Fire and Ice
or Civil Disobedience
Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice. - Robert Frost
Robert Frost might have intended to be whimsical, but fire and ice (in the apocalyptic sense) are real - we can see them now as less opposed and more conjoined. We also sense them as being close at hand, intimate possibilities, if not certainties in a deranged world that has just distinguished itself by installing Donald Trump as the trustee of our biological fate. The hands of the doomsday clock are so close to midnight that you would need an electron microscope to perceive the space between the minute hand and the dot of 12. But will it be fire or ice?
I would prefer an old fashioned super volcano, or a collision with a meteor from a distant orbiting belt of cosmic flotsam to the ExxonMobil extinction event. We, as the only known species able to imagine the end of the earth, deserve better than a fizzled out collapse, a fascist clusterfuck, or an Anthropocene barbecue roast with us as the main course. The biological project launched in the Cambrian explosion - the greatest creative act of sunlight, chemistry and complexity that we know of - has resolved all of the Darwinian twists and turns, the mass extinctions, the environmental resets, with renewal. The Earth, if it had a sentient, detached image of itself, would wonder how it came nose to nose with a predicament like this - with no exit.
All mass extinctions have featured silver linings. The Permian "Great Dying" brought a hundred and sixty-five million years of dinosaur glory. The end of the non-avian dinosaurs brought us tigers, mammoths, skies full of birds (the consolation prize of dinosaur denouement), and oceans full of whales, dolphins, seals and walruses. It also created us - the mother of all invasive species. Nature, across billions of years, parceled out fire and ice carefully - leaving at least a small gateway to eternity. The crustal silicates with its plate tectonics, its continental collisions, rifting and uplifting, kept the world on a succession of measured cycles. Now the string has broken and we lurch through the cosmos trailing plumes of smoke like a planet built by Boeing.
In a world of questions without answers, I ask if Trump is a tipping point - an equivalent to an overheated Greenland without a speck of ice to be found. Speaking of Greenland, we all were staggered to learn that Trump wants Greenland for himself - with or without ice. How did that bizarre turn of events come to pass? With years of Trump's word salad pouring across the media, how is it that suddenly we all learn that he craves Greenland? And Panama, Canada and Mexico, too. Trump has avoided any sort of reassuring gestures that we have come to expect - none of the usual homilies about unity or wanting to represent us all. His contorted, leathery face, his thin, clenched, yellow mouth generates an expectation of heartless intent that you might expect from the commander of a firing squad. One struggles to imagine a secret, hidden Trump - a private brain observing himself with amusement, and, perhaps, even astonishment. "I never imagined how stupid and gullible these people are. It requires all the restraint in the world to not cry torrents of tears for them. They are as innocent as toddlers." Might that have been what Trump whispered to Obama at Jimmy Carter's funeral? But where was I? Oh yes, Greenland.
The world is his, but the riches and plunder laid out at his feet have not coaxed even a moment of visible gratitude or even a self satisfied, philosophical stroking of his chin - he simply continues in his wooden, humorless manner to set out demands with an air of impatient irritation. We all remember the unedited vomit that famously sprang from Trump's brain and throat when he proposed that people quaff bleach to burn out the COVID virus - the impulsive, guileless nature of his thoughts define his demands. He resembles an obnoxiously rich child attempting to think of something so rare that it can't be given to him. "Greenland it is young master!"
In the game of endless Supermarket Sweep that Trump now plays, he gets to gather whole countries into his shopping cart, maybe even continents. It seems odd that he has not vowed to take Antarctica from the penguins.
Antarctica, by global agreement, lies outside of the boundaries of imperial plunder, but in the Machiavellian plans of authoritarian narcissists, Antarctica's oil reserves, both oceanic and waiting under miles of glacial ice, ought to be a prime target for Trump's expansive dreams. Are we really going to stand back and watch this happen - the Antarctica continent opened up like a can of Andy Warhol’s tomato soup, and drained of hundreds of millions of years of carbon - maybe enough to heat the earth to the temperature of a bread oven?
I am making a big deal over Trump, as if he is the reason that mother earth is headed for hospice. He isn't. As long as capitalism, oil-industry-funded-rightwing-thinktanks and corporate lobbyists own all the chess pieces (Republican and Democratic) we will continue to go down the Permian Reprise Highway. Think of Trump as the Mariano Rivera (before the former genius of the cutter got into Evangelical trouble) of doomsday. Trump is the closer, but the score is 20-0 in favor of the Washington Apocalypse - the winning team doesn't need Trump. The hitters due up in the top of the ninth are Schumer, Pelosi and Fetterman - none of these has ever hit a ball out of the infield in decades, if ever. The losing squad, The Washington Capitulators have no chance, but will it be fire or ice in the ninth inning?
Fire and Ice were abstractions to Robert Frost, things of no real consequence scheduled to play out billions of years in the future, now they have urgent meaning. Do we choose to blow ourselves up in a nuclear frenzy of nationalistic ferocity, or do we just leisurely outsource collective doom to Chevron? The former will bring on the vaunted nuclear winter with global starvation, radiation poisoning and the second coming of snowball earth. Fire and Ice, as I already stated, work as a team. The earth bakes and a sweltering, suffering humanity turns its displeasure into the favorite default for hard times - war. Climate overheating is the mother of fascism - a program of scapegoating and rage. When the world is elbow to elbow with overheated people and psychopathic rulers, that bomb will eventually be called upon. Call it Fire and Ice - like a legal corporation.
What about hope, mass resistance, civil disobedience on the epic level that Trump deserves? I am an ordinary person, and I am unqualified to guess whether or not US residents have the cohesive rage needed to meet Trump with collective force. I am old enough to remember a time when the left had the power to shut down a war and push civil rights through the barrier of the KKK. I marched in 1971 with a half million others in DC against the murderous war in Vietnam - I still picture a sea of people and a nervous line of outmanned national guardsmen with their riot helmets and sticks. Where did that all go? There was music back then, and a sense that "The Times, They Are a Changing." There is still music, like here and here, but the consequences of not resisting are numbing and the tide of protest is nowhere in sight.
In 1971 we only marched against mass colonial crimes against humanity. We had not yet imagined the end of the web of life. What does gathering extinction do to our unity and spirit? We had no trouble picturing children burned alive by US napalm - a year after the DC march we received the iconic photo linked above, confirming what already was known. The environmental crimes of US corporations leave our imaginations groping for images.