Joe Bageant’s Personal Liberation

Green Turtle at home in Tortuguero, Costa Rica, described in David Ehrenfeld’s book Beginning Again

My friend Jon Husband sent me the latest Joe Bageant article this morning. If you do nothing else today, please read it. Don’t be fooled by the “aw shucks” writing style — this guy is brilliant, funny, and very thoughtful. Here’s the last 5 paragraphs to tease you into reading the rest:

Exactly one month prior to this Earth Day 2007, I was standing in the coral sand of a tiny atoll in the middle of the Caribbean Ocean at night amid several other vanishing species. Less than a hundred feet at its longest point, its sands were scattered here and there with the bleached skeletons of ancient lobster traps and sea turtle shells, and etched by the tracks and tailings of turtles, small birds, and all sorts of strange crawlies from the tide pool. Swarms of translucent little crabs with huge black and white target-like eyes on stems coming out of their heads scurried furtively, avoiding the cormorants and other kinds of birds hugging the atoll against the same sturdy winds that once carried disease and guns into the new world and Spanish gold away from it. During the day the sun on that sand was blinding. But at night there was just that wind and absolute blackness with millions of stars and the cries of birds.

Seldom have I ever felt the presence of the earth’s spirit and the terrible beauty of creation so strongly, where the world flourishes and struggles and dies right before your eyes. Thousands of colorful worms go by in the shallow water, winking on and off and schools of tropical fish are plainly visible right at the water’s edge, their fate hanging with the frigate birds suspended overhead.

And while standing there — frankly, taking a nocturnal piss — the wind rose and grew stronger. And as I closed my eyes against the billowing coral sand, that wind blew away all the flesh from my bones. Then blew away the very bones themselves. And what I was left with the core of selfness, just the awareness of awareness — that center of humanness that exists in pure duration before any thought or word is even formed, the unarticulated stuff that exists in the womb of woman and in that great frothing amniotic soup of the mother of us all — the sea. It was just me and the overarching black canopy of the world, as if god’s own infinite bowl of stars itself had been overturned, dumping them upon my fallible and pitifully meaningless outer self — the one presently engaged in pompous scribbling about the liberation of man, yet unable to save a single one of those tiny crabs or glowing sea worms in the tide pools from their own destinies, from their return to the sea via the gullet of a vanishing petrel.

Western civilization began by smashing the faces of beasts with stones, determined to “conquer the wilderness,” hammering at both matter and mind on the anvil of the millenniums until finally, we pulled down mountains and made atoms scream in tortured orbits. Now the day of deliverance comes, casting our shadows in merciless hydrogen light, illuminating not only our latest war crimes, but also crimes of trade and finance and greed during what has come to pass for peace, when our darkest commercial cannibalism feasts upon the naked wondrous bodies of the innocents. And now destruction dances in infinite rooms, singing in dark chords for the brute who smashed open the celestial clock, hungry to eat the ticking heart of god.

For all that the study of history could have taught an amnesiac America about the fall of empires and civilizations, it is doubtful it can prepare anyone for what is fast coming upon us, because it has never happened before and by definition can only happen once. Though the Wiccan priestess, the fundamentalist preacher, the rabbi, and environmental biologist call it by different names — as if renaming an apocalypse made much difference — we need a liberated theology, epistemology, or ontology (again, that obsession with naming rather things than doing things). Something to liberate “the within” of we who find ourselves traveling together amid gathering darkness toward the long promised kingdom of sanity and justice. That kingdom which rests at the end of no mortal road, but was always within us. Just like Jesus and Buddha and the Pentecostal preachers of my childhood said it was.