The egregious lie Americans tell themselves
Jacob Bacharach Truthdig November 16, 2018, 3:51 AM GMT
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."