From the Faraway Nearby Rebecca Solnit
ELEGY FOR A TOXIC LOGIC
And carpe diem for what comes next
ARoshi, the founder of the San
Francisco Zen Center, once
student of Shunryu Suzuki
sheepishly asked him whether he could
sum up the essence of Zen in a single
sentence. “Everything changes,” said
Suzuki Roshi without missing a beat,
then moved on to another question. Now
that everything has changed, the despair
of four years ago—not just that Bush had
been re-elected but that he would prevail
forever in a nation that would forever
believe his lies and follow his cult of
imperial war and climate-change denial
and free-market fundamentalism—has
vanished like morning mist.
Everything changes. I myself expected
we’d see a nonwhite or nonmale presidency in my lifetime, but not that it’d
come so soon, and with it came a profound symbolic shift within the United
States, a rede>nition of “us” and “them,”
as well as a sign to the rest of the world
that this country is some kind of hybrid,
turbulent bridge between global north and
global south, the white and the nonwhite,
wealth and poverty, as the poles weirdly
united in Barack Obama, whose symbolic
currency is immeasurable, whatever his
limitations. But electoral politics, even as
they unfolded with all the richness of a
Shakespearian drama (with the Clintons
doing a splendid Lord and Lady Macbeth
in the primary season and McCain topping
them with his King Lear to Faust melt-
down), were hardly the only arena where
change prevailed.
Capitalism imploded more dramatically than anyone had imagined, though
once it had, its collapse seemed as obvious as inevitable. That is, underregulated
free-market capitalism ate itself before
our eyes. At the beginning of the Bush
era, now passing from the face of the
Earth more like a toxic plume than a
morning mist, the then-functional FEMA
predicted three major catastrophic risks
for the United States: a terrorist attack in
New York, a hurricane strike on New
Orleans, and a major earthquake in San
Francisco. In early 2008, some distinguished sources were predicting an economic apocalypse too, including German
president and former International
Monetary Fund chair Horst Köhler, who
declared, “International >nancial markets
trying to understand its vastness. What
exactly collapsed? Not just the >nancial
assumptions of the Bush era, or the
Clinton and Bush eras of globalization, or
of Reaganomics with its cult of the free
market, but something bigger and deeper.
It became clear that the American economy had been for almost four decades a
desperately ill patient requiring more and
more life support to keep it going: get o=
the gold standard in 1971, then deregulate
markets, globalize capital, go for “>
nan-cialization”—the conversion of more and
more aspects of life on Earth into investment opportunities—unto the derivatives
and hedges and bundled mortgages that
brought it all down.
I have never been able to con>rm the
adage that the Chinese word for crisis is
made up of the characters for disaster
and opportunity, but if it isn’t true it
Capitalism imploded more dramatically than anyone had
imagined, though once it had, its collapse seemed inevitable.
have developed into a monster that must
be put back in its place.”
When these markets fell apart, so did
many of the fundamental premises of the
past few decades, which is part of what
makes this moment in history so interesting, and so unpredictable. Even trying to
grasp it is dizzying, like looking—as Mike
Davis put it—into the Grand Canyon and
ought to be. This unforeseen moment
has many possibilities. The death of capitalism, or rather the revelation of its profound diseasedness, is an opportunity it
would be ironic to call golden. But check
out what Michael Pollan wrote last
October: “In the past several months
more than 30 nations have experienced
food riots, and so far one government has
