The Probability Broach, chapter 4
After disarming the bomb in his apartment, Win spends a rough night sleeping on the floor for fear of boobytraps. Before going to sleep, he found two more: another antipersonnel mine under his bed, and a wire rigged to electrocute anyone who used the shower. In the morning, before he leaves for work, he dons his bulletproof vest and takes all his guns and extra ammunition (“This wasn’t my day for regulations”).
Back at the office, since Chief MacDonald never filed any paperwork, Win is still officially assigned to the Vaughn Meiss murder. He checks out a car, saying that he’s going to interview Meiss’ mother to throw off suspicion. In reality, he’s going to Meiss’ workplace at Colorado State University.
It was good to push my Plymouth out of that eternal curtain of brown smoke. Millions of bike-induced coronaries won’t put a dent in pollution, when the State House exempts its own “Public Service” gunk factories. With a cautious eye on the rearview mirror, I settled back and let the miles peel off—ice-blue Rockies on my left, Kansas somewhere off to the right—and tried forgetting corpses, Burgess, maybe even poor old Mac awhile.
Now wait just a darn minute.
Is pollution a bad thing, in Smith’s opinion? This passage implies that it is. That’s a step forward compared to Ayn Rand, who was staunchly pro-pollution (she describes smog from coal fires as “sacred“).
But in the anarcho-capitalist utopia that Smith fantasizes about, it would obviously be impossible to have environmental protection laws. Anyone could pollute to their heart’s content: spew smoke into the sky, pour raw sewage in rivers, dump trash in the ocean, bury toxic waste where it leaches into the soil.
Obviously, for-profit businesses can and have done all these things. They’ve caused a litany of infamous disasters, from Love Canal to Cancer Alley to the Donora death fog to the Exxon Valdez to Deepwater Horizon. But Smith is so dead-set on blaming government for every evil, he shoves that history under the rug and pretends that the state – not private actors chasing profit in an unregulated market – is solely responsible for pollution.
Coincidentally, this passage also shows why the free market can never solve this kind of problem. He hints that the state is pushing people to ride bikes, but it won’t matter as long as they keep spewing out pollution themselves.
That’s Prisoner’s Dilemma logic, and it’s the exact reason why an ancap world would suffer environmental devastation. Everyone who runs a polluting or planet-destroying business will reason, “Why should I bother cleaning up after myself? It won’t make a difference, because everyone else won’t bother!” – and because everyone thinks this way, the problem will never be solved.
The only way to stop this race to the bottom is with a government, which can pass laws that bind everyone. It’s the social coordination mechanism that overcomes the hurdle of individual Prisoner’s Dilemma selfishness. The experience of history proves it: since the Clean Air Act was passed, air pollutants like particulate matter, ozone and sulfur dioxide have declined decade by decade. Millions of people live longer, healthier lives because of this law (even if too many places, especially poor and minority communities, still bear the burden of environmental racism).
I couldn’t forget the body armor, though even with the drop in temperature outside the inversion-bowl that makes Denver the second-stupidest place in America to build a city.
You might wonder, as did I, what L. Neil Smith thinks is the stupidest place to build a city. If he ever says, I couldn’t find it.
The inversion bowl is real, however. It’s a problem that dates back to the late 1800s, as an environmental engineer explains:
“It’s worse in the winter because of something called temperature inversion,” Devore explained, when cold air gets trapped under a layer of warmer air.
“In Denver, because we’re actually in somewhat of a bowl, where we’re bounded on one side by the mountains and the Platte River Valley on the other side, which actually rises up a little bit, so we become trapped.”
Those inversions can last between a day, sometimes even a couple of weeks, she said, and when those happen, the air is stagnant.
When this happens, pollution from any source – soot from burning wood and brushfires, nitrogen and sulfur dioxide from car and truck exhaust, particulate matter from oil and gas drilling – gets trapped and lingers in the stagnant air, rather than being dispersed by wind. The result is a noxious brown cloud that makes the air unhealthy to breathe, potentially for days on end.
But again, the free market will never solve this problem, and Smith doesn’t even try to argue otherwise. The way to fix this is with collective action: vehicle-emissions standards, burn bans, and other laws that protect air quality, so pollution doesn’t build up.
I flipped over to CB for some amateur entertainment.
There was plenty: farmers swapping yarns along their lonely furrows; truckers seditiously exchanging tips. Suddenly the band exploded with obscenity: President Jackson is a ——, four or five unpopular federal agencies are ——. The diatribe began to repeat itself. I slowed, listened—yes, there it was again: a CB “bomb,” a cheap, battery-operated tape player with a seven-minute loop, and an equally expendable transmitter, buried by the roadside and simmering up through a ten-foot copper wire, waiting for FCC gunships to triangulate and blast it to pieces. Remote-control radicalism. The People’s Committee for Free Papua entertained me almost all the way to Fort Collins, then quacked suddenly and went off the air.
Illegal pirate broadcasts and FCC black helicopters! It sounds like a parody of right-wing militiaman paranoia, but this book plays it absolutely straight. (You have to wonder whether “President Jackson” is meant to be Jesse Jackson, or whether Smith was using a generic name so as not to implicate any real-world politician.)
Has the First Amendment been repealed in this world? Can people be imprisoned or worse for protesting the government? This is yet another throwaway detail that hints at a wild backstory – which, alas, we’re never going to get. By the end of this chapter, Win Bear is going to escape from this sorry world for good, with scarcely a glance backwards.
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The stupidest place to build a city is probably Los Angeles, which also has an inversion problem over the L.A. Basin. It’s why L.A. smog was so infamous back in the 1970s and 1980s. Someone like Smith probably also doesn’t think much in the way of good things about L.A. and Hollywood politics in general.
I could think of worse places, but I’m assuming here that Smith, like a lot of such people, never really considers that there might be history happening outside of the United States either, so I was limiting my guesses to American cities.
My first guess was Washington D.C. which has had over a century of jokes made about how it was built on a malaria-filled swamp and the Maryland was anxious to not have to deal with that land any longer.
But my second thought was L.A., and in the 1970’s the smog was of epic proportions. There are surviving records from the early explorers of California who reported that even when the only occupants of the L.A. basin were Native Americans, the smoke from their cooking fires caused smog in L.A.
Finally, I lived in Denver for a year in the 1980’s. At Lowry AFB for my technical training. And yeah, the thermal inversions can really concentrate the pollution. Not as bad as Ankara, Turkey, but it was not always pleasant to be outside.
Wait, there’s MULTIPLE booby-traps?! Suddenly I’m thinking of those old “Tom and Jerry” cartoons where the cat gets shot, electrocuted, incinerated AND blown to bits in the space of five minutes. The level of ridiculosity is approaching self-parody here.
(And if he’s already looked under his bed to find that antipersonnel mine, why would he be afraid to sleep in his bed? If he’s already looking for booby-traps, I’m sure he would have looked around and over his bed, just to be able to get close enough to look under it.)
It was good to push my Plymouth out of that eternal curtain of brown smoke…
Okay, stop — does he actually think all that smoke just stays within city limits forever? And why is he saying he’s “pushing” his car, rather than, you know, DRIVING it? Does he have to push it to where there’s oxygen before he can start it? Or is there some evil Big Gummint regulation saying he can’t have the motor running within city limits? This would be a lot funnier if I didn’t have to stop and ask “Wait, was this SUPPOSED to be funny?”
I love to visit New Orleans, but it gets my vote for stupidest place to build a city. Not the French Quarter, but the bulk of the city is a bowl that fills up every time it rains and only huge pumps keep the city from flooding even in non-hurricane storms.
The French Quarter would seem to be the first high(ish) ground that one reaches sailing upstream, so an obvious place to build a settlement, and the rest the city just grew out from there. Since there’s no natural higher ground until one reaches Baton Rouge and perhaps further (there are some artificial hills which might be spoil from chemical industries, or where excavated material from port facilities and dredged material from the Mississippi channel is deposited) I wonder if the high ground of the French Quarter is completely natural (it’s partly the northern levee of the river; Greenville and the Garden District are also built on the levee)
There are additional issues that weren’t apparent when New Orleans was founded. Maintenance of the main channel of the Mississippi and the prevention of flooding by raising levees means that most sediment is being deposited in relatively deep water at the tip of the Birds Foot delta lobe, and in the absence of new supplies compaction of sediment results in the land level lowering. Subsidence due to oil, gas, salt and sulfur extraction is a possible issue, but the Louisiana state government says that it is negligible, and it doesn’t look to be particularly relevant to New Orleans in particular.
The line about “millions of bike-induced coronaries” cracks me up, because it’s so much like the typically laughable pushback I always hear from don’t-tread-on-me types whenever public health advocates or environmentalists recommend changing our behavior. Seat belts? “You could get tangled in the belt during a wreck, and break your collarbone!” Reusable grocery bags? “You could get food poisoning after reusing them too much!” Like come on, how often does any of that ever happen?
From the article on Pope Francis:
In defense against your smugness to be fair, a papal bull at that time wasn’t an infallible proclamation from the Magisterium but rather more akin to a secular edict, given the fact that the papacy and other bishops had a huge decree of temporal power (The pope even had all of central Italy to himself as a personal dominion.) in Catholic kingdoms, plus there was another pope from the same timeframe who hypocritically extened his opposition to slavery inly to the enslavement of Christians. Nonetheless, the fact remains that this was done by the official authorities of the Catholic Church, and that the Church claims moral highground despite its involvement in (and initiation of) the persecutions and other human rights violations of the past, and so to claim this was never doctrine doesn’t absolve the faith of its wrongdoings.
The “slavery is fine as long as it’s not my people” belief was actually quite common.
The original prohibition of slavery in English law was that no Englishmen could be slaves, but people of other nations could be. That didn’t last long, apparently because some could just call themselves Englishmen and confuse the issue. So the law rapidly became one where no white Christian could be a slave. Non-whites and non-Christians took a few more centuries to get protection under the law.
Similarly, in the predominately black, Muslim, Northern African states, the laws were such that no Muslim could be a slave. The only slaves allowed were white, mainly Christian. Note, this would be in the late fifteenth century. During the original expansion of Islam across North Africa and into Al-Andalusia in the eighth century all “People of the Book” were exempt from slavery. Ahl Al-kitab, “People-of-the-Book”, were Jewish and Christian, and were understood to be believers in Allah, just not as enlightened as Muslims. In that same eighth century period, in Al-Andalusia (and probably other places, but I’ve focused my reading on Al-Andalusia), there were taxes applied to Jews and Christians which Muslims were not subject to. Needless to say, that convinced a lot of people to convert.
So if the government is willing to place multiple traps to ensure Win dies, why don’t they just have the hitman wait right next to his front door and shoot him once he opens it? It would have more plausible deniability than blowing him up, since it could be passed off as a home invasion gone wrong, and would ensure he dies. If the hitman works for the government, he won’t be arrested. I can believe a totalitarian government is competent at disappearing people. I can’t believe that they suddenly become incompetent when dealing with our protagonist even though Smith likely passed it off as screwing up is in the government’s nature so it can’t help but bungle an assassination. It’s like the fascist propaganda that the enemy is simultaneously strong and weak in exactly the same fields.
The pollution thing is, of course, an argument against hypocritical and ineffectual environmentalism, i.e.: greenwashing, but Smith is trying to use it against all environmentalism, i.e.: “the government pollutes more than private citizens, therefore climate change is a hoax.”
So, are the CB-“bombers” recording their messages and then driving out to some place they want destroyed, broadcasting the message there, and escape before the government destroys the location for them? It’s implied they’re tricking the government into destroying its own buildings, so how does the government keep falling for this? And so much would have been cleared up if Smith had just written one line saying there was a second civil war last year and the tyrannical government won and crushed the opposition. Otherwise, since it’s only a few years in the future, he’d have to explain why there isn’t active resistance from those who remember democracy.
I think this is exactly right. The government in Win’s world is ruthless, totalitarian and unrestrained by law or custom, but somehow, they keep failing to kill one good guy who has a gun and isn’t afraid to use it.
It fits with Smith’s beliefs that government is always power-hungry and a force for evil, but also, overthrowing it never requires collective action. It just takes enough heroic individualists fighting back on their own.
Yes, that seems to be what it’s saying. I’d assume the FCC thugs consider any place that’s destroyed in the bargain to be collateral damage.
I forgot to mention that their killing MacDonald backfires on the bad guys, since Win would have officially been off the case had he lived long enough to file the paperwork. Now, Win is not only motivated to keep investigating him, he’s doing it legally.
Wikipedia suggests the “President Jackson” is supposed to be Henry M. Jackson, who headed the Socialist Party USA at the time, not a placeholder name. Thought I’d point that out. (Smith couldn’t have known that Jackson would die before 1987. That’s still funny.)
This Henry M Jackson guy?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_M._Jackson#Influence_on_neoconservatism
Hmm.. Doesn’t quite seem to fit the bill. Died in 1983 and served as a Democratic Congressrep.
Nor does this :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialist_Party_USA
fit that bill lacking that name as leader.
Then there’s this party along with a few others :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_Socialists_of_America#Membership
But can’t seem to find that name there either.. might’ve missed it just glancing through but? Can you clarify a bit please?
Anyhow did Smith’ really expect Socilaists to become POTUS or take over the USA? Was that something people seriously thought would happen esp after McCarthyism?
Sorry. I think I confused him with an earlier politician of that surname who was a socialist. The Wikipedia article definitely says Jackson is Smith’s fictional dictator-president, but since he seems to have actually been a typical Cold War De,octant, Smith is Evdn more delusional. My bad for only reading the article halfway.
I mean, “Democrat” and “even”. How do you edit your comments here?
Yes, actually, right-wingers did expect “socialists” to take over our government, at least insofar as they routinely lumped everyone to the left of Nixon together in an undifferentiated “those people are all the same” category of “socialists.”
Blody hell, Rand was messed up upand evil. Another word for that smogh wa sdeadly and ofc it killed people and made others sick and their lives shorter.
As for the worst place to build a city what about Las Vegas right in the middle of a desert? Maybe Phoenix for the same reason too although as a non-American (Aussie typing here) I could be missing some geographical factor that make those locations make more sense..