Smoke on the Water

Notes on Ohio

I’m going to dash this off. I’m in a mood. There is more to the 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 highly toxic chemicals, resulting in an unholy cloud of poison that towered above the small town of East Palestine like an exhalation from Hell itself, the news was scarce. Local residents took it upon themselves to wade into creeks, shoot videos of fish deaths and of the greasy water in which they died, then circulate them on social media. Other residents hollered in public meetings, which were also recorded. The federal government slept. At least, like the national papers and cable channels, it appeared to sleep, 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 railway 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 and then, further along, the Mississippi. It’s the nature of rivers – and also of railways, whose paths tend to run alongside them for various reasons – that they join up, they come together, physically mapping our overlapping 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 sort of cloud of dread and anger. 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 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 frame their fears as standard partisanship 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 – before the story proper had even been fully investigated. But all that is solid melts into information – “mis-” and “dis-“ -- for today’s guardians of righteous thought. Even a meteor strike might get this treatment, depending on where it hit and who was harmed and who complained the loudest about the damage. 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 quickly rank as urgent news.

Whether or not the toxic plume above the farmland and waters of Ohio warrants, at this stage, comparison to Chernobyl (let’s hope this proves a hysterical response), the runaway meltdown of media authority appears unstoppable. One reason for this, quite possibly the main one, is that the embattled institutions have grown so preoccupied with the dimension of perceptions and ideas that they’ve abandoned their former strongholds in the dimension of earthly occurrences. Man bites dog was a big story once, but the bigger story now, for them, is the cultural import of the attack and who is strengthened and who is weakened by the assorted retellings of the matter.

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, unforgiving realm of chemistry, and so do we. The people.

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