Locophelia

Please. Someone tell me. Am I losing my mind, or did our President just propose a 53 billion dollar federal downpayment on new bullet trains to financial oblivion? Clearly Obama and his ilk must honestly believe that we're all playing some kind of game with play money. Trillion dollar deficits as far as the eye can see and we're going to build the new George Jetson Orient Express? How could this lefty locomotive leviathan end up being anything else but Amtrak on steroids? Subsidies and yet more subsidies. You don't have to be Edgar Cayce to forsee the thousands of environmental lawsuits, a whole new federal department of Choochanomics, cataclysmic cost over-runs, and endless delays. Maybe we should commission a dozen or so feasability studies to research if government is even capable of building anything of this magnitude? Could they even get through their own labyrinth of city, state, county and federal permits, environmental impact studies, union strikes and death and injury lawsuits ? Hell, we can't even rebuild Ground Zero in a decade. Bullet trains could take 100 years! But then again, maybe that's the whole idea. Bullet trains are just like government; they'll devour money at even greater speeds than ever before, create prevailing wage, politically correct jobs for new age John Henry's for untold decades, and never have to justify their existence on any pragmatic, fiduciary level, and of course provide unparalleled myriads of photo-ops for politicians nationwide. Government's become nothing more than a jobs program floating upon an influential minority's collective, delusionary, futuristic vision. At least Disneyland was built with private capital. If we can't cope with any of our real day to day problems, at least we can dream! Fiscal conservatives just aren't 'young at heart'.

I think the left's romantic obsession with trains mirrors their subsurface yearnings for a totally planned economy, a compulsory society where the 'trains run on time'. (Could Denzel Washington's new runaway train movie, Unstoppable, be a serendipitous, national subliminal metaphor for the runaway train as the American experiment gone out of control?) But it will take more than 30 years of Denzel's cinematic rail-yards practical experience, ingenuity and individual heroism to stop this latest 21st century socio-politico-enviromento-cultural bullet train to oblivion. It will require the leadership of a superhero of mythical proportions. Who was it again that was 'more powerful than a locomotive?'*

*Even if we find our Superman or Superwoman wasn't it green kryptonite that could kill them? Hope theyve saved some of Reagan and Thatcher's DNA for the first successful human clone. That's what I'd call a bonofide Sputnik moment.


George Will writing in Newsweek, Feb. 27:
Generations hence, when the river of time has worn this presidency's importance to a small, smooth pebble in the stream of history, people will still marvel that its defining trait was a mania for high-speed rail projects. This disorder illuminates the progressive mind. . . .
Forever seeking Archimedean levers for prying the world in directions they prefer, progressives say they embrace high-speed rail for many reasons—to improve the climate, increase competitiveness, enhance national security, reduce congestion, and rationalize land use. The length of the list of reasons, and the flimsiness of each, points to this conclusion: the real reason for progressives' passion for trains is their goal of diminishing Americans' individualism in order to make them more amenable to collectivism.
To progressives, the best thing about railroads is that people riding them are not in automobiles, which are subversive of the deference on which progressivism depends. Automobiles go hither and yon, wherever and whenever the driver desires, without timetables. Automobiles encourage people to think they—unsupervised, untutored, and unscripted—are masters of their fates. The automobile encourages people in delusions of adequacy, which make them resistant to government by experts who know what choices people should make.
Time was, the progressive cry was "Workers of the world unite!" or "Power to the people!" Now it is less resonant: "All aboard!"

M.D.T.