The Egregious Lie Americans Tell Themselves
Commuters crowd into a subway car in New York City. (Mark Lennihan / AP)
In September 2016, the Liberty Bridge in Pittsburgh caught on fire.
Originally built in 1928 and last renovated in 1982, the bridge carries more
than 50,000 vehicles a day and serves as a main commuter link between the
city's central business district and its populous southern suburbs. Long in
a state of questionable repair, it had been an object of particular concern
after the spectacular and deadly collapse of the Interstate 35W bridge in
Minneapolis in 2007. Pennsylvania had-and still has-one of the highest
percentages of "structurally deficient" bridges in the nation, and the
prospect of a failure of the Liberty Bridge, whose main span is nearly 45
feet above the Monongahela River, was terrifying to contemplate.
Nevertheless, it took six years after the I-35W disaster for Pennsylvania's
perennially Republican state legislature to pass a transportation spending
bill to free up repair funds. In the interim, increasingly drastic weight
restrictions had been imposed in order to prevent, or at least mitigate
against, a Liberty Bridge failure or collapse.
Even after legislative approval, funding delays pushed the start of the
project to 2015, and it was expected to last 30 months. The blaze that
engulfed the bridge burned so hot it buckled one of the main support beams,
and an investigation determined that the contractor had failed to follow
proper fire safety protocols. The Occupational Safety and Health
Administration fined it several thousand dollars. It faced a more
substantial penalty of $3 million from the Pennsylvania Department of
Transportation, but then the PennDOT decided to simply waive the fine.
There's a verbal tic particular to a certain kind of response to a certain
kind of story about the thinness and desperation of American society; about
the person who died of preventable illness or the Kickstarter campaign to
help another who can't afford cancer treatment even with "good" insurance;
about the plight of the homeless or the lack of resources for the rural
poor; about underpaid teachers spending thousands of dollars of their own
money for the most basic classroom supplies; about train derailments, the
ruination of the New York subway system and the decrepit states of our
airports and ports of entry.
"I can't believe in the richest country in the world. ."
This is the expression of incredulity and dismay that precedes some story
about the fundamental impoverishment of American life, the fact that the
lived, built geography of existence here is so frequently wanting, that the
most basic social amenities are at once grossly overpriced and terribly
underwhelming, that normal people (most especially the poor and working
class) must navigate labyrinths of bureaucracy for the simplest public
services, about our extraordinary social and political paralysis in the face
of problems whose solutions seem to any reasonable person self-evident and
relatively straightforward.
It is true that, as measured by GDP, or by the size of the credit and equity
markets, or even just by the gaudy presence of our Googles, Amazons and
Apples, the United States is the greatest machine for the production of
money in the modern history of the world.
But this wealth is largely an abstraction, a trick of the broad and largely
meaningless aggregations of numbers that makes up most of what the business
pages call "economics." The American commonwealth is shockingly
impoverished. Ask anyone who's compared the nine-plus-hour train ride from
Pittsburgh to New York with the barely two-hour journey from Paris to
Bordeaux, an equidistant journey, or who's watched the orderly, accurate
exit polls from a German election and compared them with the fizzling,
overheating voting machines in Florida.
Now, it is true that bridges collapse in Europe, too, although this past
summer's tragedy was in Italy, whose famously ungovernable corruption may be
the closest continental analogue to our own United States. American liberals
and leftists tend to over-valorize the Western European model, but there is
no doubt that the wealthy countries at the core of the EU have far more
successfully mitigated the most extreme social inequalities and built
systems for health and transportation that far outstrip anything in the U.S.
Even in their poor urban suburbs or, say, the disinvested industrial north
of France, you will find nothing like the squalor that we still permit-that
we accept as ordinary-in the USA. Meanwhile, in our ever-declining
adversary-of-convenience, the Moscow subway runs on time.
The social wealth of a society is better measured by the quality of its
common lived environment than by a consolidated statistical approximation
like GDP, or even an attempt at weighted comparisons like so-called
purchasing power parity. There is a reason why our great American cities,
for all of our supposed wealth, often feel and look so shabby. The money
goes elsewhere. Seville, a pretty, modest city of less than a million people
in the south of Spain, built 80 kilometers of bike lanes for $40 million in
less than two years, and eliminated a lot of ugly, on-street parking in the
process. Imagine a commensurate effort in New York City, a far wealthier
place on paper. Well, its supposedly liberal mayor is going to give Amazon
$1.5 billion in tax breaks instead.
To be fair, New York City and state, mired in graft and corruption, cannot
build a single mile of subway for less than $2 billion.
Elsewhere, the con artists running America's military-industrial complex are
worried that the hundreds of billions we sink every year into planes that
cannot fly in the rain and ships that cannot steer have left the United
States virtually unable to win any wars. The United States spends perhaps a
trillion dollars every year on its military and wars.
Poverty-both individual and social-is a policy, not an accident, and not
some kind of natural law. These are deliberate choices about the allocation
of resources. They are eminently undoable by modest exercises of political
power, although if the state- and city-level Democratic leaders of New York
and northern Virginia are the national mold, then our nominally left-wing
party is utterly, hopelessly beholden to the upward transfer of social
wealth to an extremely narrow cadre of already extremely rich men and women.
I voted last week, an exercise that now feels like mouthing polite prayers
at someone else's church. The line snaked out the door of the tiny, hot
basement room and into the cold rain. There were only three voting machines.
One was broken, and one seemed to be working only intermittently. A young
woman with a baby in a stroller was in line in front of me. After we'd
waited for 10 minutes without moving, she looked at me and rolled her eyes.
"Can you believe this is how we do this?" she said. "In 2018."
I smiled. I shrugged. I waved at her cute kid. I did not say, "Yes. I can
believe it."
Jacob Bacharach
Truthdig
Jacob Bacharach is the author of the novels "The Doorposts of Your House and
on Your Gates" and "The Bend of the World." His most recent book is "A Cool
Customer: Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking.".
