Call Them by Their True Names

American Crises (and Essays)

Rebecca Solnit

• Publisher: Haymarket Books
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781608469475
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Femminismo e teoria femminista

"[A] call to arms that takes on a range of social and political problems in America—from racism and misogyny to climate change and Donald Trump" ( Poets & Writers ). National Book Award Longlist
Winner of the Kirkus Prize for Nonfiction
Winner of the Foreword INDIE Editor's Choice Prize for Nonfiction Rebecca Solnit is the author of more than twenty books, including the international bestseller Men Explain Things to Me. Called "the voice of the resistance" by the New York Times, she has emerged as an essential guide to our times, through incisive commentary on feminism, violence, ecology, hope, and everything in between. In this powerful and wide-ranging collection of essays, Solnit turns her attention to the war at home. This is a war, she says, "with so many casualties that we should call it by its true name, this war with so many dead by police, by violent ex-husbands and partners and lovers, by people pursuing power and profit at the point of a gun or just shooting first and figuring out who they hit later." To get to the root of these American crises, she contends that "to acknowledge this state of war is to admit the need for peace, " countering the despair of our age with a dose of solidarity, creativity, and hope. "Solnit's exquisite essays move between the political and the personal, the intellectual and the earthy." — Elle "Solnit is careful with her words (she always is) but never so much that she mutes the infuriated spirit that drives these essays." — Kirkus Reviews (starred review) "Solnit [is] a powerful cultural critic: as always, she opts for measured assessment and pragmatism over hype and hysteria." — Publishers Weekly "Essential reading for anyone living in America today." — The Brooklyn Rail

III.

American Edges

Climate Change Is Violence

(2014)

If you’re poor, the only way you’re likely to injure someone is the old, traditional way—artisanal violence, we could call it: by hands, by knife, by club; or maybe modern hands-on violence, by gun or by car.

But if you’re tremendously wealthy, you can practice industrial-scale violence without any manual labor on your part. You can, say, build a sweatshop factory that will collapse in Bangladesh and kill more people than any hands-on mass murderer ever did, or you can calculate risk and benefit about putting poisons or unsafe machines into the world, as manufacturers do every day. If you’re the leader of a country, you can declare war and kill by the hundreds of thousands or millions. And the nuclear superpowers—the United States and Russia—still hold the option of destroying quite a lot of life on Earth. So do the carbon barons.

But when we talk about violence, we almost always talk about violence from below, not above. Or so I thought, when I received a press release from a climate group, announcing, “Scientists say there is a direct link between changing climate and an increase in violence.” What the scientists actually said, in a not so newsworthy article in Nature, is that there is higher conflict in the tropics in El Niño years, and that perhaps this will scale up to make our age of climate change also an era of civil and international conflict.

The message is that ordinary people will behave badly in an era of intensified climate change. All this makes sense, unless you go back to the premise and note that climate change is itself violence. Extreme, horrific, long-term, widespread violence.

Climate change is anthropogenic—caused by human beings, by some much more than by others. We know the consequences of that change: the acidification of oceans and decline of many species in them; the slow disappearance of island nations such as the Maldives; increased flooding, drought, crop failure leading to food price increases and famine; increasingly turbulent weather. (Think of the recent hurricanes in Houston, New York, Puerto Rico; the fires in California and Australia; the typhoons in the Philippines; and heat waves that kill elderly people by the tens of thousands.)

Climate change is violence.

So if we want to talk about violence and climate change, then let’s talk about climate change as violence. Rather than worrying about whether ordinary human beings will react turbulently to the destruction of the very means of their survival, let’s worry about that destruction—and their survival. Of course, crop failure, drought, flooding, and more will continue to lead—as they already have—to mass migration and climate refugees, and this will lead to conflict. Those conflicts are being set in motion now.

You can regard the Arab Spring, in part, as a climate conflict: the increase in wheat prices was one of the triggers for the series of revolts that changed the face of northernmost Africa and the Middle East. On the one hand, you can say, How nice if those people had not been hungry in the first place. On the other, how can you not say, How great is it that those people stood up against being deprived of sustenance and hope? And then you have to look at the systems that created that hunger—the enormous economic inequalities in places such as Egypt and the brutality used to keep down the people at the lower levels of the social system—as well as at the weather.

People revolt when their lives are unbearable. Sometimes material reality creates that unbearableness: droughts, plagues, storms, floods. But food and medical care, health and well-being, access to housing and education—these things are governed also by economic means and government policy. Climate change will increase hunger as food prices rise and food production falters, but we already have widespread hunger on Earth, and much of it is due not to the failures of nature and farmers but to systems of distribution. Almost 16 million children in the United States now live with hunger, according to the US Department of Agriculture, and that is not because the vast, agriculturally rich United States cannot produce enough to feed all of us. We are a country whose distribution system is itself a kind of violence.

Climate change is not suddenly bringing about an era of inequitable distribution. I suspect people will be revolting against in the future what they revolted against in the past: the injustices of the system. They should revolt, and we should be glad they do, if not so glad that they need to. One of the events prompting the French Revolution was the failure of the 1788 wheat crop, which made bread prices skyrocket and the poor go hungry. The insurance against such events is often thought to be more authoritarianism and more threats against the poor, but that’s only an attempt to keep a lid on what’s boiling over; the alternative is to turn down the heat.

The same week I received that ill-thought-out press release about climate and violence, Exxon Mobil Corporation issued a policy report. It makes for boring reading, unless you can make the dry language of business into pictures of the consequences of those acts undertaken for profit. Exxon says, “We are confident that none of our hydrocarbon reserves are now or will become ‘stranded.’ We believe producing these assets is essential to meeting growing energy demand worldwide.”

Stranded assets means that carbon assets—coal, oil, gas still underground—would become worthless if we decided they could not be extracted and burned in the near future. Scientists advise that we need to leave most of the world’s known carbon reserves in the ground if we are to go for the milder rather than the more extreme versions of climate change. Under the milder version, countless more people, living species, places will survive. In the best-case scenario, we damage the earth less. We are currently wrangling about how much to devastate the earth.

In every arena, we need to look at industrial-scale and systemic violence, not just the hands-on violence of the less powerful. When it comes to climate change, this is particularly true. Exxon has decided to bet that we can’t make the corporation keep its reserves in the ground, and the company is reassuring its investors that it will continue to profit off the rapid, violent, and intentional destruction of the earth.

That’s a tired phrase, destruction of the earth, but translate it into the face of a starving child and a barren field—and then multiply that a few million times. Or just picture the tiny mollusks: scallops, oysters, or Arctic sea snails that can’t form shells in acidifying oceans right now. Or another superstorm tearing apart another city. Climate change is global-scale violence, against places and living species as well as against human beings. Once we call it by its true name, we can start having a real conversation about our priorities and values. Because the revolt against brutality begins with a revolt against the language that hides that brutality.

Blood on the Foundation

(2006)

The place where the teenage twins were murdered was beautiful, and the men who killed them and their uncle were to become among the most celebrated in the United States. But on that Sunday, June 28, 1846, the murder site just north of San Francisco was not in the United States. It, like the rest of California and the entire Southwest, was still Mexico, and this is why the two de Haro boys, Francisco and Ramón, were shot down in cold blood along with their elderly uncle, José de la Reyes Berreyessa.

I have imagined it as an image often enough I now see it: the three men standing up against the blue water of San Francisco Bay, wearing serapes, carrying saddles, startled, then stunned, then dead, one by one, as the gunman picked them off. There’s something about those three figures against the water of the pristine bay, stark and symbolic. Blue water. Gold hills. Three upright against the beauty of the place. Then three bodies lying crumpled on the shore. It’s the kind of death sung about in ballads, the kind of death that paintings are made of. No one has made much of this one, though San Rafael–born poet Robert Hass mentioned their deaths in his 1970 poem “Palo Alto: The Marshes (for Mariana Richardson 1830–1899).”

Some accounts put the murder scene at Point San Pedro, the semi-rustic peninsula jutting into the bay; some put it closer to Mission San Rafael, in what is now the town center. All the accounts agree that the three Mexican citizens had rowed across from Point San Pablo, north of present-day Berkeley. News in those days traveled at the speed of a horseman or a boat, and news of the seizure of Northern California’s administrator, Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo, in Sonoma on June 14 may not have reached many of his fellow Californios—as the Mexican citizens of Alta, or upper, California were called. Berreyessa, however, had heard that his son José de los Santos Berreyessa, the alcade (or mayor) of Sonoma, had been taken prisoner and had rowed over with his nephews to investigate.

The little war had been brewing for a while. President James Polk had major territorial ambition, and he had sent emissary Thomas O. Larkin to encourage the Californios to defect (with their territory) to the United States. At the same time, he had pushed Great Britain to settle the dispute over the Pacific Northwest, acquiring what is now Oregon and Washington for the United States, as well as annexing the newly independent (from Mexico) Texas and starting what our school textbooks call the Mexican-American War. It might more accurately be called the War on Mexico, because we started it. When it was done, Mexico reluctantly ceded nearly half its territory—more than half a million square miles, including what is now western New Mexico and Colorado, California, Nevada, Utah, most of Arizona, and a bit of Wyoming.

Huge swaths of land—which really belonged to the Native nations that had been there long before Spain, Mexico, or Polk—transferred title in those years, and the United States assumed its modern coast-to-coast shape. But the Bear Flag Revolt wasn’t epic or heroic, just a strange squabble that melded into the war against Mexico. It began when a number of Yankee settlers near Sutter Buttes in the Central Valley, inflamed by rumors that a small army of Mexicans was coming to drive out the illegal aliens—the Americans—decided to jump the gun and seize the place. They set out in the second week of June, recruiting as they went, so that about thirty of them stole into Sonoma’s plaza at dawn on June 14.

There, the illegal aliens stormed Vallejo’s home and took him hostage. Some wore buckskin pants, some coyote-fur hats; some had no shoes. One account describes them as “a marauding band of horse thieves, trappers, and runaway sailors.” Vallejo was a man of culture, a rancher, and a reluctant governor, not averse to being annexed by the United States but not inclined to become a prisoner or a second-class citizen. It was his open immigration policy that had created the problem in the first place. They raised a flag with a bear so badly drawn that some of the Mexicans thought it was a pig. A better version remains on the California flag, though the subspecies of grizzly on it became extinct more than eighty years ago. The ironies pile high.

Captain John Charles Frémont, who had entered California illegally with a band of scouts and soldiers, egged on the revolt and then joined it, stealing horses, commandeering supplies, and pretty much doing anything he liked. The morning of June 28, he and his chief scout, Kit Carson, were near the shores of San Rafael when the de Haro twins rowed their uncle across so that he could, by some accounts, visit his son in Sonoma. Carson asked Frémont what to do about these unarmed Californios. Frémont—according to Jasper O’Farrell, who was there—waved his hand and said, “I have got no room for prisoners.” So Carson, from fifty yards away, shot them. As one history relates it, “Ramón was killed as soon as he reached the shore. Francisco then threw himself down upon his brother’s body. Next, a command rang out: ‘Kill the other son of a bitch!’ It was obeyed immediately.” When the uncle asked why the boys had been killed, he was shot down, too. Berreyessa’s son Antonio later ran into a Yankee wearing his father’s serape—the bodies had been stripped of their clothing and left where they lay—and asked Frémont to order its return to him. Frémont refused, so Antonio Berreyessa paid the thief $25 for the garment.

The son remained bitter for the rest of his days. The father of the twins is said to have died of grief. California became part of the United States. Carson, who had participated in a massacre of Klamath tribespeople to the north, would later mu...