End of the Dream

by Wylie, Philip;

  Morning dawned murkily. Smoke rose here and there. People were still dying, on the streets, in their homes and in countless buildings, including many where old-fashioned air-conditioners failed finally to clean the air.

  Nora watched our visible stretch of Park Avenue for more than two hours without seeing a soul move. The dead lay where they’d fallen. A car caught fire and burned out, fortunately not setting adjacent vehicles aflame.

  A breeze sprang up toward late afternoon and we watched the veils of poison as they swirled, curled on one another and gradually thinned out. Martial law had been declared on Saturday evening, but only now were any numbers of National Guardsmen, in gas masks, entering the worst regions. After dark, tanks and bulldozers with blazing headlights began to batter lanes through the stalled vehicles. With paths cleared, masked Guardsmen began to collect the corpses which were carried off by city trucks.

  These cadavers were laid out in Central Park and elsewhere for identification, a process that was never complete as so many of the dead were from out of town and, of them all, a great many had been robbed or trampled, had lost pocketbooks, and even their clothes. Relatives and friends who might have identified thousands refused to come into the city area and could hardly be blamed. A thaw followed the period and bodies began to putrefy, those waiting outdoors to be named as well as thousands in alleys, houses, in the vast slums, in apartments where ventilation failed and many had hidden beneath rugs, car blankets, beds, under cartons and in closets and even trunks and boxes.

  The city smelled like a battlefield.

  Mortality from other causes than the combined toxins were also fantastic. In the vast regions peripheral to the deadly smog, tens of thousands more died, cardiacs, the old, people with respiratory troubles, handicapped persons unable to get to less choking areas, infants and small children without number, and pets.

  Looting continued in spite of the Guardsmen and police.

  For the areas of death were all but intolerable to persons without protective masks, and these were insufficient for all save the essential personnel. Most of Manhattan and much of the Bronx as well as a vast stretch of Brooklyn soon became deserted by all but the soldiers, police and other city workers—and looters.

  The death toll was estimated, finally, at just over one million two hundred thousand. An exact figure was out of the question.

  But even that massive self-execution was not the end of the disaster, and perhaps not even its worst aspect.

  Although I have here recorded my own experiences in the “Saturday Slaughter,” I do not feel competent to give a clear and detached concept of the whole. However, Raymond L. Bainter, writing in the North Atlantic for December, a year later, skillfully presented certain circumstances that are relevant here, so that what will presently follow is taken from an article by him in that excellent magazine. It was called “The Suicide of a City.”

  Raymond LaFlange Bainter was one of those young men who proliferated in the late seventies and early eighties, a “brain” but also an athlete, talented, but usually within limits they failed to perceive. He graduated from the University of Miami (Florida) and went on to take an M.A. at the University of Wisconsin and a doctorate at the University of Colorado. Ray was writing a syndicated newspaper column while still a senior in Miami, and by the time he started on his Ph.D. at Colorado more than three hundred newspapers subscribed to his thrice-weekly “As Youth Sees It,” and he had made several quite spectacular appearances as a panelist on network TV.

  We at the Foundation for Human Conservancy became well acquainted with young Bainter in the period when he was still getting his degrees. He wrote about our work and he came to see us, meeting both Miles and myself several times. Like most of his generation, he fancied himself as a conservationist and an environmentalist, sometimes referring to himself in his column as “your unemotional ecologist.” In the effort to save the environment his stand was certainly the most common among people of similar backgrounds and also people with his brand of education, at whatever levels.

  He believed that technology could and would perfectly suffice to undo or reverse the admitted sabotage man had performed on his ecosphere. He went all out in favor of any and every device, machine, process and installation that was even claimed useful for pollution abatement. So he felt the Foundation position was extreme, even hysterical.

  At twenty-one Bainter’s writings were widely read into the Congressional Record by like-minded politicians, the great majority; and Bainter’s arguments, set forth with what appeared to be sweet reason, total understanding and utter fairness, helped defeat several bills the Foundation backed. Young Ray shared the general feeling, for example, that Nature was present to provide humanity with resources, and that no land, desert, or forest, swamp or coastal wilderness should be permitted to “lie fallow.” All wild lands should be open to “multiple use” if more than one use for such areas could be found or even invented.

  Later, when various measures to protect wild lands from the erosion and ruin of public invasion were passed, Ray Bainter was almost willing to go that far in the matter of saving a few regions of such sorts. He went along with the idea that roads for cars should not be built through such shrinking, priceless masterpieces of nature, but he insisted on trails and cabins so that even the “preserved” or “closed” places would be open to back-packers, horse or mule parties, and snowmobiles in winter.

  By 1970, to pluck a date at educated random, there were very few men living anywhere who had entered and dwelt for a time in a genuine “wilderness,” one in which they were the first of their species to become known to the indigenous fauna, the first men of whom the “wild animals” had had any memory, parental teaching, any warning, or any instinctual pattern relating to the proper way of accepting, fleeing, living with or watching genus Homo.

  So there was virtually no longer a way for mankind to find out what natural animal behavior was and would be, if not altered by human passage or presence. Similarly, the opportunities for ecologists to study cross sections of life forms that had not, also, been man-changed was small. But leaving a region untouched, unoccupied, untrespassed, in order to allow it to recover from “human shock,” seemed a preposterous waste to nearly everybody.

  The foregoing is set down by this editor not so much to define the intellectual attitude of Ray Bainter as to show the near impenetrable defenses which the Foundation encountered, the subtle sorts, not the overt kinds where sheer profit, greed, ignorance, fears, all sorts of other, “normal” human conditions made the bulk of mankind hostile to nature. Trying to tell a Western man, even one as highly “educated” and as brilliant as young Raymond Bainter, his biological location in the living world, and the endless fragile, balanced life systems on which he was dependent, was an all but hopeless task. If one began to succeed in such an effort the pupil usually became so downcast as to give up—feeling man had no survival chance whatever.

  Raymond Bainter and his ilk simply could not accept the hypothesis that man was still so completely dependent on forms, systems, natural phenomena, delicate balances of vast-volume elements like air and water, that “science and technology” could not find a way to save him from those very many and often very possible menaces we had listed.

  Yet in the end Bainter was one of the few men of that time who were “converted” and came firmly to believe that the reason why no human culture yet devised has achieved stable and indefinite viability is that—to put it in the crudest terms—the more sophisticated the technology devised by man, the faster it erodes the environment. Bainter’s own account of that “conversion” appeared in a book which he published in 1980—two years before the New York calamity, and three before his essay in the North Atlantic of December 1983, from which I have selected certain relevant passages.

  3. An Article

  The North Atlantic, December, 1983

  SUICIDE OF A CITY

  NEW YORK’S “SATURDAY SLAUGHTER” AND AFTERWARD

  by Raymon
d L. Bainter

  Official figures for casualties in the Greater New York disaster of November 1982 stand at “about” one million two hundred thousand. But these do not include the numbers who died in the weeks and months after that Saturday-Sunday-Monday catastrophe. Perhaps twice as many would be about correct. And multitudes suffered harm from the polluted air or injuries owing to trampling, to fire, to assault by ravaging mobs, whose lives are shortened or handicapped permanently as still another result.

  After the mayor was slain mobs went hunting for other city officials and some sixty of these, many having no connection with or responsibility for the disaster, were cruelly murdered. Wild gangs descended on the stricken area, and virtually every major store in the central shopping area of Manhattan was repeatedly raided.

  The police lost 1157 dead in the first week. Their injured ran to some five thousand. Guard losses were approximately equal. The Guard and police between them killed 14,178 looters and an unknown number were wounded. Nevertheless, the richest portions of Greater New York were ransacked and hundreds of thousands of persons escaped with booty, often highly valuable.

  The hoped-for “record Christmas sales” became, instead, such a great loss for so many that tens of thousands of firms are today financially ruined. The comparatively few able to set up business again have no present intention of doing so in Greater New York. Scores of thousands of well-off city-dwelling families have moved out and more will do so when able. New York City, itself, is not just bankrupt but so many billions in debt that none of the holders of its bonds or other paper expects any return.

  It became a half-deserted city, a city of alarms and crime by day, murderous by night. Regular Army units can still be seen, everywhere, as the city is under federal management and law now. Wall Street is sluggishly active again, but the market will move soon to Chicago, or perhaps some less vulnerable city in mid-continent. Shipping is regaining its life on a reduced scale. A few great structures even in the worst ravaged area stand untouched, some bank and office buildings that proved resistant to every assault, also the towering Smythe Building which was built by Jason Smythe and later housed the central offices of the Foundation for Human Conservancy. Many of these edifices are in partial operation under heavy guard. Buses show the snouts of machines guns.

  What is the future outlook for New York?

  No one can surely say.

  But what is certain is this:

  It will not again become the great megalopolis it was, the world’s fifth largest and the richest urban complex in the time of man. Nothing new is being constructed and little reconstruction is in progress. Half of its buildings are damaged. The roar of the collapse of some shoddy structure, or of a building weakened by mob acts or by dynamiting for fire belts, is a frequent sound in a city otherwise strangely quiet.

  The financial failure of the great commercial center of America touched off the current and deepening national depression. The means of the death of New York sits like a leaden weight on the spirit of Americans. Most, alas, live in or near some huge or near-huge urban center, nowadays. And all these are asking themselves a question few dare speak aloud: Could it happen to us? There have been too many calamities.

  The Cleveland catastrophe left that city stricken and it has not yet devised financially acceptable plans for reconstruction. New York had already suffered the disaster known as Black Valentine’s Day; but its general recovery was fairly swift, after a considerable period of shock. For a time it appeared the Missouri-Mississippi River basin was doomed, as the mighty waterways and many tributaries were increasingly gorged with a terrifying indestructible, fast-multiplying alga, a mere one-celled plant which, it seemed, man could not conquer.

  Other cities and many non-urban areas in this nation have suffered many sorts of agonies for which man was, in the end, the cause. Yet here, as before, reaction is not an admission of human fault but at most a silence and, commonly, a reflection of human responsibility. Even for the New York calamity of last December, blame is laid on a few politicians and their appointees, along with some merchants, as if these were not either elected by the people or else providing the people with what they desired. Yet not one in a hundred of those who castigate such specific individuals would have acted differently in the same positions.

  The intellectual disavowal of common fault for events all men share blame for has become infamous. The three somewhat destructive quakes in California in the seventies occurred, in every case, near huge reservoirs, a known cause of earth movement owing to their placement of masses of water over a previously not loaded geological spot. Those three quakes have added stress on the great San Andreas Fault, already strained beyond the point where relief will be sure, eventually: tomorrow or in a hundred years, the experts say, the San Andreas will slip. But should the worst happen and the cities from San Francisco to San Diego be leveled, or tossed into the Pacific, men will call that an act of God. So it is, but one, if it happens, that man will have accentuated by his dams and reservoirs and one that will involve millions, perhaps, in death, because they live in that area, knowing well their implicit hazard and the risks they added.

  Again, John Frakant, Secretary of the Department of Interior, backed by the Secretaries of Labor and of Welfare, has recently condemned China in congressional hearings on the ground that China’s swift and almost incredibly massive industrialization has measurably and increasingly contributed to the pollution of much of the atmosphere reaching USA. Forced to industrialize by the least costly means, China has automatically used the most polluting methods. And now the American air as it circles ever eastward in the North Temperate Zone arrives in an industrially dirtied state. Again, men did it—Chinese men. But what is then carried across USA and the Atlantic bears our vastly great burden of contamination, yet we give no heed to its next recipients, the people of Britain, of Europe, of Russia.

  Men did not have to use, to enter New York on that fatal Saturday, vehicles of ancient vintage with controls which have deteriorated. Men chose to do so as a “right.” And the wave of crime which has continued to rise for decades, and is another menace to all Americans, is the doing of men, not an act of God. The many great oil spills, from undersea blowouts of wells, from breaks in huge pipelines and from accidents to the fleet of ships in which single vessels transport a million tons of “black gold,” are always a human fault and not some unanticipated event which no drillers, designers, pilots or engineers could foresee. Each of these is the result, and a statistically absolute result, of the fact that men everywhere in the world demand petroleum for fuel, power, automotive vehicles and, in general, for the major energy base that permitted our “progress,” as we go on calling it. Now the lapses in that single enterprise are killing the very seas.

  Nobody has to live near the San Andreas Fault, and doing so is now causing an anxiety that bravado merely emphasizes. Men lived without petroleum too.

  The harsh demands of the Desert War had to be met, I agree. We could not have allowed the breakdown of whole states and nations that led us to support the UN-sponsored effort to “oilice” the riven lands in North Africa and the Middle East. Support was vital and America answered the call finally and with ultimate success. The weapons and supplies for that conflict had to be made, with no regard to the effect on environment. The broad and bitter crisis was resolved and it may well lead to stability in that long-turbulent region.

  But men made that war; not us, at first; and not the Israelis, till they were massively attacked; but the Arabs, sworn to push the little state of Israel off the earth. We fought, too, because Red support of the Arab nations had reached a point where those passionate, ill-informed multitudes would have not only erased Israel but also let the Soviets take over the desert oil empires. Take over the Mediterranean, too, probably, and move into Africa to arrange for its fall into Red hands, in time.

  But was the American postwar leap into every possible fabrication of every possible item, whether useful, merely luxurious or even h
armful, necessary? Did we have to jump into a deluge of consumer-goods-making at full steam when we knew that haste would leave no time or funds for a slower, more careful and less polluting industrial shift from munitions to cars—and all the rest? Is boom the one answer to depression, the end of man, boom?

  A year after the debacle New York is becoming, with a certain few areas and streets and avenues excepted, a ruin. For decades, men have struggled to keep it viable and men have also expressed doubts that it could be governed. Its rule is military now. But it is not being “governed” because most of that great city is a void and a void cannot be managed or governed. In time, only islands of business, industry, other activities will remain and remain operational. In fifty years and with luck, those islands might begin to spread and touch and create a smaller but functioning city. But it is entirely possible, also, that Greater New York will simply decay, topple, turn into the first true American ruin, a giant heap of ultimate rubble for future archaeologists to pick at.

  In their present mood, sullen, frightened, with guns and newer weapons, most urban and suburban dwellers still look to arms for personal safety rather than to what causes debacle. And their fears are motivated by recent findings. It was not just the Harlem blacks or the slum dwellers who took part in the ravishing of New York. Many “ordinary, law-abiding citizens” joined in—professors, doctors, lawyers, accountants, the cream of the urban crop, even some ministers. Our young people ask, rightly, why the law should be obeyed by them, when such others have turned thief.

  The next issue of the Northern Atlantic will appear in January of a new year, 1984. Many readers of this summary and comment will recall George Orwell’s book, entitled 1984. He predicted that by then the world would be split into two camps, both absolute dictatorships. The two would wage eternal but limited war, to maintain the totalitarian state. There would be no freedom of speech but only forced hewing to the ruling line. All individuals would be under constant, electronic surveillance. The Ministry of Love would be the enforcement bureau, using refined torture on any dissident or suspected antagonist of the state. The Ministry of Truth would be in charge of propaganda, of state-supporting lies, and it would rewrite history as the ruling group and the chief tyrant, Big Brother, wished history to say, not what it was.