Prefaces to Imperial San Francisco
Preface to 2007 edition
Hollywood had long entertained us with special-effects blockbusters featuring the destruction of great cities, but the real thing failed to amuse or distract.
I shared the shock felt by countless others as I watched on television the towers burn and drop in the island metropolis. Images of blinded and choking wraiths wandering through the suddenly monochromatic canyons of lower Manhattan looked eerily like nightmares I'd had of a nuclear aftermath and made visible the worst fears I harbored for a city that I'd come to love. They looked, in fact, likeillustrations to a magazine article that appeared just four months after atomic bombs had demon strated their lethal effectiveness on two cities. "The 36 Hour War" visu alized for readers of Life New York City after rocket-borne A-bombs penetrated a less-than-perfect missile shield meant to protect the United States from unspecified enem ies.2
The towers fell just two weeks after I'd crossed the plaza at their baseon my way to visit the New York Mercantile Exchange. I was working on a sequel toImperial San Francisco,to be calledImperial Manhattan,and I wanted to see for myself the frantic ritual by which traders convert the organic world into ciphers for reinvestment in innumerable otherventures, including the precious urban real estate over which I walked. I'd used San Francisco as a case study of how imperial cities parasitizetheir hinterlands for the benefit of those who own their land and muchelse besides-especially the channels of information that shape perceived
“The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist. McDonald’s cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the designer of the U.S. Air Force F-r 5. And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley’s technologies to flourish is called the U.S. Army, Air Force, Navy, and Marine Corps. And these fighting forces are paid for by American taxpayer dollars.”
