Last night's rush hour was another peak performance from the drama queens at the T.  My trip usually takes 45 minutes door-to-door.  Last night it was a two-hour ordeal.  I have to ask your indulgence.  It's not a very interesting tale, but I like to record the details, just in case someone decides to file a class action suit or something.

It started with alarms going off in Arlington station.  They are apparently not connected to any warning system, because the sirens blared for several minutes, no one from the T showed up, and no announcements were made.  I suspect that even if the T "Ambassador" were to be alerted he or she would not take the trouble to walk all the way down the block-long corridor to check on it.  I mean, if they left their station, who would stand around glaring at the customers and doing nothing while they were away?

T riders are so battered and beaten down they don't bother to do anything when they hear an ear-splitting alarm in the underground, either.  Am I about to be suffocated by a cloud of poison gas?  Oh well.  It's the T.  What did I expect?  Guess I'll be a little late for dinner again, honey.

The trains were running on their usual rush-hour schedule.  Long stretches of waiting and then three at once.  With the sirens blaring, I got on the first train that arrived, though usually I end up letting a couple go by because they're too packed to squeeze on with any of your human dignity intact.  But when it comes to enduring ear-splitting noise or abandoning human dignity, I think the choice is clear. 

The ringing in my ears subsided by the time I reached Park to catch the red line to Alewife.  My dignity would take longer to recover, but, oh well, it's the T.  What did I expect?

Once four trains had come and gone on the opposite track, I knew this wasn't just your everyday, ordinary rush-hour drama underway.  No announcement from the T as four more trains came and went in the opposite direction, and not a dicky bird on the track to Alewife.  The platform got more and more packed.  After about half an hour, with no word from the T, a lame train wanly tooting its horn inched into the station. 

The conductor announced that they would be emptying the train, which was packed as well, onto the platform, and obviously not taking any passengers.  This process took another ten or fifteen minutes, as only one of the doors in the lead car was working.  Finally, an automated message in a warbly voice announced that there was a disabled train at Downtown Crossing (presumaly the same train that was now sitting in Park), causing "serious delays."  Yeah, thanks for the heads-up.  Good to know the T's on top of it. 

The disabled train limped out of the station, and it was four more back-to-back packed trains before there was enough space for me to get on one.  I felt sorry for the poor sods at Mass General, the next stop on the line, who were trapped on an outside elevated platform in the furious wind and cold, wet snow.  There was no room for any of them on the train I was on either.  Who knows how long some of them had been waiting, or would end up waiting for a train that could accommodate them.

Once we crossed the Charles, we stopped again for what the conductor grumbled was a "medical emergency" at Harvard station.  Probably just a drunk.  Of course I don't believe anything a T employee says when it comes to service, especially delays, but it would not surprise me if there was a medical emergency.  In fact, it's surprising there aren't more when you pack people in like that and then leave them standing for an hour and a half.  It's a freak-out situation, if ever there was one.

We inched into Kendall/MIT, and left the station minutes later only to stall in the tunnel.  The Conductor came on again to tell us that this time it was a disabled train in Davis.  By now, it didn't matter what the cause was, if it ever did, if, indeed there was one.  I mean, what are you gonna do?  You're trapped.  You're at their mercy.  They could say: "We are holding the trains because we hate you and want to ruin your evening plans," "or "Little Joe's escaped again and has hijacked a train," or  "there's been a nuclear attack, and we'll be stuck down here for several generations, or at least until the nuclear winter is over," and we'd all nod our heads, roll our eyes, cluck our tongues, and be like, "Figures.  Knew I shoulda TiVoed Toddlers and Tiaras."

I was getting some reading done, anyway, although as we approached the two-hour mark I was starting to cramp up all over, as you do when you can't move about, except to shift your weight from one foot to the other.  I was reading about the Italian Renaissance, of all things, and how it really came about. 

In A Crowd of One, John Clippinger writes:

In many respects the Italian Renaissance offers the perfect, contained, concentrated  case study of how closed, traditional, clannish, violent, and hierarchical societies were transformed into significantly more open, progressive, inclusive, and less violent societies in relatively short periods of time.  These changes ... were not the consequence of any deliberate "democratizing process"—such as elections, universal suffrage, legislation, or even enlightened rulers—but rather the result of extending trust networks beyond locality and familial relationships.

Hmm.  But change didn't come out of nowhere (it seldom does).  One of the catalysts for change during the 1300s, Clippenger goes on to explain, was the Black Death, which killed nearly 60% of the population of Florence. 

As I read on, stuffed into a subway car with hardly enough room to breathe, I could not help but imagine how much easier my daily commute would be with 60% fewer riders.  It would be easier to get a table for Sunday Brunch, too.

Obviously, "there was a shortage of skilled workers of all types and classes, given all the warfare and plague.  The strictures of a hierarchical social and moral order had to be relaxed if any work was to be completed."  But that was only the beginning.  Clippinger's premise, and that of a growing number of Evolutionary Psychologists and neuroeconomists propounding a new "social physics" is that "contrary to Hobbes's state of nature in which every man is for himself, human beings and virtually all other social species have evolved highly sophisticated behaviors for cooperating, fighting, and dying in defense of their group."

Crises in 14th century Florence led to the breakdown of the "Big Man" model of social hierarchy.  People had to network.  "Success in Renaissance Florence depended upon acquiring relationships, skills, and status in one arena and using them to achieve prominence in another.... It was the values of cooperation and joint payoffs that eventually out-competed the values of hierarchy and zero sum conflict."

All sounds vaguely Obamaish, doesn't it? 

Still, it's wise to keep in mind, as Clippinger reminds us, "Just as there is no inevitable 'progress' in nature, so there is no inevitable progress in human affairs; successor societies are not always better than their predecessors.  The Renaissance was followed by two centuries of political retreat in Italy, with much of the innovative energy of the Renaissance moving out of the country."

But let's not get ahead of ourselves.  First the Black Death, then the Renaissance.  Because, trust me, we're not going to even enjoy it if we're all smooshed together and in each other's way like we are now.