Did He Not Swear That He Would Have No Lightning Rods?

We keep pushing the button and no more juice is coming out.

Shoreline armoring is the practice of building physical structures, usually from metal, wood, or rock, to stave off coastal erosion. Since 2014, armoring has increased at least fivefold along the eastern coastline of Lake Michigan. Nineteen percent of the coastline is now armored.

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There are five hundred and eighty-two trees in Detroit’s Clark Park, give or take. They are comprised of fifty-one species, give or take. I counted them myself the other weekend.

Of these, only two are horse chestnuts. These have gone brown in the leaves faster than just about any other as we barrel into autumn here, and for the last few days these palmate offerings have begun to pile up beneath their trunks.

This morning I watched a city employee on a riding mower circle on trunk over and over again, turning the leaves to so much fine powder.

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Some possible short-term effects of armoring: fewer properties damaged by the lake, fewer economic disruptions during high-water years.

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Pointless, pointless. As is so much labor, I know. The logical endpoint of a ravenous capitalist state: only the jobs can justify the system, and so the jobs themselves must all be justified, no matter how stupefying or destructive.

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Some certain long-term effects of armoring: increased erosion, the loss of public beaches to private structures, the inability of beaches to shift and restore themselves through natural processes, massive future economic disruptions as properties and beaches disappear.

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Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas:

And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting—on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave...

So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.

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Ethan Theuerkopf, Michigan State University researcher:

In a very general sense, we are changing the way the coastal system functions in these areas. There’s this natural dynamic of sand flowing both onshore to offshore, and then back offshore to onshore. When that feeding of the nearshore system gets shut down, you’re changing where the wave energy is distributed across the coast.

Rather than being broadly distributed across the beach, it’s hitting that sea wall and being forced down. And that’s digging a big hole in front of those sea walls, making the recovery process worse and forcing the sand out deeper.

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Not all jobs can justify themselves to the system, of course. It just seems like it’s all the wrong ones. Any time I find myself on the New York State Thruway I begin wondering what became, in the process of automating toll collection, of all of those toll workers. Until very recently being on I-90 in that state required you to receive a punch card at one booth upon entering and to pay for it in cash at another booth upon exiting.

Growing up these jobs were spoken of aspirationally: a career, not just a job, with an impressive salary, state benefits, and retirement to make it worth the isolated drudgery of the task. Gone now, gone the way of the red brick Thruway rest stops, all now become Stick Frame Venture Capital Millennial Greige.

I’m getting older all the time.

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Theuerkopf:

…it’s one of those things where the more it happens in an area, it sets a precedent. You have very few situations where people are choosing to not armor when they’re surrounded by other people who are armoring. It becomes almost a necessity, because basic physics means armored areas that flank an unarmored area are going to accelerate erosion in that area.

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I used to go out pretty often and canvass for the Medicare for All campaign, back when anyone with any power had to pretend to care about improving people’s lives. One of the key pillars we were advocating at the time was A Just Transition. Something like 300,000 people are employed in private healthcare administration in this country. The problem with a society in which everyone must earn a livelihood is that you end up with a lot of people whose lives depend on the ruination of others.

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The thing about all the city employees on riding mowers in the park is that I always seem to be in their way. I walk my dog like one of the Family Circus kids to avoid them. Until the snows come, they’re hardly ever not there. Which seems to suggest, maybe, that the purpose of a city park is its maintenance rather than its use.

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So many contradictions live within me. I believe, as strongly as I can about anything, in the need for a truly democratic reorganization of society. But man…have you seen the people? Each and every person exists with a beautiful and singular spark within them, and I also believe that with the right push they would eat each other. Hogs trained for the slop. I am not exempt: not long ago, grad school reduced me to my basest instincts, simply from spending all week Thinking Too Hard. I felt I could do nothing more with my spare time than: Get high. Eat ice cream. Watch movie while scrolling Twitter and remember nothing of either. Repeat.

It’s been five months since graduation and each weekend I fight anew the urge to slide back into the anodyne.

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Moby-Dick, chapter 123, THE MUSKET:

“He would have shot me once,” he murmured, “yes, there’s the very musket that he pointed at me…I, who have handled so many deadly lances, strange, that I should shake so now. Loaded? I must see. Aye, aye; and powder in the pan;—that’s not good. Best spill it?—wait. I’ll cure myself of this. I’ll hold the musket boldly while I think…he would fain kill all his crew. Does he not say he will not strike his spars to any gale? Has he not dashed his heavenly quadrant? and in these same perilous seas, gropes he not his way by mere dead reckoning of the error-abounding log? and in this very Typhoon, did he not swear that he would have no lightning-rods? But shall this crazed old man be tamely suffered to drag a whole ship’s company down to doom with him?—Yes, it would make him the wilful murderer of thirty men and more, if this ship come to any deadly harm; and come to deadly harm, my soul swears this ship will, if Ahab have his way. If, then, he were this instant—put aside, that crime would not be his. Ha! is he muttering in his sleep? Yes, just there,—in there, he’s sleeping. Sleeping? aye, but still alive, and soon awake again. I can’t withstand thee, then, old man. Not reasoning; not remonstrance; not entreaty wilt thou hearken to; all this thou scornest. Flat obedience to thy own flat commands, this is all thou breathest. Aye, and say’st the men have vow’d thy vow; say’st all of us are Ahabs. Great God forbid!—But is there no other way? no lawful way?—Make him a prisoner to be taken home? What! hope to wrest this old man’s living power from his own living hands? Only a fool would try it…I stand alone here upon an open sea, with two oceans and a whole continent between me and law.—Aye, aye, ‘tis so.—Is heaven a murderer when its lightning strikes a would-be murderer in his bed, tindering sheets and skin together?—And would I be a murderer, then, if”—and slowly, stealthily, and half sideways looking, he placed the loaded musket’s end against the door.

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See also: Oilfield workers. See also: Auto workers. See also: Food service employees at Yankee Stadium.

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There’s a famous, or at least internet-famous, diagram of a monkey from an addiction study. He’s pushing a button to receive a juice reward when he views a particular stimulus. It really does feel like that sometimes, doesn’t it? See stimulus. Push button. Anticipate reward. We are—I am—pathetic and disregulated. We are—I am—this way because the world we are currently locked into is pathetic and disregulating. The pop culture example I was going to use to demonstrate this when I started writing is already dated.

How many times would the monkey keep pushing the button if no juice were coming out?

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I open Instagram and see a video of a wildlife rehabber grafting the wing of a dead monarch butterfly onto the tattered remains of a living one. A living wing, I mean. The adhesive holds. A precious pollinator will get a few more weeks among the milkweed. We could always choose this kind of work, the work of life. We could always do that.

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Thanks, as always, for reading. I’ll talk to you next time.

-Chuck

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