Smoke on the Water

Notes on Ohio

I’m going to dash this off. I’m in a mood. There is more to our precious world than words sometimes, especially when you can smell it burning.

Last week, a train derailed in eastern Ohio. You’ve probably heard the news. It may have taken a bit of trying, though, because when the accident first happened, and when a decision was made to clear the tracks by detonating a group of rail cars containing several highly toxic compounds, resulting in an unholy cloud of poison that towered above the small town of East Palestine like a bonfire lit in Hell itself, the news was scarce. Local residents took it upon themselves to wade into creeks, shoot pictures of dead fish and pictures of the greasy water they died in, and circulate them on social media. Other residents hollered in public meetings, which were also recorded and streamed onto the internet. The federal government slept. The national papers and cable channels slept with it, all cozy in that big bed they've come to share.

I took the incident personally, as I do the prospect that its effects will be long-lasting and, possibly, quite terrible. I live in a railroad town, Livingston, Montana, and a block from my front door is a sprawling rail yard where tanker and coal cars rumble through the night and sometimes sit on the sidings for days and days. We’re aware in our town of the risks that come with this. A runaway train or a midnight switching accident could easily blow the place to kingdom come. You might be injured or sickened too, eventually. Because not far from the rail yard is a river, the Yellowstone, the longest free-flowing river in the US, which joins the great Missouri in North Dakota, which flows into the Mississippi. It’s the nature of rivers – and also of major railways, whose paths tend to run alongside them for various reasons – that they join up, they come together, like physical maps of our merging human fates.

As the days passed after the derailment and the immense explosions touched off to deal with it, outrage and worry over the disaster merged with other concerns to form a a cloud of dread and apprehension. As you’ve probably noticed, large industrial mishaps seem to have grown common lately. Ag facilities up in flames. Exploding plants and factories. Combined with the shortages of goods evident in stores across the land, and then combined with the harsh tattoo of war drums sounding louder and louder from our capital, a sense of uneasiness, even of mounting terror, is an understandable result. Those who find themselves at odds with the country’s political leadership might be expected to sound the loudest alarms -- and so they have, perhaps – but to dismiss their fears as merely partisan is itself a partisan act.

The press went ahead and did it anyway. An internet headline from the New York Times, whose coverage of the derailment as a hard news event had been sparse thus far, outpaced by that of Youtubing civilians, called out “Right-wing commentators” (why Right-wing was capitalized eludes me) as being “particularly critical” of the government’s handling of the horror. What a peculiar and post-modern angle, especially so early in the story – and before the story proper had been investigated. But all that is solid melts into information – “mis-” and “dis-” -- for today’s guardians of hygienic thought. Even a meteor strike might get this treatment, depending on where it hit and who was hurt and who complained the loudest about their wounds. And if a government agency – NASA, say – was deemed negligent in not warning of the strike, one can be certain that questions about the “commentary” would inevitably rank as urgent news.

Whether or not the toxic plume above the lands and waters of Ohio warrants, at this stage, comparison to Chernobyl (let’s hope that this notion proves hyperbolic), the hastening meltdown of media authority appears unstoppable. One reason for this, quite possibly the main one, is that the embattled institutions have turned toward the realm of perceptions and ideas and away from their traditional stronghold in the dimension of happenings on earth. Man bites dog was a gripping story once, but the more gripping story now, for them, is the cultural import of the attack and who is strengthened and who is weakened by various retellings of the matter. A fog of deep thoughts has fallen on the newsroom, a fog of thinking about thinking.

Meanwhile, a town is poisoned, perhaps a region, and the toxins float ineluctably downstream, their ultimate effects unknown. They may dissipate harmlessly or they may not, but they’re not information, these particles. They’re molecules. They exist in the hard, embodied realm of chemistry, and so do we. The people.

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