As Dylan put it in a
recent interview:
Well, America's
a different place than it was when those [older] records were made. It
was more like Europe used to be, where every territory was different —
every country was different, every state was different. A different
culture, different architecture, different food. You could go 100 miles
in the States and it would be like going from Stalingrad to Paris or
something. It’s just not that way anymore. It's all homogenized. People
wear the same clothes, eat the same food, think the same things.
And
one of the "same things" they think is that the brutal ascendancy of
Money Power is just the natural order of things, that there's nothing
to be done about it: you just vote for one slickly earnest
Bible-quoting goober after another, knowing all the while that he will
steer the contracts for roads and bridges and sewer pipes and health
inspections and safety checks and schools and hospitals to some crony
or contributor who will cut every corner he can to fill his pockets.
What does he care? He'll take a helicopter, he doesn't need the
highway. He's got the finest doctors on call, his house is custom-made,
his children go to the best private schools, and if one of the
meat-packing plants he and his fellow venture capitalists own blows up
and kills a bunch of locked-in workers, so what? The insurance will
cover it, and if it doesn't, you can just slice and dice another deal
to get an extra wad: maybe some crony pol will sell you the city water
system for peanuts, and you can jack up the rates.
People think
that the rapidly expanding gap between the richest rich and everybody
else is just the way things are, when in fact, it is
totally
unprecedented in America. Again, you don't have to be very old to
remember when things weren't this way. And I'm not talking about some
kind of nostalgic utopia where corruption and cronyism was never known.
Such things we have had and will have with us always. What is different
today is the vastly magnified scale of the corruption and cronyism, and
its active, ruthless, relentless augmentation by government — and the
ever-growing cumulative effect of year after year of this rot on our
infrastructure, our politics and our lives. But the bright, garish
diversions and carefully cultivated, corporate-skewed media
misinformation that have swallowed our civic society have induced a
kind of amnesia amongst the older populace, who are led at every turn
to distrust and reject the historical evidence of their own lives.
And
of course, there are now generations of Americans who have lived well
into adulthood in the "shambling catastrophe" that the Money Power has
made of the country. For them, it really is the way of the world, and
it takes a conscious, determined, continuous effort on their part to
see beyond the grotesque carnival they've been born into. Fortunately,
there are many such young people; but of course, the default position
of most people (of all ages) is, quite naturally, just to get on with
their lives as best they can in the world in which they find themselves.
At
any rate, for whatever reason, beyond expressing displeasure at the
state of the nation in an occasional poll, the majority of Americans
seem to have sunk into a strangely apathetic state. I have seen some
remarks around the blogosphere expressing hope that the Minneapolis
bridge collapse will at last spark some productive anger in Americans,
cause them to rise up and demand that their communities and nation be
rebuilt and properly maintained, that corruption and incompetence will
no longer be tolerated, and so on.
We're talking about a nation that countenanced the
destruction and abandonment of one of its greatest cities, New Orleans,
that still sits by as the Bush Regime and its cronies gorge themselves
on "reconstruction" pork while thousands upon thousands of people
remain refugees in their own land. (See
here,
here ,
here and
here, all
via Buzzflash.) Will such a people swallow the destruction of a whole
city but strain at the loss of a bridge? I doubt it.
Maybe the
fact that most of the people affected by the bridge collapse are white
might give the catastrophe a little extra political oomph; we probably
won't see jowly white Republican congressman from the Midwest breezily
suggesting we just forget about rebuilding the bridge and leave the
people to their fate. (Hey, it's a free country; if they can't cross
the Mississippi there, they can always up sticks and move somewhere
else where the bridges are still standing, right?) And no doubt we will
see the Bush Regime and state governments move to slip fat, no-bid
contracts to favored cronies to "upgrade" bridges around the country,
in the same corner-cutting, pocket-filling manner described above. But
a mass movement to stem the accelerating decay of the country by
putting a brake on the rigged-game Money Power and its many sniveling
helpers in government? That's one thing we won't be seeing any time
soon.
(For more, see Jon Schwarz' excellent piece:
Our Crumbling America.)
Anyone of a certain age — and not a very great one at that — knows perfectly well from their own experience how the country's infrastructure has been allowed to wither and rot over the past three decades. 
