Thursday, October 6, 2016

The Background on the Rock City Theme

Planning for the first Rock City took a full ten years of meticulous study and that started in the early 21st Century when people got fed up with being treated like cattle just so General Motors can make a buck.  The dominance of the car in American life is one of the deepest limitations and anyone who has experienced a big city traffic jam knows how that goes.  Since traffic will only increase in parallel with the population, we need a better way, a much better way.

There was a hunger in America for man's ancient tribalism for our protection because we lost a great deal of that in prefab neighborhoods where they have tight insular families but relatively little bonding between the people in the different homes.  Frequently there was no significant connection to people who only lived twenty feet away.

The American obsession with consumerism could not continue because it's intuitively obvious a population cannot grow without limit and the ever-increasing production to serve a population doomed in that way cannot possibly succeed.  Even if nothing else, eventually we won't be able to keep up with the ability to feed everyone.  In many areas, that situation exists already.

There were many problems in the world in desperate need of solution and thus the divergence into creative social and civil engineering.


Cadillac Man has been on the road and is now being chased out of the Southland by Hurricane Matthew.  I'm not sure if I mentioned to him Florida is getting whacked because even hurricanes don't want to go to North Carolina.  He was outside of Charleston and headed for Knoxville when we spoke and he had nothing but good things to say about the evacuation except for how creepy it felt to be in Savannah as it deserted.

Note:  he did not see li'l Gracie Watson and I really did ask him about her.


Yah, she looks like butter wouldn't melt in her demonic mouth but just come back after dark, why don't you.  How do you like the creepy way the Spanish moss hangs off all those trees in the dark too.  You can tell yourself there are no supernatural wraiths flying about but you know you're lying to yourself.  You wanted a Voodoo Chile and, guess what, you found one.



CM had caught a glimpse of the Rock City developments but that was only enough to observe the theme is complicated.  That's true in terms of justifying the processes to be used but there isn't such tremendous complexity in the overall design.  A frustration just now is I'm not a graphic artist but I need a good visual representation of the model to make it more approachable to readers.


We have one obvious advantage to the Rock City in play right now because you know what happens when the Rock City gets hit by a hurricane.  Well, I'll tell you what happens:  not one damn thing.  The Rock City is too far inland to care about the storm surge and we larf at the weather.

It's the same situation with tornadoes but your air transport at the ground level probably still won't like them too much.  Sure enough, no-one inside the Rock City is ever getting blown to Oz again although the stories were nice.


There are profound reasons for considerations of a project of this nature.  Safety is a definite major reason but we're living in an antiquated social order which hasn't changed significantly since the Industrial Revolution except to get larger and America wound up with the most of it.  Regardless of the wealth, we're confined within a model which is two-hundred-years old and has little capacity for growth.

The existing cities can't grow laterally since they're gridlocked with poor transportation systems and they can't grow vertically because skyscrapers offer limited potential as well.  Mostly the skyscrapers are just nests for rich, unimaginative bureaucrats and most people do not live in such structures while the workers in them typically can't afford to live anywhere near them.  Maybe you all regard that as a healthy system but we would be mystified by that conclusion.

One of the primary benefits of the Rock City is a much more egalitarian distribution of benefits in terms of it's not just the rich who can get to work quickly, everyone can.  We don't need to take their money and, in most cases, we don't even want it but we want substantial improvements in infrastructure which improve the quality of life for everyone.  We don't want to be rich people and, in many cases, we don't even like them but we do want the basics of existence and many are deprived of such things now.


In large part, we have a craw full of false promises from politicians who don't ever change anything and we want to review that which really would effect positive change because you damn sure better find some before this country goes completely down the toilet with aggressive internationalism, false morality, and the never-ending Manifest Destiny which, coincidentally, is also about two hundred years old and it was a hideously bad philosophy when it started; it's even worse now.

The point to all of these discussions is we can fix these things so long as we're not strangled by Washington bureaucrats and their simplistic ideas of nationalism, freedom, and how to gouge as much money as possible from the people.

There's one simple theme:  we deserve better than that.

Part of the problem is you don't believe we deserve better but that's your problem to fix.  Of course you deserve better than prison food from WalMart (e.g. frozen TV dinners) and the like.  Everyone deserves better than that although there is some marginally good news in that regard:  apparently only twenty percent of Millennials have ever eaten a Big Mac.  It seems there's some rejection of prison food already.

America is capable of doing great things but it's not doing great things now.  We want to fix that.

6 comments:

Cadillac Man said...

I missed seeing little Gracie Watson in Savannah's famous Bonaventure Cemetary. Savannah's old, historic cemeteries play a part in the 1997 murder mystery book and movie based in Savannah, 'Midnight In the Garden of Good and Evil.' It is based on a true story and murder in a large, stately house during the 1980's. The Mercer-Williams house situated in one of Savannah's famous 26 squares was built in 1868. The house was the family home of Johnny Mercer, famous songwriter who wrote 'Tuitti Fruitti', the Little Richard hit rock song. I did get to see the house and eat some Tuitti Fruitti ice cream at Leopold's soda fountain in downtown Savannah.

Unfortunately, Hurricane Matthew cut short my Savannah visit. The evacuation was mandatory. The hotel was closing and even the front desk clerk was leaving. Hotels were booked solid even north of Atlanta. I ended up here in the Smoky Mountains, 400 miles away near Knoxville. I guess I'll exchange my soda jerk cap for a coonskin cap today.

I'll definitely see Gracie on my next visit, which will hopefully be soon. Savannah is a beautiful city and hopefully any destruction to the town and it's residents will be minimal.

Here are links to Gracie's story, the movie and another famous statue, The Bird Girl, originally in the Bonaventure Cemetary and featured in the movie and book.

http://discoverhistoricamericatours.com/savannah/historic-people/little-gracie/

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midnight_in_the_Garden_of_Good_and_EvilR

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bird_Girl

Unknown said...

That sounds like it rates an excellent adventure when it even includes a hurricane. Nice move!

I did find a pic of the Bird Girl but she doesn't have quite the creepy panache of li'l Gracie Watson. No way in hell I'm staying in that cemetery at night!

Anonymous said...

Why does sweet little Gracie get a demonic month.
The statue Bird Girl was moved from Bovenature years ago because they could not handle the number of tourists coming to see it
Savannah has many nightime ghostvand cemetery tours
The 26 squares is one of the coolest walking tours even in the heat of summer as the entire area is old growrh trees with beautiful architecture to admire

Unknown said...

I don't like cemeteries at the best of times and even more when I have creepy stone people looking at me and general haunting about the place. It's the same reason I don't watch horror movies since I believe that crap. Things happen in cemeteries which aren't supposed to happen, you know.

Cadillac Man mentioned the 26 squares and it sounded like they blocks of the old city which is something he wants to see as well. My taste is just a little different as I'll get teary over something which is a couple of thousand years old but not so much for newer whereas CM has a deep passion for knowledge of America.

Anonymous said...

26 squares is colonial era

Unknown said...

That would be impressive as there was really old stuff in Rhode Island but all I saw that was way back colonial was Plimoth Plantation and I've raved about that one before. Seeing things at a later stage when they weren't quite so primitive would be some interesting time traveling.