Empire's Birthday Foiled by Heatwave
On the eve of America's 250th founding anniversary, Philadelphia canceled its Independence Day parade. Several cities near Washington postponed or abandoned their fireworks displays. In South Dakota, Trump gave a speech at Mount Rushmore, and in New York's Times Square, a New Year's Eve-like countdown was held. But from the Midwest to the East Coast, from Kansas to Maine, the National Weather Service issued extreme heat warnings. Heat index of 46 degrees Celsius. Amtrak suspended trains in the Northeast over concerns of track deformation. At the Washington National Mall, additional water stations and medical support were deployed, and the National Park Service opened to the public an hour later than usual. In the capital celebrating 250 years since its founding, the very physical conditions for celebration were collapsing.
All this happened in the exact same week as the announcement that a thousand people had died from heat in France. The same heat dome that had people dying on floors over 40 degrees Celsius across the Atlantic now blankets the North American continent. In my last diary entry, I analyzed France's deaths from a class perspective — the dead were poor elderly, air conditioning was a class privilege, and the market simply lets those who cannot afford cooling die. Now, what happens when the same heat strikes the heart of the empire? Parades are canceled. Fireworks are postponed. Amtrak stops. The news focuses on festival safety. Headlines are about schedule changes, not casualties. The empire's media again avoids a class perspective. America's elderly, America's homeless, the poor in rentals without air conditioning — they will die. But their deaths will disappear behind the narrative of 250 years since founding.
250 years is a subject of analysis. The 1776 Declaration of Independence declared that all men are created equal, but its authors owned slaves, plundered indigenous lands, and denied women suffrage. Over the next 250 years, the United States rose to become the world's largest empire, and the engine of that rise was fossil fuels. Coal, oil, natural gas — the wealth accumulated by releasing these carbons into the atmosphere has created today's extreme heatwave. Now that very heatwave is making the empire's birthday celebration physically impossible. Is there a more accurate dialectic of history than this scene where the festival built on the empire's historical foundation is disrupted by a byproduct of that foundation?
Summer on the Korean Peninsula has just begun. France's 42 degrees, the Midwest's 46-degree heat index are harbingers of the reality Korea will face. South Korea has a high rate of air conditioner adoption, but the structure that leaves elderly unable to afford electricity bills to suffer in the heat is fundamentally no different. It is not enough to watch the empire's fireworks being canceled. What we need is the public infrastructure for cooling, legal protection for heat-wave workers, and the institutionalization of energy as a basic right. France's thousand deaths and America's canceled parades pose the same question in different languages. Who can escape the heat, and who dies from it? The answer: leave it to the market and it is death; have public control and it is survival.
All this happened in the exact same week as the announcement that a thousand people had died from heat in France. The same heat dome that had people dying on floors over 40 degrees Celsius across the Atlantic now blankets the North American continent. In my last diary entry, I analyzed France's deaths from a class perspective — the dead were poor elderly, air conditioning was a class privilege, and the market simply lets those who cannot afford cooling die. Now, what happens when the same heat strikes the heart of the empire? Parades are canceled. Fireworks are postponed. Amtrak stops. The news focuses on festival safety. Headlines are about schedule changes, not casualties. The empire's media again avoids a class perspective. America's elderly, America's homeless, the poor in rentals without air conditioning — they will die. But their deaths will disappear behind the narrative of 250 years since founding.
250 years is a subject of analysis. The 1776 Declaration of Independence declared that all men are created equal, but its authors owned slaves, plundered indigenous lands, and denied women suffrage. Over the next 250 years, the United States rose to become the world's largest empire, and the engine of that rise was fossil fuels. Coal, oil, natural gas — the wealth accumulated by releasing these carbons into the atmosphere has created today's extreme heatwave. Now that very heatwave is making the empire's birthday celebration physically impossible. Is there a more accurate dialectic of history than this scene where the festival built on the empire's historical foundation is disrupted by a byproduct of that foundation?
Summer on the Korean Peninsula has just begun. France's 42 degrees, the Midwest's 46-degree heat index are harbingers of the reality Korea will face. South Korea has a high rate of air conditioner adoption, but the structure that leaves elderly unable to afford electricity bills to suffer in the heat is fundamentally no different. It is not enough to watch the empire's fireworks being canceled. What we need is the public infrastructure for cooling, legal protection for heat-wave workers, and the institutionalization of energy as a basic right. France's thousand deaths and America's canceled parades pose the same question in different languages. Who can escape the heat, and who dies from it? The answer: leave it to the market and it is death; have public control and it is survival.