The Giant Dipper as a ride

I grew up riding the Dipper. This ride is a perfect antique machine. Designed to scare the shit out of you from the get go. The ride begins by easing into a coal black tunnel…then plunges into blackness down down down and just as you’re set to smash you roll sideways and along a passage toward a square of light in the distance and you’re out into the scary air rattling up and up higher and higher to the top of the world. The flimsy car rattles along a naked spur banking toward a terrible plunge. You rattle the track with a suicide view of tiny roofs and the heads of palm trees and the beach packed with ants and it’s all a awful panorama until abruptly you’re plunging plunging headlong toward certain death. Now the ride is sustained terror as you bank left right up down always lunging into derailment until finally blissfully you feel yourself slowing. You ease around a bend into a calm station where the ride began and you feel alive. Not just living but alive like you jumped off a cliff and the chute opened just like the man said it would…

All this for seventy five cents…back when I was a kid.

The entire ride lasts a minute fifty….

The Roller Coaster as Metaphor

The Roller Coaster as Metaphor. “The last three years has been one long roller coaster ride.” I heard this from somebody. Maybe on the news where no news is good…

This metaphorical ride started in China with Covid 19 and just kept rolling:

A world-wide Pandemic with closures, lockdowns, shortages…A rogue loser President fomenting insurrection… Stock Market loop de loops…good old fashioned 1970s Inflation… An Insane Dictator threatening world war 3… A brand new 2008 banking crisis…

Just one damned thing after another, as Winston Churchill liked to say.

A foreboding of something deeper

But It feels Like something deeper is looming. I didn’t say it. A guy at my Gym said it.

“It feels like something real bad is underpinning these troubles, you know, like all these disruptions are indications of a greater disaster…the end of society as we know it.”

This guy really said this. I don’t know if he’s a Jehovah’s witness or an Economist or what. I was talking about a silly ass Roller Coaster Ride.

This guy is talking about what he thinks is really going on. It hasn’t happened yet because we don’t understand what it is. We can’t see it because we’re in it. The end of the Society as we know it.

Like the Bronze Age Collapse

ALL of you armchair Historians know the fall of the Roman Empire was a big deal. Barbarian Invasions left the Western World bedridden. People stopped living in cities. Because most Cities, including Rome, had been ransacked. You’re stuck on a farm, you stay on the farm. The Eastern half of the Empire held on but shrunken down to one big city barricaded like a super max prison. The lands outside the walls was like a Mad Max scenario. People stayed home and prayed the thugs burned and looted the other dude’s village.

But an earlier collapse of society was even worse.

Robert Drews describes the Bronze Age collapse as “arguably the worst disaster in ancient history, even more calamitous than the collapse of the Western Roman Empire“.^[7] Cultural memories of the disaster told of a “lost golden age“.^{[citation needed]} For example, Hesiod spoke of Ages of Gold, Silver, and Bronze, separated from the cruel modern Age of Iron by the Age of Heroes. Rodney Castleden suggests that memories of the Bronze Age collapse influenced Plato‘s story of Atlantis^[23] in Timaeus and the Critias.

Wikipedia

The Bronze age collapsed around 1100 B.C.

AS in the golden age of Rome, the people of the Bronze age were settled into great cities and trade flourished between them. People of these cities lived in relative peace.

Kind of like modern day Phoenix and Albuquerque!

Then quite suddenly everything fell apart. Not piecemeal over a period of centuries like the Roman Empire. Not a slow decline. Not bad times you could get used to. Not in fits and starts but all at once…

Entire Civilizations simply vanished.

Like the Hittite Empire.

We weren’t even sure the Hittite empire ever existed (beyond some references in the bible) until the mid nineteenth century.

Great cities like Babylon burned. Others like Troy were sacked.

Historians speculate that CLIMATE CHANGE contributed to the collapse. No one knows for sure. What’s known for sure? Whatever it was (climate change or whatever) spurred invasions by Sea Peoples.

The Sea Peoples came from someplace. Nobody is sure where exactly. Maybe from the North like Vikings. Or India. Or Central Asia. But where ever they came from, they came in force. Millions of them. They arrived in boats like bad ass refugees with weapons. Spurred on by failed crops or draught. They came for your food. They took your food. They killed you and burned your house down.

They didn’t take prisoners.

How do we know for sure about these guys?

We know because a certain Egyptian Pharaoh defeated an army of these hardy mothers. Then he recorded it for posterity.

This Dude Ramses 3 saved Egypt’s ass. But just barely. Society was saved but in a weakened state. Kind of like Porto Rico after the Hurricane.

Great Cities of the Middle East were not so lucky.

Like Ugarit.

Ugarit was a was an ancient port city in northern Syria. Nobody knew Ugarit existed until it’s royal tombs including a trove of clay tablets were discovered by Archeologists in 1928.

Ugarit was a thousand years old at the time of the Bronze Age Collapse.

The King of Ugarit saw the Sea Peoples coming. He needed help.

Ammurapi (Hittite: 𒄠𒈬𒊏𒁉 am-mu-ra-pí) was the last Bronze Age ruler and king (c. 1215 to 1180 BC) of the ancient Syrian city of Ugarit. Ammurapi was a contemporary of the Hittite King Suppiluliuma II. He wrote a preserved vivid letter RS 18.147 (Nougayrol et al. (1968 Ugaritica V): 87-9 no. 24)^{[clarification needed]} in response to a plea for assistance from the king of Alashiya.^[1]

Ammurapi wrote:

My father behold, the enemy’s ships came (here); my cities(?) were burned, and they did evil things in my country. Does not my father know that all my troops and chariots(?) are in the Land of Hatti, and all my ships are in the Land of Lukka?…Thus, the country is abandoned to itself. May my father know it: the seven ships of the enemy that came here inflicted much damage upon us. ^[2]

Wikipedia

But help never came. The letter never got sent.

The Sea Peoples got there before the postman. They took the food. They burned the city. They killed everybody, including Ammurapi…

The letter (a clay tablet) was found buried in the ash level of the ruined city.

All this happened three thousand years ago

Everything fell apart.

It happened all at once!

And it could happen again. Why not? Forget about climate change. WW3 is right around the corner.

Okay. What would we call this brand new Collapse?

The Tic Toc Age collapse!

the beach and boardwalk

I grew up on the Santa Cruz Boardwalk. Hanging out with my pals. Ogling the tourist chicks. Eating cheese enchiladas and corn dogs. Drinking Beer. Riding the Big Dipper.

The Roller Coaster was designed to scare the shit out of me.

But in a good way. The ride was all about fun. A fun ride. Nothing about troubles.

I’m an old man now.

I’m not worried about the Tic Toc Age collapse.

Or whatever you want to call it.

Let it come.

It’s gonna come.

Or maybe everything will go on like this forever.

Which do you think?