My Life In Dada Land Or A Day Of My Life In Absurdistan
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| Dadaist Marcel Duchamp epitomized the Dada ethos with his 1917 urinal as art that satirized art itself. By permission of copyright holder Micha L. Reiser |
The Dada art movement was born as a reaction by artists to the senseless, absurd slaughter in the trenches of the First World War. Their response was to create absurd art for an absurd world. In essence, in a world that doesn't make sense, art too should be senseless. When the world has gone mad, create art to match it. In our current reality, when many of the forces of government, business, and culture are bent toward destroying a habitable planet while spinning it as a positive, creating contrary art is a rebellion. In our present, instead of crazed activists throwing paint at valuable artworks, they should be engaged in creating the art of the absurd to throw paint on the farcical nature of our current reality.
Similar to the murderous absurdity of the First World War, we are currently in a new moment where everything is bent toward destroying our earthly home in a way the First World War couldn't even imagine. Of course, that is only true if you look at the data and ignore the pundits who want you to believe everything will be super if we just keep going the way we in the global "North" always have. The belief that everything will be alright if we just keep consuming, burning, and digging the planet is an absurd blindness many are choosing and more will probably follow as the realities become harder to deal with. We live in a Dadaesque present and I live in Absurdistan.
All I can do is laugh at the bizarre present and make the occasional absurd sticker to share and post like a small scale Banksy as my own Dada graffiti of rebellion. It is a bit like Don Quixote tilting at windmills, but like the mad knight, when the world has gone mad, push back against it by being ridiculous, because that is the only sane thing to do.
Here in the Bakken oil field, my job, my home value and livelihood depend on the absurd business as usual, since an unsustainable extraction economy is almost always built around the extraction of one finite resource. The finite resource in this case also happens to be the source of the larger climate crisis and that is absurd. If the resource falters, so does everything that depends on it and that is the definition of absurd. It all goes along wonderfully until the companies pull out and leave everyone here and me holding the tab for cleanup and that is the final absurdity that will last for generations.
Thus, I give the place where I live the moniker Absurdistan. But of course, Abusurdistan could be the name for our entire unbalanced, globalized civilization where so many things are upside down, yet touted as right side up. I am reminded of an old Star Trek The Next Generation episode where Captain Picard (played by Patrick Stewart) defiantly yells out "There are four lights!" after a grueling torture session where he was being coerced to see something different. I am trying hard to continue to see four lights.
It has happened a couple of times before here in Absurdistan. Marshall Mathers, better known as the rapper Eminem spent the early moments of his life here in the oil patch. Some of the anger in his lyrics may be chalked up to his mother living with an abusive husband running a local hotel in the 70s. I've enjoyed some of his music because it speaks to deeper issues in our society. It makes me wonder what anger will babies born in our current unstable iteration of Absurdistan unleash in the future as I listen to the daily police sirens echo across the city? In Absurdistan, planning with an eye toward generations not yet born is never a priority. As Eminem would sing in one of his most famous raps: "...snap back to reality, ope, there goes gravity."
On a December week where temps are expected to reach balmy highs near 40, the oil is pumping, apartments are full, carbon emissions and oil production globally hit record levels and things just roll on as usual. Reality doesn't matter in Absurdistan. The absurd COP 28 is going on in the oil producing nation of Dubai ludicrously headed by the president of an oil company and will likely be more "blah, blah blah" to quote the Swedish activist Greta Thunbeg. To top off all that absurdity, to disparage fossil fuels in a meeting about fossil fuel caused climate change is so controversial it has never been mentioned in a final agreement until now after nearly three decades of meetings. Saturday Night Live should do a comedy sketch it is so darkly hilarious.
The most darkly risible fact is we must keep going like a smoker who has a cancer diagnosis but cannot quit. Everything in our world, whether you live in an oilfield or the most granola-crunchy blue state city, still runs on oil even though a transition to renewables is taking place. That is absurd since we have had almost four decades to make changes and should have never been in this position. We all live in Absurdistan, but living here, I can see and smell it.
It isn't just about oil though and that is the central problem. It is the way we approach the planet in general that is the source of what is eating us alive. Even if we "solve" the climate crisis, the planetary crisis of consuming the biosphere and throwing it away will still exist as a recent New York Times essay and a powerful and moving address to COP 28 by Pope Francis make clear. Switching out an "ICE" car for electric is a bit like driving to pick up vegetarian take out instead of steak; it still consumes resources in an unsustainable way. Instead of these stupid meetings focusing myopically on climate, we need to return to the idea of a comprehensive meeting on the Earth like happened in Rio in 1992 when the biosphere was approached as an interconnected whole.
As I learned from years working with indigenous people, everything is connected and should be approached that way. We are what the Lakota call "wasichus" (wa-see-chu), a derogatory term that means "takers" similar to what Daniel Quinn described in his great novel Ishmael. The wasichu way is the way of the taker and is destroying our earthly home. The Lakota gave us that name when we first moved across the plains like locusts killing buffalo and taking land. It is still our name, because we have not changed and may not change enough until the Earth forces us to.
To be a wasichu, in my perception, is to live a life centered on a culture that puts money and economics at its center. It is to follow the dictates of that culture and extract from a place so as to turn it into money, because that is its central value system above all else. In fact, money is the culture, full stop. It is to live in a place and take from it without having a deep relationship with that place. It is living with the fiction of being an individual untethered to anything else, especially the natural world. It is to think of everything as a resource or a way to make money instead of something to be left alone for its own sake. Despite my ability to see outside the Matrix, I am still a wasichu. To live and work in a resource extraction zone is to live in a place totally consumed by the wasichu ethos.
Thunberg, who is autistic, believes that the reason many autistic people are climate activists is that they cannot look away. I am not an activist. Instead, I am more resigned to the absurdity of our present, like the subtitle of the Cold War film Dr. Strangelove: "How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Bomb". Of course, we have the bombs here as well in sacrifice zone times two. Despite my resignation, like the often dramatic Thunberg, as hard as I try, I cannot look away.
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