological struggle.

Notwithstanding the apparent impotency of our politicians to actually do anything substantive - from the personal to the planetary - our mood is nevertheless impacted by the tenor of Washington. The 2020 federal election will be a measure of how that mood translates into votes and those votes into the balance of power between the parties. Ideally, it will be a measure of whether we, as voters, despite being partially disenfranchised by way of gerrymandering and the archaic electoral college, wish to vote for the future or for the past; whether we see in our history greater pride and passion than dishonor and revulsion; whether we believe that our history needs eulogizing or exposing; or whether we believe it deserves mythic reconstruction or eviscerating deconstruction. Our president has clearly articulated arguments for the former. It appears doubtful, at this moment, whether arguments for the latter, if they are made at all, will be characterized by coherence, passion or robust intellectual argument. Incarnate, as it now stands, in two septuagenarian party figureheads, it is the vainglorious fabrication of America’s past that may yet triumph over a nebulous future sketchily presented by the opposition: neither vision is remotely equipped to withstand the reality checks imposed by a pandemic, economic turmoil, civil unrest and environmental degradation.

The president has emerged from a horrendous period of political turmoil – articles of impeachment, Ukrainegate, Russiagate, Covid and the Black Lives Matter protests - with speeches given in the shadow of the Mount Rushmore National Memorial, and, a day later, at the Lincoln Memorial on July 4th, that will define his particular brand of populist conservatism. While his is a presidency that has been defined more by rhetoric than action, more by symbolism than facticity, the pain and suffering he has caused many Americans and those who desire to be American – or at least to live here -  is very real. At the same time, his right-wing populism, made manifest in scapegoating, demonization, and petty acts of tyranny, has disaffected vast swathes of the electorate to whom his very persona is a daily rebuke. But he remains the master of his base - lionized by its members - and it was to them that these speeches were directed. The deeply disaffected are unlikely to be swayed by his rhetoric. These were speeches, not of persuasion, but of confirmation of his ideology.

Backgrounded by the Lincoln Memorial, our president summarily summoned the character of all Americans when he declaimed,

“America’s fearless resolve has inspired heroes who defined our national character … It has willed our warriors up mountains and across minefields.  It has liberated continents, split the atom, and brought tyrants and empires to their knees.”

What that ‘fearless resolve’ has not done is fully validate the idea of America for all of its inhabitants; what it has not done is ensure that those who dream the dreams this country offers, if not entirely fulfilled, are at least recognized; and what it has not done is correlate the country’s remarkable achievements in the arts, popular culture, technology, science, and design with social justice, equitable opportunity and liveability for all its people. In our name, apparently, this country has ‘brought tyrants and empires to their knees’ – but its social failures have now inspired its own inhabitants to take-a-knee, in wordless supplication for inclusive social equity.

On a personal level, I remain deeply in love with this country – but I want to change it.  The change I want to see will not come this November, the change I want to see has already begun, and is already manifest in a fearless resolve that, quite simply: This is No Way to Live!

A Requiem for George Floyd

Exactly a month after George Floyd’s death, driving along Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood, ‘Black Lives Matter’ tags have converted the plywood  board-ups that line the street into a tapestry that establishes a rhythmic mantra - proclaiming a society of equality and justice. Approaching Crescent Heights Boulevard, the currently closed Laugh Factory is covered with images of George Floyd as though he were the featured stand-up comedian at the club. Floyd, however, achieved his eight minutes, forty-six seconds of fame with his neck pinned to the ground by a white police officer’s knee.  His life was unregarded and his potential death, as his last moments ebbed away, entirely ungrieved by his assailant. 

That his life mattered, and now continues to matter, has been fully established. On Sunset, his spray-painted, chiaroscuro image appears repeatedly on either side of the road as it passes through glitzy Sunset Plaza and then curves uphill past music clubs, boutique hotels, and restaurants, over all of which loom huge billboards that, like mechanical raptors, appear to be surveying their prey - but it is Floyd’s face, at eye level, amidst the BLM tags, that commands a deeper, visceral attention. All this changes abruptly as the road begins its meander through residential Beverly Hills, Bel Air and Brentwood. Here, manicured trees, groomed yards, and neatly trimmed hedges obscure the grand houses which shelter those entirely untroubled by the precarity experienced by many, perhaps most, Americans.

Here too, no doubt, ‘Black Lives Matter’ is also having a moment –  the Kindles of its residents loaded or their coffee tables scattered with appropriately themed books, like the seven of the ten that command the NYT hard-cover non-fiction best-sellers (as of May 31 – June 6): White Fragility, Robin D’Angelo; So You Want to Talk About Race, Ileoma Oluo; How to be an Antiracist, Ibram X. Kendi; Me and White Supremacy, Layla F. Saad; The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander; Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates; and, Becoming, Michelle Obama. Feelings of earnest concern, genuine sympathy, resolve to make a better world, and a sense of solidarity, surely prevail.

However complicit we may be in sustaining the historical-racial schema in this country, we can all now agree that, ‘Black Lives Matter’, but the tag’s emblazonment across the country, and internationally, remains a hollow gesture unless there is meaningful collective action to create a social environment in which all black lives can indeed flourish - and matter. Southerners lost the Civil War but won the peace by instituting one hundred years of Jim Crow. After overthrowing Reconstruction, white Americans colonized the freed slaves, exploiting their labor, denying them their democratic rights, and policing their lives with state sanctioned violence. It is thus that the Civil War continues. It is a war about an equitable share of the nation’s wealth and, perhaps as importantly, societal respect. The psychiatrist, Frantz Fanon, in, The Wretched of the Earth, 1961, suggests that the eponymous masses, under the heel of European colonization, rebel not only against need and hunger, but the continuing humiliation to which they are exposed.  While the condition of Black America is surely as varied as White America, the former carries with it the accumulated inheritance of four hundred years of humiliation (established in 1619), barely dented by the election of a person of mixed heritage as president in 2008. White America carries with it, in even its direst subjects, the taint of unassailed privilege (established in 1492), in which, as a white immigrant resident here for some forty years, I undoubtedly share.

Judith Butler, the U.C. Berkeley academic and author (blurbed by Cornel West as, “the most creative and courageous social theorist writing today"), is unlikely to appear on any New York Times best seller list. But her new book, The Force of Non-Violence – An Ethico-Political Bind, published earlier this year, directly addresses the issues surrounding the murder of George Floyd. She frames the possibilities of non-violence in American society within the concepts of ‘livability’ and ‘grievability’.

She writes that, “...equal treatment is not possible outside of a social organization of life in which material resources, food distribution, housing, work, and infrastructure seek to achieve equal conditions of livability. Reference to such equal conditions of livability is therefore essential to the determination of “equality” in any substantive sense of the term.” These conditions of equality must be achieved outside of the shadow of colonial power falling on a population and thus rendering them dependent. “That deployment of dependency confirms both racism and colonialism: it identifies the cause of a group’s subordination as a psycho-social feature of the group itself.”

Butler argues that non-violence is untenable unless it occurs within a society committed to equality. The equal value of life is its essential condition – otherwise, as she notes, “certain lives will be more tenaciously defended than others.” It follows then, “If one opposes the violence done to human lives, this presumes that it is because those lives are valuable” - their loss, in any circumstance, is made worthy of grief. All members of a society founded in equality will then possess ‘grievability’.

Butler uses the frame of grievability to review the death of Eric Garner, a black arrestee put into a choke hold in New York City by a white police officer while the victim gasped, “I can’t breathe.” This 2014 tragedy helped to catalyze the national ‘Black Lives Matter’ movement. In an analysis that directly relates to the murder of George Floyd, she asks, “…is it simply that this life is one that can be snuffed out because it is not considered a life, never was a life, does not fit the norm of life that belongs to the racial schema; hence, because it does not register as a grievable life - a life worth preserving?” After a Staten Island jury failed to convict the N.Y.P.D. officer responsible for Garner’s death, William Barr, the Attorney General, chose not to pursue a federal civil rights indictment against him.

What establishes solidarity is mutuality – a common desire to live our lives un-threatened by each other; a recognition that it is only the establishment of the universal grievabilty of life - all life, human and non-human – that will ensure our survival as a society and as a part of the global ecosystem. Thus, it is that Judith Butler expands the thesis of her slim volume to register the enormity of America’s, and humanity’s challenge.

The Force of Non-Violence ends with what may serve as a requiem for George Floyd,

“So, whether we are caught up in rage or love – rageful love, militant pacifism, aggressive non-violence, radical persistence – let us hope that we live that bind in ways that let us live with the living, mindful of the dead, demonstrating persistence in the midst of grief and rage, the rocky and vexed trajectory of collective action in the shadow of fatality.”

That is too long for a tag, but it seems to me to be the full flowering of what ‘Black Lives Matter’ can mean: it represents its lived destiny - its ontogeny. If we can embrace the ‘vexed trajectory of collective action’ implied by these three words, now imprinted on our urban infrastructure and on our consciousness, we might begin the difficult work of transformation required of them.