Speaking of the Devil, who is he anyway?

    Present tense question, because eighty percent of Americans believe in

his existence.

    Eighty percent pray to God to protect them from the Devil's predations.

    Eighty percent ask God to show them the way to right conduct.

    Far be it from me to pull rank on these good people.

    After all, they're the ones who make up consensus reality's actual

flesh-and-blood majority.

    Not some spin doctor in his computer tower.

    Not some covey of time-serving academics deciding for us what we think.

    No, I'll lay my money on the intuition of the four out of five.

    They're quite clear about the Devil.

     The Prince of Darkness, incarnation of evil, is fully active right now.

    He's available any time of the day or night for Faustian bargains to be

struck.

    Your land in exchange for the oil underneath it, your crops for sterile

seeds which mortagage away your future, your health for a sack of deathcamp

glueburgers.

    Your job, family security and sense of self-worth exchanged for an

abstract game of currency trading.

    Sounds like the Devil's work, doesn't it?

    But who is he, really?

    He came to this land on the Mayflower, we know that much.

    There was no Devil before the Puritans arrived.

    Trickster spirits, yes, dark energies which needed to be placated,

ancestor presences causing all sorts of havoc if not respected. But the

Devil? No.        

    Irony worthy of the Evil One himself, to ascribe his own ways to the

very people who were living here before repressed palefaces took over the

landscape.

    The spiritual practices of the Indians, their sexual mores, their

communal existence--how clever to call all this the work of the Devil!

    Ask the Hopi if there was Original Sin.

    Ask the Chippewa if God threw us out of Paradise because we listened to

a snake with a bad-news gleam in his eye.

    Ask the Maya if a serpent seduced their first woman, tempting her with

knowledge of the Tree of Good and Evil.

    And that she corrupted the first man with her feminine wiles, bringing

disaster on the heads of their progeny forevermore.

    But it's certain that the Devil piloted slave ships which landed on the

shores of Caribbean sugar plantations.

    He slaughtered Plains Indians by the tens of thousands to make the land

safe for the Iron Horse.

    He invented biological warfare on these shores.

    When the smallpox vaccine was developed, the U.S. Army inoculated

soldiers and then traded smallpox-infected blankets with the Indians.

    He brought mosquitoes and rats and alcohol and tuberculosis to the

jungle islands of the Pacific and then carpeted them with golf courses.

    He sneaked into American universities with the aid of the CIA, disguised

as German nuclear scientists on the run from a collapsing Nazi regime.

    He fed LSD to unsuspecting prisoners as part of research programs to

melt down enemy minds.

    He universalized the very concept of the enemy, expanding it to include

everyone and everything.

    He suckered researchers into believing that all technological advance is

morally neutral.

    He stole your time, giving you dollar bills in return.

    His finger in every pie, his hand on every ass, his word in every glib

rationalization, his glance lighting up every madhouse window.

    But the moment you look for him he's not there.

    If you ask him to stand and face you he's gone.

    What Devil?

    How crude, how declasse to even mention such a personage.

    Of course you're speaking metaphorically, my dear.

    Who would take you seriously otherwise?

 

 

    But I've seen the Devil in action, I know he exists.

    I've smelled his presence, unlike any other--choking fumes in the middle

of Paradise.      

    I've heard the sound of his triumph--the machinery of oil wells

deafening and unrelenting, never pausing, never resting, twenty-four hours a

day, seven days a week.

    In October, 2000, I travelled to the jungles of Ecuador.

    I met Huaorani men, from a tribe of no more than a couple hundred souls.

    They were seduced and browbeaten into working for the oil companies

which are everywhere down there these days.

    Indoctrinated into a money economy for which they previously had no use,

the men abandon their wives and children for the cheap thrills of liquor and

venereal disease.

    The Evil One snaps his fingers--men are transformed from proud

inhabitants of the forest into ghostly versions of themselves.

    The Evil One has them sign legal documents--the rights to their land are

snatched away.   

    He creates a vacuum within which the women step, magically transformed

from self-sufficient cultivators of manioc and papaya into prostitutes for

the oil camps.

    And not only the Huaorani.

    The Shuar, the Secoya, the Quichua--all are rapidly being pushed into

lives of degradation, their villages no more than stage sets for ecotourists

whose dollars go mostly to preening macho guides from the towns.

    Throughout the jungles of the Oriente roads have been laid in every

direction.

    Running beside them are black steel pipes full of blood.

    The Vampire sucks this blood from beneath the forest floor.

    while his compatriots clear-cut the trees above, shipping tropical

hardwood to Europe, the United States and Japan.

    Oil and timber and gold.

    Syphilis and alcoholism and AIDS.

    Trinkets and batteries and cigarettes.

    For centuries now, fortunes deposited in distant cities of the world.

    And in exchange, torture and starvation.

    Not to mention the mirage of consumer addiction, the friendly fascism of

television.

    So don't tell me that the Devil's just a metaphor.

    Don't pretend that such an elusive yet all-powerful force is imaginary,

a product of superstition.

    Because the joke's on you, dear reader.

    Very soon--tomorrow--today--you too will wake up with a tube in your

neck, your life force sucked out into the void for someone else's profit.

    What delusion, to persist in thinking that "no one" is doing this to

you.

 

 

    Rage--how can I control it?

    What good does it do me?

    My throat constricted, my heart heavy, I returned from Ecuador and

wandered the streets of the world capital, unable to relax, unable to savor

the finest wines, unable to eat elaborate meals prepared by temperamental

geniuses of the jaded palate.

    My friends insisted I dine with them-- "You can't imagine what you're

missing!" they whispered, afraid others were going to steal our table from

under our noses--and I forced some famous seafood sausage down my throat.

    Ten minutes later I was puking in an elegant restaurant bathroom, my

stomach convulsing, hydrochloric acid searing my lips.

    But my friends barely noticed my absence.

    They were scheming among themselves to raise the four hundred dollars

more it would take to taste that bottle of Special Reserve they'd had their

eye on for months.

    "This night of all nights!" they shouted, frustrated in spite of gullets

already stuffed with delicacies beyond description.

    I stumbled outside, leaving them to their exquisite addiction.

    Walking slowly, with measured steps, I disassociated.            Traffic

sounds, people passing on the sidewalk, the weather, the buildings--all of

it meant nothing to me.

    The only thing that mattered, the only thing I saw, was my treasured

mental picture of Pego, the seventy-five year-old Huaorani warrior I'd met

in Ecuador.

    Not more than five feet tall with jet black hair, his blowgun balanced

on his shoulder, he came alive when we ventured into the forest.

    He paused before one plant after another, clucking to himself like a

bird as he described its uses.

    This one for snakebite, that one for menstrual problems, another for

intestinal pain.

    As we penetrated the layers of green, a profusion of butterflies and

other insects buzzed and floated around our heads.

    Lattices of bird song filled the air.

    Pego often paused, smiling joyfully as he tilted his head into the

canopy above.

    He uttered some word in Haourani and our guide would translate ("X bird,

Y tree") but it was obvious that the name--the identity--of what he saw was

only the beginning of his engagement with it.

    No matter what we jotted in our notebooks, we could not follow him into

that engagement.

    His radiant smile, his gentle satisfaction.

    Soon I put away my notebook and just watched him.

    The only time his smile vanished was when someone among our little group

took out a camera and pointed it in his direction.

    Then our guide told us, "Pego was a feared warrior in his youth. He

killed many people. In fact, as recently as four years ago he was still

leading raiding parties on neighboring Haourani villages. It was their

practice to kill the women, even though there are less than five hundred

Huaorani left. It meant nothing to Pego when I explained how they were

sabotaging their own future by murdering potential mothers. He said that

this was the custom of their people. This was the way it always had been."

 

 

    And the custom of our people?

    Is it equally harebrained, equally self-destructive in spite of how

right it feels?

    (How right it must have felt to Pego, esteemed by his brothers for his

prowess with the blowgun. Alive with anticipation as he threaded his way

through the forest night toward unsuspecting victims.)

    Is it the custom of our people to burn holes in the ozone which protects

us from harmful radiation?

    Is it the custom of our people pollute the aquifers on which we depend

for drinking water?

    Is it the custom of our people to treat the diversity of forests as

nothing more than potential board feet?

    To look at the broad Earth potential strip mines?

    We have no choice, we say.

    "I'm doing this to put bread on the table. I'm doing this for my career,

for my survival."

    How can it be, our time on this planet passed in brittle, envious

competition?

    How is it possible that our hunger for survival has become the principal

agent of our destruction?

 

 

    America, we still love you but something's wrong, you're full of shit.

    Your only hope a major detox.

    A national enema, a transnational colonic!

    America, go on a vision quest.

    Draw a circle around yourself in the wilderness and stay there for three

days--seven days--twenty-one days.

    Without food or water.

    Completely silent and alone, humbly offering up your senses to the

spirit surrounding you.

    With purity of purpose, with humility and grace.

    Surrender all pretense, all excuses and explanations.

    Blow the poisons out of your gut.

    Release the junk clogging your mind.

    America, life is not property.

    Break the globalization trance.

    Abandon your cockeyed, reductive vision.

    It's only resulted in ignorance, superstition, plague.

    Only resulted in your essence owned by corporations.

    Only resulted in you Americanizing the planet, making it over in your

image as if you were God.

    America, heal yourself.

    Pull the plug on your addictions.

    Open your eyes to the consequences of your actions.

    Wash your hands of the blood which stains them.

    Before your bloated ego brings the heavens crashing down around you.

    If the opportunity for recovery even still exists.

    Because, raving in darkness, you've sailed past the point of no return

many times.

    Without love your soul appears deformed.

    Rigidity and fixation triumph.

 

 

    So what can we do?

    Don't be discouraged by long odds.

    Each moment exists only to break those odds.

    You're immersed in a psychological continuum which, no matter how

intense, can be ruptured more easily than you imagine.

    Consensus reality is insubstantial.

    It's made of nothing but images and beliefs.

    The instant you change them, they vanish.

    The instant you change them, a new world appears.

    This demonic realm is a con game, arbitrary and vulnerable.

    Remember biology's open secret--learning can be transmitted from one

member of a species to another without direct communication or even any

contact.

    All it takes is intention.

    Understand the power of that intention.

    Embrace the magic of not-knowing.

    Study the concepts of critical mass, the tipping point, and singularity.

    Refuse to give in to the done deal--it's bogus.

    Laugh at anyone who tells you otherwise--they'll always say it's too

late.

    Global corporate media pushes the idea that there's no alternative.

    But human values can change. They're not natural laws.

    We can create a sustainable, dignified world.

    How do mass movements begin?

    Look to the farmers in India, poor peasants who organized against the

terminator seed foisted on them by Monsanto and--against all odds--kicked

the giant out.

    Look to the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh--lending institution as social

movement.   

    Look to the European campaign against genetically modified organisms.

    Look to the American abolitionists, the labor movement, the consumer

rights movement, feminism.

    All began with a handful of people.

    So too, you who are going to dismantle the demon.

    Stop up your ears to global capital's siren song.

    Corporations are confections.

    Re-write state charters, putting corporate control back in the hands of

real people.

    Erase the vision which has trashed this planet.

    Refuse a techno-eugenic future.

    Abandon the petrochemical nightmare in whatever way you can.

    Learn from psychoactive plant substances, they are your oldest teachers.

    Become ecologically literate--the only waste generated on this planet is

by us.

    Teach your children biodiversity.

    End your reliance on pharmaceuticals.

    Stop filling your face with dead food.

    Reject the cattle culture and its myriad depradations.

    Re-enter the garden of no work which is your birthright.

    Before you know it, thousands will morph into millions.

    All it takes is determination.

    All you need is your intention.