From the Island

A north wind blows west to church bells playing Somewhere Over the Rainbow

In order to finish Silent Spring by the time I need to be on the ferry back to the mainland, I need to read sixty pages a day. This will be easy because the book is just what it should be—simple and fascinating—and it is published in hardback with thick pages and generous margins. Plus, the lake is wide and the sun persistent, and there are four wood long chairs on the beach for me to chose where I might spend any number of fourteen or so hours of the day. And sitting on the beach reading Carson’s opus, I can look out into the lake and see the swans and the terns and gulls dipping in and out of the tropical blue water for littler things than they and recognize some truths. This is what vacation is for.

Here are some truths. Evolution does exist, whether you chose to call it Evolution or ‘evolution.’ We know it does because sea lampreys native to the ocean can not only exist but thrive and expand and acclimate to the Great Lakes to such an extent that they can succeed in decimating the titan and ecologically critical population of lake trout in Lake Michigan after being brought into the lake by the promises of world trade and capitalistic enterprise in the early years of industrialized shipping at the beginning of the twentieth century. Now the states stock lake salmon in the lakes to bring a top predatory force back into the ecosystem. Lake trout could be more widely stocked, of course, but they are too prone to sea lamprey, being smaller and less sturdy.

We also know that evolution exists because all sorts of presumed lawn and yard pests and lurk in the underbrush like communists or terrorists and threaten the vernal gardenhood of American suburbia are able to become immune to the chlorinated hydrocarbons of the industrial era and the ambitions of men to become wealthy barons of capitalistic innovation in an age of created and propagandanized threats conceded to the bored yes-men state officials of so many environmental bureaucracies. Despite the stealth of man’s chemical quest it is not enough to save spare everything else that surrounds the terrains of our created threats.

And William Sloane Coffin—the late William Sloane Coffin—is the source of truths on this island when I am otherwise rather insulated from the dysfunctions of our free market hegemony over the industrialized and deindustrialized world. Another perk of vacation is the absence of Bushisms and sound bytes, news of retrogressive public policy and the approval of new initiatives in environmental destruction from a federal executive administration drunk on the ecstasy of delusion and denial. And it is here, not in the daily world of news and commentary and people struggling in work and word to appeal to some collective sense of rightness and reason that I encounter a single, definitive, characterizing paragraph of Coffins words that would otherwise act as the epigraph of this current age: a democrat is anybody who knows that “to show compassion for an individual without showing concern for the structures of society that make him an object of compassion is to be sentimental rather than loving.”

It is his words too that frame my awareness that in three weeks I will be back at school when he reminds me that “The Lord forbids our using our education merely to buy our way into middle-class security.” What is there that is untrue about this wisdom? What are we in America, and why on earth are we? The right has Lewis Lapham reflects well on this question in his essay in the beginning of the July issue of Harper’s:

“His voice went out of fashion in what came to be known as the Me Decade; small was beautiful, and it was thought wise to hedge the bets of idealism with prudent balances of self-interest. The investment proved sufficient to finance the bull market in utter selfishness that was the glory of Ronald Reagan’s Morning in America and continues to sustain the imperial narcissism of the current Bush Administration. Audiences believing that money is the answer to all their prayers don’t like to be told that instead of loving things and using people, ‘people are to be loved and things are to be used’ or listen to Coffin say that ‘those who fear disorder more than injustice invariable produce more of both,’ that ‘nationalism, at the expense of another nation, is just as wicked as racism at the expense of another race,’…that ‘Hell is truth seen too late.’”

What, in spirit, is there to miss here? What is there with which to disagree? If those who profess Christianity as an implicit conviction of the ontological and teleological weight of that philosophy, how can the root causes of the world’s cultural and economic conditions be ignored by credos that are themselves framed—defensively framed—by these conditions? That is, the rightist response to injustice is two fold, but ultimately created by the very conditions that provoke this response at all: first, denial. There is no wealth gap, there is no genocide, there is no flaw in American enterprise, no greed, no exploitation, no sin, and no arrogance; there are no social divides—race, income, land, economy, commodity, community—and there are no compromise solutions, no critical counterarguments. In order to substantiate denial in light of quite obvious and tangible indications otherwise, blame must be disbursed: racial tension is the result of black apathy and anger. Poverty is the result of poor folks’ laziness. Rage in the Middle East is the result of violent religion. Abortion is the result of the godless, the evil. Divorce is the result of promiscuous sex and homosexual tolerance that degrades the practice of marriage. Drugs are the result of cities. Pollution is the result of over-sensitive special interest granola heads that don’t realize the world is large and its resources ours for the taking.

Sometimes, these two aspects merge and form a single response: suburbanization is good—a sign of growth and prosperity, and the promising health of free market capitalism. War is righteous because there is evil in the world, and as it happens to take the form of Muslims so we must root it out in a hostile land [serendipitously home to the world’s largest supply of fossil fuels, quite literally the fuel of free market capitalism and the thing that lets us get to Wal-Mart to save sixty-two cents on cheese sauce and saves us from being forced to buy local, sustainable, farm-produced, real cheeses for use in real cuisine and real collective culture].

How is it possible for this pattern to exist at all among those who do claim to profess Christianity as an implicit conviction of the ontological and teleological weight of that philosophy? It is simple: the Christian community has systematically put down the Gospel—drained it from collective expression, seized it from the work of their hands, blocked it from their intellect, and silenced it on their tongues—for the sake of a handful of time, economy, and culture-based sound byte totem rallying cry issues that abide in political arenas. It has now become a particularized American political affiliation, specific to limited widely-accepted groups of people: steel workers but not journalists, truckers but not those that bike to work, homemakers but not vocal mothers, accountants but not non-profit administrators, developers but not land-use advocates, contractors but not naturalists, venture capitalists but not affordable housing financiers.

Watching Lake Michigan, still and grey, over Indian Point as a fog rolled in and cool waves of pungent earth enveloped the chair where I sat, it was too clear that the question is not about whether Evolution or ‘evolution’ exists or whether a fetus’ life begins at the splitting of the first cell or upon the third trimester. The answers are that nature is constantly changing and we are overwhelmingly persuasive players, and birth does not matter but rather life. These answers are not determinant or black and white, but they are concise and they are thorough. But our cognitive capacities, and our senses, give us more than ample critical means to interpret their meaning, and in turn give meaning to meaning.