Feeling stuck is how the sickness began. I’d driven these rural roads for five years now. Each twist and bend around cornfields and the wooded hills felt impressed on my heart. I’d done this commute between home and the (suburban) civilization of a paycheck too many times to count. I wondered if I could do it with my eyes closed. I couldn’t. Instead, I opted to get drunk.
After work I darted to the invitingly run-down corner-store across the street. I picked out the 25 oz. “Big Daddy.” Back in the car, I’d get the still-futuristic sounds of Can’s Tago Mago pumping through my aux cord. I surged with empty warmth from my brew and high beams as I howled down county highways. A trailer-park denizen sneaking out for a late night cigarette might have seen a single can chucked out a speeding window. Tracking its trajectory, their eye would have followed it up as a glimmering speck among a thousand clear-night stars until, falling, the projectile got reclaimed by the field’s inky blackness.
I met fellow-travelers in this void. One night, a pimped-out pickup blaring death metal pulled up alongside me at an intersection. Death metal’s usually too corny and stylized to impress me much. But these atonal shrieks with the revving of his souped-up engine got under my skin. Against my better judgment I glanced over. What met me was the face of some “good ol’ boy”—but his mouth was transfixed with an awful, devilish grin. In broad streetlight on the corner of 28 and Buckwheat he swilled from his fifth of whiskey. Something was burning behind his recessed eyes. The light turned green, and before I really knew what had passed he hauled ass off into the night toward whatever private hell he’d come from. I think he wanted to race, but I was dead in my tracks. Processing that face (a future reflection of my own?) I sat stunned in the intersection as the light cycled from green to yellow to red and back again. I still tell people I’ve seen a demon once in my life.
I felt indomitable in those hills. The heady buzz of birthright coursed through my veins. That invincibility complex, though, shielded a deeper pain. Life didn’t make sense to this freshly minted adult. The gap between what was promised and what was possible left a wound only psychotic recklessness could cover up. But reality persists. In my drunken haze, I saw only unpopulated wastes and reflections of self. But maybe I wasn’t born to blank out. When I began to see myself in others, slowly and haltingly, I got some changes. They were subtle, but a subterranean soul was trying to surface. I saw myself becoming one with a lonely generation of serpents and can-chuckers. I wanted out.
Not all folks in the free world live such lives of ravenous desperation. But as I mature, I wonder if us marginal few act out, in miniature, contradictions of a larger macro-system. In my head, those fires burning inside and my disregard of damage correspond eerily with wildfires burning in the global South.
As inhabitants of empire, we’ve much to learn historically from the Amazon’s flames. At a geographic remove, though, it’s hard to attain a boots-on-the-ground understanding of such late capitalist “limit experiences.” But we sense a complicity. As a symbol of failed stewardship, the fires signify something beyond the problem of some “shithole” country. Our personal reactions and prejudices to such an event constitute a layer in the fractured global ego parsing immediate danger. But there’s been too few felt inflection-points so far.
The Atlantic ran an article with the headline “No, The Amazon is not the world’s lungs.” In it, the writer details how earth’s oxygen supply is stable. The massive carbon deposits under our feet which we’re frenziedly burning are the planet’s true, essential carbon sink. Cynical clickbait titling marred an otherwise educational piece. The enlightening distinctions made up for the misleading headline—but the thoughtfulness was soon to end. Days later, Forbes ran the mother of all nothing-to-see-here-folks posts, entitled “Everything you know about the Amazon is wrong.” In it, a second author quotes the Atlantic’s distinctions, but turns them into contemptuous denials that there’s anything to worry about. He combines that angle with the observation that many celebrities were tweeting pics of flames from forest fires decades earlier. That’s true, and should be pointed out in cooler, good-faith discussions. With the Amazon, though, the celebrities’ virtue signaling did the essential work of getting word out to the public. (By now it’s common knowledge how shamefully long it took for mainstream news outlets to pick the story up.) Even a broken clock is right once a day. Our Forbes man, though, seized on that one instance to cry foul.
Recently, this kind of denialist nitpickery in the face of horror was brought closer to home. A coworker and friend of mine’s dad was decapitated overnight in a car wreck. When I heard that news, it stopped time. I’d been on the phone with my friend only hours before the crash. She was cheery as usual—and the thought I’d interacted with her so innocuously and so shortly before her life changed forever made my stomach turn.
At work a few days later, I broached the subject with another coworker, not really sure what to say. He responded nervously, but at my “It’s so fucking terrible” he dodged hard. “I know,” he said, “but they’re still piecing together the situation. They think,” and here his forced solemnity cracked, revealing for a split second a nervous, devilish grin, “They think he was drunk at the time of the crash.” That ghastly smile was familiar. My male coworker’s not a monster. In fact, whatever ugly, complicated emotions showed forth in that moment I’m sure were a candid attempt to navigate around/through a shared grief. The weird sadism of that smile, though, denied the pain by moralistically other-ing the victims out of empathy’s reach. “That’s not me,” it said. But the desperate, frenzied look in that instant begged to differ.
I recall an even heavier denial from memories of my Christian childhood:
And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth up the earth.
That’s God to Adam in Genesis 1, which some polls suggest up to 100 million Americans believe is a literal account of the universe’s origin. Sometimes I think embrace of capitalism is the greatest lie the devil ever sold the Church. It’s fitting, then, that for them, history would be a brief blip before the Industrial Revolution’s eternal Now. Nowadays, that “dominion over the earth” justifies churning God’s creation into pools of resources and dead labor. That promise works less sinisterly, of course, in the individual’s believing heart. For one, its shores up anxieties about a system that seems too opaque to understand, much less change. Yet it’s possible to be too forbearing to faithful folk, Those who equate ownership with unchecked pillaging also believe men have God-given authority over children and wives.
I grew up with Evangelicals. I esteem them enough to argue respectfully about the meaning of revelation or Christ’s love. When an evangelical looks into my eyes, though, and claims: “It’ll be ok. God gave Noah a rainbow in promise he’d never destroy the Earth again,” I can’t stand it. I have to look away. I have to—
Time passes strangely nowadays. Large swathes get lost; gigantic events pass by unfelt. Minor ones, too, explode randomly into our private fantasies according to taste. The last Real Event for many lost whiteboys like me was the hysterically anticipated Zizek/Peterson debate. In one corner stood Zizek, the supreme charlatan of bro-Marxists and ideas that melt five seconds after eliciting “cool.” Opposite stood Peterson, esteemed expounder of the reality principle and universal archetypes by which to cool our heads.
Peterson railed in defense of capitalism and its ravages, positing it as the only moral and realistic solution to Hobbesian dilemmas. Zizek countered the bluster at first with his usual false modesty and disingenuous self-abasement. He trod out his old warhorse, the parable of the train, to delighted hoots from the crowd. But something was different in this telling. In that moment, there was a certain, not tranquility, but fierce-eyed stillness. Zizek cast off his usual snark and buried egotism; or rather, perhaps some absent zeitgeist deigned to use him as a medium. He spoke of a train hurtling deeper into a tunnel, feverishly racing towards the end-light. That light, though, is an oncoming train. Something broke in me in the stillness of that night. I thought of myself, and those I’ve met, loved. Some had willed themselves to believe, per Zizek’s parable, that immanent disaster was salvation itself—a Big Daddy come to bestow endless warmth. Others, myself included, saw our superior reflection in the window and thought we’d escaped. We haven’t, but that doesn’t mean we can’t. I think of a favorite Carseat Headrest song, “Drunk Drivers (Killer Whales).” Vocalist Will Toledo’s lamenting some small heartbreak, and feeling stuck on a suicidal course. But he resists self-immolation. Instead of cultivating burn-out he connects inward directions to larger social imperatives:
It doesn’t have to be like this
If we learned how to live like this
Maybe we can learn how to start again
Here’s that voice in your head
Giving you shit again
But you know he loves you
And he doesn’t mean to cause you pain
Please listen to him
It’s not too late
Turn off the engine
Get out of the car
And start to walk
Instead of another oncoming train, sometimes I think we’re hurtling towards some cosmic mirror. The ominous light we see reflected is our own. The hedonic thrust of our wheels is leading us on a solipsistic death race towards… what? Who knows what will happen at impact, when the glass finally shatters? But with what time we have left, and with the help of others, I’ll be looking for ways off the train. I don’t want to be anywhere near that thing when it hits.