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  • 6. Blowback
  • Anthony Channell Hilfer

The term “blowback,” which officials of the Central Intelligence Agency first invented for their own internal use, is starting to circulate among students of international relations. It refers to the unintended consequences of policies that were kept secret from the American people. What the daily press reports as the malign acts of “terrorists” or “drug lords” or “rogue states” or “illegal arms merchants” often turn out to be blowback from earlier American operations.

—Chalmers Johnson, Blowback

We know we are in trouble, near or at the tipping point where environmental problems become disasters. We know too that we have brought this on ourselves by overloading our world with toxic material, blind to actions that exceed natural limits. It is blowback time. This chapter makes no attempt to preach to the choir on this theme but rather aims to elucidate some literary and cinematic parables on the etiology of our present crisis and our failure to respond adequately to it. The following stories are clearly parables, with discernible morals, depicted in broad strokes because our desperate circumstances and our blindness to them demand it.

Jack London’s “To Build a Fire” was written in 1910, well before “global warming” (more accurately termed climate change) became apparent. But it is a parable, a rigorously realistic fable, of hubris, of overstepping the limits. In keeping with its simple, almost algebraic, form, the story’s protagonist is not granted a proper name; he is only “the man.” The plot: the man goes out alone on a very cold day in the Klondike, hits a spot in the snow with underlying water that soaks his feet, builds a fire to warm his feet before they freeze, makes an elementary mistake in doing so, and dies. Underlying this simple structure, like the water beneath the snow, is an ironic verbal texture that reiterates “he knew,” “he knew,” “he knew” three times in one paragraph to build to the revelation that he did not know enough, that his dog knew better: “It knew that it was no time for traveling. Its instinct told it a truer tale than was told to the man by his judgment” (7). But in his complacency, the absence of sun, the “intangible pall over the face of things [. . .] did not worry the man” (3). Even when he realized that it was well below fifty, “the temperature did not matter” (5).

The man has two fatal limitations: he lacks a philosophical perspective, and he is self-reliant. The lack of philosophical perspective appears at first as only a character flaw, but something more is implied from the length of London’s usually spare character depiction:

But all this—the mysterious, far-reaching hairline trail, the absence of sun from the sky, the tremendous cold, and the strangeness and weirdness [End Page 284] of it all—made no impression on the man. [. . .] The trouble with him was that he was without imagination. He was quick and alert in the things of life, but only in the things, and not in the significances. Fifty degrees below zero meant eighty-odd degrees of frost. Such fact impressed him as being cold and uncomfortable, and that was all. It did not lead him to meditate upon his frailty as a creature of temperature, and upon man’s frailty in general, able only to live within certain narrow limits of heat and cold; and from there on it did not lead him to the conjectural field of immortality and man’s place in the universe.

(5)

In effect, the man dies because he lacks respect for the power and danger of the natural world’s sublime force, because he is unable to imaginatively conceive of his place in nature.

He also fatally underestimates his need of other men. When he supposes that he has built a sufficient fire, he celebrates his self-sufficiency:

The fire was a success. He was safe. He remembered the advice of the old-timer on Sulphur Creek and smiled. The old-timer had been very serious in laying down the law that no man must travel alone in the Klondike after fifty below. Well, here he was; he...

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