KUNSTLER'S SPOOKY HALLOWEEN

With little to do while waiting for something possibly very bad to happen people tend to get jokey. That was how I felt about the election until Hurricane Sandy came along. For one thing, I happened to travel (by car – how else?) last week from Bennington through Brattleboro, Vermont, and down into a de-industrialized corner of northwestern Massachusetts. There were at least three major highway bridge re-construction projects (and many lesser ones) still underway along the route from last year’s Hurricane Irene, which devastated Vermont. There’s a fair chance that Vermont will get whacked again, undoing a billion dollars of work along the same mountain river roads. How demoralizing will that be? And where does the local share of the money come from?

     I remember, too, being in Wilkes-Barre, in Eastern Pennsylvania just a few years ago and seeing that the city never actually recovered from floods induced by Hurricane Agnes in 1972, which coincided with the beginning of the end of the local coal industry. The downtown was functionally dead, with a zombie overlay of social services, wig shops, and street people conversing with themselves. It appears that Hurricane Sandy is going to rip through the same region again, then curl east into my part of upstate New York and finally slog into the same new England states that got bashed last year.

     Then, of course, there is the question of what happens to New York City in the next 48 hours, a potential enormity too vast to quantify from here (not to mention Washington DC, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Wilmington, and the toxic waste dump formerly known as New Jersey).

More