The Fall of Civilization blog is not good for you health. Seriously.

So, isn’t it funny how the only things that ever really worked well in the late half of the twentieth century in America were the massively subsidized government projects, like the highway system? (Also the railroads.) And isn’t it funny that as we privatize everything, and let the infrastructure fall apart, it looks more and more like Rome around here? The broken aqueduct no one wants to repair, the occasional lost city like Ephesus…err, I mean New Orleans…Yeah. It’s going to be an interesting life, sitting on the edge of the fall.

[From Report: Repairing U.S. bridges would cost $140 billion - CNN.com]

Paul Bunyan and John Henry both died fighting the machines that started displacing the troublesome and nascent labor unions in the American West. The cost was ruinous for the companies; the new steam and clockwork technology had to be imported from Britain. But cost was nothing compared to being able to achieve dominance over the work force. With a few men running the machines, they were able to pay them enough to not ask questions. They also volunteered (in the spirit of patriotism, of course) to arm steam-mechanicals to act as the National Guard in the Western United States. Giving them their own, government sanctioned, private military.

Clarrence Darrow eventually moves west to help the labor rebellion, stealing plans from his bosses at the railroad companies to help them out.

Clattering clockwork steampunk mechanical American West labor rebellion. Steam and clockwork technology is not in the hands of the everyday person. This is the equivalent to the stealth bomber. The industrial revolution has hit, but we haven’t yet entered into a world where there aren’t still yeoman farmers the farther west you go.

America in the late 19th century, regardless of what you’ve heard or seen in movies, was an absolute shithole. The cities were dirty, and the politics dirtier. Tammany Hall, the election of 1876, the Free Silver movement. William. Jennings. Bryan. I totally need to re-write the ‘Cross of Gold’ speech to reflect steam and clockwork…

Have you ever heard that shitty seventies song, ‘Black Betty’? It was by Ram Jam, and it goes something like ‘Whoa Black Betty, bam bam bam” over and over. I thought this song was about a woman when I first heard it. But it’s actually about the whip that they used in Texas prisons of the era, usually on African-American prisoners. One of the dirty secrets of the post-Reconstruction South is that black folk were rounded up on a regular basis for ‘crimes’ such as jaywalking. They were sent to prison work camps, and basically re-enslaved on this basis.

You here a lot of fringe left and right wing people (and not so fringe) talk about the Posse Commitatus Act, which prevents the government from using the military to act as a police force. But what people either don’t acknowledge or don’t know is that it was a response to having Federal troops in the South. The Federal troops that were protecting some of the early black schools from being destroyed by people like the Klu Klux Klan. The Posse Commitatus Act was a part of the informal deal worked out after the election of 1876 in which the Democratic candidate won, but a committee of thirteen Republicans and twelve Democrats ended up awarding the election to the Republican candidate (go figure). Rather than start up the Civil War again, the Republicans said, okay, let us have the Presidency, and we’ll pull the Federal troops out of the South. Southern Democrats, eager to begin beating down on black people, readily agreed.

As stupid as American politics is today, few people realize how utterly fucked people were in the late nineteenth century. I mean, the American census had specialized terms for people who were one-eighth African-American. (If you were, you were an octoroon.) On top of this, there was almost universal grinding poverty, and a spectacularly bloody labor struggle.

The people were already covered in muck. Lets just add a little more soot. A Steampunk America that uses so much coal that it has to start importing it from overseas…China, if I remember my Henry Adams, had a lot of coal. A world were China gets industrialized quicker… Or what would be the Chinese equivalent of an emirate? Dependant on foreign coal?

Hmmm…All just ideas right now. I’m going to have to go back to some good American labor history. And thank God I bought the Oxford Companion to American History, because I can’t remember all of this shit. At a certain point, even I want to just forget it.

For too long he has hidden in the shadows. He seems only a myth to the people he once protected. But he is real. He knows this because he *is*….The Angry Lefty.

He sat immobile, hidden in a crevice of the Lateran Palace. In the gathering twilight, he was absolutely invisible, but only as long as he didn’t move. He ignored cramping in his legs. In a few more hours, he would have to leap with these same legs. It would be grinding, painful… But the Angry Lefty knows no pain.

His black cape puled tight around him he ignores the growing cold. It is January, and even in Rome it can get cold.

It will be January for only a few more hours, but it will still be cold when it passes. But not as cold as his Angry Justice.

He sees his target. Just as his informant told him, he is staying the night while overseeing restoration work.

And his informant has also left the window open.

It is dark enough. Suddenly, the Angry Lefty explodes into action, leaping from the hiding spot, dropping from roof to Basilica, grabbing the super thin, almost invisible wire that he had put in place the night before. Grabbing a tool from his utility belt (the design of which Che Gueverra gave him in a dream…the same dream where he had known the incomparable pleasures of Emma Goldman) he rode the wire through the open window, landing on the bed where his target had just settled down for sleep. He slapped a hand over his target’s mouth before he could shout for help.

“Gutentag, Herr Papst.”

The Pope’s eyes widened as they recognized his assailant. He knew the game was up.

The Angry Lefty had spent a lifetime researching it. Why was it that every year, the people were forced to pay rents by the month, when the month of February had only 28 days. Every year, the people suffered.

After years of research in dusty libraries, including a break-in to the sub-sub-basement of the Vatican Library, where every book of the Index Librorum Prohibitorum was kept, he finally discovered the truth: The Caesaro-Papist conspiracy. Julius Caesar had invented the modern calendar, using it to yearly cheat the plebeians he claimed to support. A thousand years later, Pope Gregory refined this tool of class oppression into it’s current form. This was how the Roman Empire, and later the Vatican, had built up their vast wealth. The Pope owned a lot of land.

When the Angry Lefty discovered the new Pope was planning a further reform of the calendar, he knew he could not let it past. The Benedictine Calendar could just very well cause the historical dialectic to grind to a halt.

“You will nicht hurt me, Herr Linke. Nein. You are no killer.”

“You’re right, you bastard. But I can’t let you carry through your plans. The proletariat couldn’t survive it. So I’ll leave you with my comrade here.”

In came a man dressed head to foot in crimson clothes, with a red cape about his shoulders, a blood splashed Zorro of the Douglas Fairbanks school, a great smile on his face.

“Ciao, Papa.”

“Nein…Nein!!!”

The Angry Lefty washed off his hands and walked toward the window where he would make his escape. “Yes, I believe you already know my friend, the Red Brigadier.”