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Cities can be wonderful things. Visiting London or Paris, New York or Chicago, or any one of the myriad smaller metropolitan regions around the world can help a traveler to broaden his interests, gain new perspectives on his own society and the people of other cultures, and provide a plethora of activities designed to appeal to the intellect or to bodily pleasures that are unavailable in other, more sparsely populated regions.
Yes, the great cities of the world can inspire. Unfortunately, the existence of these vast concentrations of talent and energy can lead to darker implications for our freedom.
My wife and I recently made it through our pile of "time shifted" television programs on videotape and finally watched Ken Burns's post-9-11 continuation of his series on the history of New York City. Viewing those scenes of NYC as it struggled through the Great Depression, boomed after World War II, and fell from grace as many of its citizens and manufacturers abandoned the Big Apple for cheaper and more spacious environs kept me both exhilarated and disgusted.
My first and so far only visit to New York City came last spring when thoughts of terrorists barely registered on the national psyche, when uttering the name "Bin Laden" would have led to the query, "Bin who?", when the World Trade Center towers still dominated lower Manhattan with seemingly impregnable solidity.
One of the first things we did on our trip to the city that Ayn Rand loved so dearly and where she made her home as she finished Atlas Shrugged was to venture to the Empire State Building. Like a lone sentinel of concrete, glass, and steel, this skyscraper stands apart and aloof from the other massive structures dominating the New York City skyline. A failed experiment to shift the center of commerce and construction, the Empire State Building now enjoys even more celebrity because of its very solitude. The other behemoths that house the homes of countless local and international businesses compete for attention in their crowded neighborhoods.
The Empire State, however, is sui generis. Constructed at a feverish pace at the beginning of the State-induced "Great Depression," the building symbolizes in the strength of its metal bones and the beat of its mechanical components the willingness -- the ability -- of people who were unafraid to defy the sky, who viewed this engineering challenge and accomplishment as a veritable extension of their selves as American individuals.
Taking one of the first elevators of the day up to the 86th floor, we drank in the rarefied atmosphere of a walkway open to the air. Unlike the glass-enclosed observation deck of the Sears Tower in Chicago, this arena for gaping visitors places no constricting barriers between you and the world stretching before you.
Impressive vistas surrounded us as we moved from vantage point to vantage point, enjoying our eagle-eyed perspective. Buildings, streets, cars, and people made tiny by our lofty aerie filled the landscape below. From our outlook, the incongruous green squares and rectangles of various parks acted as nothing more than bright accent points to the man-made, not the dominating facts of existence they are in so many other regions of the country. As much as I enjoy the "great outdoors," nothing compares to the species of power and mastery evident in the vibrant world of an organized but essentially unplanned (in the Marxist sense of that word) world.
Somehow those millions of men, women, and children manage to exist (generally) peacefully with one another, living their lives within the parameters of their urban environment, working, playing, and loving as each of them best sees fit. Largely strangers to each other, these people pursue their goals, their dreams, their loves and lives amidst the panoply of a culture as rich and as deeply textured as any in the world.
And yet...
Even before the current "War on Terrorism," we were confronted with the other Janus face of New York City. With no hint of the disaster to come in September of last year yet evident in the wind, the upper observation deck on the 102nd floor was closed to tourists, ostensibly because of "crowding." A more likely explanation was the shooting that occurred in the Empire State Building some years ago. Because of the actions of a single criminal, innocent others were punished. Again.
Now, we as a nation are undergoing a similar loss of value, a similar punishment through the actions of a handful of irrational fanatics.
And yet...
Many politicians would have the situation no other way. Oddly enough, what happened in -- and to -- New York City in the Thirties held pregnant echoes of what is transpiring today, not only in that city but in all her lesser kin.
One of the commentators in the Burns documentary pointed out a fact that comes as no surprise to those of us who understand history through the lens of liberty. This woman rightfully explained that the Depression marked a watershed moment in the heart of America. Before that economic debacle made worse through the kind ministrations of such admirers of Benito Mussolini as Franklin Delano Roosevelt, few citizens in the United States would have even toyed with the odd notion that it was the job, the purpose of the federal government to care for its citizens: to feed them, to determine where they lived and under what conditions, to provide them jobs regardless of the need via "public works."
For lovers of freedom, the "New Deal" was more "Raw Deal," a period to be surrounded by a black border of weeping, not a ring of joyous red roses.
To this woman and the other historians and urbanists lending their opinion to Burns pictures, however, the years of FDR's rule did not signal a descent into slavery. No, for these academicians, the god that was Franklin attested to the ascendancy of true humanity, the final recognition of the State's rightful role as benefactor to and guardian of its timid, helpless wards; the wayward children to be protected from the vicissitudes of daily existence.
Even when those same historians decried the "redlining" of NYC neighborhoods that led to the impoverishment and ghettoizing of blacks and Hispanics; even when they complained about the razing of whole neighborhoods and the disruption of tightly-knit communities to accommodate "the automobile" (curiously, never people who drive cars but "the automobile," as though it were an independent entity, a mindless monster unleashed upon the sacred urban landscape); even when they sighed over the loss of manufacturing jobs in the city, these NYC aficionados never paused in their ultimate praise of government as the Great Savior.
They marveled at the hundreds of millions of dollars that poured into NYC from the federal government run by FDR to build highways and airports and bridges and subways...but never made the psychic connection that what enriched NYC paupered the rest of the country, as though that wealth used to purchase concrete and steel materialized from the air. They sang hosannahs to the WPA, the government soup lines, and the vast tracts of government-constructed housing for those evicted from their apartments...but never questioned the received wisdom or understood the reality that that selfsame government was prime culprit of the very abuses FDR stepped in to correct while shifting his guilt onto the heads of innocent businessmen and entrepreneurs.
I love cities. So do politicians, but for vastly different reasons.
Beyond the taxes their commerce might produce, cities are cherished by statists and collectivists -- not for the achievements the colliding intellects there produce -- but simply for the very fact of their dense concentration of humanity.
The more contained individuals are, the easier they are to manage and manipulate. The stark clarity of this fact is nothing new. Whether in Roman or Medieval or modern times, a ruler wants his minions where he can keep a close grip upon them. With citizens jostling each other cheek-by-jowl, it is far easier to induce a mob mentality, to appeal to their darkest fears, to lift their wallets and blind their vision. A person who is a gypsy in spirit or in reality threatens that carefully contrived control; threatens to disappear beyond the omnipresent gaze of those scared witless by independence and individuality.
Perhaps that is why the "War on the Automobile" and the "Battle Against Urban Sprawl" ring so loudly and so long in the halls both of Congress and the Academy. Mobility subverts political power. Dispersion undercuts control.
The city dwellers are pitted one group against another by those parasites wangling for their votes. They are scared into opposing their country brethren who might prefer the freedom to defend themselves, the liberty to build a home as they see fit, the release from prying and endlessly tracking eyes from dusk to dawn.
The more citizens that can be crammed into what should be repositories of brilliance but have, in many ways, instead become cloistered and provincial enclaves of humanity, the happier will be the Emperors strutting about in their New Clothes.
Squeeze private land owners from national forests and parks by destroying their access. Eliminate jobs by bogus fears concerning "endangered" insects and spotted owls. Bankrupt cattlemen by restricting their grazing rights. Expand the federal reach by creating more and more national "monuments." Send collectivist idiots like Ted Turner into the wilds to buy out more and more small ranchers.
They'll do whatever they can to obliterate the last, lost enclaves of freedom in this country. That the collectivists have brought blight and disgrace to what should be the proudest real monuments to human genius hardly seems to disturb them. The local "urban planners" seeking to micromanage your life -- by force -- reveal how easily what our ancestors achieved can be lost.
It is up to each of us to remember how we reached the heights we have and to beat back the constricted souls of those who would consign us instead to the dirt.
For those with even a remnant of self-respect clinging to them, there is simply no other course to follow.
