Stephen Markley’s book, The Deluge

A history of our frightening future

 

The Deluge is both a fine novel and a frightening and convincing history of our future. At almost 900 pages long, the book is unlikely to reach the full audience that ought to absorb the lessons about climate change, climate-driven catastrophes, and climate activism that Markley is trying to convey. And the book could use a table of contents that would demonstrate up front both The Deluge's time and geographical sweep, and it's obsession with detailing a wide sample of the heat waves, droughts, dust storms, floods, wildfires, famines, political confrontations, climate denialism, capitalist opportunism, totalitarian actors, craven capitulations, terrorist attacks and grassroots activism that will dominate the next decade and a half of life in the United States and around the world.

 

There can be no succinct summary of The Deluge, but on page 639, in one character's attempt to capture what life had been like and why no one had been able to predict, in full, all that they had experienced, there's this:

 

"Little did we know the self-reinforcing crisis of our climate, our economy, and our democracy would begin to spiral and whiplash like the arms of a gathering cyclone."

 

The destruction and loss of life that dominate the news cycle in this book, and will materialize in similar forms in our own lives in the years to come, are horrifying. The destruction and loss of life as the book proceeds, and as we navigate our own future, will relentlessly and persistently bend the arc of the universe in the world of The Deluge, and in our own parallel universe, in unpredictable ways. And those "ways"will create conditions that some significant number of us will not survive, regardless of the extent of our personal privilege.

 

The Deluge is full of engaging and generally well-defined characters. But one colossus of a character stands astride them all. Kate Morris, both an obsessive-compulsive truth teller, and a devious hero with little interest in playing nice, seems like an amalgam of dozens of charismatic and relentless activists that dot the history of American resistance to power; take your pick of figures like, say, John Brown, Sojourner Truth, Emma Goldman, Ida B. Wells, Martin Luther King, Jr., Gloria Steinem, Shirley Chisholm, Wilma Mankiller, or make your own list. Kate Morris stands on the shoulders of all those heroes that came before her and goes as hard and moves the needle as far as any of them were able to do. Kate is the founder of a wildly successful organization, the Fierce Blue Flame, that fights the giant fossil fuel corporations and all their lobbyists and political servants, to a virtual standstill. It is with the description of her musings on page 459, that I realized that I had better begin writing:

 

"Instead, she couldn't stop thinking of how the blood had roared in her ears as that armored vehicle rolled toward her, how the adrenaline felt like it might lift her off her feet and send her hurtling like a mortar round into its hull. Shock them, fuck them, grind them to the bone. Be fearless. Be Achilles, be Roland, be Joan of Arc. Have a mental disease. Follow your clit. Drive across the Dakotas and watch a storm sear the horizon, recognize herself in its peals of wind and each crack of lightning, her true fellow travelers. Don't change, don't learn, don't fall, don't flinch. All she'd ever feel was sorry for people who didn't know what it was to want something more from their own life. Conjure a tempest, spew rage from the heart, and make them stare into this city of Cassiterite dark she'd made with nothing but her ravaged voice."

 

All of Markley's true, live heroes have weaknesses. In some cases, staggering weaknesses that few could expect to survive through the decades of political, economic and climate storm und drang. But on page 634-635, there's this soliloquy from Keeper:

 

"'I've done so many awful, awful things. Horrible things, man. I've--I've hurt people. People I don't even know or couldn't even find again to tell 'em I'm sorry. Tell' em I'm sorry. Tell 'em what I did was evil. How am I supposed to believe God can forgive me? That'd just be me wishing there was a way I could even get forgiven.' Your voice cracks and you swallow this lump of grief yet again. The next words come out in a snarl. 'We were in Georgia and Florida after the hurricane. That big one, Rose. And in one of these collapsed buildings, we hear this baby crying somewhere down in the rubble. Of course, no one really wants to get down into that shit, but I do it. I go. And it takes me forever. I'm crawling down into this hole, crawling on my belly, and there's slime everywhere, and it smells like shit. But finally the hole opens up into this little space. Freezing water up to my thighs. No sign of the parents, but I could smell them, somewhere nearby. But there was this little girl still in her crib because this one room didn't collapse, and she's shrieking and shrieking, so I go over to her and pick her up, and then ...' Your voice cracks again and you let a small sob escape. 'As soon as I pick her up, she stops crying. Just goes totally silent. And she's staring at me with these huge brown eyes, looking so scared, and I swear to God when I picked her up...'

 

“Now you can't help yourself. You start crying and it's embarrassing, how you're powerless to control your own hurt. Your hands come out in front of you like you're still cradling her.

 

“'I swear to God, when I held her in my arms, it felt like she was my own daughter.'

 

“Tears fall from your cheeks to the snow, and when you dare glance up, you're surprised to see the reverend is also crying.

 

“'I carried her out and handed her off. I'll never know what happened to her.'"

 

Nearing the end of the book, one particularly cranky research scientist, who has been warning for decades about the severity of the coming climate catastrophe, finds himself afflicted with a metastasizing cancer that has escaped treatment because his own role in forcing climate legislation through Congress in one of the most dysfunctional moments in American government history means that he has no time to set aside for the medical procedures that will prolong his life. But he does have a final opportunity to share with a friend his feelings about his wife's death from cancer some twenty years earlier.

 

"'When I lost my wife,' said Tony, 'I decided that grief is actually always there. It's like it lives in you, dormant. Until somebody goes. And that person dying, it just wakes you up to it. Makes you aware of it. But it's always been there (page 830).'"

 

That moment comes just over 50 pages from the end. But it suddenly felt to me that I was hearing the author, Stephen Markley, expressing his own feelings through Tony. Feeling grief. Endless grief encountered in the course of writing this book and knowing how much suffering of all kinds lay ahead. 

 

But here's the thing, in Markley's book the activists never give up. And they are, by and large generous and stalwart and, most importantly, strategically and tactically agile. In The Deluge the struggle between the people and the power may take an unfamiliar form, but don't be deceived. The struggle for climate justice and more is the same old struggle. And the future always hangs in the balance.

A political lesson Bernie Epton's life can teach

An open letter to Paul Vallas: 

An edited version of this op-ed piece was published by the Chicago Tribune on March 12, 2023. 

I understand how you must feel right now. The possibility of being the mayor of Chicago, this massive, shiny, and troubled metropolis, is likely intoxicating. I know my father, Bernie Epton, felt that way in 1983. Forty years after his campaign against Harold Washington for mayor of Chicago, popular history characterizes him as a candidate who had an undistinguished political career until racism made him a viable candidate against a Black man. But that is not who he was in the years leading up to that election.

 

In 1950, he ran for congress in the Republican primary against Dick Vail, then a former congressman and always a red-baiting, race-baiting echo of the notorious Wisconsin senator, Joe McCarthy. Among Bernie’s supporters in that race were leading south side Black ministers, like Archibald Carey, Sr. and Major Taylor. Dad also received the endorsement of the Chicago Defender, perhaps the country’s most prominent Black newspaper at the time. But he lost that race.

 

In 1968, after Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated in Memphis, rioting in Chicago’s south and west sides caused extensive damage that still scars the city’s neighborhoods 55 years later. At the time, Dad was again a candidate for office. This time for an open Republican seat in the Illinois House of Representatives. During that campaign, he took the time to go to Memphis to join the memorial march for King, organized and led by the Memphis sanitation workers’ union. After the march, he returned to Chicago, resumed his campaign, and won--the beginning of 14 years of service as a Republican representative from Hyde Park. Twice during those 14 years, the Independent Voters of Illinois (IVI) named him the state’s “Best Legislator.”

 

By late fall in 1982, when Bernie decided to run for the Republican nomination for mayor of Chicago, his reputation, earned over 40 years of political activism, as a supporter of open housing, an opponent of redlining, and an ally of the Black community and of anti-machine Chicago voters, was well established. But in the ’83 campaign against Harold Washington Dad became the champion of white supremacists citywide. Though the campaign was characterized by recurring racist incidents, two facts stand out.

 

First, of course, was the historic Washington victory, due largely to a strategically mobilized Black community. But the second most striking feature of the campaign was Dad’s slogan, “Epton, before it’s too late.”

 

Dad claimed, often and always, that the slogan meant that the city was teetering on bankruptcy and he was the guy to rescue it before collapsed. Some family members and lifelong political supporters took him at his word. That was the position that he maintained throughout the campaign. But everyone else in Chicago who gave a damn about such things knew the slogan for what it effectively was, a dog whistle, beckoning white voters to the ramparts. And many of those white voters would have shrugged away any concern about dog whistles. To them, it didn’t really matter what it meant; Bernie was their guy. He was the white hope.

 

Imagine what that meant. The Bernie Epton who had been a colleague of Timuel Black and Harold Washington in the creation of a Chicago-focused Henry Wallace for President Committee in 1948, who had walked in the Memphis memorial march for Martin Luther King in 1968, who continued sending his children to public schools long after many neighborhood families had fled to whiter communities, had somehow transformed 25 years later into the George Wallace of Chicago. And he had brought it on himself.

 

One legacy of his campaign would be an empowered white majority on city council that opposed every Washington reform initiative for the next four years. Chicago’s bitter power struggles would earn the city a reputation as “Beirut by the lake.” Dad’s election defeat sidelined him forever. But the divisiveness that characterized city politics for years began with the racial warfare of the ’83 campaign.

 

So, consider now, before this campaign goes any further, your “let’s take Chicago back” message. That message is landing as a dog whistle only slightly less shrill than “Epton, before it’s too late.” Stop saying that it means something else. The senders of messages don’t get to determine their meaning, which lies inescapably in what the audience hears.

 

Do what my Dad did not do; pivot to a different message. One that unites. That envisions a single city, unified in its pursuit of equity and justice. Hit that message hard, even if it costs you a victory. Because no victory is worth the price of your reputation. And no victory is worth the price Chicago would pay if a Vallas victory depended on an appeal to white supremacists.

 

I understand how you must feel right now. The possibility of being the mayor of Chicago, this massive, shiny, and troubled metropolis, is likely intoxicating. I know my father, Bernie Epton, felt that way in 1983. Forty years after his campaign against Harold Washington for mayor of Chicago, popular history characterizes him as a candidate who had an undistinguished political career until racism made him a viable candidate against a Black man. But that is not who he was in the years leading up to that election.

 

In 1950, he ran for congress in the Republican primary against Dick Vail, then a former congressman and always a red-baiting, race-baiting echo of the notorious Wisconsin senator, Joe McCarthy. Among Bernie’s supporters in that race were leading south side Black ministers, like Archibald Carey, Sr. and Major Taylor. Dad also received the endorsement of the Chicago Defender, perhaps the country’s most prominent Black newspaper at the time. But he lost that race.

 

In 1968, after Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated in Memphis, rioting in Chicago’s south and west sides caused extensive damage that still scars the city’s neighborhoods 55 years later. At the time, Dad was again a candidate for office. This time for an open Republican seat in the Illinois House of Representatives. During that campaign, he took the time to go to Memphis to join the memorial march for King, organized and led by the Memphis sanitation workers’ union. After the march, he returned to Chicago, resumed his campaign, and won--the beginning of 14 years of service as a Republican representative from Hyde Park. Twice during those 14 years, the Independent Voters of Illinois (IVI) named him the state’s “Best Legislator.”

 

By late fall in 1982, when Bernie decided to run for the Republican nomination for mayor of Chicago, his reputation, earned over 40 years of political activism, as a supporter of open housing, an opponent of redlining, and an ally of the Black community and of anti-machine Chicago voters, was well established. But in the ’83 campaign against Harold Washington Dad became the champion of white supremacists citywide. Though the campaign was characterized by recurring racist incidents, two facts stand out.

 

First, of course, was the historic Washington victory, due largely to a strategically mobilized Black community. But the second most striking feature of the campaign was Dad’s slogan, “Epton, before it’s too late.”

 

Dad claimed, often and always, that the slogan meant that the city was teetering on bankruptcy and he was the guy to rescue it before collapsed. Some family members and lifelong political supporters took him at his word. That was the position that he maintained throughout the campaign. But everyone else in Chicago who gave a damn about such things knew the slogan for what it effectively was, a dog whistle, beckoning white voters to the ramparts. And many of those white voters would have shrugged away any concern about dog whistles. To them, it didn’t really matter what it meant; Bernie was their guy. He was the white hope.

 

Imagine what that meant. The Bernie Epton who had been a colleague of Timuel Black and Harold Washington in the creation of a Chicago-focused Henry Wallace for President Committee in 1948, who had walked in the Memphis memorial march for Martin Luther King in 1968, who continued sending his children to public schools long after many neighborhood families had fled to whiter communities, had somehow transformed 25 years later into the George Wallace of Chicago. And he had brought it on himself.

 

One legacy of his campaign would be an empowered white majority on city council that opposed every Washington reform initiative for the next four years. Chicago’s bitter power struggles would earn the city a reputation as “Beirut by the lake.” Dad’s election defeat sidelined him forever. But the divisiveness that characterized city politics for years began with the racial warfare of the ’83 campaign.

 

So, consider now, before this campaign goes any further, your “let’s take Chicago back” message. That message is landing as a dog whistle only slightly less shrill than “Epton, before it’s too late.” Stop saying that it means something else. The senders of messages don’t get to determine their meaning, which lies inescapably in what the audience hears.

 

Do what my Dad did not do; pivot to a different message. One that unites. That envisions a single city, unified in its pursuit of equity and justice. Hit that message hard, even if it costs you a victory. Because no victory is worth the price of your reputation. And no victory is worth the price Chicago would pay if a Vallas victory depended on an appeal to white supremacists.