What a morning

It has been more than a month, again, since I posted anything. I would apologize to my regular readers for this lapse, except that there are none--or at any rate, very, very few. I doubt I have disappointed anyone by being so absent from this page, but in case I am mistaken about that, I apologize.

It's not because nothing has happened worth commenting upon, or because I have been unusually thoughtless. Rather, it is a combination of three factors that have kept me away.

First, I have been very busy putting to bed the September-October issue of The American Interest. This issue is always sort of pain because a lot of it has to be done after the academic year is completed, and it is hard to get lots of people to do anything after a certain set of days in May. Also this time we devised a feature on the future of the U.S. armed forces, which locked me into dealing with a series of authors who, with almost no exception, are not particularly good writers (they have other virtues, to be sure, that are arguably a lot more important), who I have never worked with before, and who were generally late with their submissions. It all turned out fine, but it did not leave a lot of leisure time for blogging.

Another reason, however, for ignoring this blog in recent weeks is that I have to confess I had hoped that at least a few colleagues would take to reading it. None have. Indeed, I have come reluctantly to the conclusion that pretty much no one reads anything I write. My book Jewcentricity, published about 10 months ago, has been almost totally ignored--I know of only two short reviews in train, both positive but neither yet published. I published a review of Peter Beinart's new book The Icarus Syndrome in the July 19 issue of National Review (because they asked me to do it and offered money.....) As far as I know, no one has read it, except for maybe the copy-editor over there. Even my publisher seems not to read my essays in The American Interest. He was making all sorts of noises about the futility of the war in Afghanistan the other day, and complaining that the magazine had not pointed out all this. I, as editor, he implied, was responsible for this. I reminded him that we had, too, pointed these things out, most recently in my piece called "Disconnected" in the May-June issue. The magazine over the past five years has run at least a half dozen major pieces on the war and related matters, as well -- all critical of then-present policy. He remembered some of the other essays, I know. But not mine, apparently. He said, in effect, "well, you didn't put your piece on the cover, and you're not famous, so that's why no one reads or remembers what you said." Hard to reply to a remark like that, so I didn't. I guess he's right. That won't persuade me to put my own work on the cover, however.

I am certainly sure some days that I am not only not famous, and that no one reads what I write, but that I am in general doormat material par excellance. Take today.

Today I had to get up very early to make a 7:45 doctor's appointment--just a simple little tryst with my friend Dr. Martin K. to check on how a new blood-pressure medication is working. (It's working well, thank you very much.) But the Ride-On bus broke down just about 200 yards from the Metro. The driver seemed to lose his transmission. He found it again, because the bus got to the platform sooner than many of us did walking away from the breakdown. We just missed a train; those who hung with the bus made it. That's a pisser, ain't it? And it is very muggy today, so that by the time I'd walked that short distance I was already in a sweat--despite my short-sleeve shirt and casual pants. (I only wear a suit and tie in summer when there is some compelling reason to do so.)

Then I found that in addition to blood-pressure tests, I needed to get blood taken to test my potassium and vitamin D levels. Hell if I know what for. "Oh, no"--I say to myself, and here is why: Since changing insurance plans some months ago, I now have to go to a lab, in the same building as the doctor's office, that takes at least an hour just to take a vial of blood--this as against the lab I used to go to where the whole process never took more than ten minutes. And sure enough, the same three slow-witted, slow-moving, dialect-afflicted women managed to waste another whole hour of my time shuffling paper and turning in random circles. It's not just my time they waste, of course, but I can't say I particularly care about what happens to anonymous others, except theoretically. I always have a book with me to read to fill the gap, so the time is not really wasted. But still.....

Eventually I escaped the medical maze and walked back to the Metro, picking it up at Friendship Heights. It's only a four-block walk, but again, because of the humidity, I was re-drenched by the time I get to the Red Line. I took the train to my usual stop, Dupont Circle, and, once again, there were no up-escalators working. This was the case for several days running last month. It is hard to understand how a repetitive and predictable problem like that can go unrepaired for so long, and then recur in almost no time. Today, there was an escalator working, but it had been designated a down escalator. Go figure.

And please understand: We are talking about one of the deepest stations in the whole DC Metro system. There are something like 160 steps from bottom to top when the escalator is frozen, and there are no working elevators on that side of the station either. So some people, older people, obese people (of whom there are shockingly many) have real trouble making it up those steps. It is not good for their cardiac situation. They slow everyone else down, too.

The sheer incompetence of everything about the Ride-On and Metro systems is a wonder to behold. And no one, as far as I can tell, ever gets fired or reprimanded for repeated demonstrations of incompetence. So it continues. This is also the jist of the recent NTSB report on the fatal June 2009 Green Line crash that killed 9 people. Those running the system day to day are poorly educated, present-oriented people with very little sense of responsibility for outcomes, and the system of governance, which is really to blame, lets them persist in it. It's hard to get past the suspicion that Metro is mainly a jobs program for an unfortunately poorly educated minority, and that this is at the bottom of the reason why it is so screwed up. But you're not allowed to say that, because saying it raises accusations that you don't like the minority. Nothing could be further than the truth in my case; what I don't like is the systematic educational disadvantages afflicting this minority, which has a long and complex explanation I have no intention of going into here.

Anyway, so once spewed out of the Dupont Circle exit I go over to the pharmacy to fill my prescription for this blood-pressure medicine. Same people over there except for one new trainee, apparently. The woman who usually takes my script took my script, but instead of taking it to the pharmacist while I begin to wait my ten minutes, she stopped to answer a question from this trainee that inflated itself into several questions, a rant and a harangue taking many minutes to rise and fall. All the while, my script has not made it into the hands of the otherwise idle pharmacist. I did not say anything. Eventually, I got my pills. And then eventually I made it to my office.

And so I considered the morning thus far: I had woken up at about 6:00 am, and now it was 9:30 and I had yet to breakfast. Thank you Ride-On bus system, thank you idiot lab-tech administrators, thank you clueless Metro escalator mechanics, thank you oblivious pharmacy counter clerks. All I can say is that I am deeply thankful that I did not need to make a stop at the bank or the post office. Oh Lord, anything but the post office......

Now for the long-awaited third reason (thought I had forgotten, didn't you?): Blogging is a lot like exercising. If you get out of the habit, it's hard to get back into it. But once you do, you find you have more energy than you imagined possible, for both.

I definitely need to get more exercise, now that the magazine's offices have moved a floor up and I no longer have a shower to use--meaning I cannot commute part way by bike anymore. I did that, from my house in Potomac to the Metro and back, four days a week in the Daylight Savings Time period of the year, for 10 years -- 14 miles roundtrip. It was very good for me, and now I can't do it, because I cannot seem to find a way to replace the shower. All the gyms downtown refuse to let me keep my street cloths locked up over night. They expect people to walk in in their street cloths, change into gym cloths, and change back to leave; what I want to do is just the opposite. The only facilities they have to keep stuff overnight are these tiny wire baskets. They will not make an exception, which they have the physical ability to do. I have asked. I have offered to pay more than regular. They won't do it. The clerks are not paid to make decisions, and they seem not to care: They follow the SOPs to the letter, and their superiors let them. But that leaves me with no option, except maybe to join the Cosmos Club (where I had drinks a few weeks ago with my friend and member Dov Zakheim). But I think I can't afford it, or rather, choose not to afford it

It is clear that if I were famous, not only would people read what I write, but I could get some customized service at the gym. Maybe the elevator at Dupont Circle would always work, too--who knows? If you're going to fantasize, don't pull punches. But I don't know how to get famous (and I am not at all sure I want to). So I suffer or, in Cartesian form: I languish, therefore I am.

But what goes for exercising goes for blogging--that, I think, was my point here. If I just make myself do it more, I'll be able to do it more. That doesn't mean anyone will read it. But so what?

Now that I have wasted your time, dear non-existent reader, with pap and persiflage, you are probably wondering whether I have anything of actual interest to say. Of course I do. Since we're on the subject of incompetence, and incompetence related to infrastructure (buses, trains, health-care system...) in particular, let's stay there for a bit.

We have in The American Interest, as you ought to know if you don't, an ongoing project called "Nation-Building in America" and infrastructure renewal is a subject I have been trying to get covered, to no avail.

To be specific, I have sought for The American Interest an essay on how we should build a 21st century infrastructure for the economic and broadly social good of our country. That, apparently, is where the simple part stops. That is because I define a 21st century infrastructure as an integrated structure that encompasses energy, transportation, communication, airports, water/sanitation and all the rest, bound together by an IT-driven central nervous system. We all know about the “smart grid”, but that’s just about electrical utilities. I am talking about something an order of magnitude above that. I am taking about maximizing the synergies among developing technologies, and I am talking about skipping a technology generation to acquire a truly advanced infrastructure that can serve as real productivity value-added for the economy. It’s not exactly like the opportunity Japan and Germany had after WWII, where the Allies had destroyed their legacy systems, but we’re in such bad shape that it’s almost analogous.

Yet the government seems clueless. The stimulus program was about shovel-ready projects--old technology that it's foolish and wasteful to fix--but of course that that also a jobs programs and little more. The Obama Administration's new investment in railroads is nice, but it's a one-off. It is not integrated into anything, as best I can tell. The President is just jealous that French and Japanese and Chinese trains can go faster than ours. That's what he actually said, in the State of Union address, no less. I waited to hear a vision for infrastructure that was economically sensible and sound in terms of engineering principles. Nothing doing. If this guy is really so smart, why is he consistently so disappointing?

Now, I am not a centralization freak; on the contrary, I am more impressed by the efficiencies of subsidiarity. But there are some public-goods functions that can benefit from technical and engineering synergies, and I think infrastructure in an age of rapid IT advances is one of them. We want an infrastructure that’s efficient in thermodynamic terms, but also desirable in broader social terms, because we know that the choices we make about technology affect social patterns, attitudes and behaviors (think internal combustion engines, highways, suburbs and drive-ins....or think the Pill, for that matter — not all the shaping is spatial in nature). We don’t get integrative efficiencies from dumb luck. They require some planning, some forethought. They also require a capacity to trade short-term for longer-term benefits. Why, for example, do we still keep so many of our power and telecommunications lines up in the air, where they’re vulnerable to every passing windstorm, instead of burying them? Partly because we’re incapable, it seems, much of the time, of front-loading a long-term investment.

Seems to me, too, that if we now need some aspects of this system to be national in scope for the sake of efficiency and rational management (say, the telecommunications piece), then we cannot keep doing on the state level some of the things we’ve always done before. How much sense does it make to have 50 separate licensing schemes when the technology is of national (and international) scale? (Though perhaps there are some functions that would be better de-federalized and given to the states.)

And it seems to me that the principle of modularity needs to be built into a new infrastructure, so that just as newer avionics packages can be put into old airframes (to a point), technological advances can be instituted in infrastructure systems without having to start over every time some component ages. Now we face a mountain of costs because we have let systems age so badly. If they had employed modular designs, we would be able to upgrade without that mountain being so high, and that should be our aim in the future: to use modular design, insofar as possible, to space out our investments, so that maintenance is a form of upgrading, again, insofar as possible.

Moreover, I want this essay to consider what the role of government ought to be to promote (not to own and manage) a new infrastructure. That is what the whole nation-building project is premised on: that if you want genuinely new and better policies leading to better outcomes, you need to consider the design function, because old bureaucracies can rarely do new and different things well, or do them at all.

There are some people I know who argue that government should have zero role in infrastructure, that it all should be privatized. I regard this as an insane remark, but actually, so do most of the people who assert it — because the moment after they got their liberatarian rocks off, so to speak, they acknowledge all the “exceptions” in which some government role was necessary. If you add up all the exceptions, there’s not much ideology left. Any reasonable and historically literate person knows enough of the history of the canals and roads and railroads and telegraph and so on to realize that we need government for a variety of purposes: licensing to ensure health and safety and rational use of scarce public goods, providing an understory market for new technologies, basic science and R&D investments, and so on. There is a logic to some kinds of public monopolies, after all.

The design problem in this regard is that we need a place where the partners and participants involved in building a new infrastructure can convene to decide what to do and how to do it. I have a hard time seeing how people who build electricity grids, people who build road systems, people who build trains and light rail, people who do energy infrastructure, people who do fiber optics, people who plan airports, people who think about financing such things, people who consider safety and environmental issues (one of several necessary governmental functions) and so on, will all somehow get together on their own accord within a private-market framework to plan an integrated system. Without such a place to convene and plan, we will get incremental developments at best, and possibly developments not up to efficient scale. We will get a system that is less than the sum of its parts rather than more. As things stand now, there is no such place in the Federal government, nor is there any interagency arrangement substituting for such a place.

Now, I am mindful that even if a concept for such a place were developed (say, merging the Dept of Transportation, the non-military side of DOE, the FCC and the NTSB) there is a good chance that the U.S. political system, as presently constituted, could not do this right. (Look how the Feds messed up the original DHS proposal to create the dysfunctional monstrosity we have now.) The opportunities for distortion, corruption and God-knows-what are almost too large to imagine. But is that a reason not even to think about it? Moreover, seems to me that the promise of a really major leap forward could attract significant private sector support. Oddly enough, in this economic climate, it may be easier to think and build big than to persuade people to go further into debt to fix already obsolete bridges, rails, roads, water/sanitation systems and so on.

I have explained this project to a few sets of authors in recent months. Some tried and failed because they ignored the governmental piece, after promising me they wouldn't; some did not understand what I wanted to start with. I just don’t see the problem here. I don’t say it’s easy to think practically about this — a writer or team of writers would have to understand both the technical side and how the government works — but this isn’t rocket science. And I am not asking for a book or for the final word: I just am asking someone to start a useful conversation, that’s all. What’s the best infrastructure for our future we can think of, and how do we need to organize ourselves to translate vision into reality? As I said to begin with, simple.

I think I have finally found an author who understands what I want and can do it. We'll see. In the meantime, I went with some optimism to the newly opened offices of Building America's Future (BAF) here in Washington. This is, supposedly, an infrastructure renewal project co-sponsored by Governors Schwarzeneggar, Rendell and Mayor Bloomberg. I told the head of this office, Marcia Hale, that I wanted to help them get out their message. Come to find out, they have no message. They do not have any version of even 2,000, let along 4,000 or 5,000 words they can give me for TAI. So far, it seems, they have only a PR stunt, a minor upper-middle-class jobs project and some rental real estate; they seem to have done no actual thinking at all. If they have, I can find no evidence of it. What a typical Washington escapade. Unkind? Too cynical, you think? Maybe; let's see. So OK, Arnold, Eddie and Michael: Prove me wrong. I dare you.

Mornings like this can peel the paint right off a person's residual optimism.

Well, that's all for now. Come back in days soon to come for commentary on William Graham Sumner, plutocracy, Pakistan, and the scourge of the designated-hitter rule. Promise. And I promise I will not discuss Charlie Rangel and Maxime Waters. Why waste the electrons?