claims to support, at least in theory: "green energy." It hasn't worked well so far. Go see the vast solar farms in Nevada, for instance, which are new yet already defunct, like great science-fiction mirrored fields in the desert. Wind farms? Only so-so, with many problems
One goal we always hear about is a network of long-distance high-speed passenger trains. Not much progress there. The tech has long existed. Is there demand for them? Enough demand? Enough to beat air travel? And is casual inter-regional travel even agreed to be a good thing now?
The one class of infrastructure project, if you can call it that, which we have robustly supported in the last decades is big sports stadiums. There was no real ambivalence there, at least from governments. But we all know why that is. Money. They seem like hollow playthings now
So what, exactly, do you build, what to you even choose to *rebuild,* when there is no way of life, no level of activity or sort of activity or particular way of fueling that activity, that you are not ambivalent about undergirding and encouraging?
Finally, in the midst of a great paralyzing internal controversy about the racial implications of every step you take, and every step you have taken in the past, how do you direct the use of public funds on semi-permanent physical projects at all? Mustn't you finish having your
nervous breakdown, your great debate, your ritual exorcism, your super-trial of all you've ever done and are doing now before you can earnestly set to work on anything, supposing you can even decide what to work on?
If you are even ambivalent about how to protect people and things using the law and using public might, about how to police the world around you and protect that which is valuable -- which you can't define either -- how do you construct a new set of valuable objects?
A country riven by ambivalence over what it values, whom it values, and why it should value anything in particular aside from a great cloudy good like environmental health or an optimal global mean temperature, seem to me to be in no position to launch great physical projects
But perhaps the greatest ambivalence of all, and the one that makes rather a joke of the whole idea of infrastructure, is ambivalence about our commitment to a traditional extroverted physical existence over a new sort of introverted virtual existence
What probably does exist is the raw human energy to mount these projects whose nature we can't seem to identify. We have the people. We have the tools. To not harness them may even be socially toxic somehow. But our human energy is at present being turned upon ourselves
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