i have been trying to find the right way to put this, but it's not easy.

yesterday i wrote for hours about slavery and petroleum, the Transition movement and Lydia Maria Child.

there's a point to be made there, but i couldn't quite make it, because i feel a powerful need to cover my bases, explaining carefully, so i am not misunderstood, what is and is not the same about the chattel slavery economy and the petroleum economy. and what i hope and fear is, or is not, the same about Transition Northampton and the Northampton Society of Education and Industry.

i've also been reading stories about what the world might look like, once petroleum goes away, if slavery doesn't. they're quite good, and have gotten inside my head, in that way that unsettling parables do.

and i've been planning for grad school, in history. and reading derrick jensen for the first time, and spending a lot of time outside, down by a river that seems to get lower by the day, and the woods that are none of them much past 100 years old.

just now, a series of funny things. i read this sentence: "what are ten species of edible plants within one hundred yards of your home?" and i could answer that question. more or less.

and then i read this: "I was recently in new england, and someone there commented that local trees had grown back over the last hundred years. he took this as a good sign: the people of the region had finally learned to not deforest their own backyards." followed by a counterpoint: "technological and social innovation have enabled these yankees to deforest the globe."

and my first thought was that when i walk, or run, out to those century-old woods by the river, where i can identify burdock and lambs quarters and dandelion and acorns and nettle and daylily and a half dozen other edible plants, i find them in fields that get annually bush-hogged, and in the thin slips of young woods between.

and then the last funny thing that happened was that, in this same book, i read the name of a friend i fell out of touch with years ago, which spurred me to try to find the right way to say this again... and when i went upstairs, i found i'd left my coal burning computer open and idling on the website of the man who gave me that phrase.

the friend was someone who went to yale when this country was first invading iraq. she thought that the invasion was a really bad idea, and hung the flag upside-down out her window, and for her trouble, she had her living space invaded by a belligerent group of white undergrad men wielding 2x4s and racist epithets.

I remember the sense, at the time, that this kind of violence was waiting, out in the open, for anyone willing to say anything marginally honest about iraq, and this nation's military goals there. doubly so if these honest people failed to be straight white men.

and i remember being confused that someone who so gloriously failed to be such things would still be, as our mutual acquaintances told me she was, a primitivist. my exposure to primitivists at that point was mostly to the variety that seemed excited about The Collapse, and the fantasy of eking out a hard-bitten survivalist existence that was nasty, brutish, and short, in the deer hide pants that they had already made for the occaision. i had, and have, little patience, and something verging on utter contempt, for dudes whose rejection of "civilization" stems from civilization's emasculating nanny culture that fails to separate the men from the boys... or whatever. so i wrote off primitivism and deep ecology and "anti-civ" as so much masturbatory ablist heteropatriarchal macho fantasy, with a fetish for the noble savage. There's a slight aftertaste, bitter and lingering, of some of that in Jensen's writings.

at the beginning of my senior year in college, i watched Post-Katrina New Orleans happen. and i worked on my thesis during spring break, when most of my friends went to new orleans for the same reasons i later did - a powerful need to do something.

and when i got down there, i found that Post-Katrina New Orleans had taken place just like The Gulf War. and what is most upsetting, and hardest to shake, is that new orleans absolutely refuses to be anywhere but the real world. which means that what happens there happens because of what happens here. the same world, the same rules, the same patterns of inputs and outputs. 

at the beginning of the summer, two lovely friends from new orleans visited my home town, and we talked about the Deepwater Horizon. gallows humor, mostly. a few weeks ago, a wonderfully thoughtful mentor and i sat down to lunch, and she said "It's gotten to the point where things are so fucked that I can't take it all in." we were talking about the collapsing lobster population in the atlantic, and about the Deepwater Horizon, which had still not been capped.

i've reluctantly revisited my dismissal of primitivism. or rather, i've come to the conclusion that all my discomfort with The Dudebros Of The Apocolypse is merited. and that calling it "civilization" is complicated, but that the industrial petroleum economy is going to burn itself out, that there are other economies waiting to take its place, and they are also going to burn themselves out, and that in so doing, those economic systems are going to continue destroying vast areas of the world, and vast numbers of its inhabitants. Look at the gulf, or that other gulf that oil comes from. or the niger delta, or the appalachians. or the Sundarbans. one of the helpful things about Jensen is that he insists we already know plenty of examples. and i find that i do.

basically, i have, in the last several years, stopped seeing apocalypse as an adventure fantasy, and have started to see it as a fairly honest way of describing actual events. a partial description, because apocalypse, as a concept, has two parts. the first part is the end of the world in question. then the veil-lifting part. and we've got the worlds ending part. it's been with us since 1492 (in Al-Andalus and Guanahani both) and before, and since. the difference now is that many different sorts of worlds seem to be ending at once. 


there's some level of consensus on oil discovery and production being well over the hill. ditto the effects of climate change. and as joni seager doesn't quite put it in her wonderful talk at barnard, fuck a bunch of 2 degrees feel-good bullshit.
it's the revelation part that we're still waiting on. not The Case Of Chosen v. Fallen kind of revelation. the other one, where knowledge gets assimilated, incorporated, and acted on.

So i'm marking the end of this summer by taking the GRE, and then looking after some dogs, and then going to work with some Queer Family in tennessee. and from there, i'm hoping to go visit a lot of people i care about, in a lot of places i've never been, and try to figure out the right thing to do, somewhere in the process. 

because i know that i can wake up in the morning and write my thesis instead of going to new orleans. i've made that decision before.

but there are deeper and more simple questions, about far less familiar and far more apparent options.

And i'd appreciate some input.

RUN

In the ongoing debate over Whether We Should Do It, Nike have generally held a pretty consistent position. To put it mildly, they are in disagreement with Frankie's view.

 Frankie assume that we want to Do It. Nike tell us that we Don't want to Do It, but hold out the hope that we may be able to Just impulse-buy our way out of that lethargy. With help, of course, from Nike.

But then sometimes Nike Say somewhat different things about doing it.

Sure, we have that special, disempowering form of women's empowerment, where women still get targeted and objectified like in any slasher film, but are then empowered to not die by the products they purchase! But i also see what Nike did there, with the turning of the slasher film pastiche on its michael-meyers-visaged head. and there's something worth salvaging from it: running away is awesome.

Chainsaw Man has all the Power signifiers. he's a burly, masked, fully clothed dude. he has a deep throaty growl, a chainsaw, and the element of surprise.

Fleeing Woman has all of the powerlessness signifiers. she's a slight, partially disrobed, unarmed lady with a high-pitched scream and no obvious means of defense. in a normal slasher movie, FW would grab a kitchen knife, lock herself in a closet or bathroom, and/or run outside into the protective arms of Big Strong Man, who will then take up his patriarchal protective responsibility.

FW doesn't do any of this, she just takes off. Nike wants to associate itself with her ability to run, which is bullshit for reasons i'll get into another time. but all the things that make FW look like the inevitable victim of CM in the typical misogynistic slasher narrative are quite the opposite if her goal isn't to defeat the bad guy and defend the territory of The Home. minimal clothes make movement easier and body temperature self-regulating. no mask makes breathing easier. and it's much easier to run when you're not carrying a growling chainsaw.

and as she heads off into the night, FW isn't looking for BS Man who will fight for her. nor a closet to lock herself in. she's just running.

Running from a conflict is supposed to be bad. "cut and run" is now used in political posturing to mean, roughly "i support the war and don't care that my figure of speech implies that our ship of state will shortly be dashed to splinters by the oncoming storm." The imperative to hold the line insists on the failure of giving up property or territory or an affected posture of Power, which are all made more or less synonymous. Holding your ground, or your stuff, or your burly bravado, all require the ontological certainty that anything so defended will be safe, or more generally, that you can define a space, and keep out the things you don't want.

Any trans person who's ever used a public bathroom can attest to the safety of such defended spaces.
so can, hopefully, anyone who's paying marginally close attention to the current debates over immigration.
or anyone who's ever been present uninvited on a college campus, or in a corporate building.
or any queer person or other mutant who's been ensconced in the normative safety of The Home.
or ask Francine. or Mrs. Torrence.

the call always comes from inside the house.
or more to the point, the zombies always get in, and if the cavalry shows up, then you're stuck with the cavalry.

Holding the line never just requires grit and guns. it requires a chain of command, and uniforms, and the brig. and the first to be frog-marched to the brig are always the people who we've been holding the line down on top of. their bodies make our line waver treacherously, and this Will Not Do.

but the good news is, the line can't be held. you can't stay pure, and you can't stay clean, and you can't stay safe, and you can't keep from getting hurt, and that door won't hold forever. but you can run away. you can't carry much with you when you do. and that's a good thing. so relax.

what we can do is keep moving. resist the logic that says we have to stay put, have to clean up, have to defend what we have, where we are, because someone else wants it and somewhere else will be worse.

we can keep running longer than anything else with feet. ain't nothing can keep up with us once we get moving. not the creep with the chainsaw, not your husband with the axe, not the zombie, and not the man with the gun

quick. the world we thought we knew is burning. drop everything and run.

visualization aids in learning

Info from the Wikileaks Afghan War Diaries.
(thanks to Casual Entropy for the link)


the original, higer-resolution version of this video is set to Iron Maiden's "Run To The Hills."
for those unfamiliar, that's a song by the heavy metal band about the genocidal Indian Wars of the 1800s.
which wouldn't be so bad if the youtubes didn't keep urging me to buy the MP3 on itunes, and present me with popup ads about designer shoes. moreover, it's worth mentioning that, to this day, standard US military parlance refers to all territory not under US or Allied control as "Indian Country."

the obvious

< stating it >
although it's been said,
many times, many ways,
bear with me.

because now that everyone else has said it,
it's worth saying again.

we are not doing anyone any favors by continuing to occupy Afghanistan.
No wait, let me rephrase that. We, the taxpayers who fund the US military, have actually allowed our employees to do many favors, for many people. Many of these people are in the Pakistani military, including the Directorate For Inter-Services Intelligence, and the Taliban.

To whatever more abstracted degree support for the Taliban has been enabled by US drone attacks which predictably kill civilians and destroy towns, to whatever degree our strategy has transformed the embattled ruling cadre of the Talib into an ethnic Pashtun nationalist anti-occupation insurgency, the fact remains.

We Fund The Taliban. No past tense. We're doing it right now. We give money to warlords, they give it to the Taliban. We give money to Pakistan, they give it to the Taliban. The Occupation Funds The Taliban.

We can, and clearly do, pretend otherwise.
It's not that it's so glaringly obvious, or so embarrassingly well established as to be impossible to ignore.
It is well within our power to keep ignoring the old information. I have total confidence that we can continue to do so, while simultaneously dismissing new information as "nothing new."

We can keep doing it until we lose.
< / stating it >