Does devotion to history prevent one from enjoying the pallid fruit of late-stage capitalism, whose vacuity offers refuge to those alert enough to seek it?

Why do you still desire to be ever the faithful slaves of the past, the filthy gatekeepers of the biggest brothel in history, nurses in the most wretched hospital in the world, in which souls are languishing, mortally corrupted by the syphilis of sentimentalism? — F.T. Marinetti, “The Battles of Venice”

After almost four years of living in New England, I’ve decided to move back west. These years spent in a dull, dilapidated northeastern city weren’t exactly torture, but they weren’t fun either. I suffered through endless months of gray skies. I frantically dodged potholes that would tear the tires off a Hummer. I went swimming in the Atlantic and got pinkeye. I dropped an Andrew Jackson on a rancid lobster roll. And I discovered that my next door neighbor had been dead for two weeks before a heat wave alerted the landlord — and the rest of us in the building — to the problem.

I’ll admit I did have fun at times. I went hiking through the verdant forests of Vermont and visited fantastic exhibitions at Boston’s Museum of Fine Art. I loved being able just to swing down to New York City. I learned a lot about the virtues of local agriculture. And I enjoyed that season know as autumn.

I also enjoyed the sense of history that my city has. Though surrounded by a ring of crack houses and moldering projects, my city does have a quaint historic center. Those first few months it was lovely to stroll down the streets and look at all the fun little plaques affixed to the historic houses: “Here stands Ebenezer Doolittle’s house, built 1784” and “E. A. Poe shat here, 1807.” Coming from a city that historically speaking was born yesterday, I found comforting these little reminders that meaningful things had been done in meaningful times.

For the first year I did manage to put on my perceptual blinders, looking only at the quaint colonial houses and stately ivy-covered libraries. But as talk of the recession started to bubble up to the surface of my awareness, and the tagging and monster potholes became more prevalent, I stopped enjoying that sense of history so much. Indeed, it became downright oppressive. I felt as though I were some interloper, a girl from Mars set down in a place that plagued her with tidings and remembrances of a race apart. Soon I grew surly, reading the bad omens broadcast by Calculated Risk and refusing to leave my apartment unless necessity dictated.

The bad news pouring in over the transmission lines made all that history outside my door seem all the more obnoxious. I yearned for my history-less, shining city in the West, a mecca for real-estate speculation and consumerism gone nuclear. The vast expanses of anonymous tract housing, the strip malls and supermarkets the size of airplane hangars suddenly seemed so natural, so fitting for someone born in the third third of the twentieth century. It’s not that I like orgies of consumerism (I don’t), or that I hate history (quite the opposite). It’s just that it seemed to me that only in certain cities out west do I feel lighthearted, free from any reminders that life could indeed be otherwise — purposeful, enlightening, tough, even downright miserable, but also rewarding. I don’t understand building a house in 1829 wherein I could raise a family, establish a meaningful profession, become an important citizen to my fellow townspeople and just generally engage in activities free from commodification and unnecessary abstraction. I don’t understand because it is ontologically impossible for me to understand; I was born 150 years too late.

I can be blissfully, emptily postmodern in a blissfully spiritually and historically empty city.

The cities of the west I understand: Among their beautiful freeways weaving concrete arabesques against a cloudless, pool-water blue sky and their seemingly endless acres of empty space (and even when that space is filled — with houses, stores, schools — it is still empty, devoid of permanent signification), I feel at home. Given a choice, I would not necessarily have selected it as home , but by virtue (or the sins) of time it’s my home nevertheless. I can be blissfully, emptily postmodern in a blissfully spiritually and historically empty city. No need to read of how Wall Street has made it impossible for me ever to have what Ebenezer Doolittle had. No need to drive over potholes bankrupt cities can’t fill and past defunct factories turned into outlet malls and yuppies’ digs, feeling anger slowly boil in my stomach. No need to be reminded that, at one time, life consisted of more than just getting the shaft.

The road less graveled: holes in roads and state budgets in New England.

Certainly when confronted with these cultural “treasures” and the disintegration that surrounds them, one cannot help but think of German theorist Walter Benjamin’s remarks on the documents of barbarism left to us by history. “They are called cultural treasures, and a historical materialist views them with cautious detachment,” Benjamin writes:

For without exception the cultural treasures he surveys have an origin which he cannot contemplate without horror. They owe their existence not only to the efforts of the great minds and talents who have created them, but also to the anonymous toil of their contemporaries. There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism. And just as such a document is not free of barbarism, barbarism taints also the manner in which it was transmitted from one owner to another.

I find, however, the means by which the barbarism is transmitted, rather than the barbarism itself, more disturbing. If anything, the very fact that these cultural treasures were kept intact highlights not so much their barbarism, but the absolute barbarism of the age in which we live. I’ve read enough H.P. Lovecraft to know that the New England of earlier centuries wasn’t much fun, but the absolute blight and violence of  late-capitalist disintegration makes anything that occurred in years past look … well … like a tea party in comparison. For the barbaric disintegration of the contemporary New England city doesn’t leave room for hope. It is final, and it’s hard not to think these cities have breathed their last — cultural treasures and all.

The barbaric disintegration of the contemporary New England city doesn’t leave room for hope.

An added benefit, then, is that cities out west, particularly in the southwest, haven’t had long to deteriorate. My “quaint” New England city, a victim of de-industrialization, has had almost forty years to deteriorate, and certainly the current recession might just finish it off. There’s no Works Progress Administration team ready to patch the bridges and roads that are still in use because speculation seemed more important than building new infrastructure. My beloved city out West has only begun to disintegrate, its bubble having popped just three years ago. It too will rot. Potholes will go unfilled and trash will fill the streets. But cities rot slowly in dry climates; I figure I’ve got about twenty years to enjoy all those glittering skyways, all built just ten years ago, before they start to crumble. Until then, my postmodern ennui can have a veneer of first-world comfort — even if I do have to dodge packs of roving meth heads gone Mad Max.

Indeed, just today The Bostonist ran a story with the headline, “$295 Million Budget Hole: Is Mass Doomed?” According to the article, unexpected costs from the federal-state health-care program, MassHealth, has led to a $295 million dollar shortfall in the budget, and so already reduced services are going to have to be reduced even more. The article then goes on to point out that much of the state’s infrastructure is crumbling:

Couple that with news that 500 bridges across the state still require repairs to fix structural deficiencies, and it’s not a jolly Friday. (Counterpoint: The Mass DOT ran a blog post about the “Patrick-Murray Administration’s unprecedented $3 billion, eight-year Accelerated Bridge Program to reduce the Commonwealth’s backlog of structurally-deficient bridges.” It features the above photo of Patrick in a hard hat.) The bad news gets worse: The state estimates that it will have 700 structurally deficient by 2016.

So while the East Coast watches the last of its infrastructure crumble to the ground, I’ll be sitting in my $500.00 a month condo (which most likely comes complete with a landlord in default), thanking the gods that the West wasn’t considered remotely civilized (by East-Coast standards) until the 1980s. It’s certainly a sorry sort of disintegration arbitrage, but what else can one do during these barbaric times?

Ylajali would love to hear from you. Drop her a line at hansengenbub [at] gmail [dot] com.