Leaving Las Vegas ~ Interlude V ~ Improvising Counter-Hegemonies ~ “Why, You're UnAmerican!”
Cara Judea Alhadeff
November 2023
“Claim your FREE Polar Bear Family Fleece Blanket!”
How can we accept the normalization of such perverse marketing?
Do the National Wildlife Federation (NWF) and its financial contributors (liberal, mainstream environmentalists) not see the irony of producing, distributing, and disposing of more microplastics (an essential ingredient in fleece textiles) as antithetical to the mission they purport to be committed to? Adjacent to a photograph of a desperate-looking polar bear scaling a rock wall that used to be an icecap,
the letter inside this envelope begins: “Dear Friend of Wildlife.”
I suggest other marketing soundbites:
Friends Don’t Let Friends Donate to Giant Environmental Non-Profits
Click on the image to enlarge
The system reproduces its existence because it goes unrecognized.
—Pierre Bourdieu
It is difficult to convince a man of something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.
—Upton Sinclair
Even though I was only in Las Vegas for four days, it has taken me four months to leave. And before we leave Las Vegas, we need to return. Before we return, we need to pass through Happy Valley, University Park, State College—all names for the home of Pennsylvania State University, the exponentially growing Big Business, Big Ag town a few hours away from the City of Brotherly Love. However, hospitality not only falters, but invites degradation and even xenophobia when we are only able to see what is apparently visible. For next month’s Mother Pelican, I will explore the climate-chaos inducing collision between the seen and unseen.
I introduced myself and we began talking about the expanse of lawns surrounding the farms. He expressed extreme displeasure at his neighbors’ “obsessive” need to constantly mow their lawns—back and forth, all summer long on their tractor lawn mowers. My fellow walker showed me “his” land, [1] zoned as agricultural, not residential—unmowed, unweeded, posted laminated signs declaring: “Master Gardner Certified: Pollinator Friendly Garden ,” “National Wildlife Federation Certified Wildlife Habitat,” “Monarch Way Station ,” and so on. He shared that he worked for the National Wildlife Federation for fourteen years as the Regional Mid-Atlantic conservation agent and local leader of environmental activist groups. He pointed out some of the “invasive” species and proudly declared how helpful Roundup has been to “keep them in check.”
I thought I had fallen through one of those Alice-in-Wonderland vortex cracks in liberal-environmentalist rhetoric…Did he just say “Roundup?”
I paused, caught my breath. And asked for clarification. He was quite pleased to share how the little sprayer works—distributing the magic potion at the root of the “invader.”
“That’s exactly why my husband left the non-profit environment world and federal environmental agencies—not just because of their hypocrisy, but their profound malfunction,” I told him.
He was quick to change the subject by remarking that my octopus tattoo that wraps around my shoulder must have been painful. I took this as an opportunity to make the connection between human bodies and the earth’s body. Clarifying that the reason, why, yes, this particular tattoo hurt as much as it did was because my immune system had been depleted from recent extreme lack of sleep and proper sustenance. I suggested that instead of relying on Roundup, he might consider addressing why “his” land is vulnerable to “invaders” in the first place.
Just then, a car flew past us at top speed, oblivious of our vulnerable pedestrian bodies, let alone the slithering garter snakes, diving goldfinches, darting groundhogs and opossums. Apparently, the state of Pennsylvania spends an annual two million dollars on keeping roadkill[3]
“in check.”[4]
In response to the two of us (humans) dodging the speeding car, the former NWF conservationist wished me a “safe”[5] return home. I showed him my pencil and scrap of paper that I carry when I walk.
“I wave this when a car zooms past me on these country roads; I pretend to write down their license plate number.”
He chuckled in amusement: “Ha! Instead, you should whip out your phone and pretend to shoot a picture of the passing car.”
“Well, that’s not an option—I don’t own a smartphone and never have.”
“Why, you’re UnAmerican!”
“That’s why I’m here! That’s my job.”
And off I went, dodging cars along that country road.
The perimeter of Micaela Amateau Amato’s painting reads:
CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY YEAR AFTER YEAR ~ ONE HUNDRED FIFTY MILLION ACRES OF SOYBEANS WHEAT CORN SEEDS COATED WITH NEONICOTINOID PESTICIDES ~ EPA’S CRIMINAL NEGLIGENCE ~ METHANE VINYL CHLORIDE ACROLEIN EXPLOSIONS CHOKE LIFE ON EARTH. See Robin Wall Kimmerer’s You Don’t Have to Be Complicit in Our Culture of Destruction,
The New York Times (nytimes.com). Click on the image to enlarge
This bizarre exchange reminds me of Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Kundera warns us of the “…witless embrace of cliché as a defense against the weight of human reality.” Like Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, Kundera’s job isn’t to make people feel comfortable—unlike the FDA, WHO, IMF, CDC, EPA. If the EPA allows it, it may be safe; if the FDA approves it, it must be safe. The mentality of relinquishing our response-ability (our ability to respond) dictates our sense of safety. Similarly, if you can’t find it on Google, it must not exist.[6]
The Departure
After train zigzagging across the United States, my Amtrak ticket home was cancelled at the last minute. Apparently, the confusion had to do with the fact that I don’t own (have never owned) a smart phone and hadn’t downloaded the required App. My flip phone has apparently become obsolete. I am not referring to planned-product obsolescence , but planned-cultural obsolescence,[7]
gradually eliminating public spaces and human interaction.
Really?
Against my heart-body-mind, intuition-knowledge-based principles, but after two months of being gone from my child, husband, dog, Love Bus, and urgently craving home, I find myself in flight. The turbulence feels extreme. Beeping. Whirring. The warning from the pilot. I look up—to the left of the Fasten Seat Belt illuminated symbol is one I have never seen before (in all caps—urgency embedded): TURN OFF ALL ELECTRONIC DEVICES….I am leaving Las Vegas. Is it too late? Has modernity arrived at its evolutionary conclusion? Or, are we still in flux? Do we still have some capacity to change? To shift our habituated obedience, what Timothy Morton calls agrilogistics—the logistics of our industrial, agricultural-operational models masquerading as “civilization”? We accept the illusion of the neutrality of cultural somnambulism sustained through corporate-induced torpor.
I think I am leaving Las Vegas. But I’m not. Just like the idea that you can take the people out of Egypt, but you can’t take Egypt out of the people, we are thoroughly indoctrinated. Mitzrayim in Hebrew translates as narrowness, constriction: originally referring to our flight from Egypt, but relevant now in how we get stuck in our habits of assumptions, refusing to ask questions, refusing to seek connections, refusing to witness our interdependencies. Internalized fascism, the ways in which we approach our complicity as inevitable, is the norm. Capitalist-driven accumulation as a pastime, a compulsion, a civic duty to buy, buy, buy is integral to our cellular make-up. What were once revolutionary educational possibilities, like the Sudbury School whose philosophy is to simply let children be, can no longer function. “Letting children be” is no longer revolutionary; that philosophy has become truly an act of conformity because it does not acknowledge the intricate mechanisms of behavioral engineering through addictive digital-technology . In our current cultural context, “letting children be” relinquishes our and our kids’ agency.
I had a friend years ago who thought my continual shock at the way the world works was laughable. How can we not be continually shocked? From the ubiquitous QR codes that have become an assumed key that allows us to cross the threshold into public spaces to the new normal that a one-year-old can’t learn to poop in a potty without a digital device that directs her internal compass to greenwashing, land acknowledgments, and “diversity, equity, and inclusion justice” (DEIJ) statements as a nauseating (oh Sartre, if you only knew what would hover on the historical horizon!) perversion of hospitality and conviviality.
My goal at the University of Las Vegas Ingenium Anti-Conference Conference* was to redefine normalcy. I challenged myself and my audience to catalyze the impossible, to mandate a personal-political commitment to recognize and radically transform J. Krishnamurti’s warning: “It is no matter of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.” I asked us to individually and collectively (as a small, collaborative group) to explore what could happen when we recognize the patterns of infrastructural and psychic Band-Aids that perpetuate everyday corporate-consumer-led violence (habituated entitlement); and, how we can begin to transform our stifling conformity (i.e., dominator civilizations’ manufactured consent) and embrace the potential for a world not based on “I” but on “we.”
Finally, I am returning to my home, equally fraught with complicitous contradiction and love, compassion, and an urgent desire to connect by highlighting how we are all implicitly interconnected.
[3] The term roadkill was coined by ecologist Robert McCabe in 1943. Like roadkill, bugkill annihilates entire species of insects. Insects [and this means pollinators!] are going extinct eight times faster than mammals, reptiles, or birds (Goldfarb 155).
[4] Penn State biologists determined that part of the Deer-Vehicle Collision (DVC) crisis was that “the state had planted the highway’s flanks with a buffet of clover, grass, and vetch. …Interstate 80 had created the best possible edge habitat in the worst possible place” (Ben Goldfarb’s Crossings: How Road Ecology is Shaping the Future of Our Planet, New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2023: 35). Like railroads that carry grain that spills and draws animals to the rails only to crush them by oncoming trains, roads lure and murder wildlife. Pennsylvania was America’s deer kill capital in 1950s and 60s—a “bloodbath” “on a stretch of highway you could drive in ten minutes” (35). In Pennsylvania between 1963 and 1970 the visible death toll of deer kill rose from 7,000 to 22,000. (31).
[5] Like the taken-for-granted term “safe,” “health” has been equally co-opted and diminished by our $14 trillion well-being industry (Mama V, formerly known as Eve Ensler in discussion with Bayo Akomolafe).
[6] Several of my students in my Gender & Education class at UC Santa Cruz determined that “ancestral memory” (a term I would frequently include in my lectures/ discussions) doesn’t exist because they couldn’t find it on Google.
[7] In Zazu Dreams: Between the Scarab and the Dung Beetle, A Cautionary Fable for the Anthropocene Era, I explore how cultural obsolesce converges with ideologies of waste and how our ancestral technologies and biomimicry—histories of conviviality and symbiosis—can uproot these hegemonies. In next month’s Mother Pelican, I will investigate alternatives to sacrifice zones, disparate impact, and externalities bound within settler-colonialism.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Dr. Cara Judea Alhadeff, Professor of Transdisciplinary Ecological
Leadership, has published dozens of interdisciplinary books and
articles on critical philosophy, climate justice, art, epigenetics,
gender, sexuality, and ethnic studies, including
the critically-acclaimed Zazu
Dreams: Between the Scarab and the Dung Beetle, A Cautionary Fable
for the Anthropocene Eraand
Viscous
Expectations: Justice, Vulnerability, The Ob-scene.
Alhadeff's
theoretical and visual work is the subject of documentaries for
international films and public television. She has been interviewed
by
The
New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Pacifica
Radio, NPR, and the
New Art Examiner.
Alongside
Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Vandana Shiva, Alhadeff received the
Random Kindness Community Resilience Leadership Award, 2020. Her
work has been endorsed by Noam Chomsky, Bill McKibben, James E.
Hansen, Paul Hawken, SHK-G, Eve Ensler, Alphonso Lingus, Avital
Ronell, and Lucy Lippard among other activists, scholars, and
artists.
Alhadeff's
photographs/performance-videos
have been defended by Freedom-of-Speech organizations (Electronic
Freedom Foundation, artsave/People for the AmericanWay, and the
ACLU), and are
in private and public collections including and San Francisco MoMA,
MoMA
Salzburg, Austria,
the
Kinsey
Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and reproduction, and include
collaborations with international choreographers, composers, poets,
sculptors, architects, scientists. Her art-based and pedagogical
practices, parenting, and commitment to solidarity economics and
lived social-ecological ethics are intimately bound. Former
professor of
Philosophy, Performance, and Pedagogy at
UC Santa Cruz and Program Director for Jews Of The Earth, Alhadeff
and
her family
live in their eco-art
installation repurposed schoolbus where
they perform and teach creative-zero-waste
living, social
permaculture, and cultural diversity.
She is always eager to collaborate with other activists, scholars,
and artists from other disciplines. If you are interested please
contact Cara via email at photo@carajudea.com
or
via her websites, Cara
Judea
and
Zazu
Dreams.
See also this article: Social
ecology pioneers return to Nederland.
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