“Protest is when I say something does not suit me. Resistance is when I make sure that that which does not suit me no longer occurs”

-Ulrike Meinhof

So you’re in a restaurant and a man starts to choke. His table is immediately crowded by waiters and fellow diners who, by extraordinary coincidence, all happen to be opinion columnists, philosophers and social critics.

“Clearly we need to do something,” says Paul Mason, author of Why It’s Kicking Off Everywhere: The New Global Revolutions.

“Perform the Heimlich manuever,” you say.

“This is terrible,” says Prospect Magazine columnist Geoff Mulgan. “But ultimately nothing can be done.”

“If you just-”

“We need to be better organized,” ventures Naomi Wolf, author of The Beauty Myth.

“Just stand behind the guy and use your hands to exert pressure on his  diaphragm!” you shout, though nobody seems to be listening.

“If something good happens I want everybody to know that I am entirely responsible,” says Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

“I can think of ten reasons that we need an alternative to choking- but what?” says New Left Project writer Simon Hardy.

“We must ask ourselves the difficult question of what we can do to clear this man’s airway,” says Slavoj Zizek, gesticulating wildly.

“Ideology has made it impossible to even conceive of what can be done to dislodge a small quantity of food from an aesophagus,” observes Capitalist Realism author Mark Fisher.

“Heimlich manuever!” you scream. “The Heimlich fucking manuever! Described in a June 1974 article by Henry Heimlich published in the journal Emergency Medicine!”

By the time the man lies dead in his soup four General Assemblies have been formed and are mere months away from agreeing that choking on food is indeed bad and that something should be done. #Occupyhypotheticalrestaurant is now a trending topic.

This is the position we find ourselves in today, summed up by the aforementioned Mark Fisher as Capitalist Realism, which manifests itself amongst the Left as the sense that something must be done, but that nothing can be done- we are fresh out of ideas. For some this tendency expresses itself as a kind of political Millennialism in which we are (always) moments away from the coming of a Occupy Messiah, a new Marx who will lead His (or preferably Her) children in to the promised land. This is the impression one gets from Slavoj Zizek’s current writing, which seems to be saying that some of us now living will see the coming of the Kingdom (or Commune). Or in a secular form it appears as the Occupy movement’s abdication of responsibility for articulating an end goal.

It has always seemed ironic to me to see Occupy protesters in the ‘Guy Fawkes’ masks made popular by Anonymous call for Justice. I am sure that many of them when pressed would identify the masks as originating not with a 17th century Catholic terrorist but in the ‘film’ V for Vendetta. Further pressed they might admit that V for Vendetta was originally a ‘graphic novel’ (which is what we’re forced to call comic books for grown-ups to avoid admitting that grown ups can like comic books) by Alan Moore and David Lloyd. On pages forty and forty-one of my collected edition V, the eponymous masked terrorist, addresses Justice directly, talking to the statue of Lady Justice on top of the Old Bailey, the central criminal court of England and Wales, and voicing the idol’s replies. After a polite preamble he gets to the point of his visit:

V: “I’ve long admired you… albeit only from a distance. I used to stare at you from the streets below when I was a child. I’d say to my father ‘Who is that lady?’ and he’s say ‘That’s Madam Justice.’ and I’d say ‘Isn’t she pretty?’ Please don’t think it was merely physical. I know you’re not that sort of girl. No, I loved you as a person, as an ideal. That was a long time ago I’m afraid. There’s some-one else now…’

Justice: “What? V! For shame! You have betrayed me for some harlot, some vain and pouting hussy with painted lips and a knowing smile!”

V: “I, Madam? I beg to differ! It was your infidelity that drove me in to her arms! Ah-ha! That surprised you didn’t it? You thought I didn’t know about your little fling. But I do. I know everything! Frankly, I wasn’t surprised when I found out. You always did have an eye for a man in uniform.

Justice: “Uniform? Why, I’m sure I don’t know what you’re talking about. It was always you, V. You were the only one…”

V: “Liar! Slut! Whore! Deny that you let him have his way with you, him with his arm-bands and jackboots! Well, cat got your tongue? I thought as much. Very well. So you stand revealed at last. You are no longer my Justice. You are his Justice now. You have bedded another. Well two can play at that game!”

Justice: “Sob! Choke! Wh-who is she V? What is her name?”

V: “Her name is Anarchy. And she has taught me more as a mistress than you ever did! She has taught me that justice is meaningless without freedom. She is honest. She makes no promises and breaks none. Unlike you, jezebel. I used to wonder why you could never look me in the eye, now I know. So goodbye my dear lady. I would be saddened by our parting even now, save that you are no longer the woman that I once loved. Here is a final gift. I leave it at your feet.”

He sets a box of chocolates down, walks away, and an explosion topples the statue.

The Wachowski brothers film did away with any references to its heroes being anarchists or its villains being fascists. Instead, the battle was between two shades of grey along the liberal-capitalist spectrum. Between the publication of V for Venetta’s final issue in May 1989 and the release of its film adaptation in 2005 Capitalist Realism had taken over. V was no longer fighting for ultimate freedom against ultimate oppression, but merely correcting a system that had gone astray as America had during the Bush administration in to which the film was released. V as played by Hugo Weaving wasn’t clearing away the past so that a new world could be born but allowing the old world that had existed prior to the ascent of John Hurt’s ‘Norsefire’ party to return. Like the Occupy protesters wearing his mask he wanted a kinder, more responsible liberal-capitalism and like them he was unable to state this directly without reducing his bombing campaign to farce.

The V of the film was also prevented by the rules of our current Capitalist-Realist hegemony from stating directly that he was an anarchist; that anarchism is one of the four central political philosophies alongside capitalism, communism and fascism; or, and this is particularly important, from making the case that it may be superior to those forms of government for precisely the reasons that the V of the book outlined to Lady Justice.

Anarchism today is the Heimlich manuever in the story above: an obvious, practical solution to the problems currently faced by the developed world that is going completely ignored even by those nominally opposed to capitalism- bizarrely, even by those like Zizek and Evans who fully realise that there is an unstated prohibition against talking about alternatives to capitalism.

So, for those of us quaffing Capitalist-Realist Kool-aid, here’s how an anarchist society would work. Note that I’m not going to bullet-point reasons that liberal-capitalism is failing and ask the state to please do something about them as Occupy London has done, merely explain in a quite general sense what is possible without a centralised state.

Firstly, it is important to bear in mind V’s statement that anarchism ‘makes no promises and breaks none.’ All prior forms of government have relied on promises and subsequently broken them: there was no coming socialist utopia, no thousand-year Reich and there is no invisible hand to regulate markets or ‘trickle down’ from the rich to poor. If anything is central to a philosophy that promotes radical decentralisation then it is this: nobody knows better than you how to live your life. That is, anarchism does not tell the poor that they should live like the rich, as hyper-competitive Randian wealth creators who must brutally crush all competition when it is in fact in their best interests to work cooperatively (through food and housing co-ops, credit unions and the like.) Nor does it tell the John Galts of the world that the only acceptable way of life is as a numbered drone in organic mung-bean processing unit #478 (formerly Ohio) when they could be single-handedly building railroads. Most people will probably fall somewhere in the middle of this spectrum- they would like the freedom to keep what they earn but accept that they gain benefits from aligning themselves with larger groups.

There have been many forms of anarchism that advocate a one-size-fits all approach to a stateless society- Anarcho-communism at one end and Anarcho-capitalism at the other. Neither is viable. We only have entirely-communist or entirely-capitalist societies today because states, through their monopoly on force, can impose them. If your worker-owned syndicalist commune notices that a group down the road has started trading sea-shells for goods and services how are you supposed to stop them from doing so if not through physical violence? And if the members of your cooperative are starving in unheated hovels while the sea-shell traders are well-fed and comfortable should you prevent members of your cooperative from joining them in the name of a socialist utopia that has clearly failed? Feel free to flip that analogy around if you are more inclined towards collectivism than capitalism, it works either way. A stateless society is likely to look something like modern Israel (only without the crazy racist apartheid and religious weirdos calling eight year old girls sluts because they can see their hair), where radical communes exist alongside a developed capitalist society and citizens are free to flit between both as it suits them, though capitalism has, for the time being, shown itself to be more popular.

But if there is still capitalism minus the ability of governments to regulate it won’t we have unleashed a monster? Wasn’t the recent financial crisis caused, at least in part, by ineffective regulation? It was, but the state is not the only way of keeping the excesses of capitalism in check. Firstly, worker ownership of many businesses would mitigate many of capitalisms worst qualities- it’s easy for a CEO with a yearly wage in the millions, if not billions, to lose sight of basic decency and morality, since their wealth insulates them from having to deal with the consequences of their actions. If both wealth and decision-making power were shared equally between all members of a company the actions that company takes would inevitably be much better aligned to the morals of ordinary people. Secondly, because worker ownership means no shareholders, and no shareholders means that companies are no bound by law to maximise profits for those shareholders, leading the boards of publicly-traded companies who might under different circumstances chose to keep their factories in their home country to outsource them abroad to increase share prices.

What of the companies that still operate in the traditional way? They clearly need to know that there are consequences for abusing workers, polluting the environment or making unsafe or overpriced products. This is where unions of consumers could regulate markets from the bottom up instead of relying on easily bought officials to do it on their behalf. Just as unions of workers hang the threat of a strike over the heads of capitalists, using their greater numbers to balance out the greater power of their bosses, consumers can threaten boycotts and blacklisting of companies who violate moral standards. Since there are few to no standards for morality that we can all agree on there are likely to be many consumers unions: a ‘green’ one, another concerned primarily with the rights of workers, others like a outgrown and politicised version of the UK’s Which? magazine that demand effective products and fair pricing. There are millions of people who won’t buy products by Apple, Nestle, Starbucks and others for moral reasons who can be easily ignored because they are not organised. If a letter were to land on Tim Cook’s desk telling him that one-hundred million people won’t be using Apple products because of the abuse of FOXCONN workers and high price tags the iPhone would cost two-hundred dollars and have ‘Made in the USA’ stamped on it by next week.

(Consumers unions and cooperative companies could of course be implemented today, but are unlikely to be while we buy in to the Capitalist-Realist party line that we are weak, isolated points of data connected only by the ‘social grid.’)

Policing and healthcare would have to be paid for on a insurance-based basis, much as healthcare currently is in the USA. This is hardly an appealing prospect, but consider that with taxation abolished even the poorest workers would have money for health insurance, and those who don’t could club together for group policies. Furthermore, consumer unions could blacklist companies that don’t give their employees health insurance and police protection. There are unlikely to be many people going without, but for them charitable organizations could be set up to provide care for people who for whatever reason can’t be provided for by their employer, commune or family. Though I’m not naive enough to believe, like Ron Paul does, that charitable giving will replace the healthcare system, neither am I cynical enough about human nature to think that there aren’t enough people in the world willing to chip in to live in a world where people aren’t left on the pavement to die because they don’t have health insurance.

There are likely to be dozens more examples of how an anarchist society could be run more efficiently and with greater humanity than the feudal protection-rackets we find ourselves in today. However, if one could get the Capitalist-Realist to accept that there is a better way to do things we would then reach the next objection: “it sounds like a nice idea on paper- but how are you going to achieve it?”

That, it turns out, is equally simple.

What most galls me about Occupy (aside from their ignorance of eighties comic serials) is that they are already living in a stateless society and yet they seem incapable of seeing how the way that Zucotti park and St Pauls are being run could scale up to provide a more democratic system for a whole society. Instead of using their system of assemblies and collective kitchens as a blueprint for the future it is used purely to allow the movement to remain in stasis, remaining in a single place long enough for the police to turf them out as they did this week in Oakland, allowing the protesters to tell everybody on the campus quad that they were there when the shit went down man.

If they could agree that the long-awaited answer to what happens after capitalism is a world without states, a truly democratic future, then continuing to camp out in public places would hardly seem like the best way of achieving this. It would be far better to demand settlements like that offered to Occupy L.A: a tract of farmland and an office block in exchange for protesters leaving city hall. The land would allow the movement to be self-sustaining, the office a place to coordinate and recruit. They could show that living without capitalism works, the farm showing every passing commuter that an alternative is possible. Then the objective becomes to expand: buy housing and start cooperative, socially beneficial businesses. Clearly the city, state and federal governments aren’t acting to reduce poverty and homelessness, provide education or healthcare, so do those things, and do them better. The aim should be to gradually expand until neighbourhoods run on anarchist principles are as common as those run on statist diktat, where you are just as likely to buy goods made in cooperative factory at a cooperatively run store as you are from a capitalist company and where joining a self-sufficient commune is as normal as going off to college or working in a McDonalds drive-thru window. The long-term goal would be to ‘starve the beast’ (to quote Ronald Reagan of all people) of both funds and, more importantly, legitimacy.

More than anything, Capitalist Realism is what keeps the world how it is. Occupy all you want, wear masks of fictional terrorists whilst not subscribing to their ideals, write think pieces for the Guardian or books published by Verso- an alternative has existed for thousands of years (in Taoism and the Greek Cynics and Stoics then crystallised during the Enlightenment) and has been followed by thinkers as diverse as Leo Tolstoy, Oscar Wilde, Germaine Greer and MMA fighter Jeff Monson. You are as much a part of the problem as any Wall-Street banker of pepper-spraying cop as long as you continue to deny that fact.

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From The Utopian, two of the finest minds of the 20th century engaged in a discussion about humanity’s future that is still relevant today.

“Adorno: My innermost feeling is that at the moment everything has shut down, but it could all change at a moment’s notice. My own belief is as follows: this society is not moving towards a welfare state. It is gaining increasing control over its citizens but this control grows in tandem with the growth in its irrationality. And the combination of the two is constitutive. As long as this tension persists, you cannot arrive at the equilibrium that would be needed to put an end to all spontaneity. I cannot imagine a world intensified to the point of insanity without objective oppositional forces being unleashed.

Horkheimer: But I can. Because mankind is destroying itself. The world is mad and will remain so. When it comes down to it, I find it easy to believe that the whole of world history is just a fly caught in the flames.

Adorno: The world is not just mad. It is mad and rational as well.

Horkheimer: The only thing that goes against my pessimism is the fact that we still carry on thinking today. All hope lies in thought. But it is easy to believe that it could all come to an end.”

The Utopian · Towards a New Manifesto.

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The title may be an emo-core band name waiting to happen, but Slavoj Zizek is nailing it once again in this expanded version of his speech at the Occupy Wall Street protest:

The Western Left has come full circle: After abandoning the so-called “class struggle essentialism” for the plurality of anti-racist, feminist, gay rights etc., struggles, “capitalism” is now re-emerging as the name of THE problem. So the first lesson to be learned is: Do not blame people and their attitudes. The problem is not corruption or greed, the problem is the system that pushes you to be corrupt. The solution is not found in the slogan “Main Street, not Wall Street,” but to change the system in which Main Street cannot function without Wall Street.

There is a long road ahead, and soon we will have to address the truly difficult questions—questions not about what we do not want, but rather about what we DO want. What social organization can replace the existing capitalism? What type of new leaders do we need? What new institutions, including those of control, should we shape? The 20th century alternatives obviously did not work.

It is thrilling to enjoy the pleasures of the “horizontal organization” of protesting crowds with egalitarian solidarity and open-ended free debates, but as we do so we should bear in mind the words of Gilbert Keith Chesterton: “Merely having an open mind is nothing; the object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid.”

This holds also for politics in times of uncertainty: The open-ended debates will have to coalesce not only in some new Master-Signifiers, but also in concrete answers to the old question: “What is to be done?”

The Violent Silence of a New Beginning — In These Times.

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I’m going to post something to expand on the themes in this article shortly, but to whet your appetites:

Capitalism would seem to require an optimal balance of happiness and unhappiness amongst its participants, if it is to be sustainable. The need for dissatisfaction is implicitly recognized by Keynesian economics, which sees the capitalist system as threatened by the possibility of individual or collective satisfaction, manifest as a demand shortfall. Capitalism’s gravest problem is then how to maintain governments or consumers in a state of dissatisfied hunger, and how to find ever more credit through which to feed that hunger. The defining difference between the Keynesian era and the neo-liberal era was simply that the former depended on an insatiable, debt-fuelled, ‘unhappy’ state, whereas the latter depended on an insatiable, debt-fuelled, ‘unhappy’ consumer. The question of who or what is to inject such an appetite in future has no apparent answer as yet.

Max Weber, and more recently Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello in The New Spirit of Capitalism, addressed a parallel problem, but via moral and cultural sociology. To what extent and on what basis must capitalism serve our human needs and desires, if we are to remain committed to it? Immaterial needs and desires play a key role, as these are less easily exhaustible than material ones. As Boltanski and Chiapello argue:

Whereas capitalism, by its very nature, is an insatiable process, people are satiable, so that they require justifications for getting involved in an insatiable process. It follows that capitalism cannot make do with offering nothing more specific than its inherent insatiability.

The culture of capitalism must keep individuals sufficiently dissatisfied that they continue to seek satisfaction from it, but not so dissatisfied that they reject or resist it outright. Boltanski and Chiapello’s central argument is that capitalism has drawn on varieties of anti-capitalist critique in generating the ‘spirit’ which induces a sufficient mass of the population to remain at this finely tuned level of engagement. At key moments of crisis, capitalist accumulation has alternately drawn on those criticizing its unfairness (the ‘social critique’) and those criticizing its dullness (the ‘artistic critique’) in order to find ‘routes to its own survival’. [12] In promising to answer these critics, it pledges to treat the moral and human injuries that it itself has enacted, thereby renewing its legitimacy.

New Left Review – William Davies: The Political Economy of Unhappiness.

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Most people view creativity as an asset — until they come across a creative idea. That’s because creativity not only reveals new perspectives; it promotes a sense of uncertainty.

The next time your great idea at work elicits silence or eye rolls, you might just pity those co-workers. Fresh research indicates they don’t even know what a creative idea looks like and that creativity, hailed as a positive change agent, actually makes people squirm.

“How is it that people say they want creativity but in reality often reject it?” said Jack Goncalo, ILR School assistant professor of organizational behavior and co-author of research to be published in an upcoming issue of the journal Psychological Science. The paper reports on two 2010 experiments at the University of Pennsylvania involving more than 200 people.

The studies’ findings include:

• Creative ideas are by definition novel, and novelty can trigger feelings of uncertainty that make most people uncomfortable.
• People dismiss creative ideas in favor of ideas that are purely practical — tried and true.
• Objective evidence shoring up the validity of a creative proposal does not motivate people to accept it.
• Anti-creativity bias is so subtle that people are unaware of it, which can interfere with their ability to recognize a creative idea.

More at Science Daily

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I am afraid to even ask this, but since when is unemployment really a problem? I understand we all want paychecks — or at least money. We want food, shelter, clothing, and all the things that money buys us. But do we all really want jobs?

We’re living in an economy where productivity is no longer the goal, employment is. That’s because, on a very fundamental level, we have pretty much everything we need. America is productive enough that it could probably shelter, feed, educate, and even provide health care for its entire population with just a fraction of us actually working.

According to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization, there is enough food produced to provide everyone in the world with 2,720 kilocalories per person per day. And that’s even after America disposes of thousands of tons of crop and dairy just to keep market prices high. Meanwhile, American banks overloaded with foreclosed properties are demolishing vacant dwellings Video to get the empty houses off their books.

Our problem is not that we don’t have enough stuff — it’s that we don’t have enough ways for people to work and prove that they deserve this stuff.

Are jobs obsolete? – CNN.com.

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Make no mistake about it, without plentiful, cheap, and easy to access oil, the United States of America would descend into chaos and collapse. The fantasies painted by “green” energy dreamers only serve to divert the attention of the non critical thinking masses from the fact our sprawling suburban hyper technological society would come to a grinding halt in a matter of days without the 18 to 19 million barrels per day needed to run this ridiculous reality show. Delusional Americans think the steaks, hot dogs and pomegranates in their grocery stores magically appear on the shelves, the thirty electronic gadgets that rule their lives are created out of thin air by elves and the gasoline they pump into their mammoth SUVs is their God given right. The situation was already critical in 2005 when the Hirsch Report concluded:

“The peaking of world oil production presents the U.S. and the world with an unprecedented risk management problem. As peaking is approached, liquid fuel prices and price volatility will increase dramatically, and, without timely mitigation, the economic, social, and political costs will be unprecedented. Viable mitigation options exist on both the supply and demand sides, but to have substantial impact, they must be initiated more than a decade in advance of peaking.”

In the six years since this report there has been unprecedented oil price volatility as the world has reached the undulating plateau of peak cheap oil. The viable mitigation options on the demand and supply side were not pursued. The head in the sand hope for the best option was chosen. The government mandated options, ethanol and solar, have been absolute and utter disasters as billions of taxpayer dollars have been squandered and company after company goes bankrupt. The added benefit has been sky high corn prices, dwindling supplies and revolutions around the world due to soaring food prices. The last time the country went into recession in 2008, the price of oil plunged from $140 a barrel to $30 a barrel in the space of six months. I’d classify that as volatility. We’ve clearly entered a second recession in the last six months. So we should be getting the benefit of collapsing oil prices.

But, a funny thing happened on the way to another oil price collapse. It didn’t happen.

WHERE’S OUR OIL PRICE COLLAPSE? « The Burning Platform.

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What do I mean by ‘better at romance’? Well, there are costs and benefits to romance. Having to buy sexy clothes, going on unpleasant dates, paying for pleasant dates, obsessing over another person’s every utterance for months, crying over break ups, blushing over refusals, and compromising over the layout of the living room are all costs. You can probably think of some benefits. I will say we are better at romance when we are more efficient at it, that is we get more benefits for the costs we incur. A romantically efficient person gets more affection and orgasms for the same input of searching and pining, just as an efficient farmer gets more grain and pigs for the same amount of land and dirt. The big question: are we getting more romantically efficient?

It’s fairly hard to judge the rate of improvement here. Romantic satisfaction is complicated to measure and measuring it too quantitatively is supposedly destructive to it. People tend to be private and deceitful about it. But suppose we were getting efficient at romance as fast as we are getting efficient at, say, animating movies. We would notice, even without detailed records, because the relationship we have now would have been completely unbelievable ten years ago (OK, for some near the start of our adult lives this is still true). Even if romance was improving as fast as say farming, everyone would be able to see a huge improvement since their grandparents’ time, when one had to get up at 5AM to start the foreplay.

Still, perhaps romance is improving more slowly than we can tell with such primitive observation methods. There are some reasons to think it is, and some to think it might be getting worse or at least moving very slowly. Let’s break romance down into a few different parts. First you have to find someone to do it with. Then you have to convince them that they have also found someone. Then you have to actually do whatever it is you wanted to do with them, and both enjoy it, or get whatever else it was you wanted out of it.

Where Are You, Sexularity?.

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The concept of intellectuals in the modern sense gained prominence with the 1898 “Manifesto of the Intellectuals” produced by the Dreyfusards who, inspired by Emile Zola’s open letter of protest to France’s president, condemned both the framing of French artillery officer Alfred Dreyfus on charges of treason and the subsequent military cover-up. The Dreyfusards’ stance conveys the image of intellectuals as defenders of justice, confronting power with courage and integrity. But they were hardly seen that way at the time. A minority of the educated classes, the Dreyfusards were bitterly condemned in the mainstream of intellectual life, in particular by prominent figures among “the immortals of the strongly anti-Dreyfusard Académie Française,” Steven Lukes writes. To the novelist, politician, and anti-Dreyfusard leader Maurice Barrès, Dreyfusards were “anarchists of the lecture-platform.” To another of these immortals, Ferdinand Brunetière, the very word “intellectual” signified “one of the most ridiculous eccentricities of our time—I mean the pretension of raising writers, scientists, professors and philologists to the rank of supermen,” who dare to “treat our generals as idiots, our social institutions as absurd and our traditions as unhealthy.”

Who then were the intellectuals? The minority inspired by Zola (who was sentenced to jail for libel, and fled the country)? Or the immortals of the academy? The question resonates through the ages, in one or another form, and today offers a framework for determining the “responsibility of intellectuals.” The phrase is ambiguous: does it refer to intellectuals’ moral responsibility as decent human beings in a position to use their privilege and status to advance the causes of freedom, justice, mercy, peace, and other such sentimental concerns? Or does it refer to the role they are expected to play, serving, not derogating, leadership and established institutions?

Boston Review — Noam Chomsky: The Responsibility of Intellectuals, Redux.

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A stunning article from Outside Magazine, deftly blending fact and fiction to explain the economic, structural, environmental and human cost of an overdue 9.1-richter earthquake hitting the Pacific Northwest.

By “full-rip nine” Corcoran means a mag­ni­tude-9.0 earthquake, the kind of massive off­shore temblor that triggered the tsunami that killed 28,050 people in Japan on March 11, 2011. Geologists call them megaquakes. Geo­logists also call the Northwest coast of North America—from Vancouver Island down to Northern California—one of the like­­liest next victims.

“When that earthquake hits, it’s going to shake for a long time,” says Corcoran. “Three to five minutes or more. You’re going to feel lucky to survive. Then guess what. You rode out the quake? Congratulations. Now you have 15 minutes to get above 50 feet of ele­vation. Fifteen minutes. You’re elderly and not very mobile? Sorry. Your condition does not change the geologic facts. It’s called a tsu­nami. The water’s coming. It can’t be stopped. Don’t ask Jesus to save you. Be your own Jesus.”

This is the prophecy that Corcoran offers to school groups, Rotary Clubs, town ­councils, and first responders up and down the Ore­gon coast. In Newport, Coos Bay, Seaside, Cannon Beach, Gearhart, Waldport, and Bandon, the people have heard his rap. And how do they respond?

“People are like”—he sticks his fingers in his ears—“Na-na-na-na-na-na-na! Can’t hear you!” He shrugs. “It’s human nature. People don’t like to get bad news.”

More at Outside Magazine

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