Power’s down here, as it appears to be in a significant number of Ulster County homes, but with a fully charged iPad and a cellular plan, this, alas, is no excuse.
I have no idea what’s behind the outages. Downed tree, Liz thinks, but well into the calm after what wasn’t much of a storm anyway, I prefer to suspect a creeping infrastructural collapse, a climate-related over-taxation of the Eastern Seaboard power grid and SCADA systems, regulatory and staffing insufficiency, and the malignant let-it-rot indifference of the one percent.
She sees the glass as half full. I see the glass as half a toxic PCB-shedding rigid polymer snuck onto the market without proper testing, along with a generation full of profitable environmental horrors under the pretense of an emergency regulatory leniency ordered by the Trump administration ostensibly to speed the development and approval of a Covid vaccine. Because that kind of shit actually happens all the time.
File under comedy.
Read more installments of Village Voices by John Burdick.
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