12,273. RUDIMENTS. pt.831

RUDIMENTS, pt. 831

(what you don't know can hurt you)

By the middle or end of the

1960's, wherever I went, it

seemed that 'American' industry

was beginning to die, or at the

least flounder. By the mid

1970's it was a whole other

story, mostly over; ruins and

abandoned mills and factories.

Things had all lost their place

and meaning. It was beginning

to be a sorry sight and the most

of it was that fathers, uncles, and

even cousins everywhere around

were all getting hurt. Broadsided.

They'd pitted their lives against

time, and time was running out

on them  -  payments, furniture,

cars, mortgages, the families with

the boats and second homes, the

shore rentals, the cabin in the

hills. A person brought up in more
'privileged' circumstances would 
not understand nor experience 
much of this and it could probably
be argued all day as to which
of these fragmented ways of
being better represents what 
America was supposed to have 
been about. The poor are different.
They have a closet all their own,
wherein they hang their dissent.
Outside of that 'possessional'

stuff, most of these people had

nothing. At least if a person has

a room or two full of books there

is always something to fall back to,

a different sort of ethos, a wider

alternative  -  breakaway universe,

creative and outside references,

etc. It's much more difficult to

feel stuck. The way it was going,

as I saw it, the ground beneath

all things was giving way, and

something was dying. I first

sensed it in those early days,

1964 or so, at the seminary,

as I've written, when we'd take

the scrap metal and the junk

truck into the no-man's land that

the back areas and salvage yards

of Camden were becoming. How

that happens, I don't really know -

how slums develop and all. In

these cases, in that old pickup

truck, we'd be driving down

destitute lanes which once were

streets, and rows of houses, and

homes, and corners and turns. Yet,

all that was left were occasional

houses, perhaps every fifth or sixth

one, on what used too be whole

streets of homes. The wrecks of

roads led past all that, into vacancies;

into open fields that had become

scrapyards. Acres of rusted cars

and scrapped steel, with some

little guy in an office hut lording

over this kingdom  -  weighing

things and doling out the

scrap-metal value. It had to be

dangerous just having that

cash laying about in such an

environment. All of that anger

and envy, roiling. At each of

those homes, on the way in and

the way out, as we'd slowly drive

past, there would be eyes, on each

porch and in each doorway, staring

out at us. Just watching. The people

seemed dead and listless in that

way of cast-offs or prisoners.

It gave me the willies just to

drive along and think what might

happen if the truck broke down,

or we were forced to a stop.

Scary stuff.

-

Anyhow, it was all the beginning

of that same end that later overtook

Newark and the mills and factories

of Paterson and Jersey City and

Trenton and Elizabeth too. That

whole flavor of what was America

died. The sorts of people who like

to list and categorize, they'll say

it was caused by this, or that; they'll

date the demise by an event. The

Kennedy assassination; Vietnam;

the atomic bomb; the Second World

War. That stuff is all wrong, and

it's right too. The whole mix died

when the spirit of the people went

down the tubes. The air went out

of the matter  -  small manufactures,

machine shops, trimmers and crafts

people all were slowly changed over,

their lines of works, into much more

thoughtless large companies and

corporations, buying each other,

expanding goods and services,

finding cheaper formats overseas.

They just left everything behind;

America, as a growing wreck.

As a kid, we were taught to laugh

at labels that said 'Made in Japan.'

Joke's on you, daddio. It reached

a point, oddly enough, by the early

70's that if you could find an old

toy or trinket that said, 'Made In

Occupied Japan,' you really had

something. A whole breed of

collectors paid big money for that

stuff. And then the 'Japanese Miracle'

happened; and then the 'German

Miracle' too. All these countries

that we'd bombarded to hell and

back, we'd then set back up, put

back up on their feet, rebuilding

their infrastructures and wrecked

cities and manufacturing plants

and Ruhr Valleys and Essens and

Tokyo prefectures. We did good,

and we did it good, and then they

were beating us back  -  and after

that all of Asia and more got the

same treatment. America was

thrown right out the window.

They got Benz and Daimler

back and we got Camden.

-

With that loss, as I said, we lost

everything else too  -  because there

was nothing to fill the void. We got

the shenanigans of Yiddish theater

transferred to TV and the big screen.

We got suburbanized skid rows of

bank infested mortgage streets; we

got the emptiness of sports and

false pleasure  -  rows of dead towns

and scattered lots and malls and

parking areas. Nothing authentic

was left; all things were faked,

given fake-real names, so as to

pretend. Once 'Quality' leaves,

the air is dead; people faint and

feint. It's over, in their hearts, and

they know it. Quality cannot

just be thrown back together; it's

the sort of thing that relics and

history afforded us, but in, now,

museums and universities  -  in

each artificial place where that

old sense of quality could instead

be viewed as a part curiosity :

While shingles fell of the remaining

houses, and our great cities turned

to lucre and crud. Artifice is

never reality, yet the folks who

run us now don't know that.
-
One of the more amazing things a
person can do is to drive through
Camden to get to the cemetery and
the grave in which Walt Whitman
is entombed. In order to get to the
quite lovely and serene final resting
place of Whitman (and some family
members too), one needs first to
carefully drive through the ruination
that is everywhere. It can be scary :
here and there a clump of great old
movie palace and old storefront
facades, lingering on. Disrepair.
Neglect; leaks, stains, boards
instead of glass windows. Here and
there a few staggering, probably
half-demented, blacks will stare you
down, but that's all. They haven't the
energy to lunge. I don't think.
This shallow reef at the front steps
of Death's mansion is all that's
left. Even the police force has left
town, and been replaced, for policing
purposes, by the N. J. State police;
who drifts languorously around in
their State Police vehicles, avoiding
potholes and, yes, probably, the
occasional dead body. What a shame.