Return of the Throwaway Society

I know - it never left, but read this.

My wife and I have been living through another one of those little collapse-of-civilization kerfuffles that seem so common today. This one involves misdirected Amazon packages, and what to do with them. Lois wrote a simply dandy story about this on her Substack, and I suggest you read it right now. Click here. Right now.

Then come back here, because I have a few additional comments.

Okay. 

When I was quite a lot younger, there was something called Earth Day. Actually, it's still around, but there was a time when there was no Earth Day - the first one was in 1970.

Until then, the United States was officially a throwaway society. Over the years, the idea of caring about our trash has made considerable progress. For instance, used hypodermic needles and other medical waste no longer wash up on New Jersey beaches. Wait - that's a categorical statement. Let me rephrase: I haven't seen a used hypodermic needle wash up on a New Jersey beach in years.

Today, everybody seems to pay at least lip service to the idea of preserving the planet. What they actually do is often something else. Many companies still seem to quietly view trash as an "externality" - an economist's polite way of saying "I don't care."

Mr. Bezos and his Amazonians seem to think it's okay to leave packages on your doorstep - this is called "delivery," and they even take pictures with their phones to prove they've "delivered." Then the porch pirates come. And nobody in a position to do anything about this mess cares. 

And then it turns out that misdirected packages are also just another part of the trash stream. 

We are headed in the wrong direction. 

See also Scavengers and Scow Trimmers; In Defense of Disgusting Alleys; Art Meets Sewage; Somotomo; The Gowanus Transforms, Again; What Does a Clean Street Look Like?

Hollow Man Still Standing

I think there is a level on which Donald Trump knows he is falling apart. But what would that look like?What would he be thinking? I've been wondering about this for a while, and then recently I was reading a remarkable new novel about a wealthy, aristocratic Hungarian family in the first half of the twentieth century, a time, shall we say, of considerable stress and uncertainty - or shall we just say chaos. At any rate, the baron who heads the family, a fairly young man with teenage children, starts to feel he's simply falling apart under the pressure. Here's what the author thinks that looks like: 

"The baron was like a madman who realises his mind is slipping away but can do nothing about it. He sensed himself falling to pieces inside and checked his most routine actions for signs of neglect. 

"If, for example, he realised that he had uttered a word with insufficient clarity because his tongue was too lethargic, the next time he took particular care to articulate this word cleanly, only to stumble over another. If he was lost in thought, he often forgot things, such as replacing the cap on the fountain pen. The more he resisted his decline, the faster it appeared to proceed. For this reason the ignorance of others was the only thing still keeping him together. While this continued, his decline remained something that could be hidden and hushed up." 

- Nelio Biedermann, Lazar p. 166. This book was published in German in 2025, and the English translation came out in early 2026. 

As an aside, some time ago I read Joseph Roth's The Radetzky March, and just recently I read Antal Szerb's Journey by Moonlight. Both of these books are literary landmarks, and each of them deepened, in its own way, my understanding of the former Austro-Hungarian empire. But if I had time to read only one book, it would be Biedermann's Lazar.

See also The Man Who Would Be King, The Democrats Need to Fight the War, Deja Vu All Over Again, The 800-Pound Gorilla in the Oval Office, What Can Pierre Laval Tell Us About Donald Trump? 

Wrapping the Art Alliance

Christo and Jeanne-Claude would be very proud of us. 

On July 4, 2025, the Philadelphia Art Alliance, a beloved building that stands next to Rittenhouse Square, suffered a devastating fire that required the attentions of 120 Philadelphia fire fighters and a simply enormous amount of water, which continued to flow gently down the building's front steps for an amazingly long period of time. 

Just walking around the site, I got the sense that the fire may have started at the back of the ground floor, where I believe there was a kitchen. But to this day the general public has no good idea of what happened in this fire. (For what we do know, click here and here and here and here.) 

Garden area at the back of the building.

The fire certainly had a lovely time raging through this old building, which had quite a lot of wood in it. I vividly remember, as a sometime visitor to the upper floors, years ago, the interesting sensation of walking up the squeaky, beautiful wooden stairs.  

We also know that the fire destroyed the roof. Here's a picture of the top story, directly under the roof, with a view of the sky through one of the glassless windows.

After the suppression of the fire, attention naturally turned to stabilizing the structure and securing the premises. And here is where I got a lovely surprise. As I was walking down 18th street one day, I noticed that the Art Alliance building had been largely wrapped in protective plastic sheeting.

I had never seen a building wrapped before. I knew that it was common to wrap smaller things, like boats being stored for the winter. 

And then I immediately thought of Christo and Jeanne-Claude, the dynamic duo who wrapped a whole Australian cliff in plastic sheeting in 1969. (For a lot more, click here.)

The only Christo and Jeanne-Claude installation that I got to see with my own eyes was The Gates, which showed up in Manhattan's Central Park in 2005. I actually walked through some of the gates; there were a lot of them. According to the Whitney Museum of American Art, they were inspired by Japanese torii gates. 

And here I was in the present day, staring at an installation of white plastic. I found myself wondering if Christo and Jeanne-Claude had inspired this concept of wrapping buildings. In other words, was it yet another example of life imitating art?

As I was looking at the wrapped Art Institute, I noticed a little sign on the wrapping. You can see it in the picture above. Actually there are several of these signs. Here's a closeup.

The sign says the company's name is Global Wrap, and helpfully adds, "We are the original shrink wrap company since 1980." 

Well, Christo and Jeanne-Claude wrapped an Australian cliff in 1969, so who has priority here?

Then I remembered about the shrink-wrapped boats. I went online and found a Gregg Mansfield on a site called Boatmart, and he told me the shrink-wrap process for boats was patented in 1980.  

It turns out that Christo and Jeanne-Claude wrapped a Volkswagen Beetle in 1963. 

I thought I was on a roll, but then I hit a bump. I got the funny feeling that there were people who were using plastic to wrap big objects well before the dynamic duo came on the scene. And that's probably true; I just can't prove it. The internet does not appear to be interested in this subject. 

We do know that wrapping small objects with plastic became very popular after World War II, with the introduction of Saran Wrap, aka cling wrap, which can be found in a drawer of the typical American kitchen, along with aluminum foil and wax paper. 

The only other lead I had was the wrapping of pallet loads with plastic sheeting. Before the plastic wrapping, the boxes sitting on a pallet were secured with metal straps. So when did the changeover happen? It turns out the answer is 1972. That was when a company named Lantech introduced something called the "stretch wrapper," a machine which made wrapping pallet loads with plastic pretty easy. 

It was around this time that I became aware that shrink wrapping and stretch wrapping are two different things. I'm still a bit hazy on how they differ. 

And then something else struck me: The wrap on the Volkswagen was not shrink wrap. Ditto for the Australian cliff. The dynamic duo was wrapping, but not with shrink wrap. So maybe Christo and Jeanne-Claude were leaders in wrapping but not in shrink wrapping. 

I think I can live with that. I'll let you in on a secret. Every time I walk by the Art Alliance, which can easily happen several times a day, I find myself thinking of Christo and Jeanne-Claude and the Australian cliff. And it makes me happy.

See also Putting Some Park into Old Parking Lots, Paul P. Cret and Rittenhouse Square, Lighting Rittenhouse, What Came Before the Laurel.

"I propose to fight it out on this line if it takes all summer." - Ulysses S. Grant, 1864

Grant at Cold Harbor, June 1864 (Library of Congress).

With a father from southern Alabama and a mother from northern New York State, I think I naturally took an interest in the centennial of the Civil War, which occurred when I was in my mid-teens. After all, who was I?

I read quite a lot, and took a particular interest in General Stonewall Jackson. I got a full dose of "There is Jackson standing like a stone wall!" And Jackson's final sentence, "Let us cross over the river, and rest under the shade of the trees." 

I won't bore you with my odyssey. I eventually came out on the Union side. But I had a lingering disdain for U.S. Grant, who was willing to tolerate some pretty amazing casualty numbers.

Frankly, I still don't like Grant. And I don't think he was a great president, either.

But, on May 11, 1864, during the Battle of Spotsylvania Court House, he sent a message back to Washington that resonates with me today: 

"I propose to fight it out on this line if it takes all summer." 

Grant's casualty numbers at Spotsylvania Courthouse, and before that in the Wilderness, were truly eye-popping. And yet he, and the army, and the Union, fought on. And not just to the turning of the leaves in the fall of 1864. 

Robert E. Lee didn't surrender at Appomattox Courthouse until April 1865. 

Which brings me to our present situation. If you're feeling tired, if you're dismayed by all the things that are going wrong, if you think the Democratic party needs to dump its consultants, if you don't like the fact that ICE troopers are shooting people whenever they feel like it, I'm with you.

This slug fest is no fun, and we're still just holding the line. Our victories are defensive. We'll continue to win a lot in the courts, and we'll also see more slaughter in the streets by government agents who belong in prison. The real counter-offensive is still in the future.

You need to decide whether you're in this for the duration of hostilities. And one place to start is to ask yourself, can you say, "I propose to fight it out on this line if it takes all summer."

And then don't think the war will be over right after Labor Day. 

See also Politics on a Very Hot Day, Unleashing the Oligarchs.