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This is the way the world ends. . .

July 23, 2014

I've long been obsessed with what it would have been like to be a Saxon in post-Roman Britain. Roman concrete was so good that for hundreds of years Saxons inhabited Roman buildings. But their architectural wherewithal was primitive compared to the Romans, so as the roofs collapsed on the Roman buildings they would replace them with leaky timber and thatch jobs. What must that have been like, to live and die in hundreds of years old ruins that are still better than anything you can build?

I think with many things like this the change must be so gradual that nobody ever gets alarmed by it. Every moment in the progressing crappiness just seems like the way things statically are.

LSU is about six years into budget cutting that resulted from unsustainable tax cuts for the wealthy. Part of the result of this is that we have an atrocious backlog for building repair and rennovation. The money amounts are well into the tens of millions of dollars, so bad that it's hard for the administrators to triage. Just this year a six hundred pound chunk of ceiling fell in the dilapidated art studio. It might have killed a student, yet we still don't have the money to fix the building. Cracks in the stucco in my building have caused extensive water damage. Every year or so they cosmetically fix the bubbling over paint on the inside of my office wall, but haven't yet fixed the exterior of the building. The toilets are also slowly dying. About half of them don't flush appropriately, and only work if you hold the handle down for a long time, which of course many people don't do. As a result, by the end of the day most of the bathrooms have raw sewage in the toilets. It smells nauseating, sometimes out in the hallway.

Maybe it's just nostalgia from my youth in the 70s, but I think that public infrastructure has gotten increasingly crappy during the course of my life. When I was a kid we didn't have days long power outages every year from inclement weather. I remember airports as feeling almost like church or art museums, quiet, reverential in a strange way, and clean. It's interesting to think how far down this slope we might slide as we become increasingly a nation of private opulence for a very few and public squalor for everyone else. But maybe nobody will notice much.

Posted in “Austerity”? You mean class war, don’t you?, Jon Cogburn

12 responses to “This is the way the world ends. . .”

dmf

July 23, 2014

I remember heading to college in London in the 80’s and being surprised at how rundown things were in the UK and really Europe at large and now I find that students coming here to the US from South Korea and even China are having similar dawning senses of how did they get so far down/backwards?
hey the dreadful decline of NYC in the 70’s led to some of yer favorite music so who knows…

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Corey McCall

July 23, 2014

Have you read Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story? Great on a near-future America in decline that feels awfully like the America of today.

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Jon Cogburn

July 23, 2014

Cool! I haven’t read that yet.
I loved Absurdistan and the Russian Debutante’s Handbook. He’s written some really entertaining non-fiction pieces on the web too. Thanks for the recommendation, I’m really hyped about reading it.

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M Lister

July 23, 2014

On the other hand, when I was in grade school (in Idaho, in the early 80’s) and in Jr. high, the roofs of our school buildings leaked every time it rained or the snow melted. We had multiple trash cans set out in the hall-ways and in class rooms. Those buildings were all given new roofs in the late 90’s, and I’m told by my relatives (whose have kids there now) that they don’t leak, if there is a leak, it’s rare. Power lines are generally much better now- many can take a tree falling on them and not break, because of better design. Huge storms will still cause outages, but they were in fact more common when I was a kid.
We do have a serious problem of under-investment in the US, and should be doing more. (We should have been doing even more than that around 2008 when commodities and labor prices were very low!) But it’s dangerous to extrapolate from unclear memories and bad local cases.

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CJ

July 23, 2014

I remember reading, though I don’t remember the source, that even in the city of Rome itself, in early medieval times, there were actually a number of distinct settlements within the old city limits. Whereas in most of Europe your little settlement might be separated from others by a wood or a fen or whatever, in Rome you might be surrounded instead by stretches of decaying monumental stonework.

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Alan White

July 23, 2014

Jon, I have real sympathy for LSU’s situation (though I’m UT Vol PhD and thus your sworn enemy especially on the football field and men and women’s BB courts) from a similar footing in Wisconsin. It’s pretty clear that our Wississippi legislature has no love for UW System, where my younger TT colleagues now have take-home pay (in the 40s-K gross) reduced to levels lower then when they were hired thanks to Walker: Taxes Ranger and his Assembly and Senate cronies enacting increased contributions to a pension fund that was already the most responsibly funded in the nation before these “reforms”. There is a real but quietly effective strategy to defund public education through elitist-portrayal-demonization of the humanities, well-funded promotion of tech-school education over public universities, vouchers for private but unregulated schools, etc. etc. The de facto result is the increased businessfication of public institutions just to survive, assisted by the multi-motivated radical inflation of administration and salaries balanced off near-exponential increased use of non-TT faculty to deliver the “product”.
I’m actually glad I’m closer to the end of my career than the beginning. One just can’t be sanguine about the future of public education viewed as a real public good, which was at least part of the attraction of teaching and writing when I started.

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Simon Evnine

July 24, 2014

Another book recommendation: Nicola Griffith’s recent Hild. If you haven’t read it, it’s about, not Saxons, but Angles in 7th century Britain. The presence of Roman ruins, with questions of repair of them, etc., while not a major theme in the book, is fairly constant. And it’s a mind-blowingly good book!

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Jon Cogburn

July 24, 2014

Awesome. I just amazoned it.

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Jon Cogburn

July 24, 2014

New York’s alright if you like saxophones.

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dmf

July 24, 2014

a sax or 3: http://www.wnyc.org/story/rahsaan-roland-kirk/
or ya know the talking heads

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Jon Cogburn

July 24, 2014

My God! I’ll never make fun of jazz flute again.

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Adam

July 31, 2014

Jon, you might be interested in The Archdruid Report (http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/). There’s a lot of it to catch up on, but it’s an extended rumination on our own collapsing civilization, as well as (in the earlier posts) an extended argument for the collapse claim itself.

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