Bezos and the rusting bridge to freedom
With the weather ruinous and the climate changing and inflation soaring and Putin still breathing and Trump still at large and the clay streaming off the hill behind my house and settling an inch thick in the yard, we’re all in need of a bit of good news.
Well, one bit of good news is Mr Karcher’s water blaster which is a joy to deploy, being utterly antiprostatic, and the other is a story from the Dutch port of Rotterdam that sends the endorphins of delight cartwheeling through every synapse (no, no, don’t write to praise my grasp of neural matters. It isn’t brain surgery, you know).
Rotterdam was bombed to oblivion by the Nazis in 1940. Only a handful of buildings survived and even fewer bridges, one of which was a 1920s rail bridge of steel lattice. It was an ugly beast but, because it survived, the locals took it to their hearts, and they even gave it a nickname, the Hef.
Rotterdam is renowned for its shipbuilding, so when the revoltingly rich Jeff Bezos wanted a new yacht built it was to Rotterdam that he went. His yacht is all but finished now, at a cost of half a billion bucks, but if it is ever to go to sea it needs first to pass under the Hef, and, what with its helipads and other oligarchic essentials, it is far too big to do that. So the boatbuilders applied for permission to disassemble the Hef, sail the yacht out, and then reassemble it. This would take a few days at most and all costs would be met by nice Mr Bezos. Fine, said a council official, go ahead.
But word got out and the good people of Rotterdam were not happy. A group was formed whose members pledged to attend the Hef on the day of its dismantling and to pelt Mr Bezos’ shiny new yacht with eggs. So fierce was the protest that in the end the boatbuilders withdrew their request to the council and for now the Bezos yacht is stuck in the boatyard.
Of course one can understand the locals being reluctant to lose the use of their bridge, even if only for a day or two, merely to indulge a tycoon’s whim. One can also understand their reluctance to see the bridge taken apart. It is a hundred years old, after all, and might prove difficult to put back together.
But as it happens the locals wouldn’t be losing the use of the Hef, because the thing was replaced by a tunnel in the 1990s. The Hef is a bridge no more. It’s just
a landmark. Moreover, it has already been taken apart and renovated in a threeyear process that ended in 2017. In other words the quick dismantling would have risked nothing, cost nothing and inconvenienced no-one.
So the only reason the locals objected was to thwart a billionaire. They stood up to the notion that money can buy anything. The Hef might be ugly, old and useless, but it was theirs, and they would decide what happened to it.
That noise you can hear is your own guts cheering. We inhabit a world too long in thrall to the worst of American capitalism and the conflation of wealth with worth.
The consequence is a few dozen islandowning, space-rocketing billionaires with the mentality of toddlers playing priapic games of my-yacht’s-bigger-than-yours while everything else crumbles. And if we’re ever going to uncrumble it we’re going to need a lot more people like the egg-biffing burghers of Rotterdam. I raise my blaster to them and go back to work with a grin.