The Encyclopedia of Trouble and Spaciousness (50 page)

BOOK: The Encyclopedia of Trouble and Spaciousness

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During the 1980s, when our government was sponsoring the dirty wars in Central America, two U.S. groups in particular countered those politics of repression, torture, and death. One was the Pledge of Resistance, which gathered the signatures of hundreds of thousands who promised to respond with civil disobedience if the United States invaded Sandinista-run
Nicaragua or otherwise deepened its involvement with the dictatorships and death squads of Central America. Another was Witness for Peace, which placed
gringos
as observers and unarmed protectors in communities throughout Central America.

While killing or disappearing
campesinos
could be carried out with ease in countries like El Salvador and Guatemala, doing the same to U.S. citizens, or in front of them, was a riskier proposition. The Yankee witnesses used the privilege of their color and citizenship as a shield for others and then testified to what they saw. We have come to a moment when we need to strengthen the solidarity so many activists around the world have felt for the Zapatistas, strengthen it into something that can protect the sources of “the fire and the word”—the fire that has warmed so many who have a rebel heart, the word that has taught us to imagine the world anew.

The United States and Mexico both have eagles as their emblems, predators which attack from above. The Zapatistas have chosen a snail in a spiral shell, a small creature, easy to overlook. It speaks of modesty, humility, closeness to the earth, and of the recognition that a revolution may start like lightning but is realized slowly, patiently, steadily. The old idea of revolution was that we would trade one government for another and somehow this new government would set us free and change everything. More and more of us now understand that change is a discipline lived every day, as those women standing before us testified; that revolution only secures the territory in which life can change. Launching a revolution is not easy, as the decade of planning before the 1994 Zapatista uprising demonstrated, and living one is hard too, a faith and discipline that must not falter until the threats and old habits are gone—if then. True revolution is slow.

There’s a wonderful passage in Robert Richardson’s biography of Thoreau in which he speaks of the Europe-wide revolution of 1848 and says of the New England milieu and its proliferating cooperative communities at that time, “Most of the founders were more interested in building models, which would be emulated because they succeeded, than in the destruction of the existing order. Still American utopian socialism had much in common with the spirit of 1848.”

This says very directly that you can reach out and change the state and
its institutions, which we recognize as revolution, or you can make your own institutions beyond the reach of the state, which is also revolutionary. This creating—rather than simply rebelling—has been much of the nature of revolution in our time, as people reinvent family, gender, food systems, work, housing, education, economics, medicine and doctor-patient relations, the imagination of the environment, and the language to talk about it, not to speak of more and more of everyday life. The fantasy of a revolution is that it will make everything different, and regime revolutions generally make a difference, sometimes a significantly positive one, but the making of radical differences in everyday life is a more protracted, incremental process. It’s where leaders are irrelevant and every life matters.

Give the Zapatistas time—the slow, unfolding time of the spiral and the journey of the snail—to keep making their world, the one that illuminates what else our lives and societies could be. Our revolution must be as different as our temperate-zone, post-industrial society is to their subtropical agrarianism, but it is also guided by the slow forces of dignity, imagination, and hope, as well as the playfulness they display in their imagery and language. The testimony in the auditorium ended late on December 31. At midnight, amid dancing, the revolution turned fourteen. May it long continue to spiral inward and outward.

2008

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I hope that this book is, for the readers, an adventure. For its writer, it’s a travel journal, a list of experiments, a bouquet of theories and practices, and a few proposals about how things could be. Rereading its almost thirty pieces filled me with gratitude for the friends and companions on encounters around the world and for the editors I worked with on the resultant essays. People from four publications stand out: Tom Engelhardt, Nick Turse, and Andy Kroll of
Tomdispatch.com
, the little website with the huge global reach, where nearly a quarter of the pieces here originated; Luke Mitchell at
Harper’s
; Jennifer Sahn at
Orion
; and the editorial department at the
London Review of Books
. A significant percentage of the book first appeared in these four venues, though Richard Kim at
The Nation
, Yuka Igarashi at
Granta
, Jon Christensen at
Boom
, and many others at the
Guardian
, the
Financial Times
, and elsewhere facilitated the birth of other pieces. Lisa Gabrielle Mark, then of the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, invited me to explore 1970s California, a fascinating, unsettling experience. Ann McDonald at Artspace Books commissioned what became “Inside Out,” one of the essays that was particularly a pleasure to write.

Tyrone Martinnson invited me to Svalbard in 2011, one of the most enchanting passages of my life. In 2006, my magnificent friend Sam Green and I hatched a plan to go to Detroit that resulted in “Detroit Arcadia.” Trevor Paglen’s amazing work and warm friendship were the occasion for “The Visibility Wars,” and Bob Fulkerson and Grace Bukowski were the friends who’d taken me deep into Nevada in every sense beforehand. Many friends in San Francisco, Oakland, and New York, notably Sunaura Taylor, David Solnit, Marko Muir, Rupa Marya, Mona Caron, Adriana
Camarena, and David Graeber joined me in the Occupy movement in 2011, which lit up several essays here. Astra Taylor was a great friend and traveling companion at both Occupy Wall Street and the BP blowout in the Gulf of Mexico. Marina Sitrin was a wonderful friend and a companion at the Zapatista
encuentro
, and her own brilliant work on civil society, popular power, and social change are a major influence on my political ideas. In New Orleans Rebecca Snedeker and A. C. Thompson were indispensable friends and collaborators. The people who came together as civil society and rewrote history again and again are at the heart of many of these pieces, and in my heart as well, and to them I owe another kind of thanks. Thanks as well to Barbara Ras for taking on this book, and to Sarah Nawrocki and BookMatters for seeing it through.

The essays in this book were previously published in the following publications and are reprinted here with thanks (and, in some cases, minor revisions).

“The Visibility Wars” was in Aperture’s book of Trevor Paglan’s visual investigations of surveillance and military infrastructure,
Invisible.

“Inside Out” was the text for an Artspace book also featuring the paintings of Stefan Kurten.

“Concrete in Paradise” accompanied Alex Fradkin’s photographs of the Marin Headlands in
Boom
magazine.

“Journey to the Center” was the text for a book documenting Elín Hansdóttir’s magnificent labyrinth
Path
, published by Crymogea.

Harper’s
originally published “Detroit Arcadia” and “Notes from Nowhere: Iceland’s Polite Dystopia.”

The
London Review of Books
is where “Dry Lands,” “Oil and Water: The BP Spill in the Gulf,” “The Great Tōhoku Earthquake and Tsunami,” and the trilogy on Silicon Valley, “The Google Bus: Silicon Valley Invades,” “We’re Breaking Up: Noncommunications in the Silicon Age,” and “Pale Bus, Pale Rider” originally appeared.

“Rattlesnake in Mailbox” was originally published in the 2011 exhibition catalogue
Under the Big Black Sun: California Art 1974–1981
by the Museum
of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and DelMonico Books • Prestel. Reprinted by permission of the publishers.

The two New Orleans pieces, “Reconstructing the Story of the Storm” and “We Won’t Bow Down,” were first published in
The Nation
.

Orion
was the original venue for “Cyclopedia of an Arctic Expedition,” “One Nation under Elvis,” “Winged Mercury and the Golden Calf,” the essay on Thoreau’s laundry, and “Revolutionary Plots: On Urban Gardening.”

Tomdispatch.com
was the place of origin for these seven essays: “The Butterfly and the Boiling Point,” “In Haiti, Words Can Kill,” “Icebergs and Shadows,” “The Volcano Erupts: Iceland in Upheaval,” “Letter to a Dead Man on the Occupation of Hope,” “Apologies to Mexico,” and “Revolution of the Snails: Encounters with the Zapatistas.”

INDEX

Abalone Alliance (antinuclear group),
45

Abbey, Edward (writer),
66

Aeneid
,
11

Afghanistan,
52
,
300

African Americans (see also
slavery
),
29
,
37
,
55
,
68–83
,
85
,
86
,
90
,
91
,
113
,
120
,
123
,
225
,
228
,
231–239
,
240–247
,
282