Texas Chainsaw Redux
Genocide creates millions of jobs
In images of Earth more detailed than the famous Blue Marble, we can see the fires. Broad swathes of forest, now understood to be Earth’s lungs, eagerly combining with oxygen to send all that hot carbon aloft. In a similar way, another conflagration is probably clear by now, but the images are usually about three years out of date. When we first saw our whole planet, it altered the balance of power. It’s something to do with focus: Everything is still accelerating and scaling up, things are starting to fly apart, and the ongoing churn of human affairs has centered on something so awful, it’s centrifuging our attention and fragmenting our culture. Our relationship to time is still changing. But acceleration and scale are still hard for humans to perceive, and easy to exploit.
On The Ground
“Bibi” and his bully boys, enthusiastically backed by most Israeli citizens (if polls can be trusted) can rely on President Biden for more than enough weapons, money and praise, no matter how many helpless civilians they explode or crush to death. According to Bibi, this will take at least another year of mass round-the-clock slaughter, but as long as it takes to expunge all Palestinian life from Palestine. If they want the rest of the world’s opinion they will provide it. The rest of the world’s governments tolerate this to the degree their investors profit.
The deafening silence from the sidelines is the silence that follows a bad accident, or a mass shooting. Everybody wonders what happened. Then they wonder how how anybody could cause so much horror in so short a time, right out in broad daylight. Then they have to wonder how come it’s still going on, and nobody is stopping them, in fact the people who could stop them are cheering them on and yelling “anti-Semitism!” at anybody who wants it to stop. How can this be happening? How can they get away with it? They’re shredding babies, and laughing, and shredding more babies! On video! Why don’t they stop?
They can’t stop. They’ve lost their moral compass.
It was a borrowed moral compass anyway, a precious ancient heritage appropriated by a generation so traumatized they couldn’t see context anymore, and called this “pragmatism.” They hammered it into a utilitarian political identity. In the process they roped in an entire religio-ethnicity, who are tied up sorting that out. The Zionists aren’t the first trauma-crazed death-cult to mistake might for right.
Same Words, Different Tune
Humanity isn’t a subculture or a religion, certainly not a “race.” It’s more than the sum of its parts. They are all necessary to our existence.
Humanity is our Common. It moves in a different way. It doesn’t react to disturbances on the surface. It’s more like those subterranean tectonic plates, resonating outside the audible range, far below the noise of visible forces and trends.
But when the diffuse reverberations focus, when harmonic interference-nodes converge as they always do, we need words like “tsunami” and sometimes we have to invent Science and Philosophy and Religion all over again from scratch. Then the story is told and retold until only paleontologists and linguists and geneticists can trace its origins.
No surprise, then, that Humanity lags a bit behind everyday human concerns. It takes time for us to find the edges of our world and maybe expand them a little, before we break something serious, or get some dragon really pissed off.
We’re at such an evolutionary moment now, and it might not be too late, the deep structural imbalances might not be irreversible yet. If so, there still is probably nothing you or I can do that won’t make it worse. But turning away is a deadfall trap, not an option. Our power to witness our species into a new phase is both all we have left, and all we ever had. This might be as impossible to see as our Common, but equally impossible for any group of us to cause, much less obstruct. It doesn’t belong to anyone: everyone belongs to it.
Darwin’s great insight about adapting to environmental conditions is also about changing those conditions. Ironically, our own adaptations have altered conditions to the point where humans are an exceptionally maladapted species. Now we must adapt, and damn quick. Natural Selection won’t cut it, we’ve been selected out.
But.
Humanity is a different kind of evolutionary force, and a strong one: Cultural Selection outpaced Natural Selection in the last few millennia, because it changes both ourselves and our environment so much more efficiently, if a little recklessly. But there’s no argument now: we do have a hand, and/or a word, in our own evolution. Good news and bad news.
We now know our behavior is correlated to perception, not just logically, but neurologically. We know that perception is about what happens in our brains, whether real or imaginary, interpreted in language. Our worldview(s) arise out of what we say about it all, and that includes what we listen for.
It follows that our collective behavior is likewise linked to our collective worldview. This isn’t about voting. We already voted, for all of this. It’s about the unspoken assumptions that form the background of experience.
There are two issues:
a fragmented, incoherent collective worldview and its correlate fragmented, incoherent collective behavior;
a cascading process of social and environmental collapse.
Now, with thanks for going along on this little mental excursion, let’s take all that as the backdrop, the stage-set, the frame. This will put some new meaning on some ordinary language, which was the idea in the first place. Take a couple of examples.
The so-called international “community” is like that moral compass that went overboard, maybe slipped from Einstein’s gentle fingers, I don’t know, but it’s gone. Now, in the heat of a roaring Genocide with no end in sight (short of two million murders streamed online for obscene profits), the “International Community” just a flimsy scrim hiding the little men whose games of power grind the powerless into the fine sediments of history with absolute impunity, while enriching the profiteers at logarithmically increasing scale.
No damn cat, no damn cradle, as a certain prophet used to say.
The privately-owned and operated system with which to extract everyone’s momentary attention, and prod them this way and that, to watch them dance, and take their time and money, we call The Internet. The key is fear, precisely tuned to ambient anxiety, about body-image, self-worth, being known (as in, found out), “success”... how are you feeling right now?
A benumbed, anxious and distracted population of consumers is the antithesis of an informed electorate. As violent insanity rises and our attention-span shrinks, the power imbalance goes off the charts. It’s a runaway feedback loop. There are no meaningful constraints.
Now I’m going to just let my battered and abused imagination run wild here. None of what follows is “the truth”; I don’t have any inside information. What follows is just a narrative, a story, glimpsed between some dots. Not necessarily fiction.
Up the Garden Path
After generations of collective abuse, fits of violence, and opportunistic political exploitation, desperate people may react collectively like a cornered animal. This may precipitate overwhelming retaliation against a helpless population.
Familiar?
From the Texas Tribune:1
Gov. Greg Abbott’s migrant busing program is what asylum advocates wanted all along
Texas’ migrant buses were meant to send a message about immigration and antagonize Democrats. But the program is also helping migrants get across the U.S. for free.
BY STEPHEN NEUKAM SEPT. 2, 2022 5 AM CENTRAL
As Gov. Greg Abbott expands his program to bus migrants into a third major metro, inciting a fresh feud with a new Democratic mayor, immigration rights experts say the Republican governor who is working to crack down on illegal immigration is actually establishing one of the nation’s most generous publicly funded services to assist immigrants entering the country.
Seen at the outset as a vicious publicity stunt, it was much more. Lots of attention is lots of power in this Attention Age. It’s how we got No. 45. In that context, placing lethal floating barriers in the Rio Grande to drown desperate refugees on the Mexican side amplified public anxiety. Abbott’s recent razorwire showdown with the Feds is timed with crowds of helpless migrants sent willy-nilly to clog O’Hare or the New York Port Authority, creating an impression of surging “illegals.”
Thousands of desperate people, school teachers, factory workers, small business owners, grandparents, young children, unemployed workers, fleeing the horrible results of US foreign policy in South America, walk for months, exploited and assaulted all the way. Somehow they get around the perpetual War On Drugs at the official entry points, to cross through The Wall at isolated, desolate, empty desert. They spend freezing nights on the US side hoping for the Border Patrol, waiting to be picked up and taken to start their daunting and confusing Asylum process. Their cellphone batteries are dead, their relatives here don’t know where they are or if they’re alive. The Border Patrol speaks very little Spanish.
Where is this all going? Are these the next Gazans?
WWBD (What Would Bibi Do)
Public opinion about The Wall has been groomed since before 2016, and now people all over the US have seen busloads of impoverished non-English-speaking people passing through, getting stranded, seeking shelter. The “drug-crazed rapists” trope is a plank in a political platform. Now that the Governor of Texas has strung razorwire and interfered with the Border Patrol while people actually drowned in the river, Abbott makes cracks about shooting across the border. There is no context under which his remarks are humorous. They aren’t meant to be.
SCOTUS waffled on a technicality, allowing the Border Patrol to clear the razorwire but failing to enjoin Abbot from installing more; and thus bumped the dispute up to Constitutional level. How far will Abbott go with his National Guard troops? More to the point, how many other states will step Davey Crockett-like across Abbott’s line-in-the-sand?
25, as it turns out:
From the BBC:2
On Thursday, 25 Republican governors released a joint statement of solidarity with Mr Abbott for “stepping up to protect American citizens from historic levels of illegal immigrants, deadly drugs like fentanyl, and terrorists entering our country”.
Fentanyl and terrorists! Nice touch, devoid of any actual information, but a riveting attention-magnet in some constituencies. The story has been distributed far and wide with slightly different slants.3
There are significant differences between this purpose-built crisis and the Palestine Genocide. The bomb targets in this case lie outside the country that will blow them up; the refugees in question are new arrivals; and it’s not the “Holy Land.” But the financial interests of policy-makers, and the unlimited power and profit in what is now the Genocide Industry, are a very toxic mix.
We can imagine the narrative environment by the time drones start picking off “terrorists” or “traffickers” at The Wall. The cover-stories will all recycle. The next president, whoever it is, will ramp up production, so many American jobs are at stake, as Blinken and NATO and our legislators and the other oligarchs at Davos have said so explicitly. The genocide machine eats billions of dollars, but they “create jobs.” Count on a lot of mayhem.
Change
The foregoing is based on the same logic that now has white phosphorus and other frighteful poisons raining down on starving, homeless refugees in yet another remorseless genocide. This may include “depleted” uranium, 60% as radioactive as nuclear fuel. Within that logic, trying to reason your way through to a sane and just peace is like punching your way out of a paper bag (nobody can do it, you put your fist in a paper bag, you punch, the paper bag just stays on your fist).
The causes we ascribed to “winning” a world war were only causes within its limited frame of reference. Two cities obliterated with nuclear bombs. Maybe now we can carry it all the way to species suicide. That is our current trajectory.
The original Nazis killed millions of people without the rest of the world finding out until much too late. The first people to enter the extermination camps (the Russians, who suffered far more losses than the other Allies to defeat Hitler) were not prepared for what they found, as if any preparation for that were possible. German people in neighboring towns were unaware of the industrial killing, even when they could smell it. Who would believe so many millions could be killed with such…routine efficiency while life went on as normal?
But now we have constructed a world in which killing large numbers of people in total secrecy is physically impossible. So now we do it out in the open. In order to do that Humanity itself has to change in ways to which future adaptation may not be possible. Humans ideas change the parameters for survival, and not trivially, even if we didn’t have the Big Red Button under the fingers of our greatest psychopaths. Our addiction to oil is very likely to end us well before 2050. We can edit our own genes!
Maybe we can give this another think, before setting up a global extermination-for-profit system begins to seem like a good idea. Cultural Selection means all of us, not just a majority or a junta, not just the rich ones, all of us, collectively, we do have a say. We already do. The final say.
That means we are responsible. It’s your call. It’s time to speak.
What do you say?
1 From the Texas Tribune (https://www.texastribune.org/2022/09/02/texas-migrant-bus-cost/)
2 From the BBC (https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-68101927)
Excellent thinking here. It's looking grim and likely to get much grimmer.
Whew, what an action-packed essay, like a movie drawing our attention to the big and small pictures that fit together. Thank you!