| Submit your comments on this article |
| Home Front: Politix |
| Mark Steyn: Tapped Out |
| 2025-01-11 |
| by Mark Steyn [SteynOnlime] I think of the fire hydrant as a quintessential bit of American iconography. Yes, they predate the United States, going back to the sixteenth century and the spread of piped municipal water systems in Europe and Asia. But, if you asked the average person to picture a fire hydrant, his imagination would conjure one in the American design - in part because elsewhere (Britain, Germany, Spain) the hydrants are below ground and no one knows their shape. It's the Yanks who brought them up to the surface as if to say: see? here our writ runs; you can count on that. Decades ago, somewhere in Queens, I rounded a corner and found the fire department flushing a hydrant, and the excited kids jumping around and occasionally darting into the spray. Golly, I thought, I've walked into a Norman Rockwell cover. Which I had (see Saturday Evening Post top right). Silly me. Like Angela Merkel diversity bollards or utility poles in western North Carolina, fire hydrants are now purely decorative: As I usually say at this point, nothing works anymore. But, when even the fire hydrants don't work, it may be time to retire that line. This is your future - the future they're building for you every day. When you work as assiduously as the west does to become the Third World, don't be surprised that it happens a lot quicker than you thought. Seventeen years ago, I received a note from a reader advising me to lighten up - on the grounds that we're rich enough that we can afford to be stupid. Almost two decades later, some of us are rich enough to be able to afford a home in Pacific Palisades and are willing to indulge a monumentally stupid mayor who, as the first ciswoman of colour to go on a fact-finding mission to study West African emergency-services management, shattered the glass ceiling before it had a chance to burn down: Needless to say, it was a whippersnapper of a foreigner badgering and hectoring the poor wee defenceless chief executive of one of the most famous jurisdictions on the planet. Any American "journalist" minded to do the same would never work again. But it will make a great vignette for her pre-2028 political memoir It Takes a Child to Raze a Village. Read the rest at the link Related: Fire hydrant 01/10/2025 LA's $750k-a-year water boss struggles to explain why fire hydrants ran dry in bumbling video about inferno response Fire hydrant 01/09/2025 Trump has history of warning Newsom over wildfire prevention Fire hydrant 01/09/2025 Malibu beach homes are completely gone |
| Posted by:badanov |
| #1 Africa is like Marxist Mecca. Bass can’t be faulted for going there. |
| Posted by: Super Hose 2025-01-11 09:32 |