Grand Hotel Abyss

My life has only just ceased to be scored by the insectoid hum of news helicopters. I sit here typing a mere and disconcerting ten blocks from the televisual catastrophe I suppose you’ve all been enjoying.

People here in the land of “Minnesota Nice” are certainly enjoying it: I’ve never quite experienced the peculiar giddiness, the high spirits and festiveness that enters a population in a moment of public calamity. I was reporting this last night to a friend who called from Chicago to check in, and we concluded that if this was the psychological state of Minneapolis, then Baghdad must be a laugh riot. Nobody went to work today, and everyone rushed, camera in hand, to the site of the disaster, hoping to snap that perfect shot. I, unemployed, walked by but did not pause, so firm is my integrity.

The response of the liberal blogosphere and commentariat has been coordinated and strong. It’s obvious to anyone with eyes that this country is physically disintegrating, and the occurrence of this collapse in a city rightly renowned for its quality of life and public institutions ought to be a startling reminder of the price of endless foreign wars, disestablishment of the public sphere and a sick fetish for sports stadiums.

Oh yes, we have the stadium problem here in Minneapolis. It reminds me of my vanished youth in Pittsburgh PA, where the government put the prospect of two new stadiums to a referendum. The voters, looking around them at a city many parts of which were and are coming to resemble something out of the old Second World, rejected the measure. The city swiftly implemented what they called Plan B. Plan B was, “Fuck you, we’re doing it anyway.” Things are no different up here. I say, if you want to privatize something, privatize sports in all its aspects.

Speaking of privatization, we already see the old shell game being played. Tucker Carlson today advocated having all bridges sponsored by corporations! What a trick: defund public infrastructure, wait till it falls apart, when it falls apart blame government inefficiency, then hand everything over to private interests.

Where, by the way, are all of these super-efficient corporations of neoliberal mythology? Corporations are in my experience vast, grey, faceless, wasteful and arbitrary bureaucracies, dehumanizing and inefficient beyond the wildest dreams of Lenin. (Hence my preferred phrase: Corporate Stalinism.) Enough of this bullshit.

Anyway. A commenter on The Nation’s blast against defunded infrastructure accused the left of not coming to terms with the fact that one cannot have everything. I may not be public-spirited; I may not even plan to vote for Barack “Invade Pakistan” Obama or Hillary “Don’t Say You Won’t Nuke ‘Em” Clinton or any other member of that wretched party; I may want to vomit when Senator Amy Kloubachar says that bridges should not fall down in America, thus implying that it’s just fine and what you’d expect for bridges to fall down in Peru or Indonesia; I may even be some kind of anarchist. But surely, surely, we mustn’t despair so much that we cannot even imagine a collective effort to ensure that the very ground does not fall away from beneath our feet.