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.

Our History is Our Future

We can be sure that the public grandiloquence of Barack Obama grated mightily on at least half of the country during his eight years in the Oval Office. Now, we Libtards find every Trump tweet excruciatingly inane - or horrifyingly inflammatory. As ever, it is the style, not the content, of American political leadership that is in question. For Its neoliberal ideology has been unwavering for four decades and is but the contemporary version of an implicitly racist dedication to the well-being of the wealthy that was fundamental to the founding of the Republic. Committed to the economization of all facets of public and private life, we citizens are remade as human capital: mini entrepreneurs whose only civic duty is towards pumping up the GDP. This is what our government demands of us, and we would be foolish to expect more from it than further destruction of the public realm and further trivialization of the democratic process. Having relinquished our individual roles as a necessary part of the Republic’s sovereignty, our vote is rendered superfluous at a time of a viral pandemic, unprecedented unemployment and expectations of further economic dislocation likely to eclipse the melt-down of 2008.

On a weekend when the nation’s streets exploded in violent protest against racialized police brutality, the President and the Vice President chose to attend a manned rocket launch contracted by SpaceX, a private corporation.  Politics have been dethroned, the public realm abandoned and the public good forsaken. Trump is ascendant, his sun-bronzed, narcissistic gaze reflected in the ruddy glow of burning streets.  His military, on high alert, awaits its orders.

Our smoldering streets may no longer be safe for Trump’s ‘warriors’ attempting, around the country, to fully re-open the American economy. Many will doubtless now enlist as his Law and Order ‘vigilantes’. Neoliberalism demands the appearance of vibrant, life-sustaining markets. Trump has seen the financial indices decline as the epidemic curve has arced skyward, but his focus has always been on economic rather than public health. He, and his ‘warriors’, are quite prepared to sacrifice ‘flattening the curve’ for the sake of a rising Dow but his calculus must now include appeasing his newly enrolled ‘vigilantes’ while not entirely disaffecting African Americans.

Neoliberalism, as the SARS-CoV-2 viral pandemic and the uprising demonstrate, is this country’s comorbidity – a precondition making it extremely susceptible to both viral disease and to the recapitulation of long-ago racial injustice.  In, The Road to Serfdom, 1944, Friedrich Hayek, the Anglo-Austrian economist, explicitly equates the freedom of the individual with the unfettered workings of the market. By way of contrast, he identifies the centralized economic planning evidenced in National Socialism, Communism and Social Democracies as inevitably trending towards totalitarianism. He suggests that governments restrict all attempts to establish social objectives and by extension, any encouragement of the citizen’s role in shaping these objectives. In other words, he recommends abandoning both the social and the political realm in favor of the invisible hand of the market, a goal that continues to inform neoliberalism as it is practiced across Europe and the Americas, and is the ruling ideology that has shaped the United States since the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980. Hayek’s ideas, developed out of his deeply felt reaction to German and Soviet totalitarianism, have had disastrous consequences in the United States where the gross injustices of its past continue to haunt its present, and where its best moments have been enshrined in exactly the kind of social objectives, such as FDR’s New Deal and LBJ’s Great Society, that Hayek spurns.

In the 1830’s, the two signature, home-grown horrors that have shaped American history, the genocidal eradication of indigenous peoples and slavery, coalesced in President Andrew Jackson’s ‘Indian Removals’ which aimed to deport a number of surviving Indian tribes to west of the Mississippi to make way for the establishment of further industrial cotton plantations.  This expansion of slavery was partly funded by securitized bonds, sold in New York, London, Paris, and other finance capitals, in a process that involved the financialization of human flesh. The violence necessary to convert slaves into a fungible commodity had existed for over two centuries, practiced in their initial capture in Africa, in their transportation, and in their work. The stain of slavery was then embedded in the capital generated by the cotton crop which went on to be invested in the Industrial Revolution and formed the basis for this country’s extravagant wealth. It is a wealth that has not been shared by most of its citizens.

The highly visible murders of Ahmaud Arbery and George Floyd, performed on the street and reprised endlessly as viral videos on social media, go to the heart of this country’s racialized hierarchies established in 1492 and then compounded in 1619, with the arrival of the first shipment of African slaves introduced to this country as stolen human capital. Neoliberalism has made human capital of us all, but has vastly accentuated the wealth divide because, as Piketty has shown, it is from investment and inherited wealth that the rich are made – not from an honest day’s work. The majority of the U.S. population, and certainly most African Americans, rely not on wealth from inheritance or investments, but on the mythology of the equitable rule of law and equal economic opportunity. As the looting component of the uprising suggests, egregious racialized murder exposes an awareness of this country’s endemic economic injustice.

Nick Estes writes in, Our History is the Future, 2019, “Indigenous elimination, in all its orientations, is the organizing principle of settler society.” In documenting the Lakota tribes’ struggles to prevent the Dakota Access Pipeline passing under, and across sacred indigenous lands, Estes lauds the ongoing struggles of native peoples to resist a colonizing civilization that possesses an overbearing commercial ethic which leaves little room for the recognition of other, non-material values. Across the continent, indigenous peoples regarded the native soil, along with its flora and fauna, as co-creators of their lives, and the concept of its individual ownership was unthinkable. Genocide after genocide has still not entirely eliminated their awareness of belonging to the land - ever in conflict with those who so clearly prize the value of individual ownership, property rights and, of course, the strange notion that the land belongs to them. 

It is in this country’s varied civilizational currents that the supreme value of the almighty dollar emerged. As a nation, we have bought and sold people, bought and sold the land’s natural beneficences, and now we have sold our sovereign right to vote to corporations that exist only to give succor to their owners and shareholders. The neoliberalism that was created out of a fear of totalitarianism has now made societies beholden to a totalized economy in which all is subsumed. Its values are those of the market, entirely blind to the human concerns of a richly diverse population many of whom it makes vulnerable to an ever increasing precarity in their livelihood, housing and health care. The current pandemic, natural disasters, debt crises, and recessions expose the venal character of this prevailing ideology, while emergency relief and bailouts are leveraged by the wealthy to expand capital in readiness for the next ‘recovery’ - widening the corrosive gulf between the rich and everybody else.

As a Native American academic, Estes celebrates his peoples’ ongoing resistance to the dominant culture, established shortly after 1492. By declaring that “Our History is Our Future”, he is committing to a continuance of this struggle. White members of the dominant culture can find no such guidance in their past. We see our history reenacted in violence and racial injustice entirely too often to wish it to be our future. We suppress our past and fear our future for good reason.

Neoliberalism has obliterated the conditions for democracy by concentrating wealth, eschewing the public good and causing civility to be drowned out by over-amplified, profit-seeking media. The democracy that now struggles to exist in this country, does so only as a fully financialized product fertilized by corporate money featuring a roster of politicians pitifully beholden to the special interests that support their reelection campaigns. Estes is right to reaffirm his peoples’ history. Our salvation might be in confronting ours.

Visions of a Post-Covid-19 World

While most of us sit at home, the planet continues to warm – polar ice melts, oceans acidify, glaciers disappear, and seas rise. Plants, animals, and humans continue to be displaced from their accustomed habitats. Life in our climatological greenhouse goes on, but now, one of a trillion microbial species has our attention. 

Zoonotic infections, exacerbated by urban development pushing ever further into the remaining wildlands of the world, where fauna and humanity newly comingle, are symptomatically allied to global warming. The Covid-19 pandemic is a late manifestation of ‘The Great Acceleration’, the era of unprecedented human expansion that was initiated post-WWII and has continued into this century - fueled by new technologies and a vastly expanded utilization of fossil energy. Infections are now rapidly disseminated - as the spawn of globalization - on airliners burning kerosene, and cruise ships and freighters burning diesel fuel, across global trade and tourism routes.

Accustomed to fire, flood, drought, extreme temperatures, crop failures, desertification, and the increased incidence of hurricanes and storm surges, either through direct experience or, more often, through the media, the link between the burning of fossil fuels and global warming has effectively infiltrated human consciousness - even as it continues to be fiercely denied by some. This consciousness must now expand to include these connections between fossil fuels and viral pandemics.

Since the mid-1970’s, with the advent of computerized climate models, it has been scientifically irrefutable that increased CO2 levels are warming the world in life-threatening ways.  For that almost fifty-year span, we, as individuals, communities, nations and international organizations have sat on our collective hands. Action, in the form of remediation, has been characterized by its absence - the void only breached by broken promises, betrayals, futile bureaucratic machinations, and outright denials of the foundational premise for its necessity.

This spring, a plot twist unfolded in this dispiriting and stultifying saga. While we, perforce, sit at home, inured to many decades of sleep-walking towards the climate apocalypse, the skies cleared, the price of oil dropped to negative $40 a barrel (rebounding to just short of positive $20 at the time of writing) and a global reduction in carbon emissions of nearly 8% is forecast for the year. We are living the dream of effectively confronting our egregious consumption of fossil fuels. From a global warming perspective, our social isolation has been highly efficacious - the pernicious, growth-driven habits of exploitation, extraction and habitat destruction have been put on hold. A window has opened to a less polluted, less traveled, less rapidly warming, and healthier world, albeit one in which the enduring human susceptibility to viral disease has again been exposed.

While the global pandemic has put everyone at risk, the most vulnerable are the elderly, the ill, the obese, the economically distressed, the inadequately housed and the homeless, minorities, the institutionalized and all those who occupy lands governed by the inept and the venal. Across the globe, the frontline communities which suffer the ‘first and worst’ impacts of global warming are similarly devastated by Covid-19.  Yet, at a biological level, the SARS-CoV-2 virus practices rigorous non-discriminatory levels of infection.  Wealth and circumstance can only confer certain levels of protection, to which the daily obituaries attest - none of us is safe. Despite those many exposed to extreme levels of risk by the inequities of their lives, our common humanity is emphasized by our shared vulnerability to this mutated bat virus.  

To recapitulate: societal response to the pandemic has slowed the frantic pace of economic activity, largely driven by the one-time energy bonus of unearthed fossil biomass, first realized in the mid nineteenth century but risen to an unprecedented frenzy since the 1950’s. This respite has moderated the climatological blow-back of a carbon-laden atmosphere. The wealth generated by fossil capital has been distributed with extreme prejudice. It has accrued to the rich (made wealthy in former times by land, inheritance, and, in the U.S. and its trading partners, by slavery) and has exacerbated those gross inequalities of power, resources and well-being originally institutionalized in feudal societies and then spread around the world through the process of colonization and conquest.  

The subtext of global warming is thus exposed as the ever-widening gulf between the world’s obscenely rich and its metastasizing poor. The recent microbial intervention is revealed as a potential inflexion point in both global warming and wealth disparity.  Still wrapped in the cocoon of social isolation and stunned by the sudden freeze of economic activity, we can now ponder the form society will assume upon its emergence from these unprecedented changes of state. Jason Moore in, Capitalism in the Web of Life, 2015, writes, “Civilizations do not form through Big Bang events. They emerge from cascading transformations and bifurcation of human activity…” He suggests that capitalism “…emerged from the chaos that followed the epochal crisis of feudal civilization after the Black Death, (1347-1353).” What will emerge from the Covid-19 pandemic?

Broadly, there appear to be two competing visions. One favors a return to the status quo ante, a restoration of the old evils for the continued benefit of a tiny minority confident in their ability to ride out the coming climate cataclysm and escape the coming plagues. The other sees the potential for ‘cascading transformations’ that might lead to greater equality, opportunity and increased well-being for the majority in a world that eschews fossil fuels, moderates the escalating impacts of global warming and pulls back from rapacious habitat destruction and its concomitant exposure to novel zoonotic diseases. Recent history suggests the former vision, with little or no consideration of the latter, will prevail. The moment of clarity, expressed in climate and consciousness, will pass and progressives will resume their regular, but now carefully washed, handwringing.

The bank bailouts of 2008, after the financial crash initiated by the mortgage derivatives melt-down, will likely provide the template for the U.S. and other first-world countries re-starting their economies. Old fossil-fuel dependent heavy industries will be revived, airlines resurrected, factory-farming jump-started, the auto industry saved from bankruptcy, the oil industry revivified, and a new era of deregulation birthed – all justified by the economic crisis.

George Monbiot in his weekly Environment column for the U.K. Guardian suggests,

“This is our second chance to do things differently. It could be our last. The first in 2008, was spectacularly squandered. Vast amounts of public money were spent reassembling the filthy old economy, while ensuring that wealth remained in the hands of the rich. Today, many governments seem determined to repeat the catastrophic mistake.”

In the U.S. we can be sure that Trump will promote the feeding of the zombie economy with massive quantities of public monies and celebrate its every flicker of life as it slowly lumbers back to its accustomed habits of growth, pollution and the advertising propaganda that fuels our  search for identity and social meaning through consumption. The Club of Rome, the distinguished international think-tank that published its seminal report, The Limits to Growth, in 1972, suggests an alternative,

“Covid-19 has shown us that overnight transformational change is possible. A different world, a different economy is suddenly dawning. This is an unprecedented opportunity to move away from unmitigated growth at all costs and the old fossil fuel economy, and deliver a lasting balance between people, prosperity and our planetary boundaries.”  

In the Netherlands, more than seventy academics have co-signed, Five Proposals for a Post-Covid-19 Development Model.  Leiden University’s web site, where this document originated, has, for the moment gone off-line, perhaps hacked or over-loaded. Its first proposal calls for a move away from development focused on aggregate GDP, suggesting that degrowth should be applied to extractive industries and advertising, while growth is encouraged in the health, education and clean energy sectors. Its second recommends a universal basic income funded from progressive taxation, along with job-sharing and a reduced work week. Its third proposes a regenerative transformation of agriculture, local food production and fair wages for farm workers. Its fourth focuses on the need to reduce travel and heedless consumption, and its fifth suggests debt forgiveness for students, workers, small business owners and impoverished nations in the Global South.

This standard wish-list of a progressive agenda would indeed fulfill the Club of Rome’s call for ‘a lasting balance between people, prosperity and our planetary boundaries.’ Endless growth can only end in tears, yet our leaders are addicted to an expansionary economic model that continues to be fossil-fuel dependent. The extraordinary circumstances of a global stand-down as SARS-CoV-2 careens across the planet, has given us, amidst the appalling realities of viral sickness and death, a momentary vision of a saner, healthier, and a cooler world.

A Shared Perception of Harm - The Disruptive Power of Covid -19

Myth, magic and ritual largely define pre-modern thought. Now, and at least since the Enlightenment, science attempts an explanation of the world. It is around points on an epistemological spectrum, bounded by these simplistic characterizations, that societies cohere. From the time of Socrates, it is the analysis of these systems of thought that form the basis of philosophy, the modern version of which, since Kant, has developed as a critique of knowledge. Early in the twentieth century, the American philosopher John Dewey established the concept of ‘Publics’, arguing that within societies, smaller groups develop around shared perceptions of potential harm. Our general understanding of the world, and an awareness of the threats humans face within it, are now subject to a global transformation.

Science has revealed the SARS-CoV-2 virus in spectacular imagery rendered by the electron microscope. It is pictured as a florid, multi-colored, globular life form, but it is the virus’s invisible-to-the-naked-eye transmission across the pervious borders of human skin that have infected our bodies and haunted our imaginations. Its colonization of humanity, having been previously confined to Asian bat populations, has enabled the pathogen to express itself dramatically in the form of a global pandemic. As image, performative infection, scientific phenomenon, and statistical event, the little microbe has assumed the role of protagonist in the world’s unfolding present.

We, as a predominantly passive (as in locked-down) subject population, receive broad-brushed synopses of scientific findings and assume that a medical understanding of the virus, as well as therapies such as a vaccine, will be established within this system of thought - and will eventually halt the pandemic. What science leaves out are those forms of awareness contained in the fundamentals of pre-modern thought which I characterized as myth, magic and ritual.  Yet science, founded on an objectification of the natural world, may now be taking account of the co-mingling of the human and the non-human which has always been the creative province of non-civilizational storytelling, sorcery and ceremonial observance. There has been a disruption of modernity whereby new versions of ancient wisdoms may infiltrate.

Our common understanding of modernity, as it has developed over the last century and a half, depends on the work of Darwin, Marx and Freud and their respective explanations of evolution, capitalism and the unconscious.  An awareness of the comingling of life-forms in a world in which we humans no longer enjoy sovereignty reveals the hard truth that our story is no longer all about us. Philosophy has usually designated humanity as the unique province of intentionality, of expressions of will, and rendered humanity’s setting - its environment – as a largely mechanical world, allowing for its appropriation and exploitation entirely according to human appetites. Biology has previously tended towards a teleological version of evolution which establishes humankind as its final triumph. The unconscious is now explored in ways that are breaking down the mind-body binary in seeking the biological unconscious. As philosophers, social theorists, political theorists, biologists and ecologists take up the notion of a co-evolved, co-existing world, reflecting their understanding of the entanglement within and amongst life-forms, the fortress of modernity is coming under siege.

Donna Haraway, Professor Emerita in the History of Consciousness Department at U.C. Santa Cruz, has given us the term, sympoesis, which denotes a sharing, multi-species approach to the processes of life-making. Bruno Latour, the French Philosopher and former historian of science, extends agency to biota (plants and animals) and as well as abiota (climate), which he collectively characterizes as willful ‘actants’. Timothy Morton, the object oriented ontologist, ascribes sensuality to objects, while Jane Bennett, a Professor of Political Theory at John Hopkins, is a vital-materialist who studies the human-nonhuman ‘assemblage’ - a word she uses to identify an ‘arena in which stuff happens’, inhabited by ‘a spectrum of agentic capacities’.

Parts of this sort of thinking derive from the breaking down of scientific notions of individuality. Scott F. Gilbert, a Professor of Biology at Swarthmore College specializing in developmental genetics and embryology, challenges the idea of an anatomical individual by observing that, “Only about half the cells in our bodies contain a human genome. The other cells include about 160 different bacterial genomes.” Each of these bacterial species forms complex ecosystems. He points out that what has been characterized as our ‘sacred DNA’, is in fact violable. Our bacterial symbionts (each half of a symbiotic relationship) also confer heritable traits which link to our metabolism and brain function. We know now that we are all holobionts - hybrid organisms that depend on persistent communities of symbionts. We maintain bacterial microbiomes within which viruses coexist, and they, in turn, form the human virome. Just as there are both healthy and deleterious bacteria, there are both benign and pathological viruses. So it is that we inherit, live and die, at least partly, by our non-human symbiont communities.

Each bacterial and viral member of its respective biome and virome has a face. But if we are currently haunted by just one, another 1.7M viruses are waiting to infect those who attend the continuing push of urban development into the farthest reaches of the global, but especially Asian, wildlands where they have long inhabited the viromes of native fauna. There is irony in this capitalist agenda of exploitation and extraction wreaking a viral revenge. The Dean of Yale School of Public Health, Dr. Sten Vermund, has opined that, “There is no greater threat to the economic well-being of planet Earth than pandemic respiratory illness.” How long ago was it that the sages were suggesting that global warming – another by-product of capitalism - offered a threat of similar magnitude?

Jane Bennett writes, in, Vibrant Matter, A Political Ecology of Things, 2010, that all matter is vital. But she goes further. She reprises John Dewey’s idea, established in, The Public and its Problems, 1927, of ‘Publics’ which suggests that political communities function as ecosystems. Bennett sees this as confirmation of their literal organicism. She writes that, “Dewey imagines a public as a set of bodies affected by a common problem generated by a pulsing swarm of activities.” We cannot be sure what Dewey meant, but Bennett’s phrasing clearly indicates her interpretation. The spark of life retrogrades through her sentence, from ‘pulsing swarm’, briefly touching down on ‘common problem’ and then leap frogging to ‘a set of bodies’. It is a leap she makes, and I suggest that it is in these terms that we may now be experiencing Covid-19 as part of a human-nonhuman assemblage - sparking the vital matter of an organic political ecosystem.

She goes on to note that Jacques Rancière, the French philosopher, in his, Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy, 1999, suggests the radical potential of these politicized groups. He identifies a disruptive force within the public, or ‘demos’, that consistently trends towards exposing, “…the ultimate secret of any social order - that there is no natural principle of domination of one person over another.” Additionally, he suggests that there is a protean force that flows through the demos that disrupts ways in which people see. A Covid-19 public has formed around the global presence of the virus. We may see, as members of this public, Wuhan, the sprawling capital of China’s Hubei province, its eleven million be-masked people, even its famous cherry blossoms, its bio-labs, and its teeming wet market, as a part of our origin story - but more compelling are the personal, political and bureaucratic impacts of the arrival of the virus in our local communities. All these particularities and events cohere within Bennett’s notion of the ‘arena in which stuff happens’, and it is in these swarms of vibrant materials that she discerns the comings and goings of ’agentic assemblies.’ A decade ago, at the time of writing Vibrant Materials, she posed such questions as, “Can a hurricane bring down a President?”, and ominously, “Can an avian virus jump from birds to humans and create havoc for systems of health care and international trade and travel?”

Cruise ships and recalcitrant, populist, demagogic political leaders; the absence of medical equipment; freedom-loving, gun-toting deniers of prescriptive social distancing are some additional actants pulsing through our shared, global space. Within it, we now understand, bat-borne viruses can infect human populations in days, or weeks, and vaccines are likely to appear only after the virus has mutated to a less symptomatic version (which it tends towards in order to maximize its host population).

Meanwhile, many of us may feel more and more removed from the organic processes that support our lives – isolated from food production, desensitized to the violence of resource extraction, and, until very recently, by virtue of modern standards of hygiene and near universal vaccinations, securely separated from the planet’s miasma of bacteria, viruses, fungi and protozoa. Our modernity has been our protection against the nonhuman. But what Bennett and others have been preaching, and which science has been confirming since at least the beginning of the twenty-first century, is that we have always been thoroughly entangled in the nonhuman world - cosmically, biologically, and botanically.

The SARS-CoV-2 virus, arriving within the human population via an immensely complex human-nonhuman agentic assemblage, has now produced its own public - a global population that coheres around a common perception of viral harm. If Rancière is correct in identifying a disruptive, democratizing force within such political ecologies, then this public’s power is immense. Its voice will be of excluded humans and nonhumans alike, but we must be attuned to its massive sonority if we are to respond, or take part, intelligently. Most have not heard its pre-modern bass tones, unvoiced for a half-millennium, and I suspect we are ill-prepared for the profundity of its message.

Freedom Virus

The Pilgrims and Puritans arrived in America in the first half of the seventeenth century determined to practice a religion other than the one sanctioned by the Stuart kings of England, James I, and his successor, Charles 1. Their determination was founded on a single characteristic - a ‘freedom’ meme that was firmly lodged in their minds.

This meme has now evolved into a deeply held conviction, in many Americans, of the immense value of personal freedom. But, it is a conviction, as Wendy Brown suggests in her most recent work, In the Ruins of Neoliberalism – The Rise of Antidemocratic Politics in the West, 2019,  that, “walls out that monster coercive power, the state, but also democratic norms such as equality, inclusion, access, and social justice.”

In recent weeks, it appears that this ‘freedom’ meme also inhibits the manufacture, procurement, and maintenance of essential medical equipment, the provision of hospital beds, the necessary planning and development of infrastructure for medical emergencies, as well as the population’s adherence to the social distancing and travel restrictions imposed upon them during the current pandemic by local, state and federal authorities. This meme, then, is now directly implicated in the level of intensity with which the COVID-19 virus has attacked the U.S.A.

That memes behave like viruses in the human consciousness has been well established by the evolutionary biologist Roger Dawkins, and elaborated upon by Richard Brodie, Daniel C. Dennett, and many others. In a classic example of punctuated equilibrium - an episode of rapid speciation in the otherwise glacial pace of evolution - the freedom virus, as I will now call it, was suddenly transformed when it was embraced within neoliberal ideology in the mid 1970’s. Newly weaponized  in the political sphere, it has raged virulently over the last forty years with truly devastating results.

The official history of this country, which celebrates its independence and its freedom from the dead hand of governmental strictures that inhibit personal agency and reveres the Founding Fathers for their creation of a new democratic society in a new land, has long been at war with the reality that the United States arose out of a massive genocidal project which largely eliminated the Native peoples and was formed amidst the brutal dehumanization of its African slave population. These assaults on the intellectual coherence or, more bluntly, the veracity intrinsic to the freedom virus, now so entrenched in American consciousness, began first when the earliest English colonists refused to honor Native Americans’ personal freedom, their right to live in the lands in which the Christians had so recently arrived, or even their right to life. But, they, like the Founding Fathers, are a part of an official history that continues to give life to the freedom virus, despite the rank hypocrisies practiced by those infected by it.

Notwithstanding the failures of Reconstruction and the institution of Jim Crow, the lynching of African Americans, the racist immigration laws that made the Chinese an outlaw population, the internment of American citizens of Japanese descent in WWII, the ongoing racial, class, gender, and economic injustices of this country, the freedom virus lives on. Explicitly invoked as the rationale for American wars of empire, the ‘spreading of freedom’ is rarely welcomed in countries chosen to host this viral attack. Embedded in neoliberalism over the last four decades, the continued virulence of the virus was exposed dramatically in the 2016 U.S. Presidential election and is again ghoulishly revealed in the nation’s woeful response to the global COVID-19 pandemic.

The valorization of personal freedom and the demonization of the social is at the heart and soul of the neoliberal antidemocratic agenda that, as Brown contends, is infecting the West and is most egregiously personified in Donald Trump. While neoliberalism feeds on the freedom virus, it is traditional family values, traditional morals, and the machination of markets which, in the Friedrich Hayek designed model, fill the void of democracy. Nowhere is the state allowed room to provide for the welfare of its people (the public good) for fear of incipient totalitarianism and the dread lack of personal freedom that system portends. Hence, the lack of ventilators, testing kits, hospital beds and face masks. Health care, in this ideology, can only be tolerated if it is entirely beholden to markets run by insurers. The resistance to Medicare for All is founded on this fear of providing for the public good and marks those who oppose the program as craven advocates for neoliberalism. (I’m looking at you, Joe).

Who knew that the public good could be bad? Hayek knew, Steve Bannon knew, and now the Trump administration knows. Reagan knew, Margaret Thatcher knew, Augusto Pinochet knew. Over the last forty years, the politics of the United States have vividly demonstrated what they knew. America’s dead faint in the time of Corona is just the latest manifestation of this poisonous knowledge. When you have the social infrastructure of the traditional, God-fearing family, you don’t need repaired roads and bridges, high-speed rail or, indeed, any public transport; you don’t need hospitals, schools, public universities or childcare, contraception, abortion services or hospices. ‘Responsibilized’ men and women, rather than the state, are ‘free’ to care for teen pregnancies, for their children, the disabled, the elderly, the isolated, and the sick and dying.

The thinking goes like this. You need guns to defend your home. You need an S.U.V. or a truck to run over the pot-holed tracks that pass as roads and to take trips to your church and the out-of-town Walmart. You need a prison system that warehouses threatening, potentially heathen, populations and an immigration service that takes care of, i.e. deports, illegals. It’s also a good idea to have a military, intelligence services, and homeland security that protect the sanctity of your country, here and abroad, and provide employment opportunities for many of your home-schooled children. You also need a large American flag to fly from your flagpole or the back of your truck to demonstrate your devotion to freedom. Although both parties support the neoliberal regime that has now been in place since before you could vote, you favor conservative politicians. The ‘Libtards’ may take offense at your social mores, be true believers in democracy, be more concerned with public education, eschew guns, be slightly less supportive of a bloated military, but they too are largely accommodative of the predatory capitalism that thrives best under neoliberalism.

Friedrich Hayek, an economist and a philosopher, was educated in Vienna and London and taught at the London School of Economics before accepting a professorship at the University of Chicago, in 1950, where Milton Friedman was already a seminal figure in the post-war, ‘Chicago School’. Of all the neoliberal intellectuals (which included Friedman, the notorious ex-Nazi, Carl Schmitt, and others), Brown writes that Hayek was the most sustained critic of social democracy. He considered the social, “the signature of all misbegotten efforts at controlling collective existence, the token of tyranny.” Hayek viewed social justice to be “the gravest threat to most other values of a free civilization.” Those ‘other values’ at threat are most purely enshrined in markets and morals which Hayek considered to be supremely effective in gathering humans together in productive harmony without the oversight of a coercive state. Brown notes that while Hayek’s critique, “… was iconoclastic in the post-war decades, it has become the common sense of a robust neoliberal conservatism today.”

Hayek was scarcely more favorably inclined towards democracy, which as Brown writes, he considered a “dangerously self-expanding domain that had to be tightly bound and conformed to neoliberal purposes.” Neoliberal academics, such as Hayek and Friedman, objected to the platform that the political provides for “market distorting interests whether those of big capital or democratic majorities, the poor, or those advancing notions of the common good.” Anything approaching robust democracy was considered an invitation to rule by the mob, totalitarianism, or fascism. Thus the hobbling of popular democracy is a project that has long been pursued by neoliberal politicians using such traditional devices as disenfranchisement, voter suppression, and gerrymandering.  It is a project that has also greatly benefited from the Supreme Court’s conflation of free speech with corporate donations to political causes. 

Neoliberal ideology has now been laid bare by the Corona epidemic. It is impotent in a public health crisis because it promotes the financial starvation of government through lower taxes while simultaneously expanding military budgets, both of which are inimical to the public good. Shortage of masks, ventilators and hospital beds, amidst a collapsing healthcare system, serve to highlight the vanquishing of democracy and the eradication of the social, while vividly demonstrating the failures of a predatory market to adequately serve the vulnerable poor and middle classes.

God, family, and free enterprise failed to save the United States from COVID-19 or ameliorate its consequences. But the freedom virus - that virulent precursor and necessary reagent to neoliberalism - will likely survive the pandemic and continue to infect large swathes of the American population, including most of its politicians, all proudly ‘free’, but inured to the suffering in the world.

Civilization Ruffled by a Perfect Epidemiological Storm

It is the beginning of the twenty-first century and most humans remain inhabitants of what James C. Scott calls the ‘Multispecies Resettlement Camp’ – the aggregation of men, women, children and their domesticated  plants and animals that was made possible by the development of agriculture. His book, Against the Grain – A Deep History of the Earliest States, 2017, takes a jaundiced look at sedentism – the staying put that initially gave rise to urban culture and that would, some millennia later, come to define modernity. This progression represents the conventional understanding of the development of Western Civilization which we are accustomed to celebrate - or did, until a couple of months ago when we reaped its corollary of epidemiological terrorism. As city dwellers, and more broadly, as subjects of highly interdependent, globally connected states, we remain prey to the “chronic and acute infectious diseases that devastate the population again and again,” which Scott identifies as a primary characteristic of the very earliest states.

Scott’s ambit spans across the early states that emerged in Mesopotamia, the Indus Valley and Egypt in around 2500 BCE, and a little later in the drainage basins of the Yellow and Yangzi Rivers in China.  But he extends his review of ‘civilized’ humanity to the moment, at the beginning of the seventeenth century, when urbanity at last predominated over its antithesis, the world of non-state peoples. For these barbarians, from the very beginnings of emergent states, and entirely beforehand, had always been vastly more populous.

We Americans are heirs to one of the last great ‘victories’ of the civilized world over the barbarian. That victory was won, initially, by our introduction of the myriad zoonoses - those diseases we shared with our domestic animals - to which our habitual sedentism in the ‘Multi-Species Resettlement Camp’ had made us hosts. Scott writes, “Once a disease becomes endemic in a sedentary population, it is far less lethal, often circulating largely in a subclinical form for most carriers. At this point, unexposed populations having little or no immunity against this pathogen are likely to be uniquely vulnerable when they come into contact with a population in which it is endemic.” He notes that Native Americans had been “isolated for more than ten millennia from Old World pathogens” and succumbed in horrifying numbers to the diseases that the earliest colonists brought with them. It should be remembered, however, that Europeans were not themselves immune to novel infectious disease, having lost perhaps one-third to one-half of their population during medieval pandemics. Despite their partial epidemiological eradication, the more complete destruction of Native Americans populations required, as  Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz notes in, An Indigenous People’s History of the United States,  2014, “three hundred years of colonial warfare, followed by continued wars waged by the independent republics of the hemisphere.”

So, just as early states were reborn after repeated pandemics, medieval Europe survived debilitating plagues, and Native Americans survived a concerted pathogenic assault beginning in the sixteenth century, the world will survive COVID-19. But in every case, the argument can be made that survival required a fundamental reevaluation of accustomed ways of life. Early states collapsed under the pressure of disease, but their remaining populations melted back into the world of un-taxed, non-state peoples whose support strategies included slash and burn cultivation, small scale horticulture, maritime foraging and hunting and gathering. After devastating early losses, Native Americans adopted both the firearms and the domestic animals of their oppressors. Now, after a limited die-off of vulnerable populations, survivors of the COVID-19 pandemic will likely fundamentally change the political calculus of the modern state.

What is certain is that, for the foreseeable future, the preponderance of the global population will remain tax-paying creatures indebted to their particular continental state, entirely trapped for their livelihood within a global web of capitalist trade. We, as a species, have been domesticated as surely as we have functioned as the agents of plant and animal domestication. As Michael Pollan and others have remarked, we have become slaves to landscapes designed to provide us with a consistently abundant food supply. That dependence has been extended, at least since the mid-nineteenth century, to include a reliance on the state and the corporations it embraces for our travel, entertainment, news and communication. We are faced, in the longue durée, not only with the collapse of states, and of empires, but with potential global, systemic disintegration. Perhaps it is unlikely that the-little-virus-that-could, COVID-19, will be the agent of that cataclysm, but it certainly constitutes one element in the decay of urban centers that Scott establishes as a characteristic of the ancient world.

Scott argues that the repeated collapse of early states was due to the rise of infectious diseases caused by crowding and the domestication of animals, to the ecological disaster caused by deforestation and the salinization of over-irrigated croplands, and to the practice of total war in which the population of the losing state was entirely captured as slaves and their urban infrastructure razed. It does not require a great deal of imagination to understand that the fragility of our current global civilization – a manifestation of hyper-sedentism, only compounded in its pathologies by the hyper-mobility of our work, trade and leisure – is similarly threatened and that these threats are inextricably braided in a world of metastasizing diseases, climate catastrophe and habitat destruction together with extinction-grade military lethality.

In 1918-1920, the Spanish ‘flu impacted 25% of the global population of 1.8 billion, and killed between 17 and 50 million people in three distinct waves of infection. Less than half a century later, in 1957-1958, Asian ‘flu killed over a million people world-wide, including 116,000 Americans. In 1968, the Hong Kong Flu also killed over a million victims. HIV/AIDS was first identified in the Democratic Republic of the Congo in 1981, and has since killed 36 million people. It remains a virulent threat in sub-Saharan Africa where over 5% of the population is infected.

In a highly urbanized world, chronic and acute infectious diseases strike crowded populations again and again. Nothing has changed since humans elected to forgo survival strategies that ranged over a variety of ecological habitats for the concentrated production of grain and livestock in early states. Now we rely on agribusiness and factory farms to funnel food to endlessly conjoined urban, suburban and exurban developments. We wait helplessly for the latest vaccine while new strains of disease quietly gestate in these fetid congeries of human habitation.

For Americans, a secondary impact of this latest epidemiological threat is the backgrounding of our concerns for global warming, for the apparent selection of a deeply flawed Democratic candidate for the Presidency in 2020, for the endless wars in support of Empire, and for all those other pressing issues that evaporate in the presence of impending death. The unfolding threat has already caused the cancellation of the American people’s other opiate of choice, national sporting events, disrupted travel, and will likely result in a broad economic recession. As we contemplate these trivial impacts, truly existential terror awaits.

We live in a world that is characterized by its epidemiological, ecological and political fragility. Its continued existence, our continued existence, is constantly at threat. Crises such as 9/11, Katrina, continent-spanning wildfires, and now Covid-19, that have so recently piled up across the globe, are not black swan events, appearing out of nowhere: they are manifestations of this inherent fragility.

While statism has spread across the planet, barbarians are in full retreat, marginalized in the least propitious areas of the world. Their shrinking territorial base no longer represents a safe haven for those fleeing a failing civilization. Change must come from within, and it will be forced upon us through crisis. We are left to question, ‘Can COVID-19 be the one that, like Shiva, is the destroyer who ends this cycle of time and begins a new Creation?’ 

Bernie and the Biotariat

It is useful to remember that revolution is clearly sanctioned in the United States in one of the nation’s foundational documents, the Declaration of Independence, published by the Second Continental Congress, and now celebrated every July 4th.  

Its second paragraph begins with the familiar stanza:

“We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness - That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed, that whenever any form of Government becomes destructive of these Ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its Foundation on such Principles, and organizing its Powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.”

So, never mind ‘Liberty’ and the ‘Pursuit of Happiness’. Let’s just stick to ‘Life’. To be clear, in this moment of environmental catastrophe, ‘Life’ must include, not just human life but all life. It is in this spirit of inclusiveness, of holism, that the Cambridge academic and poet, Drew Milne, has crafted a riposte to this nation’s revered textual beginnings:

“We, the Biotariat, hold no human truths to be self-evident, acknowledging rather that all humans are mutually dependent on unacknowledged life forms, that they are endowed by their genealogy with certain heavy responsibilities, that among these are the Biosphere, the Solar Commune and the mutual furtherance of Peaceful Symbiosis. That to secure these responsibilities, alliances are assembled among humans, deriving their lasting vitality not just from human wills but from the continuance of all species. That whenever any form of Corporation becomes destructive of these ends, it is the duty of the people to alter or to liquidate it, and to institute new formations and alliances, laying its prospects on such principles and organizing its forms as to the best of their Scientific Understanding shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness. Sustainability, indeed, requires that Corporations long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that humans are more disposed to suffer, while Global Warming appears inevitable, than to take up arms against the forces to which they are accustomed. But when a long slick of Industrial Pollution and Technological Innovation, pursuing invariably the same Profit Motif, evinces a design to bring them unto species extinction, it is their responsibility, it is their duty, to throw off such Corporations, and to provide new regulative frameworks for future Symbiosis.”

Thus, the just cause for rebellion established by the Declaration of Independence leads Milne to argue, writing in the late eighteenth century literary style of the original document, that global warming and species extinction are now entirely valid causes for the overturning of the existing structures of power - which he identifies as ‘Corporations’. His is a ‘Declaration of Symbiotic Interdependence’, suggesting that whatever we may claim as our ‘independence’ is entirely mortgaged to the continued existence of other life forms.

We are fortunate to live in a nation where one of its foundational texts allows for on-going revolution. If we truly believe in the exceptionalism of this country, now surely is the time to act on the opportunity bequeathed to the people of the United States by the Founding Fathers. Is it too soon, in 2020, to anoint Bernie Sanders as the agent of the revolution’s second coming?

First, some attributions and a definition. The Drew Milne piece, “The Makings of the Biotariat”, is quoted in Mckenzie Wark’s, Capital is Dead, 2019, and a footnote mentions that it is, “unpublished, quoted with permission.” The word ‘biotariat’ was coined by Stephen Collis, a Canadian poet who teaches at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, B.C. It appears first in his poem, To the Barricades, 2013. In it, he writes, “The next revolution / is what culture will teach / we can and can’t do / as system’s feedback loop / grabbing the red flag / spore poppy claw / of the biotariat.” On a now defunct blog, he offers the following definition:

“The biotariat: that portion of existence that is enclosed as a “resource” by and for those who direct and benefit from the accumulation of wealth. So: workers and commoners; most animals and plants, including trees and forest and grassland ecosystems; water; land, as it provisions and enables biological life; minerals that lie beneath the surface of the land; common “wastes” and “sinks” too, into which the waste products of resource production and use are spilled—the atmosphere and the oceans. It’s that large. The enclosed and exploited life of this planet.”

A few years later, Collis reviews Drew Milne’s poetry collection called, Lichen for Marxists, published by the Cambridge Literary Review, Summer, 2017. He begins by writing, “I have been reading Jason W. Moore’s, Capitalism in the Web of Life, a book that theorizes the rise of the Biotariat”. He goes on to quote Moore, “All limits to capital emerge historically, out of relations of humans with the rest of nature. And in equal measure, so do all projects for the liberation of humanity and our neighbors on planet earth”. 

The biotariat has been with us all along, but it is our increasing sense of the symbiotic relations inherent in what Moore calls ‘the web of life’, along with the injection of Marxist analysis, that speaks to the grasping, extractive fundamentals of capitalism, that gives us a full sense of Collis’ neologism. There is, of course, an unmistakable whiff of ‘proletatariat’ in ‘biotariat’ - the former an historical vehicle for revolution and the latter a medium for a future global transformation. In their respective names, old chains can be loosed or corporations thrown-off.

In his essay, Marx’s Vision of Communism, Bertell Ollman writes, “One cannot describe communism because it is forever in the process of becoming”. He quotes Marx, “We do not anticipate the world dogmatically, but rather wish to find the new world through criticism of the old.” The circumstances of the mid-nineteenth century in the advanced, industrializing states of northern Europe called forth a revolutionary response from Marx founded on his analysis of the dynamics of a newly insurgent capitalism. After a century and half of increasingly violent plunder, and the incremental marginalization of the natural world, the notion of the biotariat prompts us to seek solidarity, not with a vitiated industrial proletariat, but, as Collis writes, echoing Donna Haraway, with “collaborative interspecies collectives” or “some form of social relations and interspecies mutual aid”. In a new world, the distance between the words, ‘proletariat’ and ‘biotariat’, echoed in the historical divide between the human and the non-human, may vanish within this process of ‘becoming’.

Marx never described the society that was the end-goal of his revolution. But he believed that the then existing class antagonisms would eventually resolve into a socialist victory. As Ollman suggests, communist revolution initially attempts the overthrow of present exiting conditions - its utopian vision irrevocably linked to the premises it must transcend. Like that of Marx, Sander’s vision, is not based on the nuts and bolts engineering of the future, but on a belief in the transformative power of a movement to achieve utopian ends – devised in opposition to the deficits of the present. He does not promote tinkering with the arcane rules of the senate such as overturning the filibuster rule, because he believes in a day when his movement will deliver a democracy no longer shackled to institutions born out of the eighteenth century.

Sanders’ movement, built on the conjoined ideas of free child-care, free education, a highly progressive income tax, limiting the power of corporations, greening the economy, and universal health-care, parallels many of the elements in Marx’s agenda - although the philosopher’s bullet-points were inevitably couched in terms of the second half of the nineteenth century. Marx’s version of greening the economy, for instance, was framed as practicing a rigorous program of soil improvement akin to permaculture. He proposed the abolition of banks, rather than corporations, and his analysis of health care was based on the environmentally deleterious impacts of industrialization on the British working class such that he considered ill-health endemic to the processes of capitalism.  

In the United States, permission for revolution is granted by a document, written in 1776, that was the product of the anti-aristocratic, revolutionary fervor of its time. It was not until 1848, the great year of European revolutions, that the Communist Manifesto would be published. Now, it is the dire condition of both American democracy and of the planet that calls for a renewal of revolutionary agency. In this country, can we look to Bernie to wrench revolution out of the wreckage of our foundational documents, extracting first, the imprimatur offered by the Declaration of Independence? Globally, can renewal coalesce around an expanded planetary consciousness, expressed in the idea of the biotariat, which remains, for the moment, a word trapped in scarcely read poetry and obscure blogs?

It is the strange genius of Drew Milne that he should have crafted a cry from the heart that melds both potential circumstances in one paragraph of almost infinite possibility.

Three Old White Guys - Bernie, Biden and Bloomberg

Buttigieg’s declaration of victory in Iowa reminded us that neither sex, sexual orientation or skin color is in any way intrinsic to a person’s judgement - the first gay or the first African-American or the first woman to do this or that may still be mired in the mediocrity of their convictions. Distinctions of identity may remain relevant, but it is the authenticity of their narratives that should concern us.

So it is that a grizzled old white guy whose performative chops are limited to pointing and shouting appears to have been bested by a smooth-faced, hyper-articulate young gay man when, in fact, what we are seeing is a profound ideological battle between the attempted destruction of capital, along with its attendant ills, and its preservation by any means, occurring within a contest in which the safeguarding of the status quo is the only acceptable outcome.

Despite briefly sparking to life in the New Hampshire debate, can we now safely consign Biden to the category of the walking dead? The Democratic National Committee’s zombie candidate refuses to die. Joe has always been an empty suit. In 1988, he stuffed his elegantly draped fustian with some biographical features of a British politician, Neil Kinnock, whom he had a fancy to plagiarize. In 2008, he referred to fellow presidential candidate Barack Obama as "the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy", offering a searing glimpse of his blindingly white racist soul. Despite, or perhaps because of, exposing this characteristic shared by a large slice of the electorate, Barack chose him as his vice-president. Now, as a sort of twilight candidate in 2020, he hangs on for dear life to the coattails of his former boss, trusting that some of the president’s gravitas will enliven the tailor’s dummy. After his fourth-place finish in the heartland, it may be time again for him to retire his suit and aviator shades and reflect on his lifetime achievements of inflicting Clarence Thomas on the U.S. Supreme Court, and his son, Hunter, on Ukraine’s Burisma Holding’s corporate board. 

The DNC is committed to maintaining the sham of American democracy whose plutocratic roots go back to the very beginning of the Republic when the then richest man in America became its first president by acclamation of his wealthy friends and neighbors. Over time, recognizing the liberal instincts of its subjects, the oligarchs have allowed for the expansion of voting rights to those whose interests are clearly not those of corporations and the uber-wealthy. But they have fought back by establishing programs of disenfranchisement, most famously under Jim Crow, gerrymandering, control of critical sections of the media, building the carceral state, limiting education and opportunity for the middle-class and the poor, requiring voting to take place on a work-day, establishing spurious ID requirements and simply purging voter rolls. This countervailing program of franchise restriction has been abetted, over the last decade, by the Supreme Court’s Citizen’s United decision which has resulted in a flood ‘dark money’ from corporations, oligarchs and offshore interests pouring into the election process.

The DNC itself has inaugurated a kind of junior league plutocracy whereby its presidential hopefuls must be validated by their supporters sending them cold hard cash. Money as a proxy for voting is the oligarch’s foundational gambit and the anti-democratic forces of the DNC have now substantiated it in their farcical presidential primary process.

Just as the elite in Britain use the emotional ballast of royal regalia to deter rebellion, the wealthy ruling class in the U.S. call upon the trappings of the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the Pledge of Allegiance, and the flag - all conflated in the notion of American democracy - to quash radical action that might challenge them. Even as its universality has been squeezed hard, the sop of voting – the lure of having one’s voice counted – has been remarkably effective in guaranteeing the quiescence of the people.

The bastion of capital, which affords a dictatorship of the rich and the immiseration of its subject population, is supported by the twin pillars of neo-liberalism, the Republican and Democratic parties. Its walls are battle-hardened against rogue outliers such as Bernie, while the likes of Biden have spent their careers augmenting its fortifications. But there have been moments in that dictatorship, when chinks of humanitarian light have shone through its fortress walls. Its hostility to the wellbeing of its subjects is not necessarily guaranteed. Enter our third old white guy, Mike Bloomberg, flying the standard of the Democratic Party, but refusing to play by the DNC’s rules.

At least since Jackson, America has been built on just enough democracy to ensure that the masses retain their Horatio Alger dreams - believing the myth of equal opportunity and the chance to strike it rich - but never enough to challenge the power of the wealthy. Hard work has been replaced by education as the base material of these dreams, but the latter obscures the debt peonage its achievement often requires and the low-level work it typically enables. Trader Joe’s, the supermarket chain, requires all of its staff to have a college degree.  Hard work counts for little in an age when the buying power of minimum wage has atrophied into insignificance. Voting, despite the purging of the rolls and other impediments to its practice, remains for many a feel-good way to connect to the grand mythos of America, inflating the self-worth of those who are otherwise victims of its deceits.

Material wealth, first as stolen land, then as industrial capital, and now as control of information (which today drives the forces of production through algorithms fed by real-time consumer desires, or clicks) is at the heart of the American pathology of exploitation, extraction, subjugation, oppression and the devastation of the natural world. Our putative democracy has been entirely enfolded into this ongoing historical project. It is an enabler of these crimes against humanity. It is an ideological co-conspirator.

Bernie proposes an ‘allopathic’ prescription for the overthrow of this world. He suggests that its corruption can be changed through the application of policies like Medicare for all, free college tuition, new taxes on the wealthy, slashing the defense budget, breaking up agri-business, the banning of fracking, and the overturning of the Citizen’s United decision.  He understands that money is the medium through which all corruption flows. Mike Bloomberg, proposes a ‘homeopathic cure’, to heal like with like and use 2% of his wealth, or a billion dollars, to ignore the DNC’s beauty pageant, take on the billionaire incumbent and, as president, from deep within the bastion of capital, effect mildly progressive programs for the incremental improvement of the people’s civic and domestic lives, while all the while sustaining the pernicious arc of the American project for a further four or eight years.

Of our three old white guys, we have a candidate who refuses to be bound to the DNC’s rules, another whom it may refuse to anoint, and a third whose candidature is clinically dead.

The radical ideas proposed by the ancient Caucasian, cis-male senator from Vermont - whose bid for the nomination was last time up-ended by Hillary’s quest to be the first woman President of the United States, and is now challenged by the gay Pete Buttigieg and the women Amy Klobuchar and Elizabeth Warren – may represent a step towards overthrowing the capitalist hegemony.  It would be tragic if his inability to challenge - by personal example - perceptions of identity, except perhaps to confirm the value of the aged, should in any way limit the possibility of success for his campaign.

His is the only authentic voice for change.  

Global Plastic

In the Beginning, there was no plastic.

Four and a half billion years ago, or thereabouts, there was nothing but a hot, rocky, lifeless mass bathed in water vapor, ammonia, hydrogen and methane. After seven-hundred million years, the Earth had cooled sufficiently for the water vapor to condense and become an ocean. And still there was no plastic. A little over half-a-billion years ago, layers of dead phytoplankton, algae and primitive marine organisms that had begun living in the ocean drifted to its floor and were trapped in mud and sand. Over geologic ages, through heat and pressure, these layers of decayed organic material became oil and liquid gas trapped beneath the earth’s surface of rock and clay.

And still there was no plastic. But its feedstock was now comingled within the seams, pools, shale beds, and seeps of fossil biomass – the hydrocarbons that had trapped the solar energy of an ancient world. The simplest of all the hydrocarbons was methane, encapsulated as a liquid gas from vapors released by the rotting carcasses of tiny sea creatures and, over time, larger, more complex organisms. Out of the simple methane molecule, in those dark, cloacal spaces, with the addition of a single carbon atom, variously configured, were created ethane, propane, and butane.

Today, these feedstocks, sourced from Hydrocarbon Gas Liquids (HGLs), derived from natural gas, are turned into plastic pellets, or nurdles, which are the raw material of finished plastics. The United States is currently undergoing a so-called ‘Resin Boom’, with manufacturers daily producing trillions of the lentil sized pellets, which are mostly shipped to Asia. Pellet ‘loss’, in production and shipping, is now a major source of global plastic pollution. Nurdles, likely to be found in their hundreds on the beach nearest you, are but the latest reification of our plundering of the earth’s subterranean store of hydrocarbons.

Peat, a coal precursor, formed by decayed organic material lying close to the Earth’s surface and partially digested in acidic and anaerobic peatland ecosystems, has been harvested as a fossil fuel since the human discovery of fire. The unlikelihood of a flammable square of turf cut from a bog, was, much later, matched by the discovery of sedimentary rocks that would burn. Coal then become the first hydrocarbon to be mined, and its use as a fuel dates back at least three millennia to China. In Europe, it was used by the Romans to heat, among other things, the water in their elaborate bathing facilities. Today, a large part of its historical notoriety is linked to it fueling, in a very literal sense, Europe’s Industrial Revolution.

From the beginning, fossil fuels have been sought out as alternative sources of energy to less tractable resources. Thus, in the second half of the nineteenth century, site-specific water mills were replaced by coal-powered steam engines that could be located in areas of cheap labor, and lamp-oil sourced from whale carcasses was replaced by oil distilled from petroleum. The first widely used plastic was celluloid, which used plant-based polymers. Polymers are large molecules made up of long chains of smaller molecules called monomers. They provide the strength and flexibility, or plasticity, inherent in the cellulose that makes up the cell walls of plants. These natural polymers are also found in hair, silk and DNA.

It was the polymers present in hydrocarbons, however, that held the promise, at the start of the twentieth century, of a vast world of plastics. The first to be made, in 1907, was Bakelite, from coal tar, and was initially designed to replace shellac, sourced from Asian beetles, and used in electrical insulation. It was quickly developed as a key material in the burgeoning consumer goods market, used to encase radios, telephones and clocks, and made into housewares and jewelry.

In 1920, Union Carbide (now Dow Chemical) established the first steam-cracking plant, in West Virginia, specifically to produce ethylene, a short polymer petrochemical with a wide range of industrial applications, but none as epochal as the production of polyethylene. Still dominated by Bakelite, the plastics industry was slow to respond. After 1929, development was constrained by the Depression, but Wallace Carothers, working for Du Pont, developed an artificial rubber, neoprene, in 1931, and nylon in 1938 – both of which were militarily significant materials. Consequently, the production of plastic metastasized during World War II.  Fueled by the post-war economic boom and an excess of production capacity, it quickly became the preeminent material in consumer products, clothing, packing materials and food storage.

Swept up in the ‘Great Acceleration’ - the post-war decades of excessive consumption, extravagant leaps in technology, profligate waste and CO2 emissions - this consummate material of modern materialism birthed Global Plastic, a circumstance in which, like Global Warming, we, and all other beings, now live and breathe. The Earth’s atmosphere had become a dumping ground for its greenhouse gases and its oceans a sink hole for its discarded plastics.

The evidence mounts of the apocalyptic significance of Global Plastic. As an acknowledged endocrine disruptor, the material penetrates creatures through their skin, in the air they breathe, the water they drink, and the food that they ingest. Yet, the devastating consequences of a material that refuses to decompose, is recalcitrant in all attempts to recycle it (90.5% goes unrecycled, world-wide), is being produced in ever increasing quantities, and in its discarded after-life threatens to colonize the lands and oceans of the planet, remains overshadowed by that enclosing cloud of upper atmosphere CO2, which is, to coin a phrase, sucking all the oxygen out of the room. For now, Global Warming dwarfs the perceived exigencies of Global Plastic. All the while, the production of plastic, from hydrocarbon to finished material, contributes greatly to global CO2 emissions and is expected to reach 17% of the global carbon budget by 2050.

Those in the business of proclaiming ecological disaster have a professional interest in assuring their audience that there is still hope amidst the encyclopedic evidence they present to the contrary; that change can occur without radically re-thinking the world and our place within it; that state sanctioned planetary predation, of which the subterranean extraction of hydrocarbons is but a part, can continue without fatally compromising the  viability of the world. Greta Thunberg speaks her dark and eerie truth to power, uncompromisingly pure in her walking of her talk. But the single-minded focus on CO2 emissions, that she and others profess, has shaped our concerns for the environment so that the clearly observable anthropogenic changes to the climate have become the dominant trope in our visions of the apocalypse. The terrestrial threat of a planet wrapped in plastic waste, sourced from the same hydrocarbon plunder that generates CO2, has been slow to infiltrate our primal fears for the survival, in recognizable form, of the earth’s natural systems.

It is now apparent that our failure to maintain a sustainable, naturally regenerating environment which we share with all other human and extra-human beings is the result of a systemic flaw in the way we have organized our hegemonic, first world, human-privileging societies. It is not just the extinctions and the loss of wild-life habitat for those species that remain; the ubiquity of plastic waste on land and sea; the micro-plastics in our bodies, our water, and the micro-fibers in the wind; the ever-rising levels of CO2 in the atmosphere; the fires, the rising sea-levels, the pollution, and the droughts and other consequences of extreme weather. These are but the symptoms of a profound misunderstanding of our place in the world.

It is a misunderstanding that has as its consequence the widely touted prediction that by 2050, there will be more plastic in the world’s oceans, by weight, than fish.

It is a misunderstanding that has as its consequence seeds, plants and animals washing up on shores where they are not native by inadvertently riding the oceans currents on windblown aggregations, or rafts, of plastic waste and devastating the finely balanced ecosystems where they land.

It is a misunderstanding that has as its consequence the clear plastic bag which strangles birds, asphyxiates small children and is mistaken for food by marine life, while being freely dispensed at your local Farmers Market to be filled with organically grown fruits and vegetables.

It is a misunderstanding that has resulted in the choking of the San Francisco Bay with micro-plastics generated from plastic waste made brittle by the sun and then abraded by wind and tides, and from rubber and neoprene marbles thrown off by tires on the twisting, vertiginous streets that surround the bay. 

It is a misunderstanding that has created the vast garbage patch of plastic waste in the North Pacific Gyre between California and the Hawaiian Islands where discarded drift nets, called ghostnets, and other commercial fishing gear, swirl amidst the microplastic soup.

It is a misunderstanding that has as its basis the intellectual separation of Nature and Society. The seeds of this toxic binary were planted over five hundred years ago and now, grown vast and enveloping, it is a construct that poisons the way of being in the world for all those who live under the sway of modernity.

Jason W. Moore, in Capitalism in the Web of Life, Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital, 2015, notes that the “New modes of knowledge, bookended by Copernicus and Newton (c. 1470s – 1720s) …unfolded within a historical project that aimed at making nature external – the better that it could be subordinated and rationalized, its bounty extracted, in service to capital and empire.” This new way of being in the world emerged out of the decline of feudalism - that reasonably communitarian system that ensured some level of cooperation between lord and peasant, and they with the land on which both depended. This relationship, which lasted in Europe from the ninth century to the fourteenth, limited environmental devastation despite a slowly rising population in the Medieval Warm Period, 950 – 1250. But escalating class struggles, intensified warfare and cultural destabilization slowly eroded feudalism, its decay exacerbated by the Black Death, 1347-1352, which killed a third of the population. In the fifteenth century, Europe’s slow expansion of its frontiers beyond its continental landmass profoundly impacted the old comity and after the discovery of the Americas, in 1492, it was fatally wounded.

As Moore reports, “By the end of the sixteenth century, a tipping point had been reached – a new ethic developed that sanctioned the exploitation of Nature.” This was confirmed by Francis Bacon’s establishment of the empirical scientific method, and later by the Cartesian charge that mankind, “…make ourselves, as it were, the masters and possessors of nature”. Thus, was born a materialism based on a scientific and economic rationalism that demanded the separation of humans from the rest of the natural world. Successive waves of imperialism greatly expanded the territory on which this freshly sanctioned predation could occur, and fueled agricultural and industrial revolutions which, in turn, enabled vastly increased through-puts of labor, food, energy and raw materials. It was in this matrix that the institution of slavery could be considered rational and that later, the vastly expanded extraction of fossil fuels, after the invention of the steam engine, would become inevitable. Both events are inextricably linked with the contemporary development of capitalism.

Moore points out that what he terms ‘bio-prospecting’, has been practiced from Columbus to Monsanto and Exxon. These activities are typically supported by states in pursuit, in his lexicon, of ‘geo-power’, the control of natural resources that bolster their economic strength. It is in this pursuit that the United States has expended vast amounts of treasure to protect American oil interests in the Middle East, and vast sums, too, in the development of technologies to access this country’s unconventional oil and gas reserves.

The plastic pellets produced from HGLs have made the production of natural gas a new focus of the U.S. oil and gas industry and is helping sustain the boom in fracking. Seventy percent of U.S. natural gas is now fracked from shale deposits such as the Marcellus formations beneath Ohio, West Virginia and Pennsylvania along with the Permian, Woodford, Barnett, and Eagle-Ford formations in Texas, as well as North Dakota’s Bakken shales. The Monterey formation that runs down the spine of California, from Sacramento to Los Angeles, holds two-thirds of the nation’s shale oil and gas reserves. It has, thus far, been saved from extensive fracking by its complex geology, local activism and the fact that much of it is under the state’s prime agricultural land. But the Monterey shale, and other unexploited formations, remain forever vulnerable to advances in extraction technology and increased demand.

The boom in fracking would not have been possible without new computer-controlled drilling and ballistics technologies, together with innovative chemical formulations, developed with the financial assistance of the U.S. Department of Energy. The state has, in effect, joint-ventured with private enterprise in plundering the shale that lies beneath the United States. This plunder is founded, as Moore and others show, on debasing the value of the natural world. It represents a strategy of terrestrial violence that asserts our dominion over the planet. The value of leaving hydrocarbons in the ground now, gold and silver back in the day, or of leaving the rich biodiversity of the prairies untouched, is, and always has been, discounted to zero, except by the continent’s pre-modern indigenous peoples.

The genocidal impact of colonial exploitation, beginning late in the fifteenth century, is widely understood as a fundamental part of the history of the Americas - but the blowback that impacted its imperial perpetrators, while less often considered, was not inconsequential. The importation of vast quantities of precious metals into Spain and Portugal resulted in a massive financial inflation that led directly to several centuries of economic immiseration on the Iberian Peninsula. The blowback from the mining of hydrocarbons is global, and we are beginning to understand that it extends, in this country, beyond the well-documented impacts of the production and burning of fossil fuels. It extends to the fracking, cracking and polymerization of HGLs, which are responsible for significantly adding to the global supply of plastic pellets, and, in turn, for the waste generated by finished plastic products.

While colonialism always relied on the development of new technologies appropriate to transportation, food production, social controls and the building of urban settlements, computerized control systems have now vastly expanded the range and impact of humankind’s predation. Moore notes that “At the core of the capitalist project, from its sixteenth century origin, was the scientific and symbolic creation of nature in its modern form, as something that could be mapped, abstracted, quantified, and otherwise subject to linear control.” Computer-controlled fracking operations serve as the apotheosis of this concept, enabling the economically efficient extraction of natural gas from shale and similarly facilitating the production of plastic pellets.

Over 300 new plastic production facilities are currently proposed in the U.S. A giant plant is planned by Royal Dutch Shell for Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, but it is the Gulf Coast from Houston to New Orleans and up the Mississippi River to Baton Rouge that is currently ground zero of the massive congeries of industrial infrastructure devoted to the processing of the fracked HGLs into synthetic polymers. The distillates run directly from the shale fracking fields through pipelines that riddle the eastern two-thirds of the United States, and through the Cochin pipeline which snakes north to Alberta, Canada. They travel to coastal processing plants, where they are ‘fractionated’ to separate the ethane, propane, and butane. The separated gas liquids are then pipelined to other facilities nearby, where they are polymerized (the process of forming polymer chains) and turned into plastic resin pellets. Packed in 55lb. bags the nurdles fit comfortably, beanbag like, into forty-foot shipping containers. Typically shipped directly from the Gulf ports to Singapore, they are then transshipped to other Asian destinations. Finished plastic goods then return from those same destinations, often in the same containers, to the U.S. market.

Annual consumption of the pellets is projected to double in the next decade to over half a billion tons, and production capacity continues to grow in the petrochemical industrial ghettos of Texas and Louisiana. Here, they are interspersed with prototypical, mostly black and brown, frontline communities, in areas vulnerable to flooding and rising sea-levels, where toxins lie heavy in the air and vicious colloidal dispersions paint rainbows on the streets. These are the quintessential environments of slow violence, in which the early-twentieth century chemical engineering triumphs of Union Carbide are substantiated on a massive scale, and where the poor and middle classes are oppressed by the rabid feeding of nurdles into Global Plastic’s supply chain.

Like Global Warming, Global Plastic is a planetary phenomenon, but the U.S. has an outsized responsibility for both. While the emergence of capital accumulation driven by fossil fuels first occurred in the second half of the nineteenth century, in the British Isles amidst Blake’s ‘dark satanic mills’, America’s contribution to greenhouse gas emissions in the twentieth was realized both in the metrics of its oil production and in the grotesque levels of consumption to which the rest of the world, then and now, aspires. While the U.S. is no longer the primary global source of greenhouse gas emissions, it has taught the world well, and is now eclipsed by those regions that have fallen under the pall of its cultural influence.

Crude oil production in the U.S. reached a peak around 1970 of ten million barrels a day. It then suffered a precipitous decline before flat lining until 2008, when the shale fracking revolution radically increased this country’s hydrocarbon output. Since 2014, it has been the world’s largest hydrocarbon producer, outstripping its nearest competitors, Russia and Saudi Arabia. As a part of this expansion, the U.S. now produces more than 20% of the world’s plastic, and its production continues to increase fueled by ever cheaper fracked natural gas.

Perhaps the greatest damage that America has wrought, in terms of planetary degradation, is in its vast media outreach that has consistently advertised a high-consumption lifestyle. That consumption now comes wrapped in, or is largely made of plastic, and often both. Packaging consumes from between 35% – 45% of the global production of synthetic polymers; construction another 16%; textiles 15%; and transportation and electronics a further 10%. Plastic is essential, at this moment, in the packaging of our food, the building of our shelter, the production of our clothing, computers, telecommunications and transport, and in our healthcare where wellness is dispensed in plastic vials, IV bags, tubes and syringes; our sundered vitals sewn with nylon thread.  We are surrounded by the corporeal presence of plastic. Buck Henry’s line from the 1967 film, ‘The Graduate’, spoken by a middle-aged wanna-be career coach, to the eponymous young man, played by Dustin Hoffman, “I want to say one word to you. Just one word. Plastics.” is a nostrum, although eschewed by Hoffman’s character, that has now been heeded around the world.

Geographic particularism is irrelevant when considering phenomena which are truly global. Global Plastic is a toxic emanation that enfolds the earth. While it is the direct result of the exploitation of a widely dispersed fossil biomass, the U.S.A. remains the avatar of those societies of mass-consumption and a throw-away ethos in which its plastic end-products are now so pervasive.

Given the time it takes to biodegrade: In the End, there will be plastic. Even if production were to stop today it would still be with us in the fourth millennium. The legacy of the modern world of, let us say, the last five hundred years, is a warming atmosphere preternaturally laden with CO2; a planet with a plastic bestrewn surface, plastic saturated seas, and with winds, waves, rocks and tides grinding brightly colored polymers into toxic grains, fated to be embedded in the geologic layers of the Anthropocene.

It is a legacy based on the manipulation of those looted hydrocarbons, created in ages past and now, in the modern world, transformed into multiple agents of biospheric destruction. This tragic inheritance is founded on a misunderstanding of our place in the world - a misunderstanding that now, perhaps, with its consequences fully apparent, we are beginning to comprehend.

The Real Megxit Deal

In a move that reflects the time-worn pathologies of powerful aristocratic families, the House of Windsor has agreed to allow the Queen’s grandson, Harry, currently sixth in line to the throne, and his California-born wife, Meghan, to leave the family business (The Firm) and attempt to establish independent lives in Canada, a former colony which remains a member of the British Commonwealth. This represents their exile from the territorial, ceremonial, financial, and emotional heart of the royal family.

The gimcrack contrivance of the constitutionally constrained modern royal family was immediately apparent upon its founding in the late seventeenth century. During a century of revolutions, the territories of England, Ireland and Scotland briefly cohered as a republic from 1649 to 1660 under Oliver Cromwell, following the execution of King Charles I. Subsequently threatened by a royal line devoted to Catholicism with the birth of a male heir to James II, the ruling class imported a foreign, but suitably Protestant, monarch, William of Orange, in what has been called the ‘Glorious Revolution’, 1688.  This line ran out in 1714 with death of Queen Anne (memorably portrayed by Olivia Coleman in the film, The Favorite) who had no surviving children. Despite the efforts of James II’s son, the Catholic James Stuart (The Old Pretender), Anne’s second cousin, George, Elector of the tiny German state of Hanover, assumed the throne, ensuring a Protestant king. The Hanoverian dynasty has proved fecund. Its offspring continue to maintain the royal line, although the House of Hanover has been known, since the First World War, as the House of Windsor - a re-branding that attempted the concealment of its German ancestry.

The idea of the nation, an area of territorial coherence marked by shared ethnicity, language and culture, developed out of the perceived need for states to enshrine their permanence. Britain was first in embracing this modern notion by creating its parliamentary democracy (of sorts) under the aegis of the monarchy, in order to bring a sense of ageless political, cultural and historical inevitability to a fractured group of North Sea islands. That this conceit has survived into the twenty-first century is remarkable, but the defection of Harry and Meghan exposes its fragility at a time when Brexit presumably requires a revived sense of purpose, with the nation about to be cut loose from the European Union. It calls into question the family’s purpose beyond its existence as providers of fresh, tabloid-ready, globally enabled, sometimes salacious, occasionally tragic and consistently sentimental content.

Tom Nairn makes the point, in his dyspeptic study of the British Monarchy, The Enchanted Glass, 2011, that the royal family has often functioned as a conservative counterweight to British radicalism.  He suggests that it has been encouraged by the ruling elite to generate sufficient and timely pageantry, bonhomie and noblesse oblige, in the celebration of the family’s births and marriages, in the lachrymose mourning of its deaths and in its tireless patronage of worthy causes in order to paper over the gross injustices evident in British society. Harry and Meghan dutifully played their part in this long-running production which Queen Elizabeth II continues to oversee as an aging but still stately showrunner. Their defection has resulted in the loss of The Firm’s brightest stars while simultaneously creating the kind of diversionary furor which is the family’s stock-in-trade.

Larger questions arise however, in consideration of the connective tissue (mostly composed of falsehoods) that binds nations together in the current age of information –the transmission of which is controlled not by individuals, states or royal families, but by the likes of Google, Facebook, WeChat and YouTube. Meghan and Harry have discovered that they cannot control the nature of their celebrity when it is disseminated by what McKenzie Wark, in Capital is Dead, is this Something Worse, 2019, calls ‘vectors of information’ under the command of an all-powerful ‘vectoralist class’ -  the elite global coterie lorded over by the likes of Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Page, Jeff Bezos and old-school media moguls such as Rupert Murdoch (whose News Corp retains ownership of the British tabloid, The Sun). These new supra-capitalists “own or control the brands and celebrities that galvanize attention”. To the extent that ‘Sussex Royals’, the couples intended lifestyle and charitable brand, is a success, Meghan and Harry will remain victims of the same powers that, Harry believes, killed his mother, Princess Diana, and are currently intent on ‘destroying’ Meghan.

Zoe Williams writes sympathetically of Meghan in The Guardian, (traditionally a broadsheet not a tabloid),

“She has become a battlefield in a culture war. Something for Piers Morgan to sound off about, a vegan sausage roll in human form. It is a fantastically unenviable position to be in, but it is also one in which she could not have stayed neutral without being trampled to dust. Silence in the face of this would not have been dignified: it is both courageous and vital to object to it, whatever the cost.”

Princess Diana, Harry’s mother, was travelling in a dimly lit tunnel in Paris, attempting to escape a swarm of chasing paparazzi, when her chauffeur-driven Mercedes crashed and burnt, killing her, her partner, Dodi Fayed, and its driver instantly. In Britain, tabloid journalists are rabid in their pursuit of Royalty: it is a high stakes game that has frequently struck at the heart of the family. Elizabeth II has suffered not only the death of Charles’ ex-wife in 1997 but was earlier witness to the dissolution of her sister Margaret’s life, barred by Royal protocol from marrying the love of her life, the divorced Peter Townsend.  Margaret’s subsequent marriage to Anthony Armstrong Jones in 1960, her divorce, and several celebrity affairs were all conducted under the withering glare of a viciously sanctimonious British press. More recently, her third son Andrew has been ensnared in the sordid unraveling of the Jeffrey Epstein sex-trafficking ring. Much of the British public takes great joy in the travails of the nation’s most privileged family while simultaneously reveling in the pseudo traditions and ceremonies that the royal family gamely continues to produce and star in amidst, what for most members of the clan, is the wreckage of their personal lives.

Theirs is, quite literally, a noble cause – the stifling of overt class dissent, forever bubbling beneath the surface of British society. They are the proud producers of an on-going soap that validates Britain and its cruel inequities by parading the family as living exemplars of the privileges of aristocracy whilst remaining ‘relatable’. The tabloids attempt the family’s subversion at every turn, as faithful recorders of its instances of moral turpitude, peccadilloes, and lapses of protocol. Yet they remain pathetically sycophantic come a royal birth or marriage.

Enthralled by freshets of free entertainment enabled by personal electronic devices, and the increasing availability of cheap consumer goods brought directly to one’s attention by those self-same devices, we exist in a perfect storm of twenty-first century bread and circuses - supine in the face of the social and democratic collapses that fester under such conditions of popular disinterest, inattention and apathy.

Royalty, heads of state, captains of industry, sports and entertainment stars offer up their lives in service to the insatiable maw of those who trade information for the privilege of exposing consumers to targeted advertising. They are but the tip of the pyramid, the base of which consists of all those who contribute cat videos, personal vignettes and the like to social media. Goods routed to consumers, along global supply routes and hub and spoke distribution networks, do so only upon the initial capture of their consumers’ attention on, most often, the tiny screens of their devices. (The actual production of those goods remains largely hidden from their consumers eyes, spread across the planet, most often in areas of poverty-wages, pollution and environmental vulnerability). 

While the British royal family have traditionally fulfilled a leading role in the making of a state mythology, its function in the weaving of a plausible national tapestry is now challenged by self-curated ‘news’ streams that daily create personalized, pixilated visions of national coherence.  The family’s unique ownership of ‘pomp and circumstance’ remains a significant attribute, but one must question whether a nation nominally ruled by Boris Johnson really needs the staid back drop of traditional royal ceremony. As Lord Mayor of London, he was quite capable of creating a phantasmagoria of Britishness at the opening of the 2012 Olympics. The Queen, The Firm’s leading lady, you will recall, had a bit part in this production alongside Daniel Craig as James Bond. Donald Trump, who is about to begin his fourth season as the show-runner for Make America Great Again, has no need of the Founding Fathers, the Constitution or the Bill of Rights, to validate his show – he is content with a mythic past that does not reach back much farther than the 1950’s.

Harry and Meghan have most likely consigned themselves to a lifestyle of the demi-monde, a twilight of insignificance as royal exiles in the sad tradition of Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson – those seminal arbiters of louche style and unfortunate political alliances. They do so at a moment when the relevance of the British royal family, never a very stable construct, is increasingly in question.

Bad Planet

Australia is an island continent composed of a vast treeless desert edged with a fringe of heavily urbanized temperate bush where the fierce heat of the land is moderated by onshore ocean breezes from the Pacific to the East and the Indian Ocean to the West. Now, areas of this temperate fringe are aflame as hot desert winds fan bush fires amidst a record series of early-summer heat waves. A world audience watches in horror as news reaches them framed in terms of houses destroyed, lives lost, koalas scorched and kookaburras that no longer sing in the oppressive heat. Greta tweets,

“Not even catastrophes like these seem to bring any political action. How is this possible?”

But it is indeed possible, probable, and arguably even inevitable because the climate crisis, née global warming, is embedded in a mostly white, liberal, humanist civilization whose peoples, at least since the middle of the fifteenth century, have privileged the appropriation of land, labor and geological resources over an ecological accommodation of the rest of the planet. It is this ideology, rooted in capital accumulation, that now manifests as extreme weather events. Their remediation requires not just political action, but an almost unimaginable civilizational reboot. We refuse to make this leap because making it threatens the accustomed terms of our existence.

Despite conventional green-wisdom, and Greta’s urging, changing our predominant energy source to real-time solar, wind, photovoltaic, and hydro from the harvesting of prehistoric, subterranean stores of fossil biomass does not change the underlying modes of subjugation practiced by the capitalist class hell bent on resource extraction. Alternative energy sources promote an extension of appropriation – the seizure of cobalt and lithium, for instance, in addition to the continued extraction of coal and oil.  Having reached the ends of the earth, the territory of depredation is, even now, being technologically extended to the seabed where polymetallic nodules await harvesting deep beneath the world’s oceans to provide copper, manganese, nickel and cobalt –all elements essential to the chimera of new ‘clean’, ‘renewable’ energy. Can we doubt the extractive implications of state-sponsored and commercial space exploration?

The climate action agendas proposed or enacted across the planet, including the Green New Deal, represent opportunities to replace, and potentially to expand energy use – and thus to expand the despoliation of ecosystems, human culture, communities and individual lives. They will do so by continuing to feed the algorithms of acquisition and over-consumption (by some) that Timothy Morton, Jared Diamond and other thinkers source to the beginnings of agriculture.

Kathryn Yusoff, a professor at the University of London, uses the construct of the Anthropocene to frame her critique of colonialism and slavery in service to capital accumulation. In A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None, 2019, published on-demand by the University of Minnesota Press, its small pages packed with academic prose, she writes, “The solutions and the proposals are all about the continuance of the current stain of inequality, powered by other means in a future that continues to privilege the privileged. The Anthropocene is the white man’s over-burden.”

She makes the argument that until the global North stops oppressing the global South, in the historic and present binary of a white bourgeoisie subjugating black and brown people in order to extract an economic surplus, there can be no profound healing of the ills that plague the planet. She suggests a response to the climate crisis, more subtly phrased than ‘civilizational reboot’, but with a similar impulse, when she chides her readers “to think about encountering the coming storm in ways that do not facilitate its permanent renewal”. Artfully couched, her words barely conceal the radicalism required by their premise.

A response to a problematic framed by millennia can usefully be built around the armature of the Anthropocene, which demarks the onset of a planetary epoch characterized by human production, rather than the cyclical, deep time, geological impacts that have hitherto served to delineate them. The new construct demands an investigation into its ideological underpinnings. Yusoff establishes a baseline of enquiry by suggesting that, “The Earth is massively geo-engineered, that may be what the word Anthropocene actually means.” She points out that the European program of geologic appropriation, initially and most egregiously exercised in the Americas, was achieved by the enslavement of Africans and indigenous peoples. Slavery, she writes, “…weaponized the redistribution of energy around the globe through the flesh of black bodies”. It is those bodies that, “began the work of the accumulations and which have now coalesced as the Anthropocene as an expression of geotrauma.”

She further argues that the coal mined in Britain during the nineteenth century and used to fuel that country’s industrial revolution, often cited as the proximate cause of anthropogenic global warming, was mined by men inured to their task by the pre-eminent colonial drug crop of sugar, first harvested by slave labor starting in Madeira in the middle of the fifteenth century, and later in the Americas. Tea and tobacco, produced by black and brown field workers in conditions that varied from slavery to serfdom, are similarly implicated in the bio-chemical support of the drudgery endured by Britain’s industrial working class, and thus in the creation of deleterious climate impacts. But she notes that, “While Blackness is the energy and flesh of the Anthropocene, it is excluded from the wealth of its accumulation. Rather Blackness must absorb the excess of that surplus as toxicity, pollution, and the intensification of the storm. Again, and again.”

In the United States, slavery was embraced (until it wasn’t) by white liberal society as the cost of doing business. In the event, Jim Crow ensured a continuation of the subjugation of black bodies, their humanity nullified, based not on the overt cruelties of slavery but on the implicit degradations of racism. Today, we live with that legacy, which runs deep in the minds and bodies of Americans. We live in a materiality that is often wrought by black and brown bodies, their work shadowed in the mined mineralogy of our land and oceans, the production of our farmlands, and the infrastructures of our industries and transportation systems. Prison labor and inmate fire-fighters are but the most visible evidence of an exclusionary humanism that, as Yusoff suggests, “Renders Blackness always belated in time and therefore never fully now and human”.

The precise calendrics of the golden spike, the marker that delineates the beginning of the Anthropocene as a geological epoch, remain highly contested. The invention of the steam engine in the late eighteenth century, the onset of the British Industrial Revolution in Britain, and the Atomic Age, located in the mid-twentieth century, have all attracted support. Yusoff emphatically states that, “The Anthropocene is a project initiated and executed through anti-Blackness and inhuman subjective modes, from 1492 to the present.” Columbus worked to bring African slaves to the Portuguese sugar plantations on Madeira before voyaging to the Americas and initiating the enslavement of its indigenous peoples. He thus arrived in the New World well practiced in the colonial arts of appropriation and subjugation.

 The 1619 Project published in The New York Times, August 18, 2019, attempts to establish the arrival of more than twenty enslaved Africans, subsequently sold to the Virginia colonists - four hundred years ago - as the true foundation of this country. Nikole Hannah-Jones, who inspired the project, declares, “America was not yet America, but this was the moment it began.”

Whether the choice is 1492 or 1619, the territory we now call the United States is deeply implicated in the entwined histories of slavery and the Anthropocene. Yusoff demonstrates that the geological construct is as much the product of a billion nameless black and brown bodies subjugated by white Europeans as it is of the time-stamped deployment of innovative technologies. Slavery in America can be seen as a strange, bio-mechanical conflation of the two: historian Edward Baptist makes the point that it was the ‘whipping machine’, methodically operated by white overseers, that drove the productivity of the plantations in the southern states. While the natality of both the Anthropocene and ‘the idea of America’ remain contested, it is now abundantly clear that the colonial project that began in the Americas in 1492 substantiated a modernity based on the appropriation of land, labor, and geological resources  in service to capital accumulation. It made a world that must now end, if, as Yusoff writes, “another relation to the earth can begin”.

As Australia burns, and Greta fulminates, it is the dark histories of race, subjugation and violent appropriation that must be reconciled before we can begin the work of repairing the planet. David Hammons, the New York and Los Angeles artist, notes in an interview with Calvin Tompkins, published in the December 9, 2019, New Yorker, that, “Trump is the truth about America, because America has been like this forever. White people haven’t seen it, but we have.”

Nikole Hannah-Jones and Kathryn Yusoff may differ on the precise meaning of Hammons’ ‘forever’, but along with the artist, they are all agreed that America is held hostage by its underlying racism. A resolution of the exclusionary practices of white liberal humanism is fundamental to the solving of America’s and the World’s climate crisis – unless we adopt Hammons’ nihilistic fatalism expressed in his subsequent remark that,

“You know, the reason we never see aliens is that everyone in the galaxy knows that this planet is a bad planet. They all know to stay away.”

We do not have that choice.

The Green New Deal and Accursed Wealth

Accursed Wealth! O’er bounding human laws,

Of every evil thou remains’t the cause:

Victims of want, those wretches such as me,

Too truly lay their wretchedness to thee:

Thou art the bar that keeps from being fed,

And thine our loss of labour and of bread.

Al Gore missed this memo, written at some time between 1809 and 1813, by the poet John Clare in Norhamptonshire, England. However, in his latest op-ed, It’s Not too Late – The climate crisis is the battle of our time and we can win, in the New York Times, September 22, 2019, the former Vice President helpfully notes that the fastest-growing occupation in the United States is solar installer and the second fastest-growing is wind turbine service technician. The loss of Clare’s world is un-remediated. The loss of our world, apparently, is salved by the growth of mostly low-wage ‘green-tech’ jobs. Clare, at least, identifies the cause of his loss – Accursed Wealth, or, as we might call it today, capitalism.

Gore, in his best, ever youthful, Gee-Wiz journalese proclaims that, “…we are in the early stages of a sustainable revolution that will achieve the magnitude of the Industrial Revolution and the speed of the digital revolution, made possible by new digital tools”. John Clare’s erstwhile bucolic freedom had been proscribed by the British parliament’s Enclosure Acts early in the nineteenth century, under which he lost his rights to the common lands that were seized for the benefit of proto-capitalist land-owners newly cognizant of the wealth generated by grazing sheep. Wool, like cotton, was a fiber fundamental to the modern capitalist ethos whereby the acquisition of wealth transcended the interests of both humanity and the natural world.

There is, it must be admitted, something quite wonderful about wearing a sweater knitted for one by someone near-and-dear, of hand spun wool.  Similarly, there is enormous gratification in living in a house that produces all its power needs through panels attached to its roof; but we should not for a moment imagine that wool and photovoltaics, despite their benign potential, are not grist to the capitalist mill. As Clare recognized over two hundred years ago, ‘Accursed Wealth’ had overtrodden human laws. As many understand today, capitalism is the financial system that while it seemingly underpins our entire civilization and is responsible for many of its most alluring aspects, has also fatally wounded what Earth-system scientists understand as a coupled human-natural order.

After two hundred years or more of extravagant exploitation, it is getting increasingly difficult, as Jason W. Moore writes in Capitalism in the Web of Life, 2015, “to get  nature, including human nature, to yield its ‘free gifts’ on the cheap” -  be they land for grazing sheep or producing the rare earth elements  such as indium and tellurium, used in photovoltaics.

Gore is an unrepentant capitalist, eager to put nature to work in new and different ways. An exploitative capitalism is similarly baked into the Green New Deal (Resolution 109 of the 116th Congress). While the Resolution promotes “a new national, social, industrial, and economic mobilization on a scale not seen since World War II and the New Deal era”, and resolves to reduce greenhouse gas emissions through “economic transformation”, it remains premised on the same economic model that sparked the Industrial Revolution. It is this economic model, however dressed in green vestments, that now ravages the planet with for-profit industrial, commercial and institutional development, as well as connective and energy infrastructure – all of which feed on labor and resources brutishly extracted from the earth, albeit with sophisticated electronic assists.

Resolution 109 further notes that climate change, pollution and environmental destruction have exacerbated the ‘systemic injustices’ which afflict ‘frontline and vulnerable communities’. In response, the Green New Deal is charged with creating millions of high-paying jobs, unprecedented levels of prosperity and economic security which will counteract systemic injustice. How will this be achieved? By a combination of federal and state incentives to individuals and businesses resolved to fix the problems within the same old economic parameters.  The United States will achieve net zero greenhouse gas emissions, create new ‘green’ jobs, invest in infrastructure and secure clean air and water, promote climate and community resilience and ensure ‘access to nature’ and a sustainable environment within an economic ideology that presumes a supine natural world, that as Moore notes, “has sustained capital accumulation over the past five centuries”.

Given this failure to imagine epochal change it’s all too plausible to conjure a future incarnation of Sarah Palin decrying, at some point during the program’s projected ten-year mobilization, “How’s that Green New Dealy thang going for yah?”

On reading Al Gore’s hopelessly Pollyannaish and wrong-headed op-ed, I was emboldened to return to his seminal work, Earth in the Balance – Ecology and the Human Spirit, 1992. Maybe ‘return’ is too strong a word. Full disclosure - although the hardback book had sat on my classroom shelves in the room where I taught ‘Green World History’ to 10th graders in the mid ‘90’s, I had never gotten much further than the blurbs on the back cover by the redoubtable, Bill Moyers, M. Scott Peck and Carl Sagan. Having now read it, I realize that although Al Gore may not have invented the internet, he can certainly lay claim to a good portion of the intellectual authorship of the Green New Deal.

Earth in the Balance rose to number four and remained in the top ten of the New Times Non-Fiction Best Seller List for almost six months after its publication in June 1992.  But it was, I suspect, a book much purchased, and little read. Resolution 109 has the virtue of brevity - but in many respects, it ploughs the same ground. Gore’s exposition of the ills that plague the planet is admirable: melting icecaps, methane release in thawing tundra, desertification, deforestation, species extinction, a prediction of on-going increases in the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere causing “catastrophic changes in global climate patterns”, loss of wetlands, the privatization of seed genetics and the loss of germplasm resources in wild refuges threatened by development, atmospheric pollution, toxic waste, the plethora of plastics, and methane production from garbage dumps – it is all there. In short, he claims we are “bulldozing the Garden of Eden”. However, as Timothy Morton might suggest, whatever its veracity, it is also horseshoe-in-a-boxing-glove propaganda, and like most tomes dedicated to the ecological apocalypse, its impact can be relied upon to be in inverse proportion to the gloom of its dystopian vision. Nonetheless, it is an encyclopedic review of the most pressing environmental issues, extant early 1990’s, and is important in its recognition of the “intricate and interdependent web of life” in which both humans and non-human species are entwined.

His solution to the planet’s dilemma covered in the last one hundred pages of the book is the development of a ‘Common Purpose’ which makes “the rescue of the environment the central organizing principle for civilization”. He proposes ‘A Global Marshall Plan’ which will contain five strategic goals: stabilizing world population; development of environmentally appropriate technologies; economic ‘rules of the road’ under which the ecological consequences of production are reflected in the market place; international agreements that will ensure the success of the scheme; and the establishment of a cooperative plan for educating the world’s citizens about our global environment.  

In Gore’s vision, the United States will take the lead and primary financial burden in attaining the goals of this ambitious project – with the success of which, if you will allow a moment of extreme understatement, the last twenty-seven years has not dealt kindly. Do we have any reasonable hope that the next decade will prove more receptive of the Green New Deal?

Moore suggests that the theoretical separation of mind and body promoted by Descartes, was shadowed by the similar binary of Society and Nature. It was these foundational intellectual presumptions of Modernity, he suggests, that allowed for, “the exploitation of labor-power and the appropriation of nature” which led to the half-a-millennium drive towards capitalist commodification, now manifested in a planetary crisis. The Green New Deal, like its antecedent, Gore’s ‘Global Marshall Plan’, will create barely a bump along this road to perdition.

Considering global warming, Moore writes, “…the appropriation of Cheap Nature has not only compelled capital to seek out new sources of cheap labor-power, food energy, and raw materials, but to ‘enclose’ the atmosphere as a gigantic dumping ground for greenhouse gases”. This is perhaps, to turn on a word, the new ‘Enclosure Movement’, accidentally engineered as a convenience to capitalism and as dramatic in consequence to our daily freedoms as the eponymous nineteenth century movement that foreclosed the options of young John Clare, the poet, along with millions of others throughout the British Isles. In its new guise, it is foreclosing the future of billions.

It was the ideas of Descartes and Bacon that created a space, in the early seventeenth century, for a scientifically founded modernity. The climate emergency - the planetary crisis - now demands, not a Green New Deal which recycles Gore’s still-born ‘Global Marshall Plan’, but the attempted closure of modernity through a complementary revolution in thought – an intellectual foment capable of turning back the rapacious appetites of capitalism.

The Four Storms of the Apocalypse: Katrina, Sandy, Maria and Dorian.

The history of the United States remains shrouded in the fog of myth and overlain by the mists of time. Here in the stygian gloom, its founding looms as the triumph of freedom over tyranny; its slaveholding the reasonable exploitation of an inferior race; its civil war the singular triumph of a great president; its period of reconstruction proof that former slaves were not ready to take their place in the country’s democratic institutions; and in Jim Crow a return to the natural order. Here, the great wealth of this country in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century is viewed as the result of American entrepreneurial genius and technical wizardry rather than its founding on the flagellated backs of African slaves.

Out of this venerable gloom, the Roaring Twenties shimmer as the best of times; the Great Depression rises up as a proving ground for the spirit and resourcefulness of the white population in tough times; the New Deal is established as the benevolent assurance of universal welfare; and, after Japan’s dastardly attack on Pearl Harbor, American industrial might and its greatest generation appear as the sole reason for the Allied victory in WWII. Its economic boom after the war is visible as the just fruit of that victory; its wars in Korea and Vietnam limned as vital to maintaining its freedom; its bestowal of Civil Rights upon African Americans faint proof of this country’s generosity and inclusivity.

Even in the obscuring miasma of the fog of (cold) war, the fall of the Soviet Union is seen as the result, once more, of America’s freedom triumphing over tyranny; financial deregulation and globalization (and their corollary of devastating ‘structural adjustments’) appear as a beneficent effort to spread prosperity to all; the vision of the 9/11 attack by the dark forces of Islamic extremism is brightly etched; the nation’s response coruscates as a bloody crusade undertaken across the Middle East, Asia and Africa to rout the terrorists and preserve the sanctity and freedom of our Christian homeland.  Now, when myth is hastily promulgated by social and corporate media, we perceive the homeland as threatened by menacing nation states - Russia, China, or Mexico and its neighbors in Central America, selected for demonization according to one’s partisan taste - all gathering at our real or virtual borders threatening our security, our prosperity, our democracy and, once again, our most precious heritage - our freedom.

Our mythic history is thus played out on an epic scale unto the ends of the earth - where the forces of liberty must constantly renew themselves if they are to hold oppression and tyranny at bay within the precious homeland. Yet this is a history that does not yet take account of a new actor raging across the existential battlefields where our holy sacraments (most obviously, the right-to-bear-arms, the Stars and Stripes, the Pledge of Allegiance and the Star-spangled Banner) are the visible, aural and moral evidence of our God-given grace - which we must daily defend against the secular forces of evil. Global Warming is newly arrived on the stage - no longer just a part of the scenery, as Latour has it, or at best a ‘mechanical’ but now with a big speaking part.  Strangely, this epochal and newly verbose character has yet to acquire mythic status within our nation’s historical saga.

If the phenomenon of Global Warming were instantiated as ‘The Four Storms of the Apocalypse’, for instance, though already suitably anthropomorphized by The World Meteorological Organization as Katrina, Sandy, Maria and Dorian, might it then mediate the phenomenon’s mythic enshrinement and substantiate its historical gravity?  For they are the storms, spread across fourteen years, that have morphed into a tentacular Shiva, the destroyer of all things.

Surely the imagery of a flooded New Orleans and the terrifying swamp of a refugee camp that the Superdome became are seared into the nation’s cerebrum, alongside the inane flippancy of our then president, George W. Bush? Who of us can forget Lower Manhattan, the seat of the global neoliberal order, sinking beneath a full moon and a Frankenstorm surge in 2012? The tragedy of Puerto Rico continues to unfold after Hurricane Maria hit in 2017, and once again an inane President, this time Donald Trump, provided us with a horrifying picture of a lack of governmental gravitas, with his paper towel toss. Now comes Dorian, still marauding along the East coast as I write, having devastated Grand Bahama and the Abaco islands. When will Global Warming and the storms it spawns rise to the mythic level of a 9/11? The combined death toll of just these four storms, all within the American sphere of influence, far exceeds that of the Al Qaeda attack, and the human misery they have caused is incalculable.

A quick Google search for Weather Terrorism reveals two referrals to pieces of mine in Counterpunch, here and here and then to a site that promises to reveal all - “As the CIA pretends to know what is going on, the world is waiting for the real answer to the question: Who is controlling our weather?” Most reputable scientists know the answer in some detail even if our President protests his innocence of it, and even more alarmingly, of the question.

As a nation that professes a profound reverence for the Christian religion, perhaps we should seek mythic resonance in the Bible. Metastasized weather phenomena certainly find a place in Biblical Mythology. I have already referenced the final chapters of the New Testament, the Book of Revelation, wherein the Lamb of God (Jesus) opens a scroll secured by seven seals. Opening the first four seals reveals four riders on, respectively, a white, red, black and pale horse, which are taken to symbolize Conquest, War, Drought induced Famine and Death, each an element of the Christian Apocalypse which presages the Final Judgment. Daunting roles for Katrina, Sandy, Maria and Dorian but not entirely incommensurate with their awesome powers of destruction.

Both Elizabeth Rush in Rising – Dispatches from the American Shore, 2019, and Jeff Goodell, in The Water Will Come – Rising Seas, Sinking Cities and the Remaking of the Civilized World, 2017, reference what Goodell calls ‘the oldest story ever told’ – which he suggests, has its genesis in the breaching of the landmass between the Mediterranean and the Black Sea – what is now the Bosporus Strait. Given the disparity in levels between the higher Mediterranean and the Black Sea, the latter rose by over 300 feet in two years, flooding, by some estimates, 25,000 square miles and giving rise to the flood story in The Epic of Gilgamesh, written some two thousand years before the Bible.

Rush notes that Noah’s flood was initiated by God’s anger at the unprecedented population growth occurring, we can presume, at some point after the invention of agriculture, and in his wrath, he caused it to rain without cease. We now know that a massive increase in the burning of fossil fuels, linked to the industrial revolution in Britain, was initiated some time in the 1840’s and has since resulted in epic population growth and growing prosperity together with extinction levels of carbon in the planet’s atmosphere and oceans.

Since 1880, when the data were first reliably recorded, average global sea level rise is about nine inches. Today, we suffer not the cataclysmic rage of a vengeful god but death by these inches, where small increases in ocean levels are transforming islands, seashores and estuaries across the planet - creating wet slums, homelessness and the loss of livelihoods nurtured over the centuries in what once were relatively stable shoreline ecosystems. Meanwhile, warming seas, where most of the planet’s heat increase resides, are supercharging hurricanes to unprecedented levels of intensity (Dorian recently joined Maria and Katrina as a Category 5 storm) and to unremitting levels of frequency.

This is the environmental epic of our age. It is, as far as we know, of anthropogenic rather than divine origin, yet any effective response must include infrastructural landscapes (either hardening or softening the shore) and the resettling of threatened populations, at Biblical scales. Such heroic strategies can only be made manifest if the phenomenon they attempt to ameliorate is likewise understood at a mythic scale. In this country, Global Warming must now join the pantheon of high dramas that illuminate (even in the twilight of historical memory) this nation’s story.

The alternative is to have The Book of Global Warming, or perhaps The Book of Fossil Capital appended at the very end of our civilizational saga.

The Isle of White

The island of North Haven in the Penobscot Bay, Maine, is an eastern establishment, white-shoe summer-place overlain on a diesel swilling, bottom feeding lobster-industry that supports the year-round residents of this tiny, fractal-shored resort. It is washed by the gulf steam and reports the fastest rising ocean temperatures in the Western hemisphere, dramatic sea level rises and a devastated eco-system. Comprehensively cleared of its old-growth hardwood forests in the nineteenth century, its second growth pines are now attacked by bark beetles moving north under the duress of a warming climate. In place of the diseased trees, the severely invasive, non-native Buckthorn is proliferating. Lashed by several hurricanes in the twentieth century, the island now awaits the first of this century’s superstorms. Already, beaches are eroding into the bay at alarming rates.

But some still say it is paradise. Expensive yachts crowd its harbors and summer visitors wave cheerily to each other as they drive or bicycle along its well-paved roads. The summer houses of the rich and discreet spot its meadows, bays and palisades. Vacation revelers eat ice cream and drink the craft-beers of North Haven Brewery along the harbor front, eat gourmet pizzas, and enjoy coffee, movies and ping-pong at Waterman’s, the community center. Lily-white youngsters learn to sail off the Casino dock. There are a couple of art galleries, a hotel and restaurant and, in the summer months, a farmer’s market.

This east coast summer enclave of wealth and privilege was originally founded between 1910 and 1920 by Wall street luminaries, including the Morgans, the Rockefellers and the Lamonts. Shortly afterwards, Thomas Watson, founder of IBM, established a 300-acre summer estate along the island’s northern shore. Several generations of their descendants still summer on this gilded isle, joined now by other families of post-second world war, twentieth-century wealth.

 The island is unspeakably white. There are other ‘white’ summer enclaves (and certainly not all are islands) just like it up and down the east coast of America. They are where many of the wealthiest, of old money and new, go to live the summers of their dreams - a summer amongst their peers, with just enough poor and middle-class workers to service their every need and, perhaps, to add just a little historical authenticity to their Fantasy Island.

 North Haven is powered by three gleaming (white) wind turbines, discreetly located on an adjacent island. They illustrate the uncanny ability of the rich to thrive in green, sustainable communities while the poor often remain in the polluted cities, suburbs and exurbs from whence wealth is extracted. The island demonstrates the dark survival of what we can quaintly call the class struggle whilst establishing the evolution of that conflict within a subsuming ecological crisis.

 Deregulation, since the early 1990’s, has facilitated the globalization of the economy and the out-sourcing of production to regions of low-cost labor, primarily Asia. This trend is resisted politically by the poor and middle class who have found a salve to their financial wounds in fierce nationalisms that cohere around skin-color, religion and territorial origin stories. This much we know. It is Bruno Latour, the French philosopher, who has added a third dimension to this dynamic by suggesting that those made wealthy in this global revolution are very aware that the climate catastrophe will now further curtail the well-being of most of humanity.  In Latour’s telling (Down to Earth, 2018) the uber-rich have made the calculus that the world will be increasingly riven between the haves and the have-nots and that they will make no attempt, either politically or economically, to heal the rift.  Indeed, they will, he suggests, continue to assiduously corral the world’s resources for their own benefit since there is not now, and likely never will be, enough to go around in a world closing in on eight billion people and whose natural beneficence is increasingly disrupted by weather terrorism.

The class struggle has metastasized, gone global, and is now conjoined with the fight to maintain a habitable planet. The apparent prosperity that existed in the United States post 1945 allowed for a brief flickering of hope for something like wide-spread well-being (at least as evidenced by the white population’s material prosperity). Three decades of this historically anomalous economic circumstance were coopted by the state as an ideological weapon  in the cold-war, but shortly abandoned in the mid-1970’s when corporate America reacted to the social challenges presented by the revolutions of the 1960’s by self-interestedly assuaging calls for personal freedom and expressions of individuality by reducing security of employment and initiating the beginnings of the gig-economy. It was Luc Boltanski and Eva Chiapello, in The New Spirit of Capitalism, 1999, who painstakingly connected the dots. The increasing precarity this caused served the wealthy elites, while Bill Clinton’s vicious Violent Crime Control & Enforcement Act of 1994, enacted policies of mass incarceration, further intimidating neighborhoods already suffering from this financial destabilization.
 
It has only gotten worse. Wars waged against the poor, on drugs, on terror, on health, on welfare and on immigrants are all in service to protecting those elites, who, having abandoned all aspirations towards universally equitable social improvement, if indeed they ever harbored them, are now engineering the impoverishment of those eight billion ‘others’ with whom they nominally share the planet.   As the global elites’ press their advantage in this war of the have-lots against the have-nots, some, in the most disaffected communities, retreat to the politics of extreme nationalism and race, manifested at the margins by apparently irrational mass violence.  Perhaps white supremacists perceive their skin color as their only asset as they fight a rearguard action against diminished prospects of achieving self-respect and economic viability; extreme nationalists may perceive their birthplace as conferring special privileges within ancestral origin stories which are threatened by the arrival of the non-native born – their worth daily diluted. Whatever the motivations of the disaffected, they risk becoming grist to an over-arching war on the poor and middle-class – either coopted by governments as their shock-troops or used as a pretext for draconian social controls. 

 We live in a new era of exclusion and extirpation that is fundamental to the vision of America not-so-secretly harbored in the hearts and minds of the powerful and well-heeled. Spot fires of deadly violence inevitably flare up amongst the underclass, unknowingly aping the ideologies of the ruling caste who then lightly condemn them. As Todd Miller shows in Empire of Borders, 2019, U.S. border protection radiates beyond the homeland far across the planet - where its agencies attempt to hold the line against the infiltration of…’your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore’… and the non-white. Our southern border is the last in line of serried ranks of exclusionary practices made manifest and is the notorious site of graphic barbarity practiced for the edification of the world.

The United States displays exemplary leadership amongst those states in the Global North committed to harassing, impoverishing, quarantining, deporting, imprisoning and denying quality education and health care to most of its citizens (and almost a totality of its undocumented inhabitants). As Paul Street succinctly establishes here, this country no longer represents even a notional leadership in democracy; instead, for the last forty years we have led the world in income triage, abandoning fully ninety percent of the population in a relentless quest to achieve obscene levels of wealth disparity. This amassing of great wealth (which represents access to resources) is the ultimate hedge by global elites against a collapsing eco-system amidst catastrophic climate change. In this country it is practiced by the uber-wealthy with a sublime disregard for the immiseration caused by their wealth-hording.

 Those who are politically and philosophically engaged in the travails of the Anthropocene understand that a revolution that attempts to install democracy in the United States is irrelevant unless it is framed within the larger struggle of the poor against the rich, which is entwined with the war to preserve a viable planet for our shared future. Historically, it is has taken power and resources to destroy the environment - the traditional purview of the wealthy. The poor are but instruments of this depredation, as, for instance, miners, drillers, builders, fishers, farmers, soldiers, policemen and ultimately, as consumers.

 If we continue to triage humanity along the wealth divide only the rich will live green, along with their select non-human companions, in their urban principalities, country estates, mountain aeries or idyllic islands. Others will endure in the brown fields of environmental devastation amidst the carnage of the sixth extinction, while the violence of the most disaffected bubbles up around them, disguised as nationalism, race-hate or religion. These ‘others’ may wait at the gates or loiter along the shores, and idly engage in discussions of freedom and democracy, but the vortices of effective power swirl ever further beyond their reach.

Joe Biden is a Collaborator

It’s really quite simple: the rogue oligarchs and corporations who now run this country constitute the enemy. Since becoming a Senator in 1973, your favorite Irish uncle, Joe Biden, has actively collaborated in the extreme capitalism, racism, nationalism, and police state-ism that enable the oligarchs’ agenda; and while most ably empowered by their instrument, the Republican Party, between times, it is more than adequately carried out by the Democrats. What we see now, with a mostly pliant Trump, with a conservative majority Supreme Court, and with a divided Congress where stasis rules, is the Oligarchy’s ideal. But as the political calendar moves on - a proven collaborator must be installed, over the next twelve months, as the Democratic nominee in the 2020 tryst with their current champion – just in case.

As has been demonstrated lately, juridical interpretations of a moldering and malleable document enable the Supreme Court to rule by decree. Indeed, in terms of command by capricious diktat, the Court, with the Constitution functioning as its Holy text is barely surpassed by the Ayatollah and the Koran. Democrats, Biden now apparently preeminent among them as the former Vice President and a Senator of Noachian longevity, stand by to facilitate this process. Not so long ago, Obama, the Appeaser-in-Chief, with the collaborationist Biden at his side, did sterling work on the oligarchs’ behalf. Obama’s failure to adequately press for the instatement of Justice Merrick Garland in 2016, ensured the Court’s conservative majority.

Having just greenlit gerrymandering in the Rucho v. Common Cause decision, the Court has neatly bookended their earlier Citizen’s United decision which allows for unlimited corporate contributions to political parties. As parties are given free rein to engineer Congressional districts to maximize their advantage and be assured of ludicrous amounts of funding, the last vestiges of representative democracy fall away.

The Democratic Party, despite its professed support of Labor and egalitarian social programs, is a tragically weak bulwark against this prevailing agenda of enrichment of the few at the expense of the many. In recent history, we have suffered through two intensely collaborationist governments, overseen by Bill Clinton and Barak Obama. In 2016, we only escaped a third because of Trump’s victory over his putative opponent Hillary Clinton. She, of course, was a Presidential collaborationist in the making, having served her time as both a Senator and as Secretary of State in a government committed to the demands of capital and to the realpolitik of Empire. In place of a Presidency infused with a profoundly false consciousness, we have instead the real deal. Frightening isn’t it?

The Republican Party has a base of self-interested voters composed of the very wealthy and of corporations and their officers. As Noam Chomsky points out, this represents a highly insubstantial voting bloc. But the Party has engineered an expansion of its base (on behalf of the very few) by appealing to the religious right through its latter-day adoption of Right-to-Life policies, by appealing to the racism of poor and middle-class white populations with horrific anti-migrant policies, and by its appeals to the base instincts of nationalists – which it appeases through populist rhetoric, a foreign policy of  blood, bombast and a lethal drone program - all wrapped in crass veneration of the flag. Democrats have stood idly by as this fabulist reinvention has taken place and, indeed, now ape many of its tropes. Biden’s sign-off at the recent Democratic nominee cattle-call of ‘Good night, and God-bless our troops’ was heinously ironic for a man who voted for the greatest blood bath of American troops in this century - the egregiously unwarranted and illegal invasion of Iraq.

Members of both major parties practice equal-opportunity genuflection before the uber-rich who, in turn, ensure their election. It is a closed system, but not hermetically so, as was illustrated by the recent Mid-Terms. The great non-white, non-male hopes of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar and their cohort of progressive comrades, is a welcome leavening of an institution predominantly populated with old white males beholden to the rich and powerful.

But we should not forget that Biden remains typical of the great, antediluvian Congressional horde. His complicity in furthering the oligarchs’ agenda is well known. He was complicit in the passage of the racist Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994; complicit in Obama’s canny retention of private health insurers in the mix of the Affordable Care Act; and complicit in the ACA’s denial of health services to ‘illegals’. This blatant act of government triage is coupled, in its inhumanity, with the deportation, during Obama’s two terms, of almost three million ‘illegal’ immigrants. Both actions are eerily redolent of past foreign genocides and directly comparable to our own home-grown genocide when Native Americans were herded into reservations which offered tragically limited game-lands, poor soil, disease and overcrowding. Now, in this revisiting of the past, our deportees are returned to impoverished and violent countries, fatally corrupted by the United States, where the climate emergency has made life for the poor a living (and dying) hell. It is worth recalling that these deportations are perpetrated in a nation founded by ‘illegals’.

Lest we forget, Biden is complicit too, in negotiating the passage of The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, designed to halt the Great Recession but which ended up famously rewarding Wall Street and punishing Main Street, and which furthermore, permanently enshrined the ‘temporary’ highly regressive tax policies of the Republican, George W. Bush administration. A notable win for the Oligarchy.

Biden’s collegial interactions with old-line segregationists early in his career, his vituperative opposition to federally mandated school busing in the 1970’s and his intemperate denial of a fair hearing for Anita Hill which resulted in the lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court of a highly reactionary Justice – indicate both his racism and sexism. Never mind the allegations of inappropriate touching of female staff, constituents and Congressional colleagues.

The aging Senator’s contributions to these acts are not ones of omission but of commission, and his Senatorial tasks are undertaken in a spirit that takes them far beyond the bounds of appeasement: they reflect the overt behavior of a revanchist collaborator, a confederate of the enemy. His legislative and administrative impulses are to reclaim the worst of our colonial past and the worst of our superannuated attitudes of racism, sexism and jingoism. At heart, his schtick reflects the instincts of an old-school populist expressed through a duplicitous patter of avuncular demagoguery. Let it be said: Joe Biden is Trump without the flim-flam and without the social media reach. He makes a terrific patsy for the oligarchs. If he gains the nomination and goes on to win in 2020, it will be because it is their determination that, as a political idiot savant, Trump is intrinsically unreliable, that he harbors notions of independence, and is more deeply obsessed with his own aggrandizement and dynastic pretensions than the enrichment of their class.

Predictably, the Democratic Party’s establishment (the Democratic National Committee) loves Biden. Despite the caveat expressed above, we can expect him to join the long list of their failed presidential candidates and thus allow his opponent to claim victory in a Jimmy Carter certified, free and fair election honestly fought against an ideological foe. But the people will once more be denied a choice. It will be Tweedledum (R) and the collaborationist Tweedledee (D) yet again.

Global Warming as a Tactical Weapon

Rather than expending energy on reviewing, handicapping and researching the policy positions of the leading Democratic candidates for the role of the losing challenger in the 2020 US Federal election, might our time not be better spent war-gaming the next five plus years of a Trump presidency effectively in control of the Judiciary and at least half of a broken-down, worthless Congress? Several former Democratic presidential candidates shadow these ruminations: Humphrey, McGovern, Mondale, Dukakis, Gore, Kerry and, the darkest of all, if only because most recent, Hillary Clinton. My consciousness is forever dappled by the failure that each of these names represent - and these were the ’winners’ of seemingly endless internecine machinations before their fall, come election time. Those who have longer living memories of the American electoral process, or indeed, a greater grasp of its history, can doubtless add to this list of the politically maladroit, the inept and the spiritless: losers all. Do we really care so very much who, in 2020, will be added to their number?

The environmental, social, financial and international violence perpetrated by the Trump government are tactical instruments of ideological coercion. Might not the far greater violence of global warming, or more explicitly of extinction, be used as a countervailing instrument of radical change? Not with the game-board set up as it now is.

The Democratic National Committee, in its quest to remove the last microbe of radicalism from its platform, has, as of this writing, chosen not to devote one of its upcoming candidate debates to global warming, thus neatly twinning its party with their head-in-the-sand opponents and high-lighting the irrelevance of Federal electoral politics. The process is twice dead. Meanwhile, we face grave threats to our way-of-life while, at the same time, our way-of-life poses grave threats to the species with which we share the planet and ultimately, to our own continued existence.

The Republic is thus doubly threatened at a time when its ability to govern democratically is in extreme jeopardy. Trump arrived by a process that may not now be sufficient to remove him. We should not, as Bruno Latour warns, fall into an understanding of time passing as if it were abolishing the past behind it. He warns, “The past remains and even returns”. So it is that Trump is not a novelty - he is an echo of a dark past that remains present because of the intensity of its historicity.

Hitler sized power early in January 1933 and President Paul von Hindenburg then declared him Chancellor in the political chaos that followed the Reichstag Fire. He sought to further legitimize his position by holding elections in March and despite a concerted campaign of violence, propaganda and voter repression, the National Socialists won less than 44% of the vote. Yet two weeks after the election, with the support of all non-socialist members of the Reichstag, he forced through an amendment to the Weimar Constitution giving himself dictatorial powers. At the same time, he established an alternative system of ‘justice’ that existed without judicial controls and created the National Socialist League of German Jurists that purged all Jewish and socialist lawyers from the system. The Reichstag was thus neutered, and the judicial system became actively aligned with Nazi ideology.

In our war-gaming, we can assume that the Electoral College and the ineptitude of the Democratic Party will deliver the election to Trump in 2020. We are now complicit in his continuing in office in ways that will likely lead to a dynasty devoted to its own aggrandizement rather than to an attempt to confront the mortal perils of a climate-changed world. War-games can be made real by a desperate public – non-violent maneuvers such as planning for a Federal tax-revolt or State succession, can begin immediately. ‘Global warming’ is available as both a casus belli and a tactical resource for its pursuit. But first, this phenomenon needs to be weaponized to break through our intransigence.

This year’s fire season began in Southern California on Sunday June 9th when the Sky Fire erupted in Santa Clarita, just east of Six Flags Magic Mountain, causing a panicked evacuation of the theme park.  Viewed from its roller coasters, the sight of a leaning tower of smoke with a carapace of flames at its base heading towards the park, (propelled by gusty winds from the east), doubtless added a frisson of mortal danger to visitors experiencing the carefully calibrated thrills of their chosen ride. For a few minutes that afternoon, before the park was hastily shut-down, each exercise in light-hearted gravitational duress was compounded by a naked fear of on-rushing, uncontrolled wildfire.

Los Angeles, ‘Theme Park of the Apocalypse’, as foretold by Mike Davis, reached its apotheosis in those few moments, as Nature (wildfire) threatened to invade one of the more extravagant built expressions of its Culture of sensory titillation (Six Flags Magic Mountain). This was Baudrillard’s Hyperreality fully manifested - where the boundaries between the real and the mediated coalesce into a high-definition chimera.

David Wallace-Wells attempts a strangely parallel exercise, by injecting fear into the readers of his recent New York (June 13-26) cover article, ‘Living with Fire – What climate change has in store for Los Angeles’, most of whom, one presumes, live on the east coast, where climate change wreaks a very different sort of havoc.  Los Angeles, and in particular, Malibu, its north-western geographic extremity and cultural instantiation, is featured in his piece as a hellscape of perpetually threatened and frequently manifested wildfire. As Latour might suggest, he intensifies the event’s historicity.

Wallace-Wells takes as his text the 2018 Woolsey Fire which ran from just west of the Ronald Reagan Freeway - jumping the 101 Freeway – and then some seventeen miles to the Pacific where it scorched almost the entire 21-mile length of Malibu, from north to south. The images illustrating the article, suffused with the orange and red light of an inferno, are overlain with pull-quotes such as, “There’s nothing left to burn, except us” and “You could see the smoke from Space”. Its opening double page image is titled, “Los Angeles Fire Season is Beginning Again, and it will Never End”. He articulates our doom amidst the colors of conflagration. But his article is not, as the magazine coyly claims, “A bulletin from our climate future”. That future is now. For those living in California and much of the West, it is a horrifyingly present reality.

We need scare tactics to mobilize a complacent public. Hitler achieved his aims by the petty terror of the SA, his drunken brownshirts, and the more coldly professional violence of his personal paramilitary, the SS. Can we leverage the very real terror of fire in California, of sea-level rise in Louisiana, of Hurricanes in Texas, Florida and Puerto Rico, the heat-deaths in Phoenix and the storm surges in New York and Connecticut in order to viscerally impact every American? Weather violence can be reified as a political weapon; bewildering climate impacts can be augmented through media and transformed into heart-pounding Hyperreality. The lurid journalism of David Wallace-Wells shows us a way of smashing the windows of our complacency.

Global Warming, that vast amorphous phenomenon characterized as a hyperobject by Timothy Morton, is an all-encompassing reality. Its reach extends far beyond the puny swamp of special interests that is Washington D.C. It awaits its moment as a transformative element of global, governmental change. Birthed in the dark past of the Industrial Revolution, it’s unleashed demons of fire, flood and drought may now force us to transcend our ideological divides and re-invent the political process.

But we can be reasonably sure that this transcendence will not occur within the bounds of America’s next cycle of Federal elections.