Nowtopian

Visiting the Pacific Ocean in late August, an easy bike ride from home…

Last December I wrote a bit about my discovering more deep history around the Pacific. I neglected to mention then my pal Tina’s remarkable atlas Sea Change: An Atlas of Islands in a Rising Ocean. In it she makes her way from island to island around the planet, giving capsule histories and likely scenarios as the oceans continue their inexorable rise. California’s history is fully intertwined with that of the Philippines, Hawaii, Japan, Korea, China, India and the rest of what is lumped together as Asia and the Pacific. Tina’s atlas doesn’t try to untangle all those complicated histories, though she notes many important pieces in passing. In the past few weeks I’ve had the pleasure of diving rather deeply into this.

An incredible book, well over 500 pages, is Alfred McCoy’s 2009 opus Policing America’s Empire: The United States, the Philippines, and the Rise of the Surveillance State. He has popped up in prior blog posts of mine as the author of various works describing the steady unraveling of the US empire (he originally made his name with The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia that revealed the role of the CIA in running heroin during the Vietnam war). This book on the Philippines and US colonialism is a tour de force, and a product of 40 years of close research McCoy carried out during most of his academic life. It covers the initial seizure of the Philippines in 1898 and betrayal of the ongoing war of liberation there, through the many years of developing and perfecting technologized systems of counterinsurgency and colonial repression, up to the post-WWII granting of formal independence, the Marcos martial law regime, the post-martial law “democratic” governments up to Gloria Arroyo’s in the early 2000s, and more. It’s so detailed and is so careful to connect the role of various colonial administrators (starting with future president William Howard Taft, governor of the Philippines in 1901) to their later roles in US domestic politics, that it is incredibly revealing. Perhaps as telling, if you followed any of the news of Philippine President Duterte, who was wildly Trumpian in his denunciations of drug users and criminals and brazen in unleashing the police and military in mass killing campaigns, reading this book you come to realize that he wasn’t such a huge departure from what preceded him in Philippine politics (nor what followed, i.e. “Bongo” Marcos, Jr.). It is a work of deep historiography too. Here McCoy helps illuminate a framework he employs that sets him apart from most historians:

Even this research is still, at this writing, overwhelmed by the sheer mass of dissertations, monographs, histories, textbooks, documentaries, monuments, and museums whose unstated, unwitting aim is to affirm state authority. Through the sum of these endeavors, historians have encircled the nation-state with a sacral barrier that precludes cognizance of its profane margins: systemic violence, institutional corruption, extralegal security operations, and most important, syndicated vice. Many social historians have escaped the nation-state’s hegemony through studies of popular movements among workers, women, or minorities. But few have looked at the state long and hard from its sordid underside—an interstice that is the sum of addiction, avarice, blackmail, cowardice, scandal, torture, venality, and violence. As acolytes of the nation-state, conventional historians turn away from such a disconcerting dimension and often adopt a positive, at times celebratory view of their polity that discourages consideration of the influence of the informal on the formal, the criminal on the powerful, or, in some cases, the colonized on the colonizer. (p. 12)

I will come back to McCoy in a bit. There’s much more to share from his work, and it connects in various ways to other themes I want to expand on. But first let’s bring in Amitav Ghosh’s latest nonfiction work Smoke & Ashes: Opium’s Hidden Histories. This is a work that carefully brings to the forefront the sordid underside McCoy describes above. It also helpfully grants the poppy plant itself historical agency!

The brute fact is that it was a flower that defeated the mightiest military power in human history [the U.S. in Afghanistan]: the opium poppy may be humble in appearance, but it is one of the most powerful Beings that humans have encountered in their time on earth. To be sure, tea, sugarcane, tobacco, rubber, cotton, Yersinia pestis, and many other plants and pathogens have played major roles in human history, some of them over several centuries. But today they are all much diminished in their influence, while the opium poppy is mightier than ever. (p. 112) … in colonizing the poppy fields of Bihar [India], the colonizers have themselves been colonized—by a non-human entity whose intelligence, patience and longevity far exceed that of humans. It is almost as if the elders of the plant kingdom, having concluded that Homo sapiens was too dangerous an animal to be allowed to survive, had given humankind a gift that they knew would be used by the most ruthless and powerful of the species to build economic systems that would slowly, inexorably, bring about the end of their civilization. (p. 250-251) … …opium creates its own temporalities: when opioid epidemics subside, they are followed by periods of amnesia, which, after a few decades, help to rehabilitate opioids all over again. These cycles are another sign of opium’s potency as a historical actor in its own right. (p. 270)

An all too common sight in San Francisco these days, someone in the midst of a “fentanyl freeze.”

San Francisco is famously having a drug problem. It’s decades old, but it is also quite new in that the arrival of synthetic opium in the form of fentanyl has been killing drug users at an unprecedented rate. The anti-overdose drug Narcan is now readily available and many people are carrying it around to try to save the lives of people who are obviously dying on our streets. It can be rather bleak walking past the blocks where police seem to have ushered the most desperate drug users to congregate. It is not uncommon these days to see people in almost any part of town doing the “fentanyl freeze” where they are rooted, standing stock still but bent completely in half as their upper torso has descended towards their knees, unable to sustain an upright position while experiencing the intense high of a fresh dose. It’s very sad, to say the least. But our opioid addiction crisis covers the country, and by all accounts is as bad or worse in many of the most abandoned and poverty-stricken rural areas of the midwest and the south in addition to the inner cities.

Continue reading History… We’re Soaking in It!