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.
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