A Brief Eulogy for Concrete and Steel
American steel built the iconic trestle bridges that cross the various waterways and canyons of the continental United States. Once the mainstay of bridge design, they now stick out like green-bronzed relics of an ancient age that call forth the ancestral memories of American engineering. To cross over one, often taking care to ignore what are often numerous patches in the roadway, the threatening flakes of crimson rust across riveted seams, burns into the traveler’s mind a split image: the bridge as a staple of what the country once was, and the fraying, disintegrating manifestation of what it has become. For such bridges that get replaced, their substitutions lack the rustic aesthetics of geometric girders and oxidized frames.
It would be remiss for a Maryland native with a platform, modest as it is, not to offer some comment on the collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge over the Patapsco river Tuesday morning. Six men are still missing and by now are presumed dead. If you have a moment, please offer up a prayer for their repose. The others that fell into the water seem to have been found if not also rescued, but the debris, naturally, still remain, as does the noticeable hole in the skyline above the outer harbor. Neither the boat that struck the support pillar, nor the remains of the bridge, are going anywhere for the time being.
By now, the loose order of affairs is already familiar to most readers. A mid-sized ocean freighter bound for Sri Lanka, the Dali, lost power twice as it exited the Baltimore harbor, and at some point, swung several degrees too far to starboard. After sending out a mayday alert, it collided with one of the supports for the main span of the Key Bridge. Weighing in the neighborhood of a hundred and twenty thousand tons,the vessel imploded the structure as if a bowling ball had struck an erector set.
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Baltimore is not the port it once was, nor the port it could—and should—have been. At one time, the population of Baltimore numbered over a million, with thirty year projections from the fifties predicting its growth to double. By 1990, however, the population was instead well on its way to halving, and the reasons for its decline are as obvious as they are in every other major city in the United States. Plenty of cities have grown in that period, but even they still witnessed the same sort of aesthetic, political and infrastructural decline as Baltimore. Spiritual Boomers can complain all they want about “Democratic-run cities,” but the phrase comes across as little more than an impotent whine that refuses to grasp movement of ethnic blocs and the scale of corruption and that keeps “Democrat-run cities” so Democrat-run.
Now, Baltimore City’s population floats around five hundred seventy-six thousand people, and it continues to decline every year. The Freddie Grey riots of 2015, coupled the decision made by then mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake to order cops to stand down amid looting and burning, severely affected the already poor relationship that Baltimore citizens had with the police force. Since then, and since the continued racial-political violence that has swept the country almost every other Summer since the Trayvon Affair, DEI related measures and anti-police sentiment has proliferated not just around the municipal governments but all the way up inside of them, as well. Baltimore, like Minneapolis a few years ago, also experimented with its political class attacking the very guard that keeps the overwhelming violence within its borders under something resembling order.
But Baltimore’s political history is only one relatively small part in the city’s long march toward obscurity. The collapse of America’s domestic steel industry, owed in part to the shift toward Free Trade agreements in the nineties, meant that the deluge of steel out of the rust belt would slow to a trickle. Most of this steal found its way onto export vessels in the Baltimore Port, alongside raw materials that were extracted from the same region. Coal, for instance, which still thunders regularly through the suburbs to Baltimore’s west and southwest sides on rail lines that border the Patapsco river.
In part due to the navigability of the relatively shallow Chesapeake Bay and subsequent Patapsco, coupled with economic and social pressures that wrought havoc on the city since the sixties, the Port of Baltimore’s importance eventually declined in favor of larger, more easily-accessible ports such as New York, New Jersey, and Virginia. While the eclipse of Baltimore’s port in volume was to be expected, it nonetheless remains a vital port for raw materials exports and, as imports go, foreign commodities and cars. All of these can be rerouted with some relative inconvenience, of course, and the added traffic to be directed to these other ports will, naturally, tax their already past-capacity facilities. The nationwide impact of Baltimore’s port closure will almost certainly be negligible, however, and the ones who will feel it the most will be the Maryland natives.
A quick scroll through Twitter will show you how many people are eager to attribute this act to terrorism, domestic or otherwise. When one watches the video of the Dali as its lights go out, black smoke belches from its exhaust, and pulls hard to starboard, it’s only natural to recognize that something had gone horribly wrong. Boats aren’t supposed to do that. They’re not supposed to seemingly aim for bridges, for one thing, but they also aren’t supposed to lose power—twice—during what should be a routine exit from port.
Boats losing power is not exactly novel, however, though doing it while leaving port is. Overcompensating a turn immediately after a power outage isn’t particularly novel, either, though again, ramming into a major roadway is. Whatever happened onboard the Dali, we’ll get at least an official explanation in a matter of weeks. A mechanical, electrical, or digital error seems obvious, but when one puts the moving pieces together into a broader picture, an intentional act of sabotage, hacking or otherwise, does seem unlikely.
Twitter disagrees, of course. The e-right, as it has grown, has found that old Q types have metastasized into even more deranged conspiracy-obsessed, impulsive, and easily programmable drones. If something happens, then no explanation is ever good enough. Everything has to be connected. Netflix specials released a year ago obviously, according to their confounded narrative, predict and refer to real contemporary events that rarely even bare passing similarities. Clearly, because there’s a white lion on the flag of Singapore, which the Dali was flying, the Obama-funded Netflix special from a year ago was a coded reference to the NWO dropping the Key Bridge in an act of domestic terrorism. One would like to dismiss this sort of ‘theorizing’ as satire, or schizophrenic, but it’s not. It’s just retarded.
Others instead are waiting for some confirmation that Russian or Chinese hackers did this, or maybe Israeli ones, pointing out a number of seemingly coincidental events in world politics that would make our national rivals and enemies want to undermine our trade and stability. No one has wanted to take credit for it, however. Yet, the spectacle associated with dropping a local landmark is grand enough, and its economic impact—by comparison—inconsequential enough to make foreign terrorism something of an obvious non-starter. If Russia did this, they should be bragging, but this sort of bravado doesn’t exactly fit the mold of Russian aggression against the United States. The same can be said for the Chinese. And as for Israel, well, as much a deal in false flags, the Key Bridge doesn’t seem remotely important enough for them to bother with. Whatever message a conspiracy theorist might expect them to send, it wouldn’t be sent very well by crippling Maryland infrastructure.
The point here is that the Key Bridge simply wasn’t iconic enough to make its collapse a national spectacle, which undermines most theories attempting to tie it to foreign terrorism. Meanwhile, its economic impact won’t be severe enough to tie it to a domestic false flag, either. The accident angle again just seems more likely.
One more theory worth touching on is that of the DEI influence across the broader American and world economic spectrum. While the crew of the Dali were Indian, the pilot wasn’t, as every international harbor keeps a staff of pilots on hand to steer large boats in and out. The Patapsco river is a shallow one, after all, with a narrow channel and plenty of obstacles. Could the pilot be at fault? Maybe. The investigation should reveal some of that, even if it attempts a cover up. But the power failure makes it hard to put blame on whomever the pilot was. So that leads to the question: what was the source of the power failures? Freak accident? Sabotage or terrorism? Systems failure from neglected maintenance or inspection routines? At the moment, there’s just no information. Jumping to the belief that DEI is responsible for this is very obviously jumping the gun, and it’s muddying the waters of what the actual cause turns out to be. It’s an attempt to steer narrative, and right now the narrative should be “a boat had a problem, and we don’t know what it was.”
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On a more personal note, the Key Bridge was one I’d driven over myself a number of times. Dundalk and the regions immediately north of the structure were not places my life regularly took me, and in general, when passing into the northwest, I usually ended up using the Harbor Tunnel as a more direct route. But the Key Bridge was a staple of the skyline at certain times of day and from certain angles of approach toward home. It was the first major water crossing I’d ever driven across during my time with a learner’s driving permit however long ago that was. And it looked cool.
There will be a new bridge built at the same site for the same crossing. Of this, one can be assured, barring severe infrastructural and political collapse of the state of Maryland. Given how things are going, any official recognition of such decline will never be recognized until long after the fact, but for the time being, construction crews still operate, commerce still occurs, salvage divers are still getting checks cut from the state treasury, and the federal government still has a line of credit reliable enough to keep its own fingers in the pot. What the new bridge will look like, and more importantly, what it will be named, however, obviously remain speculative. If I had to guess, it’ll probably be named after some obscure Baltimore native who assisted in the running of the Underground Railroad. Or, maybe Clarence H. Burns. It’s possible it might be given a name as benign as it is mediocre, like “the Freedom Bridge” or “Equality Crossing.” Let’s hope the committee in charge of this issue avoids at least those options.
For residents and Maryland natives, however, whatever the new bridge is officially named, it will still be the One that Replaced the Key Bridge. The New Key Bridge. Less interestingly, 695 to Dundalk/Glen Burnie. It won’t be made of steel truss and cable, that’s for sure. The rustic American beauty of mid-century frame and girder, and in the Key’s case, augmented by cable suspension, are forever banished from contemporary American bridge design. We might not even get something as interesting to view as the rebuilt Sunshine Skyway in St. Petersberg. The last major river crossing completed in Maryland was the replacement for the Governor Nice Bridge that carries US Route 301 over the Potomac: an old rickety, un-updated and harrowing two-lane crossing that dropped its passengers in Dahlgren, Virginia. The new one, which fortunately bares the same name, is an uninteresting ribbon of causeway regularly punctuated by concrete columns, but at least its roadbed isn’t falling in bits and pieces into the river below.
One can hope that the new Key Bridge keeps the name, as happened with the Nice, but given that radicalized ethnic activists tore down Francis’ monument in the city a few years ago, one doubts that anyone liberal enough to be on a state planning committee is willing to again honor the man who penned the lyrics to America’s national anthem. The last decade has made it clear who runs the current consensus as to what defines historical narrative, and historical narrative, in polite coastal company, demands the removal of classic American patriotism.
Though if reports about the ethnicities of everyone directly involved in the incident are true, the latest mass casualty event to take place in Maryland has yet to feature an American. The ship was foreign, as to be expected, and the construction crew who lost their lives were, too, foreign, having immigrated from south of the border. We still await to hear word about the pilot, though his (or her) identity likely will not be released to the public for understandable reasons. In any case, if the bridge itself can be used as something of a synechdoche for mid-century American ingenuity, one can certainly pardon interpretations of its collapse in much the same manner: a foreign vessel accidentally destroys a structure now occupied and maintained by other foreigners.
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