Living in the Burn Down
solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
--Tacitus
There is nothing really useful to say about the first presidential debate. I watched 90% of it, and I was mostly sober for it. I did not go to bed sober. This morning, in class, I was unfocused and under-prepared (I’m sorry to any of my students who may read this. Also, I hope none of them do, because the vast majority of them are on the political right, and I could be fired for exercising my free speech, even away from the university – hence why I never name it on this blog.)
Not enough people are familiar with the Battle of Blair Mountain, one of two instances I know about where air power was used on U.S. Citizens, the other being the Tulsa Race Riots. Interestingly, air power has been used on striking workers and on black people, but just about never on any other supposed domestic threat.
America is a failed state, and I’m pretty sure that future historians will characterize the period that we’re living through right now as part of a civil war. It doesn’t look like the conflict we normally characterize as “the Civil War” (because the prevailing lie is that America has had only one. Never mind the Whiskey Rebellion, or the Campaign of Terror by the Ku Klux Klan, or the Battle of Blair Mountain.) it, instead, looks a lot like civil wars in the modern day: look at Belarus, and Egypt, and Syria.
I say this with good reason:
Street violence in Portland has continued for – at the time of this writing – four months and two days, largely driven by the disproportionate response by the state to initially peaceful protests.
Murders have been committed by right-wing vigilantes such as Kyle Rittenhouse and the “boogaloo”-related killing of law enforcement and security personnel in California (notably, no credible reports of left-wing murders have been made.)
The federal government has been using bureaucratic and administrative levers of power to worsen the ongoing pandemic and other emergencies for jurisdictions that they view as political enemies.
A totally normal and good thing to do when the west coast looks like this.
And the most potent symbol for this situation is two septuagenarians arguing on national television. I’m transfixed by the horror of it, staring into the eyes of the basilisk. Biden might have been able to win in a normal election year (he’s failed a few times in the past, but America loves electing senile old men to office.) I worry that he won’t be able to carry the day against his opponent – an uncomfortably wet-looking schoolyard bully that’s responsible for most of the horrors I’ve discussed when I turn away from aesthetics and philosophy to focus on politics (and, as mentioned, American politics has become, for me, a basilisk. My eyes are fixed and I cannot turn away). This isn’t a normal election year because the right-wing candidate has already signaled his intention to steal the election, and the institutions that most Americans trust in have already shown that they are unable or unwilling to stop him.
A map of the American Empire — the belt of military installations we have built around the planet — as mapped in Jacobin. Notably, despite the vast size or this network of installations, it’s apparently always lagging behind our competitors.
The great power of our day – a world-spanning empire that has enjoyed economic, cultural, and military hegemony beyond the imagination of any that has ever come before – is in the process of killing itself. It won’t go out alone, because no empire does: there is always fallout. There is always ruin. The edges fray before the center collapses. What we have here is the frayed edge voting for the center to collapse: leaving aside whether the empire was a good or salvageable thing, people have given up on the future to the degree that they are a de facto suicide cult dedicated to the aforementioned uncomfortably-wet-looking schoolyard bully.
The pretentious-looking quote in Latin up at the top is the rule of every empire: “they make a desert, and call it peace.” The footprint of every empire is not just violence against people but ecological devastation, and we live either in or in the shadow of an empire that encircles the world. We already know that the global climate cannot return to pre-industrialization levels. The desert left by the American empire will forever change the way humans relate to the Earth. It makes sense that, now that this change is fundamentally irreversible, the empire will commit suicide.
I have tried and failed to coin terms in the past, but my mind keeps calling this period the same thing. We are living in the Burn Down. The period of history where empire ignites and goes up in flame. We are watching the forests burn. We are watching elected officials effectively splashing gasoline over the mechanisms of power that would check their authority. We are watching oligarchs loot the coffers that we have paid in to; we even elected one of them to the highest office in the land, and have evidence that this is all happening because he has more than $500,000,000 in debt coming due in a few short years. Enough of the electorate decided that he was charismatic and appropriately unashamed of sexual assault and racism to put him in charge of robbing us blind.
The world is burning down around us, and we’re going to work. We’re going to the grocery store and the laundromat and watching Netflix. We have no ability to productively imagine what we have to do in this situation, because the obvious option – taking to the streets, going on strike, making actual demands – are things that we have been conditioned not to do. We continue on as we have been, because the alternatives are either outright unimaginable or are the objects of horror and anti-fascination.
And so the Burn Down continues.
This isn’t the first time such a thing has happened on this continent. My mind turns back to Cahokia.
You know. Cahokia.
Cahokia was the center of the Mississippian culture, an urban center just outside East St. Louis, Illinois, founded around 1050 CE and abandoned around 1300 CE. For a time, it was bigger than contemporaneous London, having a population that was theorized to be about 18,000 people. This would be a small town today but it was a world-class city in the time we’re talking about. The city centered around large terraced mounds, and some of these earthworks were titanic: the largest of them contains more than 622,000 cubic meters of earth. It becomes all the more impressive when you realize that they did all of this without the labor of domesticated animals.
They were a sophisticated culture, radically different from us. Sadly very little remains.
This culture, the Mississippian culture, dominated much of eastern North America, with a trade network that stretched from the Rocky Mountains to the Atlantic, and from the Gulf of Mexico to the Great Lakes. It is thought that they were a strongly hierarchic culture that centralized political and religious authority in a small number of hands.
It isn’t really known what caused the collapse of Cahokia – social disintegration is one key theory, heavy flooding another, but the one I’ve personally heard most often is ecological exhaustion of the surrounding area. The environment became unable to support the culture that lived there, and they dissolved. Their ancestors survived in the Kansa, Missouri, Seminole, Choctaw, Natchez, and Osage peoples, among others.
I’m not exactly a scholar of these people’s cultures, but I do recall learning that many native cultures of the Contact period had a greater reverence for the natural world than the Europeans. They had already lived through their period of empire-building and some among them saw what had happened, and did their best to craft a lifestyle that avoided that.
Or maybe not. Perhaps I’m simply romanticizing.
I do believe that it’s pretty helpful in 2020 to listen to Native voices.
But either way, I like to end with some kind of idea for what to do. What do we do after the Burn Down? What do we do to make it through the Burn Down?
I’m an English teacher. I don’t know.
But I have a suspicion. The goal isn’t to prepare for a civil war: this isn’t going to look like any civil war any of us have imagined. It is going to be an asymmetric conflict that scales up to total environmental collapse: it’s an extinction level event. We have to prepare for the totality of this, and that’s a really tall order.
We have to prepare to survive an apocalypse, and we don’t do that by hunkering down in bunkers and sheltering in place. We do that by internalizing the techniques that people have used since time immemorial to survive these events.
Published by Penguin Random House.
A few years back, I read a book by Analee Newitz entitled Scatter, Adapt, and Remember: how Humans Will Survive a Mass Extinction. I would recommend reading it, but if you can’t the title tells you the three key lessons. If the present situation escalates like it appears that it might, then I would recommend you remember them.
Scatter: survival will depend upon moving to places less hard-hit by the event in question. This is difficult for those of us who find ourselves in the imperial core: the rampaging pandemic has left us stranded in the worst possible place. These bans are temporary, though.
Adapt: the way of life that led to the disaster must be abandoned, and new situations require that we be flexible enough to change and confront them. If you do the same thing every time, then you will get the same range of results every time. Embracing experimentation is key.
Remember: forgetting the lessons of collapse are one of the surest ways to ensure another collapse. Long-term survivability requires long-term memory, and this is one of the things that our culture has largely abandoned: the age of information technology is the age of forgetting, we have farmed these functions out to devices and we’re behind the eight ball on it. Short-term dopamine loops, where reward quickly follows the behavior being encouraged – the behavior desired by the people who build the platform – are poison, and it is necessary that we exercise our ability to remember the past; especially without romanticism and nostalgia.
Perhaps I’m simply being alarmist – I will be the first to admit that I have a paranoid streak in my thinking – but I would rather be alarmist than asleep.