Everybody knows that the American way of life would never have been possible without ethnically cleansing this continent first. The broken promises. The fake treaties. The smallpox blankets, and the wholesale massacres of both people and their food animals*; ‘Geronimo’ finally eastbound on the train a little over one hundred years ago, his Anglo name turned into a war cry for paratroopers and children. The county where Cochise was tricked and slaughtered named for him, thirty years later. The noble old Nez Perce warrior turned pacifist when all other options were dead. On and on.

The average American, more or less successfully living that way of life, can’t morally or psychologically afford to be too concerned about it.

Well, ya know, it was a loonngg time ago … less enlightened times … all the progress we’ve made since … maybe we are just better than them, anyway.

But what if I told you (insert Morpheus matrix gaze here) that within your own lifetime, your government ethnically cleansed another place, because they wanted to use the land of the indigenous for a massive military base?

What if you knew that, in the name of National Security and ‘our interests’, they scooped up every inhabitant from this place, dumped them on the beach hundreds of miles away, knocked over their houses and put that military base up before anyone could object, or even notice?

Okay … what if I told you that the military rounded up all their pets, and gassed them? Yes. Gassed the pets, so they wouldn’t be in the way of construction. Species cleansing to go along with all the poor brown people …

Would that bit about the furbabies make things more real? (It shamefully did for me …)

Watch it and weep, should you have any tears left over after the month that’s been.

The truth each one of us must confront if we’re honest is that it’s not just the ‘Homeland’, and the island of Diego Garcia, and the West Bank and Palestine generally. It’s standard operating procedure.

It’s what we just do, to ‘succeed’, to ‘spread democracy’ (i.e., capitalism with OUR capital, aka ‘the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie’).

We invade. We cleanse those unfit to be our proles and slaves. We take their land and whatever bounty there is upon the land, from cadmium to bananas, and on the seventh day we rest, and pray to our loving God, and call ourselves his special favored children, the good people, the brave people, the land–no irony allowed–of The Free.

The land your house and my house sits on was stolen. Not by us–in fact, we’re paying mortgage bribes to the thieves, and taxes too–but by our glorious forebears and by this star-spangled System that we praise and bleed and pledge to every moment of our lives.

Oh say …

Can you even fucking see?

+++

* The hunter-gatherer lifestyle, as attempted in the modern world, is treated as a direct threat to all things civilized, because in certain particulars, it is. To the modern liberal sensibility–from the dullest local cop to even the good people of the World Wildlife Fund–there is no tangible difference between a hunter-gatherer and a poacher, or a rustler … hang ’em high, right?

This is one of the many valuable insights contained in The Rewilding Prodcast, Episode 2. I listened so you don’t have to, but it doesn’t mean you can’t.

I listened to the last few minutes as a way of wrapping up my day, and I thought …

For a while there, some feminists were trying to explain to us how important it was to call stewards and stewardesses Flight Attendants. That much is taken for granted now, but they also wanted us to call househusbands and housewives Domestic Engineers. Which didn’t … uh, take off in the same way.

What I am these days is very exactly a Domestic Engineer, but …

I am also in the same moments militantly against domestication.

A Rewilding Technician is an oxymoron. I hope that’s obvious.

Fuck it. Call me what you want; take that tone with me, missy–it’s all okay, at least for marketing purposes.