Winter conducted a fighting retreat this year, one last storm bringing down our cable service. That left us without TV, Internet, or house phones. When we signed up for this threefold package a couple of years ago, Mrs. Straggler observed that we should soon be getting our food and water from the cable-service provider. With some advances in the technology of molecular-level matter synthesis, my lady’s prediction may yet come to pass; but on this occasion we were only inconvenienced, not starved.
At such times one’s thoughts turn naturally to the fragility of civilization, and to speculations about whether our current civilization is more fragile than most. It used to take an invading barbarian army to turn comfortable urbanites into subsistence farmers or corpse-piles. Nowadays potential agents of civilizational destruction are more numerous.
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