By PETER APPLEBOME NY TIMES
Some say the world will end in fire. Some say in ice.
In those long, bone-chilling New England winters that inspired Robert Frost, it must have seemed a clear choice, both as reality and metaphor.
These days, not so much.
Once the world seemed to stop on a snowy day in the suburbs, exurbs and beyond. The children were stuck at home. The paper didn’t arrive. The plow trucks came when they came — for the public roads, not for your driveway, which you and neighborhood kids did yourselves.
There wasn’t much on TV, just the soap operas that rattled along in inscrutable flirtations and intrigues and the weather-centric local and national news with weathermen standing in front of clunky-looking maps. It was inconvenient, but mostly a welcome inconvenience, a holiday from the routine.
Some places, particularly in Connecticut, had quite huge snow totals on Wednesday. But absent the blizzards or lesser storms that knock out power, now it’s always game on. Maybe the train is running late, but for all the hysteria in New York City about the snowstorm in December, the ’burbs mostly know how to do snow. The town plows run all night, and the for-hire plow guys show up in time for you to get to the station. In December, our hilly streets were plowed, and people were out running errands by noon.
And with the 24-hour shout-athon of cable and talk radio, the eternal IV drip of the online world, there’s no need to miss a moment of the positioning in the macroculture either. “With ‘Blood Libel’ the 2012 Campaign Has Begun.” “Pol Wishes There Was ‘One More Gun.’ ” “Feud Between Joe Scarborough and Glenn Beck Erupts.” “Limbaugh: Loughner Has Democrats’ ‘Full Support.’ ” It doesn’t need to be news to be news.
It’s not that Wednesday’s storm, in which about a foot of snow fell in northern Westchester County, didn’t affect people’s lives. In our little world of stone walls, open space and hilly streets, one that Frost would have recognized, a winter snowscape remains as pure a visual representation of ancestral Americana as you can find. On snowy days, people, uncharacteristically, wave when they drive by. The park is full of children sledding. A neighbor and I, who seldom stop to speak, wandered into the street, snow shovels in hand, to compare notes on storms and shoveling, past and present. Frost, who wasn’t the cheeriest of characters, would have felt at home.
AND it’s not all bad that reality, certainly the horrific images from Arizona, refuses to vanish for a day. “Things personally are O.K.,” a friend e-mailed on Tuesday, apologizing for leaving town early to get ahead of the snow. “Not so sure about this country.” Who could be?
It would be nice if Jared L. Loughner’s life had a simple narrative, but unlike fixing the Sanitation Department, it usually doesn’t work that way. So you had left and right battling over his story, as always, as if on Planet Fire and Planet Ice. Maybe there’s a way for a sane, nuanced conversation about guns, about the over-the-top political and media culture of grievance, retribution and rebellion, about a middle ground between Mr. Loughner as random, unexplainable, angry nut and Mr. Loughner as a direct spawn of the language of the right, but, well, that will have to wait until the next blizzard in Tucson.
On a hot night in Nashville last summer, I walked past a parked car with a man inside smoking a cigarette, the engine off, the radio on. An angry voice was ranting about the “ground zero mosque,” a place that the driver probably had never been near, but that nonetheless was this moment’s prime ballast in talk radio’s constant stew of outrage. So he listened in the dark as the voice crackled in the night.
It’s January in Westchester, not August in Nashville, but however peaceful and eternal the Frostian snowscape outside, that crackle is always with us these days. The anger never goes away. Snowmageddon makes for good tabloid fodder, but getting the sanitation trucks and plows right, as they did this time in New York City, is one thing. Fixing what ails us in our seething, angry, gridlocked, stuck-in-place culture is something else.
Some say the world will end in fire. Some say in ice. “From what I’ve tasted of desire, I hold with those who favor fire,” the poet concluded. That taste out there now isn’t desire, but even on a cold, peaceful day, one part fire, one part ice, it feels as if he got it right.
E-mail: peappl@nytimes.com
Some say the world will end in fire. Some say in ice.
In those long, bone-chilling New England winters that inspired Robert Frost, it must have seemed a clear choice, both as reality and metaphor.
These days, not so much.
Once the world seemed to stop on a snowy day in the suburbs, exurbs and beyond. The children were stuck at home. The paper didn’t arrive. The plow trucks came when they came — for the public roads, not for your driveway, which you and neighborhood kids did yourselves.
There wasn’t much on TV, just the soap operas that rattled along in inscrutable flirtations and intrigues and the weather-centric local and national news with weathermen standing in front of clunky-looking maps. It was inconvenient, but mostly a welcome inconvenience, a holiday from the routine.
Some places, particularly in Connecticut, had quite huge snow totals on Wednesday. But absent the blizzards or lesser storms that knock out power, now it’s always game on. Maybe the train is running late, but for all the hysteria in New York City about the snowstorm in December, the ’burbs mostly know how to do snow. The town plows run all night, and the for-hire plow guys show up in time for you to get to the station. In December, our hilly streets were plowed, and people were out running errands by noon.
And with the 24-hour shout-athon of cable and talk radio, the eternal IV drip of the online world, there’s no need to miss a moment of the positioning in the macroculture either. “With ‘Blood Libel’ the 2012 Campaign Has Begun.” “Pol Wishes There Was ‘One More Gun.’ ” “Feud Between Joe Scarborough and Glenn Beck Erupts.” “Limbaugh: Loughner Has Democrats’ ‘Full Support.’ ” It doesn’t need to be news to be news.
It’s not that Wednesday’s storm, in which about a foot of snow fell in northern Westchester County, didn’t affect people’s lives. In our little world of stone walls, open space and hilly streets, one that Frost would have recognized, a winter snowscape remains as pure a visual representation of ancestral Americana as you can find. On snowy days, people, uncharacteristically, wave when they drive by. The park is full of children sledding. A neighbor and I, who seldom stop to speak, wandered into the street, snow shovels in hand, to compare notes on storms and shoveling, past and present. Frost, who wasn’t the cheeriest of characters, would have felt at home.
AND it’s not all bad that reality, certainly the horrific images from Arizona, refuses to vanish for a day. “Things personally are O.K.,” a friend e-mailed on Tuesday, apologizing for leaving town early to get ahead of the snow. “Not so sure about this country.” Who could be?
It would be nice if Jared L. Loughner’s life had a simple narrative, but unlike fixing the Sanitation Department, it usually doesn’t work that way. So you had left and right battling over his story, as always, as if on Planet Fire and Planet Ice. Maybe there’s a way for a sane, nuanced conversation about guns, about the over-the-top political and media culture of grievance, retribution and rebellion, about a middle ground between Mr. Loughner as random, unexplainable, angry nut and Mr. Loughner as a direct spawn of the language of the right, but, well, that will have to wait until the next blizzard in Tucson.
On a hot night in Nashville last summer, I walked past a parked car with a man inside smoking a cigarette, the engine off, the radio on. An angry voice was ranting about the “ground zero mosque,” a place that the driver probably had never been near, but that nonetheless was this moment’s prime ballast in talk radio’s constant stew of outrage. So he listened in the dark as the voice crackled in the night.
It’s January in Westchester, not August in Nashville, but however peaceful and eternal the Frostian snowscape outside, that crackle is always with us these days. The anger never goes away. Snowmageddon makes for good tabloid fodder, but getting the sanitation trucks and plows right, as they did this time in New York City, is one thing. Fixing what ails us in our seething, angry, gridlocked, stuck-in-place culture is something else.
Some say the world will end in fire. Some say in ice. “From what I’ve tasted of desire, I hold with those who favor fire,” the poet concluded. That taste out there now isn’t desire, but even on a cold, peaceful day, one part fire, one part ice, it feels as if he got it right.
E-mail: peappl@nytimes.com
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