A Pirate Looks at Extractive Capitalism

This probably reflects the media echo chamber I’ve built around myself more than the zeitgeist at-large, but I’ve noticed a lot of buzz about extractive capitalism recently, and particularly its legacy in Appalachia. For me, this cycle started earlier this month with an episode of WNYC’s podcast, “Dolly Parton’s America.” In it, host Jad Abumrad and producer Shima Oliaee talk to Dr. Lynn Sacco, who teaches the University of Tennessee Knoxville class that inspired the name of the podcast. The episode covers a lot of ground, including a range of takes on Dolly from current UT Knoxville history students. It’s worth a discerning listen in its entirety. But for the sake of this reflection, there is one point I’ll underscore. And it’s the one that I think Abumrad and Oliaee position as the central revelation in the episode—that is, the term hillbilly has its origins in racism.

The hillbilly persona became emblematic of Appalachian stereotypes and was cast by parachute journalists from larger urban centers as a race unto itself beginning in the early 19th century. The stereotype has picked up steam from historical and political developments in the decades since, but what has survived is the same fairly monolithic caricature. And if Sacco’s students—many of whom grew up in the South, if not Tennessee specifically—are to be taken as representative, the caricature is still consequential. As a case in point, almost all the students Abumrad and Oliaee interacted with had taken deliberate measures growing up to get rid of their Southern accent. Many were told by parents that they had to if they ever wanted to be taken seriously. And, now as adults with little detectable accent, many of those students regret sanitizing that aspect of their regional identity. In addition to the latent stigma that still trails many folks from Appalachia, the episode also engages with how the hillbilly stereotype was used to justify the diversion of resources from Tennessee, Kentucky, West Virginia, and adjacent states.

In the same week that that episode of “Dolly Parton’s America” went live, Todd Haynes’ new film Dark Waters screened at the arthouse in my town. I know I’m outing myself in a way that may incite some eyerolls, but you love what you love, so I’ll just get this out of the way and say I’m a moderate Todd Haynes stan by virtue of his contribution to the Dylan discourse, which is his 2007 film I’m Not There. But, in addition to my measured respect for Haynes as a tasteful and inventive Bob Dylan mythologizer, I had listened to some press he did for this new film and really responded to his philosophy about representing extractive capitalism. That is, though those who profit from it are abundantly worthy of indictment, Haynes feels that it would be irresponsible to make a narrative film about it that satisfies our sense of justice. I found that really refreshing. To do otherwise—to suggest that there’s always simple recourse for people who exploit other people to make money—would be the stuff of fantasy. And I think that when we perpetuate that fantasy, we actually give people an out. What do I mean by that? For one, people have a hard time implicating themselves for behaviors that enable injustice in a system they’re part of when they think that system still works. For two, I think hopeful messages usually hinge on a binary of good guys vs. bad guys. The risk of that construction is that when well-meaning people don’t see themselves as directly benefiting from corporate greed, they feel absolved. But our economic structures aren’t that simple.

I think showing how irrevocably fucked a system is, is a more effective way of getting people to reflect on their complicity. And I’m sure there’s some social psychologist out there who can easily debunk this claim as completely crackpot, but it makes good sense to me. Exposing the fundamental flaws of a system is an equalizer where people can confront that most of us aren’t good or bad, but naively complicit. Now, what’s novel about the subject of Haynes’ film is that the repercussions of the story have had time to bear out in reality. To spare you the quick Goog if you don’t already know, Dark Waters is about the corporate lawyer who started running himself ragged in 2001 to expose how DuPont was dumping a long-chain (C8) fluorocarbon that can’t be broken down (organically or otherwise) into the mid-Ohio River Valley for—hold my beer—six decades. C8, also known as PFOA or the “Teflon toxin,” is associated with a substantial rap sheet of diseases (including multiple types of cancer). It remains unregulated at the national level and is now in the bloodstream of—hold my beer again—99.7% of Americans (for more where that uplifting statistic came from, I highly recommend checking out this deep dive from 2015).

So, there’s an upbeat taste of the damage a single corporation can do. And you’ve probably made this connection, but the people who paid the steepest and most immediate price for DuPont’s asininity were West Virginians. So yet again, Appalachia got played. A company headquartered in Delaware came in, made it out like they were doing the region a solid by employing a fuck-ton of people, made a lot of money, did their thing, were found out, and still haven’t paid much back in the way of reparitions to the people they poisoned who now have longterm medical conditions if they aren’t already dead. And now we’re all in this together in a weird way because the data suggests that pretty much all of us have been touched by the Teflon toxin—and all because DuPont wanted to make money off of non-stick cooking pans made with a chemical compound originally developed for combat tanks.

I don’t think many people know this about me, but in addition to having ample rage reserved expressly for capitalism, I also have a peculiar affection for the state of West Virginia. So, yes, Todd Haynes really has a way of covering my Mt. Rushmore of personal obsessions in his choice of narrative film subjects. But I have other reasons for citing my affection for West Virginia here. There was a minute in my life when it was happening more frequently, but now it’s more of an every-few-years thing that I meet a standout human who eventually leaks that their home state is West Virginia. Even if they haven’t lived there for a minute, I’ve noticed a lot of folks from West By God have an atypical sense of connection to their home state. I think I respond to it because it reminds me of my primal, inarticulate connection to my home state, Montana. But there’s also a way in which the affinity is less abstract. My paternal side of the family are yinzers, and my dad and his siblings came up in an era where Pittsburgh was culturally and economically akin to Appalachia at-large. My aunt who still lives in Pittsburgh pronounces “wash” in a way peculiar to that region: warsh. I hear it every time she says the name of her neighborhood, Mount Washington.

That’s all to say, I am both unironically fond of Appalachia and decently familiar with American society’s unflattering track record of exploiting the region. In a way, Haynes’ film is just another representation of a single chapter in a Tolstoy-length epic that’s still going on. Much as I’d like to feel a healthy sense of indignance when I’m reminded of how many times we’ve peddled that region, its people, and its resources like a cheap date, I’m pretty desensitized. However, I did not view Dark Waters in a vacuum. I saw it in a theatre. So, there were other people around me—people who felt and said certain things out loud during and after the movie. And I’ll tell you what, having the critical context about the function of Appalachian stereotypes and race theory fresh in my mind from “Dolly Parton’s America” gave overhearing some of those things an edge they wouldn’t have had a week sooner.

At the risk of sounding like I’m trashing the population of my current town outright, I do think it bears to underscore some of the more complicated facets of Port Townsend, Washington. For those who don’t know, PT is a very charming Victorian seaport community on the Olympic Peninsula with a local population that skews very gray. There is a joke that PT is where old people go to visit their parents. It’s also overwhelmingly white. I think those are important qualifiers to put on the table to tee up my point here, which is: for a town that prides itself on being open-minded and nominally progressive, it’s not particularly woke. I’ve overheard a lot of uncomfortable takes about race, gender, homelessness, poverty, body image, and sexual identity since I’ve moved to this town (for more on PT’s identity crisis with its income and wealth disparities, I highly recommend Stephanie Land’s memoir Maid). And while I can’t honestly say I miss anything about living in an East Coast city, I am grateful for the frame of reference my time back in the District afforded me for communicating inclusively and non-violently. What’s tough about having that perspective though is that you notice more of the racist, sexist, and otherwise chauvinistic bullshit at the root of the more problematic things people are willing to say publicly in broad daylight. Suffice to say there’s no shortage of bad takes in the air in PT on a given day.

So, there’s a bit of dialogue early in Haynes’ film that invokes this tradition in American discourse whereby people from West Virginia who leave the state avoid calling attention to where they’re from. Then later, when that biographical detail comes out, there’s an expectation that the rest of us give West Virginia-born folks a hard time about it. During my screening, after Haynes’ protagonist was told by a colleague that he didn’t need to conceal his West Virginia roots, I heard a male—one-half of an older couple—behind me ask his partner what that was supposed to mean. The woman said, “you know what that means,” sounding amused that he should have to ask. That grated on me. But I think I gave it a pass for objectionability just because any kind of talking during a screening bothers me. So that didn’t faze me nearly as much as the general tenor of the audience by the end of the film. People seemed truly indignant that DuPont is still in business after what happened in Parkersburg. I know that sounds like it’s maybe the point of the film. But I’d argue that that actually misses the point, and that—I don’t think—is a failing on Haynes’ part. Like I said before, he was conscious about constructing it in a way that wouldn’t give people an out. Ideally, we don’t resort to vocal indignance about the misdeeds of others, but instead reflect on our own role in this clusterfuck. And even if I didn’t understand that specifically as what bothered me in the moment, I must have been on my way to processing it because of what occurred to me as I sat through the credits (yes, I sit through credits; don’t @ me). Here were all these visibly upset white retirees, eager now to lambast a chemical corporation and recommend a movie chronicling their misdoing to all their friends—also white retirees, presumably. And yet, many of them would probably be going home to packages from a corporate retailer that’s more than a century younger than DuPont and already more lucrative.

DuPont combined with Dow Chemical Company in 2015, a merger then worth an estimated $130 billion. As of October of this year, Amazon’s net worth was $160 billion. And I don’t know exactly what this means, but I know it’s a big number, so I think it’s worth throwing in that Amazon’s market value eclipsed $1 trillion in 2018. Dow and DuPont had been in business for a combined 300+ years at the time they merged. Amazon has been in business for 25. Even if they aren’t cooking up the next unbreakable fluorocarbon (as far as we know), you’d think we’d be more leery of the kind of unchecked damage they can do when we consider the outsized impact of DuPont. But we’re not. In fact, if Prime membership rates are any indication, everyone and their dog is drinking the Kool-aid. Estimates from this summer have the percent of U.S. households with Amazon Prime memberships at anywhere between 59 and 82%.

With DuPont, it took the better part of two decades to get any kind of legal recourse, and that was already six decades after the PFOA chemical was developed. Will it take the better part of 20 years to learn the atrocities that the majority of American households are subsidizing through Amazon? Maybe. But maybe not. They have a lot of data on us now, so I think it’s more likely that they’ll be able to blackmail anybody who finds them out into signing NDAs. It’s all pretty haunting shit. And because it’s a worn-out talking point in the circles I run in, I table it most of the time, but it’s tough in December. We all know somebody who’s given Amazon their business this month. I think that was in my mind when I saw Dark Waters, and it was tough noticing how people compartmentalized after engaging with a text that is fundamentally a scathing indictment on the long-term (in the case of PFOA, permanent) damage of corporate greed. But that kind of psychological distancing is also par for the course in PT. And in fairness, I don’t think the people in this town are all that dissimilar from most economically mobile people—many of whom fancy themselves educated and generally on the side of justice, but can’t be bothered to consider who’s paying the price for the convenience they enjoy daily.

On paper, all the numbers make me suspect there’s not much to be done to slow Amazon’s roll at this point. I feel the same about the petroleum industry. That is, I can be all but certain every time I put gas in my car that I’m fucking somebody over even if I go out of my way to avoid brands like ARCO, BP, and Exxon because I just happen to know about their high-profile scandals. But I think there’s a reasonable response to it all that actually connects back to something I’ve been stewing on a bit recently—the function of ego. Like race, it’s a constructed thing. Also like race, it has real-life consequences. The term ego is often wrapped up in negative, narcissistic connotations and I’ve had a pretty awful relationship with my own, owing mainly to my difficult brain chemistry. But I’ve recently been taken with the fact that the ego we construct is the prism through which we apprehend any sense of individual ambition or values. In a perfect world, we’re all discerning enough as individuals that our consumer habits reflect our values. That’s not reality though and I have to believe that therein lies the disconnect where it’s possible to now live in a world where as many as four in five U.S. households are perpetuating the sordid legacy of extractive capitalism with their Amazon Prime subscriptions.

If I had to guess, most consumer behavior is probably just unexamined. A lot of what people buy is highly impersonal and—if not mindlessly programmed—just a matter of brand recognition. There’s no way to force people to turn a corner and get beyond that. If there were some way to decree that we all had to take stock of our identities as individuals and define a sense of values based on it before we could ever participate in the economy, that’d be nice. And it would be nothing short of a miracle if that practice became trendy enough to actually transform our behaviors as consumers. Nonetheless, there are ways to incrementally actualize the idea.

Folks who know me in real life are familiar at this point with my philosophy when it comes to independent record and book sellers. And while it’s tempting to shame people who are not on the same page about where they should get physical format media from, the truth is that most people probably have no idea why mainstream procurement habits are damaging. I mentioned earlier that the wisdom in Haynes’ rhetorical approach for Dark Waters is the assumption that most of us aren’t uniformly good or bad, just naively complicit. So, for those reading who will still purchase books and records from retailers like Amazon instead of brick and mortar stores without batting an eye, this is my plea: if you personally value art, buy it from somebody who shares that value and supports creative infrastructure. Big retailers weren’t created with values in mind. They were created to make money. If you think that philosophy is fucked up, you don’t have to subsidize it.

If you live nowhere near an independent seller, I do see you. I grew up an hour away from the closest hospital. I’m happy to report, though, that you can place delivery orders with indies—it’s an option with pretty much any store that takes online orders. So there’s probably something like thousands of stores you can choose to buy from as an alternative to corporate retailers (if finding one sounds overwhelming, please @ me with the town or state you want to support a seller in; I will for-real find one and send you a link to their web store). I should note here, too, that if you buy physical format music, it doesn’t hurt to order from artists’ websites if you can’t find their material in a brick and mortar shop. All the better if you can pre-order once their work has a release date—labels do take those numbers into account when they make business decisions. Same applies with publishers and their signed authors. Whether you’re buying directly from artists or an independent seller, you’re not only giving a very satisfying middle finger to greedy bastards, but also supporting art in a way that’s most directly benefiting artists and the on-the-ground infrastructure that supports them.

Now, I kind of look at buying from independent sellers or directly from artists as the preventive care side of living in a world with the malignant, ballooning tumor that is Amazon. For me, the equivalent of treating the existing condition is donating to independent watchdog journalists. Seriously. If there’s anything awful to expose about people in power—corporate, political, or otherwise—journalists are the ones who will do it. But if you’re ready to run with this idea yourself, I should say exercise caution before trying to “support journalism” by getting a subscription for, oh, say a big national paper like The Washington Post…because, fun fact: that’s now owned by Jeff Bezos. But separate from that ownership point, few national publications are truly independent in an audience-supported sense. If you’re not already reading a local, independent news source, finding one near you that’s probably doing some damn good reporting is easy. The Institute for Nonprofit News’ member directory is a good place to start. And if you’re really getting off on the idea of supporting investigative journalism specifically, you can filter the results by that focus area.

Look, I know there’s a strong chance that by 2030, we’ll all either be underwater or working as hired hands at Jeff Bezos’ cosmic estate on whatever planet he’s “purchased” and named after himself. And don’t get me wrong, I don’t enjoy being alive that much as is, so I hope I park it well before then. But I’m a sentient creature at the end of the day and don’t want to die a slow, agonizing death. Personally, I just want a fair shot at going out getting struck by lightning or swallowed by a whale. If the corporate bastards have anything to do with it, I’ll probably get cancer or hepatitis from some leached material waste before I have a dog’s chance of going out with any sort of fanfare. And because we’d potentially all be susceptible to disease at that point, Bezos’ cosmic estate is going to have to double as a quarantine facility when we get there. All I’m saying is I think there’s a better way to live in the interim.

What you probably didn’t see coming is that this whole missive on extractive capitalism was just a ploy to harp on one of my latest acquisitions from my local record seller. That is, the magna opus of Jimmy Buffett’s Key West phase, A-1-A. Okay, I’m joking a little bit. It’s a fact that this month marks that record’s 45th anniversary. It’s also a fact that one of the seminal songs from that release is “A Pirate Looks at Forty”—which I’ve lifted and adapted twice on here now. And while I do think Buffett’s prowess as a poet and stylist is criminally unsung even though he’s such a household name, that’s not why I bring up this purchase. Nay, I bring it up as a case study in the value of analog processes for collecting art.

Somebody more tender and affable than me can probably make the eloquent case that the primary value of seeking physical items out in physical places is the human connection. I think that position is valid, but it’s slightly different from what I value most about the whole enterprise. Insofar as what that is, Carrie Brownstein put it excellently in her memoir, so I’ll just reproduce what she said about the process of physically seeking out art and ideas: “…the effort really grounded the learning into contexts, chronologies, and histories.”

As I’ve made a habit of frequenting record stores, my experience has been that there is that incidental learning that Brownstein described built into the seeking process more often than not. In the case of A-1-A, I learned that the vinyl copy I now have was owned by a Port Angeles man who passed away. I also learned, when that came up, that Quimper Sound gets asked to size up a lot of collections all over the Peninsula when folks die because it’s now the only record store left on the Olympic Peninsula. It also happens to be the oldest independent record store in Western Washington. Even without the regional distinction, it’s hard not to root for that joint. So why do we do things that actively undermine these places? Why do we do things that undermine other people for the sake of convenience? And though we may not know exactly how for several decades, I’m highly suspicious that—as was the case with DuPont—we’re ultimately doing some real, irreversible violence to ourselves by continuing to sleep on this Amazon horseshit.

In my wildest dreams:

Amazon kicks off an avowed Leave No Trace-inspired program of deleting itself from history by first donating its entire inventory of books and records to independent sellers.
We adjust our consumer practices before we ever have to be surprised or upset to find out, yet again, that corporations cannot be bothered to do the right thing.
Corporations wouldn’t have the same rights as individuals, so our government could actually prosecute them when they’ve fucked up (provided our government were actually competent—you know, while we’re fantasizing here).
I would be less condescending and annoyed toward people who aren’t bad, but just naively complicit, because we wouldn’t have to deal with extractive capitalism.

And while it’s quite possible that we’re all going to be stuck on the cosmic estate/quarantine site together in 10 years no matter what, I think there are ways to take the edge off in the meantime. My $0.02 for how:

Buy from independent sellers. Don’t give a multi-billion-dollar corporation your business if there are alternatives.
Before you make a joke at the expense of historically (and/or currently) poor and marginalized people, consider the history of race and extractive capitalism, and how you might be contributing to its modern iteration.
Support journalists who can mine that history for context to give us all a shot at getting on the same page.
Give Jimmy Buffett’s back-catalogue a discerning listen if you’re an avowed ~~fascist~~ naysayer.
If it’s important to you that Greta Gerwig’s new film does well at the box office, see Little Women twice this week if you can.

If you’ve decided before or after reading this that you’re on the market for a nonprofit newsroom to impulse-donate to, show this squad over in my home state some love. Anything you give through December 31 will be matched.