Madness and Sadness, Aiming for Gladness with the Help of some Bad-Ass Unknown
“Human Sacrifice Zones” and the Moans of Pain Inaudible from the Thrones of the Mighty
HISTORY, LAW, AND THE LAYERING OF HUMAN MEANING
The “Incident at Owl Creek Bridge”, by Ambrose Bierce---the best writer in American history, perhpas, and the “Old Gringo” of Carlos Fuentes’s book---should annually be a required text for all U.S. citizens. It tells of a wealthy Southern romantic, cut off from the human costs of his choices, whom a treacherous Yankee scout---dressed in Confederate gray---subtly provokes into attacking said bridge, to end up dangling by the neck at the end of a stout rope under the gaze of Federal scouts.
The background setting for “Owl Creek Bridge” could have been Calhoun County and Anniston, Alabama. The origins of the city are no less fanciful nor duplicitous than the fate of the plantation owner who swings to his demise in the short story. The general who in 1864-65 oversaw the Union forces in the area purchased his commission as a Colonel, with the help of a business collaborator from England. They had read of the confluence of ore and timber and water and space in the region and hoped to create fortunes our of the fulfillment of abolition’s righteous cause. They conquered, instead of buying, their stake.
Similar opportunistic conjunctions occurred all over North Alabama, and the entire Southern U.S., and the echoes of those enterprises resound to this day near Anniston in the wealth and power of companies like USX, Monsanto, and the Southern Company. Each chapter of this overall history is full of marvel and wonder to delight a Marquez or a Gordimer, not to mention the elaborate and nearly eternal fascination of one Mr. Hickey.
Thugs and idealists, crooks and con-artists, Black and White, politicians and whores performed the myriad dances of the human race in every possible measure and manifestation. Former slaves fought and formed fleeting partnerships with former slave owners, while the bankers and other carpet baggers schemed constantly for the political formula that would allow pacification, division, and the profitable management of the new empire that was to be the launching pad for all the empires to come.
Anniston never strayed far from its martial roots as an imperial outpost. It acted as a staging point for U.S. munitions prior to the Spanish American War, and was a thriving depot by the time of the First World War. Industry in the area served the technology of war, with plants that produced specialty metals, machinery, munitions, electronics, and chemicals all well developed by the beginning decades of the last century.
Out of this percolating pot of poison and production grew the world’s largest manufacturing facility for the production of PCB’s, which fell by 1930 into the hands of the Monsanto Corporation. The results of this confluence of capital and the ‘lost cause’ were a grotesque burlesque of hyper-profits and ecological rape. Monsanto knew, from at least the mid 1930’s, of the consequences of human contact with the PCB’s it produced. Several Alabama workers died under the observation of doctors retained by the company. Untold thousands of employees wasted away while Monsanto willfully looked away.
When Monsanto’s mercenary practice of manslaughter came to light, circa 1975, confirming what wage-earners had been suggesting for twenty years or so, a strange result of the discovery of the mutally shared mutations and cancers and blights of Blacks and Whites was a reduction for a time in the hateful ethnocentric focus of locals. Communities Against Pollution blossomed as organizational fruit of this shift. Not until the legal and organizational muscle of Johnny Cochran were present, under C.A.P. auspices, however, did any settlement of claims and remuneration of folks for damages occur on any substantial scale. This finally came to pass in 2003.
A huge difficulty with the litigious approach to such issues, of course, is that it occurs after the damage has already happened. David Baker, a founder of C.A.P. and longtime sufferer in his own body of the ravages of PCB’s, speaks of the losses for which compensation can never truly compensate. “MY BROTHER WASN'T BUT SIXTEEN WHEN HE DIED, AND THEY FOUND A BRAIN TUMOR IN HIM, LUNG CANCER, LIVER FAILURE, AND HE NEVER DRANK, NEVER SMOKED. ALL HE EVER DID WAS PLAY IN THE DITCH, DRINK THAT WATER, PLAY IN IT; AND IT KILLED HIM. WE HAVE BABIES BORN HERE WITH TWO BRAINS, BABIES BORN WITH CANCER, CHILDREN DYING OF CANCER BEFORE THEY'RE ONE YEAR OLD. ALL I WANT IS FOR MY CHILDREN, AND MY GRAND CHILDREN, TO HAVE A HEALTHY PLACE TO LIVE IN.”
Moreover, of course, the massive sums that change hands in settlements of such class action cases simply staggers the brain. Hundreds of millions of dollars is common. But in Annistion alone, 20,000 people who bear the scars of the PCB legacy are part of the suit, and they will be lucky to see $10,000 each. This tiny sum is more by a factor of ten thousand to one than the likely hundreds of thousands of dead and non-party damaged goods who are bystanders and forebears to this situation.
So saying, no easy answer is possible in what our ancestors have helped to create and we inevitably continue and try to countenance transforming and from which we hope to bring into being a better world for our children to have and to hold. Rufus Kinney is a lifelong resident of the area and a History Professor at nearby Jacksonville State University. He has studied social relations among Blacks and Whites professionally and has developed his work on environmental justice as an avocation for which he is one of the South’s strongest advocates. He notes the complexities and contradictions of the lives he and his fellow citizens must confront.
“ANNISTON IS THE MOST PCB POLLUTED SPOT IN AMERICA. IT IS WHAT I CALL A 'HUMAN SACRIFICE ZONE', AND THAT IS WHY THE PLANT IS HERE, BECAUSE THEY THINK THEY CAN GET AWAY WITH IT HERE. IT IS ALWAYS THE CASE THAT THEY PUT THESE FACILITIES WHERE THERE IS A LARGE CONCENTRATION OF MINORITIES, AND/OR WORKING CLASS WHITES. ANNISTON IS A PERFECT EXAMPLE OF THIS, ESPECIALLY WEST ANNISTON, A PERFECT DEMONSTRATION OF ENVIRONMENTAL...INJUSTICE, IF YOU WILL. IT IS NOT THE NATURE OF THIS COMMUNITY, ITS HISTORY, TO STAND UP TO THE STATUS QUO, TO STAND UP TO THE GOVERNMENT, TO STAND UP TO THE ARMY.”
Kinney’s mention of the Army is apt. Soldiers have been on the fringes or at the center of Anniston’s existence for 140 years now. Since the late 1930’s, in addition to being a PCB repository, Anniston has been synonymous with chemical weapons. Fort McClellan was the Chemical Weapons training facility for nearly fifty years, and along with the Anniston Army Depot and a huge Dixie Military Industrial Complext logistics and maintenance center that adds additional toxic and environmental burdens to the area, Anniston has been since 1960 one of eleven sites for storing U.S. stockpiles of chemical weapons, ranging from the mundane pain of mustard gas to the sublime lethality of VX and GB agent, a drop of which can easily kill people in a demonstration of suffocation most horrific to witness and most disturbing to contemplate receiving.
Local actors dramatized some of this last year in a drama and dance called “Welcome to Toxic Town,” which examines the chilling issues and absurd horror of the entire situation. Over the past ten years, the Army has built a facility to destroy the tens of thousands of tons of weapons, chemicals, the varied progeny of one flavor of our nations bouquet of ‘Mass Destruction.’ The cost of this to all of us, not including the cancers and sickness attendant on the Army’s methods, is in the indeterminate $15-50 billion range. Mike Abrams, the Army’s PR magician spins the story like this. “BY BURNING (THE WEAPONS) WE ELIMINATE THE RISK.”
Rufus Kinney is livid at this, seeing lies and corporate greed. Along with the Chemical Weapons Working Group of Kentucky, Kinney has demonstrated repeatedly that between 60 and 70% of Calhoun County’s residents want non-incinerative methods of elimination to replace the furnace that has only managed to operate at about half its promised capacity since it opened last July, has released various “agents” into the plant and through its stacks into the atmosphere, and scares the wits out of most of the people in the vicinity, who have the perverse honor of being the only community in America to receive gas masks and duct tape, not to ameliorate the effects of possible terrorist attacks, but as a routine precaution against possible events of any given day of the Army’s operation.
Professor Kinney does not mince words. “THIS SPECIAL BRANCH OF THE ARMY, THE SYSTEMS ADMINISTRATOR FOR CHEMICAL WEAPONS DEMILITARIZATION, HAS JUST TOTALLY ABUSED ITS AUTHORITY---BUDGET OVERRUNS, MAKING UP THE ENVIRONMENTAL AND SAFETY JUSTIFICATION AS THEY GO ALONG, THEY HAVE JUST TOTALLY IGNORED WHAT THE PEOPLE HERE WANT, AND THEY CONTINUE TO EXPECT TO GET AWAY WITH IT.”
Mike Abrams, the Army’s man, is unflappable, promising that only between 16 and 17 cigarettes worth of pollution will emerge from the annual process of burning enough poison to kill millions of people. Craig Williams, of CWWG, practically has a stroke he laughs so long and hard at this characterization. “IT WOULD BE HILARIOUS IF IT WEREN’T SUCH CALLOUS MURDER. I’LL TELL YOU WHAT. I’LL SMOKE MY DAILY DOSE OF A PACK A DAY FOR A YEAR, AND I’LL LET MR. ABRAMS WRAP HIS LIPS AROUND THE END OF THAT STACK FOR AN HOUR, AND WE’LL SEE WHO’S STANDING AT quTHE END OF THE PERIOD.”
Ah, the travails of the underfunded journalist. There is so much story behind story behind story, history and anecdote and bloody biology and murderous mayhem all interlocking and catapulting to new levels of the bizarre and the tragic, filled with cowardice and replete with magic simultaneously. How to squeeze in something interesting and comprehensible, allowing for later expansion, the addition of new vectors, the possibility of insight and direction that may not even be accessible to imagination now, is not at all clear to me. But here, nonetheless, the reader finds a teaser about one of the magnificent sagas of human history, in the accents of North Alabama, riven through and through with every possible contrariety of contemporary life.
On the surface, the settlement of the big suit against Monsanto(and its offspring, Solutia)appears as a big victory, albeit attenuated by the problems I suggest above. And, in spite of the Army’s roughshod antidemocratic fervor for pork over the human prospect, the continuing battle of men and women like Kinney, Williams, and others is a daily inspiration to those who pay the least bit of attention. Thus Anniston in some ways portrays a system that can work in spite of its fissures and corruption.
The one truly perverse happenstance that has transpired from the intertwined madness in Calhoun County is the sundering of the thousands of adherents, primarily African American, of C.A.P. from the thousands of adherents of the Environmental Justice analysis and policy pleas of CWWG. The rulers of corporate America could not have bought and paid for a more expertly designed implementation of “divide and conquer” from Niccolo Machievelli himself. Craig Williams suspects that, more or less, this scenario---of alienation and suspicion among the folks who suffer jointly from established approaches---is precisely what the Army’s PR presence here, at a cost to taxpayers of $5million or so, has yielded. Inasmuch as this assessment is accurate, the ‘system’ is working well unless its purpose is to empower people, in which case amputation and revolutionary change are going to prove essential.
But that, as they say, is another story; it’s my story, and I’m sticking to it.