On Why the Femicidal Stranglehold in Texas is Essential to the Fossil Fuel Economy
Warning: this post contains sweeping generalizations which may trigger or offend some people.
September 8, 2021 is Rosh Hashanah, a time of renewal after atonement which begins a new year. It comes this year after Labor Day, intended to let those who work, rest. I have written this before all three: atonement, rest and renewal. I will atone for my terror and rage over events in Texas. I plan to rest after writing this. I will believe in the potential for renewal.
I argue that ecocide is the byproduct of fascism; fascism is a patriarchal construct that subjugates women and nature to the profits of a few mostly white men; the consequences are femicide and genocide. I see no daylight between the radical right in the United States epitomized by recent decisions on voting rights and abortion in Texas and the Taliban in Afghanistan. Both the Texas Republicans and the Afghani Taliban have sacrificed the common good to personal power. Is it reasonable to see a parallel? Women are collateral damage for both.
This post is about the common semiotics of the words in my text:
My premise is that the ideas each of these words represent constitute a complex adaptive model, that is, a way to consider complexity that predicts the future by examining relationships between agents, in this case, represented by words such as those above which have become binding law. In the last century, there was a lot of discussion in academic artworld circles about the power of words and metaphors to shape reality. I have since considered that shaping as a form of making, sculpting a world. I am making an assertion in this text that the predictive potential of considering the relationships between the words in my heading points to a fascist future, a monumental conceptually phallic sculpture celebrating totalitarian patriarchy.
In the state of Texas, Roe vs. Wade was effectively over-turned September 2, 2021. The radical right has used fairy tales about infanticide, enabled by corrupt judges leveraging fundamentalist rage to instate fascism. Like any other fanatically lunatic fringe, the fanatic Texas fascists have mobilized rage to scapegoat and eventually murder resistance. I argue that targeting women’s rights alongside recent voter restrictions weaponizes extreme misogyny to privilege corporate over democratic power. Of course, misogyny is not limited to men. Associate Supreme Court Justices Amy Coney Barrett and Brett M. Kavanaugh have equal claim to the toxic masculinity, rape culture and misogyny that ends in femicide, genocide and ecocide.
The actions of fossil fuel corporations have been deemed both genocidal and ecocidal. Populism is not the same as democracy. The manipulation of populist rage is a time-honored tool for fanaticism to gain control of government and is a foil for corporate fascism, termed super capitalism. The original impetus for Roe vs. Wade was death by botched abortions. The 1973 law saved women’s lives at a time when government felt a mandate to care for its citizens. Texas has banned abortions after six weeks, before most women know they are pregnant. Unplanned pregnancy dooms women and children to poverty and often, death. The fanatic right turned around the reality that women die of botched abortions to accuse women of infanticide. The pro-choice following cast a blind eye to dying women and dubious science to exorcise their own inchoate rage. The result in Texas will be femicide at the hands of ignorant political fanatics.
Why bother to enshrine institutionalzed femicide in the legal system?
I would argue that the reason the radical right wants to destroy women’s rights is to pave the way for a failed state.
Why would anyone want a failed state?
I would argue that if government is removed, there is no impediment to corporate genocide and ecocide in the service of shortterm profiteering.
How?
I would argue that by manipulating an addiction to rage, a population can be convinced to do anything for any reason that serves their amygdala.
Fear is a good reason to become an addict. We can be addicted to anything in excess, alcohol, sugar, sex or rage for example. Substance abuse is only a problem when it hurts ourselves or others. Buddhism counsels that these forms of excess inevitably lead to misery. 12-Step recovery programs assert that the hallmark of any addict is self-centeredness but that recovery must come from the addict. Nonetheless, it is routine for those who care for an addict to stage an “intervention,” which is a whole separate industry dedicated to pointing out how the addict is harming themselves and others. Arguably, self-centeredness is just garden variety narcissism. Tom Nichols, in his new book, “Our Own Worst Enemy: The Assault from within on Modern Democracy,” (Oxford Press) has argued that what is destroying democracy is a narcissistic culture, mostly driven by privileged white people who feel entitled to MORE, which they imagine someone else has and has stolen from them. So for the narcissistic fascist, the solution, is to deny the rights of others to accumulate more personal power.
In the case of denying women the rights to their own bodies, particularly over reproductive health, patriarchy and patriarchal values at the expense of women (let alone the planet) are protected and reified.
In my forthcoming book, “Divining Chaos,” I wrote, “At the end of the 1980s, I heard a sociologist on the radio say, “It is amazing how much pain one/you can inflict if you don’t feel your own.” That was after I had already created decades of work about violence between people—not only rape but child abuse and domestic violence, violence between men and on animals victimized by people, always trying to understand the link between human behavior and environmental disaster. Perpetrators of rape or ecocide might be people who have disassociated from their own vulnerability and dependency on others, human or not— people afraid to feel either empathy or their own pain and choosing to inflict pain instead. The perpetrator might be as much a captive of the learned helplessness that triggers fear as the person victimized.”
The historian Heather Cox Richardson wrote the day Texas over-turned Roe vs Wade, that, “The common story is that Roe sparked a backlash. But legal scholars Linda Greenhouse and Reva Siegel found something interesting. In a 2011 article in the Yale Law Journal, they showed that opposition to the eventual Roe v. Wade decision began in 1972—the year before the decision—and that it was a deliberate attempt to polarize American politics. …
Traditional Republicans supported an activist government that regulated business and promoted social welfare, but radical right Movement Conservatives wanted to kill the active government. They attacked anyone who supported such a government as immoral. Abortion turned women's rights into murder.”
What happens when you destroy government? Eventually you have what movement conservatives rail against and has actually driven immigration from Central America: a failed state. Why would you want a failed state? A failed state, as seems to have been hidden in plain sight in Afghanistan or now in Texas, invites populist opportunism, corruption, totalitarianism, and rule by gangs. In Texas, the corrupt gang that has seized power has been enabled by the United States Supreme Court.
Why would Texas want to be a failed state? Who is the gang destroying democracy and constitutional law? I would argue Texas is the stronghold of the fossil fuel industry and the Trojan Horse for our collective future, unless, we all work to protect true democracy.