Reading through the attached article.
“The reason we don’t have beautiful new airports and efficient bullet
trains is not that we have inadvertently stumbled upon stumbling blocks;
it’s that there are considerable numbers of Americans for whom these
things are simply symbols of a feared central government, and who would,
when they travel, rather sweat in squalor than surrender the money to
build a better terminal.”
I’ve been thinking for a while of this image I have of the Platonic Ideal of the modern Republican: that of a mummified corpse in the midst of a scorched desert, with a grin on its dessicated lips, because he poisoned the waters of “his” oasis rather than let anyone else benefit from it, and died of thirst with a smile.