The Bridge To Nowhere - Boondoggles, Scams, And The Seedy Nature Of Local Government

Montgomery County took a perfectly good four lane feeder road linking a major urban hub with important thoroughfares to downtown Washington and Virginia, and made it two car lanes and two bike lanes. 

The County Supervisor, testifying at a public hearing said:

We feel that the reconfiguration of Little Falls Parkway will confirm the County's environmental focus.  We are committed to the progressive move to self-propelled, environmentally friendly transportation.  The skies above will be brighter, the air cleaner, and our byways made quieter, more friendly, and more accommodating for all. 

The completed project has done nothing of the kind.  No biker has chosen to ride the bike lanes for the a few hundred feet of cycle freeway only to merge with busy commuter and commercial traffic and end up on two of the region's major thoroughfares. 

It is the road to nowhere, a stunt, a politically devious and administratively wasteful project.  Not one bicycle has been seen on the new dedicated lanes, and traffic now with only one lane in either direction, is stalled during morning and evening rush hours. 

'If we build it, they will come' is the old saw used by public planners since time immemorial, and Montgomery County was no different. 'You may not see much bike traffic on our new road now, but its time has not yet fully come.  When bikers see the advantages of dedicated lanes, a scenic environment, and safe access beyond, they will flock to Little Falls Parkway'. 

Now, Montgomery County is not the first jurisdiction to build roads to nowhere, make improvements where they were not needed, disrupt a perfectly good, well-functioning system for no apparent reason.  In a nearby residential neighborhood in Northwest Washington, DC, a perfectly good service road, an important passageway for trash pickup and other heavy vehicles was ripped up and replaced.  The old road was as solid as the Hoover Dam.  It took weeks to just jackhammer and remove the old concrete which was as thick as a fortress wall, laid down to last a century. 

'It needed it', said the Councilman responsible for the works. 

In one of the wealthiest neighborhoods of Washington, perfectly good sidewalks and curbs were torn up and replaced.  Not only were the old sidewalks perfectly good, but this was a neighborhood of two -car high-end SUVs where nobody walked.  

None of this should be a surprise to anyone, given the fact that local government has  been as corrupt as Sodom and Gomorrah since the first urban settlements; and infrastructure projects a cash cow for contractors, their municipal supervisors, and politicians.  

There hasn't been a public works project in the District of Columbia that has come in on or under budget since home rule, and most are subject to significant cost overruns - not just tweaky little adjustments, but major revisions. 

Everybody profits. Labor unions are delighted that their members are put to work and could care less about the viability or reasonability of the job.  Contractors salivate when granted priority status with the municipality, for they will be the first to receive generous awards, all of which can be doubled or tripled with overruns. 

The Minnesota childcare and transport services frauds are nothing special.  The District of Columbia alone has built hundreds of millions of dollars in public service infrastructure which lies boarded up and graffitied after a few years of desultory use.  Mammoth extensions of public schools, far beyond the demand and built in 'anticipation' of a demographic boom which by any actuarial or economic analysis will never happen, are common. 

'Little black children deserve better', said the councilman for one of Washington's most impoverished and crime-ridden inner city districts; so a massive renovation and expansion project was quickly approved despite the fact that the truancy rate in that ward exceeded 70 percent, and the schools were no more than prisons with lockdowns, armed monitors, and a few color-within-the-lines classes. 

The Montgomery County Executive was a die-hard environmentalist, and he engineered the most unsafe hodgepodge of bicycle-friendly disruptions of any jurisdiction.  On the assumption that cyclists can do wrong, and that vehicular traffic must always give way, traffic rules and regulations have been abandoned for cyclists, and as a result bike paths interfere and conflict with safe, properly conservative vehicle traffic. 

The County built a dedicated bike lane which crossed the major on ramp to the area's principle interstate, and neglected to regulate bike traffic to avoid accidents.  Given the presumption of right and the absence of any stop signs, warning lights, or indications to dismount, cyclists are smashed to smithereens every year...and drivers are blamed. 

The problem is threefold - the easy cover of social righteousness (bikes are good for the environment; services for poor black people require no more justification), the easy money always available from infrastructure projects, and the direct and indirect payoffs (walkin' around money) to constituents who profit from the public sector jobs thrown their way by municipal politicians. 

During Mayor Marion Barry's tenure in Washington, he made sure that all the voters of the city's black wards voted for him and spared no expense to assure it.  The black residents of Anacostia cared little about utilitarian, cost-benefit, risk-reward analyses of infrastructure projects.  Building them means day wages, salaries, and kickbacks whatever their stated purpose. 

Most of the taxpayer money comes from Washington's wealthy, all-white Ward 3 - a ward which has consistently voted against the corrupt lineup of politicians repeatedly returned to council seats and City Hall, but these elected officials know that the rest of the city will vote for them.  They don't need Ward 3 votes, only its money, and given Washington's demographics, this scam will continue ad infinitum. 

LaShonda Evans, bright star of the black community, and longtime advocate for a Mamdani democratic Socialist style of governance, put it this way to Washington's white community:

We the people, we the black people, legatees of the wisdom of the forest and the lessons of the street, and inheritors of the primal instincts of power from our African tribal ancestors, will rule.  There can be no questioning our right to govern and your duty to support us. Slavery, Jim Crow, segregation, and systemic racism is all you need to know when you sign your name to the check. 

Walkin' around money was to be endemic and universal - indirect reparations at the municipal level. 'We will rebuild the city in our image'. 

LaShonda is not alone in her racial bombast. Many if not most large American cities have black mayors and city councils.  Chicago is perhaps the best example - a race-baiting, self-interested, political incompetent Mayor who has seen profit in every George Floyd, anti-ICE demonstration and every road to nowhere.  Chicago, the home of Bathhouse John and Hinky Dink Kenna, the most influentially corrupt politicians of early Twentieth Century history, has continued its corrupt, ward politics days.  'Vote early and often' was the meme, walkin' around money found its apotheosis there. 

Alexander Hamilton saw this coming - the will of the people was suspect and popular rule an idealist's chimera - but he would be dumbfounded at what he would see at the base of the pyramid - municipal democracy rotten to the core. 

Only demographics will change the corrupt nature of Washington politics.  The city has become known as Metrosexual Heaven and the influx of white, educated, upwardly mobile voters gentrifying the city, turning old slum neighborhoods into vibrant, modern cultural meccas; and eventually this demographic shift will have its effect.  More accountability, more conservative governance, and a modicum at least of political propriety if not honesty. 

But that, Aunt Margaret, will take time. 

The Feral Passion Of A Trump Hater And The Perils Of True Belief - The Saga Of The Madwoman Of Bethesda

'I hate him', said Vicki Carter to her closest friend, Hanna Blinker, referring to Donald Trump. 'He is vile, horrendous person, and I shudder whenever I think about him'. 

'Well, don't', replied the much more recondite and reserved friend; but she knew that any temperance, moderation, or objectivity on the part of Vicki was impossible.  The woman's hatred for Trump had become a part of her, an integral piece of her personality and character, as indivisible and strong as any. 

Vicki began to cry and hated herself for it. Just like a woman, she said to herself, fighting back the tears and choking sobs which wracked her.  'What's a person to do?'. 

There is a bell curve for political belief, just as there is for intelligence, height, and weight.  Some people are uninterested, others diffident, still others concerned, and finally those for whom politics is the be-all and end-all of their lives. 

 

For Vicki hating Donald Trump wasn't just political animus - a normal reaction when one watched the man's deliberate dismissal of the principles of democratic liberalism, international adventurism, and racist attempts to restore white privilege and consign the black man to yet another generation of segregation, isolation, and prejudice.  Vicki's hatred was a defining, existential element.  It was what made her bounce out of bed in the morning, pursue every possible avenue of legal sedition and insurrection during the day, and retire only when the clock struck midnight. 

Political belief so framed her perceptions that she could only live within a circle of equally passionate  believers.  One by one she cancelled her Vassar classmates for apostasy, having the temerity to sympathize with conservatism.  First went Wendy Barker, wife of a former chairman of the Republican Party and Ambassador to the Holy See.  She and Wendy had gone arm and arm down the Senior Path, loved each other like a couple, and had the same aspirations for life; but now, Wendy was of no value. 

Vicki had known Wendy long before Vassar.  They had grown up in the same neighborhood of Bryn Mawr, tony WASP redoubt on the Philadelphia Main Line.  They had gone to Miss Porter's, a finishing school-cum-college preparatory feed to the Seven Sisters, had roomed together, and were both frilly and girly and studious together. They were inseparable and thought that this was a lifetime friendship. 

But now the years of friendship were annulled.  It was as if Wendy had never existed.  Anyone who believed what she did, conservative to the core, could not be trusted.  Despite a natural affinity, she was the sworn enemy, the devil in disguise, an obstruction. 

So now Vicki lived only with her own - a safe space of commonality, an indissoluble group of true believers, women who had dedicated their lives to undoing evil and ridding the country of the scourge of Pennsylvania Avenue and would die trying. 

Everything about the President rankled Vicki - his hair, his voice, his slathered on fake tan, his cruel and dismissive retorts to responsible journalists, his mockery, and of course his politics.

Yet with all her Sturm und Drang and that of her colleagues, nothing seemed to budge the man.  He kept up his drumbeat of faux American patriotism to couch his capitalist greed and autocratic ambitions.  He had been successful in sending back tens of thousands of undocumented immigrants, sent bulldozers down Independence Avenue and razed the government bureaucracy, the only stalwart against conservative intent.  He opened the oil fields, sent oil gushing through formerly closed pipelines, authorized new, polluting refineries, and restarted the nuclear energy program. 

His first year was a juggernaut of fulfilled promises, and loyal progressives had nothing in the wings, nothing to counter his counter-revolutionary agenda except howls of indignity. 

'We must never give up, never, never', she said, her voice trailing off in the summer breeze.  More and more she found herself talking to herself, sitting alone on her suburban patio watching the cardinals and the robins and smiling at the antics of the squirrels.  There was a strange new penumbra around familiar things - the Ficus took on a glow, a kind of angelic, beatific light; the hum of the refrigerator was in tune with the B-Minor fugue; and the sunlight coming in the bay window was celestial. 

Her friends noticed the changes in her - the faraway looks, the unhinged outbursts, and the animal look in her eyes.  When asked, she replied that all was good with her.  She never felt more complete, in control, and on the path destined for her. 

'Yes', she thought as she watched a Spring robin peck for worms ('I must reseed this year'), 'it is a question of destiny' by which she meant an anointed path.  It wasn't just by chance that she was put on earth at this time, maturing politically at just this moment of history.  Fate could be capricious, but at times there is a holy order to its choices, and she was the beneficiary of this particular turn of the screw. 

She jumped up quickly from her chaise longue, upsetting her gin-and-tonic, leaving the mess for the maid. 'I've things to do', and so she ran past the musical refrigerator, the glowing Ficus, and the luminescent bay window to the phone.  'Marge', she yelled into the old fashioned graphite receiver - land lines were less easily hacked - 'we must do something, we absolutely must'. 

'But sweetheart, what on earth do you mean?' said the lady on the other end of the line, Mrs. Helander, the florist whom Vicki in her confusion dialed by mistake. 'I sent you the zinnias last week'. 

Vicki stumbled over profuse apologies, angry at herself for such a blundering mistake, recovered quickly but forgot why she was on the telephone in the first place. 

'This happens', wrote Arnold Israel, Professor Emeritus of Social Psychology at Brandeis, 'in not a few cases.  Ironically the offhanded political swipe at the President's hectoring accusers - Trump Derangement Syndrome - is not too far off the mark.  The virulent, passionate hatred experienced by many in today's political climate can have far-reaching psychological effects'. 

The progression from concern, to extreme agitation, to downright, unsupported hatred in the political advocate parallels certain classic psychological disorders - a kind of early schizophrenic response triggered by exogenous, environmental forces but resonating from deep within the psyche of the disturbed individual. 

Was the professor implying that there was something of group hysteria in Trump hatred?  A certain psychotic personality that many progressives shared; and sensing this commonality grouped together in a kind of psycho-traumatic cabal?

'We have studied only individual cases', the professor went on, 'and while there might be an emergence of classic group hysteria, we have no hard evidence to date'. 

Meanwhile back in Bethesda, Vicki was going around a final bend. She began hallucinating, seeing Donald Trump in her bedroom, drinking her Pouilly Fume before the fireplace, peeing in the rose garden, and leaving muddy tracks on her Kashmiri dhurrie. 

Luckily her mental 'disruption' was caught before she did any harm to herself.  She was stopped by local police responding to a call about a woman walking down the center line of Montgomery Avenue, seen by a staff psychologist, and admitted to the psychiatric wing of Suburban Hospital. 

Now, God forbid that this should happen to anyone, regardless of political affiliation; but it also serves as good counsel if not warning.  'Eating too many donuts is not good for you', said Professor Israel, 'and neither is gorging on political belief'. 

 

A Man Who Imagines Himself A Poet Writes A Memoir - The Marvelous Art Of Self-Deception

Arnold Gray retired early from his job at an international bank.  Tired and discouraged after years of flogging African countries to do the right thing, he decided to settle in to a new life of renewal.  Foreign assistance was now in the rear view mirror, its ups and downs receding in the distance, and a new life of self-exploration and promise was before him. 

'I'm going to write a memoir', Arnold said, 'about my passion, the outdoors' and with that no sooner had he cleaned out his office at the bank, did he sit down at his desk at home, brewed a cup of chamomile tea, and set to work on his new enterprise.  Now, finally, he would be able to put his perspective down in black and white, tell of his years of  cycling, backpacking, and hiking.   

Most of his weekend excursions were on bikes - marvelous machines tuned to perfection, carrying above and beyond his expectations of grace, power, and agility.  'I rode a 21-speed', he wrote, 'and as I approached the first incline on my way through the Shenandoah, I clicked through the gears until I found a comfortable place. 

 

A decent start, but then Arnold, captivated by the sheer elegance of the bikes machinery, went on to tell of gear ratios, torque, wheelbases, incline calculus, braking distance, and the new gyroscopic stabilizer, a $1000 element which provided stability without compromising pull-ratios or cruising equilibrium. He didn't stop at an overview - a glimpse into cycling's advancements for the lay reader - but gave a disquisition on engineering. 

As he rounded steep turns, it wasn't the feeling of speed, the counterpoise of balance and inertia, the whizzing landscape of pines, firs, and oak; nor the sweet, floral scent of magnolias, the sunlit clouds over the Blue Ridge, the exhilaration of a physicality only felt in this one dynamic place - hurtling forward amidst the grandeur of the mountains. 

He didn't write about all this because he couldn't.  There wasn't a scintilla of poetry in the man, not one drop of spiritual drama, not an iota of princely beauty.  The woods, the forests, and the mountains were simply the context - the environment - within which he pedaled, made his way up and down back roads, and clocked his miles. 

The first chapter was indeed Arnold Gray - a treatise on what makes a bicycle go.  It was ponderous, tedious, and boring.  

 

'I have something to say'. Arnold told his friends at the bank when he announced his retirement; but when pressed he could only manage 'biking'.  Most imagined trips through the Western mountains, over the Donner Pass, by the Pacific in Carmel and Pebble Beach, sunsets over Biscayne Bay, Napa, Sonoma, and wine country - a travelogue, a personal account of wind in your hair travel. 

Arnold, however was no Shelley whose poem 'Mt. Blanc' told of his epiphany as the clouds obscuring the mountaintop cleared, and he felt overwhelming joy, surprise, and spiritual discovery

And when I gaze on thee
I seem as in a trance sublime and strange
To muse on my own separate fantast,
My own, my human mind, which passively
Now renders and receives fast influencings,
Holding an unremitting interchange
With the clear universe of things around;
One legion of wild thoughts, whose wandering wings
Now float above thy darkness...

 

Travel writing is an old art.  Ibn Battuta, an Arab traveler wrote of his experiences in 1350, a travelogue of personal impressions, ethnography, and adventure.  Sir Richard Francis Burton wrote of his trek to Lake Tanganyika to find he source of the Nile and his penetration into Islam's holy of holies, the Kabbah in Mecca.  

Mungo Park wrote of his journeys up the Niger River to locate its source, and told tales of his repeated capture by African tribes, bartered and sold as a white slave, and somehow managing to escape. Paul Theroux wrote a series of travel books which were more reflections on his place on earth, his purpose, and the meaning of his ambitions and desires than simple descriptions. 

His The Book of Tao, is a collection of writing from the world's most famous travelers and their particular reflections on the spiritual nature of traveling alone. 

One of the best memoirs of recent years is Roald Dahl's Boy and Solo, the latter a recounting of his days as a RAF fighter pilot, the former about his childhood.  Both have little to do with the actual events of his life, but his often hilarious, ironic, and marvelously creative telling of how he saw them, what he felt, and the often ridiculousness of each situation. 

 

The two-volume memoir of Russell Baker, a journalist for the Washington Post and editorial writer is in the same deferential, modest, humorous mode.  Life is a circus, Baker often noted, but what a fun ride.

Robert Reich, former Secretary of Labor in the Clinton Administration, wrote Locked in the Cabinet, a memoir of his time in Washington, and again done with the same self-deprecatory, humorous, sanguine view of life. 

Everyone thinks they have a memoir in them just waiting to be written, but when it comes time to write it, it often comes out sodden, trite, and punishingly boring.

A three-tour Vietnam War helicopter pilot, a man who loved the war, flying helicopters, and landing in hot LZs taking fire, began writing his memoir - one which many thought would be a best seller.  In an era of PTSD, the horrors of war, the misery of death and destruction, the pilot's expression of the joy of battle from above would be unique. 

Yet when he started to write, the results read like an inventory sheet.  Like Arnold and his bikes, he wrote about rotor torque, inclines, inertia, gravitational forces, cargo, maintenance, and logging time.  There was no sense of the sheer joy he had flying about enemy lines, laying down suppressive fire, avoiding the lines of tracer bullets rising from the jungle - just altimeters, compasses, and range finders. 

A doctor who ironically was diagnosed with terminal cancer when he was only thirty-five, defied predictions and lived a long life, albeit with a variety of experimental drugs, radiation, immune therapy, and surgery.  He wrote a memoir about his journey but the book was an unremitting clinical spreadsheet.

He was more interested in telling about alternative clinics in the Alps, aromatherapy, radioactive implants and the techniques of the procedure than his reactions to the early death sentence.  Few people got through the first chapter. 

'I have a story to tell', he told his friends; but he had no idea of the nature of the genre - memoirs are not dutiful biographies, but stories of personal events, life, loves, danger, adventure, travails, and beauty. 

Both Arnold and the helicopter pilot thought that they had something important to say, something vital and human; and they were both surprised to see that they had nothing of the kind.  Even in the unimaginable scenes of combat, the pilot could only manage wind velocity and arcs-of-fire.  

Those who imagined life over the treetops in Vietnam had more creative juices than the pilot ever had.  Those who imagined bike rides up and down the Tetons, Denali, or the Rockies had more fantasy and communing with nature than Arnold could muster on his best days. 

Those who opened the doctor's book were expecting My Left Foot, a marvelous, humorous, delightful memoir of a severely disabled boy who became a world-renowned painter, all using only his left foot. Needless to say, they were disappointed. 

In many cases failed memoirs are because of inexperience.  The writer does have something to say, but cannot find the words to say it.  In most others, however, the writer has nothing to say but is laboring under the false impression that he does - the marvelous art of self-deception. 

'At least he tried', said Arnold's friends as each rewrite was as uninspired, intellectually lethargic, and frightfully boring as the previous one.  Arnold finally gave it up, never really sure why he couldn't manage something that people liked; but his friends never let on.