Facing the Emergent(cy) Future By “Electing” a Different Past

James W. Perkinson

The rain drop fell gently on my hand

And then astonishingly, she spoke

“Help me. I’m dying. Of plastic.”

I stopped in my tracks.

Wondered if I should rush to Emergency.

Was I losing my mind?

A raindrop, speaking?

But she interrupted, even more faintly.

“MAGA,” she whispered.

“MAGA, MAGA.”

“May Adam Give-up the Apple.”

It was a prayer. Of a raindrop.

Then the water evaporated. Became air.

Fortunately, and unfortunately,

I hadn’t stopped breathing.

Yet.

Introit

A title. A poetic riddle. An invited commentary. Obviously, we are in an emergency. But how long has it been so? And how broad is the geography?

The invite here was for response to “the election.” A word already hosting a trove of ghosts, a layer, multiple layers, of significance. I am learning from indigenous counsel of more than a decade now to pay attention to etymologies, to word-genealogies, to the history that our modern world in all arrogance designates “pre-history,” hidden up inside our words, or better, gestating inside their roots. “Election” in the context of the contemporary United States of America, hints a different ramification altogether. Since the late 18^th-century we pride ourselves on a supposed “revolution,” arcing from English monarchy to “American” democracy. An election of representatives “of the people, by the people, for the people.” An election by a supposedly “exceptional” people. “American exceptionalism” there for all to see!

But which people? The original “Americans”? Native people? Turtle Islanders? Where I currently reside at the strait called in French, détroit, but in Anishinaabemowin, waawiyatanong, “where it (the water) goes around”—the Ojibwe? Or Ottawa? Or Potawatomi? And our current “elected” President hums and smirks and deadpans and pontificates: “Make America Great Again.”

But yes, which “America”? What people? Even within the first 50 days of new policy, it is obvious he does not mean the first Americans. Not the Three Fires groups I just mentioned. Or the Haudenosaunee. Or the Lakota. Or Diné. Etc. Already the preference is clear.

MAGA intends (and pretends) to serve “the elect.” A charged term: a self-designation of those who began to show up after 1492, sure they were indeed “the chosen.” “Christians”—with a self-adopted mandate “direct from God” to “civilize,” “missionize,” clear out, clean up, cut down, plow up, dig, mine, plant, and otherwise render productive for elite appetite, all land on the continent (actually, on the earth, but we’ll stay focused for the moment on this geography, between the Atlantic towards which the sun rises and the Pacific in the direction where it sets).

Democracy in its earliest reference indeed meant “people power,” demos-kratos in Greek. But only fully “peopled” people; only those considered to be “real people”! It did not include native-dwelling “questionable people” or melanin-endowed “non-people”—such as those already residing here or those pirated from the Mother Continent (“Africa” in the English tongue) to labor as “tools” on the land taken from those original inhabitants—people who looked, dressed, spoke, danced, dwelt, and worshipped differently from those doing the naming and electing. It did not include female persons even if they “looked right.” Or even “right-looking” male persons if they did not have property. A democracy of propertied males for propertied males. Whose light skin tones vis a vis these other bipedal creatures would soon enough be designated “white.” Pink when washed, red when embarrassed, yellow when afraid, blue when cold, “white” men. With weapons-in-hand as prosthetic extensions of their apparently too-small organs. Democracy. Election. Can’t we go back there?

Such is the riff of a poet who matches some of the favored skin tone in trying to begin to write about the most recent, obscenely expensive, PR absurdity we call “elections.” Two-hundred-and-ninety-million Musk dollars to weight the outcome in a particularly “orange” direction—to “get rid of waste and enshrine a policy of efficiency.” Five-and-one-half-billion dollars by both presidential candidates together. And $15.9 billion for all races. Money to ensure money controls. But enough riposte for a moment.

Let me analyze in a more modulated tone, before returning to the beginning poem—the real sum of the opinion being sketched here. A few days before the election, I posted for the first and only time in my life on Facebook. I did so to try to give broad perspective on what I thought was materializing before our eyes. I will largely quote from that articulation in what follows to give summary formulation to what most exercises my concern in this hour. The introit (already offered) “vented” that concern. The Facebook enumeration sketches its bureaucratic policy “face” and briefly augurs some of its underbelly—a visceral conundrum that actually dates back before the founding of the country itself. And even that depth condition, I will suggest, is the more recent concatenation of a historical conniption 5,000 years in the making, now roiling an entire globe. This latter throbs at the heart of the opening poem and will occupy the larger compass of what we consider below. But first, Facebook:

A Brief Foray

Two weeks ago, I voted for Kamala Harris on a mail-in ballot. But it was not a vote for the Democratic Party, whose refusal to address the genocide in Palestine as a genocide had me raging regularly (as well as protesting continually). It was a vote against Donald Trump.

My vote against Trump was not a vote against the man. It was not a vote against a despicable character who is a convicted felon, convicted sexual abuser, fraudster, slum lord, etc.—worthy as that rejection might be. It was a vote against what is behind and underneath him, for which he is a temporary “tool.” It was a vote against a movement.

That movement is not Trumpsterism. It is a movement that has been marshaling under the surface of our society for more than fifty years. It does not have a single name. But terrifyingly, it does have a 922-page “playbook of policies” spelled out in detail in Project 2025 and a very clear plan of implementation to put such immediately in place by way of Schedule F.

Schedule F of the plan anticipates rapid re-classification of as many as 50,000 Federal employees into “temporary” job status such that they can be fired with impunity and replaced with a bureaucratic army of “true believers” who will implement the policies. Those policies are comprehensive, devised by dozens of former Trump officials now working under Heritage Foundation sponsorship, championed in a book by one of them, the Foreword for which was written by Vice Presidential candidate JD Vance. Trump and Vance attempts, pre-election, to distance themselves were pure posture, a sleight-of-hand “con” as is now clearly evident.

In effect Project 2025 seeks to “gut,” abolish, de-fund, or cripple the following:

• Voting (democracy replaced with theocracy)
• Department of Education (to be replaced by party-controlled propaganda)
• Libraries (defunded and closed)
• Health care (Obamacare either abolished or eviscerated)
• Social Security (vastly cut)
• Medicaid (abolished); Medicare (privatized)
• Unions (made illegal or sued out of existence)
• Protest (met with military response, imprisonment if not killing, maybe concentration camps designed for such)
• Abortion (banned nationally)
• LGBTQAI+ identity (suppressed)
• Press (dismantled or made a mouthpiece for the President through lawsuits, regulations, etc.)
• Department of Justice (weaponized to go after “enemies” political and general)
• Climate action (made illegal)
• AI Regulation (instead, AI mobilized in service of security, surveillance, police control, military assault, reduction of insurance claims, health care claims, etc.)

While these policy goals are already deeply alarming, it is the 50-year-old “force field” they now coalesce that is the real emergency. Underneath, all around, and animating Project 2025 are four major movement groundswells now converging into a veritable flood. These include:

1. White supremacist mobilization embracing the Turner Diaries as its “bible,” written in the later 1970s as a novelistic vision of white power, moving from a tiny minority on the far-right fringe step-by-step into the political mainstream by way of continuous activity in “cells” until able to emerge as a “Party.” The Oklahoma City bombing carried out by Timothy McVeigh in 1995 and the January 6 assault on the capitol in 2021 were “featured organizing events” anticipated in the novel. The Proud Boys were passing out the Diaries on the streets in the January 6 event. This white wet dream “maps” emergence into a major party, take-over of the country, and then by way of nuclear war, take-over of the planet for pallid-skinned men. Clearly, we are already at the “Party” stage in the recasting of the Republican Party as it now is. Yes, it is just a novel. But it is functioning for many as a bible.
2. Christian Nationalist takeover of institutional and political life and public discourse, beginning with the Moral Majority in the 1970s, gathering steam in the Dominionist Theology initiative, finding organizational form in the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR), growing out of the evangelical and charismatic movements of the earlier 20^th century, the Shepherding Movement of the 1970s and 80s, and now championing the Seven Mountain Mandate, committed to abolishing “separation of church and state” and “democracy,” taking over the seven major forums of society (family, religion, education, media, arts, entertainment, and government), recasting them as a pyramidal structure now to be run by Christians alone (primarily men), pushing their agenda as a spiritual war pitting themselves as the sole forces for good, fighting against all opposition as “demonic” and thus not to be reasoned with or negotiated over, but dominated and obliterated.
3. Militant gun culture, emerging out of the pre-history and early years of the country requiring every white male to function as surrogate police, on prowl to catch fugitive slave-runaways and to kill remaining Native Americans, historically gaining shape and political cache in the NRA, but now broadly enculturated to the tune of more than 400 million guns in the country, overwhelmingly owned by white males (62% of all gunowners), and a visual culture (TV, social media gaming) that basically posits metallic “arms” as the essential emblem of valid masculinity, a veritable prostheses of that identity.
4. Billionaire Venture Capitalists and Digital-Tech Corps. manipulation of political power and social perception (building on the long history of Fossil Fuel Companies and Weapons Manufacturers doing the same) many of whose leading figures (e.g., Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, etc.) are increasingly involving themselves and their blood-soaked “wealth” in these above movements to further their agenda for themselves as articulated in one recent publication:
   “He [Musk] and the Silicon Valley MAGA cohort were finished with Democrats, regulators, stability, all of it. They were opting instead for the freewheeling, fortune-generating chaos that they knew from the startup world. They had big dreams and had made the calculus that Trump would create a more hospitable environment in which to realize them. They were going to plant devices in people’s brains, replace national currencies with unregulated digital tokens, replace generals with artificial intelligence systems and much more. ‘Technology is the glory of human ambition and achievement, the spearhead of progress and the realization of our potential,’ Andreessen wrote in his manifesto. ‘We are not victims, we are conquerors.¹”

The Facebook articulation wrapped up with confession and characterization thusly:

I do not pretend to be prescient or “crystal ball clairvoyant.” I deeply hope I am wrong. But if I was speaking to a Christian audience, I would venture that the above could perhaps be understood as the outline of a convergence of “Principalities and Powers” the like of which the planet has never seen before. Or in another articulation, Project 2025 is the Doctrine of Christian Discovery in full bureaucratic dress and policy detail, coming back up from having been faced or repudiated in its genocidal disappearance of Native folk, enslavement of African folk, and invasive rapacity plundering sovereign places elsewhere
on the planet 553 times since the country’s founding, according to the Congressional Research Council
report of 2010.

Obviously that pre-election “belch” of concern is now gaining flesh (and getting rid of such) in an executive-order “flood and fury.” And it demands utmost opposition and challenge for the foreseeable future. In every way possible.

Supremacy’s Genealogy

But it also demands equally fierce questioning and contextualization. The emergency is not alone this particular country’s sudden implosion. The pre-November 5 status quo was a festering wound just waiting the right pathogen to metastasize into blistering infection. The quote above of the 553 incursions on sovereign terrain elsewhere since 1776 is itself omen. The country has been built on violent conscription of peoples and more-than-human creatures (“resources”)
in service of an ever-more-complexly elaborated Euro-Christian and capitalist agenda at every point along the way.

Certainly, the country started that way. The US began in a program of genocide the depth and extent of which had never been seen before on the face of the planet. With estimates of between 75 and 145 million native peoples, from the top of Canada to the bottom of Argentina, dwelling in varied cultures and communities and lifestyles when Columbus first set foot on dry land (in present day Haiti/Dominican Republic) in 1492, a 95% “disappearance” rate across the Hemisphere over the centuries following represents a tally of terror and brutality that has never elsewhere been matched (Stannard, x, 11). Of course, the exact details, in concrete locations remains the subject of intense dispute—especially given that the “historical records” of such have to be conjured and augured from the texts of the Euro-colonizers themselves, largely committed to legitimizing the devastation as a necessity of the priorities of “civilization” and “Christianization.”

And of course, Columbus’ venture—as indeed of those who followed—was at core economic. For him—a concern to get to the spices of India and the silks of China by going “backdoor” (he thought) on Islamic control of the Mediterranean basin and points east along the Silk Road. Europe of the day was basically a relatively “backward” domain on the edge of a sophisticated continuum of Muslim societies and had been since the collapse of the Roman Empire by the 6^th century and the advent of international Islam from the 7^th century onwards. Portugal’s success in trading for Congolese gold in the 15^th century, catapulted Spain westward in search of economic leverage capable of competing with this upstart neighbor. And once landing and beginning to get a sense of the extent of what they had “bumped into” and after gathering up (stealing, that is) all of the “loose change” of gold and silver artifacts, discovered in the native communities they subdued and conquered, within a decade or two of their arrival, the new “necessity” was a question of labor. What was now to be “capitalized” would have to be pulled up from the land.

Native folk resisted enslavement as an incipient worker-class by fighting back, fleeing west, or dying of disease. And Euro-colonizers quickly decided what they wanted from indigenous communities was that they “be gone”—that they disappear; their only utility was the land under the feet. But how convert that stolen land—savagely cleared of its indigenous occupants—into wealth transportable back to the European homeland? Menial and criminalized European labor brought over often enough did not survive the climate extremities of this new “American” geography and the answer to the resulting conundrum just as quickly
became a concentrated “reach” into “Africa” to purchase human muscle to work land into mineral and crop, to mine and cultivate. And how remake a human being into a productive tool? By theology initially, by “painting” the upright bipedal humanity into a “spirit-vacuity” consisting only of bone and brawn “like cattle.”

A concerted theological construction of “black flesh” as devoid of a savable interiority called a “soul” underwrote the entire enterprise of “chattel” slavery (Earl, 5, 16). The initial racialization was by means of spiritual erasure. If there was no soul, there was no human, if no human, then no problem. What was inside a shackle was no different than what was under a yoke. Whether chattel or cattle—the import was a tool for produce and finance and commerce. And that rapidly convened regime of labor to re-engineer stolen land into mobile riches itself occasioned the second largest genocide in human history. Behind each African incarcerated in a slave ship, transported across the Middle Passage waters, and delivered, upright and breathing and exploitable to a Caribbean seasoning island and “American” auction block, lay 3 to 4 dead African bodies, put six feet under in the process of shackling that still moving body (Stannard, 317-318, ftnt 9).

Native genocide tallied as high as 135 million people depending on the calculus of population numbers at point of contact and how “genocide” is construed as an intentional project—each the subject of intense scholarly disputation (not surprisingly given the concerted and continuous Euro-predilection to present colonization as “advancement” and “civilization”) (Stannard, x, 11). Under similarly motivated contestation about numbers and scholarly “construction,” African genocide registers as high as 50 million (Stannard, 317-318). Even if only the lower end of the calculations is given credence in each case, the actualities of these events remain the most horrific in history—and in regard to Native America, even registering geologically as the Little Ice Age of the 17th century due to so many agricultural communities “disappearing” and so much carbon being re-interred by the re-emergence of forests (Davis and Todd, 2017).

When Grief Is Not Metabolized

With such a relentless projection of PTSD-inducing aggression structuring the nation’s earliest psyche—itself complicated by all of the early capitalist, closing-of-the-commons and witch-burning trauma of late medieval Europe—it is not surprising that this people has gone on to violate other sovereign space on average of once every six months (the 553 times reported by the Congressional Research Council of 2010) for the duration of its official life. An indigenous characterization of the history would likely flare with dire concern: “Beware the hungry ghosts!” Beware the unprocessed bile, the biochemical mix of self- and other-loathing, each compounding the other, offering only belligerent rage as feasible posture. A recently viewed exposé of white nationalist and neo-Nazi extremism (Healing from Hate) captures the physiognomy: the singular visage of the “taking back their manhood” adherents in street rally and basement party alike, radiates such rage, offering bulging jugular and grimacing teeth as badge and art. But beneath the veneer, one can only surmise uninhabitable lostness and unintelligible confusion. “What is this whiteness that I supposedly am, if not ontological superiority over every other appearance of human skin and culture? Watch me verify it at the point of my gun!” But at the trigger end of that encounter there is little that has been compellingly creative or grandly astonishing. The whiteness so postured is finally evanescent, empty.

But it is also only a late cipher for this insatiable windigo that began to emerge in and as modern history, salivating and savage with desire (Kimmerer, 306). Before it was identifiable as whiteness it was Christian and “elect.” And certain it owned the earth—everywhere! After all the planet belonged to God and short of that Being’s actual physical presence, its soil and water alike devolved to His proxies, whatever prince or potentate claimed certification under that deity’s sponsorship, imaged in His own representative emissary and offspring, Jesus. The resulting Doctrine of Christian Discovery, affirming sovereign right to soil everywhere as long as not contested by a similarly disposed power, claiming similar Christic sponsorship, imported papal bull-ying into property lawyering, giving fee simple title solely on the basis of Christian self-certainty and reducing all other human “standing” on the planetary surface to mere occupancy, subject to termination and removal at the pleasure of the Christian “overlord” (Newcomb, 59, 67, 77-78). ) Which is to say, white supremacy had a totalitarian father: a Christian supremacy certain of its monopoly on both territory and truth.

All of this is on boil under the electoral outcome just witnessed. And there is much that could and should be said in further outlining its provenience and its projection, but for the remainder here, in a short provocation like this essay, I want to focus yet deeper down and further back. Because the Christian supremacies in evidence (both Protestant and Catholic)—as well as other kindred “world religious supremacies” encompassing Judaism and Islam, Hinduism and yes, even Buddhism’s self-emptying eclipse of permanence—are also offspring of an even more rhizomic delusion of superiority, dating back to our earliest city-state elevations of elite ruling classes out of hands-on interaction with both other human denizens of their dwelling place and the entire more-than-human world of creatures with whom they nonetheless remained completely interdependent and co-valent.

The Root of Supremacy

Yes, a book like Graeber and Wengrove’s Dawn of Everything gives complex witness to ancient developments, allowing as how some early urban experiments may have retained a modicum of egalitarian exchange and communal equilibrium. But it would seem a Rubicon was nonetheless crossed when we began to settle in ever-enlarging enclaves, increasingly focused on surplus production generated by coerced labor, gathered through imposed taxation, articulating a hierarchy of importance and of lifestyle differentiation—those demanding and commandeering the surplus, living “fat” and buffered compared to their enforced labor “supporters,” who died early and often by compare (Scott, 2017). Often enough these early city-states—beginning in Mesopotamia and Egypt, but not long after in China and elsewhere—materialized this sense of an ascending pyramidal scale of value in actual architecture. Urban-centric elevations like Assyrian ziggurats and Babylonian towers gave physical expression to a slowly “enfleshing” sense of species supremacy, a conviction that human concerns and needs outweighed in immediate significance and ultimate import any other considerations of what began to be thought of as lesser species and “beings.” And here I am waxing wildly “generalist and caricaturing” of immense complexity and ever-shifting destinies, that I would, nonetheless, suggest began a trajectory that has proven relentless over 5,000 years. And given the shortness of this script, the suggestiveness will have to remain just that. A mere outline that nevertheless has only reverberated with ever-greater clarity and warning in my own reading of things.

There is a line of descendent stretching from those early elites, presiding in palatial estates and temple shrines physically above everyone and everything else and our modern city-states as nodal points of a globalized circulation of natural creatures, ripped from local ecozone interdependence, re-engineered with a vengeance, marketed in glam and glitter, used and abused with scarce a thought for their origins or integrity, until discarded as “garbage,” asking water, air, and soil to please evacuate such from the our own physicality if not the planet at large. But the (plastic) chickens have come home to roost. With microplastic particulates now showing face and force in deepest ocean trenches and highest mountains, coming out of taps and weaving through soils, setting up shop in human brains and colonizing digestive tracts across the planet, our “civilizational” ascendancy—our certainty that we reign supreme, enveloped in architecture and armature untouchable by hungry wild teeth or raging promiscuous pest or flowing toxin of waste—is showing its absurdity en masse. The project of elevation into an imagined independence of and mastery over ecology is patently insane. Recycling is not something we do, but something we are. What goes around, indeed comes around—and is doing so.

And across our 200,000-year span of “sapiential” exchange with all else—only those cultures and communities that have most honored that interdependence and mutuality have a track record approaching anything like long-term sustainability. Civilization has nowhere worked long term (Ryan, 2019). More than 100 such regimes of self-congratulatory supremacy have traversed a now predictable cycle of boom/bust lasting 200-300 years before collapsing in one form or another of “overshoot” apocalypse (Dowd, 2023). Sooner or later, the natural world pronounces “Me too” over the rapine and plunder and weighs in irresistibly. But now the civilizational encompassment is global, the elite aggrandizement seemingly uncontainable, the resultant extractive uptake and waste-discard intractable. The planet will eventually metabolize the effluent. But perhaps not before eliminating “us.”

But which “us” do I envision here? Again, in an essay this short, I can only hint. The record that is estimable is “indigenous.” Cultures that seriously embraced their rootage in a given local expression of biodiversity, tailored their collective profile to on-going communion with more-than-human “elders”—plant-life, animal-kin, seasonal-variation, water-cycling, storm-cacophony, wind-visitation, etc.—letting the patterning dictate their cultural rhythm, their language elaboration, their dance enhancement. Many were hunter-gatherer, some horticultural, in grassland or desert, pastoral nomad. None perfectly residing, some also sliding into aggression and destruction, but many learning and abiding. And many alive to the need to embrace limitation, reinforced by ritual proscription and beauty-making as a cross-generational responsibility to ensure ecozone flourishing in on-going reciprocity and gift-economy exchange, anchored in the bioregion (Prechtel, 2005). City-state settlement began our trek away from such a more-than-human valuing until now, in the hands of billionaire techno-imperialists, the agenda is conversion of an entire planet into a machine algorithm likely dominating human imagination and aspiration in an increasingly draconian fashion. Indeed, we are already far down that road with our social media addiction and AI-fascination and submission.

And it is this addictive fascination that I think is part condition and part omen. “Possession” by something larger than merely individual identity and desire I take to be constitutive of human “being.” Three million years of co-adaptation as hunter-gatherers has outfitted us to be possessed by our respective local ecologies, in rhythmic sensibility, speech cadence, temperature preference, ambulatory pace, gestural grace, and a thousand other indices of a porous boundary between our own somatic physiognomy and our original eco-ambits of nurturance and patterning. We are designed to be as big as a local eco-system. Both materially and spiritually. But devoid of such a biodiverse resonance, we fill the gaps with extracted goods and fabricated gods and ingested drugs and mainlined parlance and ideology. Bulging veins and snarling frowns now. A movement possession, that won an election—here, and with increasing virulence, all over the globe, either in the recent past (like Hungary) or the future to come.

And the only remedy I can imagine is to return—at least in vision and schooling and appreciation—to what works. What has worked in three million years of history. Not necessarily as model, but in value and basic orientation. Something kindred to what we now identify as “indigenous” in willingness to recognize and honor genius and wisdom and lesson in our “other-kind” kin. Obviously, the word “indigenous” can be used in multiple overlapping and even divergent references. Here, I primarily intend a lifestyle reference informed by a given land or marine ecosystem over generations, and a human community continuing to recognize the priority of co-evolution with such, entertaining communication and agency coming from these more-than-human relatives and witnesses to requirements of co-creation and mutual flourishing and necessary withering and dying to make room for what, and who, comes next.

The Rain that Weeps

In that light, I conclude with the beginning. I am not indigenous, except way, way back in vague trace and faint hint of Indo-European ancestry before it went urban and Christian and white and insane. But I am committed to learning from such wherever encountered in either living community or yet extant mythology and memory. I have dwelt in cities lifelong and on eastside inner city Detroit after eight years of immersion, began to discover living traces of African and Afro-diaspora conservation of such a memory—in a vibrant though beleaguered culture of percussive celebration and antiphonal intelligence, using call-response energies to survive all kinds of imperialized urban impossibility and coercion (Long, 7, 163, 194-195). Thankfully, I have never recovered from that epiphany, and it continues to course through my own paltry responsiveness now more than 40 years out from the initial revelation. The schooling has been constant and opened me to begin recognition of such traces of a not-yet-obliterated mode of honoring ancestry and ecology still peeking through the civilizational stomping and disinformation on many sides (Perkinson, 2024 and earlier books).

One of which is inside the very Christian mythology (in the genre sense of that word) whose supremacy I so lament. After decades of re-reading the founding tradition thereof in Hebrew literature and gospel scripture, on hunt for what might have been precursor “indigenous” practices suppressed but not entirely erased therein, I now can scratch the text surface and uncover still pulsing traces of living in relational embrace with Levantine creaturely beings who schooled and nurtured and embodied and revealed what came to be revered as “deity” (Perkinson, 2019). But here I would only underscore one possible take, on one such trace.

Lakota theologian/lawyer Vine Deloria Jr in a short chapter in his book, For This Land, sketched out a striking pedagogy of his people’s topography, under the title “Reflection and Revelation” (Deloria, 250-260). Under “reflection” he emphasized the build-up of mythic layers of story, attaching to virtually every prominent feature of the home-place landscape as rumination was repeatedly provoked by striking geological formations, seasonal observations, events affecting community members, floral changes, faunal encounters, storm occurrences, etc. Over generations the landscape would have accumulated multiple layers of storied memory such that a mere stroll across the ground was also a traipse through ancestral history. But under “revelation’ he noted another kind of experience in which an elder or medicine person stumbled into a particular “place” on those lands—outcrop of rock, grove of trees, canyon recess, etc.—that suddenly “pushed back,” communicating as inchoate Subject, reducing human presence to mere object, with time and space standing still, dread prickling the hairs on one’s neck, accompanied by a distinct sense of “being watched.” This place was then understood as surrounded by an invisible limen and verboten, off-limits to the community, a nook or patch reserved unto itself, perhaps guarded and frequented by various animal species (or not), but only ever to be traversed in the future in times of emergency when such an elder might dare enter the sacred space, at risk, asking for medicine or help.

Stepping back from Lakota experience into the ancient Levantine mists of time, what if the Genesis memory of an original “red mud people” (adam from adamah as collective term), is understood along similar lines? A community living in symbiosis with trees (and perhaps reflecting a trace of an actual such people of the 12^th and 11^th millennia BCE called the Natufians), having the run of olives and dates and acorns and pomegranates, but at some point finding themselves accosted with a dread sense of limit, reserving one species of tree (perhaps, according to rabbinic lore, the fig) for itself, for wild concourse alone, separate from human affairs. Thus, a Sacral “land communique” establishing a limen at once eco-systemically vital in fact, and pedagogically essential in principle, in reinforcing mutuality and reciprocity—not human priority or supremacy—as the watchword of sustainability and viable dwelling for the generations. What if such an epiphany—the inchoate “unveiling” of a specific threshold of exclusion, a sequestering of some kind of geo-physical mystery—is the beginning of any eco-local “original instruction” for in-dwelling humans, inculcating self-limitation as a mythic and ritual duty of first import?

We then end with our beginning. An election, at a catastrophic threshold, with some of us sitting like a Frodo and Sam on an outcrop of rock, watching lava cascade and wishing for eagles, in which the depth-hope being sounded and re-visited indeed goes back to the origins of the problem. White supremacy, disclosing an even deeper Christian (and world religious) supremacy, itself offspring of the incipient species supremacy that began this trek into apocalypse. How deep is the emergency? How far back the impropriety? Our rain is indeed choking with plasticity. Can we hear the whisper of that wet teardrop? “MAGA. MAGA. MAGA.” “May Adam [finally] Give-up the Apple. May Eve give a fig . . . back to a fig.” It is impossibly complex. It is impossibly simple. We used to know how to live—and let live—within limits. Do we really think there is some other kind of “solution” that can sidestep such? Yes, “election.” From ex “out,” and ligere/legere “to choose.” Can we “elect” a living planet—an earth whose creatures live “outside” human chains and demands and disposal? Can we choose ourselves—within limits?

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Endnotes

¹ Jonathan Mahler, Ryan Mac and Theodore Schleifer, “How Tech Billionaires Became the G.O.P.’s New Donor Class, Elon Musk and a group of Silicon Valley allies have built a shadow campaign to put Donald Trump back in office.” New York Times (10/18/2024) (https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/18/magazine/trump-donors-silicon-valley.html?campaign_id=2&emc=edit_th_20241019&instance_id=137273&nl=today%27s-headlines&regi_id=54661955&segment_id=180834&user_id=2a268bc02e89b0f57c05bdbbff3483dc

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Bibliography

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