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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.
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