“The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.”
-Steve Bannon to Michael Lewis, January 30, 2018
Thanks to the Trump administration’s “Flood the Zone”
tactics, it’s easy for ordinary Americans to feel powerless. That’s something
Mr. Trump and his enabler, billionaire Elon Musk, are counting on. I got some
wise advice from someone—either Mary Doria Russell or Heather Cox Richardson—to
focus on something you know and care about. For me, that’s easy: intercity
passenger train service.
I’ve been a supporter of passenger rail for most of my life,
including 32 years as an Amtrak employee. Outside of North America, rail is an
integral part of the transportation system. In Europe, Japan, China, and other
developed countries, passengers can travel rapidly and cheaply on
well-maintained rail systems.
But Trump and Musk don’t want Americans to have that option.
Musk wants Amtrak, the quasi-public system of intercity passenger rail, to be
privatized, after comparing it unfavorably to the Chinese rail system. Yet the
Chinese State Railway Group is government-owned, and China has spent over $500
billion in the past five years in new tracks, trains, and stations. If Amtrak
had that kind of support, it truly would be a world-class system.
The reason Amtrak came into being was that the private
railroads were unable to make money on passenger trains after the U.S. Post
Office shifted first class mail off the trains and onto trucks and planes in
the late 1960s. Fred Frailey, in Twilight of the Great Trains (1998)
writes that most railroads kept two sets of books: one using the “fully
allocated” formula demanded by the Interstate Commerce Commission, which included
costs that the railroad would incur whether or not the passenger train ran; a
second, based on solely related costs, showed the true expense of running a
train. “In 1960,” Frailey writes, “In 1960, when the fully allocated loss on
U.S. passenger trains was $485 million, the loss based on solely related
expenses was a mere $10 million and would turn into a $17 million profit in
1961.”
That all changed, beginning in 1967, when the Postmaster
General, Larry O’Brien, began eliminating the Railway Post Offices—cars where first-class
mail was sorted enroute. Most of the first-class mail went to trucks and planes.
While some trains still carried bulk mail, the drastic cut in revenue made virtually
every passenger train a money-loser, even using solely related costs. Railroad
companies, which had opposed federal subsidies for passenger trains, suddenly
changed their tune, and Congress, after massive discontinuance proposals,
especially by the Pann Central Transportation company, passed the National
Railroad Passenger Service Act of 1970, creating the National Railroad
Passenger Corporation.
When the Nixon Administration signed off on the NRPC, later
called Amtrak, it added a “poison pill,” making the corporation “for profit.”
While Congress changed the wording to “operated and managed as a for profit
corporation” in 1978, some Amtrak opponents believe the profitability is the
only way to measure Amtrak, despite the intercity passenger train’s
fuel-efficiency and low carbon footprint. And, of course, they ignore massive
government subsidies of other transportation modes.
Privatization, without major spending on infrastructure and the
return of mail and express to the trains, would mean a shutdown. Last year,
Amtrak advocates were talking about an expansion of both short- and
long-distance Amtrak service. That won’t happen if Trump and Musk get their
way—the entire Amtrak system would go down.
Former Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood wrote in 2023,
“In recent decades, America invested trillions to maintain and expand highways
and air travel, while European and Asian nations invested heavily in high-speed
trains. Between 1949 and 2017, the federal government invested only $10 billion
in high-speed rail with $4 billion of that dedicated to the California project,
compared to investments of $777 billion in aviation and over $2 trillion in
highways.
“Meanwhile, since 2004, China has invested over $1.4
trillion to build a 25,000-mile high-speed rail network and is pouring billions
more into high-speed rail projects worldwide.”
The message needs to get out. Trump and Musk can’t be
allowed to destroy passenger rail.
Note: I recently sent an abridged version of this letter to
Indiana Senator Todd Young, a moderate Republican who has the potential of
challenging the Trump Administration. I’ve also published shorter versions in
the Elkhart Truth and South Bend Tribune.
Thinking about the production of this writing is its own entertainment, but focus on the topic: a point somewhere between the capybara itself and Shteyngart’s playing up his own neuroticism for the cameras.
It dawned on me that the capybara represented a duality I knew all too well: a desperately friendly creature always afraid of being attacked. Is this why people love the capybara? Do we all feel trapped in a world that encourages us to be hyper-social yet rewards us with nothing but endless existential anxiety?
These tonal bits are my favorites of the piece. E.g., the below is tongue-in-cheek, tweeness only allowed for being ironic self-deprecation, and I do not care I love it:
One night in Curitiba, I went out with my translator, a documentary filmmaker, and the filmmaker’s “gonzo lawyer.” We stayed up late into the night eating and drinking at a Japanese izakaya and becoming immediate friends. “To the capybara!” we toasted, as round after round of banana cachaça cocktails and frothy chopes were deposited at our table and the edamame flowed. We had met that day, but some species of animal and human are just meant for companionship. When we were introduced, a part of me wondered, “Will they eat me?” And then I answered, “No, they are in the arts.” “Will they pet me?” I asked myself. “Yes,” I answered, “if I am as charming as a capybara.” And a few hours later our friendship was complete.