The family learned of intricacies, such as that Yellow Cedar has never been artificially reproduced. It cannot be made to reproduce in a nursery. No one knows why this is, but any Yellow Cedar reproduced by humans is done by cuttings, not by seed. In a clearcut only three species tend to be replanted (Red Cedar, Douglas Fir and Western Hemlock), superseding the abundance there was before and the variation that comes with different elevations. It used to be pure monoculture, and Red Alder groves would be clearcut just for the sake of replacing them with Douglas Fir. Red Alder (Alnus rubra) was considered a waste tree. (Being known for its vigorous growth means it would produce wider grained lumber.) No one knew that in succession Alder is an establishing (pioneer) species that harnesses nitrogen in its root nodules, allowing other trees to become established after because they literally enrich the soil. On the drive to the valley many old alder and maple groves were passed. After all the other trees were running out, they began to see these groves being clearcut as well.
She remembers visiting the clearcut when it began on Glad Lake Main with a woman who could only make her think of Puck because of her round elven face and unibrow, and how she cried. She remembers her conversation with Simon at the waterfall, a Welshman who went into politics there years later, because there were moments it took a wee bit of concentration not to be distracted by the fact that he was nude (and she wasn’t); she first met him sunning himself on the rock by the waterfall cascades. She remembers the night she and Judah smoked up with Paul the Australian and a little of what they spoke about, being the only time they addressed God and spirituality, which was a bit of an anathema. She remembers a night sitting in the circle around the fire where the light made his face look angelic and he smiled. She remembers her burgeoning friendship with English Jon and when he first saw Marianne walking across the bridge, a beautiful spirited small proportioned pixie with flaming red hair dyed red down to her waist and pale blue eyes, and that she sensed exactly what the fates had in store. She remembers when Frank the Dutchman, who would ride a motorcycle there and back (hardly any other people did this but she ended up doing it as well, and so did her parents). She remembers when Frank made spicy Thai peanut sauce for the rice because there was so much peanut butter in camp and not much else. And then there was Rolly, who had been a former Green Beret in Vietnam and who had protested at Nevada nuclear testing sites. She remembers Velcrow and Heather, and how Velcrow and his partner filmed it all and made ‘The Road Stops Here’. Then there was the Toronto group of Mack and Corrine and Bea (who were inseparable), Maggie, Lynne, and the mild mannered jovial Kathy who ended up being The Walbran Martyr. The Toronto group was a constant unflagging presence with Mack being a sitter more than once. And there was Dana from Singapore, who would be forced to change his name. Dana and Jon in particular had to avoid being arrested or being sitters because they were past the length of time they were allowed to visit Canada and would be deported if arrested. Aussie Paul was probably in the same boat; he was one of the first people they met hiding out in the woods on that first day hike.
And she remembers when things began to turn. It was the weekend and the camp was drawing a considerable amount of people; over the weekend Sylvia had estimated 60, and this build-up was recurring. It was starting to attract the odd rowdy type and some drinkers, people whose mentality was party. It also had attracted an unusual Native man named Jesse. He walked straight into camp one day and stopped at Randy’s sign listing God’s attributes, identifying Them as YHWH. He noted that with interest. The camp was developed enough now that it had a good first aid tent and Sylvia had volunteered to be a nurse there. When the family left over the weekend, Rahab and Zeb took the liberty to get more involved with the protest, attending the strategy meeting. Zeb helped with the blockade set-up, which took during place during the night. They were still deliberately peripheral and only acted as witnesses, but they were there before 6 am Monday morning for the purpose. It was an idea Aussie Paul put forward that was taken, and it was a truly daring exercise that had never been attempted in blockade history before.
The last leg of the drive into the valley befit the territory; the road was high up on a very steep slope that descended nearly straight down to the east Walbran river perhaps 500 meters. There was a 90-degree turn where this went back into a crevasse with a small creek tumbling down the centre and the road was actually V-shaped. The slope after the turn was a not quite perfect drop cliff that gradually descended over 100 feet. On that side the logging company had put large logs to prevent anyone from driving off the cliff. There was an abandoned green van in the valley that had basically been donated. Paul suggested they use the cliff strategically for a blockade by cutting a notch into the barrier log. They would get a large enough downed tree to straddle across the road so that its length reached out over the cliff edge and rest it in the notch. Paul had already noted where there were tree falls close by suitable for the purpose. On the tip of the tree they would suspend a platform. This was where English Jon would be in play. The abandoned green van would provide the counterweight for the log blocking the road with the sitter on the other end hanging over the cliff edge. The van was to be filled with rocks. So long as the sitter was on the platform, the logging company could not remove the van and its contents. Nor could they cut through the log to get through, for that would send the sitter to their death. A man named Colin (whose nickname was ‘Wolf’) volunteered to be the sitter over the cliff.
The weekend was utilized for the set-up; on Sunday they worked through the night. There were two members of Greenpeace present. They participated in the blockade set up, leaving before dawn and basically told the participants ‘we were never here’. However by the time of the Tuesday morning paper curiously the word was out. It was not long before it was conclusive that there were plants, moles within the protest camp, infiltrators placed by either the logging company or the RCMP. It made no difference which party had hired and placed them; the RCMP were using company hirelings as their own investigative resource. It didn’t appear Jesse was one of them. During the previous week he had threatened Sylvia with a knife, demanding painkillers from the first aid tent. Then again, he was creating that element of instability; the camp was becoming wary of him. He was a big man.
Rahab and Zeb were present as witness support Monday morning. Still acting under the precautions of their parents’ policy to avoid risking arrest and acting only as a support base for the protest movement, they dutifully kept their distance and sat on a log on the other side of the ‘V’ with Colin and the blockade in full view. They did not arrive early enough to see the logger’s arrival, but were told it had been an unusually large procession of six vehicles that morning that had come just at the break of dawn. At their usual accustomed speed they had turned that 90-degree corner around the sheer rock with no sense of what lay in store and narrowly avoided a six-vehicle bumper-to-bumper collision. The bulk of the vehicles left and the RCMP were notified. When asked what difficulty rating they would give this blockade on a scale of out of ten, the RCMP and loggers rated it an ‘8’. It suffered from a design flaw, which unfortunately ended its run shortly. A ‘cherry-picker’ was notified and brought into the valley, basically a knuckleboom loader truck with a long jointed swivel arm and platform on the end. It was long enough to reach the platform. English Jon was roving the road between the blockade and where Rahab and Zeb were sitting on the other side. He was taking notes of what happened in his notebook as part of his effort to work for the Western Canada Wilderness Committee, who were willing to hire him in order to help keep him in the country. There was a woman going into hysteria wailing about Colin’s life being put in danger and other protesters trying to settle her.
The RCMP on the cherry picker platform went out repeatedly to confront Colin. Colin voluntarily ended his sit based on the negotiation and threats he received for non-compliance, that if he did not accept being arrested at this time, then the charges would be further stacked against him. Faced with the threat of continually escalating charges as non-compliance was judged as an increase in contempt, Colin stepped down and joined the the RCMP corporal on the cherry picker. The fact that they had a cherry picker that could reach the platform put the onus on Colin and made him vulnerable to increasing the threat of the contempt charges that would be laid, since sitting there was simply based on his refusal. Each time he refused to leave the platform was going to be counted against him as another instance of contempt against the court. Rahab looked at Jon’s notes where he transcribed the time that Colin came down; the blockade concluded at around high noon, and around 1 pm for the first time, massive machinery was rolled into the Walbran including an excavator. It so happened that this morning they had actually been blocking a new arrival of the machines. Or as it turned out, maybe it was the other way around.
There was a deep sense of disappointment in losing the cliff platform so quickly; it had been the first of its kind anywhere in the world; Paul said so and Paul was one to know. He had first been a rainforest protester in Australia, then the Amazon. Now he was in BC. His next intended destination was the Sarawak in Malaysia. In that sense Aussie Paul was the one individual Rahab happened to speak to who had come specifically with the intent of protesting in BC the ‘Brazil of the North’ if not specifically the Walbran Valley; not even the Toronto group had arrived with that intent even though they had a history of protesting the Gulf War and on other subjects. They simply had come out to hike the West Coast Trail, hadn’t known about the new waiting list system, and someone had re-directed them to the Walbran Valley so they could make use of their holiday. There was a second individual who was a professional protester of sorts who’d arrived for the sake of protesting in the Walbran Valley; that was Rolly. Rolly and Jesse were like senior statesmen in the group purely due to their relative age; Jesse was not around for any duration nor was there leadership by definition. Paul W. was in camp during this interim and with Ian M. had proposed another strategy, in fact he’d nearly killed himself coming up with a way to climb into the giant cedar at the end of the road, something stirrups could never encompass. It had taken going up three different trees in succession to do it. 'The Road Stops here’ was the key, this tree was the key, and someone should be stationed in it. This idea was not attended to when he left; he was not present for the precipice blockade.
When a piece of the equipment roared past on a quad axle lowbed towed by a semi Rahab had never seen any machinery of that sort that large that close. It felt especially defeating. The protesters were undaunted and continued as usual; at the end of the working day Marianne and a few others drove out to the clearcut at Glad Lake Main which is where the machinery had been parked, to scope out where to tree-sit next. At the close of the day there was already a security guard by the machinery. He was alleging that the protesters had sabotaged the equipment, which mystified the group. First off, the only blockade prepared had been the cliff blockade; based on how effective they expected it to be there had been no tree sitters or protesters sent to the Glad Lake Main site. No protesters had gone there that day until the end of the working day. The equipment would have been under watch all day with the company working at that site in the valley for the day, so if it had been a maverick action against protest camp policy, how could it have been pulled off?
The Tuesday edition of The Times Colonist (the local city paper) ran two headlines the next morning. They ran a headline about the first ever cliff blockade platform sit. Above it however they ran a headline alleging that company machinery had been vandalized. It was a while before Rahab was in town again and was able to see this paper. Based on Jon and her notes from that day Rahab was aware of a serious discrepancy; the story the newspaper had been given by the logging company for when the vandalism occurred, when the company alleged it had happened, the machinery had not even been in the valley yet! And indeed by the time it arrived, there had only been a three to four hour window before Marianne and her crew drove up and were informed of the vandalism for it to have possible occurred. With the company workers present during this interval and working around the machinery this was tantamount to impossible, nor was the type of vandalism that had happened to the machines ever identified. It was a precisely coordinated smear campaign to discredit and dismantle the protest, specifically timed to divert from the cliff blockade itself.
Rahab never felt an impetus to write a letter to the editor and correct this discrepancy; she had been subject to her letter to the editor being edited once before on another subject entirely specifically to neuter its sense of relevance. Based on her impression of the censorious nature of the paper, and the fact that they’d swallowed the company line uncontested like pablum and not fact checked it at all, she felt that anything she wrote asserting the falsity of the story would never see the light of day. It was far too calculated a piece of propaganda to be anything else. If that was its intent, contesting it would not be permitted. After all the 13 largest logging companies in BC were already in full gear in the province, having hired Burson-Marsteller to concoct the BC Forest Alliance as a lobbying corporate front group supported by their workers. They had the funding, and one of the largest, most effective, most morally bereft New York PR firms available had been unleashed to reverse public sentiment in the province. And the key to reversing public sentiment was to label the environmental protesters vandals. It was impeccably timed in another way for that week.
On Tuesday night Rahab and Zeb slept on the bridge so they could watch the shooting stars in August as they went to sleep, right above the trickling sound of the river. They were woken on the bridge at 6:00 am by the loggers, who had driven straight up ‘their’ line to the ‘The Road Stops Here’ bridge and the protest camp rather than to the usual working sites. 6:00 am was much earlier than usual to end up being served an injunction while you are asleep especially at the end of the road. Normally they were coming up on a blockade between 7:00 or 8:00 am. It turned out to be notice for what came next, for the following morning, they arrived just as early with the RCMP. The camp was drawing too many people and it had to be smashed. Wednesday night was the ‘party’ night though Rahab does not remember this, because neither she nor Zeb drank significantly that evening, though they hung out with the protesters for a while. A huge delivery of anonymously donated beer arrived at the protester camp that afternoon, and the protesters partied. Many were hung over the following morning. Who under those stressful circumstances is going to turn down a free beer delivery when you haven’t drank significantly in months? Always look a gift horse in the mouth. A liquor donation had never occurred before, nor after.
Friday, July 30, 2010
The Walbran - CHAPTER 7 - Part 3
In terms of the blockading there was a gradual up the ante. There would be variations of either a morning blockade on the road (loggers tending to arrive before 8 am, as that was when they would start their shift) or people would go directly to the designated clearcut in progress and sit in a tree, because if you are up in that tree, they can’t cut it down or they’d probably kill you. This becomes a cat and mouse game in which the ante goes up, and up it goes. Over the course of the summer the family met the first living tree sitter (in Canada at least), the guy who came up with the idea first. His name was Paul W., and it turned out he had been raised in the house next door to them on Amphion St., but he had moved out by the time they moved in. The youngest son who was the last of the brood of nine moved out not long after they moved in. It turned out Paul’s mother Celia had babysat Judah and Rahab when they were children. He had many stories to relate in a tree-sitting vein, including its invention. You can rappel down, but not up. How to do it? Stirrups. A simple loop of rope. You need two loops and they must be knotted in the middle. You stand in one while throwing the second loop around the tree you are climbing. You put the loop through the loop and step in it. And so on. Several of the kids got to try this during tree sitting workshops, rappelling down off the bridge, and the stirrup method. Paul told of his first tree-sitting episode when he first invented the stirrups, went and sat in a tree using them, and belatedly discovered under a lot of urgency (while a logger was chainsawing his tree down), that the stirrups did not work ‘backwards’ for going down. So to get down in a hurry, Paul learned to rappel. He also had a logging supervisor put him through the gag of shooting him with a BB gun. Not that you can tell a BB rifle is just a BB from over 30 ft up in a tree. Although they had met his mother, they had never actually met Paul himself before the Walbran.
Of all the people in the Walbran Rahab had met only one of them prior, Bobby. They met over a conversation in the University of Victoria cafeteria, finding themselves both in the then rare position of being against the Israeli occupation of Palestine. Bobby was the first Jew Rahab met to take such a stance. At the time she didn’t know that he had also been a protester in the Tsitika Valley that feeds into Robson Bight, which was isolated enough that the behavior on behalf of the RCMP had been particularly egregious. In fact one of the officers had commanded his dog to attack a woman protester they had already arrested and handcuffed while she was sitting on the roadside. Bobby had a constantly gregarious, cheerful and articulate leadership quality about him, so did Mack from Toronto and several other people.
Paul W. had first taken up tree-sitting at Sulphur Pass in Clayoquot Sound thanks to an epiphany he had on Meares Island in 1988. He came up to Tofino/Clayoquot to present his light show and was struck by the urgency of the logging, which was happening at such a rate, the notion of fund raising through art simply wasn’t an option. He decided the only thing to do was to be much more direct, as in, how could he as one individual get in their way? He climbed a tree and used a hammock. As he was the first individual to try tree-sitting in Canada, it is needless to say that tree sitting as a form of civil disobedience was pretty new stuff.
Among the first tree sitters in the Walbran were Paul from Australia and Alan (who was Canadian). Alan was the first sitter they tried to catch after a shift. It’s not like tree sitting creates an enormous obstacle; there are a lot of trees that can be cut down surrounding a tree sitter in a designated clear cut after all. But soon enough they weren’t satisfied with the confrontation that was taking place during the day shift, as no one was coming down. When Alan climbed down from his shift after every one had apparently left, there were two black clothed RCMP officers concealing themselves behind his tree, waiting for him. He managed to flee in the rain and even though he was followed by police dogs; he escaped by crossing the Walbran River and circuited back to the camp. He was not identified. It was the first of only three successful sitter escapes that took place in the Walbran Valley. He ended up being arrested in a rather mundane way, but that comes later. Alan also ended up being one of the people who broke the sixteen km rule and came back to the Walbran only to get arrested a second time, which really got him into trouble.
It was pretty obvious that people came out of that tree sitting confrontation markedly changed and traumatized. It would amount to being verbally abused all day, as well as being subject to every type of persuasion tactic and threat imaginable; the RCMP were always using the threat of worsening the charges for anyone who resisted. You can imagine what was said to the female tree sitters; there were many of them, including Marianne and Amanda. It was Amanda who remarked about how sore you could get sitting on a tree limb in excess of eight hours so the tree sitters began using little makeshift platforms to sit on, no more than a strip of plywood. Many other women sat on road blockades or stood in order to be arrested, including Lynne who was put in a tripod suspended over the road. Maggie and Rebecca and Dan were arrested for standing in front of her when a grader shoveled debris and rocks towards the structure.
In the forest where a clearcut took place, the tree sitters would be all alone with no witnesses. That was the first tactic. The boundary being used to define the parameter of where active logging was taking place was 100 meters. This was based on how far away anyone not participating in the logging was supposed to be for safety reasons according to the Workman Protection Act. What the RCMP shortly began doing was arbitrarily putting that boundary a half mile away or more so the tree sitters would have no human support or contact. They enforced their arbitrary boundary by saying anyone who stepped over it would be arrested for contempt of court. In this manner they isolated the tree sitters completely so no one could see them and there were no witnesses to the confrontation that would take place in the clearcut.
Paul the Australian was a sitter when things got confrontational. It became the usual tactic that even though the RCMP was the enforcement entity who was there to perform the arrests, they would send a logger up the tree to confront the sitter and convince him or her to come down. The logger’s method of climbing a tree using cork boots and a leather belt means that he can’t climb where there are any limbs, so a logger proceeding up this way would bring his chainsaw, de-limbing the tree every step of the way. When a logger was sent up, the RCMP would literally turn their backs on the situation so they weren’t witness to whatever might happen. That way if the sitter was injured they could not be compelled to testify as to what happened. There was no such thing as impartiality and no protection for the sitter. The RCMP were only present to enforce the injunction. Paul rappelled down part way to meet the logger in order to prevent him from de-limbing the tree any further. This was a losing proposition because eventually the logger could out manoeuvre him; Paul’s rappel lines would become wrapped around the tree a full 360 degrees, and then the logger could pass him as he would have to unwrap himself the other way. Paul slowed him down for a while but had to retreat to the platform. The logger with his chainsaw then proceeded to start chain-sawing the two limbs the platform was resting on. He cut one limb halfway, and then proceeded to chainsaw the second. Paul unhooked from his rappel line showing the logger that if he cut down the platform, Paul would be in freefall, possibly to his death. The logger continued to chainsaw the second limb, expecting to scare Paul into hooking back into his rappel line so he could force him to the ground. It was only when he went to switch back to finish sawing the first limb, and Paul managed to get his arm in place next to it telling the logger ‘if you cut any further, you will be cutting through my arm’ that the logger shut off his chainsaw, gave up, and went back down the tree. That was the confrontation for that day. That was the sort of temerity it took for a tree sitter to win the day, just one day. There were many, many days. The confrontation lasted from June until October, the entire logging season.
Tree sitting was used in Clayoquot Sound as well after the Walbran blockade was finished. Having become immersed in that circuit, one night at their home in 1993 Rahab had the privilege of meeting a woman in her early 20’s named Nicole who had just finished being a tree sitter in Clayoquot. Rahab sat and listened to her entire story of the confrontation she went through at 90 ft. in the air, higher than nearly all the platforms there had been in the Walbran. As with the Walbran confrontations, a logger was sent up de-limbing the tree all the way in order to get her down, but before that, the company had brought in a back-hoe. Again the RCMP had deliberately avoided being witnesses. Nicole was subject to the back-hoe digging a trench on all three sides of the tree she was in, making it so unstable it was shaking, with the threat that it would just continue. Then a logger was sent up on day three. The logger they sent up was green enough he was visibly shaking. He pleaded with her to just come down because he had no idea what he was doing. She conceded and was lowered with a strap looped around her midriff, which felt backbreaking.
Because of Paul the Australian’s harrowing episode and others in the Walbran an effort was made to improve on strategy and protection. The idea was conceived to suspend platforms between four trees. That meant more than one tree couldn’t be felled; it also made the tree sitter far more difficult to get to. It was a Walbran historic first; suspended platforms had never been attempted before. Among the men who went about suspending these platforms were ‘English Jon’, who had become a sailor at 16 and hence knew his knots, and an American named Andrew. One day Jon questioned Andrew as to why he was having giggle fits while they were suspending the platform. Andrew responded that he was on acid.
The ante’s continued of course. Eventually a suspended platform was put up 92 ft. in the air. One of the sitters to man this platform was Steve. The intimidation tactic that Fletcher-Challenge used for this platform was to bring a helicopter as close to the platform as they could at tree top level. This would cause enough turbulence in the trees to make the platform, which was suspended between trees by ropes reaching up to 20 ft. or more, literally bounce in the air, suddenly levitating erratically five feet or more, a fairly terrifying experience. At the end of his stint Steve was never so happy to touch terra firma in all his life. To this day Rahab still finds herself associating the sound of a helicopter with surveillance and intimidation. In the Walbran that is how they were used. A police helicopter made appearances as well.
The collective Walbran experience was an amalgam of extremes between the blockade experiences and the sublime contemplation of nature, the adventuring. The children took up rock-hopping as a means to get about, meaning they began to navigate by the rocks in the river and alternate this with the trails. By doing this they could travel the river much faster than people hiking solely by the trails. It was only possible in stretches of the river that had stretches of rocks at the surface, but by alternating and developing routes that utilized both, with a little bit of bushwack (the term for going off trail), they travelled much faster. It was also only possible during peak summer months and when it wasn’t wet or raining; attempting to rock hop in the rain would be a death wish. It felt more scenic to combine travelling the river with travelling the forest. They taught their routes to anyone who was interested, took anyone on tours who came and needed to go. They got so adept they would run at rock-hopping and race each other, short bursts since the moment you began to tire your reaction time would lapse ever so slightly, but enough you were risking serious injury.
Their idea of the efficacy of travelling this way was borne out when one man managed in trunks and a pair of sneakers to traverse the whole Walbran River down to where it reached the ocean, sleep over night on the beach, and traverse back the next day. Hiking through the bush to accomplish the same thing could easily take four days, and one group who attempted to do so and encountered serious rain got trapped for considerably longer. The Cummins kids trekked with all four of the Johnson kids, who came and joined them for stretches on their camping trip. They even took the ghetto blaster out to dance on the bridge together. They were so accustomed to the trails that one day when things were terribly scattered and no one was available from either the protest or family camp, Jonathan (who was only seven years old) was called upon to guide an entire tour bus of Church goers to Fletcher Falls where they could engage in prayer to save the valley.
The family themselves were praying for the valley daily as part of their routine prayers. Included on their list was a prayer for mechanical breakdowns of logging company equipment. Randy made a point of telling the protesters that prayer was just as effective as anything they were doing. The possibility of this got driven home when on one of the mainlines (major logging roads are called mainlines) to the South Walbran where there had been several confrontations and a lot of logging was slated to take place, they learned through the grapevine that the bridge on the summit of the line had been named ‘Breakdown Bridge’ by the loggers, because for a while every piece of equipment that crossed it, literally five in a row, had broken down in succession after crossing it.
One day during the initial tree-sitting period which took place on Glad Lake Main, Rahab decided to sneak past the RCMP line by going up hill off-road to see if she could find the tree-sitter. People had been standing at the line the RCMP erected the entire day waiting. She snuck past without incident and crested the hill. Getting to the top of the clearcut just as the last tree was cut and fell, she watched it hit the ground and shatter with a massive ringing crash. It shattered like glass into a multitude of pieces. The felling of a tree that size is something you never forget. It was only much later she learned that in Old Growth stands like these, about 25%of the timber is wasted as lumber. They don’t bother with the trees species they don’t want, but everything is felled. A Pacific Yew is a waste tree. A yew only five inches in diameter is approximately 90 years old. The fine grain makes it an incredible hardwood for carving and for making bows. In the Walbran they found one so large that when they put their arms around it, they could not reach their own fingers. The Pacific Yew has a substance called taxol in its bark that alleviates breast cancer and has since been synthesized, yet every yew in a clearcut is destroyed. And some trees are so big and so old, the impact when they hit the ground just shatters them. This is especially common with red cedar, so common in fact that long after a clearcut has been ‘harvested’, cedar shake guys come in by helicopter to collect cedar shake (which can be made into shingles) from the shattered cedars that are left. Plenty of wood is left behind.
postscript: there are more pictures of the Walbran Valley here.
Of all the people in the Walbran Rahab had met only one of them prior, Bobby. They met over a conversation in the University of Victoria cafeteria, finding themselves both in the then rare position of being against the Israeli occupation of Palestine. Bobby was the first Jew Rahab met to take such a stance. At the time she didn’t know that he had also been a protester in the Tsitika Valley that feeds into Robson Bight, which was isolated enough that the behavior on behalf of the RCMP had been particularly egregious. In fact one of the officers had commanded his dog to attack a woman protester they had already arrested and handcuffed while she was sitting on the roadside. Bobby had a constantly gregarious, cheerful and articulate leadership quality about him, so did Mack from Toronto and several other people.
Paul W. had first taken up tree-sitting at Sulphur Pass in Clayoquot Sound thanks to an epiphany he had on Meares Island in 1988. He came up to Tofino/Clayoquot to present his light show and was struck by the urgency of the logging, which was happening at such a rate, the notion of fund raising through art simply wasn’t an option. He decided the only thing to do was to be much more direct, as in, how could he as one individual get in their way? He climbed a tree and used a hammock. As he was the first individual to try tree-sitting in Canada, it is needless to say that tree sitting as a form of civil disobedience was pretty new stuff.
Among the first tree sitters in the Walbran were Paul from Australia and Alan (who was Canadian). Alan was the first sitter they tried to catch after a shift. It’s not like tree sitting creates an enormous obstacle; there are a lot of trees that can be cut down surrounding a tree sitter in a designated clear cut after all. But soon enough they weren’t satisfied with the confrontation that was taking place during the day shift, as no one was coming down. When Alan climbed down from his shift after every one had apparently left, there were two black clothed RCMP officers concealing themselves behind his tree, waiting for him. He managed to flee in the rain and even though he was followed by police dogs; he escaped by crossing the Walbran River and circuited back to the camp. He was not identified. It was the first of only three successful sitter escapes that took place in the Walbran Valley. He ended up being arrested in a rather mundane way, but that comes later. Alan also ended up being one of the people who broke the sixteen km rule and came back to the Walbran only to get arrested a second time, which really got him into trouble.
It was pretty obvious that people came out of that tree sitting confrontation markedly changed and traumatized. It would amount to being verbally abused all day, as well as being subject to every type of persuasion tactic and threat imaginable; the RCMP were always using the threat of worsening the charges for anyone who resisted. You can imagine what was said to the female tree sitters; there were many of them, including Marianne and Amanda. It was Amanda who remarked about how sore you could get sitting on a tree limb in excess of eight hours so the tree sitters began using little makeshift platforms to sit on, no more than a strip of plywood. Many other women sat on road blockades or stood in order to be arrested, including Lynne who was put in a tripod suspended over the road. Maggie and Rebecca and Dan were arrested for standing in front of her when a grader shoveled debris and rocks towards the structure.
In the forest where a clearcut took place, the tree sitters would be all alone with no witnesses. That was the first tactic. The boundary being used to define the parameter of where active logging was taking place was 100 meters. This was based on how far away anyone not participating in the logging was supposed to be for safety reasons according to the Workman Protection Act. What the RCMP shortly began doing was arbitrarily putting that boundary a half mile away or more so the tree sitters would have no human support or contact. They enforced their arbitrary boundary by saying anyone who stepped over it would be arrested for contempt of court. In this manner they isolated the tree sitters completely so no one could see them and there were no witnesses to the confrontation that would take place in the clearcut.
Paul the Australian was a sitter when things got confrontational. It became the usual tactic that even though the RCMP was the enforcement entity who was there to perform the arrests, they would send a logger up the tree to confront the sitter and convince him or her to come down. The logger’s method of climbing a tree using cork boots and a leather belt means that he can’t climb where there are any limbs, so a logger proceeding up this way would bring his chainsaw, de-limbing the tree every step of the way. When a logger was sent up, the RCMP would literally turn their backs on the situation so they weren’t witness to whatever might happen. That way if the sitter was injured they could not be compelled to testify as to what happened. There was no such thing as impartiality and no protection for the sitter. The RCMP were only present to enforce the injunction. Paul rappelled down part way to meet the logger in order to prevent him from de-limbing the tree any further. This was a losing proposition because eventually the logger could out manoeuvre him; Paul’s rappel lines would become wrapped around the tree a full 360 degrees, and then the logger could pass him as he would have to unwrap himself the other way. Paul slowed him down for a while but had to retreat to the platform. The logger with his chainsaw then proceeded to start chain-sawing the two limbs the platform was resting on. He cut one limb halfway, and then proceeded to chainsaw the second. Paul unhooked from his rappel line showing the logger that if he cut down the platform, Paul would be in freefall, possibly to his death. The logger continued to chainsaw the second limb, expecting to scare Paul into hooking back into his rappel line so he could force him to the ground. It was only when he went to switch back to finish sawing the first limb, and Paul managed to get his arm in place next to it telling the logger ‘if you cut any further, you will be cutting through my arm’ that the logger shut off his chainsaw, gave up, and went back down the tree. That was the confrontation for that day. That was the sort of temerity it took for a tree sitter to win the day, just one day. There were many, many days. The confrontation lasted from June until October, the entire logging season.
Tree sitting was used in Clayoquot Sound as well after the Walbran blockade was finished. Having become immersed in that circuit, one night at their home in 1993 Rahab had the privilege of meeting a woman in her early 20’s named Nicole who had just finished being a tree sitter in Clayoquot. Rahab sat and listened to her entire story of the confrontation she went through at 90 ft. in the air, higher than nearly all the platforms there had been in the Walbran. As with the Walbran confrontations, a logger was sent up de-limbing the tree all the way in order to get her down, but before that, the company had brought in a back-hoe. Again the RCMP had deliberately avoided being witnesses. Nicole was subject to the back-hoe digging a trench on all three sides of the tree she was in, making it so unstable it was shaking, with the threat that it would just continue. Then a logger was sent up on day three. The logger they sent up was green enough he was visibly shaking. He pleaded with her to just come down because he had no idea what he was doing. She conceded and was lowered with a strap looped around her midriff, which felt backbreaking.
Because of Paul the Australian’s harrowing episode and others in the Walbran an effort was made to improve on strategy and protection. The idea was conceived to suspend platforms between four trees. That meant more than one tree couldn’t be felled; it also made the tree sitter far more difficult to get to. It was a Walbran historic first; suspended platforms had never been attempted before. Among the men who went about suspending these platforms were ‘English Jon’, who had become a sailor at 16 and hence knew his knots, and an American named Andrew. One day Jon questioned Andrew as to why he was having giggle fits while they were suspending the platform. Andrew responded that he was on acid.
The ante’s continued of course. Eventually a suspended platform was put up 92 ft. in the air. One of the sitters to man this platform was Steve. The intimidation tactic that Fletcher-Challenge used for this platform was to bring a helicopter as close to the platform as they could at tree top level. This would cause enough turbulence in the trees to make the platform, which was suspended between trees by ropes reaching up to 20 ft. or more, literally bounce in the air, suddenly levitating erratically five feet or more, a fairly terrifying experience. At the end of his stint Steve was never so happy to touch terra firma in all his life. To this day Rahab still finds herself associating the sound of a helicopter with surveillance and intimidation. In the Walbran that is how they were used. A police helicopter made appearances as well.
The collective Walbran experience was an amalgam of extremes between the blockade experiences and the sublime contemplation of nature, the adventuring. The children took up rock-hopping as a means to get about, meaning they began to navigate by the rocks in the river and alternate this with the trails. By doing this they could travel the river much faster than people hiking solely by the trails. It was only possible in stretches of the river that had stretches of rocks at the surface, but by alternating and developing routes that utilized both, with a little bit of bushwack (the term for going off trail), they travelled much faster. It was also only possible during peak summer months and when it wasn’t wet or raining; attempting to rock hop in the rain would be a death wish. It felt more scenic to combine travelling the river with travelling the forest. They taught their routes to anyone who was interested, took anyone on tours who came and needed to go. They got so adept they would run at rock-hopping and race each other, short bursts since the moment you began to tire your reaction time would lapse ever so slightly, but enough you were risking serious injury.
Their idea of the efficacy of travelling this way was borne out when one man managed in trunks and a pair of sneakers to traverse the whole Walbran River down to where it reached the ocean, sleep over night on the beach, and traverse back the next day. Hiking through the bush to accomplish the same thing could easily take four days, and one group who attempted to do so and encountered serious rain got trapped for considerably longer. The Cummins kids trekked with all four of the Johnson kids, who came and joined them for stretches on their camping trip. They even took the ghetto blaster out to dance on the bridge together. They were so accustomed to the trails that one day when things were terribly scattered and no one was available from either the protest or family camp, Jonathan (who was only seven years old) was called upon to guide an entire tour bus of Church goers to Fletcher Falls where they could engage in prayer to save the valley.
The family themselves were praying for the valley daily as part of their routine prayers. Included on their list was a prayer for mechanical breakdowns of logging company equipment. Randy made a point of telling the protesters that prayer was just as effective as anything they were doing. The possibility of this got driven home when on one of the mainlines (major logging roads are called mainlines) to the South Walbran where there had been several confrontations and a lot of logging was slated to take place, they learned through the grapevine that the bridge on the summit of the line had been named ‘Breakdown Bridge’ by the loggers, because for a while every piece of equipment that crossed it, literally five in a row, had broken down in succession after crossing it.
One day during the initial tree-sitting period which took place on Glad Lake Main, Rahab decided to sneak past the RCMP line by going up hill off-road to see if she could find the tree-sitter. People had been standing at the line the RCMP erected the entire day waiting. She snuck past without incident and crested the hill. Getting to the top of the clearcut just as the last tree was cut and fell, she watched it hit the ground and shatter with a massive ringing crash. It shattered like glass into a multitude of pieces. The felling of a tree that size is something you never forget. It was only much later she learned that in Old Growth stands like these, about 25%of the timber is wasted as lumber. They don’t bother with the trees species they don’t want, but everything is felled. A Pacific Yew is a waste tree. A yew only five inches in diameter is approximately 90 years old. The fine grain makes it an incredible hardwood for carving and for making bows. In the Walbran they found one so large that when they put their arms around it, they could not reach their own fingers. The Pacific Yew has a substance called taxol in its bark that alleviates breast cancer and has since been synthesized, yet every yew in a clearcut is destroyed. And some trees are so big and so old, the impact when they hit the ground just shatters them. This is especially common with red cedar, so common in fact that long after a clearcut has been ‘harvested’, cedar shake guys come in by helicopter to collect cedar shake (which can be made into shingles) from the shattered cedars that are left. Plenty of wood is left behind.
postscript: there are more pictures of the Walbran Valley here.
The Walbran Valley - CHAPTER 7 - Part 2
The initial happenings have receded into vague memory at this point, which is regrettable, though on the other hand it would make for far too much to relate. So what I have here is a series of jumbled highlights, or lowlights and not a lot of progression. The family watched and learned of the blockades and bore witness to the steady pattern of escalation between both sides, one in innovation, the other in repressing it. There were blockades on the road most mornings initially, but then the tactic shifted to tree sitting. People would volunteer to become blockaders who would be arrested. Often the more effective actions were simpler. For example a six-hour delay was achieved when a young girl slipped under the first logging truck to stop at the blockade and krypto-locked herself (at the neck) to the chassis of the worker’s truck.
These people who volunteered were making a life-altering serious commitment. While an injunction of this sort falls under the category of civil law and is a matter between two parties at a specific place, it can be changed arbitrarily. The injunction approach was launched in the interest of preventing the grievances that caused the civil disobedience in the first place from ever being entered in court. Once accused of breaking an injunction, why the person was blockading becomes irrelevant to the court. The matter for the court to resolve is simply whether or not the person arrested broke the injunction. Once the logging companies had made a practice of launching injunctions to end protests against logging the injunction’s parameters were broadened impressively in novel ways. First, they were broadened to apply on the protester side to potentially anyone on the planet by ascribing their powers to apply to ‘John Doe, Jane Doe, and persons unknown’. Then the area they were being applied to was aggressively broadened as well to arrive at almost unlimited scope, meaning the companies, once they had one, would try to get it to apply to very large land areas, not just the valley or road at issue. The injunction created for the Walbran stated that no one arrested under it could ever return to within sixteen kilometers of the valley again, though it applied to the areas where any logging activity took place within the valley itself. That was broadening in itself, for the injunction was no longer ascribed to a specific area. As time progressed, it became clear that what was considered the parameters of a logging activity had a lot to do with what was laid down with the Workman’s Protection Act, though on the ground this was used loosely.
There was a new precedent in the Walbran proceeding; it was the first time the Attorney General of British Columbia arbitrarily ruled that anyone arrested in the Walbran was actually in contempt of the Court for breaking the injunction, and he made this a criminal offense. What this meant was that anyone who sat on those blockades and refused to move when the RCMP told them to, anyone who became limp, was given a criminal record for life. When the Attorney General issued a similar injunction for Clayoquot Sound he made this retroactive, so it was applied to every one who had ever been arrested in there, criminalizing people who had been arrested when resisting the injunction was still considered civil disobedience. It also meant that the entire basis for the act of civil disobedience was irrelevant in the court’s sight. All that was relevant to the court was whether or not the person arrested had been in contempt of court, which was pretty much a fait accompli since the person had been arrested on that basis.
This means that the reasons for the protest, that the logging was being carried out in ways that severely degraded the environment on land the public owned, and that they were undertaking this clearcutting at a rapacious rate, was irrelevant. That the Annual Allowable Cut is an egregious number far overshooting reality and that much of the logs cut are exported as raw logs to be processed somewhere else (The USA and Japan –Japan submerges trees in lakes for future use; they are that valuable) and don’t supply local jobs, is irrelevant. That the logging method is clearcutting no matter what the terrain or slope or precipitation, and that these can be added and were added upon until one such clearcut was over 300 000 Ha in size and these are so extensive they can be seen from space, was also irrelevant. That clearcutting causes soil erosion and landslides on a mass scale on this sort of terrain is irrelevant. The fact that this destroys water quality and stream morphology everywhere it is practiced (which is everywhere), destroying the salmon fishery by eliminating salmon spawning runs, is irrelevant. The fact that the Tree Farm Licenses that were at issue had been granted fraudulently and the Forest Minister responsible for it incarcerated for bribery in the ‘sale’ of TFL 46 (The Walbran is comprised of TFL 44 and 46), was irrelevant. The fact that the stumpage fee the logging companies pay per tree amounts to highway robbery (the lumber from a single average size Old Growth tree is easily $300 000), and resulted in the softwood lumber tariff war between Canada and the US, was also irrelevant. The fact that second growth is wide grain low quality timber because it shoots up and never matures under a tree canopy, irrelevant.
“At present, old-growth still accounts for about 70 per cent of the total harvest, with second-growth at 30 per cent.” -2007
The fact that there were only 10 pristine watersheds over 5000 Ha in size remaining on Vancouver Island out of 170 by 1994 and this number could have been different, was also irrelevant. That only 13% of the Island ended up being parkland after this fight, and that only 35% of that is actually lowland elevation productive old growth forest (meaning only %6 of what exists province wide is preserved), and that 87% of Old Growth on the South Island has already been logged, is also deemed irrelevant. That the South Island was (and is) home to the largest trees in all of Canada, irrelevant. You only have to click on a map to see how significant a chunk of remaining Old Growth the Carmanah/Walbran is. It is the last large chunk of green beneath Barkley Sound other than that surrounding Nitinat Lake (Pacific Rim National Park). It is in the Coastal Western Hemlock biogeoclimactic zone, the most productive forest in all of Canada. Apart from said species, the primary tree species are Sitka Spruce (Picea sitchensis), Western Red Cedar (Thuja plicata) and Yellow Cedar (Chamaecyparis nootkatenis).
It is primarily due to the fact that people protested and were willing to get arrested under criminal contempt that the Upper Carmanah and Lower Walbran ended up preserved as a provincial park, not to mention the trail building effort that had gone on in the Walbran since the latter half of the ‘80’s primarily by Syd Haskell’s Carmanah Forestry Society, an act that was made illegal as a consequence. Thanks to the Forest Practices Code it is now illegal for the public to establish or maintain trails in pristine areas on Public Crown Land in BC. The prospective penalty is either a year of jail time, an $100 000 fine, or even potentially both. In the case of the park that was made basically at the behest of 69 criminal arrests and the accompanying public protest and sentiment during a heated provincial election that proved to be an upset, the Upper Walbran, right into the central confluence where the three branches of the Walbran meet, remains unprotected, including the largest found trees and groves in the valley. The irony of the above article is that the tree it is referring to is in the unprotected portion of the Walbran Valley. And so is this one, the Castle Giant.
While all this is deemed irrelevant when an injunction is brought to bear and made criminal contempt, conversely the punishment for contempt of court is severe, and has included giving 10 months or more of jail time to septuagenarians. It effectively wiped out the ability of the people to protest to the court and government about what was happening on their lands, even though it was to shortly culminate in the largest mass arrest in Canadian history in Clayoquot Sound in 1993. While this total is officially listed as 856, according to an eye-witness arrestee (named Con) who was one of the last group to be arrested, the total was over 1200 people as the final tally only lists those who were prosecuted and excludes minors. He knows because he was able to see his number transcribed with his name in literally the last tally of names up to the final name and number.
All of these people were branded as criminals. The thing is there have been tree-sitting and blockading incidents that have lasted two years in the time since where no injunction was even sought because it was too much of a public embarrassment for the logging company to proceed with one. They opted to endure the blockade and let people have their day and say in court. Interestingly this was in an instance where logging practices were not going to be addressed since the matter at issue was a parking lot expansion at Cathedral Grove, the token Old Growth park MacMillan Bloedel granted the locals while annihilating most everything else. The court has full legal apparatus and laws in place to deal with such blockades without ever having to resort to granting an injunction in the first place, let alone opting to make resisting one criminal contempt of Court.
In the Walbran protest camp everything was done and mandated through open round table meetings via consensus. There were many foreign people involved, for people from other lands had an ability to recognize the value of what they were witnessing, because relatively speaking, they were from places were no such forests existed, whereas anyone local had grown up immersed. In fact every time you pass Royal Roads University or go into the Sooke Hills you are looking at some of the last remnants of native Old Growth. It is natural to us. It was more of a natural wonder to everyone else. There were Americans, English (Peter, Carrot, Jon and Max), and individuals from Holland, Australia, Singapore, and a fairly large group from Toronto. Many nationalities came passing through to see it, from as far a field as Vietnam and the Ukraine. If you spoke to them about how they encountered the Walbran the story was the same for the majority. They encountered the place through happenstance. They were so in awe they stopped whatever it was that they were doing and stayed there to stop it from being logged. It was no different for these people than the encounter had been for the family.
postscript: there are pictures that go with Betty's arrest (the septuagenarian) here.
This Douglas Fir was named 'Big Betty' in her honour. It too is in the unprotected area of the Walbran Valley. It is the sixth largest in all of Canada. Photo Credit: Jason Smith.
These people who volunteered were making a life-altering serious commitment. While an injunction of this sort falls under the category of civil law and is a matter between two parties at a specific place, it can be changed arbitrarily. The injunction approach was launched in the interest of preventing the grievances that caused the civil disobedience in the first place from ever being entered in court. Once accused of breaking an injunction, why the person was blockading becomes irrelevant to the court. The matter for the court to resolve is simply whether or not the person arrested broke the injunction. Once the logging companies had made a practice of launching injunctions to end protests against logging the injunction’s parameters were broadened impressively in novel ways. First, they were broadened to apply on the protester side to potentially anyone on the planet by ascribing their powers to apply to ‘John Doe, Jane Doe, and persons unknown’. Then the area they were being applied to was aggressively broadened as well to arrive at almost unlimited scope, meaning the companies, once they had one, would try to get it to apply to very large land areas, not just the valley or road at issue. The injunction created for the Walbran stated that no one arrested under it could ever return to within sixteen kilometers of the valley again, though it applied to the areas where any logging activity took place within the valley itself. That was broadening in itself, for the injunction was no longer ascribed to a specific area. As time progressed, it became clear that what was considered the parameters of a logging activity had a lot to do with what was laid down with the Workman’s Protection Act, though on the ground this was used loosely.
There was a new precedent in the Walbran proceeding; it was the first time the Attorney General of British Columbia arbitrarily ruled that anyone arrested in the Walbran was actually in contempt of the Court for breaking the injunction, and he made this a criminal offense. What this meant was that anyone who sat on those blockades and refused to move when the RCMP told them to, anyone who became limp, was given a criminal record for life. When the Attorney General issued a similar injunction for Clayoquot Sound he made this retroactive, so it was applied to every one who had ever been arrested in there, criminalizing people who had been arrested when resisting the injunction was still considered civil disobedience. It also meant that the entire basis for the act of civil disobedience was irrelevant in the court’s sight. All that was relevant to the court was whether or not the person arrested had been in contempt of court, which was pretty much a fait accompli since the person had been arrested on that basis.
This means that the reasons for the protest, that the logging was being carried out in ways that severely degraded the environment on land the public owned, and that they were undertaking this clearcutting at a rapacious rate, was irrelevant. That the Annual Allowable Cut is an egregious number far overshooting reality and that much of the logs cut are exported as raw logs to be processed somewhere else (The USA and Japan –Japan submerges trees in lakes for future use; they are that valuable) and don’t supply local jobs, is irrelevant. That the logging method is clearcutting no matter what the terrain or slope or precipitation, and that these can be added and were added upon until one such clearcut was over 300 000 Ha in size and these are so extensive they can be seen from space, was also irrelevant. That clearcutting causes soil erosion and landslides on a mass scale on this sort of terrain is irrelevant. The fact that this destroys water quality and stream morphology everywhere it is practiced (which is everywhere), destroying the salmon fishery by eliminating salmon spawning runs, is irrelevant. The fact that the Tree Farm Licenses that were at issue had been granted fraudulently and the Forest Minister responsible for it incarcerated for bribery in the ‘sale’ of TFL 46 (The Walbran is comprised of TFL 44 and 46), was irrelevant. The fact that the stumpage fee the logging companies pay per tree amounts to highway robbery (the lumber from a single average size Old Growth tree is easily $300 000), and resulted in the softwood lumber tariff war between Canada and the US, was also irrelevant. The fact that second growth is wide grain low quality timber because it shoots up and never matures under a tree canopy, irrelevant.
“At present, old-growth still accounts for about 70 per cent of the total harvest, with second-growth at 30 per cent.” -2007
The fact that there were only 10 pristine watersheds over 5000 Ha in size remaining on Vancouver Island out of 170 by 1994 and this number could have been different, was also irrelevant. That only 13% of the Island ended up being parkland after this fight, and that only 35% of that is actually lowland elevation productive old growth forest (meaning only %6 of what exists province wide is preserved), and that 87% of Old Growth on the South Island has already been logged, is also deemed irrelevant. That the South Island was (and is) home to the largest trees in all of Canada, irrelevant. You only have to click on a map to see how significant a chunk of remaining Old Growth the Carmanah/Walbran is. It is the last large chunk of green beneath Barkley Sound other than that surrounding Nitinat Lake (Pacific Rim National Park). It is in the Coastal Western Hemlock biogeoclimactic zone, the most productive forest in all of Canada. Apart from said species, the primary tree species are Sitka Spruce (Picea sitchensis), Western Red Cedar (Thuja plicata) and Yellow Cedar (Chamaecyparis nootkatenis).
It is primarily due to the fact that people protested and were willing to get arrested under criminal contempt that the Upper Carmanah and Lower Walbran ended up preserved as a provincial park, not to mention the trail building effort that had gone on in the Walbran since the latter half of the ‘80’s primarily by Syd Haskell’s Carmanah Forestry Society, an act that was made illegal as a consequence. Thanks to the Forest Practices Code it is now illegal for the public to establish or maintain trails in pristine areas on Public Crown Land in BC. The prospective penalty is either a year of jail time, an $100 000 fine, or even potentially both. In the case of the park that was made basically at the behest of 69 criminal arrests and the accompanying public protest and sentiment during a heated provincial election that proved to be an upset, the Upper Walbran, right into the central confluence where the three branches of the Walbran meet, remains unprotected, including the largest found trees and groves in the valley. The irony of the above article is that the tree it is referring to is in the unprotected portion of the Walbran Valley. And so is this one, the Castle Giant.
While all this is deemed irrelevant when an injunction is brought to bear and made criminal contempt, conversely the punishment for contempt of court is severe, and has included giving 10 months or more of jail time to septuagenarians. It effectively wiped out the ability of the people to protest to the court and government about what was happening on their lands, even though it was to shortly culminate in the largest mass arrest in Canadian history in Clayoquot Sound in 1993. While this total is officially listed as 856, according to an eye-witness arrestee (named Con) who was one of the last group to be arrested, the total was over 1200 people as the final tally only lists those who were prosecuted and excludes minors. He knows because he was able to see his number transcribed with his name in literally the last tally of names up to the final name and number.
All of these people were branded as criminals. The thing is there have been tree-sitting and blockading incidents that have lasted two years in the time since where no injunction was even sought because it was too much of a public embarrassment for the logging company to proceed with one. They opted to endure the blockade and let people have their day and say in court. Interestingly this was in an instance where logging practices were not going to be addressed since the matter at issue was a parking lot expansion at Cathedral Grove, the token Old Growth park MacMillan Bloedel granted the locals while annihilating most everything else. The court has full legal apparatus and laws in place to deal with such blockades without ever having to resort to granting an injunction in the first place, let alone opting to make resisting one criminal contempt of Court.
In the Walbran protest camp everything was done and mandated through open round table meetings via consensus. There were many foreign people involved, for people from other lands had an ability to recognize the value of what they were witnessing, because relatively speaking, they were from places were no such forests existed, whereas anyone local had grown up immersed. In fact every time you pass Royal Roads University or go into the Sooke Hills you are looking at some of the last remnants of native Old Growth. It is natural to us. It was more of a natural wonder to everyone else. There were Americans, English (Peter, Carrot, Jon and Max), and individuals from Holland, Australia, Singapore, and a fairly large group from Toronto. Many nationalities came passing through to see it, from as far a field as Vietnam and the Ukraine. If you spoke to them about how they encountered the Walbran the story was the same for the majority. They encountered the place through happenstance. They were so in awe they stopped whatever it was that they were doing and stayed there to stop it from being logged. It was no different for these people than the encounter had been for the family.
postscript: there are pictures that go with Betty's arrest (the septuagenarian) here.
This Douglas Fir was named 'Big Betty' in her honour. It too is in the unprotected area of the Walbran Valley. It is the sixth largest in all of Canada. Photo Credit: Jason Smith.
The Walbran Valley - CHAPTER 7 - Part 1
In the late summer of 1990 the family went on a local ‘forestry’ tour. It was a tour geared towards telling the public that forestry in British Columbia on Vancouver Island was well managed and everything out in the backwoods was going just fine. It managed to create that impression, despite the fact that midway through the tour they had everyone disembark in a barren valley that had been deliberately razed by fire where everything left was blackened charcoal. The tour guide explained how this released carbon, making nutrients more accessible for the second growth. Everything he said about it could not alleviate the sight of that blackened landscape, the bare earth and the severity of the slopes. The audible gasps that had accompanied the sight of it could not be reassured by his conviction of how it would all come back. When they eventually reached the end of the long gravel road he pointed out the original old growth forest without mentioning it was slated for logging. It should have been implicitly obvious; there was a bridge to ‘no where’, meaning it was a big investment (the single steel girder was so immense is was higher than a man underneath and you could walk the lip of it from end to end, a caper someone pulled off eventually when they were sneaking). Across the bridge lay pristine forest. It was ‘the other side’. He did not identify where they were, and the stop was brief.
A middle aged pear-ish woman with a demeanor and jolly appearance to match stepped out of the forest and came walking across the bridge to ‘no where’. She was not part of the group; the group had not been invited to step inside. All she could say was ‘you have to go in there. You have to see it. It’s amazing.’ Rahab expected a blissed out reaction such as this from going into the grand woods. She knew that was what it would be like, and had a sense of distance within her self that made her indifferent to the appeal, categorizing it the way she would a drug trip with the same sense of dismissal. She did not attempt to cross the bridge. Though obviously there was no time to do so, she felt immune to the experience as well, even though there was an interior tug that identified the woods with her childhood. All re-entered the bus without stepping across the bridge. The bus driver had clearly driven logging trucks all his life, was hardly decelerating to corner, and driving as if he was at the wheel of a jeep. He ripped them there and back at an incredible speed; Rahab noted at one point he averaged between 60 and 65 km. The only other driver she saw take the back wood roads like that turned out to by Syd Haskell, who had also been a logger in another life. That Syd’s rejoinder was about having three tire blowouts in one trip was no surprise at all. But that followed much later. The tour guide also promoted the second growth and how great it was doing and dismissed alder in the main stretch of Cowichan Valley. He also mentioned this happened to be some of the best growing territory in the country, as well as that the Cowichan Valley was recorded as receiving the most rainfall in all of Canada. Over the course of the next decade the stands he pointed out to them as doing so well were all clearcut.
Cowichan Valley
In 1991 they did the exact same road trip again in June with a small difference. This time they were going with Pam and Ted, who were part of an orienteering club, and grabbing the opportunity to take a hike with someone who knew the Walbran Valley (and how to get there). (If you zoom out on TJ Watt's google map, you can see how the Carmanah/Walbran is surrounded by clearcuts.) The hiking party consisted of Pam, Ted, Randy, Rahab, Judah and Zeb, and a foster kid of Pam and Ted’s named Jason. Phil H. was their guide. There was a difference going in; the main road was gated now. Maintaining a locked gate is illegal on logging roads because part of the deal for access to timber on Public Crown Land was/is that the logging companies build and maintain the roads to allow uninhibited access by the public into the backwoods. They are not permitted to cordon off public land from the public; approximately 2/3's of the land in BC is Public Crown Land and is considered to belong to the public. Despite this regulation the logging company had security at the new metal gate. They only let vehicles pass once they had counted the number of occupants, gotten the driver’s first and last name, and verified how long the group would be staying. (Needless to say they had ample time to take down license plates.)
Without any further ado they arrived at ‘the bridge to no where’; this time there was a camp at the end of the road, and people were being trained to rappel off the bridge. The first person Rahab saw and remembered turned out to be Kansas, who was American and studying to be a librarian. It was Rahab who recognized that this was the exact same place the logging tour had concluded the year before. This time the intent was to hike to ‘Maxine’s tree’, a giant Sitka Spruce (Canada’s second largest), that Syd had discovered himself, built a trail to and named after his daughter. Midway to the tree they ran into a large group of hikers from the main camp, who were camping at a site called Giggling Spruce. They later learned that this group had a lot of foreigners who had taken off into the woods because Canadian Immigration literally flew to the bridge by helicopter in order to check everyone’s visa’s and green cards, with the intent of deporting anyone who wasn’t supposed to be there. Some commitment considering this was 45 kilometers off road into the back woods.
While they’d experience no inclimate weather the entire drive up, it rained for most of the hike, which lasted more than five hours. The cable car at the water crossing was ‘down’ (a two person affair manually operated hand over hand with a rope), and they had had to cross the Walbran ‘Creek’ by building stacks of rocks in the water to hop across. Needless to say everyone got pretty wet by the time the day was out. In their usual venturesome way, the kids from the family who were on the hike decided they were going to try and trek down the giant cascade sequence of the waterfall they had encountered on the way up, rather than take the trail down. With the rain slick on what turned out to be a brown algae on nearly all the rock surfaces, this turned out to be dangerous, and the trek was longer than anticipated; the falls were a cascading series that lasted over 100 meters. As a pun they had been named for the logging company in the area, a foreign multi-national named Fletcher-Challenge who was actually from New Zealand but whose logging practices were so environmentally degrading they were banned from working in New Zealand. So the waterfall had been dubbed ‘Fletcher Falls’, in the hope of being predictive.
Despite all this the family had the time of their lives, and unanimously decided where they were going to be that summer. Having foregone camping the year prior they were pretty determined to make a summer of it, and now they knew where; there were no camping fees and thanks to Syd, an excellent set of trails it would take days to finish. They had never seen a place so magnificent. They walked out converted just like the woman Rahab had encountered the year before. It was original Old Growth, the real forest, and they were going to camp there. They had never seen so many big trees in their lives; it was a redolent place, an ‘Explosion of Life’ as her sister would say. To Rahab it felt like coming home. It was like getting to return to what she had loved about living in the country as a child, which was wandering solitary, except amplified because this was the original country.
They went out as a family the following week with the ancient camping trailer that had cost $50 and taken Randy a great deal of fixit time. It ran the danger of fish-tailing on the highway if you got to a speed between 80 and 90 km, which trust me had been a very exciting moment accompanying on a motorcycle. It had come into its own housing their great grandma on a previous camping trip. They also brought a few more tents, as it would take three to house the entire family. The first morning they awoke to find an RCMP officer (Royal Canadian Mounted Police, Canada’s national police force under federal jurisdiction) with a large video camera taking video footage of their campsite, to the extent of filming the interior of their car (it was an old green Ford Grand Torino). He went through the entire camp applying the same level of scrutiny to everyone there. The morning after that, the first arrest at a logging road blockade in the Walbran took place; Mira was arrested for chaining herself to the underside of a broken down car. The first day she and Dana had chained themselves to a stump, and the RCMP and loggers had left taking no action. Mira was the first in a series of 69 (anyone else have a different official number then please tell me as I am not sure) people arrested there. The second person to be arrested in the Walbran Valley was Dana K. (am I right about this arrest sequence?), who was only sixteen years old. Rahab, Zeb and Talitha got up in the morning to be present at the blockade in support where Mira was arrested. Zeb cried openly. Back at her work shift Rahab was shocked to learn that their faces had been on the National, television news Canada wide. It was a while before she got back though. It was also a long while before she learned from Barb that the protesters’ first impression of her, thanks to the fact that she had shaved her head the only time in her life the week prior to coming out there (which was a saving grace out in the woods), it was assumed that she was tough; they speculated she must be a serious dyke.
That was how the family ended up smack in the middle of a rainforest civil disobedience blockade that headlined throughout the province and sometimes the country. It was as inadvertent as their assay into the West Bank had been, and about as immediate. It was not long before their parents attended a blockade as well and received their ‘crash’ education on RCMP parlance in such a confrontation, which included swearing like sailors to get immediate movement. It was a real surprise and something Randy never forgot; he was there that first day as an observer and polite. They were however eminently prepared for such a confrontation. Thanks to having lived in the West Bank, the family was not intimidated. They already had the recording drill down; every encounter they had with the RCMP and loggers was captured on film. Randy was not sure how to address the wholesale destruction of nature and the hostility they encountered. He prayed about it and offered the question to God. He wasn’t jumping into becoming civilly disobedient himself, and asked how they as a family should offer their support?
What they ended up doing was that they ran the ‘Walbran Hotel’. It was a little bit of a borrowed sensibility from ‘Field of Dreams’- ‘if you build it, he will come’. As the ‘Walbran Hotel’ they fed, housed and dried anyone who needed it. Getting dry was the common challenge. It didn’t matter how backwoods you might consider yourself to be, after three days of unrelenting rain, everything is soaked through. Tent flies and tarps do not make a difference in the woods, not unless you have two tarps placed properly, for you ground tarp must reach less area than the tarp you suspend over the tent. You have to be exceedingly well equipped. This however will not get you through a winter. From the outset the family camped on the roadside and not in the woods, which was Randy’s decision. They never set up tents in the forest. It would come into play as a fundamental, pretty much necessary difference when dealing long term. And without question, the Walbran Valley was rainier than what was touted ‘the rainiest place in Canada’, the Cowichan Valley. As a west coast watershed, the Walbran met those clouds off the Pacific first. It had simply never had a rain meter to measure the deluge.
The first challenge of the wilderness in the Walbran’s terms is hypothermia. When the wood on the ground is waterlogged for the majority of the year and hardly has a chance to dry in the summer window, what use is it for drying and keeping warm? The answer is, it isn’t. It actually takes months to dry or cure properly. Many people burned the wood, but without drying beforehand and an accumulated process, that burning would not give off warmth. It was something the family learned a lot about, for it was a continual struggle that became Randy’s prime obsession. Warmth is on the bottom rung of Maslow’s pyramid of human needs, those of vital necessity. It took a great deal of effort to develop a warm fire, something that people could gravitate to when there was little else, and use to get themselves dry and warm again. In effect the ‘Walbran Hotel’ provided a supporting backbone to the protest movement. The Walbran Hotel caused enough strain on the family financially that since they were in an effort to save some of the last remaining greatest and largest forest stands (in terms of the individual trees) in all of Canada, Randy felt in good conscience about applying to welfare for assistance. It was nearly the first time for the family ever being on the dole; the other had been when Rahab was little; it had only been for 3 months. Being less regulated at the time, the paper applications all went into one tray. The family knew a social worker who worked there, John B.'s mother Ursula. She was actually a member of their little church. Randy told her the day he would apply and when it would be in the docket. She simply rifled through and picked up their file and became their personal case-worker, an act that would be impossible today.
Postscript: the youtube link, 'The Road Stops Here' - opens following a road that passes through clearcut after clearcut; that is the road that leads to the Walbran Valley.
There are pictures of the Walbran Valley here.
The Walbran Valley Reunion site, which has pictures of the protest can be found here.
A middle aged pear-ish woman with a demeanor and jolly appearance to match stepped out of the forest and came walking across the bridge to ‘no where’. She was not part of the group; the group had not been invited to step inside. All she could say was ‘you have to go in there. You have to see it. It’s amazing.’ Rahab expected a blissed out reaction such as this from going into the grand woods. She knew that was what it would be like, and had a sense of distance within her self that made her indifferent to the appeal, categorizing it the way she would a drug trip with the same sense of dismissal. She did not attempt to cross the bridge. Though obviously there was no time to do so, she felt immune to the experience as well, even though there was an interior tug that identified the woods with her childhood. All re-entered the bus without stepping across the bridge. The bus driver had clearly driven logging trucks all his life, was hardly decelerating to corner, and driving as if he was at the wheel of a jeep. He ripped them there and back at an incredible speed; Rahab noted at one point he averaged between 60 and 65 km. The only other driver she saw take the back wood roads like that turned out to by Syd Haskell, who had also been a logger in another life. That Syd’s rejoinder was about having three tire blowouts in one trip was no surprise at all. But that followed much later. The tour guide also promoted the second growth and how great it was doing and dismissed alder in the main stretch of Cowichan Valley. He also mentioned this happened to be some of the best growing territory in the country, as well as that the Cowichan Valley was recorded as receiving the most rainfall in all of Canada. Over the course of the next decade the stands he pointed out to them as doing so well were all clearcut.
Cowichan Valley
In 1991 they did the exact same road trip again in June with a small difference. This time they were going with Pam and Ted, who were part of an orienteering club, and grabbing the opportunity to take a hike with someone who knew the Walbran Valley (and how to get there). (If you zoom out on TJ Watt's google map, you can see how the Carmanah/Walbran is surrounded by clearcuts.) The hiking party consisted of Pam, Ted, Randy, Rahab, Judah and Zeb, and a foster kid of Pam and Ted’s named Jason. Phil H. was their guide. There was a difference going in; the main road was gated now. Maintaining a locked gate is illegal on logging roads because part of the deal for access to timber on Public Crown Land was/is that the logging companies build and maintain the roads to allow uninhibited access by the public into the backwoods. They are not permitted to cordon off public land from the public; approximately 2/3's of the land in BC is Public Crown Land and is considered to belong to the public. Despite this regulation the logging company had security at the new metal gate. They only let vehicles pass once they had counted the number of occupants, gotten the driver’s first and last name, and verified how long the group would be staying. (Needless to say they had ample time to take down license plates.)
Without any further ado they arrived at ‘the bridge to no where’; this time there was a camp at the end of the road, and people were being trained to rappel off the bridge. The first person Rahab saw and remembered turned out to be Kansas, who was American and studying to be a librarian. It was Rahab who recognized that this was the exact same place the logging tour had concluded the year before. This time the intent was to hike to ‘Maxine’s tree’, a giant Sitka Spruce (Canada’s second largest), that Syd had discovered himself, built a trail to and named after his daughter. Midway to the tree they ran into a large group of hikers from the main camp, who were camping at a site called Giggling Spruce. They later learned that this group had a lot of foreigners who had taken off into the woods because Canadian Immigration literally flew to the bridge by helicopter in order to check everyone’s visa’s and green cards, with the intent of deporting anyone who wasn’t supposed to be there. Some commitment considering this was 45 kilometers off road into the back woods.
While they’d experience no inclimate weather the entire drive up, it rained for most of the hike, which lasted more than five hours. The cable car at the water crossing was ‘down’ (a two person affair manually operated hand over hand with a rope), and they had had to cross the Walbran ‘Creek’ by building stacks of rocks in the water to hop across. Needless to say everyone got pretty wet by the time the day was out. In their usual venturesome way, the kids from the family who were on the hike decided they were going to try and trek down the giant cascade sequence of the waterfall they had encountered on the way up, rather than take the trail down. With the rain slick on what turned out to be a brown algae on nearly all the rock surfaces, this turned out to be dangerous, and the trek was longer than anticipated; the falls were a cascading series that lasted over 100 meters. As a pun they had been named for the logging company in the area, a foreign multi-national named Fletcher-Challenge who was actually from New Zealand but whose logging practices were so environmentally degrading they were banned from working in New Zealand. So the waterfall had been dubbed ‘Fletcher Falls’, in the hope of being predictive.
Despite all this the family had the time of their lives, and unanimously decided where they were going to be that summer. Having foregone camping the year prior they were pretty determined to make a summer of it, and now they knew where; there were no camping fees and thanks to Syd, an excellent set of trails it would take days to finish. They had never seen a place so magnificent. They walked out converted just like the woman Rahab had encountered the year before. It was original Old Growth, the real forest, and they were going to camp there. They had never seen so many big trees in their lives; it was a redolent place, an ‘Explosion of Life’ as her sister would say. To Rahab it felt like coming home. It was like getting to return to what she had loved about living in the country as a child, which was wandering solitary, except amplified because this was the original country.
They went out as a family the following week with the ancient camping trailer that had cost $50 and taken Randy a great deal of fixit time. It ran the danger of fish-tailing on the highway if you got to a speed between 80 and 90 km, which trust me had been a very exciting moment accompanying on a motorcycle. It had come into its own housing their great grandma on a previous camping trip. They also brought a few more tents, as it would take three to house the entire family. The first morning they awoke to find an RCMP officer (Royal Canadian Mounted Police, Canada’s national police force under federal jurisdiction) with a large video camera taking video footage of their campsite, to the extent of filming the interior of their car (it was an old green Ford Grand Torino). He went through the entire camp applying the same level of scrutiny to everyone there. The morning after that, the first arrest at a logging road blockade in the Walbran took place; Mira was arrested for chaining herself to the underside of a broken down car. The first day she and Dana had chained themselves to a stump, and the RCMP and loggers had left taking no action. Mira was the first in a series of 69 (anyone else have a different official number then please tell me as I am not sure) people arrested there. The second person to be arrested in the Walbran Valley was Dana K. (am I right about this arrest sequence?), who was only sixteen years old. Rahab, Zeb and Talitha got up in the morning to be present at the blockade in support where Mira was arrested. Zeb cried openly. Back at her work shift Rahab was shocked to learn that their faces had been on the National, television news Canada wide. It was a while before she got back though. It was also a long while before she learned from Barb that the protesters’ first impression of her, thanks to the fact that she had shaved her head the only time in her life the week prior to coming out there (which was a saving grace out in the woods), it was assumed that she was tough; they speculated she must be a serious dyke.
That was how the family ended up smack in the middle of a rainforest civil disobedience blockade that headlined throughout the province and sometimes the country. It was as inadvertent as their assay into the West Bank had been, and about as immediate. It was not long before their parents attended a blockade as well and received their ‘crash’ education on RCMP parlance in such a confrontation, which included swearing like sailors to get immediate movement. It was a real surprise and something Randy never forgot; he was there that first day as an observer and polite. They were however eminently prepared for such a confrontation. Thanks to having lived in the West Bank, the family was not intimidated. They already had the recording drill down; every encounter they had with the RCMP and loggers was captured on film. Randy was not sure how to address the wholesale destruction of nature and the hostility they encountered. He prayed about it and offered the question to God. He wasn’t jumping into becoming civilly disobedient himself, and asked how they as a family should offer their support?
What they ended up doing was that they ran the ‘Walbran Hotel’. It was a little bit of a borrowed sensibility from ‘Field of Dreams’- ‘if you build it, he will come’. As the ‘Walbran Hotel’ they fed, housed and dried anyone who needed it. Getting dry was the common challenge. It didn’t matter how backwoods you might consider yourself to be, after three days of unrelenting rain, everything is soaked through. Tent flies and tarps do not make a difference in the woods, not unless you have two tarps placed properly, for you ground tarp must reach less area than the tarp you suspend over the tent. You have to be exceedingly well equipped. This however will not get you through a winter. From the outset the family camped on the roadside and not in the woods, which was Randy’s decision. They never set up tents in the forest. It would come into play as a fundamental, pretty much necessary difference when dealing long term. And without question, the Walbran Valley was rainier than what was touted ‘the rainiest place in Canada’, the Cowichan Valley. As a west coast watershed, the Walbran met those clouds off the Pacific first. It had simply never had a rain meter to measure the deluge.
The first challenge of the wilderness in the Walbran’s terms is hypothermia. When the wood on the ground is waterlogged for the majority of the year and hardly has a chance to dry in the summer window, what use is it for drying and keeping warm? The answer is, it isn’t. It actually takes months to dry or cure properly. Many people burned the wood, but without drying beforehand and an accumulated process, that burning would not give off warmth. It was something the family learned a lot about, for it was a continual struggle that became Randy’s prime obsession. Warmth is on the bottom rung of Maslow’s pyramid of human needs, those of vital necessity. It took a great deal of effort to develop a warm fire, something that people could gravitate to when there was little else, and use to get themselves dry and warm again. In effect the ‘Walbran Hotel’ provided a supporting backbone to the protest movement. The Walbran Hotel caused enough strain on the family financially that since they were in an effort to save some of the last remaining greatest and largest forest stands (in terms of the individual trees) in all of Canada, Randy felt in good conscience about applying to welfare for assistance. It was nearly the first time for the family ever being on the dole; the other had been when Rahab was little; it had only been for 3 months. Being less regulated at the time, the paper applications all went into one tray. The family knew a social worker who worked there, John B.'s mother Ursula. She was actually a member of their little church. Randy told her the day he would apply and when it would be in the docket. She simply rifled through and picked up their file and became their personal case-worker, an act that would be impossible today.
Postscript: the youtube link, 'The Road Stops Here' - opens following a road that passes through clearcut after clearcut; that is the road that leads to the Walbran Valley.
There are pictures of the Walbran Valley here.
The Walbran Valley Reunion site, which has pictures of the protest can be found here.
Wednesday, July 28, 2010
On Seeing Avatar and Seeing Reality
I wish I had done this movie the service of seeing it properly but I just didn’t find it in my priorities. Entertainment just isn’t a priority (unless it’s kiddie entertainment), hasn’t been for a while and movies tended not to be my priority even when entertainment figured higher, though I did make a point with some I thought mattered. Back then this would have mattered.
Avatar puts me in a perplexing paradox I find I just have to accept. And it surely suffered being maligned from the purists in the environmental sector for not doing or saying enough or not saying it quite right. It suffered more than it ought to critically, at least from what I saw of the criticism, and maybe it got robbed at the Oscars by something that more correctly towed the party line. It is simply a movie and it was designed for entertainment and succeeds well; it conveys an otherworldly other world that is a visual feast fully integrated in its action, its vibrancy a plausible environment. That alone is its achievement, the awe and effort in every backdrop.
I’m easily swept and have always enjoyed a good Cameron yarn, his ability at plausible battles that manage to ratchet to the nth and beyond degree, the grounding that makes the calculated suspense so much more strong and worthwhile. With where I’ve invested my life it’s hard not to feel that Cameron hasn’t put his talents in service of a message of worth, that it’s basic only makes it more populist. (Salvation must come in the formulaic form of…well that’s better left unsaid.)
Trust me I have profound identity with this visual Pandora parable. It reflects my life 20 years ago, in which was caught the paradox between a techy artworld immersion love affair (surround sound and a four theme light show on the main floor of our home, an underground myth called ‘the tripping house’), juxtaposed with our second home away from home, a Swiss Family Robinson set up built from scratch in a clear cut wasteland on the fringe of some of the last pristine coastal temperate rainforest, smack in the middle of where the largest trees in Canada live. The tripping house’s best theme was, you betcha, black light neon string art/paper/paint covering all surfaces of the main living area which utilized 3-D and even engaged the floor. My first ever inhalation (introduced by my parents) coincided with a bloom of bioluminescent algae at the beach.
Pandora’s main otherworld element aside from its creatures (and the ‘Hallelujah Mountains’) is that it has a full ecosystem ‘theme’ of bioluminescent organisms, starting with the telepathic tree network which centers on their feminine deity Elya, which they access in the ‘tree of souls’ (a bioluminescent tree).
Given that I was raised to believe in a feminine Holy Spirit and that the ‘Tripping House’ was actually a church and prayer center the parallels are writ large with an unlimited budget. How beautifully they did it, that glow in the dark/neon theme, right up to the war paint on the warriors, which is exactly how neon colours look lit up by black light. Surely they employed this technique, certainly they replicated it. And oh, yes, I’m forgetting the other side that makes this complete, our family ended up in ‘Swiss Family Robinson’ mode by becoming engaged in a nationally covered passive protest blockade to save some of the last remnants of pristine temperate rainforest on Vancouver Island. In other words we were engaged in the real battle to save the real big trees. Which is where I end up flipping towards Avatar; coming from the real world, a place where this resistance really happened, Avatar is a panacea myth, a fake salve modulating what we know or don’t by telling us that the Natives get to win. Reality is that the Natives always lose.
Perhaps you find that questionable?
Well let’s bandy it about a little. In the Walbran Valley, we certainly lost, even though in terms of watershed area, it can be quibbled that the divvy of the primeval spoils was one of those Solomon exercises (divide it in half). If that had been carried out, the baby certainly would have lost; therein lies my point. Perhaps one would query Vietnam, didn’t the natives win that one? Perhaps in war at a terrible cost, but not when it came to the wages of economic warfare dubbed globalization. The same can be said for South Africa. Perestroika? Ever asked?
And spoils it is. Don’t ever assume that enviros and/or natives are not market-minded. Au Contraire. They do the math and know they are being ripped blind. All wealth is rooted in natural resource wealth. No trees? No paper/toilet paper/houses/furniture. No oil? No just about everything. No lithium? No Blackberries, no hybrid car batteries. This gets me to my quibble side viewing Avatar. It’s the level of disassociation in the audience, and how it leads to more of the same. Since the audience is so passive and pacified, it is more likely the bulk of Avatar’s influence will be to act as a panacea to that disassociation rather than as an awakening from it. They walk out with a sense of satisfaction that is false because they watched the natives win. No one thinks about what really happened in the woods, hardly anyone knows or even cares. And no one wonders about the relevance or where the Natives happen to be in the real world today. It was mind-blowing to watch this in the same week that the Pentagon announced there’s over a trillion’s worth of minerals in Afghanistan. No one asks themselves what it’s like to be Afghani today, inadvertently sitting on a trillion’s worth of minerals. Hardly anyone in America would notice any parallel with the US occupation, even though the plot line in Avatar has to do with dispossessing the Natives of a trillion’s worth of minerals through the use of violence and tearing up the place in the process. To me that’s gaping disassociation.
It was a little odd to hear through the twitter vine of depression groups being formed to try and deal with the fact that people felt like committing suicide just in the hope that they might end up reincarnating to a place similar to Pandora. Odd because it was the most passive form of disassociation from the real world you could have, the most escapist way you could deal with the sense of loss the movie produces. There is a sense of loss of that connect to the natural world, to a world which has not undergone wholesale destruction at human hands. People who were depressed over it reacting this way were so disassociated they probably didn’t even know about the real loss of the real world. It is like an amputee grieving for limbs that aren’t there, not willing to recognize that the Natives always lose, and that they’ve never once attempted to be one of them, or stop what happened to them, or been cognitive of the horror and utter pain they felt watching the earth die. They don’t know about Ecuador, or Nigeria, or even what happened to Canada, or recognize what happened to the Natives and the natural world of the US. They don’t know when the last significant tracts of giant redwoods were being fought over in California (1992), and were lost. They don’t know that the Natives always lose and that this goes way back.
And when that loss gets pronounced, the myth becomes more emphatic and causes more identity, because the myths are the inverse salve to ameliorate the loss, myths are where we get to win. Robin Hood for example. Robin Hood became most popular and most subversive during the wrench of the loss of the commons. In other words at precisely the time when the woods were lost, Robin Hood was at his epoch, winning for the poor in the woods. In the real world people with names like Winstanley were being publicly flogged for attempting to protest the loss of the commons. (Old habits die hard, as one of them is still at it today. He didn’t end up being flogged however. Just arrested, shot at…) If you read Tolstoy, he’ll mention peasants in Russia were being flogged for the exact same reason, eviction over clearcutting, and that soldiers were brought by train to publicly flog the peasant leaders.
When I say natives, it can be taken broadly. Native New Yorkers were subject to the collapse of the twin towers, were part of the clean up for the twin towers, many of whom were subject to the fall-out and subsequent life-long health issues that were continually denied and completely and deliberately obfuscated. You can ask someone like Jenna Orkin, who summed up the authoritative denial response as ‘let me count the ways I can screw you’. These eyewitness accounts, if you can find them, are always too long to be told. Even at the top of the wealth pyramid, the Natives are there to lose. We are undergoing an unspoken cancer epidemic, which is nothing more that the complete avoidance of preventive regulation and source identification in the interest of illness for profit. We don’t want to identify or discover chemical sources because they make money.
The sensation of satisfaction one might feel at seeing the natives protect their homeland in Avatar is nothing more than a virtual panacea that denies the reality that the natives always lose. If I tell you the real story of what it’s like to try and save the largest trees in a country, it is a story of how the natives lose. It is about the travesty of justice and wholesale theft from the present, and even worse robbery of the future. Not just in one valley, but throughout the province, and what was being fought over was nothing but the scraps and traces of green that were left. And if there was a significant tract, a decade plus long fight will get you….%20. That’s it. Just %20 of what’s left. A %3 increase in parkland will be fought tooth and nail and the largest PR Firm in the world will be doing battle on the other side. And they will win.
That said, I’d much rather talk about the real world. I’m glad this movie is out there even if it is in my view 20 years too late; it is timeless. It is certainly an enjoyable imaginary visit. It’s just that in the endless pattern, it changes nothing. It doesn’t change that we are killing our Mother in the present.
So I am here to talk about the real world, the real trees, and what happened there, to counter the myth. I was planning and working on this anyway but this viewing provided the final prompt. Reality is actually far more entertaining than fiction if you can manage it; it is far from formulaic. It gets so downright bizarre as to be dismissed as fiction, but it ain’t. Everything I’m about to post here really happened. I’m publicly posting part of my first draft openly for free because we are coming up on a 20 year anniversary/reunion. The people who were at this protest plan on getting together. By publicly posting, perhaps I can engage their input, recollection and correction. Addition. We shall see. But what you’ll also see is that they have been posting pictures prior of things I’ll put into prose, the story as I can best manage from recall of what happened from those people who actually put their lives on the line in an effort to save one forest.
In the real world habitat destruction can be posited to either overpopulation or the siphoning of wealth. And in that argument it is the siphoning of wealth that wins the blame game. At present we are staring down the barrel of the largest oil spill in US history, but it amounts to no more than what the US would consume in 90 minutes. And with just %5 of the world’s population, the US consumes %25 of the world’s oil. This gets me back (yet again) to my quibble with Avatar, that the Natives always lose. And trust me, your government is looking out for you because this incredibly lopsided, far superior standard of living is achieved by dominant force; it’s not due to some sort of Divine beneficence, nor is it technological or mental superiority. It’s the covert imposed siphoning of wealth from the rest of the world. Your government is making sure you’ll get the lithium for yer electric cars, yer blackberries and your laptops. Not to mention the oil.
Why would it be considered covert? Because the bulk of the US population doesn’t believe that it’s happening via warfare, not even when they’re at war, and they’ve accepted the pretexts that were provided for these wars, even when it beggared belief. It’s hard to face the prospect that you might be at present the main force in the world that is bulldozing the natives and will be mainly responsible for destroying the planet, though in all honesty it really could be boiled down to corporatism and the advantages and inordinate rights we gave it as opposed to real people; corporatism will use any vehicle at its disposal whatever that may happen to be and only a confluence of history has made the US the primary vehicle of the moment.
I find this to be the main irony of the Christian world today. For in terms of inordinate Western consumption of earth’s resources, we are dealing with the Christian world. Everything about that simple oil statistic flies in the face of everything Christianity is supposed to espouse about equity and giving to your neighbor or a stranger in need, what love and charity mean, and how Christians are supposed to emulate this. Instead they’re responsible for what’s happening in Nigeria and Ecuador, and so much else it’s truly incalculable. It’s not remotely on their agenda as something that should be stopped...There is a supreme irony in the fact that at present it is Christian nations that are the primary devices in the destruction of the planet, and that Christians have paved the path to their own destruction without any resistance, and in fact bore a prime responsibility in killing so many Natives.
There is no positive end in the continuous repeating outcome that the natives always lose. The natives always losing is leading to the destruction of our planet; our very life support is on the verge of pretty total systemic collapse, and with it our quality of perception of any quality of life. Soon only virtual realities, like the Pandora construct, will offer any qualitative pristine experience...
The only prospective message to be garnered from the destruction of the earth and how that destroys us may well be that ‘the wages of sin is death’. What a sad conclusion we reach. And logically, how can we not best define ‘sin’ except as the systemic mechanisms, the sum of parts we will see in perspicuous hindsight, as leading to the death of all life? A life collapse the likes of which we have never before witnessed? How will we come to identify the inequity we were all complicit in? How are we all so blind to it now?
Original sin has nothing to do with who ate an apple or Who told who not to. It has to do with participating every living and breathing moment in a state of dire inequity on the backs of the suffering of many. All that collateral we are never conscious of, like what happens to the minerals from the Congo that may or may not have gone into your ipod, how they were obtained, and what conditions your clothes were sewn in, -and grown. There is no conscious connect in this complicity. There has never been another time when we exist in so much complicity with so much existing evil all the time in every breathing moment in everything we wear and eat and every chemical bleach process that produces dioxins for the sake of paper products and every clearcut we happily unconsciously wipe ourselves with every day and every disposable non-biodegradable piece of trash and every tampon we could do without and every disposable diaper and upon examination it is all so endless and there on every shelf in every grocery store as if it’s a ‘normal’ way to be and even walking into Wal-mart is an ethical issue because wages are slavery in China and China has so many at its disposal and so on, never mind what it does to us. Besides the death knell for this planet will be when China emulates us. The endless quagmire of this immediate and total gratification of having fulfilled every need and having to fill it with so much more, more, more that comes from so far away. The consumer society, how come we don’t identify that phrase as some sort of insult, a gross misnomer?
It would all be quite innocent if it wasn’t all in the pursuit of grossly inequitable profits for a very small few (that champagne glass model realized) and if the amorality with which we structured the economic system on a non-existent pretext of infinite growth hadn’t led to its cannibalizing itself (us) on fiction and fraud the way it is now.
Back in the Walbran Valley we knew we were being robbed blind, not just of a pristine world we felt was sacred, it also translated in concrete dollars and cents, and sheer stupidity. A map is worth a thousand words. There are only two significant patches of green (original pristine rainforest) on the south Island below Barkley Sound. One is the Pacific Rim National Park. The other is the Carmanah/Walbran Valleys, the preservation of which we fought tooth and nail for in 1991. It’s a simple, concrete argument. In terms of sustainable use of a very valuable resource that was not treated as valuable, it has simple solutions.
That is what it was, and that is what it is. That the clearcut wasteland that is BC is viewable from space has nothing to do with BC being overpopulated; it has everything to do with the siphoning of wealth. Don’t expect if the mining corporations come to Afghanistan, they won’t be being robbed blind there as well. It’s all about daylight robbery; that’s original sin.
So I’ll start with the beauty, how about a pictorial? I want to contribute what I’ve got to the Walbran Reunion anyway.
I have nothing more to say on the state of the world. I just have another short story of how the natives always lose. It’s actually invigorating to tell with plenty of beauty and amusement. I’m here to tell their story, for it's about as close as we can get to expressing the woods. And I only do it because I think that may be worthwhile to others.
My riposte to the Christians who are or are not responsible for this state of affairs is very simple:
“But if you think that Jesus Christ is coming
Honey you’ve got another thing coming
If he ever finds out who’s hi-jacked his name
He’ll cut out his heart and turn in his grave” - The The, ‘Armageddon Days Are Here (Again)’
Funny that was 1989; it resonates far more today. What if Jesus came already and you just didn’t know it? Now your only salvation is to save the earth. And it looks like you hijacked His name to ravish the earth and the natives who cried ‘slow down’. Just stop!
Today Robin Hood is subverted as a mercenary crusader responsible for killing Muslim women and children. That should tell you something. It is in no way historic. In effect it is propaganda, while the myth of the natives victorious has never been more emphatic than with Avatar. That too should tell you something.
There’s no point in ‘suiciding’ in an attempt to reach Pandora when you’ve already lost it. You never graduated to begin with. What makes you think Jesus would appear to save you from the demise you created for yourself? I realize that’s the whole message. But why would you stake life on earth on it?
Jesus would die along with the natives.
Avatar puts me in a perplexing paradox I find I just have to accept. And it surely suffered being maligned from the purists in the environmental sector for not doing or saying enough or not saying it quite right. It suffered more than it ought to critically, at least from what I saw of the criticism, and maybe it got robbed at the Oscars by something that more correctly towed the party line. It is simply a movie and it was designed for entertainment and succeeds well; it conveys an otherworldly other world that is a visual feast fully integrated in its action, its vibrancy a plausible environment. That alone is its achievement, the awe and effort in every backdrop.
I’m easily swept and have always enjoyed a good Cameron yarn, his ability at plausible battles that manage to ratchet to the nth and beyond degree, the grounding that makes the calculated suspense so much more strong and worthwhile. With where I’ve invested my life it’s hard not to feel that Cameron hasn’t put his talents in service of a message of worth, that it’s basic only makes it more populist. (Salvation must come in the formulaic form of…well that’s better left unsaid.)
Trust me I have profound identity with this visual Pandora parable. It reflects my life 20 years ago, in which was caught the paradox between a techy artworld immersion love affair (surround sound and a four theme light show on the main floor of our home, an underground myth called ‘the tripping house’), juxtaposed with our second home away from home, a Swiss Family Robinson set up built from scratch in a clear cut wasteland on the fringe of some of the last pristine coastal temperate rainforest, smack in the middle of where the largest trees in Canada live. The tripping house’s best theme was, you betcha, black light neon string art/paper/paint covering all surfaces of the main living area which utilized 3-D and even engaged the floor. My first ever inhalation (introduced by my parents) coincided with a bloom of bioluminescent algae at the beach.
Pandora’s main otherworld element aside from its creatures (and the ‘Hallelujah Mountains’) is that it has a full ecosystem ‘theme’ of bioluminescent organisms, starting with the telepathic tree network which centers on their feminine deity Elya, which they access in the ‘tree of souls’ (a bioluminescent tree).
Given that I was raised to believe in a feminine Holy Spirit and that the ‘Tripping House’ was actually a church and prayer center the parallels are writ large with an unlimited budget. How beautifully they did it, that glow in the dark/neon theme, right up to the war paint on the warriors, which is exactly how neon colours look lit up by black light. Surely they employed this technique, certainly they replicated it. And oh, yes, I’m forgetting the other side that makes this complete, our family ended up in ‘Swiss Family Robinson’ mode by becoming engaged in a nationally covered passive protest blockade to save some of the last remnants of pristine temperate rainforest on Vancouver Island. In other words we were engaged in the real battle to save the real big trees. Which is where I end up flipping towards Avatar; coming from the real world, a place where this resistance really happened, Avatar is a panacea myth, a fake salve modulating what we know or don’t by telling us that the Natives get to win. Reality is that the Natives always lose.
Perhaps you find that questionable?
Well let’s bandy it about a little. In the Walbran Valley, we certainly lost, even though in terms of watershed area, it can be quibbled that the divvy of the primeval spoils was one of those Solomon exercises (divide it in half). If that had been carried out, the baby certainly would have lost; therein lies my point. Perhaps one would query Vietnam, didn’t the natives win that one? Perhaps in war at a terrible cost, but not when it came to the wages of economic warfare dubbed globalization. The same can be said for South Africa. Perestroika? Ever asked?
And spoils it is. Don’t ever assume that enviros and/or natives are not market-minded. Au Contraire. They do the math and know they are being ripped blind. All wealth is rooted in natural resource wealth. No trees? No paper/toilet paper/houses/furniture. No oil? No just about everything. No lithium? No Blackberries, no hybrid car batteries. This gets me to my quibble side viewing Avatar. It’s the level of disassociation in the audience, and how it leads to more of the same. Since the audience is so passive and pacified, it is more likely the bulk of Avatar’s influence will be to act as a panacea to that disassociation rather than as an awakening from it. They walk out with a sense of satisfaction that is false because they watched the natives win. No one thinks about what really happened in the woods, hardly anyone knows or even cares. And no one wonders about the relevance or where the Natives happen to be in the real world today. It was mind-blowing to watch this in the same week that the Pentagon announced there’s over a trillion’s worth of minerals in Afghanistan. No one asks themselves what it’s like to be Afghani today, inadvertently sitting on a trillion’s worth of minerals. Hardly anyone in America would notice any parallel with the US occupation, even though the plot line in Avatar has to do with dispossessing the Natives of a trillion’s worth of minerals through the use of violence and tearing up the place in the process. To me that’s gaping disassociation.
It was a little odd to hear through the twitter vine of depression groups being formed to try and deal with the fact that people felt like committing suicide just in the hope that they might end up reincarnating to a place similar to Pandora. Odd because it was the most passive form of disassociation from the real world you could have, the most escapist way you could deal with the sense of loss the movie produces. There is a sense of loss of that connect to the natural world, to a world which has not undergone wholesale destruction at human hands. People who were depressed over it reacting this way were so disassociated they probably didn’t even know about the real loss of the real world. It is like an amputee grieving for limbs that aren’t there, not willing to recognize that the Natives always lose, and that they’ve never once attempted to be one of them, or stop what happened to them, or been cognitive of the horror and utter pain they felt watching the earth die. They don’t know about Ecuador, or Nigeria, or even what happened to Canada, or recognize what happened to the Natives and the natural world of the US. They don’t know when the last significant tracts of giant redwoods were being fought over in California (1992), and were lost. They don’t know that the Natives always lose and that this goes way back.
And when that loss gets pronounced, the myth becomes more emphatic and causes more identity, because the myths are the inverse salve to ameliorate the loss, myths are where we get to win. Robin Hood for example. Robin Hood became most popular and most subversive during the wrench of the loss of the commons. In other words at precisely the time when the woods were lost, Robin Hood was at his epoch, winning for the poor in the woods. In the real world people with names like Winstanley were being publicly flogged for attempting to protest the loss of the commons. (Old habits die hard, as one of them is still at it today. He didn’t end up being flogged however. Just arrested, shot at…) If you read Tolstoy, he’ll mention peasants in Russia were being flogged for the exact same reason, eviction over clearcutting, and that soldiers were brought by train to publicly flog the peasant leaders.
When I say natives, it can be taken broadly. Native New Yorkers were subject to the collapse of the twin towers, were part of the clean up for the twin towers, many of whom were subject to the fall-out and subsequent life-long health issues that were continually denied and completely and deliberately obfuscated. You can ask someone like Jenna Orkin, who summed up the authoritative denial response as ‘let me count the ways I can screw you’. These eyewitness accounts, if you can find them, are always too long to be told. Even at the top of the wealth pyramid, the Natives are there to lose. We are undergoing an unspoken cancer epidemic, which is nothing more that the complete avoidance of preventive regulation and source identification in the interest of illness for profit. We don’t want to identify or discover chemical sources because they make money.
The sensation of satisfaction one might feel at seeing the natives protect their homeland in Avatar is nothing more than a virtual panacea that denies the reality that the natives always lose. If I tell you the real story of what it’s like to try and save the largest trees in a country, it is a story of how the natives lose. It is about the travesty of justice and wholesale theft from the present, and even worse robbery of the future. Not just in one valley, but throughout the province, and what was being fought over was nothing but the scraps and traces of green that were left. And if there was a significant tract, a decade plus long fight will get you….%20. That’s it. Just %20 of what’s left. A %3 increase in parkland will be fought tooth and nail and the largest PR Firm in the world will be doing battle on the other side. And they will win.
That said, I’d much rather talk about the real world. I’m glad this movie is out there even if it is in my view 20 years too late; it is timeless. It is certainly an enjoyable imaginary visit. It’s just that in the endless pattern, it changes nothing. It doesn’t change that we are killing our Mother in the present.
So I am here to talk about the real world, the real trees, and what happened there, to counter the myth. I was planning and working on this anyway but this viewing provided the final prompt. Reality is actually far more entertaining than fiction if you can manage it; it is far from formulaic. It gets so downright bizarre as to be dismissed as fiction, but it ain’t. Everything I’m about to post here really happened. I’m publicly posting part of my first draft openly for free because we are coming up on a 20 year anniversary/reunion. The people who were at this protest plan on getting together. By publicly posting, perhaps I can engage their input, recollection and correction. Addition. We shall see. But what you’ll also see is that they have been posting pictures prior of things I’ll put into prose, the story as I can best manage from recall of what happened from those people who actually put their lives on the line in an effort to save one forest.
In the real world habitat destruction can be posited to either overpopulation or the siphoning of wealth. And in that argument it is the siphoning of wealth that wins the blame game. At present we are staring down the barrel of the largest oil spill in US history, but it amounts to no more than what the US would consume in 90 minutes. And with just %5 of the world’s population, the US consumes %25 of the world’s oil. This gets me back (yet again) to my quibble with Avatar, that the Natives always lose. And trust me, your government is looking out for you because this incredibly lopsided, far superior standard of living is achieved by dominant force; it’s not due to some sort of Divine beneficence, nor is it technological or mental superiority. It’s the covert imposed siphoning of wealth from the rest of the world. Your government is making sure you’ll get the lithium for yer electric cars, yer blackberries and your laptops. Not to mention the oil.
Why would it be considered covert? Because the bulk of the US population doesn’t believe that it’s happening via warfare, not even when they’re at war, and they’ve accepted the pretexts that were provided for these wars, even when it beggared belief. It’s hard to face the prospect that you might be at present the main force in the world that is bulldozing the natives and will be mainly responsible for destroying the planet, though in all honesty it really could be boiled down to corporatism and the advantages and inordinate rights we gave it as opposed to real people; corporatism will use any vehicle at its disposal whatever that may happen to be and only a confluence of history has made the US the primary vehicle of the moment.
I find this to be the main irony of the Christian world today. For in terms of inordinate Western consumption of earth’s resources, we are dealing with the Christian world. Everything about that simple oil statistic flies in the face of everything Christianity is supposed to espouse about equity and giving to your neighbor or a stranger in need, what love and charity mean, and how Christians are supposed to emulate this. Instead they’re responsible for what’s happening in Nigeria and Ecuador, and so much else it’s truly incalculable. It’s not remotely on their agenda as something that should be stopped...There is a supreme irony in the fact that at present it is Christian nations that are the primary devices in the destruction of the planet, and that Christians have paved the path to their own destruction without any resistance, and in fact bore a prime responsibility in killing so many Natives.
There is no positive end in the continuous repeating outcome that the natives always lose. The natives always losing is leading to the destruction of our planet; our very life support is on the verge of pretty total systemic collapse, and with it our quality of perception of any quality of life. Soon only virtual realities, like the Pandora construct, will offer any qualitative pristine experience...
The only prospective message to be garnered from the destruction of the earth and how that destroys us may well be that ‘the wages of sin is death’. What a sad conclusion we reach. And logically, how can we not best define ‘sin’ except as the systemic mechanisms, the sum of parts we will see in perspicuous hindsight, as leading to the death of all life? A life collapse the likes of which we have never before witnessed? How will we come to identify the inequity we were all complicit in? How are we all so blind to it now?
Original sin has nothing to do with who ate an apple or Who told who not to. It has to do with participating every living and breathing moment in a state of dire inequity on the backs of the suffering of many. All that collateral we are never conscious of, like what happens to the minerals from the Congo that may or may not have gone into your ipod, how they were obtained, and what conditions your clothes were sewn in, -and grown. There is no conscious connect in this complicity. There has never been another time when we exist in so much complicity with so much existing evil all the time in every breathing moment in everything we wear and eat and every chemical bleach process that produces dioxins for the sake of paper products and every clearcut we happily unconsciously wipe ourselves with every day and every disposable non-biodegradable piece of trash and every tampon we could do without and every disposable diaper and upon examination it is all so endless and there on every shelf in every grocery store as if it’s a ‘normal’ way to be and even walking into Wal-mart is an ethical issue because wages are slavery in China and China has so many at its disposal and so on, never mind what it does to us. Besides the death knell for this planet will be when China emulates us. The endless quagmire of this immediate and total gratification of having fulfilled every need and having to fill it with so much more, more, more that comes from so far away. The consumer society, how come we don’t identify that phrase as some sort of insult, a gross misnomer?
It would all be quite innocent if it wasn’t all in the pursuit of grossly inequitable profits for a very small few (that champagne glass model realized) and if the amorality with which we structured the economic system on a non-existent pretext of infinite growth hadn’t led to its cannibalizing itself (us) on fiction and fraud the way it is now.
Back in the Walbran Valley we knew we were being robbed blind, not just of a pristine world we felt was sacred, it also translated in concrete dollars and cents, and sheer stupidity. A map is worth a thousand words. There are only two significant patches of green (original pristine rainforest) on the south Island below Barkley Sound. One is the Pacific Rim National Park. The other is the Carmanah/Walbran Valleys, the preservation of which we fought tooth and nail for in 1991. It’s a simple, concrete argument. In terms of sustainable use of a very valuable resource that was not treated as valuable, it has simple solutions.
That is what it was, and that is what it is. That the clearcut wasteland that is BC is viewable from space has nothing to do with BC being overpopulated; it has everything to do with the siphoning of wealth. Don’t expect if the mining corporations come to Afghanistan, they won’t be being robbed blind there as well. It’s all about daylight robbery; that’s original sin.
So I’ll start with the beauty, how about a pictorial? I want to contribute what I’ve got to the Walbran Reunion anyway.
I have nothing more to say on the state of the world. I just have another short story of how the natives always lose. It’s actually invigorating to tell with plenty of beauty and amusement. I’m here to tell their story, for it's about as close as we can get to expressing the woods. And I only do it because I think that may be worthwhile to others.
My riposte to the Christians who are or are not responsible for this state of affairs is very simple:
“But if you think that Jesus Christ is coming
Honey you’ve got another thing coming
If he ever finds out who’s hi-jacked his name
He’ll cut out his heart and turn in his grave” - The The, ‘Armageddon Days Are Here (Again)’
Funny that was 1989; it resonates far more today. What if Jesus came already and you just didn’t know it? Now your only salvation is to save the earth. And it looks like you hijacked His name to ravish the earth and the natives who cried ‘slow down’. Just stop!
Today Robin Hood is subverted as a mercenary crusader responsible for killing Muslim women and children. That should tell you something. It is in no way historic. In effect it is propaganda, while the myth of the natives victorious has never been more emphatic than with Avatar. That too should tell you something.
There’s no point in ‘suiciding’ in an attempt to reach Pandora when you’ve already lost it. You never graduated to begin with. What makes you think Jesus would appear to save you from the demise you created for yourself? I realize that’s the whole message. But why would you stake life on earth on it?
Jesus would die along with the natives.
Sunday, July 25, 2010
Closure -The Smashing Pumpkins Rock 'n' Roll Party Tour 2010
This is introspection, a personal experience of a show, laden with a dual context going back many years that cannot be provided here. It would take a book to provide it. If you accept the understanding that there is background here you just don’t know that can’t be readily explained, it may still be enjoyable with its speculations and salacious inferences, which seem obvious enough. There is an intro that will explain enough of the context to understand my view of this performance. If you want an explanation, go here. After it got upwards of two pages I decided to separate it. If you just want an in depth look at the show and don’t care if my interior monologue to it makes any sense (there won’t be much of it, don’t worry), just read on.
On with the show. Or should I say the pre-show? Or should I go into the day it took to be at the pre-show, all the people I met, and how this was an utterly different experience for someone who normally comes alone and leaves alone, never speaking to anyone? It was actually possible that friends were made. If they so choose, make contact…
(and here I go shifting out of first person, such a no-no)
Billy begins his introduction by saying this is 'Quasar' and it is the first time it has been played publicly, other than as an instrumental. While it certainly is a privilege the words were utterly drowned out and it was one time she wishes asking for lyric sheets afterward might have produced them. (not! –pointless to try.) Introducing the song he says it is called 'Quasar' first, but that he has another name for it he appears to like better, ‘Stella Polaris’, which he is hesitant to use since he already has so many ‘S’ titles in his cannon. Reply, “It’s OK if you’re thematic.” The song is truly everything the SP ever is and was simultaneously. It takes you backward and forward at the same time. It is right in the space, something Billy acknowledges at the end by tagging it with the psychedelic moniker when he gauges the strong crowd reaction. It has the rolling quality of Astral Planes and that great drive, but with a lot more complexity. It brings you right back in a good way, and makes you think they’re back. Right. In. The. Present.
After this ‘My Love Is Winter’ could only come across as anti-climactic, by following such a rocker. Nor could any dimension be added from the lyrics, which were indiscernible. It might have totally changed given the lyrics, that low key sensibility. “Make It Happen” is one she really enjoys from a personal standpoint, it was from the moment of immersion when she felt certain about what he was writing about, a moment that had taken a very long time to arrive. And given when it was first performed, literally the moment before it all came crashing down and that sense of connection was utterly shattered.
Make It Happen
I have no patience
For the sweetest things
Take their sweet time
I’m counting blessings
Stepping backwards
Along your many fault lines
So make it happen
Just make it so
I won’t know
That I’ve been taken
By your green eye
I thought to remind you
At the ends of your day
Happy and a solitary brain
But here I go now
Admitting some reality
You can fathom to decode
So make it happen
Just make it so
I won’t know
You’re building castles
And drowning the witch
Ain’t life a bitch
[Strictly stating]
You are impossible
But it’s possible we could get along
Filling tide pools
With your moon tide
Love is shuttered with alarm
So make it happen
Just make it so
I don’t know
That you’re my rainbow
You’re my pot of gold
I’ll call my own
When she first heard it, it was the first step into the future. The following day it did not exist. It is a little more melodic than some of the new songs in the same vein because of the transition for the chorus and perky in a way she likes with the SP pounding drive. She knew what the green eye was about, drowning the witch, the rainbow’s end, his admission of a reality that she’d decoded for him, and how many fault lines that took, the complexity, why the moon fills the water. The lyrics are simple when the context is invisible; to her it’s not; hearing the song gave her great satisfaction. It is rolled through at a clip here and breezes past quickly. 'Tristessa' is next, from a time before she never heard of the Pumpkins; it’s being here means that all eras of the Pumpkins are basically covered with this concert, something to appreciate. She is never been strongly drawn to it but appreciates getting to hear the past especially since it’s a part of the catalogue she rarely if ever accessed. Given a choice she’d have probably sooner heard 'Tom Tom', just for the sake of the Present, because she appreciates what was in it so much. Happy either way. ‘Lonely Is the Name’ came across better than she might have expected, having been tightened and strengthened for a rocking set/performance. Practice and development. ‘Blessed Mother’ was something of a revelation. Something she would have wished anything to hear what was said for it appeared to be a lot. It was a lyric based song, melodic and seemed to have something ‘My Love Is Winter’ lacked, which in part was ascribed to mood and intent. MLIW is about, has a mood of destitution, sadness, that is the SP vein unending. While the Blessed still seems to have those elements, its sense seems to possess that intentional shift Billy has made into the light. But with honesty. And that honesty is its refinement and definition, the truth being the truth with all it imperfections is how it finds and knows itself. Such is 'Blessed Mother'. At least that is what she suspects without being able to hear. Instrumentally it is a beautiful, laden melancholic song married to beauty and light and seems to capture the SP and Billy’s beauty as a songster in a microcosm once more. By being Present.
Billy answers one fan question after nearly dodging any prospect, he tried to abort that as quickly as possible but when she blurts he takes her question, which is "What inspires you at present?”
Aside, “He’s not going to tell you that."
But in a roundabout way he does, so articulately and satisfyingly well and with such breadth and honesty she can only applaud. Of course it’s mystifying that he says it has to do with the shattering of a Star and a singular focus that was unhealthy and that if you aren’t embracing multivariate forms of input and integrating with what is around you and integrating with others anything else is unhealthy at this point. He worked in that this was about a transition in common consciousness and how we all relate to one another as beings. Fine. Went with the day. Closure meant she no longer felt bound to keep secrets, amusement about actually being able to talk about your past with a given band with like minded people and just not worrying or caring anymore.
She's delighted by the opening of Astral Planes like gate crashing right thru the beginning of a show, psychedelic symphonic thru a wall with unstopping momentum done in elation. From there Ava Adore is rolling thundercrunch played with new verve and crushing intensity. The opening couldn’t be better, and settles into...the comfort of one of the big ones. She tends to have an impulse to want to ‘check out’ with the big hit standards in the cannon that were played to death and still are but finds satisfaction in hearing it performed live, mainly because it's fresh because she avoided those things that were overplayed back then. She is happy to hear 'Hummer' in the same way as 'Tristessa' and prefers the song by a fair margin. Delight with the speed/metal/thunder of ‘As Rome Burns’. So happy there's someone with the cojones it would take to premier this to Best Buy execs, the truth of the pending economic crash at the precise moment they were vulnerable to takeover. Hot D***! The fact that this band will blast your socks off. And that Billy was willing to say something about the state of Amerika starting with Zeitgeist and ‘United States’ gave him that final facet that commanded her greatest respect among the artists she most respects. The same goes for ‘Freak’, and the genius to put that forward radio friendly and upbeat.
‘The Song for A Son’ throws the first curve at her where both this and ‘Eye’ make her cry, for reasons she will not explain. Except that ‘Eye’ is now a permanent frieze rather than past tense where she would have left it, and feels like an edict, conceptual prison, or nothing at all. Except for the changes the song has undergone from no longer being a simple electronic dirge, which is all the more appreciable. Rock On, the dedication it takes for change. Oh how it soars upwards in the melancholic outro. 'Bullet With Butterfly Wings' is the frieze of that popular moment he can never escape and will always immortalize, and despite being able to jump up and down to it, to her it is one of the sleeper tracks that doesn’t gain her full attention because it doesn’t quite merit it; she never gave it in the first place. She recorded the double disk to CD when she bought it and this was the first song she dropped. It is the polarity she is no part of, but finally understood as the key. She enjoys it in the moment regardless; it’s a moment to shift the mind elsewhere; she finds herself throbbing up and down with the crowd with the same enthusiasm. She doesn’t actually see his fall, though has a queer sense it serves him right for continuing to blow this same ‘lil trumpet. Never gives it up. Aspect of humour. She has far more respect and jubilation when it comes to 'United States'; even if JC is not longer playing, it generates awe. Hearing audio from the tour prior was totally different from being there. 'Bleeding the Orchid' she felt as did others did not suit the set, though the meaning could not have been better placed. ‘Perfect’ will be beyond hard to hear in the moment, which to her no longer has the potential to exist. With all these songs she finds a curious liberation happening where they achieve their timelessness in the act of being played, so they are for everyone and every moment. She feels a distinct agenda in the zealousness with which they are played and the attitude Billy presents in playing them. He is fierce in his liberation of the music. He really is shattering the star and integrating in the moment with every participant. He is exactly where he said. He spends the majority of his performance when he isn’t singing playing ‘to’ her, as in front of her or turned to her, while completely avoiding eye contact. The only moment she felt his glance where he checked her was when he asked how everyone was doing at the pre-show, and she would not grant him her eyes nor feeling, neither pain, sadness, or joy. No point in any. She stared only at the back wall in a frieze of ice. The rejoinder in his sensibility was 'that good huh', practically unspoken and on went the show.
That he played so much in front of her can be dismissed out of hand by where she stood by anyone who wasn't there and unnoticed by anyone who was. The sense she derived from all this is that their only connect, the only connect he offers is the music itself, that 75% of his life, what it has taken. It will never spill past and may never stop.
On with the Rock ‘n’ Roll and the first SP song she ever heard. Grand and throbbing and impartial in its elements, timeless in its merit. The strength of that first impression still stands with every playing of 'Cherub Rock', lifelong. ‘That’s the Way’ she can hardly bear to hear. It is as bereft as the first time she heard it when with all her will she crushed a solitary tear because it simply isn’t real. Never there, never will be, except...and it feels like the echoes of a paradox she left behind so many years ago. Still present. 'Owata' transports as a timeless song of joy beyond any context but the present, which was unlikely to have spawned it. Grateful for the electrocution. Well done, though the treatment might have served 'Eye' even better. At the addition of ‘Oh California, look what you have done to me’, and the opening timbre of SIYL and everything it meant, she can only say, “this is what California took from you”. Only to watch it become a song. ‘Tarantula’ has lost its sense of address, the loaded context that came from its being a response, but positively rips along. ‘Tonight Tonight' achieves that sense of the eternal that only a song can possess. As we invoke this in our collective wish to be here now hearing it, we are wishing and believing upon every word in the Now, what the song was made for. She is surprised to witness its achievement and the force of the band’s execution, which is based so much in Spirit and dedication.
‘Freak’ pounds its way thru the door into the finale as truth put jovial. She is happier than she expected to hear it. Gossamer, the return of the End, the signifier once more, is a revelation, a musical transport. The cruelty in it is gone with the omission of the lyrics. It prospects beyond the shattering, to be able once more to fly beyond this hurt above all hurts that is finalized by just being present and ignored. The repeated shout of ‘we’re not going anywhere’ achieves the sensibility of the entire performance, that in this end of all ends, we are all still present and participating and not going away. Musically it lets her soar, movement of her interior that has been so lost in the distant past. She can’t help but begin to dance and she is utterly alone in that, the only one with spirals beginning thru her hands that course in symmetry throughout her limbs. She can’t even help herself. It has been so long since she felt moved like that and abandoned herself in the face of all others. It is his one moment of abandonment where he doesn’t play, doesn’t orchestrate and is simply lost and compelled by the drums. Movement in the rhythm captures them both, total immersion in the music that is mutually exclusive where neither can even see nor is conscious of the other. Billy tentatively dances and he is lost. What a delight it was to dance to the drums. The end had a mystic transport and power where the rest were watching and still.
And that was the end.
Billy made his farewell overtures to stage left and stage right in complete avoidance of the center. And that was the End.
She was happy that it ended this way and that he came here to end it.
The accompanying pictures are here. It goes without saying the lights are well synchronized whatever the particular scope of the budget. The one point of banter about being given the [middle] finger by a woman and how that's "oh yeah" was funny as hell.
SETLIST
1. Astral Planes
2. Ava Adore
3. Today
4. Hummer
5. As Rome Burns
6. A Song for a Son
7. Eye
8. Bullet With Butterfly Wings
9. United States
10. Bleeding the Orchid
11. Perfect
12. Cherub Rock
13. That’s the Way (My Love Is)
14. Owata
15. Stand Inside Your Love
16. Tarantula
17. Tonight, Tonight
ENCORE
18. Freak
19. Gossamer
On with the show. Or should I say the pre-show? Or should I go into the day it took to be at the pre-show, all the people I met, and how this was an utterly different experience for someone who normally comes alone and leaves alone, never speaking to anyone? It was actually possible that friends were made. If they so choose, make contact…
(and here I go shifting out of first person, such a no-no)
Billy begins his introduction by saying this is 'Quasar' and it is the first time it has been played publicly, other than as an instrumental. While it certainly is a privilege the words were utterly drowned out and it was one time she wishes asking for lyric sheets afterward might have produced them. (not! –pointless to try.) Introducing the song he says it is called 'Quasar' first, but that he has another name for it he appears to like better, ‘Stella Polaris’, which he is hesitant to use since he already has so many ‘S’ titles in his cannon. Reply, “It’s OK if you’re thematic.” The song is truly everything the SP ever is and was simultaneously. It takes you backward and forward at the same time. It is right in the space, something Billy acknowledges at the end by tagging it with the psychedelic moniker when he gauges the strong crowd reaction. It has the rolling quality of Astral Planes and that great drive, but with a lot more complexity. It brings you right back in a good way, and makes you think they’re back. Right. In. The. Present.
After this ‘My Love Is Winter’ could only come across as anti-climactic, by following such a rocker. Nor could any dimension be added from the lyrics, which were indiscernible. It might have totally changed given the lyrics, that low key sensibility. “Make It Happen” is one she really enjoys from a personal standpoint, it was from the moment of immersion when she felt certain about what he was writing about, a moment that had taken a very long time to arrive. And given when it was first performed, literally the moment before it all came crashing down and that sense of connection was utterly shattered.
Make It Happen
I have no patience
For the sweetest things
Take their sweet time
I’m counting blessings
Stepping backwards
Along your many fault lines
So make it happen
Just make it so
I won’t know
That I’ve been taken
By your green eye
I thought to remind you
At the ends of your day
Happy and a solitary brain
But here I go now
Admitting some reality
You can fathom to decode
So make it happen
Just make it so
I won’t know
You’re building castles
And drowning the witch
Ain’t life a bitch
[Strictly stating]
You are impossible
But it’s possible we could get along
Filling tide pools
With your moon tide
Love is shuttered with alarm
So make it happen
Just make it so
I don’t know
That you’re my rainbow
You’re my pot of gold
I’ll call my own
When she first heard it, it was the first step into the future. The following day it did not exist. It is a little more melodic than some of the new songs in the same vein because of the transition for the chorus and perky in a way she likes with the SP pounding drive. She knew what the green eye was about, drowning the witch, the rainbow’s end, his admission of a reality that she’d decoded for him, and how many fault lines that took, the complexity, why the moon fills the water. The lyrics are simple when the context is invisible; to her it’s not; hearing the song gave her great satisfaction. It is rolled through at a clip here and breezes past quickly. 'Tristessa' is next, from a time before she never heard of the Pumpkins; it’s being here means that all eras of the Pumpkins are basically covered with this concert, something to appreciate. She is never been strongly drawn to it but appreciates getting to hear the past especially since it’s a part of the catalogue she rarely if ever accessed. Given a choice she’d have probably sooner heard 'Tom Tom', just for the sake of the Present, because she appreciates what was in it so much. Happy either way. ‘Lonely Is the Name’ came across better than she might have expected, having been tightened and strengthened for a rocking set/performance. Practice and development. ‘Blessed Mother’ was something of a revelation. Something she would have wished anything to hear what was said for it appeared to be a lot. It was a lyric based song, melodic and seemed to have something ‘My Love Is Winter’ lacked, which in part was ascribed to mood and intent. MLIW is about, has a mood of destitution, sadness, that is the SP vein unending. While the Blessed still seems to have those elements, its sense seems to possess that intentional shift Billy has made into the light. But with honesty. And that honesty is its refinement and definition, the truth being the truth with all it imperfections is how it finds and knows itself. Such is 'Blessed Mother'. At least that is what she suspects without being able to hear. Instrumentally it is a beautiful, laden melancholic song married to beauty and light and seems to capture the SP and Billy’s beauty as a songster in a microcosm once more. By being Present.
Billy answers one fan question after nearly dodging any prospect, he tried to abort that as quickly as possible but when she blurts he takes her question, which is "What inspires you at present?”
Aside, “He’s not going to tell you that."
But in a roundabout way he does, so articulately and satisfyingly well and with such breadth and honesty she can only applaud. Of course it’s mystifying that he says it has to do with the shattering of a Star and a singular focus that was unhealthy and that if you aren’t embracing multivariate forms of input and integrating with what is around you and integrating with others anything else is unhealthy at this point. He worked in that this was about a transition in common consciousness and how we all relate to one another as beings. Fine. Went with the day. Closure meant she no longer felt bound to keep secrets, amusement about actually being able to talk about your past with a given band with like minded people and just not worrying or caring anymore.
She's delighted by the opening of Astral Planes like gate crashing right thru the beginning of a show, psychedelic symphonic thru a wall with unstopping momentum done in elation. From there Ava Adore is rolling thundercrunch played with new verve and crushing intensity. The opening couldn’t be better, and settles into...the comfort of one of the big ones. She tends to have an impulse to want to ‘check out’ with the big hit standards in the cannon that were played to death and still are but finds satisfaction in hearing it performed live, mainly because it's fresh because she avoided those things that were overplayed back then. She is happy to hear 'Hummer' in the same way as 'Tristessa' and prefers the song by a fair margin. Delight with the speed/metal/thunder of ‘As Rome Burns’. So happy there's someone with the cojones it would take to premier this to Best Buy execs, the truth of the pending economic crash at the precise moment they were vulnerable to takeover. Hot D***! The fact that this band will blast your socks off. And that Billy was willing to say something about the state of Amerika starting with Zeitgeist and ‘United States’ gave him that final facet that commanded her greatest respect among the artists she most respects. The same goes for ‘Freak’, and the genius to put that forward radio friendly and upbeat.
‘The Song for A Son’ throws the first curve at her where both this and ‘Eye’ make her cry, for reasons she will not explain. Except that ‘Eye’ is now a permanent frieze rather than past tense where she would have left it, and feels like an edict, conceptual prison, or nothing at all. Except for the changes the song has undergone from no longer being a simple electronic dirge, which is all the more appreciable. Rock On, the dedication it takes for change. Oh how it soars upwards in the melancholic outro. 'Bullet With Butterfly Wings' is the frieze of that popular moment he can never escape and will always immortalize, and despite being able to jump up and down to it, to her it is one of the sleeper tracks that doesn’t gain her full attention because it doesn’t quite merit it; she never gave it in the first place. She recorded the double disk to CD when she bought it and this was the first song she dropped. It is the polarity she is no part of, but finally understood as the key. She enjoys it in the moment regardless; it’s a moment to shift the mind elsewhere; she finds herself throbbing up and down with the crowd with the same enthusiasm. She doesn’t actually see his fall, though has a queer sense it serves him right for continuing to blow this same ‘lil trumpet. Never gives it up. Aspect of humour. She has far more respect and jubilation when it comes to 'United States'; even if JC is not longer playing, it generates awe. Hearing audio from the tour prior was totally different from being there. 'Bleeding the Orchid' she felt as did others did not suit the set, though the meaning could not have been better placed. ‘Perfect’ will be beyond hard to hear in the moment, which to her no longer has the potential to exist. With all these songs she finds a curious liberation happening where they achieve their timelessness in the act of being played, so they are for everyone and every moment. She feels a distinct agenda in the zealousness with which they are played and the attitude Billy presents in playing them. He is fierce in his liberation of the music. He really is shattering the star and integrating in the moment with every participant. He is exactly where he said. He spends the majority of his performance when he isn’t singing playing ‘to’ her, as in front of her or turned to her, while completely avoiding eye contact. The only moment she felt his glance where he checked her was when he asked how everyone was doing at the pre-show, and she would not grant him her eyes nor feeling, neither pain, sadness, or joy. No point in any. She stared only at the back wall in a frieze of ice. The rejoinder in his sensibility was 'that good huh', practically unspoken and on went the show.
That he played so much in front of her can be dismissed out of hand by where she stood by anyone who wasn't there and unnoticed by anyone who was. The sense she derived from all this is that their only connect, the only connect he offers is the music itself, that 75% of his life, what it has taken. It will never spill past and may never stop.
On with the Rock ‘n’ Roll and the first SP song she ever heard. Grand and throbbing and impartial in its elements, timeless in its merit. The strength of that first impression still stands with every playing of 'Cherub Rock', lifelong. ‘That’s the Way’ she can hardly bear to hear. It is as bereft as the first time she heard it when with all her will she crushed a solitary tear because it simply isn’t real. Never there, never will be, except...and it feels like the echoes of a paradox she left behind so many years ago. Still present. 'Owata' transports as a timeless song of joy beyond any context but the present, which was unlikely to have spawned it. Grateful for the electrocution. Well done, though the treatment might have served 'Eye' even better. At the addition of ‘Oh California, look what you have done to me’, and the opening timbre of SIYL and everything it meant, she can only say, “this is what California took from you”. Only to watch it become a song. ‘Tarantula’ has lost its sense of address, the loaded context that came from its being a response, but positively rips along. ‘Tonight Tonight' achieves that sense of the eternal that only a song can possess. As we invoke this in our collective wish to be here now hearing it, we are wishing and believing upon every word in the Now, what the song was made for. She is surprised to witness its achievement and the force of the band’s execution, which is based so much in Spirit and dedication.
‘Freak’ pounds its way thru the door into the finale as truth put jovial. She is happier than she expected to hear it. Gossamer, the return of the End, the signifier once more, is a revelation, a musical transport. The cruelty in it is gone with the omission of the lyrics. It prospects beyond the shattering, to be able once more to fly beyond this hurt above all hurts that is finalized by just being present and ignored. The repeated shout of ‘we’re not going anywhere’ achieves the sensibility of the entire performance, that in this end of all ends, we are all still present and participating and not going away. Musically it lets her soar, movement of her interior that has been so lost in the distant past. She can’t help but begin to dance and she is utterly alone in that, the only one with spirals beginning thru her hands that course in symmetry throughout her limbs. She can’t even help herself. It has been so long since she felt moved like that and abandoned herself in the face of all others. It is his one moment of abandonment where he doesn’t play, doesn’t orchestrate and is simply lost and compelled by the drums. Movement in the rhythm captures them both, total immersion in the music that is mutually exclusive where neither can even see nor is conscious of the other. Billy tentatively dances and he is lost. What a delight it was to dance to the drums. The end had a mystic transport and power where the rest were watching and still.
And that was the end.
Billy made his farewell overtures to stage left and stage right in complete avoidance of the center. And that was the End.
She was happy that it ended this way and that he came here to end it.
The accompanying pictures are here. It goes without saying the lights are well synchronized whatever the particular scope of the budget. The one point of banter about being given the [middle] finger by a woman and how that's "oh yeah" was funny as hell.
SETLIST
1. Astral Planes
2. Ava Adore
3. Today
4. Hummer
5. As Rome Burns
6. A Song for a Son
7. Eye
8. Bullet With Butterfly Wings
9. United States
10. Bleeding the Orchid
11. Perfect
12. Cherub Rock
13. That’s the Way (My Love Is)
14. Owata
15. Stand Inside Your Love
16. Tarantula
17. Tonight, Tonight
ENCORE
18. Freak
19. Gossamer
Saturday, June 19, 2010
'Armageddon Days Are Here (Again) ' -by The The, 'Mind Bomb'
They're 5 miles high as the crow flies
Leavin' vapour trails against a blood red sky
Movin' in from the east toward the west
With balaclava helmets over their heads, yes!
But if you think that Jesus Christ is coming
Honey you've got another thing coming
If he ever finds out who's hi-jacked his name
He'll cut out his heart and turn in his grave
Islam is rising
The Christians mobilizing
The world is on its elbows and knees
It's forgotten the message and worships the creeds
It's war, she cried, it's war, she cried, this is war
Drop your possessions, all you simple folk
You will fight them on the beaches in your underclothes
You will thank the good lord for raising the union jack
You'll watch the ships out of harbour
And the bodies come floating back
If the real Jesus Christ were to stand up today
He'd be gunned down cold by the c.i.a.
Oh, the lights that now burn brightest behind stained glass
Will cast
But God didn't build himself that throne
God doesn't live in Israel or Rome
God doesn't belong to the Yankee dollar
God doesn't plant the bombs for Hezbollah
God doesn't even go to church
And God won't send us down to Allah to burn
No, God will remind us what we already know
That the human race is about to reap what it's sown
The world is on its elbows and knees
It's forgotten the message and worships the creeds
Armageddon days are here again
Leavin' vapour trails against a blood red sky
Movin' in from the east toward the west
With balaclava helmets over their heads, yes!
But if you think that Jesus Christ is coming
Honey you've got another thing coming
If he ever finds out who's hi-jacked his name
He'll cut out his heart and turn in his grave
Islam is rising
The Christians mobilizing
The world is on its elbows and knees
It's forgotten the message and worships the creeds
It's war, she cried, it's war, she cried, this is war
Drop your possessions, all you simple folk
You will fight them on the beaches in your underclothes
You will thank the good lord for raising the union jack
You'll watch the ships out of harbour
And the bodies come floating back
If the real Jesus Christ were to stand up today
He'd be gunned down cold by the c.i.a.
Oh, the lights that now burn brightest behind stained glass
Will cast
But God didn't build himself that throne
God doesn't live in Israel or Rome
God doesn't belong to the Yankee dollar
God doesn't plant the bombs for Hezbollah
God doesn't even go to church
And God won't send us down to Allah to burn
No, God will remind us what we already know
That the human race is about to reap what it's sown
The world is on its elbows and knees
It's forgotten the message and worships the creeds
Armageddon days are here again
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