Apocalyptoween
With
little to do while waiting for something possibly very bad to happen
people tend to get jokey. That was how I felt about the election until
Hurricane Sandy came along. For one thing, I happened to travel (by car -
how else?) last week from Bennington through Brattleboro, Vermont, and
down into a de-industrialized corner of northwestern Massachusetts.
There were at least three major highway bridge re-construction projects
(and many lesser ones) still underway along the route from last year's
Hurricane Irene, which devastated Vermont. There's a fair chance that
Vermont will get whacked again, undoing a billion dollars of work along
the same mountain river roads. How demoralizing will that be? And where
does the local share of the money come from?
I remember,
too, being in Wilkes-Barre, in Eastern Pennsylvania just a few years ago
and seeing that the city never actually recovered from floods induced
by Hurricane Agnes in 1972, which coincided with the beginning of the
end of the local coal industry. The downtown was functionally dead, with
a zombie overlay of social services, wig shops, and street people
conversing with themselves. It appears that Hurricane Sandy is going to
rip through the same region again, then curl east into my part of
upstate New York and finally slog into the same new England states that
got bashed last year.
Then, of course, there is the
question of what happens to New York City in the next 48 hours, a
potential enormity too vast to quantify from here (not to mention
Washington DC, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Wilmington, and the toxic waste
dump formerly known as New Jersey).
My own main worry,
sitting here in comfort, in a well-lighted room, is how widespread the
electric power outages might be and how long might they last --
conceivably even through the election. Surely, Mr. Obama is pacing
nervously now in some deep underground White House command center,
worrying about what might be required if there is no electricity to run
the voting machines across the nation's most populous region, or if many
hundreds of thousands of voters get stranded at home by broken bridges
and washed-out roads, or how many votes his government might lose if the
juice stays on but he can't relieve the anticipated misery fast
enough... with the idiot Romney kibitzing from the sideline.
I don't know if the US can take that kind of disruption and come
out the other side the same way it went in. The systems that keep us
going are already in trouble, some of them already teetering, like the
airline industry, which can barely keep going with jet fuel clocking at
40 percent of its operating costs due to $90-a-barrel oil. The political
system itself is more fragile than we might suppose, despite the
seemingly despotic reach of surveillance, the size of the government
payroll, and the amazing complacency of the
sports-and-fructose-saturated public. Few believe in the two major
parties, or what they pretend to stand for, including many officers and
foot-soldiers in those parties. If the system finds itself unable to
hold an election on the day specified by the constitution, what happens
then? Another trip to the Supreme Court. Uh-oh....
Anyway, Hurricane Sandy and all it portends this Monday morning is a
nice distraction from all the other things un-winding, tottering, and
fracturing in so many advanced nations. Promises of massive (and
improbable) bailouts have kept the financial meltdown of Europe a few
degrees below critical mass for a couple of months, but the thermometer
is inching upward with the ominous Catalan regional election in Spain
tipping well toward the secessionists, and Greece whirling around the
economic drain, with all of its previous bail-out money merely yo-yoing
back to the client banks of the "troika" that arranged the bail-outs,
and countries like Italy, Portugal, and Ireland whistling past the
graveyard beyond the news media's peripheral vision. And then there is
China with its government transition hugger-mugger, its empty make-work
cities, its crony banking system unaccountable to anyone, and its
extremely modest reserves of its own oil to run the whole hastily
constructed shootin' match. They have been working earnestly in plain
sight - off the news media's radar screen - to construct a resource
extraction empire in Africa, but then they will be stuck with the job of
defending 12,000 mile supply lines. Good luck with that.
Finally, there is the nauseating spectacle of the presidential election
itself, with two creatures of corporate capture pretending to represent
the interests of some hypothetical majority who wish to remain the
slaves of WalMart and Goldman Sachs. If Hurricane Sandy causes such
massive disruption as to interfere with the election, perhaps that will
be a good thing - a sudden, unavoidable re-thinking of our ossified
institutional customs, and a thrust into the emergent history of the
future.
