Letter to Editor: Reclaiming Our Atmosphere

NAS Whidbey and the Destruction of the Commons

— Joseph Murphy —

It is a sun splashed afternoon as I pull down lane three at the Anacortes Ferry lot, having completed the monthly run to the city. It is a ritual encoded in Island life with the ferry serving as our portal to the World at large in all of its material offerings and spiritual challenges.

No greater offering for this Orcan exists than the transit of the Skagit Valley that such trips allow – a vestibule of bounty and beauty that, in all seasons, even in the dregs of winter, reveals itself in unexpected ways from white sheets of snow geese wintering in her fields to the humus richly turned blood dark by seasonal rains, to the brimming potato trucks bringing in the winter harvest .

As the nativity story of Buddha’s enlightenment has it, when the Big guy was confronted under the Bodhi tree by Lord Mara – the spirit of death, demanding to know who bore witness to this ascetic’s enlightenment, the Buddha merely touched the earth. No words necessary for the strength of Gaia was all. Big Mama had his back. Such is the lesson of gratitude taken from each transit of the Valley, each journey’s end down lane number three.

But lest I become too enraptured by pastoral reverie, the ferry lot often becomes a staging ground for the persistent incursions of Lord Mara. Beginning as distant rumble and steadily modulating into a thunderous mastication of sky so ostentatiously vulgar and so obscenely inflected toward every inhabitant of the realm that the rage invariably begins to mount; stoked by each gradation of Growler excrement poisoning the skies. A lifetime of reading poetry comes to fore in momentary rescue: a reflection on belonging offered at a high mountain lake by Gary Snyder to his son as a Navy jet hisses above.

“These cliffs and the stars
Belong to the same universe
This little air in between
Belongs to the twentieth century and its wars”

It is—absolutely contrary to the pious propaganda of the perpetual war state—NOT the “Sound of Freedom,” but the slavers bellow of subjugation spewing both from these death machines. Not the subjugation of only the residents of NW Washington but, Mores, THE SUBJUGATION OF A WORLD SUFFERING UNDER THE YOKE of American militarism and its grotesque Siamese twin, Imperialism. It is the rage of those relieved by drone or by meth-addled soldiers of the only property of value they will ever possess—their own skins.

For, make no mistake about it, inhabitants of this blessed realm, NAS Whidbey and their pork laden fleet of radar jamming, cyber-warfaring, armed to the air intakes aircraft is not interested in your property values, your health impairment, your sanity or your skins Their mission, plain and simple, is to support the next Imperial smash and grab – think Libya – hidden under the skirts of NATO, to “pivot” toward the Pacific in intimidation of China and Russia, to remind everyone within earshot of their obscenities who their Daddy is and, oh yes, to, as the inimitable Harvey Korman stated it in Blazing Saddles, “To keep their phony baloney jobs,” and all the Wal-Mart jobs they sanction in Oak Harbor. And, again let us be clear, if and when the citizens of the realm finally say enough, the next “pivot” will be toward a neighborhood near you. Ask not, to paraphrase John Dunne, for whom the drone trolls, it will be trolling for thee.

In seventeenth century England, as the British began ramping up the Empire, they began the process of subjugating the citizenry by fencing off the commons, those areas held as “freelands” by the English peasantry as a means of communal property and survival, as aesthetic and material sustenance.

As with all Empires from Persia to Twenty First Century America, expansion comes at great cost to the inhabitants of the Imperial transgressor as their commons are fenced off, their land stolen, and, now, their very atmosphere defiled by its markings. This evisceration of the spirit always masked as a charade of sovereignty and security.

A few decent writers – from Cicero in Rome to Hardy and Lawrence and Scott in England – have documented how that works. Or ask a Native American, next time you see one, how Empire worked out for them. The Indians at least get Casinos as partial reparation for Imperial genocide, we pale folk get ecocidal coal ports and cheap Chinese crap at Wal-Mart, along with blowback heroin for our kids who can’t find jobs. Nice.

I implore all with a voice: Whether your motivation be property values, silence, or love for the Earth and its inhabitants. All of them, Militarism is destroying our life here as it destroys the lives of those around the world. Don’t need no Growlers, no Wal Mart, no military jobs, no polluted skies. If I had a rocket launcher.

Closing down NAS Whidbey is an initial step in breaking the back of Empire. Militarism IS misogyny as surely as the drillers and miners who daily rape and call it a day’s work. Dismount Lord Mara, take back the commons of our single sky.

(In dedication to late Orcans and dedicated lifers of the anti-imperialist Left, Mary –Gibson Hatton and App Applegate. Presente!)