Secretly Ironic

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On Tuesday, 1/19, there will be a special election in Massachusetts to determine who gets Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat. It looks like it will be close, and it will definitely be important, because every vote counts in the Senate right now.

Fortunately, it’s an easy decision. There are only things you need to know:

• Martha Coakley (D) is in favor of sick people getting health care, and has been known to put child molesters in jail.
• Scott Brown is opposed to helping sick people get health care if they are poor, and has never put a child molester in jail.

Do you wish poor people would just get sick and die? Do you love child molesters? Then vote for Scott Brown. Are you a decent human being? Then vote for Martha Coakley.

Inverse Square illustrates yet again why people such as myself have stopped paying for The Atlantic: an institution which gives a platform to Megan McArdle is doing a grave disservice to our nation.

Most recently, she’s started with a more or less reasonable premise: an awful lot of federal educational aid is wasted on subpar schools which produce degrees but not learning. It is often said that for-profit schools are the biggest beneficiaries of the GI bill, and some of those for-profit schools seem to exist solely to take in the maximum amount of federal student aid (GI bill or otherwise) while producing as little education as possible.

However, she does not proceed to the sane and reasonable conclusion that we need to improve the quality of our educational institutions, perhaps through some sort of accreditation reform. Instead, she argues that we should stop subsidizing and rewarding the education of our military and civil servants.

Jumping to that conclusion (without even a hint of research) is somewhere between preposterous and perverse. Which, of course, is vintage McArdle. (As the Square says: “it’s a pretty good default to assume that pretty much anything she says is false…”)

Now, I do love a cleverly-phrased preposterous conclusion. The best parts of this very blog are preposterous and perverse. I really don’t object to McArdle writing it. I object to anyone paying for it. McArdle ought to get a real job bloviate in her spare time like the rest of us.

Or, you know, put some actual work into her output. Maybe if she had some kind of rigorous training in the craft of writing accurately and not just a knack for a catchy phrase…

There’s an episode of The Simpsons where Homer runs for Sanitation Commissioner, and in typical fashion mismanages everything and winds up filling the town with garbage. The townspeople turn on him and try to restore the previous trash commissioner, who responds “it’s so gratifying to leave you wallowing in the mess you’ve made. You’re screwed, thank you, bye.”

Maybe I just watch TV too much, but I think it’s the most obvious parallel with the MBTA and Dan Grabauskas right now. Grabauskas did a great job with the RMV, and was the obvious choice to turn the T around, and when he failed to make everything magically better, we all blamed him for it. Now he’s saying “I told you so.”

Well, now that he’s gone, it’s apparent just how much he was doing to make things less bad than they could be. He couldn’t fix the funding situation, but he did the best he could, and managed things responsibly, even if I disagreed with many of his choices. The T under his leadership was not the ideal transit system, but it’s becoming apparent that the T without his leadership is in far worse straits. There’s a tidal wave of deferred maintenance building up, and it can’t be fixed without undoing the entrenched mistakes of decades: The funding system, the intractable unions, the intractable management, the way everyone blames the unions and/or management for things that are the fault of the legislature or the pension system or low-bid construction from twenty or fifty or a hundred years ago.

Grabauskas couldn’t fix all that and we blamed him for all those problems. So we threw him out. And now it’s getting worse. We should have seen it coming. Some people probably did. I didn’t. I just kept looking at the T and thinking “why isn’t it fixed yet?”

That was dumb. “Fixing” the T is a dumb concept. We can move it away from the crisis it’s in and towards a more normal, sustainable function, but it’s never going to be permanently fixed. Still, it seems to me that it’s possible to get things back into proper functioning and keep them there. It’s just going to require more political will than we have these days.

It’ll take less disdain from people who despise dirty socialist hippies riding the bus, and less opposition from the western half of the state, which doesn’t benefit much from the T. It’s going to take a lot of money, and we’re short on that these days. It’s going to take the unions not hating management, and management not hating unions, and customers not hating both. It’s going to take good faith on the part of a large number of stakeholders who are not known for good faith. And it’s going to take cooperation among the governor, the legislature, and the city governments in Boston and every town and city near Boston.

I’m not saying it’s impossible. I’m just saying we should have known how hard it was, and given Dan Grabauskas a little more credit for what he did accomplish, and for the things we’re seeing now that he prevented while he was around.