A friend who likes to provoke sent us the following article from The National Review by one Victor Davis Hanson, reflecting on the effect of metal-hunting thieves on his rural California community. Hanson writes, "I am starting to feel as if I am living in a Vandal state, perhaps on the frontier near Carthage around a.d. 530, or in a beleaguered Rome in 455." He goes on for four pages documenting the atrocities committed in his vicinity, and punctures a "vague code of silence" to pont the finger at "gangs of young Mexican nationals or Mexican-Americans." Here's one typical lament:
"Last week an ancestral rural school near the Kings River had its large bronze bell stolen. I think it dated from 1911. I have driven by it about 100 times in the 42 years since I got my first license. The bell had endured all those years. Where it is now I don’t know. Does someone just cut up a beautifully crafted bell in some chop yard in rural Fresno County, without a worry about who forged it or why — or why others for a century until now enjoyed its presence?"
Too bad about the bell, but on the subject of the end of civilization our author hasn't been to, say, downtown Detroit over the past 50 years?
What's going on here is described in Christopher Leinberger's column in The New York Times on The Death of the Fringe Suburb (November 11, 2011), which explains how the real estate crisis and the trend back to urban centers have finally doomed the unsustainable sprawl of the outer suburbs.
Crime in cities has gone down so it is logical that crime in the outer burbs will go up. Mayor Giuliani, prisons and demographics made cities safe for the bright sons and daughters of the well-to-do, and now society’s honest minimum-wage working-class losers must move out with their frustrated offspring to bankrupt subdivisions in the outer burbs. Out there with the deer, coyotes and other wildlife.
In this apocalyptic scenario, our author will soon be joining a panicked swarm back to urban living, just as he and his parents swarmed out of the cities from the 50s until now. All to be accompanied, as the article's subtext foreshadows, by very civilized fantasies of Dirty Harry revenge.
Photo:John R. Street, Detroit, 2003, by Camilo José Vergara
From a silly article in Domus, 2011, that almost merits an Exabrupto of its own
