On the Spiders from Nowhere
by Steve ThomasI’m in Virginia, at my grandparents’ home. Here in retreat, trying to recover after a bit of social explosion home in Pittsburgh.
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My grandparents live in a development. I did not know what a development was except in passing, before they moved here one year ago. Now I fully understand the term. It means this:
Every single house one of three derivations from the same model. Accessible only by passing through a gate, but still no community. No one knows one another. More to the point—and this is the key to development—it is everywhere. And it never, ever stops. One travels the roads here, and every week a new piece of forest is destroyed and a new Development is being erected.
It’s the Geography of Nowhere, in Kunstler’s too-apt term. This is Nowhere. I have never been here. No one is here. There are no people. There is no life here. The people here are the Nothing Men, the Men of Nowhere.
It is Nowhere, and it is everywhere.
Virginia is beautiful. You see remnants of it everywhere. It’s more than beautiful. It’s abundant. It’s fecund. A community of real humans could survive here in peace and plenty until the end of time.
The inhabitants recognize this. They know it’s pretty. So every here-and-there they build Ooh Look! nature preserves. It’s not a viable habitat for any real population. If you suggested living on this land; subsisting here, making your living here, in dynamic interaction with the myriad forms of life who dwell here, the Nothing Man will laugh and laugh and laugh.
You would be suggesting a relationship. The Nothing Men do not have relationships. They cannot.
It’s simple mathematics.
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The Nothing Man might tell you he does make a living here upon this land. This is his way of life:
He drives to Washington, or perhaps Arlington or Fairfax. He drives on roads that are too few for the number of cars that need to travel them. It takes a long time. He buys gas for $2.50 a gallon. Gas imported from the Middle East. Metal for the car, asphalt for the road; all come from elsewhere, all arrive by oil’s permission.
He works at a job which does nothing. Nothing real at all. This is Nowhere, and you cannot do anything at Nowhere. He manipulates money that does not exist. He buys or sells; concepts that do not exist. His work is a fiction, sitting in an air conditioned, sterile office building. At the end of the day he drives back home over those imported roads. None of this is self-sustaining.
Perhaps he stops at Safeway on the way back. Safeway. That name encompasses half of what you need to understand the Nothing Way of Life. The other half is this: Freeway.
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Freedom and Safety. Freedom as Safety.
What is Freedom? Freedom to buy and sell and use up resources. That’s all. That’s it. Freedom to drive a car, one of the most violent acts a “private individual� can undertake.
Safety. Food is the foundation of any way of life. It’s probably not coincidence that the Nothing Men get their food from the Safeway. The Nothing Men and their Nothing Wives live in constant terror. They live in a world overpopulated by pedophiles, drug dealers, serial killers, liberals, and—above all—terrorists.
To feel secure, the Nothing Men grant a few individuals (inasmuch as they, being themselves Nothing Men, actually are individuals) power to dictate virtually every aspect of their lives.
Freedom and Safety. Freedom only means exploiting finite resources. Safety only means insulation from the consequences of overexploiting finite resources.
To kill the earth and all its inhabitants, and to pretend that this is not happening. That is the Nothing Way of Life.
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This is America. This is the American Way of Life. This is what Dick Cheney tells us is non-negotiable. This is dependant entirely upon petroleum. Cheney’s hope is that it can also be dependant upon fission. This is dependant upon war and centralized power. Power and War. “Conquest abroad and repression at home,� in Stanley Diamond’s eternal words.
This is why thousands are dying in Iraq and Afghanistan; this is why a million will die in Syria and Iran. None of this is sustainable. Everywhere the land—the fertile, life-giving, breathtakingly beautiful land that we misnamed Virginia—that could have sustained human life has been destroyed. In its place they built land that cannot sustain people or any living thing.
The Nothing Men are living on borrowed time.
It’s amusing. Maybe I’m a bastard, but it’s delightful to think about all of this crashing down around them.
I’m thinking of a part in Tyler Kimble’s movie, “Yu Koyo Peya.� The CEO of Microsoft, Steve Ballmer, is on stage, morbidly obese and sweating, chanting “Developers! Developers! Developers developers developers developers DEVELOPERS!�
It’s utterly fucking hilarious for me to think about that fat idiot walking into the Safeway, and nothing’s there. The oil ran out, and the fields that grew his food turned sterile without their pesticides, herbicides, fertilizers. And there was no oil to fly them to him anyway. He looks outside, and a deer prances past. It stops for a moment to mock him, and is gone. And then one of his fellow Nothing Men clubs him from behind, and the Fat Man winds up a feast.
*
Of course it’s not that simple. The Nothing Men are the most terrified race of cowards to ever crawl across the ruined surface of the earth.
They will allow their masters to take whatever action is necessary to preserve their Way of Life; their Way of Nothing.
They are going to go down. But they are going to go down in a blaze of conquest and repression such as the world has never seen before. The final intensification of civilization, before the end of everything. Ubiquitous surveillance. Nuclear war. It’s on the horizon, sailing in quickly on the
But in the end, even it will fall, when there are no more resources to support it.
The earth will heal on its own, but slowly. All we can do now is prevent the Nothing Men from taking so much down with them, the world is no longer inhabitable for creatures like us.
Maybe I really am a sick fuck, but the thought of the Nothing Men reduced to eating each other, of Steve Ballmer turning over a spit for the nourishment of his former employees or customers, makes me laugh for the first time in days.
*
Even here there are some who resist.
Terrorists, you might call them. And they really are terrifying. They’re little and brown and shaped like alien nightmares and weapons. They are unstoppable, and they are everywhere. They strike from the shadows, and no matter how many you kill more always rise up to take their place.
They are spiders. Tiny brown spiders that leap through every basement in every house (of course, there is only one house) in every development.
They are here in my grandparents’ house. One attacked me last night. I was sitting in the middle of the floor, and I felt a tickling on my arm. I knocked it away just in time and I killed it. I was caught between terror and admiration.
The spiders don’t seem to have any reason for being in the house. There are no insects. Everything is thoroughly too thoroughly sterilized. They have only one reason for being here:
To drive the Nothing Men out.
They are a guerrilla army. They are terrorists. They are beautiful and frightening and so damned courageous; a Holy Sisterhood, committed to the noblest jihad.
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I think the Nothing Men actually know the truth. On some level. They have to. It’s all around them. They can’t defeat the spiders, no matter how desperately hard they try, with raid and exterminators and rolled-up newspapers.
The spiders are a message from this land. “I will be here after you are gone.� They are one message out of a million that the Nothing Men are bombarded with. One message out of a million the Nothing Men must drown out with digital cable and high-speed internet and “nature preserves� and cops and snipers and terrorism legislation and Prozac and Zoloft and alcohol and breaking news scandals and some girl in Aruba.
Phytoplankton populations dropping. Icecaps disappearing. Oceanic dead zones. Tsunamis killing hundreds of thousands. Poisonous breast milk; ubiquitous cancer. State collapse and interminable war. A planet which no longer resembles a habitat for life. Turn up the volume and pop another pill.
They are driving themselves mad, trying to force the messages from their minds. They are shattering their psyches into tinier and tinier fragments to remain Unable To See.
But secretly, they all know the truth. They know what happens. They know the spiders win.
All that remains to be seen is how far they will go to stop their inevitable end; how much they will attempt to bring down with them, once they see that their end is inevitable; and whether we will find the courage to stop them.
*
You know, in some of the circles I run in, people ask “Why doesn’t G-d talk to us anymore? Where are the big omens of the past? The dread messages and the pillars of fire (or equally relevant cultural symbols)?” I stare at them now and let them in on a little secret. The world does talk to us. It said that the only way to achieve the mad power we wanted was through raping the flesh and bones of our long-dead ancestors. That the only way of achieving a mere approximation of godhood was through consuming death.
Any sane person would have turned away disgusted.
The Nowhere Men said “Hm. We’ll call this liquid death ‘oil’” and embraced it without a second thought.
All I have to say is all hail spiders and the forces of life.
Or something like that.
Thanks for the article!
Comment by Bill Maxwell — 12 August 2005 @ 2:37 AM
Spiders have always scared me. Maybe this is why. Hmmm…
…or maybe it’s just because they look hella creepy. -_^
Comment by Giulianna Lamanna — 12 August 2005 @ 10:13 AM
i hate development. here in tulsa, they’re going to cut down 100 year old oak trees in a forested area so they can put in houses. also, there’s going to be a toll bridge that will disrupt the vegetation on the river. this is one of the last pristine places in tulsa. the developer and the birdge maker say that nothing will stop them. they totally sound like steve ballmer.
also, one of my favorite spots from childhood was turned into Nothingness. i was so sad. i used to walk the trails and play in the treegouse we made. now it’s all gone. god… patterns of destruction are everywhere..
Comment by Scott — 12 August 2005 @ 10:43 AM
This reminds me of the Stephen King story “The Langoliers”. They just kept eating and eating and eating up the surface of the Earth until there was nothing left, and anyone who got in their path was mowed down as well.
I like the term “Nothing Men”. Whole lives that are without life, without meaning. The more they try to find or create meaning, the more it eludes them.
Roxy.
Comment by Raku — 12 August 2005 @ 3:05 PM
Everyone–
Thanks for your supportive comments. You all really made my day.
Bill–
This is awesome. Thank you.
Comment by Steve Thomas — 13 August 2005 @ 1:26 PM
I’ve never lived in an American city, but perhaps Manila, in the Philppines, was the next best thing.
My ‘home’ was a semi-detached ‘villa’ in Marcelo Green Village, south of the urban agglomeration, where nothing much was green or villagey, but you had to pass security guards on the way in. I worked for an American trading company, trying to sell products that were noticeably inferior to, for instance, their European equivalents.
I worked in Makati, a little bit like Manhattan, with huge skyscrapers housing nothing much better than ’service industries’ like mine at the time. The whole area was owned and developed by the Ayala family, fabulously rich descendants of original Spanish colonials. ‘Makati’ means ‘itchy’ in Tagalog, a fit description of the swamp that was developed into a modern financial centre.
There was only one route from home to work, the ‘South Super Highway’. (In London, Paris, or most other ‘civilised’ cities, you can always beat the traffic by taking short-cuts through the ‘back doubles’ - London taxi-drivers spend up to 3 years learning these before they’re given a license).
But in Manila, every ‘back double’ was cut off because it went through a gated, securitised community ‘village’.
I spent 18 hours, two weeks before I left the place, trying to get transport from work to my home, 4.5 miles away, during a rainstorm.
Although I say ‘I left the place’ as if I made the decision, I was actually sacked because the 1997 ‘Asian Financial Crisis’ engineered by somebody else far, far away, made all the solid projects I was working on into wistful dreams. Nobody could afford to buy American products anymore. Even the scams we used to sell the damned things didn’t work from then on.
Manila’s pattern is being repeated all over the world, as ‘Freedom ‘n’ Democracy’ spreads. Just look at Cairo, Shanghai, London, and even the ‘Green Zone’ in Baghdad.
I wish ‘Freedom ‘n’ Democracy’ wasn’t such a cancer.
regards
Richard
Comment by Richard Parker — 15 August 2005 @ 10:49 AM
[gratuitious pop-cultural reference]I, for one, welcome our new arachnoid overlords![/GPCR]
Comment by Thomas Rondy — 2 September 2006 @ 6:12 PM