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There was a crime wave here in Rumford Falls. Well,a crime, anyway.
As the name of our village indicates, we squat at the top of a little waterfall. It's the second-highest waterfall in America east of the Mississippi. Traditionally, you go to the first-highest waterfall east of the Mississippi when you get married, to watch the water. . .
Well, what would water do when it got to a cliff? It goes over and you look at it. Saying Rumford's falls are the second largest anything is like saying you're the tallest midget in the circus. There isn’t even enough water to keep the granite interested during a dry summer, so there aren't a lot of sightseers. Rumford was founded by profoundly practical people, so the falls make electricity, and the river serves a paper mill a little further on, and that's that.
The local power company, Central Maine Power, is owned by a Spanish company, Iberdrola, which strikes me as odd. Utilities seem like a local sort of a thing, but the world doesn't work that way any more. Their ways are mysterious and opaque. And opaque in Spanish, now, too, which is opaque indeed. They are upgrading the Frankensteinian jumble of coils and transformers and whatnot at the top of the falls to make our electricity flow through a "smart grid." A smart grid is another way of saying "a more expensive dumb grid,” but with all the dumb concentrated on the generation side, instead of letting the users act dumb with autonomy on their end with the electricity. I could walk to the hydro plant in fifteen minutes flat, but I pay some of the highest electric rates in the nation. I guess the grid is already smart -- if you own it.
One evening in late September, somebody cut a hole in a chain link fence and wrestled a $3000 coil of heavy copper wire down a hill to a parking area nearby, and made off with it. Copper thieves, or more exactly, metal thieves, are everywhere.
In the real world, even drug-addled criminals will recycle
-- whether you want them to or not.
The hardcore "environmentalists" pass regulation after regulation, living in a dream world way off the price signal map, immune to arithmetic, all the while pretending that recycling is worth the treasure and effort it takes to force people to do it. In the real world, even drug-addled criminals will recycle -- whether you want them to or not. But no one is going to commit a felony to fish through Central Maine Power's recycling bin looking for newspaper or plastic or cardboard, no matter how many Public Service Announcements they see as they nod off in a narcotic haze in front of the TV. They want something that's worth something. In the world of criminality, you can’t pretend something is valuable if it’s not, and tell the fence it should be valuable, so give me some money. The thieves don't care if what they steal is worth exponentially more if it's put to its intended, best use. They just want some oxycontin and will grab anything that isn't nailed down -- and plenty of stuff that is -- to get it.
Copper thieves aren’t smart, exactly. Clever is not smart. They scour the real estate listings for foreclosed property, make a moonlight visit, and then rip out all the copper plumbing and anything else they can get at easily that’s worth a few bucks. They know no one goes to the football field at one AM in the winter, so they saw up the bleachers for the aluminum. They know the dead tell no tales, and take the bronze grave markers, as the only thing between them and a party is a little effort at midnight, and reverence for the memory of the dead that’s dead even among people that don’t rob graveyards.
The general, non-copper-stealing public is somewhat ambivalent about such crimes, in a way that they wouldn’t be if the criminals simply mugged people. Or mugged them, to be more specific. They stand aside and shrug, figure someone’s insurance will pay for the damage, and don’t see the denouement of the ultimate costs added to their own lives, as that takes a little while and is obscured from their direct line of sight. The crime seems almost “victimless,” a word people that don’t read Bastiat think they understand, but don’t.
The solid citizen watches plenty of entertainment that features “the caper,” and ascribes more of a rapscallion vibe to thieves that don’t steal from people directly, or steal from entities they’ve decided they don’t have to care about. The crooks work so hard and are so savvy in the movies that decent people enjoy watching them, because regular people seem so lazy and bloodless compared to the doughty criminals in Ocean’s Eleven, or Twelve, or whatever number they’ve run out of interest at.
Many people have tried to tease a metaphor for the troika of statists in charge of the three branches of government right now, to no effect. The Instapundit, who I like, tried to torture a Spinal Tap reference to fit the President, but it’s a terrible simile, and by the end of it, he’s more or less talked himself out of it without any help from me. Nigel Tufnel was a sweet, harmless, clueless waif, fooled into thinking changing the highest number on his amplifier knobs from 10 to 11 made it louder. The current government is not sweet, is anything but clueless -- it just doesn’t care about the same things you do -- and the amplifier has been recently modified to play at 25, while they tell you soothingly it’s been scaled back to a 6, honest.
The squatters are still in there, furiously trying to pull
the plumbing out of the fiscal walls before they’re evicted.
No, the House, Senate and Presidency aren’t Spinal Tap, or Chance the Gardener, or if you’re from the paranoid end of the AM dial, they’re not Hitler, either. They’re copper thieves.
If you watch the systematic looting of the treasury, and the swallowing of giant swaths of the private sector so they can be stripped of whatever’s immediately of value and divvied up between accomplices, with no concern for any immediate or long term consequences, you’ll understand what’s what in the federal government right now. If you’re concerned about the next few lame duck weeks, you should be. We foreclosed on the House of Representatives in November, but the squatters are still in there, furiously trying to pull the plumbing out of the fiscal walls before they’re evicted. Everything on the table right now legislatively would have no shot to become law after January, and in the aggregate reminds one of thieves burning down the vacant house they just stripped on the way out.
When I was a little boy, we'd go into the city to see my relatives. The parts of Boston that didn't look abandoned looked like a war zone. Many of my older cousins were firemen and policemen, and told my father that miscreants were sawing off the five-sided nuts that turned on the water on fire hydrants because the brass in them was worth a little money. They'd get high for a little while, while people and their possessions burned, as firemen fiddled to open the vandalized hydrants.
Many people losing everything, sometimes even their lives, so a few degenerate people can enjoy a few moments of illusory pleasure. It was then, and is now, a perfect metaphor for the times. The copper thieves are back, and this time, they’re in charge.
6:32
