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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   30074 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 12, 2024

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As a different post for a different point: Maryland has become one of the most fascinating states, to me. It's probably the most important state that nobody really thinks about: DC is basically a carve-out of Maryland, and even if they're very different places, they're often the same thing. A lot of the old money of Maryland runs through DC, and Maryland is an odd hodge-podge of beautiful small town Americana, blue collar throwbacks, and absolute total shitholes. The history of Maryland is this deeply-repressed and forgotten thing (Catholicism was suppressed until the adoption of the Bill of Rights with the Constitution). And Marylanders often have a pride in their state that rivals Texas or California.

I wonder how much of Baltimore's condition has specifically to do with the nature of DC. In any other state, the largest city would attract some measure of wealth and some corresponding level of niceness, but all the wealth in Maryland is oriented toward the District. Baltimore is a second- or third-tier city relative to Philadelphia or New York, and it doesn't even have the tax haven corporate deference of Trenton New Jersey. In some respect the city has no real economic motive for being, except that it's close enough to DC to beg at the table for scraps, and it has a port. If Baltimore had become the government's capital city (as it could have been), I doubt it would be quite a dilapidated as it is today. If DC had been put somewhere else entirely, I wonder if it would be as bad as it is.

I wonder how much of Baltimore's condition has specifically to do with the nature of DC. In any other state, the largest city would attract some measure of wealth and some corresponding level of niceness, but all the wealth in Maryland is oriented toward the District.

Detroit is different but still equally shitty though.

Detroit's decline is pretty exceptional and represents some deep forces. The amount of industry and wealth lost in Detroit was incredible.

In about 2-3 hours, you can even make it to the far western counties of Maryland.

Thurmont almost out West Virginias West Virginia.

There's also Montgomery County, in the '70s and '80s (when I was young) a collection of affluent 95% white DC suburbs, now a declining black/latino/other third world immigrant area (the public school system is just 25% white now, a figure which includes Arabs). It's a "sanctuary county" where the local politicians virtue-signal by denouncing ICE and Republicans and fellating "diversity".

As Bilbo mentioned, Baltimore is the epitome of faded American glory and white flight.

I spent a whole day at the Baltimore museum of industry and covered perhaps 80% of what they had? https://www.thebmi.org/

Excellent place to visit to remind you of what cities like this were at one point.

That’s a hefty URL.

Bilbo?

It's largely been forgotten now, but Baltimore used to be a tremendous steel city, based around the Bethlehem Steel Sparrows Point facility. It was the largest steel plant in the world in the 1950s. There were many other large mills and shipyards there, making all kinds of things out of steel. Here's a good article about this:

https://thepursuitofhistory.org/2021/12/22/sparrows-point-from-steelmaking-to-distribution-center-hub/

Baltimore was hit extremely hard by deindustrialization, and decent jobs have not come in the same numbers to replace the ones that were lost. I suppose the interesting followup question is why the population remaining in Baltimore reacted in such destructive ways.

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