“Storm surge,” Hexter said. “They’re saying twenty-one feet above the highest high tide we’ve ever had.”
“Any more cake?” Roberto inquired.
We have got to teach ourselves to understand literature. Money is no longer going to do our thinking for us.
d) the city smartass again
A couple centuries ago there was a famous cartoon, published in one of the New York newspapers or magazines that combined to make the city such a fountain of literary excellence, ranging from Melville and Whitman to—well, in any case, this cartoon consisted of a map of the city looking west, with a foreshortened perspective such that the rest of the United States was as wide as two Manhattan blocks, and the Pacific Ocean no wider than the Hudson. A funny representation of New York’s self-absorption, and it’s interesting how easy it is to fall down that same hole whenever talking about the city: where else matters? It’s the center of the world, the capital of blah blah.
True. Maybe too true. And hopefully the concept of ease of representation will have impinged on the reader’s consciousness to the point of reminding you that this focus on New York is not to say that it was the only place that mattered in the year 2142, but only to say that it was like all the cities in the world, and interesting as such, as a type, as well as for its peculiarities as an archipelago in an estuary debouching into a bight, featuring a lot of very tall buildings.
So, while there is no need to describe the situation in other coastal cities like watery Miami, or paranoidly poldered London and Washington, D.C., or swampy Bangkok, or nearly abandoned Buenos Aires, not to mention all the inland snoozefests called out when one says the single dread word Denver, it is important to place New York in the context of everywhere else, the latter regarded, as in the famous cartoon, as a single category: everywhere else. Because from now on in this tale, as really all along, the story of New York only begins to make sense if the global is taken into account to balance the local. If New York is the capital of capital, which it isn’t, but if you pretend it is to help you think the totality, you see the relation; what happens to a capital city is influenced, inflected, maybe determined, maybe overdetermined, by what happens elsewhere in its empire. The periphery infects the core, the provinces invade the imperial center, the network tugs the knot at its center tight, so tight that it becomes a Gordian knot and can only be cut in two.
So: Hurricane Fyodor unleashed its wrath on New York and the immediate vicinity. A local catastrophe for sure, but for the rest of the world, a fascinating bit of news, an entertaining telenovela and a chance to exercise some delicious and mostly justifiable Schadenfreude. Few feel any huge affection for New York, that most desired but least beloved of cities, and no one in the history of the world has ever said Oh how I pity New York, or Oh what a pitiful city New York is. Never said, never thought. So the emotional, historical, and physical effects of the hurricane’s devastation were almost entirely local. The state and federal government sent in emergency relief to deal with the immediate problems following the storm, it being their jobs to do so, and for those not actually caught physically in the melodrama, it was quickly forgotten and people moved on to the next episode in the great parade of events. Two months later Beijing was buried in forty feet of loess dust sweeping down on winds from the northwest: did you hear? Can you imagine? Worse than water by far! Want to hear all about it?
No. Ease of representation: what strikes us most strongly seems more widespread than it really is. So back to New York, which is after all where baseball was invented. In the larger world of global capital, which is what New York is supposed to be the capital of, there were some real repercussions to this local event. Smashing New York was like dropping a boulder in a dark pool, and the ripples spread around the world like seismic waves, jiggling sensitive instruments everywhere in the moneysphere, which was now coextensive with the biosphere itself. Intersecting waves and derivative effects led to two distinctly visible results, which in their turn exacerbated each other: one, capital again took flight from New York, figuring it would be a decade at least before the city recovered from the devastation, and during that time the rate of return would be higher in Denver, meaning of course anywhere. All that is solid melts into air, as Marx once rhapsodized, and all that is liquid decamps to Denver. Then, two, housing price indexes all pegged downward a few points, with the IPPI naturally leading the drop, as being the specific index describing the zone just thrashed. Other indexes, including the Case-Shiller, also dropped, not as much as the IPPI, but significantly. The point here is that the indexes not only dropped, but diverged a bit as they did. That meant there was a spread there to bet on, one way or another, depending on which index one felt was likeliest to be right, or to correct first.
These two developments might not sound like the hugest trees in the forest to fall, not earth-shattering enough to jiggle money seismographs worldwide, pretty much business as usual, in fact. But it’s funny how things sometimes shift like flocking birds. And the way bubbles work is structurally identical to Ponzi schemes—what a coincidence!—and indeed it’s another amazing coincidence how much the entire capitalist economy resembles in its basic structure either a Ponzi scheme or a bundle of Ponzi schemes. How could this be? Is this another case of convergent evolution, or isomorphic identity, or cloning, or simply an astonishing Jungian synchronicity, in other words a coincidence? Probably just a coincidence, sure. But be that as it may, bubbles and Ponzi schemes and capitalism all have to keep growing or else they are in deep shit. A big enough glitch in their growth and they break their own logic, by depriving themselves of the margin needed to fund the next investment that will make the next margin to fund the next investment that will make the next margin to fund the next investment, and so on forever. If the system isn’t spiraling up, it stalls, and then, rather than spiraling down at the same rate of change, it drops like a punctured blimp, like a broken helicopter, like, as the phrase in finance has it, a refrigerator falling out of the sky.
As for instance.
When people objected to one of Robert Moses’s many redevelopment plans, this one requiring the demolition of the beloved old aquarium at Battery Park, Moses suggested the aquarium fish be dumped into the sea. Or made into a chowder.
Later, apropos another contested project, he said, “I wonder sometimes if people deserve the Hudson.”
e) Charlotte
Charlotte went back to work, not knowing what else to do, and figuring that the Householders’ Union office was going to be inundated with new internal refugees. Franklin had gone off to hunt for Stefan and Roberto, looking so worried that she had been tempted to accompany him, but it wouldn’t have helped, and she wanted to do something helpful.
At the office it was indeed a complete mess, with a great number of bedraggled people filling all the halls and all the rooms, though it made no sense as any kind of refuge. But any port in a storm, and possibly many of the people there felt that in the wake of the hurricane their immigrant and/or refugee status might somehow have changed for the better. Charlotte wasn’t sure that wasn’t true; they were part of a very large crowd now. Might be cause for some kind of class-action action.
First she helped sort out the crowd, handing out queue numbers and forms and asking people why they were there, and if they could leave and come back later, and so on. Most of them were not yet members of the union, and many of them had no papers at all. After a while she got tired of it and joined a group taking a police cruiser up to Central Park, because she wanted to see it.