Nick Gillespie summarizes a classic Twilight Zone episode — one I recently watched on DVD — while discussing the recent power outage, in Monsters Were Due on Maple Street:
Remember the old Twilight Zone episode, “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street,” ranked as one of the series’ best by those who care about such matters? A minor classic on Cold War hysteria, it takes place on a typical street in a typical American town, where the power goes out for no apparent reason. Within hours, the neighbors are at each other’s throats, accusing one another of treachery and worse. As the lights intermittently come back on and the day turns to night, rioting and shooting occur and the whole place goes to hell in a hand basket. Because it’s the Twilight Zone, with its mandatory groan-inducing denouement, we learn at the close of the show that two big-headed aliens, an advance team for a planned invasion of the planet, have been playing the Maple Streeters for suckers. What they did here, they’ll soon do all over the country.
As Gillespie says, “yesterday’s record-setting blackout that left some 50 million without electricity should have been a Maple Street moment,” but it wasn’t.
Indeed, the most interesting blackout-related story is the one that never happened. The sort of pandemonium, hysteria, looting, crime, and chaos that typically greets even minor football victories as well as catastrophic utility failures simply didn’t materialize.
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Compare this blackout to the last great power failure in Gotham, which ushered in what then-Mayor Abe Beame understatedly referred to as a “Night of Terror”. The total damage for the crime, arson, and theft associated with the ’77 blackout is generally pegged at around $150 million and the mayhem that ensued (including looting and widespread muggings in broad daylight) is considered on a par or worse with what followed in the wake of the late-’60s race riots there.