Apocalypse, New Jersey

  As her young man dies,
On a cold and gray Chicago morning,
Another little baby child is born
In the ghetto 
--In the Ghetto, Elvis Presley
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Matt Taibbi has a good piece at Rolling Stone on societal degradation outside of the Rust Belt in his, "Apocalypse, New Jersey." Go read if you'd like to understand how a good portion of your fellow Americans live.

An excerpt:

Any reporter who's been embedded in Iraq or Afghanistan will find these scenes extremely familiar - high-speed engagements backed by top-end surveillance technology, watched by crowds whose reactions range from bemusement to rage to eye-rolling disappointment. 

In that latter category is Bryan Morton, a fortysomething community leader of sorts who still lives in the North Camden house where he was born. Morton went away in his youth for eight and a half years for armed robbery and drug dealing, got out, went straight, got his college degree, worked for years running local re-entry programs, founded a North Camden Little League, and had things looking up for himself, before he was laid off last May. Fortunately, he'd bought a food cart six years before that, which he left in his backyard as a backup plan; he now drives across town before dawn every day, setting up next to the McDonald's in Camden's pinhead-size "downtown."

.  .  .

Détruit

--Bottle opener, from ReclaimedCleveland.com

A great empire, like a great cake,
is most easily diminished at the edges
--Benjamin Franklin

This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang, but a whimper
--The Hollow Men, T.S. Eliot

You're a scavenger, Max. You're a maggot.
Did you know that?
You're living off the corpse of the old world.
Tell me your story, Max. C'mon.
What burned you out, huh? Kill one man too many?
See too many people die? Lose some family?
Oh, so that's it, you lost your family?
That makes you something special, does it?
--Mad Max 2, The Road Warrior (1981)
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Stories like this kinda warm the cockles of one's heart:

Ever wondered where those razed, dilapidated inner city buildings go after they've been torn down? Well, an enterprising woodworking company is re-purposing the materials from one-time Best Location in the Nation --Cleveland, Ohio -- and making them into everything from chopping blocks (how ironic) to beds. Maybe Motor Town -- officially facing 10,000 demolitions though the actual number is tens of thousands higher -- could be next.

From the site London Thrillist (where we saw their advert):

Taking origin to brand-new hyper-specifics is Reclaimed Cleveland: an e-furniture shop that not only builds your homegoods using materials salvaged from condemned churches, homes & stores, but also stamps each piece with the exact Cleveland address where its constituent components used to live."

ReclaimedCleveland.com -- to see how and where empire ends.

The Wasteland

A recent NYT piece on the Lumenhaus
encouraged us to ennoble this once lovely abode,
"Wrecked House"

Not a good advert for vinyl siding

Pigeon Home

"Madonna's House"

The Bottoms Up gentleman's club.
Note the Sonitrol of the 'hood: barred doors

We wonder if the Original Glorious Church in Christ
was the convention center He visited

And you thought fish fry's weren't halal?

"Tha Brothahood Barber Shop" --
in case Obama needed a little off the top

..A mile away, nice houses in a small
oasis. "Escape From New York", anyone?

Unreal City,
Under the brown fog of a winter dawn.
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.
--The Wasteland, T.S. Eliot
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Ranger and Obama recently shared a holiday treat since we both had the pleasure of visiting Cleveland, Ohio, Ranger's hometown. This former "Best Location in the Nation" is suffering like many other Rust Belt cities, and isn't the best for much, unless you're out to score some drugs or wish to be robbed.

Pleasure indeed! Browse our montage of Ranger's former hunting grounds, deep in the now-wilds of C-Town. None of these photos are exceptional and represent the shit-hole that is the reality of too many United States inner cities. They were all taken within blocks the two homes in which Ranger grew up.

Note the house with the pigeons rooting in the exposed eaves. People were seen drinking out of paper bags at noon on porches with plywood-covered windows. We doubt Mr. Obama's motorcade passed in front of those ghetto homes. Those people are passed by on the roadway of life.

Please realize that Pigeon House or Wrecked House are not anomalies; the detritus follows each street, for endless blocks of downtown. The outliers are the very occasional well-maintained homes, usually inhabited by some equally very old-timer.

One's attentiveness to home maintenance is not rewarded in these now-slums, however -- one house had a For Sale sign of $19,000, and it is highly unlikely they will get their price before the rats devour whatever's left of the wiring.

You read horrified about people in Iraq living with only intermittent electricity? It is not unknown in your own country -- the U.S. -- for people to live without heat and cooling, and even water, either intermittently or as a lifestyle. We are not talking only squatters, nor are we talking the new Green-elite or the Amish, who engineer a livable existence sans many amenities (but not without water.) Note that most of these houses have satellite dishes and open windows, suggesting occupants. (For those who can afford something, one may be able to live with intermittent utilities, but mustn't go without satellite.)

Our politicians seem to wear blinders to a reality that is a stark as anything in Baghdad. They ignore the plight of a blighted America, functioning under the false belief that the U.S. has the wherewithal to continue its pretensions to world interventions and occupations.

Our leaders are living like it's still 1950, when the Best Location had almost a million citizens and was a thriving hub of manufacturing activity. Today's ghettoized Cleveland has lost almost all of its manufacturing and half of it's citizens. The factories are razed or shuttered, moldering in decay where they stand in mute testimony to a once-great nation.

The citizens too occupy a 1932 economic time warp, sadly, even they forgoing their own better interests, reacting mainly to meaningless, hot-button drivel topics like who's going to hell for being gay or Muslim. (Our average citizens are probably not much different from average citizens everywhere, but it is leadership and infrastructure that makes the difference.)

We get what we deserve, save for the innocents, like children.