Post London

"So I rode down to the waterside, . . . and there saw a lamentable fire. . . . Everybody endeavouring to remove their goods, and flinging into the river or bringing them into lighters that lay off; poor people staying in their houses as long as till the very fire touched them, and then running into boats, or clambering from one pair of stairs by the waterside to another. And among other things, the poor pigeons, I perceive, were loth to leave their houses, but hovered about the windows and balconies, till they some of them burned their wings and fell down."
--Diary of Samuel Pepys, September 2, 1666.

Old Sam Pepys wrote about the last great disaster in London but one (that "but one" being the Blitz, of course) in his diary and it's the standard account we have today, though others proliferate. The city was wooden for the most part then and there were no such civic creatures as fire departments. In was in this age that London modernized, it saw its greatest art and architecture, it's first modern literature and the establishment of its modern legal and social structures. The fire was an agent of progress, a terrible agent, one that consumed innocents but birthed modernity along with tragedy.
So too would the Olympic flame. London plans to raze old East End neighborhoods that have languished in post industrial poverty and squalor and build the Olympic Village there for the 2012 Games. The athlete housing will be converted in to low cost public housing and infrastructure after the games. Fire as agent of progress.

But water, water brings death and pestelence. Open sewers and contaminated drinking water have brought plague and cholera to London in the past and it was the metaphor of the flood that fueled the Clash's vision of apocalyptic metropolis in "London Calling." (Which was all could here in my head all day for the past couple of days). And the flood is the best metaphor for what happened. Seeping in underground the flood damages foundations and weakens infrastructure. The flood comes and we cannot stop it. Sand bagging it can keep out the deluge but not the damp, some always will get in. We rely on on great damns, pillars and rock to keep back the waters, men like Tony Blair and Ken Livingstone whose immediate public displays and speeches were the very definition of the lion's courage and stiff-upper-lip-ness we expect from Britain's shores--and glorious contrast to our own timorous President after 9/11, who took far to long to come up with encouraging words. But granite blocks don't keep out the flood.

When the flood comes and it has and surely will again, we must be prepared, but we needn't go about like fools selling the house and moving to higher, more fortified ground. A society that is a target to terrorism is often, by this fact, indicated as a society worth preserving. Terror needs fighting, but London is the very definition of a city prepared for terror, they have been for years. The detentions, the torture, the wars, all seem apparently not to work. The water seeps in.

Of course, if you don't buy the water thing--or you think that the flood can be contained-- and you think that terror is a fire that we can put out, well friend, the fire is always still there too. From Pepys on May 5th 1667: "Sir Jo Robinson ... doth tell me of at least six or eight fires within these few days, and continually stories of fires; and real fires there have been in one place or other almost ever since the late great Fire, as if there was a fate over people for fire."