The Deluge

by Stephen Markley

“You know why there will never be a great movie or great art about the Iraq War?” she asked. “Why’s that?” “Because it hewed too didactically to its own absurdity.” She looked off at the cold parking lot. “Like, most war is stupid in the existential sense, but this one was bad-joke stupid. You can’t get a piece of art to grapple with what’s already brain-dead, you know? I mean, the fucking child-boy president landed on an aircraft carrier with a sock stuffed in the crotch of his flight suit and stood in front of a banner that said— Well, you know what it said. How can you make subtle, contemplative art about that? The whole thing was an unknowing satire of itself from word one.”

Allen Ford Jr., her mentor and comrade, had once clued her in that people mostly just wanted to be listened to. They wanted to tell their story, and if you could get to their story, you could get to their conscience.

You can wish you were dead all you want. But don’t pretend there’s anything heroic about it. All the bumper stickers and parades and ‘thank a veteran for your freedom’ bullshit—all the pedestalizing. All the movies. All that isn’t for you guys who went. It’s for the next time. How else do you get children in Oklahoma City or Fallujah to kill people they’ve never met? Convince them they’ll be heroes.”

“McCarthy,” he said, pointing to the book I held. “Do you like McCarthy?” Blood Meridian lay in my hand, a limp accessory. I had never read anything by McCarthy. I’m one of those people constantly trying to read short stories by Flannery O’Connor yet reverting to Jodi Picoult and Gillian Flynn at the first pang of boredom.

Peter employs a self-effacing jocularity. He is an individual who should be entrenched in his entitlement, and yet my experience of these three years has been quite the opposite. Peter is without artifice. Even when he uses the word bro, which he does with hyper-frequency, each bro has built within it a statement about the preposterousness of his own subculture. It took me perhaps too long to understand that Peter’s insistence that I make the short T ride from my apartment in Cambridge to his Back Bay condo went beyond my work on the black box. It dawned on me that his perpetual motion machine of conversation was not transactional. He simply enjoyed my company. Outside of the members of my family—who I often thought were pretending anyway—I’d never met anyone who did.

Haniya later called to berate me: “I don’t care what you believe or don’t believe, Ash, but stop sharing your fucking diagnosis of the human condition with Mumma.”

There are certain activities we pursue to attain a state of concentration, and those states of concentration are often more deeply enjoyable than the activities we’re indoctrinated to view as enjoyable.

Much of Pietrus’s radical wish list is unremarkable, well-trod territory of the climate vanguard. What differentiates One Last Chance is that last part, the “carefully excised pieces.” It’s also what should send a chill down the spine of every American. First, however, his stunning grab bag of policies deserves comment, if only to deracinate it: the purchase and stranding of all US coal supplies and shuttering of all coal plants within five years; the nationalization of the thirty largest fossil-fuel-producing companies in order to “unwind” their operations; limits to production on virgin aluminum, cement, iron, plastics, and forest products; a buyback program to replace the entire US vehicle fleet with electric vehicles within ten years; achieving a 50 percent reduction in air travel by levying heavy taxes on each ticket; a rapid buildout of nuclear power plants; and massive public works projects ranging from the construction of a smart grid to carbon capture systems that would draw CO2 from the air and sequester it in the ground and offshore. The nation’s farmers will not escape either. Pietrus also insists on draconian taxes to lower dairy and beef consumption and advocates a price collar system on agricultural emissions with auctioned credits, which would “quickly and effectively shift the economy toward zero-carbon energy and food production.”

“Bad weed makes you paranoid, good weed makes you understand why you should be paranoid.”

make way for settler capitalism. Violence against nature always goes hand in hand with violence against people.” She

At some point you have to learn to take your parents for who they are and not let it rule your life one way or the other.”

“We carve out these places in the world, spare them from our cruelties, but only because it’s one of the last ways we can still feel mystery. And then even our sense of mystery becomes another consumer edifice.”

“I just don’t want to hear the word ‘green’ attached to anything ever a-fucking-gain. Besides, it’s a total misnomer. During extinction events, the oceans acidify, carbonate-forming species get wiped out, and it’s all replaced by green plankton. ‘Disaster plankton’ scientists call it. The oceans bloom with that shit. After the end-Triassic, the whole planet turned green. And that’s what it’ll look like again—a muddy tennis ball—unless we stop it. That’s why we monkeyed with the Phil Shabecoff phrase for our name, because green, at this point, is a dead fucking brand.”

These words replace 430 behind her: THEY KNEW. “ ‘They’ are the Carbon Majors, the one hundred companies responsible for over seventy percent of emissions since the eighties. Their own scientists knew what would happen. They knew if they kept burning their reserves they would threaten the future of the human race. They knew, and they built their oil rigs to account for higher sea levels and more intense storms. They knew, and they told us to focus on our consumer behavior while they locked us all into structures of hyper-consumption. They knew, and they waged a propaganda war of denial and delay. They knew, and they’re still doing it! There is no other way to put it, they are committing the greatest atrocity in human history and they knew. They knew, and they told us to worry about our fucking carbon footprints.”

“Here’s the bad news for all of you: We’ve reached the end of growth. Raising people out of poverty and maintaining Western standards of consumption are simply no longer possible. That’s why I didn’t want to come to this bullshit charade. Frankly, you people are exactly the reason real action on our ecological situation cannot move forward, because the only real way to do it is to not have lone wealthy individuals consuming the resources of small nations, which as far as I can tell is the premise of this entire gathering.

To say there was ever any return to normality isn’t quite right, but there was an acquiescence, a decision that a certain amount of chaos would be tolerated in order to let the world grind on, and within the context of the climate crisis, this was very bad news indeed.

not because the Thwaites itself will raise sea levels, but because it buttresses a mountain of ice in West Antarctica. If and when the Thwaites collapses for good, the West Antarctic ice sheet will begin sliding into the ocean. This could raise sea levels by nine to thirteen feet, which is doomsday for every coastal city in the world.

but without a stick, these companies can keep finding ways to bring their carbon to market. They win by stalling. Red states erect non-economic barriers, which has led to this uneven buildout of clean energy, and even as we bring down fossil fuel use, they just get cheaper, which keeps the market healthy. Carbon will always be useful, so unless you make it expensive or illegal to burn, those interests will find a way to do so.”

You’re pushing modest standards, which can all be eviscerated if the administration changes, when we need a two hundred dollar per metric ton tax rising twenty dollars a year, every year, at minimum. We need to phase out coal in the next two years.

we are in the process of achieving the dream of all oppressed peoples: we’re moving into the Master’s house, when really what we should be doing is burning the house down. Instead, we’re clamoring to be a part of the patriarchal, phallocentric political, economic, and social ecology. Look at the Wonder Woman–themed presidency of Joanna Hogan. This is what we define as a powerful, accomplished woman because she’s cracked the capitalist patriarchy. But there has to be an “other” for that system to maintain because it sees a world of scarcity and the only solution is an inequitable hoarding of resources.

If a system views everything in the biosphere as a resource, whether it’s buffalo, maize, fresh water, a gas deposit, or our internet data, it’s going to view women as extractive resources as well.

Any hard-left movement is susceptible to purity attacks. If you spend a handful of dollars creating the sense that she is not pure, that she’s ignoring queer Latinx voices or silencing frontline communities or marginalizing this group or that group, they’ll turn on her.

“The word ‘terrorism’ is the most powerful marketing tool of the twenty-first century.

“We’re running out of road to get ahead of ourselves on,

The corporate state is faceless. The fossil-fuel elite is anonymous, but behind this holocaust there are human beings, and they have addresses. We can rip those masks right off.