Brokenland Note:
Tracks and Maps
13 May 2015
So, on the Op-Ed page of the Times this morning, we have what looks to me like cause and effect. On the front page: result.
The cause is a growing conviction among Americans that this country is “on the wrong track.”
The effect is the inability of Congress to manage a coherent federal funding program for interstate travel. Congressmen are elected, increasingly, by voters uncertain that there is anything that the federal government knows how to do. Congressmen are sent to Washington to stop it, and that is what they are doing.
The result is the death of six passengers on an Amtrak train in Philadelphia, after a derailing that effectively shut down rail traffic in the Northeast Corridor.
This last bit of news, of course, hit me before I got to the Op-Ed page, and left me outraged to the bone. I wanted to make every living Congressman, in office or retired, who has ever voted against Amtrak in any way, criminally liable for the deaths and injuries caused by the Philadelphia derailment. I want to send them all to jail, or, better, to roll out a guillotine in front of the Capitol and chop their heads off. Not just for revenge but pour encourager les autres. That is what I wanted.
You can’t always get what you want, and that’s a good thing, because rolling out guillotines… well, I don’t doubt that my own head would be rolling soon enough.
Having calmed down a bit by the time I read the Op-Ed pieces, one by Frank Bruni (“The Bitter Backdrop to 2016″) and the other by Bill de Blasio and Mick Cornett (“Let Our Cities Move”; Mr Cornett is the Mayor of Oklahoma City), I remembered that the problem with the United States is not Congress or “Washington,” but — Americans. Americans, after all, watch all that ridiculous political advertising and are influenced by it. Or so it is believed. Correlation is not causation. The airing of inflammatory ads may simply coincide with voters’ independent inclinations. The worst thing about political advertising so far as I can see is that it leads many ordinary people to associate campaigns with voting; bored and disgusted by the first, they don’t bother with the second. So, for today, I am not going to wag my finger at Americans for being stupid enough to let political advertising stand in for political education.
No, today I am going to argue that what really bothers Americans is that we are all on the same track.
Once upon a time, the United States was a growing nation, swelling with speed and prosperity never before seen on this planet. Its mission, insofar as it had one, was to shine the light of democracy and fair play for everyone else to see. I am sure that millions of Americans actually believed this. But the luxury of doing so was paid for by a vast and fertile territory that waited to be populated and developed. How long this would have taken without the transformative technologies of the Industrial Revolution is an idle question, but, eventually and inevitably, the process was complete. The frontier disappeared.
Today, the United States is just a country like any other. The windfall of novelty has been spent. Most would-be boom-towns are ghost towns. The big cities get bigger, the medium-sized cities get smaller, and the agricultural heartland empties out. But we are saddled with a system of political boundaries that reflect ever more poorly our everyday lives. Take my part of the world.
I live on an island at the center of an immense conurbation, which I shall call “the metropolitan area,” just as everybody does, except in political contexts — because the metropolitan area has no political realty. Only part of it lies within New York State. A very good deal of it lies in New Jersey, and it also stretches into the Connecticut panhandle. (Hence that ghastly and illiterate car-ad term, “the tri-state area.”) Nor is the City of New York self-governing. Its transportation system, for example, is controlled by a department of the New York State government. Even though the Metropolitan Transportation Agency meets in and operates within the city, it is overseen by state officials in that faraway, deeply corrupt hick town, Albany. Meanwhile, the metropolitan area’s airports, and the bridge and tunnels that cross the state line that divides New York from New Jersey, are controlled by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, the vehicle for Chris Christie’s lieutenants’ dirty tricks. The purest disconnect between political and everyday reality is embedded in Staten Island, which not only dislikes being part of New York City but would prefer belonging to New Jersey. I do not believe that anyone in Staten Island dreams of relocating Richmond County outside the metropolitan area. If you drew a circle with a radius of 25 or 30 miles from Times Square, redefined everything within it as The Metropolitan Area, and made it self-governing, I think that even the Shaolinese could be happy with that.
Self-government is the great liberal idea: it is what swept despotism (benevolent or otherwise) from its thrones in the West. Self-government begins with the self; people who, for one sad reason or another, cannot govern themselves are denied their liberty. Next comes local government, badly neglected in this age of those Brussels sprouts, the professionalized overseers who “know better” and whose Industrial-Age dream it is to put everything on the same system. I’m not advocating any immediate return to local government, because local people haven’t trained themselves to do the job. Local government is the baby that the nanny state drops out the window.
Finding out what kind of government any given situation requires calls for trial and error, not vision. Transit operators will soon discover that a standard gauge will enhance the growth and maintenance of a transportation system; I daresay that, left to trial and error, they would also discover that running passengers and freight over the same rails is a bad idea, and that, in the long run, two sets of track is much more than twice as optimal as one. (We will soon be teaching ourselves that every dwelling requires two plumbing systems, with outdoor irrigation using a third.) But standards must serve a purpose, not just the satisfaction of an itch for uniformity. Why not have artists and Kip’s Bay decorators furnish and decorate the cars? Wouldn’t it be great to visit Chinatown on the Chinoiserie Line?
Given the country’s varied terrain, and its even more varied population densities, it would make sense to replace the states with regions, which we could label as “states” for form’s sake. Rising to the top, there ought, aside from matters of defense and foreign policy aside, to be very little left for the Federal Government to govern. I think about that whenever I come across news about Rand Paul.
Or maybe we are all off the track. Only the politicians care about their maps. Who else knows all the state capitals?