Listening to the Crack of Doom on the Hydrogen Jukebox (Part 1)
Living in the Shadow of Armageddon (From Reconsidering Paradise, a manuscript in progress)
Storms intensify in the Middle East.1 Droughts in the American Midwest, California, around the globe. More frequent and stronger hurricanes. Flooding. Extremes growing more extreme.
“This will be greater than anything we have ever seen in the past. This will be unprecedented. Every living thing will be affected.”2
A blackbird pecks at the bird feeder in the yard. A buzzard circles overhead. Three deer eat from the low-hanging limbs of a juniper outside our window. Trees die of fungus and rot. A fox, lost amid suburban sprawl, tears at trash bags for food.
“The cause of the world’s woe is birth, the cure of the world’s woe is a bent stick,”3 Kerouac writes. A koan? A prod?
I am not a Buddhist. Nor am I a scientist, a practicing Jew, an atheist, or a politician. I proclaim I am an artist, but what is that in a world of constant threat, the long shadow of nuclear war, the climate’s decay.
Kerouac writes:
This world has no marks, signs, or evidence of existence, nor the noises in it, like accident of wind or voices or heehawing animals, yet listen closely the eternal hush of silence goes on and on throughout all of this, and has been going on and on and will go on and on.4
We live in this world, are part of it. Perhaps, as the scientist in On The Beach says, the world can live without us. “It’s not the end of the world at all. It’s only the end of us. The world will go on just the same, only we shan’t be in it. I dare say it will get along all right without us.”5
The Great Salt Lake has “shrunk by two-thirds, continues to dry up,” and the “air surrounding Salt Lake City would occasionally turn poisonous.” A “potential environmental nuclear bomb,” says a Utah lawmaker.6
A documentary7 shows the movement of population, from South to North, from Africa, South and Central America, the Middle East, to the United States, Europe. Men, women crossing dangerous waters. Fleeing war. Fleeing disaster. Fleeing broken economies and gang violence, gangs that claim control over resources, that function as extra-legal governments, entire populations in forced migration.
Historic movements. Okies escaping dust storms, Mexicans tromping up and down the West Coast, road-weary, barely holding on. Kerouac called them the Fellaheen, romanticized their lives, but there is nothing romantic about poverty and the flight from fear or hunger.
There are men in the woods, in the vast suburbs that are New Jersey. A man living under a train overpass in New Brunswick. Rousted regularly, but he returns. And returns again, full bed roll, bags and rucksacks of clothing. I talked to a kid at the rail station. He was bumming cash. Needed a meal. I heard he died, maybe from Covid. Maybe something else. He lived on the street, in the elements. Like the Mexican in the tent camp in Lakewood. Dead from winter freeze, from carbon monoxide from a faulty heater. From being internally displaced, by capital, by no-work, by drugs, or drink, or the impending frost.
I talk to these men, these women, outcasts who lack the romance of the mythical hobo of Depression Era tales, of Woody Guthrie, of Kerouac. These men and women are not ghosts, not specters of some mythical night. They are refugees8 from an American and global economy. Economic effluent. The despised.
This is what American exceptionalism looks like, what Western exceptionalism looks like, what the machine does. What it reaps.
Sartre says9 every man bears responsibility for all of man kind. We are both the man begging on the street and the one who put him there, because we are free to decide and act, and to not act. And by not acting, by passing by, we choose the outcome, not endorse it so much as make it our own. We assign monetary value to all in our purview, to the air and water and rocks and people, turn our globe into product to be expended, turn man into beggars.
"To make myself passive in the world, to refuse to act upon things and upon Others is still to choose myself," Sartre writes. I may not choose war, or pollution, or capitalism, but "For lack of getting out it, I have chosen it." The lack of choice is choice, whether "due to inertia, to cowardice in the face of public opinion, or because I prefer certain other values.”
Kerouac saw the cataclysm coming, saw the damage that materialism was doing. He saw the West, saw development and commerce and materialism as taint, as infection, the undeveloped world as somehow pure, its people, “the Fellahin Indians of the world, the essential strain of the basic primitive, wailing humanity that stretches in a belt around the equatorial belly of the world from Malaya (the long fingernail of China) to India the great subcontinent to Arabia to Morocco to the selfsame deserts and jungles of Mexico and over the waves to Polynesia to mystic Siam of the Yellow Robe and on around, on around,” as “the source of mankind and the fathers of it.” He saw (writing as Sal Paradise) “destruction com(ing) to the world of ‘history’ and the Apocalypse of the Fellahin return(ing) once more as so many times before.”10
He saw it. We see it. We live it. Disease and death. A lingering virus that has killed more than 6.2 million around the world, a million here. That will sicken more and kill more before it is through. Russian nukes and a war in Ukraine. Wildfires. Tsunamis. Lingering radiation from nuclear accidents. Atmospheric carbon magnifying heat, warming the seas, the planet. The threat spreading.
I reread On The Beach, a book I first read in the early Seventies in sixth grade, a story of the aftermath of nuclear war, of radiation spreading south, washing across the last inhabitable spaces on Earth. I remember air raid sirens. I’m seeing the parallels. Reliving the fear, the embedded angst. A climate disaster. Nuclear destruction.
“The ‘delicate balance of terror’ that characterized nuclear strategy during the Cold War has not disappeared,” but instead has been “reconfigured,” writes John W. Dower.11 The “wherewithal to destroy the earth as we know it many times over” remains a feature of modern life.
“The future use of nuclear weapons, whether by deliberate decision or by accident, remains an ominous possibility.”
We have learned nothing. We are fooling ourselves. We live in willful ignorance.
I think: dying planet. Civilizational collapse. I think: the machine lives. The machine that transforms all into profit. Strips all of intrinsic worth. I’m thinking, “Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unobtainable dollars! Children screaming under the stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men weeping in the parks!” I’m thinking “Nightmare of Moloch! Moloch the loveless! Mental Moloch! Moloch the heavy judger of men!” Think:
Moloch! Moloch! Robot apartments! invisible suburbs! skeleton treasuries! blind capitals! demonic industries! spectral nations! invincible madhouses! granite cocks! monstrous bombs!
They broke their backs lifting Moloch to Heaven! Pavements, trees, radios, tons! lifting the city to Heaven which exists and is everywhere about us!12
Covid mutates and spreads. Continues its march around the globe. Fires ravages a drought-dry Southwest. Shortages pockmark the economy.
A police chief on TV details another shooting. Politicians offer “thoughts and prayers.” A teacher on the news, tells how he tried to protect his students. Kids told to hide under desks. To pretend they were asleep. Didn’t matter. We’ve seen this before.
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Kerouac, Jack. The Scripture of the Golden Eternity, Totem Press, 1960, p. 24.
The Scripture of the Golden Eternity, p. 21.
Shute Nevil. On the Beach, e-book.
Human Flow, Amazon Prime Video
Not in the legal sense. The United Nations defines a refugee as “someone who is unable or unwilling to return to their country of origin owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group, or political opinion.” It estimated that there were 25.4 million refugees around the globe in 2017.
Sartre, Jean-Paul. Existentialism and Human Emotion.
Kerouac, Jack. On The Road.
Dower, John W. The Violent American Century, Dispatch Books, 2017, e-book.
Ginsberg, Allen. “Howl.”