Killdozer Nation

I’ve got a pile of objects that I’ve kept around with the idea that I’d write about them someday. Ironically, this stash includes a copy of Marie Kondo’s The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up. In the interest of whittling down that pile we’ll begin with a review of a book, Killdozer: The True Story of the Colorado Bulldozer Rampage that I found in one of the Little Free Libraries I visit on my morning dog walk.

On June 4th, 2004 the author, Patrick Brower, witnessed this bizarre and largely forgotten incident in which Marv Heemeyer, a skilled welder and muffler shop owner, demolished the town of Grandby Colorado with a DIY tank.

Dubbed the “Killdozer,” Heemeyer’s tank, built on top of a Komatsu D355A bulldozer, included armor plating, external cameras, and a 50 caliber rifle. Heemeyer piloted the Killdozer around Grandby destroying the offices of Brower’s newspaper, the Sky-Hi News, and many other businesses and government buildings. Miraculously, no one was killed or injured except for Heemeyer.

Brower describes, in detail, the petty grievances that led up to the incident and dismantles the hero worship of Heemeyer that began immediately after his death. Heemeyer occupies a very familiar class of people: aggrieved and violent middle aged 50-something men who are relatively prosperous independent businessmen. Coming out of a culture of toxic individualism you can easily link Heemeyer with people like Ammon Bundy and the clownish January 6th rioters. Look closely at any of these men and what you will find is a basic inability to share toys in the sandbox. Unfortunately this toxic individualism can manifest in acts of what has come to be called “stochastic violence,” self-radicalized terrorism.

There was some real bravery in Grandby on that day in 2004, from the cop who jumped up on top of Heemeyer’s moving tank, to the heavy equipment operator who attempted to disable the Killdozer with a commandeered road scraper. If not for these delaying tactics many lives might have been lost.

Sadly, I think we’ll see more of these types of incidents such as the recent attacks on the power grid as well as the mass shootings we take for granted in the United States. Brower’s detailed description of what led up to the incident as well as its aftermath can point to ways to end this cycle of violence. Undoing the myth of individualism that’s so much a part of this country is a start. That, and providing the unflattering context for these acts of violence in order to prevent these idiots from being elevated as martyrs or heroes.

Hauntological Updates

Defenestrated
Back in 2021 I wrote about windowless buildings. In that post I mentioned the 10 freeway adjacent Abram Friedman Occupational Center, a monolithic, windowless building ornamented only with a crass Harbor Freight  sponsorship ad. Thanks to Steven Sharp, editor of Urbanize LA I now know that underneath all that stucco there’s a handsome 1920s era building:

I’m guessing the race to the bottom that is Crapitalism™ and a related disinvestment in public trade schools explains this bizarre architectural decision. The before and after pictures of this building reveal a transformation into what looks like a prison, hostile to any poor soul who walks the barren sidewalk next to those blank walls or who wanders its liminal, florescent lit corridors.

Or, to repeat the most bizarre architectural conspiracy theory on the interwebs, could this be another attempt to erase the lost Tartarian civilization?

Ghosts of Christmas Present
In a post this summer I mentioned a combined aesthetic/moral/anxiety crisis I described as a horror of  rootless landscapes. It turns out that Mark Fisher coined a word for this feeling: nomadology. Merlin Coverley author of Hauntology: Ghosts of Futures Past describes Fisher’s term as,

a sense of unease, akin to travel sickness, engendered by such anonymous environments as airports and shopping malls whose sameness seems to deflect even the possibility of nostalgia for a past that is wholly absent. Instead these spaces, whose endless repetition the world over leaves one feeling as if one could be anywhere, provoke ‘the sickness of travel [. . .] a complement to, not the opposite of, the sickness for home, nostalgia.’

I recommend Coverley’s book and, in my own take on Christmas ghost story reading, I just picked up a copy of Mark Fisher’s hauntological classic Ghosts of My Life.

Root Simple email subscription
A few readers alerted me to the fact that they were no longer getting Root Simple’s blog posts emailed to them. It turns out our subscription feature got nuked by Feedburner. I’m looking for an alternative but it’s going to take me awhile. I’ll let you all know when I find a solution.

Happy holidays to all of you who have stuck with this blog over the years and best wishes for a great 2023.

We’ve Got the Covids

We made it almost three years but finally caught the Covid. Thankfully we’re fully boosted and doing okay.

Kelly woke up with flu symptoms on Tuesday and used a home test kit that flagged her as positive. A very nice friend and neighbor offered his garage accessory dwelling unit for me to quarantine in. As a precaution I went to my health provider for a test on Thursday which came back positive today and now I’m back in our house.

Kelly felt bad this week and her doctor put her on anti-virals that seem to be working. I have very mild symptoms so far.

I think we’re in the midst of a huge covid surge that’s vastly under-reported. I know a lot of people who have come down with it in the past few weeks.

I’m very thankful for our dear neighbors who are looking after us. Be careful this holiday season.

LA’s Gangsters

Image: DSA-LA

I got sucked into local politics out of a desire to help make our car-centric city a safer place to walk and ride a bike. After years of effort I came to the realization that the establishment politicians who run Los Angeles can’t be worked with, that they need to be shown the door. I also came to understand the interconnectedness of the problem, that unsafe streets are just a symptom of a crapitalist system that also creates economic and racial inequality.

Working with elected officials here is incredibly frustrating. I found them arrogant, dismissive of activists and only interested in answering the needs of their wealthy campaign contributors. As it turns out they’re also literal gangsters.

As many of you might know by now, since it made international news, a surreptitious recording of a meeting between LA city council president Nury Martinez, councilman Gil Cedillo, councilman Kevin De León and Los Angeles County Federation Of Labor president Ron Herrera surfaced over the weekend. Because the coverage of this recording by local and national media has been not always complete I want to emphasize that, in addition to the truly vile, racist talk on the recording, we should not lose sight of what this meeting was all about: machine Democrats, in a backroom with a corrupt labor leader, gerrymandering their districts to cling to power and disenfranchise African-Americans, renters and progressive voters.

Almost half of the city council is now either in jail, under investigation or caught up in this recent scandal. My own city councilman, Mitch O’Farrell is attempting to distance himself from Nury Martinez, Cedillo and De León but we should not let him do that. On the recording Herrera says, “I want to make sure we protect Mitch.” If you live in Mitch’s district you should vote for his challenger, Hugo Soto-Martinez who is part of a young group of activists challenging LA’s status quo.

If there’s something good that has come out of this weekend it’s that the old order seems to be collapsing much faster than I ever thought it would. There’s a motion to put a measure on the ballot to expand the size of the city council, which has been just 15 representatives for a city of 4 million people since the 1920s. I suspect that progressive challengers like Soto-Martinez and Kenneth Mejia will win on November 8th.

But there’s still a lot of work to do. Now is the time to seize the moment. The old guard relied on us all to be passive and let “the adults” lead. We all will need to pitch in and participate in local government and at our unions to make the changes we need to make. Some resources:

DSA-LA voter guide

Knock LA’s coverage of the leak

LA Podcast Emergency Episode

Mike Bonin’s moving speech at yesterday’s council meeting