Stop Me Before I Vote Again

I hadn't dared hope to see this in my lifetime.

They'll turn to cannibalism in Westchester, but that's all to the good. Give them ten, fifteen years and we can send in exploratory parties. I reckon the best place to find the Abandoned will be the remnants of the malls, where they're accustomed to performing the strange rituals of their tribes. We can offer them blankets...

hey
uzz twoz dreeemahs
....get a room

keep these here personal visions
to yah-selves

general sprawl
has yet to mount his counter attack
and i'll be in the lead cherry picker

Why don't I trust this?

MH, yeah, in practice it means bulldozing the poorer people and setting up secure hamlets for the influential.

Thanks, MH and AS, I'm glad someone else saw that.

Isn't it the ruling class who are the problem? The middle class have been duped and bought into the suburbiatopia-fantasy, but are they the one's who really deserve to get it? Unfortunately, as always, its the victims who will pay...

welcome to the end of empire
during the century of contraction
in our culture of make believe

sorry to burst
your consensus-trance-bubble
OP, MH, AS and O
but infinite growth
is not possible
on a finite planet

but that's science
and reality
and i know science
and reality
are equally loathed
and "debunked"
by the left-in-name-only
and the real-right

will the poor suffer
in unequal measure

of course
such is history
and the brutal nature
of the modern
hyper-mobile
industrial
human primate

but general sprawl
has left the building

sadly
we will find
slow and small
while beautiful
will be
inflicted
in pain
suffering
indifference
ignorance
and chaos

--

i live in westchester
and i'd love to live
long enough
to see it bulldozed

the more the better

i just got rid of my car yesterday

and i'm working on shedding
as much of my
middle-aged-accumulated
stuff-and-nonsense as possible

voluntary simplicity
is my only hope
false and marginal
though it is

would that i could find
like-minded flesh and blood

just one

just
one

but living here
-as i must
-taking care
-of octogenarian
-rents
in westchester
is like living
in a planned community
of all the popular kids
from high school

a living hell
of delusion and fantasy
arrogance and ignorance

atomized and balkanized
by education and design

peace
and
good luck

--

postscript:
dispatches from the field of collapse:

infrastructurereportcard.org

lake champlain bridge can't be fixed and others could suffer bridge closings

addendum:
yes, yes, yes
i know
there's currently
essentially more
than enough stuff
to go around
in sharing fashion

but sharing
is not in fashion

and there's no indication
it's making a comeback

The history and life of the urban, suburban and exurban areas is marked by a constantly parasitized effort to create a direct democracy, socialized production arcadia. The impossibility of a real utopia is trivial compared to the possibility of making life substantially better. People try all the time.

What usually happens to the effort once it get sufficiently organized is resistance from FIRE, followed by diversion into pockets of Boho communism that quickly get eaten up and exploited - once they increase the quality of life in the area where they thrive for a bit.

Westchester could go the way of post WW II Emilia Romagna; a desirable outcome, even if it eventually becomes another stooge social democracy. But it would take socialism and a FIRE sector so weakened that it couldn't work its usual golem wiles.

mm
your credo is the hind end of crusoe's

any friday will escape your
bricoleur's leafy cabin
at first light

more self isolating then isolated i suspect

get a grip
and
get a better handle too

sugar Al

the boho legionaires like out post duty
that by definition cucles back and forth
between exo-urb and endo-urb

often u get rad biforcations
and recompactions

urban farms

rural tenaments

our present meso -urb gouter
so loathed by the culture mind shaft canary crowd ---for plus 50 years --
is
merely
the flabby half measure pleb following
of romantic boho rusticators

back to the soil => get a lawn of my own

but infinite growth
is not possible
on a finite planet

infinite banality however....

I'm not in favor of doing a reverse Pol-Pot and purging all the soft-palmed and bespectacled types and marching them into the cities. A one-bedroom apartment in a rat-infested slum in NYC is expensive enough as it is, thank you, and the last thing our cities need is more yuppies.

All the Obster is doing here is reducing the available housing stock in a vain attempt to drive up the price of what's left to please the landlord and banker class. At a time when millions of people are homeless nationwide, it seems these homes should be made available for free to whoever. Never mind the urban sprawl hooha. Our cities are Gaza-like enough as it is.

I just go this in my e-mail, unattributed:

"The percentage of 
Africa that is wilderness: 28%

The percentage of 
North America that is wilderness: 38%"

If that's the case we are doing a better job of cramming people into the bantustans than those Afreakins. 

In the world I see - you are stalking elk through the damp canyon forests around the ruins of Rockefeller Center. You'll wear leather clothes that will last you the rest of your life. You'll climb the wrist-thick kudzu vines that wrap the Sears Tower. And when you look down, you'll see tiny figures pounding corn, laying strips of venison on the empty car pool lane of some abandoned superhighway.

Owen, I hope I wasn't misleading about the Bohos themselves. Most of the time they're not initiators; they're joiners, as you say. Nothing wrong with that in itself, of course, and the flavor of Boho communism is nice while it lasts. But in practical terms it's also the first step towards gentrification, and it's a far cry from what the blue collar curmudgeons, church folks, corporate refuseniks and mad garage scientists had in mind. They pray that they'll may remain undiscovered.

Several commenters above noted, quite correctly, that if the powers that be really do roll up the nonexistent sidewalks in some particularly hard-hit suburbias -- like Flint's -- then the losers would be honest ordinary working folks.

Well, duuhh, as the kids used to say. Of course. The losers are always honest ordinary working folks, at least until they rediscover why God made lampposts.

Maybe they're more likely to make that rediscovery if they're jammed up cheek by jowl with each other in urban apartments, a la Kramden and Norton, than if they're all kept carefully isolated in the suburban house and the suburban car. This is one of the many reasons why I have it in for suburbia: it's a fantastically successful instrument of social control.

Maybe they're more likely to make that rediscovery if they're jammed up cheek by jowl with each other in urban apartments, a la Kramden and Norton, than if they're all kept carefully isolated in the suburban house and the suburban car.

As someone who was active in the tenants rights movement for years, I can assure you people are already crammed in cheek to jowl, and asshole to elbow in the tenements, sometimes 2 or 3 families in a one or two bedroom apartment. I've seen what happens when you try to cram two pounds of bologna in a one pound bag, as Alice Kramden would say. No sign of revolution yet. It was a major victory to get people to exercise what meager rights they had, even when they were protected by rent stabilization laws which make it near impossible for a landlord to evict them arbitrarily. In many cases, tenants allied with the landlords and tried to encourage other tenants not to file complaints or take action against them.

As for social control, many of the slumlords we dealt with were Jews who tried to stack their buildings with Hispanic Pentecostals, whose religion forbids them from taking action against a Jew, no matter what his offense. I don't know how that translates into the rest of the 20 percent of the US population that are Evangelicals or Pentecostals, but I suspect that in any foreseeable struggle for freedom in this country, you can write them off immediately.

The chaos theory looks nice on paper, but in any situation where there is wholesale economic collapse and widespread deprivation in this county, I expect most of America's militantly servile masses to reach for the nearest Duce who presents himself and fight to the death for the right to be his slave.