Vintage

Philadelphia Rush Hour

The clock strikes 5 p.m. in Philadelphia on a Friday and all hell breaks loose. The streets swarm with cars, the trains — swamped with gas-price-wary passengers — pull into packed underground stations in the city’s core, the sidewalks bustle with people walking home from the office after a long week of work.

Commuters pile into SEPTA’s R5 Thorndale train, historically known as the Pennsylvania Main Line, after a long Friday at the office.

Going somewhere? Philadelphia’s commuter rail system — now used by more people than ever before in its history — is one of the most extensive in the United States.

South Broad Street, recently home to Phillies victory celebrations in the National League Championship Series, hums with cars, bikes, scooters and the ever-rumbling SEPTA buses.

Wasn’t our Empire Awesome?

For sixty years we dominated the world stage — sometimes sharing it with others and, toward the end, becoming a solo act. The lone superpower. The American Empire. That’s over now, but looking back on it brings forward a lot of great nostalgia.

There was our currency, the “international” currency. It was everywhere! Whole economies outside of the United States were pinned to the dollar, confident that this one currency would carry them far into the future in a most wealthy manner. Today, the dollar is as worthless as an average piece of computer paper and American stores and shops proudly accept the Euro as an equally acceptable form of payment. More foreign markets and countries are switching from the dollar to the Euro with each passing day. Our pride and joy, our American Dollar, has become a punchline among businessmen and business majors everywhere.

There was Wall Street. Whereas some countries have an index (All Ords, FTSE, Nikkei), we had a district. Bank after bank, trading floor after trading floor, we traded in our country for the benefit of all countries. We proudly boasted the largest, richest, most important stock exchanges in the history of the world. Today alone, $1.2 trillion dollars that we used to boast about has disappeared. 4,000 points have disappeared from the Dow over the last few years alone.

There was our culture. Pop culture. A purely American concept that was loved the world over. We proudly embraced pieces of other cultures as “awesomely unique” and they proudly embraced ours as “awesomely standard.” And we did set the standard –denim, rock and roll, hip hop, slang, sneakers, motion pictures. Our empire was not just territorial. It was not just a function of military. It was a function of mass media, pop culture, and the ability to make the whole world crave what was American.

There was our industry. Our cars, our computers, our scientific innovations, our love of the new and exciting world that science and technology were quickly revealing. We prided ourselves on winning the space race; we are home to the largest computer software maker in the world; we are home to the largest computer hardware companies in the world; we are the home of Ford. But we’ve recently stopped believing in science and technology, and with it the world has seized from us the mantle of leadership in that arena.

There was our reputation. We were known the world over as the most charitable country in the world per capita. We were the executors of the Marshall Plan that rebuilt a war-ravaged Europe. We were the melting pot, the open arms of diversity and community. We were home to the most desirable schools in the world for people abroad: Havard, Yale, Dartmouth, Princeton. We were a bastion of individual liberty and choice, of tolerance and understanding, we had open minds and enviable ideals. Now, we “nation-build”, we torture, we taunt immigrants and we’ve given up essential liberty for a little safety. We deserve neither.

We’ve had it really good for the better part of the last century. From the Charleston to the Macarena, from Roosevelt to Reagan, our country was one worth betting on. We lived a lavish lifestyle in big cars and even bigger homes. We became the society with the largest “personal space” bubble in the world. We forsook mass transit in the name of personal space because we could. We spent more money than we made because we could. We bought houses we couldn’t afford because we could. We voted against our interests in several elections because we could.

Well, now we can’t. The party that began with an atomic bomb has ended with a military-industrial complex so far-reaching that even our President and his advisors can’t comprehend how to really undo what’s been done since Eisenhower warned us about it some time ago. Our empire, secured with military might and financial prowess, has been undone by those very things.

And now, my friends, because our parents and grandparents made poor decisions, we will have to spend the better part of our lives picking up the pieces and figuring out how to right the wrongs. Not so that we may maintain our empire — it’s already a memory — but so that we may maintain a semblance of harmonious existence in a chaotic world. So that we may retain as much “America” as possible, even as the once mighty country we know changes forever right before our eyes.

But wasn’t it fucking awesome while it lasted? Man. What a party.