My kingdom for a shoe

Here's a statistic, as reported yesterday by the Washington Post, that genuinely enrages and makes me want to fling a bleeping shoe or two at a certain someone: "Study groups have pegged total infrastructure repair needs at $1.6 trillion."

OK, OK, enough with the shoe-throwing and substitute expletives already. But our holiday from reality is over, which itself is way overdue, and that's what merely one of the many infuriatingly outstanding bills looks like: an incomprehensibly immense figure that never needed to be.

One point six trillion -- and that number, you may have noticed, is for infrastructure repair; which is to say, that's the necessary expenditure just to patch things up as they are.

What a waste, what an unpardonable waste of opportunity and time. For eight years we have dallied and dithered on more or less everything that matters to everyone's everyday life, and squandered our national resources on everything but.

And, as the verb "squandered" pre-suggests, what do we have to show for those years, other than a vastly diminished global reputation and a domestic disintegration that makes the Roman Empire's final years look vibrant.

Yes, it's unpardonable all right -- impeachably unpardonable, you might say, but unfortunately it's too late for that sort of constitutional conscientiousness as well as plain, simple good government and public accountability and all those other antiquated notions of collective responsibility that even disenchanted Romans still pondered from time to time.

There is, however, at least one upside to our eight-year holiday from reality, whose pithy encapsulation comes from none other than a U.S. Chamber of Commerce spokesman: "It's not sexy, but it's jobs."

True, we're catching the little scamp well after it got out of the bag, but massive and rising unemployment -- one of those legacies that George W. has been looking for; Hey George, it's over here, and here, oh, and here, too -- is a timely mate for our rather pregnant infrastructural disrepair.

For now it may be nothing but a fiscal wedding of convenience, nevertheless convenient it is, and who knows, in time we may even come to actually love taking care of the business of pressing national needs.

How pressing? Depressingly pressing. Says the Post: "It is unclear how much money will be devoted to infrastructure in [the president-elect's upcoming] stimulus package…. But the highway officials association has identified more than 5,000 road and bridge projects costing $64 billion that are ready to go, and the transit officials' association has identified 736 projects costing $12.2 billion that could start within 90 days."

Well, like the man said, that ain't sexy, but it is jobs. A whole lot of jobs, because that's a whole lot of deferred responsibility.

Naturally there's already squabbling and cat-fighting for the pending bundles of cash, mostly between big-city mayors -- who insist "there would be a better chance for a long-term impact if the money were focused on metropolitan areas where investments could make the most difference in reducing congestion and lessening dependence on cars" -- and unindicted governors, who fastidiously prefer that dips and valleys in their state highways not be natural creations.

The wusses. Have they no sense of adventure?

Which is what I wish I could call the last eight years of directionless, hands-off-the-wheel "governance" -- please do excuse my use of sarcastic punctuation -- but I lack the requisite libertarian inclinations to do so.

My sense of mixed-company decorum also prohibits me from more explicitly calling these past two terms of presidential cluelessness the bleeping disaster they have in fact been. But Patrick Fitzgerald, he of the subtle euphemism, has gallantly demonstrated the proper expression for delicate outrage.

It doesn't quite beat throwing a well-aimed shoe, though. And with that, I'll retire that trope, too.