Across America

The past two weeks were a bad time for a financial columnist to be gone — or maybe they were a fine time. I've been warning about this collapse for years, not as a wish but as a concern. That our practices of deregulation, consolidation, hollowing out of the economy and building a vast Ponzi-scheme economy in its place would inevitably come crashing down.

Gone was a train trip from Seattle to Baltimore, where the Bouchercon mystery writers' convention was honoring my editor, Barbara Peters, and publisher, Robert Rosenwald. Susan and I wanted to take Amtrak across this big land before Republican John Sidney McCain III was elected and followed through on his longtime obsession to shut down the national passenger rail system. In fact, Amtrak does a fine job, especially considering the years of underfunding it must fight against, and the fact that it is a mere tenant on the railroads it travels (outside of the Northeast Corridor). It's interesting, and heartbreaking, to consider what we might have if we had been investing in high-speed train networks instead of financial swindles over the past 20 years. Even now, the trains are packed and popular.

The train forces one out of the crazy rhythms of flying and driving. You see how vast and varied this nation remains, especially in the places left behind by the Interstate highway system. Barely a golden arch profanes the route of the Empire Builder across the northern tier. There are the rotting, bell-towered schoolhouses sitting forlornly on the depopulated Great Plains, the little farm towns, down on their luck for decades but hanging on, the mountaintops our forebears conquered with blood and tears to lay steel rails from coast-to-coast. Anxieties about stolen elections and falling Dow give way to the gentle swaying of the train.

My grandfather and uncle worked for the railroads and I learned young that the trains can tell much about the state of the nation. Far fewer freight trains are carrying Canadian lumber bound for Arizona subdivisions. Instead, they are laden with wheat going west, and the container cars are filled with scrap steel bound for Asia — some of our last exports. Eastbound, fewer are filled with stuff from China to fill Wal-Mart shelves. We are tapped out. Get across the Mississippi and pass the industrial ruins of Milwaukee, Chicago and Cincinnati and you see where that scrap is coming from. What happened to the people who once held those manufacturing jobs — they aren't working at Microsoft. Or their children — bound for Iraq or Afghanistan more likely.

Baltimore is an especially sad city. Like the others, it has lovely bones — and how stark is the contrast between the exalted architecture of 1890-1940 and the ghastly dehumanizing boxes plunked down in the '60s, '70s and '80s. Of course, the contasts are most jarring in the train stations. Chicago Union Station has its inspiring old grand waiting room — and its rabbit warren of a newer "airport-style" concourses. The same is true in Washington, D.C. Thank God, Baltimore's Pennsylvania Station is preserved largely as built in 1911. Architecture speaks to who we are as a civilization. Once we sought to elevate and inspire. Now we are mired in decadence, ugliness and pennies pinched so the rich can grow richer.

Baltimore: Now this once grand city is a tourist destination, like a New Orleans pre-Katrina. Successive waves of economic shocks have hollowed out the rest, from the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad to Legg Mason. Even newer downtown shops are closed. Everywhere, the truth of the HBO series The Wire is just beyond the safe tourist streets. The show makes whites uncomfortable, I have read, and no wonder: it shows the underclass as human, and under siege — all tastily concealed in a compelling cop show. I wonder: What will happen to this city when we reach the tipping point — when the money runs out from the generations of the old middle class — and far fewer can afford tourism? Of course, outside the city limits, the wealth of Washington is evident — the era of small conservative government has been quite profitable — and the lesser classes can be kept safely segregated.

My convention is not much of one. Besides a panel, I am pulled into the vortex of the financial meltdown and writing a column for the Seattle Times.

Baltimore — the entire East — is hot and uncomfortable. Cincinnati reaches 85 the second week in October. I lived in Ohio for more than eight years and can't remember anything like this. When are we going to realize the crisis of global warming is upon us? Soon, like the financial collapse, the corporate media will be talking about "what went wrong…" or not…stories of the time when it is too late.