Okay, buckle up. My neurons fire funny.
Last night Susie Madrak mentioned she was watching Apollo 13 again. She watches it whenever it is on. Even at the laundromat.
“We used to do big things. I have hope we will again,” Madrak tweeted.
I get that. After four years of the Trump administration, brother, do I get that. (Yeah, we’re both boomers.)
My Depression-era grandmother marveled that she’d lived to see the first moon landing in 1969. For me as a teen, it was just a natural evolution of American technological advancement. That was a given, a source of national pride. Remember national pride? Before waterboarding? Before extraordinary rendition? Before a president corrupt beyond the wildest banana-republics of TV fiction? Before QAnon?
Technology has advanced since the 1960s, but not necessarily Americans’ standard of living. Unions are atrophied. The middle class is shrinking. We’d rather allow tax cuts for rich people and fight each other for scraps that fall from their tables. Our interest in doing big things has waned and it especially shows this year.
“Infrastructure week” is a running joke during the Trump administration because we have not done big things in decades. We’ve become an Idiocracy. It just didn’t take America electing President Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho 500 years from now. We elected Donald J. Trump four short years ago. It wasn’t as catastrophic as Earth being hit by a comet. But combined with the COVID-19 pandemic, 2020 feels like a mini-apocalypse.
Susie’s wish that we might do big things again reminded me of Pvt. Joe Bauers’s speech at the end of Idiocracy (you have to have seen the film):
Pvt. Joe Bauers: … And there was a time in this country, a long time ago, when reading wasn’t just for fags and neither was writing. People wrote books and movies, movies that had stories so you cared whose ass it was and why it was farting, and I believe that time can come again!
After a trip through California’s Central Valley in 2013, I reminisced about an America that did big things more inspiring than movies about farting asses:
Has America – and the American Dream itself – gone into retreat? Once the largest, most prosperous in the world, the American middle class is faltering, crumbling like our nation’s schools and bridges.
Flag-pin-wearing American exceptionalists tell crowds this is the greatest nation on Earth, and then repeat “we’re broke.” They hope to dismantle safety net programs, telling Americans working harder than ever – at jobs and looking for jobs – that they don’t have enough “skin in the game.” Wake up and smell the austerity. America can no longer afford Americans.
Some of us remember a time when America’s dreams were boundless.
One summer when I was a child, I traveled with my grandparents to visit my aunt and uncle in Lawton, Oklahoma. My uncle was serving in the U.S. Army at Fort Sill. They lived off-base with their toddler son. The apartment backed up to a drive-in theater. “Old Yeller” was playing.
We left from Chicago driving Route 66. (The Nelson Riddle theme to the TV show is still the hippest ever.) The trip took a couple of days. The highway was still two lanes as you went further west. That was already changing.
Beside Route 66 and elsewhere, Eisenhower’s Interstate Highway System – the vast system of roads most of us take for granted – was taking shape from border to border and from coast to coast. It was a national project worthy of a great nation. The country was on the move.
Astronaut Alan Shepard was a national hero. Our parents wanted us to go to college. Our president wanted us to go. Our country wanted us to go. Getting an education was not just a key to a future better than our parents’. It was a patriotic duty. Not just something you could do for you, but what you could do for your country.
America was going to the moon by the end of the decade. We needed scientists and engineers and new technologies. Between the G.I. Bill and government-backed student loans, America was making it more affordable than ever to get an education. It was good for you. It was good for your community. It was good for all of U.S.
On another trip last month through California’s dry Central Valley, I rode past miles and miles of crops and orchards. Tomatoes. Lettuce. Vegetables. Strawberries. Walnuts. Cherries. Pistachios.
San Joaquin Valley agriculture accounts for more than 12 percent of the nation’s output by dollar value, according to Associated Press. It produces 25 percent of America’s food on about one percent of U.S. farmland.
What goes onto your dinner plate and into your mouth is made possible in large part, not by daring, bootstrap entrepreneurs, but by the huge public works project we saw on our journey. Sierra snowmelt harnessed to grow food on dry lands. Dams. Reservoirs. Pumps. Pipes. Aqueducts.
And beside those canals, farms providing food and jobs along 700 miles of the California Aqueduct and the Central Valley Project. Begun during the Great Depression. Built with public money. By Americans. For Americans.
But today, that America is in retreat. Its dreams are shriveled. Instead of investing in public infrastructure like aqueducts, highways and bridges, we watch ours collapse as China’s rise. In Washington, pundits and politicians wring their hands over nickels and dimes for Americans while spending hundreds of billions of deficit dollars to maintain a global empire. Almost 900 overseas military bases? Was that our Founders’ vision of greatness?
Meanwhile, tax cuts starve cities and states of revenue until grasping investors – foreign and domestic – can gobble up public infrastructure built with your sweat equity. The privateers hope to extract the last drop of value out of what we, our parents, and our grandparents built to benefit all Americans. These patriots will hide their gains offshore and whine about tax rates they don’t pay while pocketing billions in public subsidies.
Tom Sawyer conned friends into paying him for the privilege of painting his aunt’s fence. Tom Sawyer, Inc. is not far behind. These guys won’t be satisfied until we are paying them to work for them.
When they have stripped America bare, the vulture capitalists will move on. Hands over their hearts, still waving their flags and humming the national anthem, they’ll move on, leaving America to crumble to dust. And they will shake the dust from their feet.
How much longer will We the People tolerate that?
Not beyond November 3, 2020. No way. That is, if we have the stomach for it.
“Lucifer’s Hammer,” the 1977 post-apocalypse-survival novel by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, takes place in that same Central Valley. A comet strike destabilizes fault lines and triggers tsunamis that sweep away coastal cities and turn much of the Central Valley into an inland sea. Survivors of a battle with anti-technology religious cultists ponder eking out a minimal future as rat catchers and swineherds, “good peasants, safe peasants, superstitious peasants,” when once “we used to control the lightning!” Risking themselves to save a nearby generating station from the marauders could cost more lives, but give them the power needed to rebuild, to do big things.
“Give my children the lightning again,” pleads Senator Jellison with his dying breaths.
In hospitals across this country today, Americans are dying with no family or friends to hear their dying words. Fuck this. Crush the cultists at the polls. Build back better.
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