Will We Ever See Change, Or Will Our Children Dine Only On Leftovers?

Words occasionally fail me. More and more these days, in fact, I am left with a feeling of futility so overpowering that I prefer to devote my limited free time to nursing my fruit trees along rather than to talking a little sense. Our leaders have accelerated their advance from “dumb” to “dumber”, with the new president seeing and raising the nanny-state policies of his idiot forerunner and entangling himself faster in Afghanistan faster than he can extricate himself from Iraq. Are we witnessing the genesis of the Black Bush?

Well, I have sincere disagreements with people better informed than I about the Middle East (my own position being based less on special information, I would stress, than upon the hard facts of human nature and the material limits of our “superpower” abilities). Let me restrict myself for now to pointing out—simply by way of illustration—a few measures that we might have pursued if we had really wanted to rejuvenate our society rather than “stimulate” its current nosedive. Massive construction projects have just been funded across the nation which are supposed to restore our “infrastructure”. I have talked and written for years about the many advantages of phasing in a new kind of road system. Its conduits would be little wider than a sidewalk, and these would be traveled by single-occupancy vehicles (perhaps with the capacity to carry one more body in the rear) of go-cart parameters, more or less. Look around you at any busy intersection: most traffic on our roads is of the single-occupant variety, and the fuel needed to power individual two-ton chariots from home to school to mall to office is exponentially greater than what the go-cart would require. The little buggies would be fun to drive and immensely safer than our killer-cruisers. Their maximum speed would probably be about thirty to forty mph, yet they would get the traveler to most destinations much sooner than present cars because intersections would be virtually non-existent. (Thanks to the diminutive size of the roads, tunnels and bridges could be cheaply, abundantly supplied.) The only engineering challenge would be the smooth admittance of access roads, which might indeed require an occasional stoplight; yet new traffic would be headed in the same direction, so the lunatic determined to ignore signs and collide with someone could do rather little damage. Auto insurance would again be affordable. Taxes would go down, since roads would need far less maintenance and traffic cops would have far less policing to do. The surrounding environment would be minimally impacted: one could admire scenery almost as if one were out for a walk, especially on a relatively deserted conduit. Having arrived back at one’s neighborhood, one could park the cart in a handy “boathouse” servicing the entire block and then walk the remaining hundred feet or so to one’s doorstep.

Large thoroughfares would still be available for conventional vehicles when longer trips or heavier loads were involved. Huge tractor-trailers, however, would have a much-reduced presence on all roads, and especially on interstates. A train can haul approximately fifteen times the weight that a semi moves per unit of fuel. Trains, indeed, would never have been factored out of our economic and cultural life but for special interests salivating over new construction projects, higher sales in oil and equipment, etc., etc. Under an administration that TRULY wanted to introduce change, such decisions would not be made based on what density of lobbyist-vultures was swarming over a carrion. Rather than recycling stupid ideas like Europe’s cap-and-save policy or trying to go green by funding massive public transport projects destined to be patronized mostly by pickpockets and delinquents, a real visionary would have spent some time gathering suggestions, and then hacked away with the philosopher’s razor of simplification. We might genuinely have transformed the way we live, in other words, instead of resuscitating the urban mess we have created since World War II.

I return to a question I posed in an earlier column: are these people who “lead” us conspirators, or are they just imbeciles? How could they possibly have risen so high in the world on so little gray matter? Surely, instead, they are deliberately, cunningly seeking to reduce us to a servile mass, inured to being hazed and herded, taking sugar cubes from a palm thrust into its cage with reflexive gestures of gratitude…. Something in me inclines to pay the new administration and the Congress the compliment that they deserve to be shot as traitors. But, no… listen to them for a minute or two, and you cannot resist the conclusion that they really are idiots—elected, to be sure, by an idiot throng.