Only after faced with mounting pressure and criticism did the New York mayor cancel its ancient Marathon scheduled for Sunday. It is a debacle which exemplifies my sadness for our market economy, no better or worse than any other market economy.
Hurricane Sandy was destructive. At this moment 110 people are reported to have been killed in its wake. Two young children whose mother was not permitted refuge in someone's home were swept away in the deluge. The press reports the man who refused them refuge expresses his regret but blames the mother.
That's character: US style.
A nation obsessed with Christianity and telling others what to do, both here and abroad, beating their chests at their superiority, but whose leaders think of Marathons and whose neighbors would turn away a mother and two children just as certainly as a pregnant one could not find rooms at an inn, is doomed.
I know that sounds hyperbolic, but the evidence began long before those two young boys were swept away, and it speaks for itself. Because as sad and as tragic as the deaths of those two boys, many children have preceded them in the deluge.
We are too busy making money to notice.
The coming election was not a cause for anticipation before Hurricane Sandy served us the stew we made from industrial society, hubris, and global warming. It is not a cause for anticipation in the aftermath either. I do not, like some of my country, sit watching the rising and lowering of poll numbers or ask why a certain demographic has gained or lost faith in one or the other candidate.
Both of the candidates whose Political Parties have manipulated themselves as the only viable options will not bring the transformation we need because the Market will not accept it.
The Intelligent Classes with their phony social sciences will not tell us any truths in their dissertations because our universities are corporations endowed by other corporations. If the government ever stopped siphoning billions in guaranteed student loans to these so-called schools, the jig would indeed be up, and the right-wing, antisocial think-tanks they really are would be exposed.
The Media will also adhere to the Official Doctrines and shed little light on the scam we are sold, and which is sews our destruction. Among our Media free thought ranges, as Dorothy Parker said in an oddly similar context, "a gamut from A to B."
The truth will not be advertised. A plague rages not only in New York and the Mid-Atlantic region but across this whole country. The plague is a government intent on selling us to the lowest bidder, with all this implies.
Since commerce and markets are our only holy spirits - not the lives of children, the health of our people, the viability of our communities - our elites must keep this scam going. Our Masters want us to service their adventures at the lowest possible cost.
The Market System of buying on the cheap, stealing, and selling at a profit is why even after the destruction and death of a hurricane, Michael Bloomberg, insisted the Marathon would go on. The Show Must Go On! New York must continue to look viable to the Investor.
I remember a year ago when an horrific fire burned in the hills of Los Angeles, someone with the power to do so very quickly re-tagged the inferno The Station Fire. It was not only meant to confuse, which it did: where, the people choking on the smoke must have asked, IS STATION? This obfuscation was also meant to avoid the City being in any way associated with the madness of that fire.
A burning city of Los Angeles might deter tourists and commerce. Forget the fact the city is actually and visibly rotting from the inside out.
When San Francisco continued its slide into an abyss in the early 90's, despite yet another Recovery - can we survive another Recovery? - its corporate base was shrinking.
Bank of America moved its headquarters to a right-to-work Southern state.
Then Chevron Oil Corp moved its headquarters to the other side of the bay.
If you were paying attention these were two giant corporations seeking lower-wage employees. (Before Chevron left it had already contracted its mail-room services to temporary employment agencies).
Enter Willie Brown. A Black mayor full of phony populist rhetoric on the one hand, he sought to actually manifest an extension of Silicon Valley into the heart of the city. He managed to pitch this to what remained of the working class of the City as "jobs." This was a Lie, and some of us knew it.
If this scheme had the effect of expelling and evicting many, many working-class families so their modest apartments could be converted into modest condominiums, so be it. This was the cost of being beholden to Business.
His initial efforts failed, the bubble burst. But the powers that run that city - and that run every city, including New York City, Boston, and Atlanta - could not let up. The first attempt at the dot-com recruitment blew up famously, leaving the condos and newly renovated office spaces empty. The second attempt took.
Now the city renowned for being expensive really is, to the extent the city council considers rezoning closet spaces as potential apartments.
For many around the world San Francisco is known as a Gay Mecca - my apologies to the Muslims, especially since as James Baldwin observed "at least they aren't pretending to be Christians." - but Gay Mecca is as bold and brazen a lie as the US being a Christian country. Like Disneyland, San Francisco offers a variety of theme parks, The Castro being just one, for tourism dollars.
The Mecca has been steadily reduced in size to barely a block for tour buses to ride through and gawk.
As late as the early 90's in the wake of a viral hurricane called AIDS the gay men who lived there disappeared, and the straights - young and urbane - began to move in.
Militants didn't like it, but they believed the hype. The Castro, they believed, "is Ours." It was never "ours."
The same could be said of the equally famous Haight-Ashbury neighborhood: another theme park for tourist dollars intent on experiencing The 60's Mystique.
This is what the religion of commerce and markets do, this is the corruption of capitalism which mandates you produce for market or risk ending up looking like ...
I wanted to say looking like the Third World, the Global South. But we are already there.
Hurricane Sandy exposes this. Masses of people so easily made destitute should tell us something about the thin ice we are walking on.
The more subtle destruction in Los Angeles for which no help has been sent has always been there as soon as Blacks moved there after the World War II. Whites successfully kept the Blacks enclosed in the center and so-called "South" of the city, allowed them factory jobs and public schools to feed those factories; but nothing more. Remember not even Nat King Cole could buy the house he wanted because it was in a neighborhood zoned only for Whites.
The City fathers had a reputation to maintain. That's the Market. Liberal Hollywood, indeed!
This subtle destruction among Blacks, poor Whites, and newly arrived Economic refugees from Latin America only intensifies in the wake of the post-war industrial base being sent abroad and bringing us in return part-time, low-wage service jobs stocking shelves with garbage made by slaves.
"Would you like fries with that?" - fries brought to you by a Recovery.
The two men whose political parties have maneuvered themselves as our only option will not change this: they are firmly creatures of it, and they have said so again and again. They have always insisted The Show Must Go On. More Recoveries are promised.
This is why I am occasionally angry, sometimes inspired to action, but always saddened.
More Hurricanes are to come. the real long-distance race is can humanity and the ecosystem survive them.
