Dear Joe,
Strictly speaking, my "geezerhood" is some distance from now, but it is nonetheless, within sight (like you, I am well-armed and well-provisioned with guns and liquor). As a 45-something who grew up in a smallish northeastern farming town, left home at 15, joined the Marines at 17, and spent the years between now and then travelling the world, ultimately to retire as an infantry captain and end up an accidental banker, in a newly minted career birthed in the throes of the most significant financial crisis in four generations. I can assure you that as a dispossesed vagabond whose roots were torn early and fully, there remains a connection to the native soil that darkened my knees as a child.
Even now, I await the close of the deal that buys me 60 acres of wooded land in the Fingerlakes region of New York -- very close to my birthplace, and as near as I may come to my people.
I'm in a grumpy mood. We had a major family argument involving my stepson last night, ultimately resolved by the arrival of the local constabulary (called by my daughter), befuddled and uncertain how to deal with an angry ex-Marine, ex-paratrooper, pissed off at a punk 17-year-old lying sack of entitlement waving a baseball bat and threatening my life. It ended well, I think, as I didn't kill him, punk that he is, and deserving of a good ass-whoopin'.
I spent the night in a hotel. I love my wife, but the fruit of her loins and those of her ex-husband (a dedicated victim and physically abusive man, now sucking down my tax dollars under the guise of "disability") is emblematic of the state of today's youth: narcissistic, entitled, petulant, and incapable of thinking beyond their next burger. The stepson doesn't work: he consumes and complains. If so moved, he shits. In this regard, he is like his father.
But I digress.
Specifically, I am not so much responding to your essay "On Native Ground" (an excellent piece), nor even to the illustrious Jason ("Spake the geezer to the stripling youth"), clearly a member of the disenfranchised youth, angry at the world and the generation preceding him -- arguably, with some reason), who, in his brief diatribe (look it up, Jason) expresses all of the angst and resentment particular to his generation (shared to some lessening extent by my natural son and daughter -- and perhaps endemic to youth throughout history, as I am to your response.
I can savor the flavor of Jason's pique, even as the taste, once past the tip of the tongue, turns bitter as the meaningless syllables, devoid of insight, prove to be as saccharine as a teaspoonful of Sweet and Low: reminscient of the real thing, yet lacking substance.
He's almost eloquent, yet writes from a reservoir of disappointment grounded in the realization that the world has not conformed to his expectations, and not from the well of insight refreshed by long examination of circumstance, the testing of oneself against the slings and arrows of ourageous fortune, and the bearing of fardels, unasked, unearned, and unfair, yet there to be borne nonetheless.
I write instead to commend you for your zealous defense of your observations.
I would add that lacking a sense of locality is inherently dangerous to a mobile species, as members of our mobile species always believe there is someplace else to which they might go once they have polluted their particular geography. For a time in our species' history, say, up to 5,000 years ago, this was a valid survival strategy. Now, however, unless we suddenly discover interstellar travel, such an expansionary mindset is about to prove a net negative to the survival of our species.
In short: you can't keep shitting in your living room and expect it not to stink. As a corollary, there are only so many rooms in a house.
Scatalogical metaphors, indeed.
Where does young Jason, a member of the "for those of us who aren't old -- yet" set, reliant upon high technology and the ubiquity of Facebook and cellular towers, the three day's worth of food in a city's grocery stores, it's one-day supply of fuel, and its overburdened medical facilities, staffed by doctors seeking to heal as a secondary calling subordinate to wealth accumulation -- where does this bitter anarchist hope to find succor when the fragile bonds of society crumble if he is not even willing to acknowledge their existence, much less their worth?
Jason wrote, and you replied:
Jason: "What is gained by attempting to create a sense of locality linked to geography?
Bageant: "If you have a sense of locality, a sense of home and connection with a place, you are less likely to shit in your own nest, then run to the next spot. And right now Mother Earth has had about all the shit she is going to take off of us. And obviously she's reaching for the handle to flush us back into the pre-Cambrian slime from which we crawled.
If Jason proves himself capable -- and willing! -- to look up "pre-Cambrian" on Wikipedia I'll give him an "A" for effort in this debate.
The thing is, we've become accustomed to moving on to the next best place whenever our current location isn't living up to expectations. But in the last several decades or so, as we've fucked and reproduced ourselves to double the population on this planet than that which existed in the 1960's, like some supercharged rabbit warren, we've outrun our resources.
We won't all live. Historically, the carrying capacity of this planet for humans hovers around one billion. With technological advances, not all of which will be undone in the upcoming population crash that will occur in the near future, and given the reservoir of knowledge accumulated over the past ten decades (despite all efforts of religious fundamentalists to the contrary), I'm willing to posit we can sustain two billion people indefinitely.
That means, four billion of the rest of you motherfuckers are gonna die, and I'm gonna do my best to watch. Jason, I hope you go early. In my community, only those who value the community will be welcome, and I will truly regret turning you away.
Moreover, those who survive will be those with friends, or at least confederates with mutual interests. Those who will faithfully stand guard while one sleeps. Those who will share food, and labor, and hardship. What is gained by creating a sense of locality liked to geography is, first and formost, the realization that those who are within the circle of firelight are those who are best disposed, by circumstance and resources, to defend you and yours against the wolves circling just out of sight, and they are those, who through mutual self-interest, will wield all weapons at their disposal to ensure your safety so that, once rested, you may do the same for them.
This, then, is the social compact: we will each stand guard against the night, not just that our neighbor might live, but that our neighbor might ensure that we live.
This, then, is the social contract: that the further from our ring of fire you originate, the less claim you have to the protection of the clan. Lacking resources to protect all who seek succor, we will protect those closest to us, and the devil take the hindmost.
The rest of you may have been born in hospitals, Jason, but it is the height of arrogance to assume that your children will be born in hospitals. Find a tribe, find a community, find a common cause, or be bait for the wolves.
You will never be welcome at my fire; feel free to face the darkness alone. May you never have children, that they will be spared the ignominy of death at the jaws of the wolves, whose reality and continued existence is defined by their consumption.
John
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John,
That is one of the most brutally honest, eloquent, and genuine letters I've ever received. Straight from the gut, straight from the real life of a thoughtful and observant man. I was left speechless.
Your experience with your stepson is repeated similarly hundreds of thousands of times daily in this country. You know that. And I know that. When I am in the US among my own people I live near it and hear it from relatives and dear friends whose families have the same dramatic problems in their lives.
To my mind, Jason's pique, the national pique of a generation really, is grounded in hopeful denial and national conditioning. For the most part, who can blame them? No matter which way you cut it though, conditioning is a hard thing to escape, regardless of one's age. I know as many people with entitlement disease who are over forty as under forty.
We are all conditioned. You and I are deeply conditioned by our experience of being cast into the world at sixteen, feeling entitled to absolutely nothing. Which is what we got, and bad as that sounds by today's American views, we are probably the better for it. What we learned may or may not be someone else's particular truth, but it's what we've learned as purely and experientially as human beings, our own specific conditioning resulting from plunging forward into the world independent of any current sense of "entitled" support. Consequently, as outsiders we can see the folly of the subsequent and escalating sense of entitlement -- an idea of entitlement that deems every person the right to meaningless goods as reward for meaningless work at the expense of every other living thing on the planet.
But we older folks do not have exclusive posession of insight into the condition of America or the world. At speaking engagements I meet as many young people who grasp the reality of non-entitlement and service to the world as I do those few older ones who understand the same. And those young people and I talk, and play music together --- as in the accompanying photo --- and toast one another in the truly democratic spirit of mutual yeoman goodwill. In some cases they reject the sense of entitlement of their murban and suburban families.
Others come from families that were never nflicted with entitlement disease to start with. In fact, at Berea College in Kentucky and at Eastern Kentucky University, I met more of them in one spot than I've ever met in my life. Nearly every one of them was from Appalachia. And they understood that they had roots, even if they were sometimes conflicted about the paradoxes of those roots. And they had a deep sense of place, whether it be some shaded holler or that hell on earth that is mountaintop removal coal country. Some come from big cities, young people so wise beyond their years, who are often children of immigrants, Latino, Middle Eastern, Asian. And the experiences I have with them is about as good a replentishment of the soul as a guy can ask for these days. Particularly in light of the road ahead.
Most thinking people know that a human die-back is coming, whether it be in escalating increments or whether it cuts large horrifying swaths across the planet early on. Overpopulated foxes and raccoons get rabies. We get flus. We've been escaping their basic function in planetary biology for a while now, mostly through pragmatic and lucky choices made by epidemiologists vaccine development selection (though I am told by some epidemiologists that the long term odds are not in our favor that this luck can hold out). The latest swine flu wave is an example of the slowly escalating model.
At some point though, there will indeed be people sitting around the fire, kinship bands, small communities of some sort, more than likely church communities in basements full of canned goods, militias, or eco-minded ones who took precautions early. In any case they won't be able to order fast food over by cell phone or freeze dried goods over the Internet. And they will have to defend their resources by one means or another.
Just as some farmers in Bolivia and the Sudan have to post watches on their crops day and night in order to have enough left to eat when the harvest comes. I also find it interesting that many villages in India, surrounded and plagued by hunger as they are, do not have to have armed guards on their nearby fields. Not usually against people anyway, although for predators and wild herbivores. Also they share with the poor if possible by community custom and religion. It's because they have community grounded in location and generations.
Nor does this location have to be pastoral. Beggers in Mumbai have community, weddings, celebrations of childbirth, music, corruption and uinfairness, a political party and even their own banks, all the characteristics of human community, but grounded in a location -- the streets beneath their feer. Generations in the same location, same turf managed by ancestral agreement as to who works which urban turf. Saying this is sure to draw a lot of email telling me how full of shit I am.
Americans and even striving and middle class Indians cannot get past the idea that poverty can possibly contain a shred of anything positive. Of course poverty is a human condition and because it is human, it is capable of manifesting the good things in humanity too. But if it makes my detractors any happier, the beggars will be among the first to go in the big die-back.
The looming question regarding the die-back is: when? Two years? Forty? So long as Americans get outta bed everyday and the car starts and the coffee maker works and they've gotten email, well, then the world is OK to them. They see no evidence of what is sure to come, ot that it is sure to come simply because they have a car or three, eat beef several times a week, shop in air conditioned stores for frozen foods and need the hydrocarbon driven electric grid to survive.
What the hell? These are assumed to be the simplest entitlements of American life. Like air to breathe and potable water, which in themselves are becoming scarcer, though it goes unnoticed by most. They think they are buying life sustaining water in plastic bottles because of some wonderfully democratic consumer choice, not as a prelude to something larger and more dire. They have no idea of the thousands of municipalities trying to figure out how to pay for their water treatment plants, or the legal fights building up regarding just who has the legal rights to sell the Great Lakes, particularly in Lake Superior, to the rest of the nation, now that the great aquifers are sucked down so far.
Speaking of lakes, I wish you well up there in the Fingerlakes. I spent seven years homesteading in remote nothern Idaho with a wife who, though our marriage was not successful, taught me about the fragility of the environment and the unsustainability of "the grid" years before anyone else was even thinking about it. I learned that human sustainability involves much more than just the nearby availability of natural resources. It also involves human calories expended, the ecology of family shared work toward sustenance, and achieveing all sorts of balances that are niot strictly mnaterial or ecological in the nature sense.
Anyway, may you never have to physically defend your 60 Fingerlake acres in your lifetime. Because an ex-Marine may be almost too good at defending by nature of acquired skills. Myself, I've chosen to just let it roll, and watch and comment insofar as anyone might be willing to lend an ear.
And your remark about planetary carrying capacity of about a billion is one of those awful truths I finally gave up making comment upon. It is what it is. The truth is that Americans will have to come to knowing on their own. They cannot be dragged to it or otherwise convinced by either force or guile or well crafted language. Nor do I care to blast away at encroaching hordes from a compound. Apparently, my reptilian survival brain isn't too well developed, or maybe it's pickled in alcohol, I dunno. Perhaps if I still had kids at home I'd feel differently. But I doubt it.
I've rambled too much about things we both already know, along with millions of others who already know. So let me add this final observation of my own, one in which I am completely convinced: There are far, far more people under 35 who "get it" about planetary entitlement and the ecosystem than there are people in our age group who get it. They are as frustrated as we are. Many of them also do a far better job of living up to their planetary eco responsibility -- inasmuch as that is even possible in a corporate state that thwarts every effort -- than I dare say you and I do. If I am unfortunate enough to be around when nature pulls the plug on our virulent species, then may I be fortunate enough to be sitting around their campfire.
In art and labor,
Joe
PS: The photo of me with the gun and bourbon and the caption was mostly in jest. It is also ten years old! So to the fifty-something lady who sent me the amorous invitation, I say, be careful what you ask for.
