For Xmas our City of Magnificent Splendors has decided to commence far-ranging repairwork on virtually all of the major thoroughfares running north and south; consequently, such travel is now rendered vastly more complicated, time-consuming, and temper-provoking, as if to test our mettle as a civil society at a moment when its only glue is the prevalence of the civic illusion itself. Apart from this infrastructure, in fact, we are nothing but squatters in the ruins of the achievements of our unknown and unknowable forebears.