Notable Quote - 'Ol Remus - Granite Grok

Notable Quote – ‘Ol Remus

Their next higher category from Snow Emergency is Nuclear Attack.”

Long… but reposted here in its entirety:

“Metropolis

Remus lived in a big east coast city for a while, not near it, in it. He saw many amazing things but none more amazing than the mindless panic over a bit-o’-snow. His first experience left him bewildered. Picture a snowfall barely thicker than the soles of your shoes, gone by noon-thirty or near enough. The news outlets made the story last well into the next day. They looked exhausted.

Reporters outfitted for an arctic caribou drive interviewed city service reps with breathless urgency, interspersed with video of people using maxed-out snow blowers to clear driveways barely longer than their 4WD SUVs, you know, the Hummer-type vehicles they steer around twigs in the road. Urgent updates rivaled 9/11 for grim-faced gravity and, after warning people to stay home and do their own appendectomies, came frantic appeals to stay calm. Priceless. Weather reporters, normally a perky lot, put on their apocalypse face and warned of, yes, worse to come. It didn’t. It couldn’t. Their next higher category from Snow Emergency is Nuclear Attack.

Remus wondered what they were going to do when winter arrived. Oh wait. But then came a sobering thought. If this place isn’t prepared for a minor weather excursion, what in the world are they prepared for? Does life in the city really hang by so thin a thread? Other than being stampeded off a cliff for the entertainment of persons unknown, it doesn’t. For one thing, city people are tough and resourceful in an office politics sort of way, meaning they shift from persona to persona with the ease of a con man, it’s understandable if not admirable, they deal with more people before lunch than rural folk do all year.

They’re also masters of logistics. Consider the moving parts just in getting from home to work, driving and parking and regional rail, with their passes and kiosks and swipe cards, which train to take and which ones to avoid, even which elevator to use and when. Perhaps some future team of archeologists will do a sweep of Penn Station and find the desiccated remains of Nebraskans and Minnesotans who simply gave up in despair, but city people manage it while doing a crossword puzzle on the side.

Cities also have non-obvious redundancy. They come in layers. Remus lived in the city for a year or more before discovering a way to get from downtown where he lived to places of interest many blocks distant using a parallel city uninfested by tourists, nearly all underground, complete with shopping centers that would comprise the entire commercial district of a small town. It’s not the sort of thing they come right out and tell you. In a similar sense there’s an urban underground economy, commonly reckoned at twenty per cent or so before The Troubles, and now about at par with Europe. This is the real reason a cashless economy is being pushed, the narco thing is a semiotic.

Graybeards will recall that Europe functioned on a black market basis for years following the war. Black markets are a parallel economy, ever-present everywhere. They’ve always been the fallback when official economies crater. Our urban examples are apparently invisible to doomers, judging by their just-in-time failure projections, which are wholly reliant on the official numbers they take such pleasure in excoriating. City people are daily practitioners and move in and out of these layers with ease. The “underground” economy functions on supply and demand as a marketplace should, in fact, it so closely resembles free enterprise outsiders naturally find it perplexing and intimidating, even threatening. But like the traffic in Paris, rules are observed, they’re just not obvious or readily teachable.

East coast city people are also magnetoceptive, like turtles and bees, roughly north and south in their case. Should they travel any distance west of the Hudson or, further down, west of the Fall Line, it requires having compelling justification at the ready for family and friends. It’s a deeply suspicious thing to do, much like their notion of diversity, namely, it does other people good, probably, but they don’t risk it personally. After all, diversity isn’t a suicide pact. They cover themselves by saying there’s nothing there worth going for. What they mean is they’re apprehensive about anything outside their corridor.

Remus recognized this immediately because Appalachia is much the same. We can travel a couple states north or south and still feel at home, but not much lateral distance takes us to places uncomfortably alien. And so it is that Trenton commiserates with the travails of Yonkers, but not of Allentown. Their mental map decorates such places with ships falling off the edge of the world and dragons patrolling dark valleys. They’ve been informed by movies and PBS specials and essays in their Sunday papers, which is what they mean by ‘sophisticated’.

The only relaxed people Remus saw in the city were sleeping on the sidewalk near to warm air vents. City people live with anxiety not found outside motor vehicles offices elsewhere. Should one’s teeth-clenching lapse they notice immediately and treat it as a condition in need of emergency attention. The news hype about trivial snowfall can be seen as a public service in a way, a rally, a communion with dread where fear was heightened minute-to-minute by the media for the convenience of individual practitioners. They do this with self-extinguishing events typically, then it’s back to more recyclable calamities, say, the offing of some feral street creature in the course of a violent crime, or anything else freighted with kozmik implications that can be pressed into service as a community cud. Things are as they are, and Remus isn’t one to argue with reality, yet such a state of constant anguish, almost tactile to outsiders, is notable elsewhere by its absence.

But this isn’t why cities will give way in a serious crunch. Cities won’t survive an otherwise survivable catastrophe for several reasons, but chief among them is their complexity. It invites failure for the same reason a bus is more likely to fail than a screwdriver. Even at present it’s notably debilitating. City governments are pressured to grant every option imaginable to whatever supplicants present themselves because, at one time or another, everyone has to see themselves as having won “at the system’s expense” or they won’t play nice. They accommodate such demands with convoluted and expensive systems, which require convoluted and expensive maintenance, which spawns more convolution and expense. It creates jobs so no one much cares. And to general applause, the more incompetent the job holder and useless the position, the more majestic the title and the more breathtaking the compensation. It’s like the Special Olympics, everyone’s a winner, everyone’s happy.

After 9/11 New York didn’t simply issue a bulletin to its huge and capable law enforcement apparatus advising increased vigilance, they all but reinvented their city services to accommodate any threat, say, an invasion by mutant otters. Since 9/11 New York’s counterintelligence service has come to rival DC‘s in size and resources. It even maintains offices in foreign countries. They’ve yet to notice how none of this keeps its bridges from being condemned or its transformers from exploding or its rowhouses from collapsing after a heavy rain. Meanwhile, real terrorists marvel at this spectacle from an ocean away, much as plainsmen marveled at bison who would gore and trample a member of the herd they’d only wounded. For the terrorists 9/11 was more profitable than Credit Mobilier. For the cities, 9/11 revealed themselves for what they are, undefendable target-rich environments populated with perpetually spooked inmates who imagine themselves to be safer by being enmeshed in ever more elaborate fantasies.

Even attending to necessities gets out of hand. Consider the colossal systems required to supply a big city with electricity and water, or even out-of-season produce. Then pile on regulations and unions and reports and studies and attorneys and budgeting and on and on, it’s extortion and rent-seeking at its purest. Complexity at this scale is non-linear and high-dimensional. Statistical modelers claim predictive power but only hands-on intervention by vigilant experts actually keeps things running. The pay for doing this is very high, in part because they’re expected to deflect culpability from their employers in high-profile emergencies, even if it means accepting and publicly confessing to unwarranted blame. Again, in urban America people adopt alternative persones. In rural America this is unmanly beyond redemption, in cities their performance is frankly graded in the press.

Urban complexity is a crippling impediment in good times, and it’s meant to be. It’s not intended to optimize efficiency, it’s intended to optimize itself. It’s also an elaborate shelter from its putative beneficiaries, hence the procedural walls and moats. In an existential crisis this complexity would be unsupportable, ruthlessly jettisoned and replaced with a drastically more serviceable arrangement. The prudent will watch the transition from whatever distance they can manage.

Cities have their civic-minded people but most look to get more than they give, and they do, which is why state and federal aid exists. A fair number of them are actively and overtly destructive, usually put at one per cent. In an urban area of five million, one per cent means 50,000 combatants, found mostly in street gangs. There are countries with armies smaller than that. No civilization can allow anti-civilization in its midst. Even more numerous are the capable but parasitic by choice. Their demands are insatiable because sufficiency can never be acknowledged, which leaves expulsion or appeasement, and appeasement it’s been for most of a century. So far Detroit is the only city that’s been appeased away in its entirety, but many are on the brink.

Most cities exist because they exist, the conditions justifying them having come and gone. Were they settled more recently they’d be small cities or no cities at all, perhaps transportation interchanges with some support facilities and a bar. As it is, we have “poverty industry” settling tanks—East St. Louis, Detroit, Chicago, Trenton, Newark, Camden, Atlanta, Philadelphia, Baltimore, New York City, Gary, Cleveland, Flint and Buffalo come to mind—tumors nourished by unwilling outsiders, accidental museums, crumbling and moldering menaces, hollowed out vestiges awaiting the final implosion into whatever self-sustaining core may endure.

When the crisis arrives they’ll cave not merely because they’re dependent on intravenous feeding, all cities are, but because they do so little anyone else is willing to pay for. The productive were driven out long ago, onerous penalties and professional jeerleaders keep them away. As for the resident underclass, watching them try to form a coherent thought tells us all we need to know about their viability. This is why cities will collapse with blinding speed, they’re almost entirely overburden with nearly nothing native to support it. We can safely think of them as pre-collapsed.

Some cities will radically reconfigure themselves, not for the better but for bare continuity. Our grander port and interior cities will gladly blow away whole layers of useless accretion when it becomes necessary, and it will. Those orphaned layers will need new sponsors of course, they’ll lodge at whatever venues are unwilling or unable to expel them. This is where things only start to get ugly. After the eviction of useless eaters, what remains will devolve into a no-rules dogfight. A baser sort of meritocracy will arise; those who can and will, versus those who can’t or won’t. No claim to authority will be effective for long without deploying the kind of terror we see in wartime newsreels of yore.

Should even this falter we may expect urban warettes, with enclaves, territorial aggression, hostages and serial executions. Some promote this already and they’re not bashful about it. Other cities may simply disintegrate “last man standing” style from the get-go. The serious survivalist is incurious about these details, he’s already found the first exit to the nearest big city, backtracked a couple hundred miles and started from there.

Nationally the picture is, if anything, more grim. Even the complicit mainstream media is telling us DC is quietly, and not so quietly, rooting out political opposition, and when they’re called on it, answering with an in-your-face “what are you going to do about it?” This has been going on for a very long time, long enough that “opposition” is taking on the stance of a “resistance”. As Remus told you in March of last year:

When opposition is destroyed or driven underground, the DC gravity-well is free to strengthen without limit. This is when the real troubles begin. As it becomes plain the madness is unconstrained, hidden fractures will come unglued. Expect secessions and shifting allegiances, interagency arrests and counter arrests, local insurrections and mob rule, outright famine, partisan warfare, serial sabotage, freelance revenge and rogue black ops. Look for conflicting claims to legitimacy in DC and warring regional coalitions of states—perhaps including foreign alliances, all superimposed on daily street-level crime that would shock Al Capone.

What this comes down to, stripped of all their descriptors, is a “battle of the crowds.” Crowds don’t show the simple sanity we expect from any one person. Perhaps they can’t. Consider: we have it on the best authority those attending the Sermon on the Mount arrived in need of loaves and fishes. It seems a curious oversight, but the behavior of crowds appears to be forever beyond explanation. Even mere analysis is less than convincing, but no matter, simple description suffices. Rule One is still the surest guide: stay away from crowds.

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