Friday rant: the future is here edition
By Tom Toles
Why can’t we build a better America? Here we are the richest country in history and WHAT THE HECK IS GOING ON?? People collecting government help because there are no jobs when at the same time our infrastructure is perpetually crumbling into smaller and smaller particles that will soon be harder to see than the Higgs boson.
Why can’t we fix the crumbles, and then build some NEW infrastructure too? Why not build a transportation infrastructure of the future? We used to talk about building cities of the future, but that was in the past. Flying cars are still impractical for the reason that trying to land one in front of the convenience store would blast grandma and her walker into the shrubbery, but how about gleaming mass transit with lots of trains and stations and escalators that work? Stuff that’s better and more beautiful than the lowest possible bid and the most prosaic functionality! Cities that we would get excited about and want to live in and show off to the world and be proud of?
Because things are not “shovel-ready?” Because we are a poor nation? Because we have no workers who could do this work? COME ON! What is the MATTER with us? You don’t OFTEN GET TO BE the richest country the world has ever known, now do you? And what are we doing with the opportunity? Can’t we at least build some stuff that will be impressive ruins for future archeologists to bother with? Or are we just skipping the glories part, and going straight to the ruins?
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/tom-toles/post/friday-rant-the-future-is-here-edition/2011/12/15/gIQAWKgNwO_blog.html
= new reply since forum marked as read
...just laying it out.
You know what the problem is with this country - the syncretistic union of Copperhead and neo-Confederate ideology that overtook the Republican party after the death of Lincoln. I do posit that the Republican Party has long been the party of empire, even in it's rejection of internationalism after WWI, and continues to be so today. 
The Democrats may have been lost in the woods for quite awhile, but I think it's clear that by Grover Cleveland and William Jennings Bryan they begun to find the ideological way to what we know as the modern Democratic party. It is a good ideology that values humanity over material conditions. 
Just consider Newt's bibliography: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newt_gingrich#Books
