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August 13, 2006
I've seen the lights go out in Earlville
The newspapers are now talking about the danger that the federal government is going to override any state-level interventions in the NYRI project. The plan to bring more juice to the city while destroying everything in its Upstate path is all part of a federal initiative, dontcha know.
If the federal government goes ahead and designates the region as a high-priority National Interest Electric Transmission Corridor, then New York Regional Interconnect might be able to bypass state Public Service Commission regulators and win approval of their plan in Washington, said Gerald Norlander, executive director of the Public Utility Law Project in Albany.
Meanwhile, BP has discovered some compilation tapes from the early 80s. Two of them put Marley songs in interface with a variety of other performers; the third does the same with Chambers Brothers songs. So he converts the tapes to CD. Right now we're listening to them, and behold, one has Billy Joel's apocalyptic "Miami 2017," which begins,
I’ve seen the lights go out on Broadway-It made me shiver to hear the whole song, which is all about the loss of electricity and the exodus of its residents.
I saw the empire state laid low.
And life went on beyond the palisades,
They all bought bright cadillacs-
And left there long ago.
I appreciate the concerns expressed there. I feel them about my own home right now. The trouble is that one must presumably be sacrificed for the other. The trouble is that nobody presupposes that getting more power to the city should be accomplished without commensurately damaging another part of the country.
In commemoration of which, I've finally done what I've been thinking about: changed the category name for this entry, from "race, class, ethnicity" to "class warfare." That name doesn't acknowledge the race and ethnicity issues that come under this heading, but it foregrounds the "warfare" part, which is needed, I think, for these recent entries about NYRI and the urban-rural battles. They are a form of class warfare, just as is the North-South tension. Don't laugh; the most recent occasion on which someone from New York asked me where I was from and then congratulated me on having a PhD was two days ago.
Posted by senioritis at August 13, 2006 07:51 AM