IN THEIR VISIT TO SYRACUSE, NEW YORK to track down the serial killer responsible for the death of Meyer’s niece, Travis
looks around the noontime restaurant where he and Meyer have stopped to eat.
The downtown restaurant has a large number of city bureaucrats and politicos on
their lunch break, all seeming to Travis to have a “feverish gregariousness”
and who “seemed so frantic about having a good time.” Meyer presents Travis
with his analysis about why they seem to have such a demeanor about them:
It’s energy without a productive
outlet, I think. Most of these Mohawk Valley cities are dying, have been for
years: Albany, Troy, Amsterdam, Utica, Syracuse, Rome. And so they made an
industry out of government. State office buildings in the decaying downtowns. A
proliferation of committees, surveys, advisory boards, commissions, legal
actions, grants, welfare, zoning boards, road departments, health care
groups…thousands upon thousands of people making a reasonably good living
working for city, county, state, and federal governments in these dwindling
cities, passing the same tax dollars back and forth. I think that man, by
instinct, is productive. He wants to make
something, a stone ax, a bigger cave, better arrows, whatever. But these bright
and energetic men know in their hearts that they are not making anything. They use every connection, every contact, every
device, to stay within reach of public monies. Working within an abstraction is
just not a totally honorable way life. Hence the air of jumpy joy, the
backslaps ringing too loudly, compliments too extravagant, toasts too ornate,
marriages too brief, lawsuits too long-drawn, obligatory forms too complex and too long. Their city has
gone stale, and the light wanes, they dance.
A short while later, in visiting the
sister of the killer Evan Lawrence to gain information that will aid them in
their quest to track him down Travis and Meyer come to a house where they are
“stunned by the profusion of junk that filled the yard from fence to fence.”
All manner of detritus was on display, manufactured in the
factories of post-War America for the burgeoning consumer markets that seemed
all but insatiable; junk and more junk.
Travis looks at the scene and thinks:
The scene stunned the mind. It was
impossible to take it all in at once. In a strange way it had an almost
artistic impact, a new art form devised in three dimensions to show the
collapse of Western civilization. It made me think of an object I had seen in
New York when a woman persuaded me to go with her to an exhibition at the
Museum of Modern Art. The object was a realistic-looking plastic hamburger on a
bun with an ooze of mustard, pickle, and catsup. It was ten feet in diameter
and stood five feet height. This scene had that same total familiarity plus
unreality.
 |
| Salad Shooters. Really? |
Helen June’s yard represents for
MacDonald the wasteful excess of the throw-away culture that so much of the
developed world has adopted, with the availability of abundant sources of oil,
the growth of economies based on consumer spending (aided by the expansion of
credit sources such as credit cards in the 1970s) and globalization which has
had such a profound impact on the manufacturing regions in the developed world,
like the “rust belt” of Ohio, Michigan, central New York State (where Travis
and Meyer have lunch) and other states, and which removed factories and jobs to
low-wage regions of the world.
Meyer talks about the scrambling for
resources, money, security, and stability in the wake of high unemployment and
stagnant local economies. Who scrambles up the slag heap and comes out on top?
In 1982, MacDonald sees the bureaucrats and the politically-connected emerge as
the elites of Syracuse. They control the flow of government monies that were
then coming into the area for welfare, unemployment benefits, new roads and other
works projects to help fill the void left when the local economies were gutted
by the new economic policies then being adopted by Margret Thatcher in Britain
and Ronald Regan in America. The image Meyer portrays of unproductive “man” is
apt. Without purpose, what do we do with our hands? Meyer says that we find unproductive,
make-work things to do; in Syracuse it’s the expansion of the local bureaucracy
that’s become the booming local industry: paperwork not sheet steel, committees
instead of car parts. And government monies and local initiatives and
redevelopment projects all have played a role in revitalizing some areas that have
experienced job losses and unemployment.
Revitalizing’ is such a developer’s
words these days. The word “vital” comes from Old English and had the meaning
of something that is “indispensable” or “absolutely necessary”. But when you
rip the core out of a community, as we have seen time and time again with
globalization, ‘free’ trade, big box stores, etc. can you ever replace the
vital businesses, relationships, infrastructures and interconnections that made
the place function?
The last thirty or forty years have
seen many attempts to revitalize those affected communities, some with more
success than others; most leave them with left-over jobs and decaying
infrastructures, high rates of poverty and greyer futures. But globalization,
just-in-time manufacturing, the financialization of a large portion of the
economy (money making money instead of people making things), will not allow sustainable
vitality to return. The manufacturing jobs that have left for China and
elsewhere are gone. They will not come back, despite what the current American
president promises. (South-western Ontario, where I am from, has experienced for
decades the strains such short-sighted policies bring.) There will be a long
period of decline in those regions that have been ‘papered-over’ with the temporary
businesses and government funds.
Tattoo parlours and ATMs do not a
main street make. Where hope lies is in local initiatives once more undertaken
by local populations who have a vested interest in the stability of their
communities. New vitality will come with the making of things and providing services
that people actually need. We are apes who use tools, after all. Let's use them wisely. Fuck salad shooters.
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