The Newtown Pentacle

Monday

– photo by Mitch Waxman

Since returning to NYC from my travels, one has not allowed any dust to accumulate upon the camera. Situational need has found me in all sorts of interesting places. Pictured above is the largest single point source of greenhouse gases in Brooklyn, for instance, which are burned off into the atmosphere by the NYC Department of Environmental Protection. Those four pipes carry methane from within the bioreactor eggs of the sewer plant up to venturi apparatuses where the fiery immolation occurs. The machinery is tuned to keep the flames invisible.

Fossil fuel companies are singularly responsible for everything horrible, of course, and not the government which historically encouraged them to do those horrible things – since Governmental agencies and officials are inherently good. The latter entity, however, has engaged with an exemplar of the former – specifically the National Grid outfit – to harvest and filter the gases produced at the sewer plant and sell them to you under the product branding of “natural gas” and “resource recovery.” The Government hopes for a net profit on the process, as does National Grid, but only the latter is evil. The project is scheduled to be up and running about five years ago, and isn’t up and running yet because of the salubrious Government’s red tape, but there you are. Do as I say, not as I do.

– photo by Mitch Waxman

That yellow building just to the left of center in the shot above is where the evil fossil fuel industry first set itself up in the modern sense in 1854, manufacturing “coal oil” under the brand name “Kerosene.” The company that started the operation was acquired first by Charles Pratt’s Astral Oil, and then by John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil, and eventually by the Standard Oil Company of New York after the whole Sherman Antitrust Teddy Roosevelt dealie (TR used to be good because progressive, but now he’s evil because racism and colonialism).

The evil Standard Oil Company of New York, or SOCONY, rebranded as Vacuum Oil, and eventually decided they wanted to be trademarked as Mobil Oil. Mobil would one day merge with the evil Standard Oil Company of New Jersey in the 1990’s, after SOCONJ had changed its name first to ESSO and then later to Exxon. The evil Exxon Mobil consented to a decree by the obviously good natured New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, dictating that the corporate behemoth will need to siphon an unknown amount of “product” out of the ground at that location pictured above.

Right across the water on the Brooklyn side of Newtown Creek, the inherently good Attorney General of NYS, Andrew Cuomo, forced the inherently evil Exxon Mobil to clean up an oil spill left behind by the similarly proscribed Mobil/SOCONY. Cuomo has since been redefined as an evil scion of sex sins and a corrupt and false eidolon who was mean to the other politicians – just as evil as the fossil fuel companies are, with all of their capitalism and carbon – or like any who might question the validity of “affordable housing” or bike lanes probably are. The dichotomy offered is that someone can be good once and bad later, which is confusing. How can anyone employed by the government be, in any way, bad? I mean… just ask any politician how virtuous and vetted they all are. They’ll tell you exactly how noble, and free of corrupting industrial and financial influences, modern day politics are due to oversight committees staffed by their own colleagues.

It’s not like Tammany Hall is still running the City, right? Those patriarchal rascals were the ones who made the devil’s bargain with the inherently evil capitalists, right? Not at all like the modern day reformers, progressives, or all of the other inherently good politicians who operate in a closed loop of leadership ladder climbing that’s funded and curated by the Real Estate Industrial Complex.

– photo by Mitch Waxman

The reason that our ancestors called it “Tammany Hall” was in homage to a legendary “Sachem,” or Chief of the Lenape, named Taminend. Leaders of Tammany like Boss Tweed and Dick Croker were called the “Grand Sachem” of the political club. You remember the Lenape, of course, whose land our inherently good government stole, and who were then resettled in forested areas nobody else wanted by the same do gooders? They’re called the Delaware these days, those Lenape people who survived the inherent goodness of the political state.

Founded in 1790, Tammany Hall really came into its own in 1854 with the election of Mayor Fernando Wood. Wood seriously considered having NYC secede from the Union with the Confederacy, given the amount of slave related business NYC was involved in. Cotton was a commodity bought and sold on Wall Street, and the East River coast of Manhattan is where a large number of the slave ships, which provided a labor force for the Cotton Plantations, were built. It was a risky business, slaving, but you could safely invest in it by buying shares in a slave ship from a broker to spread out the risk, or by putting your money into insurance funds which guaranteed other people’s investments in slavery. It wasn’t difficult to find a way to invest in slaving, as Wall Street handled most of it all in the early 19th century, allowing investors to act shocked at the barbarity of the practice after the Civil War. By then, the smart money was in railroads, anyway.

Coincidence on the 1854 thing, huh? The inherently evil capitalists of the petroleum industry setting up shop here at Newtown Creek, while the inherently good government of Tammany Hall was encouraging slaveholding, armed insurrection, and cotton plantations in the American South? Gosh.

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“In the Shadows at Newtown Creek,” an 88 page softcover 8.5×11 magazine format photo book by Mitch Waxman, is now on sale at blurb.com for $30.