Matt, while utterly denouncing and mocking this George Will piece about transportation, doesn’t do enough justice to how truly terrible this piece celebrating pollution and the destruction of our planet one commute at a time.* Also, and I know Auguste will be pleased by this, Will includes Portland in the list of cities that every conservative should consider during the Two Minute Hate. I can’t wait until Austin gets nationally noticed.
Anyway, the column is fact-free and hateful, and Will’s arguments about the environment come exceedingly close to “I’m going to die before it gets really bad, so fuck you all,” but on top of all that, it’s an offense to language and writing as an occupation. Witness the first paragraph:
You might think the Department of Transportation would be a refuge from Washington’s inundation of painfully earnest and pitilessly incessant talk about “remaking” this (health care, Detroit) and “transforming” that (the energy sector, the planet’s temperature). Transportation, after all, is about concrete practicalities—planes, trains and automobiles, steel, asphalt and concrete.
Will needs to retire now, because he actually just argued that the sheer physicality and practicality of something precludes remaking and transforming it. This shows that he’s lost his grip on the nature of verbs. “Remaking” and “transforming” could be abstractions, but they are metaphorical if used abstractly. They stem from imagining physical, practical remakings and transformings. For instance, this morning, I physically transformed a pile of ground up coffee beans into liquid coffee that was more suitable for drinking. And I remade that cup of coffee by pouring half and half and sweetner in it. Doesn’t get more physical and practical than that.
In that same light, when people speak of remaking and transforming transit systems, they aren’t talking about holding hands and projecting thoughts of non-pollution at it. It’s all about physical objects, observable systems, real world experimentation, and practicalities. If anything, it’s a subject that people tire of easily because it’s so wonky and pragmatic, and the only reason it holds people’s attention is because the vast majority of transport ourselves from one place to another every day, usually multiple times a day. Reading this first paragraph, you get the impression that Will thinks “Planes, Trains, And Automobiles” was a film about philosophers and mathematicians kicking around completely abstract ideas.
But wait! There’s more!