I was dragged by the missus tonight to an event in the heart of the ruling class beast. While there, threatened by her to be on my best behavior, I engaged in a conversation with a like-minded person regarding Hurricane Helene (I have an excellent MAGAdar and just as useful a sixth sense for Deep State provocateurs).
My new-found friend asked me whether they could have built the TVA today. Of course the answer to that is no.
There are several reasons for that.
The first is technical. I doubt we have the engineering ability to pull off a project like that anymore. As a western boy whose roots were watered by dams (hello Salt River Project), I find that conclusion difficult, but inevitable. Skills not used or otherwise maintained over time atrophy and wither away. Look at military shipbuilding over the past 30 years.
The second is political. The environmental movement severed the connection between the needs of a modern economy and the will to build the technical and social infrastructure needed to support it. Policy, especially with the “Green New Deal,” is now rooted in some cartoonish “Happy-Land, in a gumdrop house on Lollipop Lane” where there are no perceived tradeoffs.
Hydroelectricity is the ultimate in clean renewable and reliable power, but while existing dams are tolerated (for now), no new dams will ever be built.
The third reason is something more vicious which is that for our ruling class, it’s not just that some Americans don’t matter as much as others but that they actually enjoy relegating certain groups of Americans to a permanent under-class status. The ruling class may decry the western history of imperialism and white supremacy, but in turn they adopt a colonial attitude toward red-state America that would have made Kipling blush. At least Rudyard wanted to take on the white man’s burden and civilize the savages, our ruling class betters in reality just want the people of eastern Tennessee and western North Carolina to disappear.
The stuff that was in the history books up until yesterday, celebrating that TVA brought electricity to an impoverished part of America? Gun-toting, snake-handling Trump voters.
Actually when it comes to modern-day colonialism, if you remember the roots of the pro-abortion movement, the reality is that they want to more or less want to put the unborn of that region to the sword.
You can hear it on the wind, that sentiment to all of those west of Asheville, just go away and die.