But enough of the specifics. What about the General Level of Idiocy here?

To address that, let's jump to Sewell Chan's "Manhattan Subway Fire Cripples 2 Lines" piece from this past Tuesday's New York Times; not on the front page, mind you, but on page A20, buried below the "In an Instant, Routine Blaze Turned Wild, Then Deadly" article (replete with much more photographic space than that afforded the subway rundown...and with much more copy to boot).

Why? Read a bit, if you will (as I don't want to insult your intelligence):

"Two of the city's subway lines --the A and the C-- have been crippled and may not return to normal capacity for three to five years after a fire Sunday afternoon in a lower Manhattan transit control room that was started by a homeless person trying to keep warm, officials said yesterday."

"The blaze...was described as doing the worst damage to subway infrastructure since...September 11, 2001. It gutted a locked room...that contains some 600 relays, switches and circuits...."

Oh, 9/11. Any related thoughts, Apple lovers? I mean aside from the fact that the report didn't appear on the front page, wasn't emblazoned all over the most important page of the paper like the announcement of THE DAY THAT WOULD LIVE IN INFAMY! That would be Pearl Harbor.

This would be --is-- a HUGE mistake, to put it mildly.

Locked room? Let's play...Free Association, shall we? How about our starting with...security? And if you're not in the mood for that game, perhaps you'll consider telling me why every leftist writer living in The Apple is rotten enough not to be addressing this issue; I only heard about it because my friend, Gui (putting up with The City, but not putting away his analytical faculties), mentioned it in passing. To reassure me that some citizens might very well be DOING something about what we're complaining about...as he tied it to previous subway sabotage, albeit with a loose knot.

If you've never lived in NYC...if you've never depended on the subway system there, you might not appreciate ugly facts like people used to waiting six minutes having to now wait eighteen minutes. Or long waits and erratic service becoming the norm for quite some time for well over a half-million people; 580,000? But perhaps the idea of a whole subway line ceasing to exist overnight will hit home. Home...as in Homeland.

Home Run for the Yanks! And just when you were being led to believe (by me) that no one could be more stupid than Alvin Toffler...with his breakdown of what it would be like with a breakdown in society as we know it. And his tedious take on WHY we have come up with the notion of government, the act of handing over our lives to The Powers. No, the Yanks not responding more vociferously, the riders allowing themselves to really be taken for a ride are...arguably...more stupid on several counts.

I'll let you count all the ways, but I'll give you one, citing from the article again:

"This is a very significant problem, and it's going to go on for quite a while," said Lawrence G. Reuter, the president of New York City Transit. He estimated it would take 'several millions of dollars and several years' to reassemble and test the intricate network of custom-built switch relays that were destroyed in the blaze, which officials believe began when the homeless person -- who has not been found -- set fire to wood and refuse in a shopping cart in the tunnel about 50 feet north of the Chambers Street station."

Again, italics are mine. Not that you need them to highlight the assumption that would have earned one of my college students back in the 60s an "F" in Rhetoric.

And...I think the whole thing begs the question of whether or not such a setup would be ideal for a "terrorist" to employ...if he/she wanted to have a backup excuse...if stopped by NYC's Finest prior to using the 'ole lighter. Or...would you rather be reading about that deadly Bronx fire (by Jim Dwyer)? That's the piece alluded to above that garnered more focus in the Times on Tuesday.

It doesn't matter if the authorities do come up with a real homeless person to blame, legitimately or otherwise. The Real Culprit here is Homeland Security...and the people who provide the paychecks for them. That'd be us.

Nevertheless, 'ya gotta just love those New Yorkers. Again, from the oh-so-important piece:

"All I can do is wait here and hope for the best," said Ana Reyes, 51, a medical receptionist from Boerum Hill who had waited half an hour for the A train at the Jay Street station in Brooklyn. 'Nobody tells you anything, so I just follow everyone else. If a train comes, I'm getting on it, and I don't care where it goes."

Woman, I'm not into writing letters-to-the-editor much these days, but if ever something begged for it on the plane of "all politics is local"...this would be IT.

And so much of it all right in the shadow of the World Trade Center. In both former and present senses.

Now's the time for readers to come out from under the inferior/obscure protection of the state. I take severe umbrage with Toffler's take on government in our lives.

To live, we're gonna have to live without depending upon them so. And without paying them so much for so little.

How to do that? Like I said, I don't want to insult your intelligence. Let's just not wait for a whole lot of people to feel secure enough to act.


Richard Oxman, a former resident of NYC, is still trying to figure out how those living in The Big Apple (including employees of Bantam Books and Seven Stories Press, both cited here) reconcile applause for the likes of Giuliani/not relocating...and the WTC asbestos they had to breathe before, during and following 9/11
(See http://www.pressaction.com/news/weblog/full_article/oxman02282004) .
NOTES:

(1) Alvin Toffler, Powershift (New York: Bantam Books, 1990), p. 462.
(2) Ibid., p. 462.
(3) From p. 105 of Angela Davis' "Abolitionist Alternatives" chapter in Are Prisons Obsolete? (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2003): "Forget about reform; it's time to talk about abolishing jails and prisons in American society...Still -- abolition? Where do you put the prisoners? The 'criminals'? What's the alternative? First, having no alternative at all would create less crime than the present criminal training centers do. Second, the only full alternative is building the kind of society that does not need prisons: A decent redistribution of power and income so as to put out the hidden fire of burning envy that now flames up in crimes of property -- both burglary by the poor and embezzlement by the affluent. And a decent sense of community that can support, reintegrate and truly rehabilitate those who suddenly become filled with fury or despair, and that can face them not as objects -- 'criminals'-- but as people who have committed ! illegal acts, as have almost all of us." Do we need a government? Do we need prisons? You have to ask yourself questions like whether or not you'd even want fire departments if the price you had to pay were three (unpunished) rapes for every answered call in a given city, false alarm or not.