Decrepitude strikes thrice

Tanks for Ukraine. Trains for no one. Heat death for everyone.

Is anyone else confused how war happens? I don’t mean the imperial impetus to kill other people and take their stuff (whatever’s left of it when you are done bombing it, that is), and the human hubris to overestimate one’s ability to effortlessly do so. I mean the actual ability to carry it out, and pretty reliably, as far as raining down death and destruction go.

At least for big countries, the military has got to be the largest, most complex, and most unwieldy corner of a bureaucratic apparatus. Many excellent, based-on-true-stories have been told parodying the banal absurdities embedded in one state’s efforts to dismember another. Talk to anyone charged with carrying out that task — whether those who actually push the button, or those who put the plans and logistics in place to do so — and you will hear some truly fantastical tales of human stupidity that make one wonder how anyone manages to launch a massive, coordinated, precision strike.

Incredibly, though, the military gets the job done, and the more advanced and adventurous ones go around the world to do it. They are the literal embodiment of the liberal-libertarian creed, “Move fast and break things.” Long before Mark Zuckerberg said it, Nazi Germany’s Blitzkrieg proved it.

To my knowledge, no country never got invaded because someone forgot to fill out a form; or didn’t bring two forms of identification; or clocked out at 2 p.m. because it’s Friday. In that light, one must wonder what the world would look like if the military performed like its bureaucratic brethren. Administrative lethargy and cumbersome regulations could bring about world peace by default.

🎵 Imagine …

Take this nugget of information that I caught in a U.S. Defense Department transcript of a news conference, following the announcement that the Biden administration will send Ukraine controversial, if not outright banned, cluster munitions.

Here, the White House makes an announcement it will do something. A couple days later, massive military machinery moves to make it happen — in an active war zone thousands of kilometers away against a nuclear-armed foe you don’t want to poke too hard. Impressive.

You could chalk this up to self-fulfilling prophecy — obviously a lot is going on behind the scenes before a decision is made public, and why make it public until you are ready to execute it? — but how many policy proclamations go unfulfilled? Last I checked, the Guantanamo Bay torture base is still open, 14 years after Biden’s erstwhile boss said, with great fanfare, that he would close it “no later than one year from now.”

These are not apples-to-apples examples, of course, but the basic fact remains that a trip to the DMV does not inspire the same cathartic chauvinism that watching an F-22 blow a balloon out of the sky can. No one gets their paperwork notarized and belches, “fuck yeah!”

That would be too much to ask of mere mortals, and the complex social and political structures they cobble together to stake out and defend common policy goals. We have shown ourselves to be less great at risk assessment, and much better at perpetuating status quo to protect and serve the vested interests of the few at the current and future cost of most everyone else.

The world is literally more on fire for more months every year now, yet the clear and present misery of climate change is somehow not enough to prompt a collective about-face in the way, say, a full-on Russian invasion of Ukraine is. A sudden swearing off of Russian hydrocarbons because Putin-bad is apparently doable, while the very same imperative makes it only into the nice-to-have box when the catalyst for change is only the heat death that those hydrocarbons cause.

Scientists are now pretty sure that at least 70,000 people in Europe died from the 2003 heat wave, and more than 60,000 did from the one last year. For most of the rest of those who didn’t, this seems like an acceptable price to pay to sustain the unsustainable. As long as Uber keeps chauffeuring and Amazon keeps delivering, we can deal with a growing number of no-outdoors days because Canada is burning.

From a purely, stuff-driven economics point of view, this is even a good thing. It means people are becoming more affluent, and inequality — at a scale so macro your simpleton plebe-brain couldn’t possibly perceive — is shrinking. If you just stopped toiling on the techno-feudal estate for a second and looked at the Gini coefficient, you would of course realize you are wrong to harbor the unshakeable feeling that everything is getting worse.

In the author’s defense, at least he acknowledges that most people are not gauging their economic well-being by an economist’s thousand-yard yardstick, which is whacking a solid section of society these days.

Many globally priced goods and experiences may become increasingly unavailable to middle-class people in the West: for example, the ability to attend international sporting or art events, vacation in exotic locations, buy the newest smartphone, or watch a new TV series may all become financially out of reach. A German worker may have to substitute a four-week vacation in Thailand with a shorter one in another, perhaps less attractive location.

Now I am no legal scholar, but I was sure that “vacation in exotic locations” is an inalienable human right. Christoph can’t go to Thailand for sex-fueled benders anymore?! Auf die Barrikaden, comrades!

At least this take helps explain how climate activists become terrorists in the freedom-loving, ego-centric liberal imaginary. After all, they are threatening our way of life: namely, our individual right to jetset one hour to Amsterdam.

While it’s easy to roll our eyes at American consumerism, as the excerpt above points out, it’s not exactly like other countries are forging an alternative metric for keeping up with the Joneses. Or, Müllers. To the contrary, they are also trying to figure out how to conquer resource mountain. If Royal Caribbean can launch the largest, gaudiest cruise ship ever — and see record bookings for it at a time the oceans in which said ship will cruise are seeing record temperatures, literally cooking — then I think we have our answer to the question, Are we the baddies?

It’s great that America’s trillion-dollar military-industrial complex is doing a bang-up job getting Ukraine weapons within days. It sure would be nice if, at the same time, the rest of us could have, like, a mostly functional public transit system. But seeing that the only drivers of change these days appear no more complex than Putin-bad-China-bad-Trump-bad, and enough people appear resigned to live out their days in a lousy Roland Emmerich reboot, I guess that is asking too much.

Just how much, I found out in the first half of this year alone — struck thrice like a Dickensian horror story. Unlike his specters, however, mine were literal and tangible, visiting in the form of structural and logistical decrepitude. Far from a Scroogian shock to the system, I doubt they will spurn any serious reform. Instead, the hands on the clock of borrowed time just tick faster.

In the Old Empire

In England in April, my train nearly fell off a bridge. I was traveling the heavily trafficked route between London and Oxford when the train stopped in Reading and everyone was ordered off. That would be our final destination that day, as transport authorities right then discovered that the bridge up ahead was unsafe to cross.

All rail traffic along that route was immediately halted, and no one would be coming to save us. The best the contact person on scene could say is “wait in the waiting area and listen out for announcements.” Wait for what and for how long: unspecified.

If not for my knowledge of the area, I would not have known there is indeed a bus service, contrary to the contact person’s claim, who actually meant there was no replacement bus service from us, the train company. It was a longer and more circuitous route than the train, but at least I reached my intended destination with little additional trouble or expense. Perhaps most importantly, I did not plunge to my death train-robbery-Western style.

The island-nation that once boasted a global empire, and gets credit for inventing the industrial revolution — and thereby the railroad itself — would need at least two months to repair a single, small bridge over a narrow stretch of the Thames. It was a bridge that they had already been trying to repair but “were not successful.”

In the New Empire

Yes, America has trains! Yes, they are slow! Few and far between, only “partly electrified,” and sometimes they are buses. And when President Barack Obama offered free money to states in 2009 to improve rail infrastructure, many Republican governors told him to keep his Nazi-Communist-unfreedom bribe.

That said, where trains do exist and when they do run, they are pretty cheap, quite comfortable, and rather enjoyable. It’s a great way to get from Point A to Point B, and see pretty stuff along the way. If you squint hard enough, it almost feels like you are in such advanced and progressive places as China, Uzbekistan, and Malaysia¹.

Although the United States built the transcontinental railroad — because fighting the Civil War was clearly not challenging enough — we can give the giant country a pass for lacking realistic, coast-to-coast train travel. Regional connections, however, are another story, and the St. Louis-Chicago one is a quintessential example of what train travel could be in the U.S.

I was looking forward to heaping praise on Amtrak, America’s afterthought of a national rail company, following a great ride last month between the two Midwestern cities. Things were looking good on the way back, too. We were chugging along ahead of schedule early, in fact.

It was too good to be true.

That the train smashed into a pick-up truck at a crossing was, probably, not Amtrak’s fault; neither was coming to an emergency stop as a result; nor was resulting damage to the engine and need to repair it. When I asked Yolanda, the crew member who seemed the most willing to engage with the passengers, if this kind of thing happens often, she shrugged:

“Yeah. Enough.”²

Details remain unclear, but this is definitely a “you should see the other guy” situation.

I had about four hours worth of patience in me, which I figured was more than enough to give the crew a chance to either get us on our way, or get us off and onto an alternative means of transport. We were, after all, minutes from our final destination.

About eight hours in, time for exercise in the prison yard.

Ten hours later — 15 hours in all, from point of departure — we pulled in. All because the Amtrak engineers, by their own admission, messed up the repair, brought the wrong tools, and underestimated how long it would take, turning hundreds of passengers into the sunk cost of staying the course.

In the Who, Us? Empire

German trains have gotten so unreliable that Germany’s Swiss neighbors, in keeping with their clockwork cliché, are kicking them out of their timetables. There’s just no way to know if they will be at the station to make a connection. It’s not just Switzerland: People who come in from any direction often report smooth rides up to the German border. After that, it becomes a game of rail roulette.

A single ride recently from Berlin to Bonn, a 600-kilometer journey that should take about six hours, is theoretically doable in four, and in reality can stretch longer than eight, came to a halt for a variety of entertaining reasons:

People on the track.

Police activity.

Brake failure.

Door failure.

Bush fire on the track.

The last one is my particular favorite. I knew I was heading west, but I did not realize I was heading into the Wild West. Other common causes are "train not ready,” “crew not ready,” and everyone’s catch-all favorite, “repairs necessary.” Exceptional circumstances aside, it is a mystery to most people how a train can already be delayed from its point of departure, before anything has even happened.

A return ride to Berlin came to a halt within walking distance of the central station because there was just too much traffic on the tracks. At least in this case passengers were let out for the wait. Almost all of us took it as an opportunity to make a run for it, and get the rest of the way home on our own.

Many German stations meet only the bare minimum standard to be called handicap accessible. Elevators are often out of service.³ Escalators often are, too, or are running in only one direction. Trains frequently change platforms last minute, sparking a frenzied dash for a connection that makes clear it is not going to wait. If you are old, slow, have mobility issues, or are just schlepping luggage, you are on your own.

It is a minor miracle that people are not regularly crushed to death as they desperately pile down stairs to get from one platform to another.

A couple months ago, my high-speed train out of Berlin showed up with the wagons in the wrong order. No one knew where their seats were. Some parts of the train ended up empty while others had people spilling out of them. No one from the crew made any effort to help. When I asked one of them if I had time to get to the other end of the platform, where I realized by rightful seat was waiting, she looked at me blankly.

“Maybe. When the doors close, that’s it.”

Deutsche Bahn staff possess no more knowledge of what is going on at any given point than you do. When a train I was once waiting for in Cologne simply never showed, without explanation, an employee at the info point simply looked at the same app on his phone that I have on mine. That train later reappeared as quickly as it had vanished, reverting from “canceled” to merely “delayed,” on the same track as the next scheduled train on the same route. It reached Berlin two hours after the other one.

Mind you, these are all examples from this year alone. Whereas the British and the Americans will offer full refunds to compensate for their systemic ineptitude and decrepitude, the most Deutsche Bahn will do is 50%. Two hours or two days, it makes no difference.

And the winningest loser is …

Don’t expect anything to get any better any time soon. Like so much else in Germany, rail infrastructure has been massively short-changed for years. DB says it needs tens of billions of euros — and many, many years — to make necessary improvements. Christian Lindner, the pfennig-pinching finance minister who gives Wolfgang Schäuble a run for his well-saved euro, is proposing an effective cut to the rail budget.⁴

In the paralleliberal universe Lindner beamed in from, Germany is a spendthrift degenerate that needs a stern lesson in fiscal discipline. Also in that universe, austerity has not been empirically branded as irresponsible politics that increases inequality, stokes public resentment, and oxygenates far-right parties. It certainly does not knee-cap economic growth and prosperity.

Definitely not.

That is not to say the American model — suffering from its own cult of austerity — is one to follow and, anyway, it’s not like you can just drop one way of organizing things onto another. Yet EU stagnation is German stagnation, and it is important to look at why that is. Germany is big and rich, but is it going anywhere?

The U.S. is a Dumpster fire, but at least it has personality. That personality may be largely a survival mechanism, but such are the sacrifices when living in obviously the greatest country in the world: work hard, get no help, make it if you can. Everyone and everything else, to paraphrase economist Adam Tooze, gets chewed up and spit out into capitalism’s ferocious and unforgiving wake.

The pursuit of so-called happiness ain’t pretty; the land of the free can only be the home of the brave. Occasionally, though, cool stuff comes out of the destruction. The rest of the time, at least you can teeter on the abyss of that destruction with mostly friendly, helpful people. Everyone knows that no one is coming to save them, so best stick together.

In this limited regard, England also gets something of a pass⁵. It is geographically and culturally somewhere between the unsympathetic smackdown of American “progress” and the cuddlier embrace of continental social democracy. The anglo “special relationship” and the Siren call of investor-class finance, however, have taken their toll. There is probably no going back.

Also at the bottom: Germany.

If any of these countries should be crushing it, it should be Germany. It has tons of money, huge companies, low unemployment, high levels of R&D, and mostly sensible political machinations. Yet the only thing Germany seems to excel at is mediocrity.

Despite enjoying a fiscal situation that is the envy of any actuary, its austerity pathology makes Germany’s politics of debt and spending about as absurd as America’s. The only real difference is that the latter’s debt ceiling is a regularly occurring, sensational circus act, while the former’s debt brake is a baked-in, inconspicuous codification. In other words, very American and very German political performances, respectively, but ultimately complete madness each in their own way.

Germany has managed to avoid the hardest edges of the free market, while profiting handsomely from it, and maintain a thorough welfare system. Its policymakers and lawmakers are generally professional and serious-minded people. All this is in notably short supply in the U.S. and UK, so how is Germany not doing better?

No one expects Amtrak to perform very well. Deutsche Bahn can, but doesn’t. The German state is massively subsidizing energy bills, but inflation remains high, and the far-right is seeing record support. Venture just a little outside scenster city centers and any romanticized Altstadt⁶, and urban decay and industrial rot set in pretty quickly. There is healthcare and social benefits, but a lot of people do not look well.

American and British decrepitude still yields limited, if not surprising, upsides in the form of cultural contributions and human dynamism. It isn’t entirely clear what Germany has to offer other than a middling state of affairs out of sync with the advantages it appears to have.

Whatever the cause, and there are many, the world’s three biggest promoters of liberal democracy are not making a great case for it, even as they stubbornly fight to protect it by sending weapons of all kinds to kill Russians with. At home, meanwhile, neither America’s profits-first path, nor Germany’s risk-averse one, nor the UK’s model somewhere in-between is serving anyone particularly well beyond those already doing well.

Perhaps precarious is the natural state of things, and our systems have over-promised and inevitably under-delivered. Still, it would be nice to hear a stronger case against China than “they bad.” Because those commies really know how to move fast and break things. I can’t imagine it’s better, but at least there are high-speed trains and hot pot.

1. Two of three I can personally recommend training through. China comes by way of reputation.

2. I came up with bupkes when I googled for any reporting of this incident, but I did come across a trove of stories over the years about various Amtrak mishaps. And that’s just for this area.

3. Years ago, I had to go weekly to a job in Nauen, a town just outside Berlin. Deutsche Bahn needed more than a year to install one elevator at the station there.

4. Accounting for inflation.

5. I use England here, and not the United Kingdom, because I have a feeling that Scotland, Wales, and perhaps even Northern Ireland might have other ideas if they had more sovereign means to express them.

6. Est. 1990.