Hinterland by Phil Neel

Armies of Mud and Flame

I was raised in the mountains overlooking a small river valley in a mildly secessionist border territory stretched between Oregon and California. Distant from the administration centers of either state, the area seemed governed more by a congress of floods, fires, and other forces of nature. In the depths of the Klamath Mountains, alpine snowmelt winds down narrow cuts in granite into storm-fattened rivers that writhe through valley bottoms like blue-green eels. Black bears hibernate in hidden, snow sealed grottoes.  Elk brush their broad antlers through the soft-needled bowery of fur and pine. In spring, rainstorms and thawing frost dislodge entire ridgelines from the mountains, periodically feeding roads, houses, and rich-smelling groves of evergreens into the endless maw of churning waters. Everyone seems to know who a sacrificed those grand, deadly rivers – the Klamath, the Rogue, the Trinity.

Upriver means mostly white valley towns encircled by alfalfa, with farms and ranches stretched up into the foothills. It means church, school, post office –the places where power seems to touch down from afar, if only gently. Downriver, on the other hand, is a violent land speckled with mud-sunken trailers, overgrown trailheads, secretive mansions built by weed barons, and ramshackle hamlets beyond the reach of any highway. Farms give way to forest service substations and, father still, the tribal lands and reservations along the rivers’ lower reaches. Down river is where the waters converge. Any corpse dumped upstream will finally surface there, bobbing and circling in eddies where the rivers mix. It’s a land that’s hardly a land – more a swirl of water and roots helmed by storms- a place where dark stories grow into ponderous myths overlooking the timbered ruin.

In  the 1970s and ‘80s, a series of communes were set up along the Salmon and the Klamath by back-to-the-land hippies convinced that America was a soulless empire on the verge of collapse. The deep folds of oak and evergreen were to be a site of spiritual rebirth, a catchment for refugees from a dying nation. But over the space of a decade, the empire refused to die, and each of the communes fell instead, evacuated of everything but their guns and drugs. Now those that are left simply curse the state for wanting to flood the valleys to siphon more water to the cities in the south. Along the river roads, meth-stricken sawyers set up  small stands selling burl statues of bears and hunched, grim looking sasquatch.

In summer, wildfires sparked in the unpopulated interior burst forward like an invading army. Clearcutting has led to mass replanting of trees, and property protection had encouraged widespread fire prevention, all ensuring that the regrown forest would neither be staggered in its grown nor properly thinned. Meanwhile, deadfall would accumulate unhindered, new seeding fire-symbiont evergreens would be slowed, and the natural firebreak offered by oak savanna gradually closed. The  feedback is essentially the same as tat between a bubble, crisis and stimulus in today’s economy: all this leading to larger, less containable wildfires, which increase the demand for fire prevention and thereby increase the risk and severity of future wildfires. As the bubble gets bigger, so does the coming crisis, and even bigger debt-financed stimulus to combat it when it hits, laying the round for the next crisis. There is no final crisis, just the continual management  of widening collapse.

Silver and Ash


The soil was blood red, heavy with iron and other ancient metals gestated by the slow knotting and fissuring of tectonic eons, now uplifted and ground apart by air, water and the invisible chaos of microscopic life. It’ often hard to connect the solidity of earth and stone to their explosive origins, as pressure flays subducted rocks down to their constituent chemicals and build them stronger – all driven by that deep, distant rumbling of the asthenosphere where solid stone  flows like slow blood; this and everything below just ripples in that constant, low-level explosion atop which continents and ocean floor float like a fragile halo.

When the bomb went off, I don’t remember seeing the combustion, just the soil turned to red dust, small stones raining down into my hair. Maybe the babysitter – in a fleeting moment of responsibility wedged between making the bomb out of gunpowder and a plastic coke bottle in the garage and lazily hurling it underhanded into the ridged like a softball- had covered our eyes, concerned about the splinters of granite that might soon bullet towards us. Or maybe explosions are sometimes things you can’t really see entirely, just as the tectonic crushing and flaying of minerals to make this incarnadine earth is itself an explosion to slow to see.

It was sometime in the early to mid 1990, when everything had already begun to shake apart even as we were told that that war for the world had finally been one. I always had trouble remembering my age in that interval between the end of the Cold War, when my first, muddiest memories were gathering, and the fall of the twin towers, when I was just beginning to hit puberty. Maybe it’s just as hard to think back to the End of History, a temporal glitch that was soon overcome as the wars and riots flooded in again. But maybe it’s more that in the countryside there just wasn’t much to remember. Mining had collapsed long ago. Timber fell in pieces, starting with a plummet in the late 1970s, recovering to a lower plateau in the 80s, and then declining ever since. Farming experienced the height of its crisis in the 80s, but in reality this was simply one period in a long decline in employment driven by mechanization. . .

The babysitter had what I would later come to recognize as tweaker eyes, bespeaking other explosions happening at other scales: the euphoric chemical explosion of dopamine and norepinephrine in the brain, the periodic explosions of meth labs in the forest like the sound of ancient trees finally being felled, the slow explosion of a rural way of life out into a groundless scattering of scams and desperate, private miseries. After a life mostly lived in the country, I am convinced that the eyes of tweakers see something other eyes do not. Those orbs gouged deep down into their sockets like antlions awaiting prey, their presence only hinted at by a brief glint of quivering motion beneath the surface – as if the eyes are sunk straight back into the brain and thereby opened to some sort of neural augury, the iris black like a single, dilated pupil open to the world’s many wounds and thus capable of seeing that world as it is: a congress of explosions tearing bodies apart all at different speeds and different directions. This reality is a horror native to country people, accounting for our  fascination with meth first and opiates second. One give as sight that reaches too far, illuminating monstrosities at the depth of a shattered world, and the other offers at last the consolation of a slow and quiet blinding.

Tweakers have become objects of revulsion within rural America, not due to their many moral failures or seemingly plague-ridden bodies but because of their matter-of-fact recognition that those of us from the country are all already dead. The way of life has been destroyed in a devastating, irrevocable fashion, essential industries torn out from under us, ecosystems razed, and everyone left suffering not just material deprivation but an expansive social and cultural collapse that can only be characterized as apocalyptic. The many new non-denominational Christian sects that sprang up in the early stages of this collapse offered a simple solution for the dead: to become born again. But now the sects are shrinking as people  see what the tweaker’s heresy had perceived all along: the born again are born dead or die soon after through the thousand sacrificial cuts of daily drudgery. The rupture of the apocalypse is therefore  not on its way in but instead long  past. We’re adrift in its wake.

Oaths of Blood 

In northern Nevada, the soil alternates between a dull yellow and a jaundiced gray, intercut with the washed-out color of skin-rending sagebrush, a sweet–smelling corpse of a plant that clusters in vast broken archipelagos scattered across endless seas of hyper-flammable cheatgrass. When the sun is at its highest, creatures rest in the intricate root work of the brush, bodies entwined in the shade, where undead tendrils offer respite to predator and prey alike – small dens dug by families of wild foxes, crevices filled with shivering shrews, weasels, and mice: lightless sinkholes hiding legions of night-black beetles; roots entwined with rattlesnakes biding their time. Everything stinks of sun-heated sage, and after working a day on the range, you return to the trailer with the same smell, covered in thin layers of yellow-gray dust. That scent burns its way into your memory like a callus.

In Nevada the real desert was not the dust or the sagebrush but the massive industrial leveling that characterizes the day-to-day functioning of a ‘healthy economy’. The undead sagebrush at least held multitudes of life in its roots. One, when one of my higher-ups had been out of a job, he’d run across a den of wild foxes. He spent several days watching them, counting their numbers, excited that the nearby mine hadn’t driven away all the sparse desert fauna. But he made the mistake of telling his co-workers, and the next weekend one of the other employees – a red-faced, blundering man originally from some exurb in Florida- drove his truck out to the area, tracked down the foxes, shot them all, skinned them, and took the pelts as trophies. It often seems as if there is an unbridgeable gap between the minds of those enmeshed in the present world and those who see it as almost unthinkably monstrous, something that is not even a ‘world’ but the name for an utterly atonal; status quo constructed on the continual ruins of worlds as such. There are those who see foxes and those who see pelts. . .

Someone like Jack Donovan would also see the fox and not the pelt, maybe seeing it much as I did. We might see the same economic apocalypse, the same increase in the valence of the riots and insurrections, the same strategic openings offered by these events, the same placid misery offered by the status quo. But none of this makes us allies. The myth of the Third Position* is precisely that opposition to the present order and all gradualist attempts to change it is the only unifying force that matters, with the left and right being mere ideological accessories. But dig deeper and politics is inevitably replaced by nature, tradition, or some other seemingly apolitical order, in which the sanctity of the community is preserved by its ability to wall itself off from all the others. Third Positionalism, national anarchism, the Patriot Movement, and even the simple populism of Trump are all forms of blood politics. Political practice only exists for them insofar as it can be performed by kindred actors, and politics  is the performance of this kinship.

What is nonetheless fascinating about the new far right is its commitment to pragmatic action. The Oath Keepers and the Three Percenters offer a fundamental theoretical insight here, since their existence is dependent on the ability to unify across the fragmentation of the proletariat via the ‘oath’ as a shared principle of action. In contrast to the unwieldy populism of ‘the 99%’, the Patriot Movement proposes a focus on the functional abilities of an engaged minority (the ‘111%’), which can gain popular support via its ability to outcompete the state and other opponents in an environment of economic collapse. And it is this fact that is missed in most ‘anti-fascist’ analysis. Rather than attempting to identify individual grouplets, parse their ideologies, and see how their practice accords (or doesn’t) with whatever programs they’ve put forward (per the usual leftist formula), it is far more useful to explore moments like ours as chaotic processes in which many different actors have to take sides in relation to political upheavals, the collapse of economic order, and the various new forces that arise amid al this. Such grouplets are often ad hoc, and frequently do not state any political positions. They seem empty of ideological content, or it is so vague as to be inconsequential. They are driven bot by a program, but by an oath,. The feature that distinguishes them is not so much their belief, as laid out in founding documents or key theoretical texts, but the way that they act relative to sequences of struggle and collapse. These are concrete things such as how they approach the influxes of refugees and migrant workers, how they participate in (or against) local cycles of unrest, whom they ally themselves with in the midst of an insurrection, and whose interests they serve when they begin to succeed in the game of ‘competitive control,’ creating local structures of power.

The far right is defined by an oath of blood. They share a commitment to pragmatic action and the ability to see the untenable nature of the present economic order, but their actions are exclusionary, and their strategy envisions closed, communitarian solutions to systematic collapse. This is mot visible in the more experienced, thought-out form of the Patriot Movement or the Wolves of Vinland, but it exists on a continuum, as more residents of the hinterland become aware of the apocalypse surrounding them. But the real political advance visible on the far right – and the thing that has made possible its recent ascendance – is the pragmatic focus on questions of power, which are religiously ignored by the American leftist, who instead focuses on building elaborate political programs and ornate utopias, as if politics were an exercise of one’s imagination. It is this focus on building power in the midst of crisis that distinguishes the partisan from the leftist, and the oath is the present organizational form of partisanship.


*Third Position is an ideology that was developed in the late 20th century by political parties including Terza Posizione in Italy and Troisième Voie in France. It emphasizes opposition to both communism and capitalism. Advocates of Third Position politics typically present themselves as "beyond left and right" while syncretizing ideas from each end of the political spectrum, usually reactionary right-wing cultural views and radical left-wing economic views


Crowds

Sometimes the seemingly determined arc of development suddenly mutates. Crowds fill spaces built for capital. Tear gas drifts through te financial district like the specter of finance itself; as if that abstract swarm of shares, bonds, and derivatives had achieved its own ascension, tearing free from prisons of paper and computer circuitry like mist rising from a corpse. Against this haunting shape, the crowds surge with their own spectral sentience. A its most extreme, the very bedrock of the city appears fissured, the plaza or square now the central fault in a new urban tectonics.

Sometimes I can only remember Occupy as a sort of impressionistic mesh of bodies pushed together and hurled for a moment through a cacophony of echoes: the crowd echoing back its own words, the police grenades echoing off the asphalt, our own chants echoing off glass palaces but for money and the people designated to handle it in lump sums – for a moment these echoes seemed to vibrate something deep down in things, stirring our flesh as if it were a fluid that could never be trapped in its entirety, throwing our voices back at us from the steel and glass in a language-less roar as if to invoke the utterly world-breaking, if ultimately fleeting, realization that such palaces could fall. As everything else gave ay to work, jail, and simple, grinding time, something of that feeling has nonetheless remained: a vague impression of power, glimpsed for a moment by the first of many proletarian generations to come.

 In the first sequence of uprisings, the landscape seem almost to become the subject of the insurrection itself – the people of Egypt were condensed into the roiling bodies of Tahrir Square, a mundane protest against the demolition of Istanbul’s Gezi Park was baptized in tear gas and batons, and then born again in a million-body flood. In the middle of winter in Ukraine, central Kiev was transformed into a pyramid of flame. People wandered through the smoke and snow beneath the pyre, their legs sunken in they grey wreckage. The barricades were all slowly caked with ash, as if a new skin had grown over everything, bodies surging like the muscle underneath.


To those looking down from the boardrooms and brownstones, the new sentience gestating in the square can only appear monstrous. Anyone who has seen such a crowd can feel the power there, the strange new logics that emerge when so many bodies are pushed together against the police and the absolutely terrifying multiplication of violence made possible by such moments. Those who seek to preserve the present order unleash their own demons against this new power, and at last the antagonisms at the heart of that vast hostage situation called ‘the economy’ descends into  physical form as hooded youths hurl bricks against swarms of rubber bullets, the newly reborn god of the rabble wresting with the old gods of capital.

The wealthy Syrian looking down from the high-rises of Damascus at the street protests of 2011 might in all likelihood have simply thought, who are these people? The answer, of course, was that many were resident’s of the country’s own agricultural hinterland, made into internal refugees by severe drought and subsequent environmental and economic collapse. Others were residents of the city who simply saw no future in the city as it was. The feeling was much the same when urban liberals in America’s costal cities looked at the blood-red election map in November 2016: their only possible response, who are these people? What is this place? The answer? This is the Hinterland. It is the sunken continent that stretches between the constellation of spectacular cities, the growing desert beyond the palace walls. These are the people who live here.  .  .


Personally, I don’t understand the compulsion to mine history for words to that might describe what’s to come. The fact is that the approaching flood has no name. Any title it might take is presently lost in the noise of its gestation, maybe just beginning to be spoken in a language that we can hardly recognize. There will be no Commune because this isn’t Paris in 1871. There will be no Dual Power because this isn’t Russia in 1917. There will be no Autonomy because this isn’t Italy in 1977. I am writing this in 2017, and I don’t know what’s coming, even though I know something is rolling towards us in the darkness, and the world can end in more ways than one. It’s presence is hinted at somewhere deep inside the evolutionary meat grinder of riot repeating riot, all echoing ad infinitum through the Year of our Lord 2016, when the anthem returned to its origin, and the corpse flowers bloomed all at once as Louisiana was turned to water, and no one knew why. I don’t call people comrade; I just call them friend. Because whatever’s coming has no name, and anyone who says they hear it is a liar. All I hear are guns cocking over trap snares unrolling to infinity.