Let's fight menaces together.
The great excitement of the weekend on my block this weekend was a fire. Whether it was a great blazing fire or some burned food that set off a smoke detector, I do not know. What I do know is that perhaps two dozen fire trucks appeared at the base of the high-rise building outside my window shortly before midnight on Saturday.
As somebody who is wary of militarism and feels unsettled watching a parade of armored vehicles or a jet flyover, I think that watching the fire department at work is a good stand-in. The FDNY is a spectacular show of municipal force — the sort of thing that makes a person happy to pay taxes.
Out of nowhere, three sides of the block were completely blanketed with fire trucks and teeming with firefighters. A man in a sharp white uniform and a hat with brass trimmings seemed to be presiding over the affair from a desk that had been stood up across the street under a streetlight.
I walked past under the guise of going to the drugstore and stopped in a small crowd on the corner. The whole neighborhood, it seemed, had suddenly taken to walking their dogs or going out to buy toothpaste at midnight. “It’s just reassuring to see all this,” said one man from a few blocks over.
The FDNY is government at its best: the promise that nine million of us have decided that fire is a menace to society. Consequently, we contribute a portion of our paychecks to the promise that we can have professionals come and sort out the problem at any time of the day or night.
“Menace” is an odd way to describe the concept of fire, but it is exactly what we have decided fire is. The term “menace” appears in all sorts of legislation and we have long used it to describe problems in our public life. The law of the City of New York describes discrimination as a “menace to the city’s foundation and institutions.” Dilapidated headstones are a menace to cemetery visitors. The possession of certain knives is a menace to public health, as are rats.
Particularly delightful to me is the City’s declaration that “the making, creation or maintenance of excessive and unreasonable noises within the city affects and is a menace to public health, comfort, convenience, safety, welfare and the prosperity of the people of the city.”
In Michigan, the Employment Security Act tells us that “economic insecurity due to unemployment is a serious menace to the health, morals, and welfare of the people of this state.”
The idea of something being a menace to society, morals, cemetery visitors, or public health carries with it an air of complete certainty and urgency — an obligation to act. Our responses to menaces have given us unemployment insurance, parks, schools, libraries, fire codes, and fire departments.
When this system works — we declare something a menace and set out as a society to fight it together — it is fantastic. Nowhere is this clearer than in New York, where the municipal government is omnipresent. The Department of Sanitation collects trash thrice weekly. New COVID vaccine recipients receive $100 for their trouble. Lifeguards patrol the beaches and pools. The Fire Department appears in great force in the middle of the night.
The grim thrill of watching good public service at work is that it feels almost completely old-fashioned — as if it were a relic of another time or place. In most parts of the country, we have lost not only our ability to decisively fight menaces but also to define what is a menace at all.
It is easy to imagine an alternate timeline in which the idea of a fire department is proposed today. People would lose their minds, insisting that fire is only natural. The fire department would be called a bastion of elitist excess. “Why should I have to pay for somebody else’s clumsiness?” the radio hosts would cry. “There will be no more incentive for people not to set fires, and how are we going to pay for it?”
I read, in 2019, a statement from a high-ranking official in Michigan’s Unemployment Insurance Agency that made two key observations: first, that unemployment insurance is a beautiful system that tells a story of our commitment to one another and, second, that unemployment insurance would never make it into law today. Several months later, the system (already under pressure from years of austerity) collapsed under the weight of the pandemic.
This is the concept of government to which my generation has grown accustomed: an organization devoted to filling potholes and widening highways while acting powerless in the face of our modern menaces: plagues, disinformation and misinformation, the increasing prevalence of the sixty-hour workweek and other instances of corporate greed, the automobile, the astounding expense of American health care and education, the specter of climate change, and the homicidal electric delivery bike operators who ride on the sidewalk.
The people of Yorkville could be forgiven, then, for taking a stroll downstairs on Saturday night and watching on a street corner as a municipal army extinguished the menace of a fire. “It really is,” as the man next to me said, “just reassuring to see all this.”
Distractions
Things I have been reading, watching, and listening to this week.
"Manhattan Lawmaker Proposes Bill to Curb Loud Motor Vehicle Noise Using Surveillance Radar Technology” in Gothamist.
In perhaps the best news of the year, my local council member has proposed noise cameras. As I type this, a car with out-of-state plates is revving its engine (with no muffler) beneath my window. Were this to pass, they could receive an automatic ticket in the mail for up to $1,575. That’s how you deal with a menace.
Palaces for the People by Eric Klinenberg.
In fairness, I read this book more than a year ago. It was at a time when common public spaces were less unnerving places to be. I think that it is still relevant. Klinenberg focuses on one institution — the library — as a centerpiece of American social infrastructure and argues that that social infrastructure is key to bridging divides in American society. Like so many other things, Klinenberg observes that libraries would never be able to get started today — people would find the idea ridiculous.