Call Them by Their True Names

Hannah Arendt has become alarmingly relevant, and her books have been selling well, particularly On the Origins of Totalitarianism

The Cahuilla were one of the myriad smallish tribes that inhabited the vast area now known as California.

They lived in the western Mojave Desert, and, in the story Lewis sent me, the world begins with darkness and “beautiful, far-away sounds—sounds such as might come from distant singers.” It continues, “And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep”—not so unlike the Book of Genesis, until the maternal darkness endeavors to give birth and miscarries twice, then bears twin broth

they fashion the world and all the things in it, the twins argue about whether there should be sickness and death. The brother who wins is worried about overpopulation. The loser abandons the earth in a huff, in his hurry leaving behind some of his creations, including coyotes, palm trees, and flies. The remaining brother becomes such a problem—lusting after his daughter, the moon; giving rattlesnakes poisonous fangs; arming people with weapons they would use against each other—that his creatures have to figure out how to kill him. No one is unequivocally good, starting with the gods.

Where I live, in the San Francisco Bay Area, the Ohlone people say that Coyote was the first being, and the world was created by him, and by Eagle and by Hummingbird, who laughs at Coyote’s attempts to figure out just where to impregnate his wife. (He’s not always this naïve. In the Winnebago stories from the Great Lakes, Coyote sends his detachable penis on long, sneaky missions in pursuit of penetration, like some drone from the dreamtime.) As the Californian poet Gary Snyder once put it, “Old Doctor Coyote…is not inclined to make a distinction between good and evil.” Instead, he’s full of contagious exuberance and great creative force. In another Californian creation myth, the gods argue about procreation: one thinks a man and woman should put a stick between them at night, and it will be a baby when they wake up. The other says that there should be a lot of nocturnal embracing and laughing in the baby-making process.

Nearly everyone under the influence of Genesis, over half of the world’s population, believes in some version of the fall from grace. Even secular stories tend to be structured that way. Conservatives have their Eden before the fall—it usually involves strong fathers and demure women and nonexistent queer people—and liberals also have stories about when everything was uncorrupted, about matriarchal communities and Paleo diets and artisanal just about anything, from cheese to chairs. But if you give up on grace, you can give up on the fall. You can start enjoying stuff that’s only pretty good.

According to the Pomo, another Northern California tribe, the world was formed when the creator rolled his armpit wax into a ball. Or, according to the Maidu, who live largely in the northern Sierra Nevada Mountains, it’s made from mud picked out from under the nails of a turtle who’d scraped it up at the bottom of the primordial soup.

Once we call it by name, we can start having a real conversation about our priorities and values. Because the revolt against brutality begins with a revolt against the language that hides that brutality.”

mother’s punitive God was the enemy of Coyote. Prankish, lecherous, accident-prone Coyote and his cousins, the unpredictable creators of the world in Native American stories, brought me a vision of this realm as never perfect, made through collaboration and squabbling.

The process works both ways. Think of the Trump administration’s turning family reunification, which sounds like a good thing, into the ominous, contagious-sounding “chain migration.” Think of the second Bush administration’s redefining torture as “enhanced interrogation,” and how many press outlets went along with it. Of the Clinton administration’s hollow phrase “building a bridge to the twenty-first century,” which was supposed to celebrate the brave new world tech would bring and disguised how much it would return us to nineteenth-century economic divides and robber barons. Of Ronald Reagan’s introduction of the figure of the “welfare queen,” a mythic being whose undeserving greed justified cutting off aid to the poor and ignored the reality of widespread poverty.

There are so many ways to tell a lie. You can lie by ignoring whole regions of impact, omitting crucial information, or unhitching cause and effect; by falsifying information by distortion and disproportion, or by using names that are euphemisms for violence or slander for legitimate activities, so that the white kids are “hanging out” but the Black kids are “loitering” or “lurking.” Language can erase, distort, point in the wrong direction, throw out decoys and distractions. It can bury the bodies or uncover them.

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