Endgame Vol.1 (15 page)

Perhaps I’m being too harsh. Global Exchange does offer people the opportunity to change the culture in more ways than merely buying things. For example, by following a link you can “Send a fax to [CEO] Philip Knight asking that Nike take immediate and concrete steps to ensure that the people making the company’s products aren’t facing abuse and intimidation.”
¹⁰⁸
I’m sure Phil will personally read your fax, and I’m sure yours will be the one that convinces him to give up the practices that have made him one of the richest men in the world.

If the fax doesn’t work, you can always try a rock through his window. But be warned: folks at Global Exchange probably won’t approve (see Premise Five).

Back to Seattle, where black-clad anarchists were throwing rocks through the windows of Nike and other stores, and police were nowhere to be seen. Who was going to protect the stores? Pacifists to the rescue. Many shouted “You’re ruining our demonstration”
¹⁰⁹
as they formed human chains in front of chain
stores. Others began “physically assaulting window smashers while yelling ‘This is a non-violent protest.’”
¹¹⁰
One shared her thoughts with a reporter for
The New York Times
, “Here we are protecting Nike, McDonald’s, the Gap, and all the while I’m thinking, ‘Where are the police? These anarchists should have been arrested.’”
¹¹¹
Local kids—mainly people of color from the Seattle equivalent of the favelas (
favela
in Brazil,
poblacione
in Chile,
villa miseria
in Argentina,
cantegril
in Uraguay,
rancho
in Venezuela,
banlieue
in France,
ghetto
in the United States
¹¹²
)—joined the anarchists, smashed some windows, and started liberating some of the goods (I believe the technical term for this is
looting
). The crowd of vandals—from the Latin
Vandalii
, of Germanic origin: a member of a Germanic people who lived in an area south of the Baltic between the Vistula and the Oder, overran Gaul, Spain, and northern Africa in the fourth and fifth centuries CE, and in 455 sacked Rome—was the most multicultural and multiracial group of the protest. As one anarchist later commented: “When [writer] Jeffrey St. Clair started to leave town on December 3rd, a black youth rushed up to him and excitedly asked if this WTO thing will come back next year. Sure, the labor march and enviro’s were mostly white folks. But the action against corporate property was the one truly diverse, inclusive, festive action.”
¹¹³
Pacifists were caught on videotape assaulting young black men—the whole time chanting “non-violent protest”—and attempting to hold them to turn over to police.
¹¹⁴
I’m sure that had these youths wanted to do some
real
damage to Nike, they could have gone to the library, logged onto computers, and sent Phil Knight a bunch of faxes. And when they’d finished at the library, they could have gone back to their ghetto and played tin can drums for tourists.

All of which is to say that pacifism makes strange bedfellows.

To keep dogmatic pacifists from calling the cops and then holding me till they arrive, I need to say that I no more advocate violence than I advocate nonviolence. Further, I think that when our lifestyle is predicated on the violent theft of resources, to advocate nonviolence without advocating the immediate dismantling of the entire system is not, in fact, to advocate nonviolence at all, but to tacitly countenance the violence (unseen by us, of course: see Premise Four) on which the system is based. I advocate speaking honestly about violence (and other things), and I advocate paying attention to circumstances. I advocate not allowing dogma to predetermine my course of action. I advocate keeping an
open mind. I advocate a rigorous examination of all possibilities, including fair trade, “Reality Tours,” lawsuits, writing, civil disobedience, vandalism, sabotage, violence, and even voting. (Recently I was talking to a number of college students about the fix we’re in and said, “We need to stop civilization from killing the planet by any means necessary.” An instructor at the college, a longtime pacifist, corrected me, “You mean by any nonviolent means, of course.” I replied that I meant precisely what I said.) I advocate listening to my body. I advocate clean water and clean air. I advocate a world with wild salmon in it, and grizzlies, and sharks, whales (just yesterday I read—not in the capitalist press, obviously—that the federal government recently refused to provide protection for the North Pacific right whale, the world’s most imperiled large whale, because, in the words of an industry spokesperson—oh, sorry, a government spokesperson—“the essential biological requirements of the population . . . are not sufficiently understood”
¹¹⁵
), red-legged frogs, and Siskiyou Mountain salamanders (then tonight I read—also not in the capitalist press, silly: what do you think their purpose is, to provide useful information?—“The rare Siskiyou Mountain salamander may be facing extinction because the Bureau of Land Management will soon allow Boise Cascade to begin logging in the amphibian’s [last remaining] habitat”
¹¹⁶
). I advocate a world in which human and nonhuman communities are allowed to live on their own landbases. I advocate not allowing those in power to take resources by force, by law, by convention, or any other real or imagined means. Beyond
not allowing
, I advocate actively stopping them from doing so.

Most of our discourse surrounding counterviolence in this country runs from nonexistent all the way to superficial. So the course for this book seemed clear. One-by-one I would carefully examine the arguments that are commonly—and I have to say, I’ve learned through long and tedious experience, most often unthinkingly—thrown out against any use of violence in any (especially political) circumstances.
You can’t use the master’s tools to take down the master’s house
, says the person still attempting to work within religious, philosophical, economic, and political systems—Can you say “green capitalism?”—devised explicitly to serve the rich (John Locke put it succinctly: “Government has no other end than the preservation of property”
¹¹⁷
).
You will become just like they are
, say people whose knowledge of violence is almost entirely theoretical (I asked some of my students, in for murder, if killing someone is a psychological
or spiritual Rubicon, and some said
yes
while some said
no
; unfortunately, Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse, and Geronimo aren’t available for comment, although I’d wager their wars against civilization did not civilize them).
Violence doesn’t work
, say those who tell us to shop and fax our way to sustainability, and who have to ignore—as is true for most of us working on these issues, else we’d probably go mad—that nothing is working to stop or even significantly slow the destruction. Hell, as I mentioned before, we can’t even slow the destruction’s
acceleration
! I would say this is partly because those in power have on their side so many tanks and guns and airplanes, as well as writers, therapists, and teachers; partly because we’re all crazy (and our sickness is very strong); partly because in the main neither our violent nor nonviolent responses are attempts to rid us of civilization itself—by allowing the framing conditions to remain we guarantee a continuation of the behaviors these framing conditions necessitate—and partly because we’re all scared spitless about doing what we all know needs to be done.

But in the couple of years between the book’s conception and the start of writing I realized that the question of whether or when to use violence is only a small yet integral part of the real question I’m after. I’m after much bigger game indeed.

To be civilized is to hold oneself in opposition to nature, which is to hold oneself in opposition to oneself, to be ashamed of the animality of the self, which to the fully civilized means the “filth” of the self. All of this destroys any possibil- ity of communication or entering into communion with any- one but other civilized humans. If we listen to the creatures and to the elements, and even to our bodies, we are then primi- tive, backwards. So we learn very early to put that away. We learn to despise ourselves and to feel ashamed of our bodies, to hate the dirt and to hate everything about us, because we’re human, which means we’re humus: they come from the same Latin root: earth and dirt. But self-loathing is a difficult thing to acknowledge—maybe the most difficult—so all those char- acteristics we must loathe if we are to be civilized, if we are to dominate, get dumped into others who bear the shame and who end up feeling dirty.

I THINK FOR THE MOST PART IT’S NOT ONLY ABUSERS WHO DON’T change. Most of us don’t. Sure, sometimes somebody or another may have an epiphany, like Saul of Tarsus did in the Bible. But let’s be honest about that one, too: after he saw the light of God and got knocked off his ass, he may have changed his name to Paul, but he was still a domineering asshole. It’s just that now instead of persecuting Christians he used Christianity as a vessel for his pre-existing rigidity, making certain the reasonably new religion mirrored his hierarchical perception of the world.

Most often, change, at least on a social level, occurs the way Max Planck described it: “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.”
¹¹⁹
Years ago I read Oswald Spengler’s
Decline of the West
. It’s a long book, from which I really remember only one image. I think Spengler would be pleased at which one. A culture is like a plant growing in a particular soil. When the soil is exhausted—presuming a closed system (i.e., the soil isn’t being replenished)—the plant dies. Cultures—or at least historical (as opposed to cyclical) cultures—are the same. The Roman Empire exhausted its possibilities (both physical, in terms of resources, and psychic or spiritual), then hung on decadent—I mean this in its deeper sense of decaying, although the meaning having to do with debauchery works, too—for a thousand years. Other empires are the same. The British Empire. The American Empire. Civilization itself has continued to grow by expanding the zone from which it takes resources. The plant has gotten pretty big, but at the cost of a lot of dead soil.

I think the exhausted soil metaphor works for individuals, too: they don’t generally change until they’ve exhausted the possibilities of their previous way of being.

Last year I received an email from a woman who said that my work had saved her life. She had many times tried to kill herself, and was contemplating suicide again when she came across a passage in my work describing part of the reason this culture’s death urge manifests the way it does, in the widespread killing of humans and nonhumans, and in the killing of the planet. This death urge is partly a simple desire to die to this way of living that does not serve us well, but
because we in this culture have forgotten that the spiritual exists, and have devalued the metaphorical, we do not understand that this death does not have to be physical, but could be transformative. Dying to one way of being so you can be reborn transformed is the oldest metaphor in the world, one the world is built on. But we forget, and so we build daisy-cutters and depleted-uranium shells, and we kill without ceasing. The woman said her own death urge might not have to manifest in the taking of her own life. Maybe she just wanted to transform. We corresponded a bit, she asked if we could take a walk when she was passing through town, and I agreed. It was a good walk, through meadows of thick sharp-edged grasses perfect for ground-nesting birds, into a sandy-soiled scrub pine forest near the ocean, and along the ocean beaches themselves. She was a good woman, smart, dedicated, knowledgeable about wild things. She was also in agony. Her agony derived partly from the aftereffects of the horrendous violence her father visited upon her as a child, and partly from her sensitivity to the similarly horrendous violence our culture perpetrates on the natural world. She said that instead of killing herself, she was going to spend three months alone in the desert, talking and listening to coyotes, clouds, ravens, rabbitbrush, and a cool, clear river. She hoped to return a new person.