The Ghosts Of Moral Vacancy

It’s delicate confronting these priests of the gun
They preach from a pulpit soaked in the blood of our suns
Their fists rustle with thousand dollar cheques and defeated bills
Their mouths spit prayers their hands never fill
Gold weighs down pockets as lead burns holes into souls
Putting death in the hands of children to hold
It’s out of control,
It’s out of control,
It’s out of control,

When will we stop this blood flow?

– Inspired by Buffy Sainte-Marie’s, “The Priests of the Golden Bull”

Amongst the various First Nations people of Turtle Island, there is known a creature — a spirit, a condition, a state of being — called Wetiko.

Cannibalistic psychosis— specifically driving the ceaseless consumption and destruction of the spirit, of the land, of one another. [1]

The idea has its own cultural contexts and meanings, but this idea of collectives being stricken by moral affliction that prompts disconnected, disembodied responses to the material world has rested in the seat of my mind for awhile.

Like my last pieces on capitalism intimated at in passing, Paul Levy and others have also written about the notion and their interpretation of the Indigenous concept in a “Western” context, criticizing and examining how we collectively operate in relationship to the land and resources. Wetiko as a spirit of a sentiment, rather than a culturally transposed idea, has resonance in capitalism, which never seems to know the edge of more, only absence.

It’s noteworthy that this spirit of wetiko rests hand-in-hand with the idea that fear of death is both fuel and the cogs in the machinations of capitalism [2]. That capitalism thrives on the idea that lives can transcend the finiteness of our material reality if only we stand — higher and higher — on broken bodies and barren soil with our hands full of gold and paper. Until every end of the Earth has come to our knowledge and under our domain, until we learn that death is knows life more intimately than we are able to fathom. Wetiko is the natural consequence of this scorched-earth fear, rage melding into the panic of trying to control our existence, and the experience of confronting the abyss at the edge of our species’ sense of wonder. We find the edge of the universe within ourselves and without collective knowledge of its rim and how to be with it, some fall into the crater and emerge back into our arms afflicted by the void.

We don’t want to talk about it.

We don’t want to talk about capitalism, or death.

We don’t want to talk about our fears, weakness, or wounds.

We don’t want to reckon with not being able to know an experience of art so individual and transcendent, it renders us speechless and transforms us into stars.

We don’t want to talk about the delineation between violence and death: violence can mean death, but death is not inherently violent. We’ve simply convinced ourselves it is to justify our struggle, paralysis, and inaction against actual violence, which is unnecessary and a choice.

I woke up this morning to news that once again, the wounds of capitalism and violence wept out the lives of several hundred people and 17 limp bodies whose light was cut short. To the news that our collective responsibility has once again been abdicated. To Pharisees capitalising on the inalienable right to justice and life for those who are oppressed and persecuted with systemic, brutal subjugation — in order to selfishly protect their own existence.

And then I learned about ALICE.

I learned that when we allow an active shooter to enter a classroom full of little lights, they are taught to, “run around, yell loudly, throw things like books or wads of paper, etc. Just be a distraction.” [3]

The sound of bullets rings in my chest and the terrorized screams of children, running, conjuring chaos to meet chaos — to extend the chaos — echoes in my ears.

In my hands, I watch them stretch time with the last spark of their Divinity.

More time for their peers to flee.

More time for us to make excuses.

More time for us to gather the pieces.

More time for cheques collected for heresy.

More time for us to feast on their sacrifice.

More time for us to justify this evil.

Their rage and their fleeting memories meld seamlessly into the miasma of our wetiko, we eat their flesh and call it liberty. Wetiko eats the tree of life — creeping through the veins, choking out meaning and time, and we call this freedom.

We eat our roots for the sake of our branches, and we decay into the arms of the ghosts of our moral vacancy.

We cannibalise our children.

And nobody lives.

CITATIONS:
[1] https://unsettlingamerica.wordpress.com/2012/01/30/lets-spread-the-word-wetiko/
[2] http://ernestbecker.org/is-a-fear-of-death-at-the-heart-of-capitalism/
[3] https://www.facebook.com/lguthr/posts/10155732094337481?pnref=story