Jabberwok

My head is exploding.

I don’t know why Greenland is doing it, when so much else could.

But Greenland is a fine place to start.  Also gibberish—which is what much of the reporting and commentary about current developments sounds like to me.

The idea that “acquiring Greenland” can be called a “national security priority,” as the White House press secretary purported on Jan. 6, is gibberish.

Yet former NATO commander Wesley Clark, in a BBC interview, ticks off reasons why the place is essential to U.S. survival.  As, dutifully, does CNN.  Location, for one.  With Greenland east and Alaska west, we’re better guarded against the arctic designs of China and…Russia.

Guarded against Russia?  

More gibberish. 

The cherished desire of Russian President Vladimir Putin is to watch the once triumphant Atlantic Alliance tear itself to flapping shreds.  It’s already happening.  What would a hostile takeover of one member by another be but the final lunge for the jugular? 

Guarded against Russia? …when President Donald Trump’s every move on the war in Ukraine has cut in Moscow’s favor—all but offering up Europe’s farther flank?

Guarded against Russia, when the current U.S. national security strategy makes that intent explicit?  The document loads mortal insult on the closest of friends.  

Europe, it intones, is facing “civilizational erasure.”  The text, promulgated in all of our names, denounces the very existence of the continent’s confederating structure, the Union—which has warded off wars for decades.  It is now U.S. “strategy” to seek the end of European policies that have kept food wholesome, plastics at bay, that have helped lands grow healthier and small towns survive—including by ensuring they’re still served by trains and busses running on time.  “We” want the “correction” of policies that invite people and ideas and the making of beauty to circulate and grow in the encounter.  By contrast, the rise of far-right parties—most of them supported by Moscow—is cause for American celebration.

Acquiring Greenland would guard the U.S. against Russia?  Gibberish.  All signs indicate that Russia is comfortably ensconced in the White House.

Greenland—like almost everything in today’s political economy—is not about anyone’s security, it’s about money.

Rare earth is one of the most recent names for that stuff, which has only apparently grown invisible.  Though now counted in electronic signals—in digital zeroes stacked in often untraceable bank accounts—money always proves to be rooted in the land.  Trace its origins far enough back and you’ll find, just like in the fairytales, treasure to be dug.  

Rare earths, our latest mineral infatuation, require some of the oldest rocks in the earth’s crust to be extracted, crushed, and, through differing series of complex processes, disentangled from each other, separated and “purified.”  Landscapes are disfigured.  Precious lifeways that reach back through millennia of our species’s sojourn on this planet, together with the wise elders who have kept them, are consigned to the slag-heap.  There they join the remains of mountains or river-valleys they revered, or knolls where white foxes once raised their kits.

We are all compelled into complicity with these crimes.  For who, least of all me, can live without some form of computer?  Who, like it or not, isn’t already using the new artificial smarts: in our electronic searches or the apps we unthinkingly load onto our phones.  One by one, friends, people I know who are most attuned to these problems, are reaching for Chat GPT—to help with research, or drafting a budget, or, just for fun, to imagine a future configuration for these United States.  The financial security of any of us blessed with a 401(K) is tied to the success of the companies that have developed an insatiable appetite for rare earth.  

We all, that is, have an interest in “acquiring Greenland.”

Meanwhile, in waters not far off the island’s southern tip, U.S. forces seize a vessel laden with that older treasure: oil.  With the help, mind, of the serviable Brits.

U.S. personnel reportedly boarded the vessel after a two-week chase, during which it doffed its Guyanan flag and adopted a Russian one.

Gibberish.

Why would the flag of a second sanctioned country, currently under a blazing spotlight—Russia—offer this transporter of contraband Venezuelan oil more security?  Its sortie from Venezuelan waters was reportedly part of a mass breakout attempt against the U.S. blockade by more than a dozen ships, most of them brazenly rebranded as Russian. 

Any explanation I might offer for this very peculiar episode would be speculation.  For example: is it possible that Moscow was playing two ends against the middle: deliberately sacrificing a few vessels to burnish Trump’s ersatz anti-Russia bona fides, while simultaneously securing a dozen cargoes of oil?  

The one thing that does seem clear is that the operation was meant—by Moscow as well as Washington—to be seen.  Therefore, take news about it with a grain of salt.

The boarding came days after the United States government deposed Venezuela’s ruler, in a supposed counter-narcotics raid.

Gibberish.

Though Venezuela is a drugs-trafficking hub (via routes reportedly pointing largely east, not north), the obsession with that place has nothing to do with narcotics.   Hardly a month ago, Trump issued a personal pardon for the former president of Honduras, Juan Orlando Hernandez, a genuine narco-kleptocrat, who had been tried and convicted of conspiring to import cocaine into the United States.  

The capture of Nicholàs Maduro, a despot roundly detested by his own people, had nothing to do with democracy, either.  As I have repeatedly argued, kleptocracy is the operating system not of individuals, but networks.  More than a decade of anti-corruption uprisings around the world has demonstrated how these networks resemble the many-headed beast of Greek myth, the Hydra: if a single head is lopped off, even the topmost one, others grow in its place.  With the exception of the man himself and his wife, Venezuela’s entire kleptocratic network remains unscathed.  And the head of one Donald J. Trump is busily replacing the severed one.  

Manifestly, Venezuela is about oil (maybe also that even more storied treasure, gold).  

But that oil is in no way related to U.S. energy security.  Trump’s enthusiasm for AI, cyber-currency and other such energy-voracious technologies is unleashing an exponentially increased demand for power—far outstripping whatever Venezuela’s heavy-crude resources could provide—while his active de-diversification of the U.S. energy offering is reducing supply.

When demand rises and supply falls, what’s the result?

Venezuela is about money. 

“We’re going to be taking out a tremendous amount of wealth, out of the ground…”  Trump himself says it all.

Then again, there may be something—and something deep—to “acquisition,” after all.  “Ownership,” he told the New York Times a few days later, referring to Greenland, “is what I feel is psychologically needed—for me.”

Isn’t that fixation with possession at the root of our problems? 

So much for trying to cut through what has seemed to me to be a befuddling miasma of words.  As I stop to reread what I’ve just written, it occurs to me that I, too, have been talking some gibberish.

Energy de-diversification?  

National security?  What national security, when our government is being dismantled from inside, and all the precepts upon which it was aspirationally founded are being systematically and ostentatiously desecrated?  From whom or what do we need securing?  Why am I even entering into a discussion that takes the phrase “national security” at face value?

Rare earth?  This whole earth is rare.  It is, so far as we know, unique.  That is, irreplaceable.  I look at the two countries in question on the map, Greenland and Venezuela, and I see the Arctic and the Amazon, the last reaches of untrammelled earth.  I see two indescribably precious regions, whose health—atmospheric, geologic, biotic—is crucial to the health of the entire planetary system.  I see the last refuges of those remaining humans who understand that the earth is alive and sacred, that the place of our species is in respectful cohabitation with all the others, as humble co-guardian, according to our gifts, of the safety and flourishing of all.

I don’t know what I’m asking of you, because I don’t know what can stand in the way of what’s bearing down.  As philosopher Peter Kingsley writes in his most recent book, Catafalque:

There is no going on as before.  Maybe we’ll think we can act in the same way for a few more years, but…  

Not for very much longer. 

Everything that was implicit in our civilization from the very beginning…is being acted out now—in spite of us and regardless of our best intentions—because of what we agreed to forget. 

Maybe I will leave you with this.  Time, humans have long sensed, does not only spool out in a straight linear fashion.  It has a pulse.  And it curves around in spirals, too.  Every year, trees commit a desperate act of faith.  They pour all their energy into the making of seeds.  Somehow, with the hardest of winters upon them, or wildfires raging, they trust in the regular return of spring.  Perhaps we are asked to do as the trees.  To be that profligate—not in our consumption, on the contrary. In our offering.  Let’s get busy making seeds of the forest to come.