The city of Bellona is severely damaged; radio, television, and telephone signals do not reach it. People enter and leave by crossing a bridge on foot.
Inexplicable events punctuate the novel: One night the perpetual cloud cover parts to reveal two moons in the sky. One day a red sun swollen to hundreds of times its normal size rises to terrify the populace, then retreats across the sky to set on the same horizon. Street signs and landmarks shift constantly, while time appears to contract and dilate. Buildings burn for days, but are never consumed, while others burn and later show no signs of damage. Gangs roam the nighttime streets, their members hidden within holographic projections of gigantic insects or mythological creatures. The few people left in Bellona struggle with survival, boredom, and each other.
The novel's protagonist is "the Kid" (sometimes "Kidd"), a drifter who has partial amnesia: he can't remember either his own name or those of his parents, though he knows his mother was an American Indian.
Mike Snyder: Three years ago, I bet that 99 percent of my readers had never heard of ORC. Of course by now almost everyone knows that ORC stands for “organized retail crime”, and it is prompting retailers to permanently shut down stores all over the nation. Right now, retail theft is happening from coast to coast on a scale that we have never seen in our entire history. Marauding bands of looters are barging into stores, grabbing as much merchandise as they can possibly carry, and then loading it into their vehicles. Online marketplaces make it easier than ever to turn stolen goods into cash, and at this point organized retail crime has become a multi-billion dollar business. As I have repeatedly warned my readers, America is descending into lawlessness. The thin veneer of civilization that we all depend upon on a daily basis is rapidly disappearing, and if we stay on this path our society will soon be completely unrecognizable.
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/marauding-bands-looters-are-stealing-billions-dollars-worth-merchandise-america-descends
Speed and Violence considers Paul Virilio’s theory of the accident and seeks to excavate his “originary scene,” the moment that produced the technology / accident economy discussed in his works The Museum of Accidents (1989), Politics of the Very Worst (1999), and The Information Bomb (2000a). In consideration of the possibility that Virilio’s thesis denies the idea of the originary position, I relate his technology / accident economy to Derrida’s deconstruction. In particular the essay examines how Virilio’s theory refers to the notion of différance. Beyond this examination of Virilio’s possible atemporalism, my analysis shifts towards a consideration of the effects of speed. Through a reading that grounds the technology / accident bind in time, the essay looks towards the Girardian concept of the victim in order to suggest that the anthropology implicit in Virilio’s dromology (theory of speed) affirms the centrality of the victimary position. http://anthropoetics.ucla.edu/ap0602/virilio/
It is you, oh yeah
It is you, oh yeah
I said pressure drop, oh, pressure
Oh yeah, pressures gonna drop on you
I said pressure drop, oh, pressure
Oh yeah, pressures gonna drop on you
I said when you drop, oh, you've gotta feel it
All that you're doing is wrong
I said when you drop, yes, you've gotta feel it
All that you're doing is wrong
Sitting masked in posh Union Square dental office talking to wife’s dentist about business loss downtown being less than 60% of a few years ago. I wondered how long small business can tolerate the grinding of homelessness, effluence, litter, boarded and closed stores next to soon to be emptiest hotels like the Hyatt. CVS is boarded up and this across street from Hyatt at Stockton and Sutter. Dentist shared his thoughts that worst case in his opinion was soon to come but the business district never would be vacant, rentals would trickle in so maybe 50% worst case next few years.
I smiled. He was a dentist and Armenian. I was an autodidact and San Franciscan for 35 years. From his view the bad was worse. For me just the Tenderloin moving like kuzdu and intractable stupid kids looking to make some fun breaking windows and grabbing goodies. Not a merry shopping experience.
It is you, oh yeah
It is you, oh yeah
I said pressure drop, oh, pressure
Oh yeah, pressures gonna drop on you
I said pressure drop, oh, pressure
Oh yeah, pressures gonna drop on you
Politics of the Very Worst, Virilo expands his position in order to show how the machine combats error through technological innovation:
…the development of technologies can only happen through the analysis and surpassing of these accidents. When the European railroads were introduced, the traffic was poorly regulated and accidents multiplied. The railroad engineers convened in Brussels in 1880 and invented the famous block system. It was a way to effectively regulate traffic so as to avoid the devastating effects of progress, train wrecks. The sinking of the Titanic is a similar example. After this tragedy, SOS was developed, a way of calling for help by radio. The explosion of the Challenger space shuttle is a considerable event that reveals the original accident of the engine in the same way as the shipwreck of the first ocean liner
In 1780 London held some 750,000 men, women and children in a compass of just a few square miles. By 1900 it was home to more than 5 million people - 9 million if you include the greater metropolitan area - and had extended its reach to almost 200 square miles. And in 2080? Will humans still exist? Tell me, Mon Oncle, O Enlightenment rationalist conception of the West. Rather than a victory of the Graeco-Roman emphasis on reason over the dark forces of irrationalism and fundamentalist religion, the Enlightenment is marked by a cultural and philosophical hubris. Contrary to a truly Western approach, the Enlightenment rejected non-Western sources and looked askance at the past. Australian thinker Peter Harrison argues that this is ultimately an anti-Western, or non-Western, approach. As a result, what is often characterised as “Western” is based on a fixed canon of works and ideas which are largely shaped by the Enlightenment’s rejection of the past.
Contrary to this rationalist Enlightenment approach, Peter Harrison suggests that the West is marked by a preservation of “a rich and varied past that can continue to serve as an ongoing challenge to the priorities and ‘values’ of the present.” Western civilisation could be defined by its eclecticism, eccentricity, and its perpetual challenge to presentist concerns. The problem of pinning down a conception of Western civilisation is, in light of Harrison’s proposition, a very Western problem.
A change is coming as Snyder see’s. Faster and faster.
“A mighty bubble of wealth is blown before our eyes, as empty, as transient, as contradictory to the laws of solid material, as confuted by every circumstance of actual condition, as any other bubble which man or child ever blew before.”
Edward Chancellor, Devil Take the Hindmost
Indeed. Retail gasps. Sales down. Online up. Money steps away from the maddening crowd . Mr. Credit lifts all boats in the bye and bye. 90 daze same as paper money with checking account credit. Spent on marked up last year fashion on sales for 60%.
Love this thanks. It touches on so many disparate things I have come to recognize during these years. From pressure drop to Snyder & Co., to my home city by the bay, to Native American mothers, to dystopian understanding. That this is a spiritual war on many fronts is clear.