Pull up your socks, people, let's get going

The Column: 02.19.24

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Before it dies, I want to come out in favor of the hyperloop project in Minnesota to create underground tubes in which people would travel in capsules propelled by electromagnetic force at speeds up to 700 mph. No seat belts, no use of carbon fuel, no roaring engines or jarring bumps. They’re proposing a link between Minneapolis/St. Paul and Rochester, 85 miles, which by my calculation will take about 7 and ½ minutes, or one cup of coffee, whereas now it takes 90 some minutes, or about the length of the opera “Hansel and Gretel” if you include the search for a parking spot and the hike to where your appointment is.

Minnesota’s, of course, would only be an experiment, which, if successful, could be extended and thereby make the country smaller — three hours from Chicago to L.A. but without the pollution — and eventually you might eliminate the vast underpopulated middle, Iowa, Nebraska, Kansas, Missouri, Oklahoma, the Dakotas, Nevada, Wyoming, and Montana, which would become one huge federal agricultural reserve, run by the Department of Agriculture, tended by migrant workers, no need for towns and cities. Kansas has 105 counties, a pointless bureaucracy ruling over wheat and soybean fields. Farming is heavily subsidized by the feds anyway and in the name of efficiency, why not let them run it, allocating acreage based on nutrition, convert wasteful grazing lands to vegetable crops. Eliminating those states would reduce the U.S. Senate by 20 seats, which could only improve it, and likely send the Republican Party careening into history, which it has been seeking for some time now. And who can name the last great senator from Kansas or South Dakota?

Okay, maybe I took the idea too far. I apologize. But why do people still want to go to the moon? We’ve been there, done that. Let’s do amazing stuff here on earth.

The hyperloops would be good for the environment, good for government, good for the American people. There’s a mood of dark defeatism hanging over the land, and we could use a dramatic technological miracle to renew our self-confidence.

This would be a modern equivalent of the Pacific Railway Act of 1862 by which Congress pushed the transcontinental railroad forward. My great-great-grandfather David Powell headed from Missouri to Colorado by horse-drawn wagon around that time, a heroic venture, and in 1869 the transcontinental was completed, the Union Pacific and the Central Pacific meeting in Promontory, Utah. Wagon travel took months and the railroad reduced that to days. It came at great cost, land grants to railroads, brutal working conditions for crews, but the effect was to make us, psychologically, one country, the Union, as secured at Shiloh and Antietam and Gettysburg.

The country needs something marvelous and fascinating to disperse the current gloom. The Republican House of today is a different animal from the Republican House of 1862, night and day different: the one in 1862 established the Homestead Act that let David file a claim for 160 acres, the Morrill Act that created land-grant universities that enabled many of his descendants to get a higher education. The current edition is a carnival of practical jokers by comparison.

David was a Republican as was my great-grandfather James. He believed in progress and went to the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893 to see the first electric train, the electric car, Ferris wheel, and to taste peanut butter, Cream of Wheat, the brownie, the Hershey bar, Juicy Fruit gum, for the first time. My grandma was 13 at the time and was disappointed to be left at home: she was an optimist and believed in progress too.

I have a Republican streak in me too and I feel it when I take a cab from the airport across Manhattan to the West Side and I pass the little shops and storefronts, the little bodegas and coffee shops, the tailor, the mom-and-pop bakery, the fruit stand, and I breathe a silent prayer for the family enterprise, the kids who work there, the perils of going up against Amazon, the crucial virtues of ingenuity and economy and amiability and also confidence.

I’m an independent entrepreneur too. I do shows and I write books. I’ve been doing it a long time. Sometimes I feel discouraged but then comes a morning when I wake up early feeling ambitious and eager to get to work. Our country needs more mornings like those. Being whooshed halfway across the country pollution-free in a couple hours has the Ferris wheel and Juicy Fruit gum beat by a mile.

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