After America - Mark Steyn [15]
There’s your American decline right there: from out-of-this-world to out-of-our-minds, an increasingly unmanned flight from real, historic, technological accomplishment to unreal, ahistorical, therapeutic, touchyfeely multiculti.
So we can’t go to the moon. And, by the time you factor in getting to the airport to do the shoeless shuffle and the enhanced patdown, flying to London takes longer than it did in 1960. If they were trying to build the transcontinental railroad now, they’d be spending the first three decades on the environmental-impact study and hammering in the Golden Spike to celebrate the point at which the Feasibility Commission’s expansion up from the fifth floor met the Zoning Board’s expansion down from the twelfth floor.
Google and Apple and other latter day American success stories started in somebody’s garage—the one place where innovation isn’t immediately buried by bureaucracy, or at least in most states, not until some minor municipal functionary discovers you neglected to apply for a Not Sitting Around on My Ass All Day permit. What did Apple and company do in those garages? They invented and refined home computers—an entirely logical response to late twentieth-century America: when reality seizes up, freedom retreats and retrenches to virtual reality, to the internal. Where once space was the final frontier, now we frolic in the canyons of our mind. We’re in the Wilbur & Orville era of the Internet right now, but at the Federal Communications Commission and other agencies they’re already designing the TSA uniforms for the enhanced cyber-patdown.
And what do you have to show for all that government? It’s amazing with a multi-trillion-dollar barrel how quickly you wind up scraping the bottom of it. In Obama’s “American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan,” two of the five objectives were to “computerize the health-care system” and “modernize classrooms.”9 That sound you hear is the computerized eyerolling with which every modernized hack author now comes equipped. For its part, the Congressional Progressive Caucus wanted “green jobs creation” and “construction of libraries in rural communities to expand broadband access.”10 And in a postmodern touch, Mark Pinsky at the New Republic made the pitch for a new Federal Writers’ Project, in which writers laid off by America’s collapsing newspaper industry would be hired by the government to go around the country “documenting the ground-level impact of the Great Recession.”11 America has a money-no-object government with a lot of money but no great objects.
GOTTERDAMMERUNG
When the father of Big Government, Franklin Roosevelt, was brought before the Hoover Dam, he declared:
This morning I came, I saw, and I was conquered, as everyone would be who sees for the first time this great feat of mankind.12
But the bigger government gets, the less it actually does. You think a guy like Obama is going to put up a new Hoover Dam (built during the Depression and opened two years ahead of schedule)? No chance. Today’s Big Government crowd is more likely to put up a new regulatory agency to tell the Hoover Dam it’s non-wheelchair accessible and has to close. As Deanna Archuleta, Obama’s Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Interior, assured an audience in Nevada: “You will never see another federal dam.”13 “Great feats of mankind” are an environmental hazard, for mankind has great feats of clay. But hang on, isn’t hydropower “renewable” energy? It doesn’t use coal or oil, it generates electricity from the natural water cycle. If that’s not renewable, what is? Ah, but, according to environmental “dam-busters,” reservoirs are responsible for some 4 percent of the earth’s carbon dioxide emissions. Environmental devastation-wise, the Hoover Dam